Richard Sharpe Shaver
During the last decades of his life, Shaver devoted himself to "rock books" –stones that he believed had been created by the advanced ancient races and were embedded with legible pictures and texts.
As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, Shaver "began to notice that one of the welding guns on his job site, 'by some freak of its coil's field atunements', was allowing him to hear the thoughts of the men working around him.
According to Michael Barkun, Shaver offered inconsistent accounts of how he first learned of the hidden cavern world, but that the assembly line story was the "most common version".
Those ancients also abandoned some of their own offspring here, a minority of whom remained noble and human "Teros", while most degenerated over time into a population of mentally impaired sadists known as "Deros"—short for "detrimental robots".
With the sophisticated "ray" machinery that the great ancient races had left behind, they spied on people and projected tormenting thoughts and voices into our minds (reminiscent of schizophrenia's "influencing machines" such as the air loom).
Women especially were singled out for brutal treatment, including rape, and Mike Dash notes that "[s]ado-masochism was one of the prominent themes of Shaver's writings".
[3] Though generally confined to their caves, Shaver claimed that the Deros sometimes traveled with spaceships or rockets, and had dealings with equally evil extraterrestrial beings.
[5] Another letter claiming involvement with Deros came from Fred Crisman, later to gain notoriety for his role in the Maury Island Incident and the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Historian Mike Dash declares that "Shaver's tales were amongst the wildest ever spun, even in the pages of the pulp science fiction magazines of the period".
These fans, already distressed by Palmer's shift away from the literary or hard science fiction of earlier years to often slapdash space operas, organized letter-writing campaigns to try to persuade the publishers of Amazing Stories to cease all Shaver Mystery articles.
[6] Dash writes that the "critics of the 'Shaver Mystery' were quick to point out that its author was suffering from several of the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, and that many of the letters pouring into Amazing recounting personal experiences that backed up the author's stories patently came from the sorts of people who would otherwise spend their time claiming that they were being persecuted by invisible voices or their neighbor's dog".
Even after the pulp magazines lost popularity, Palmer continued promoting the Shaver Mystery to a diminishing audience via the periodical The Hidden World.
He even ran a "rock book" lending library through the mail, sending a slice of polished agate with a detailed description of what writings, drawings and photographs he claimed were archived by Atlanteans inside the stone using special laser-like devices.
In that exhibition, which toured the U.S., Shaver's "rock book" photography was grouped with works by famous "outsider artists", including Henry Darger and Adolf Wolfli.
After its initial effect on the Amazing Stories readership, the Shaver Mystery continued to influence science fiction and other general literature.
Both Shaver and his work, as well as Amazing Stories, are amongst the esoteric and unusual ideas referred to in the Philip K. Dick novel Confessions of a Crap Artist.
In the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which was heavily influenced by pulp and weird fiction in its development, there exists a race of evil subterranean dwarves called the derro, which were first described in the AD&D First Edition of Monster Manual II.
These derro make raids on the surface to kidnap humans for use as slaves and food, and some among them, called Savants, possess magical and psychic powers, which they can use to influence people's minds.
[citation needed] Sociologist and occultist Carroll "Poke" Runyon produced a 2007 pseudo-documentary, "Beyond Lemuria," relating subterranean Deros to interdimensional travel.
In the book, a boy obsessed with the "Shaver Mystery" begins to hear strange noises in his parents' basement which may or may not be real.
However, UFO researcher Jerome Clark would argue just the contrary, writing that "[i]t must be stressed that Palmer did not depict the deros' 'rockets' as disc shaped.
[citation needed] Some aspects of the QAnon conspiracy theory have also been compared to Shaver’s ideas, particularly the theme of sadomasochistic abusive acts taking place in subterranean tunnels with the perpetrators also manipulating events on the surface world.
