Six years later Life Magazine called the whole Shaver affair, “...the celebrated rumpus that racked the science-fiction world.” The rumpus was due to the fact that the stories claimed to be true accounts of human interaction with a race of degenerate subhuman creatures called “deros” who inhabited a vast labyrinth of underground cities all over the world. Shaver claimed that the ancestors of the deros were a race of people known as the “Abandondero,” the descendants of the people of the lost continent of Lemuria who undertook a mass exodus from the planet when they discovered that the radiation from the sun was limiting to lifeforms on earth. These people were also known as the “Titans” or “Atlans” and were vastly superior in both wisdom and technology to anything else on Earth.
There seemed to be two factions of these supermen, one which left earth entirely, and the Abandondero who escaped the radioactive poisoning by abandoning only the surface of the planet. They created cities in vast underground caverns and there they lived for thousands of years, slowly devolving into physically stunted, mental half-wits with an agenda against all surface-dwellers whom they came to hate and who, according to Shaver, were also descendants of the Abandondero that were unable to gain access to the caves during the exodus of the Titans.
Unfortunately for us, the deros have access to the vast array of machines created by Atlan technology and left behind, machines like the “vision ray machines” which can see through solid rock and instantly teleport the dero from one location to the other. The focused rays of other such machines, he said, were capable of inducing “solid” illusions, sadistic compulsions and even nightmares in topside humans. Shaver claimed that the dero also possessed aerial craft which we call UFOs and even “death rays” which could wreak immense havoc and destruction on the surface folk. These machines, constructed thousands of years ago, were said to still be in perfect working order.
The dero, much to man’s regret, don’t have the intelligence or morals to use them for anything but destructive purposes and take great delight in causing everything from terrible accidents to wars which kill thousands.
Luckily, standing between the dero and the utter extinction of the human race, is the “tero.” The “T” was the Atlan’s symbol of deity, and stood for good, Shaver revealed, and this faction had learned to stave off most of the mental degeneration experienced by the dero and were constantly fighting them on behalf of their human cousins. The great warning to humankind was that the tero were being overwhelmed by the dero. Indeed, it would seem that, after the passage of nearly sixty-five years since this information was revealed, that the poor tero have most likely now become altogether extinct.
But was the story real, or some fabrication by just another creative mind? Even Palmer had his doubts. That is, until he visited Shaver’s rural home in Pennsylvania. After he’d spent a couple of nights there he began to wonder. The first night of his visit, Palmer later claimed, he and Shaver had talked well into the night, leaving Palmer convinced of his sincerity. The man actually believed every word that he wrote.
As Palmer got ready for bed he heard some strange voices coming from the next room; Shaver’s bedroom. He knew that Mrs. Shaver was still downstairs tidying up, and that Richard was the only one supposed to be in the bedroom, but he could hear at least five different people speaking; a woman, a child and three different men. He put his ear to the wall to hear better.
What he heard shocked and horrified him. The group was describing, in graphic, gory detail, their having witnessed a woman being drawn and quartered that afternoon. Palmer stood back and yelled; “What’s this all about?” Then he heard the childish voice tell the others to pay no attention to him at all, and that he was a dope. From that point on the unseen group spoke, sometimes all at once, in a language that Palmer was unable to identify. The voices ceased only when Mrs. Shaver approached the bedroom. Palmer was sure that Richard could not possibly have imitated all the voices, and was never able to discover any evidence of trickery.
Palmer would later write in Search magazine that the dero of Shaver’s tale had nearly killed him and that he lived a life of perpetual and terrible pain. Years later when asked by author Brad Steiger what he had meant by this, Palmer answered; “My experience with the dero took place while I was still editing Fate magazine in Evanston, Illinois. One night we had a very hard rainstorm and the drain in the basement plugged up. I was wading around in the water, trying to unstop the drain, when I suddenly felt myself being lifted high into the air. Helpless, I hung suspended for just a moment, then I was slammed down to the basement floor with great force. I was paralyzed as a result of this attack; and I most certainly do bear the effects of this paralysis to this day. I am not certain what attacked me. But I am certain that it was no accident.”
According to Brad Steiger, a woman named Norma Hall felt sure that she had encountered a subterranean inhumanoid as she lay dozing one night in a motel room in Missouri. She’d felt a sudden chill, she told him, and the eerie feeling that she was being watched then crept over her. Nervously looking over her shoulder, she was shocked to see a dark, smallish figure standing motionless in the corner of the room. When she shouted, “Who’s there?” the thing began to move toward her.
She soon saw that it was a hooded figure in a dark robe. “I switched on the lamp on the night stand,” she later stated, “and he put up his hand to shield his eyes from the bright light. She demanded to know what he was doing there as she bravely stood to face the bedroom invader. “I am a tall woman, five-ten in my bare feet,” she said, “...when I got out of bed; I towered over him. I was amazed that he seemed even shorter when I stood before him. He was scarcely five feet tall.”
“We want you, woman!” the figure bellowed in what seemed to be a mechanically amplified voice. “We need you. Come with me.” Norma looked nervously around, fearing that there might be more of them, but she saw none. “He lowered his hand from his eyes to reach out for me,” she said, “and I was repulsed by the gray complexion and the shriveled facial features that he exposed. He looked like an animated corpse; or like someone who had never seen the sun. And he smelled dank, damp like he had just pushed aside the earth that had covered his grave. Only his very large eyes with their black pupils seemed alive; his eyes and his little twitching nose and lips. He reminded me of a large, gray rat standing there, and I still shudder every time I think of him.”
According to Steiger, the grotesque little man continued to entreat the woman to come with him, only now his voice had changed dramatically, becoming quite soothing to her. “It was almost as if he were crooning a lullaby of some sort in this singsong, hypnotic voice,” Hall said. “I stood, nearly mesmerized, as he ‘sang’ about how wonderful life was down in the caves and how I could be a great mother figure among those who dwelt there. I don’t know how long I stood there listening to this eerie kind of chant, but my mind finally shook itself free of the ugly little man’s spell, and I screamed at him to get the hell out of my room. I must have screamed and yelled more than once, because all of a sudden there were people pounding on the walls for me to pipe down.”
All the commotion seemed to confuse the ‘man,’ who then hung his head as if saddened by his failure to capture her. “And then, as incredible as it may seem,” Norma continued. “He walked back to the corner of the room where I had first sighted him; and he just seemed to disappear right onto the wall.” Norma then walked over and examined the wall, only to stare in utter disbelief. It was perfectly solid.
Miss Hall narrowly escaped the clutches of the rodent-like man. On the other hand, there are others who, apparently, weren’t so lucky. According to our next account, a wonderful life in the caves is the last thing she would’ve received had she succumbed to the little man’s attempted hypnosis.
In November, 1997, two young outdoorsmen; twenty-two year old Duane Berger and his friend Mark, twenty; had decided to camp near an old deserted copper mine in Arizona. They took snapshots of the scenery and even walked back into the
tunnel a short distance to take more. When daylight was fading they built a campfire and prepared a supper of steaks and beans, then set about their mission of relaxing and enjoying the outdoors.
“By the time it was dark, we had each downed a couple of long-necked beers,” Duane later said, “and we were just sitting around the fire, feeling pretty good about life in general, when we began to hear these terrible screams that seemed to be coming from the old mine.”
The screams sounded female, and there was more than one of them screaming out at once in what sounded like pain, as if they were being hurt. The two sat there motionless, not knowing how to respond. According to Duane, neither of them had ever discussed any aspect of the supernatural or the possible existence of ghosts or creatures of the dark. “...But I don’t think either of us thought for a moment that those screams could somehow be the product of spirits. The cries and moans sounded just too real, like a whole bunch of women were being tortured or something.”
The two assessed the situation. There were no fresh tire tracks or evidence of campfires to suggest that anyone other than themselves had been at that location for a very long time. “The only theory we could devise,” Duane stated, “was that someone was living deeper in the mine and that someone, whoever it might be, was terribly mistreating whatever women were with them.” The only weapons they could find were the steak knives and a tire iron, yet they could not just sit by and listen to the pitiful cries and do nothing. Bravely, the two entered the mouth of the tunnel, weapons and flashlight in hand.
“We had barely walked a dozen yards when we saw a greenish glow ahead of us. As we got closer, we could make out the dark figures of two men in hooded robes. It was clear that they intended to block our going any further into the mine.”
They whispered to each other that they were in for it now, sure that they had stumbled onto the activities of some satanic cult that practiced human sacrifice. As they drew closer they saw that the hooded figures were barely five-foot-tall and both Duane and his friend, being muscular and standing over six feet tall each, felt sure that they could handle themselves, if it came to that, against a couple of “midget cultists.”
They boldly demanded that the hooded figures release the women they were hurting. Then both the figures replied, weirdly, in unison in a deep, mechanical voice just as Miss Hall had described in Missouri, “The women are beyond your help! Leave at once or perish! Leave at once; or join them in the caves.”
Duane shined the beam of the flashlight directly into one of the being’s face and was surprised to see what looked like a red harlequin, type mask covering the top half of his face. “The rest of his face seemed to be a sickly gray color,” Duane said. “He didn’t appreciate the light in his eyes, and he yelled what I assumed was a curse in some strange language.”
Then the little men produced what appeared to be wands of some type, from which a yellow light erupted, striking the two and instantly rendering them immobile. They then directed a green-colored beam against a wall of the mine, causing the solid rock to melt away forming an aperture or doorway. The two bizarre hooded figures then entered this doorway and disappeared. In seconds the wall had reformed back into solid rock. The paralytic effects of the rays lasted less than a minute, Duane claimed, and left both of them “tingling, like the sensation you get when you bump your ‘crazy bone’ in your elbow.”
It didn’t take long to decide what to do once they were able to move again. “We realized we were up against something totally beyond our experience. We knew that we had encountered some incredible supernatural beings or aliens from another world or demons from hell; so we just kicked out the campfire, grabbed up our gear, and got the hell out of there as fast as we could possibly move.”
Duane later claimed that, over the years since the encounter, he has reflected with some regret on the terrible fate of the women they’d heard screaming.
“I know that there was nothing we could have done to help them. A couple steak knives couldn’t compare to ray guns that could, paralyze you, then open and close holes in stone walls. Some nights when I hear those awful screams again in my mind, it seems to me as though we were hearing tormented souls crying out straight from hell. And I really wonder if Mark and I didn’t stumble on some ungodly, cursed opening that actually went from Hell directly to Earth.”
UFO researcher John Robinson appeared on a March 1957 episode of the Long John Nebel’s radio show and gave an account of a prospector in an eastern state named Brodie, who had contacted him claiming that he had been held prisoner for two years by mysterious, black-cowled figures in an underground cavern. Every time he attempted to escape he was temporarily paralyzed by a rod wielded by his weird captors.
According to Robinson, Brodie claimed that he had witnessed other prisoners being horribly burned by the application of similar rods. He didn’t know why they let him leave, Brodie said, but when he came to he was walking down Broadway toward Times Square still wearing the same clothes that he had on when taken prisoner two years before.
Robinson later claimed that he was contacted the day after he’d spoken of the event on the radio by a man with an even more chilling story to tell. The incident had happened to the witness when he was seventeen years old. He and a friend named Fred had set out to explore a “haunted mine” in the area and got a little more than they’d bargained for. This particular mine, it was long rumored, was abandoned ages before after some sort of cave had been found, which seemed to set off a series of unfortunate events and inexplicable accidents, disappearances and deaths.
The two intrepid teenagers made their way through the series of abandoned buildings of the former mining camp and climbed over a large pile of debris to one side of the mine entrance. Then they noticed a figure standing in the entrance to the mine, as if on guard. It looked like a grotesque monster, according to the witness, very thickly built and standing about four and a half feet tall. The frightening creature let out a blood-curdling scream, then started walking toward the boys. As is almost always the case, the two fled in terror back to town.
Then things really started to get strange.
Once back in town the two parted company. The witness ducked into a movie theater, he claimed, and was soon horrified to notice several dark figures walking up and down the aisle, apparently searching for the row in which he was sitting. Later that night as he was closing the bedroom blinds he’d noticed a dark form squatting in the branches of the tree nearest the house.
A few days later he tried to call his friend, he said, and learned from his distraught parents that the boy had disappeared. The only clue, she told him, was that the police had found his bicycle not far from the cursed mine. “To this day,” the witness told Robinson, “I’m afraid that whoever or whatever it was that got Fred will find me.”
According to the November 1950 issue of Fate magazine, a similar fate awaited two young boys from Pike County, Kentucky. The youths were seen entering into the old Truck Coal Mine three miles east of Pikeville, but they never came back out. A full scale search of the mine failed to turn up any evidence of the missing boys.
Strangely, their kerosene lantern was found discarded at the entrance. What could’ve made them abandon their only light before entering the dark tunnel? Abduction by underground inhumanoids springs readily to mind. Interestingly, Pike county is home to the infamous McCoy family, whose violent feud with the neighboring Hatfield clan became legendary. Those damned deros!
Years later a woman from Pendleton County named Patsy Wingate would claim to have disturbing dreams which might have some relevance here. Wingate, according to the summer 1993, issue of UFO Universe, was one of those people who seem to be plagued throughout their lives by brushes with the unknown. Her experiences included UFO encounters, MIB harassment, death threats and more.
Wingate mentions a mountain near Riverton, Kentucky where a certain UFO was seen on several occasions. Once, while on the mountain, she heard strange humming sounds which she was certai
n were coming from underground.
Later that night she had the most frightening and vivid dreams of “children underground on the mountain; begging for help. They were in glass cages.” Some of the children looked human, Wingate stated, “but some looked like aliens.” The disturbing images of children crying out for help had left her unsettled, of course, and she couldn’t seem to shake the notion that the dream was real and terrible things were going on beneath that mountain.
Accounts such as these should come as no great surprise to citizens of the Bluegrass State. Edmonson County in south-central Kentucky is, after all, the site of the largest subterranean cave system in the known world. The aptly named Mammoth Cave has over 350 miles of known underground passages and tunnels which radiate outward from the site in all directions like spokes on a wheel. Mammoth Cave is a very mysterious place and is considered haunted by many of its visitors and tour guides. It is also rumored to contain a secret entrance into the underground kingdom of the ancient ones.
Years ago, the bodies of several mummified people with white skin and red hair were discovered in one of the darkened chambers. Who they were remains a mystery. Could they have been examples of a race of underground dwellers, perhaps even Shaver’s tero? I’ve a feeling that we may never know.
Another such cave is nearby Hodges Cave in Livingston County, Kentucky just south-east of Salem. Some believe that this huge cavern was described in John Uri Lloyd’s masonic work, Etidorpha, as being of some mysterious importance to the Freemasons. Witnesses have claimed to see Masons wandering about the area, although it is unclear as to what the Masons might’ve been wearing that so marked them against the more normally attired witnesses.
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