Actually, Palmer had accidentally tapped a huge, previously unrecognized audience. Nearly every community has at least one person who complains constantly to the local police that someone – usually a neighbor – is aiming a terrible ray gun at their house or apartment. This ray, they claim, is ruining their health, causing their plants to die, turning their bread moldy, making their hair and teeth fall out, and broadcasting voices into their heads.
Psychiatrists are very familiar with these “ray” victims and relate the problem with paranoid-schizophrenia. For the most part, these paranoiacs are harmless and usually elderly. Occasionally, however, the voices they hear urge them to perform destructive acts, particularly arson. They are a distrustful lot, loners by nature, and very suspicious of everyone, including the government and all figures of authority.
In earlier times, they thought they were hearing the voice of God and/or the Devil. Today they often blame the CIA or space beings for their woes. They naturally gravitate to eccentric causes and organizations which reflect their own fears and insecurities, advocating bizarre political philosophies and reinforcing their peculiar belief systems. Ray Palmer unintentionally gave thousands of these people focus on their lives.
Shaver’s long, rambling letter claimed that while he was welding4 he heard voices which explained to him how the underground Deros were controlling life on the surface of the earth through the use of fiendish rays. Palmer rewrote the letter, making a novelette out of it, and it was published in the March 1945 issue under the title: “I Remember Lemuria by Richard Shaver.”
The Shaver Mystery was born.
Somehow the news of Shaver’s discovery quickly spread beyond science fiction circles and people who had never before bought a pulp magazine were rushing to their local newsstands. The demand for Amazing Stories far exceeded the supply and Ziff-Davis had to divert paper supplies (remember there were still wartime shortages) from other magazines so they could increase the press run of AS.
“Palmer traveled to Pennsylvania to talk to Shaver,” Howard Brown later recalled, “found him sitting on reams of stuff he’d written about the Deros, bought every bit of it and contracted for more. I thought it was the sickest crap I’d run into. Palmer ran it and doubled the circulation of Amazing within four months.”
By the end of 1945, Amazing Stories was selling 250,000 copies per month, an amazing circulation for a science fiction pulp magazine. Palmer sat up late at night, rewriting Shaver’s material and writing other short stories about the Deros under pseudonyms. Thousands of letters poured into the office. Many of them offered to support “evidence” for the Shaver stories, describing strange objects they had seen in the sky and strange encounters they had had with alien beings. It seemed that many thousands of people were aware of the existence of some distinctly nonterrestrial group in our midst. Paranoid fantasies were mixed with tales that had an uncomfortable ring of truth. The “Letters-to-the-Editor” section was the most interesting part of the publication. Here is a typical contribution from the issue for June 1946:
Sirs:
I flew my last combat mission on May 26 [1945] when I was shot up over Bassein and ditched my ship in Ramaree roads off Chedubs Island. I was missing five days. I requested leave at Kashmere (sic). I and Capt. (deleted by request) left Srinagar and went to Rudok then through the Khese pass to the northern foothills of the Karakoram. We found what we were looking for. We knew what we were searching for.
For heaven’s sake, drop the whole thing! You are playing with dynamite. My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9″ scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect silence. The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don’t know. My friend has a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared inside. How we don’t know. But we both believe we know more about the Shaver Mystery than any other pair.
You can imagine my fright when I picked up my first copy of Amazing Stories and see you splashing words about the subject.
The identity of the author of this letter was withheld by request. Later Palmer revealed his name: Fred Lee Crisman. He had inadvertently described the effects of a laser beam – even though the laser wasn’t invented until years later. Apparently Crisman was obsessed with Deros and death rays long before Kenneth Arnold sighted the “first” UFO in June 1947.
In September 1946, Amazing Stories published a short article by W.C. Hefferlin, “Circle-Winged Plane,” describing experiments with a circular craft in 1927 in San Francisco. Shaver’s (Palmer’s) contribution to that issue was a 30,000-word novelette, “Earth Slaves to Space,” dealing with spaceships that regularly visited the Earth to kidnap humans and haul them away to some other planet. Other stories described amnesia, an important element in the UFO reports that still lay far in the future and mysterious men who supposedly served as agents for those unfriendly Deros.
A letter from army lieutenant Ellis L. Lyon in the September 1946 issue expressed concern over the psychological impact of the Shaver Mystery.
What I am worried about is that there are a few, and perhaps quite a large number of readers who may accept this Shaver Mystery as being founded on fact, even as Orson Welles put across his invasion from Mars, via radio some years ago. It is of course, impossible for the reader to sift out in your “Discussions” and “Reader Comment” features, which are actually letters from readers and which are credited to an Amazing Stories staff writer, whipped up to keep alive interest in your fictional theories. However, if the letters are generally the work of readers, it is distressing to see the reaction you have caused in their muddled brains. I refer to the letters from people who have “seen” the exhaust trails of rocket ships or “felt” the influence of radiations from underground sources.