Shaver Interview

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THE CAVEAT EMPTOR INTERVIEW: November-December, 1973

GENE STEINBERG: Mr. Shaver, first of all let's
go back to the beginning, when you first had unusual experiences.What were you doing at the time, and what struck you that something unusual was going on?

RICHARD SHAVER: This is what always happens to me. My mind blanks out completely. Lord, I've written so many beginnings, I don't know which one to start on. Say something to start me.

GS: O.K. - Let's go back, you say about 40 years ago, when you became aware of the existence of a civilization below the surface.

RS: I think when I really became aware of the underworld was when I was working for a fisher­man. Clouds, there are very beautiful cloud formations, and I noticed that the clouds were doing paintings, and somebody was painting on the clouds with some apparatus, and I could talk to them, and I did talk to them ...mentally.

And over a period of time, a whole summer and fall, I got quite well acquainted with the peo­ ple of the underworld, just by talking to them with cloud pictures and mental voices. And that's really the real beginning of the Shaver Mystery. And as years went on, I became very well acquaint­ ed with the whole telepathic background of our sur­face life, which most people apparently never do get acquainted with, but which l did become acquainted with.

GS: What made you think that what you were
experiencing was something real and not some­ thing that maybe you were imagining. Let's go back to the time you saw these cloud paintings. Now at what point did you decide that, hey, I'm not seeing things, this is something that's real?

RS: Well, it's the difference between a Chinese
scroll and an ordinary cloud picture, which looks like a rough horse or some other formation, and you know it's purely accidental. But a very ornate Chinese scroll or a painting of that type has definite characteristics; you can't mistake it. And that was how I knew to start with that there was a person there behind the painting. And then they talked back. You can talk to them the same as you talk to anyone, mentally. You think and they answer. There's no mistaking it. If it happens to you, it happens to you.

GS: What kind of information did you get from this person, mentally?

RS: Well, I think the information comes across
rather in the background than in actual words. You pick up the whole mental background of the person you're talking to in the same way that you can the background of a picture. You pick it up almost unconsciously, and you know that you know all about it, even though there were no word descriptions. It's a matter of telepathic ex­ change and it's instantaneous, and there's a great deal of it in a very short space of time. It's like exchanging minds; you see the whole thing at once.

GS: So you just suddenly became aware of who this person was, or what?

RS: It isn't a sudden thing. It's a more gradual soaking up of an atmosphere and a place and a people entirely different from the one you're used
to.

GS: What did you learn about these people?

RS: Well, I learned that they lived underground in
ancient buried cities that had been buried long ago by tidal waves during the moon fall, and that in centuries past the existence of these cities had been lost and forgotten by surface people, and that they kept it that way, but that the whole pop­ulation of the underground is quite aware of us, but we're not aware of them. And that they can communicate with anyone mentally when they want to, but why they don't do more of it, I don't know.

GS: What kind of people are these who live be­ neath the surface. Are they human beings, or what?

RS: They're very much like us, but living underground has changed them in some ways. They have a longer life span because of the protect­ ed environment. They don't get the same amount of sun or pollution that we do from radioactives, and they live longer. And they have had certain ad­ vantages that we don't have. They have the old ed­ucational machines and records of the previous
civilization and the better kinds, the tero, do have a lot more information about the facts of life than we have.

GS: Now we hear mentioned the term dero. What are they? And what's their background?
Where do they come from?

RS: I wish I knew where the dero come from. I
don't think they ever grew on Earth. I think they came in during the periods of catastrophe after the floods. I think they came in from space as a kind of vermin chased away from other places, and that they've gotten residence in our under­ world and are a terrible threat to everyone on Earth.

GS: How long have they been here? Is there any way of knowing how long this race of beings
has been on this world?

RS: Back at least three moon falls, which is some-
where between 1 5,000 and 50,000 years. They go back a long way on Earth. And they've had space contact and space commerce all the time, unknown to surface people, and in that way, they have a lot of advantages that we haven't had.

GS: Do they have the capability of actually taking over - are they interested in doing that or
what?

RS: I think they've been talking of coming up -
like raising hell - for centuries - for a l0ng time - but I think they've been stopped by the tero, over and over, and I think that constant warfare still goes on. Yes, they have the capabili­ty, but they also have enemies with the capability of stopping them; and the only reason we're not in that struggle is because there wouldn't be any use in it. We don't have the same apparatus to work with, we don't have the same weapons. We couldn't handle it.

GS: Do they do anything, the deros, that's harm­ful to us?

RS: All the time. They cut our minds and sabotage our social relations and they spoil every­ one's lovelife to some degree or other by tamper, and I don't think there's a whole mind on Earth that isn't to some extent mutilated by dero tamper
and destruction.

GS: How many of them are there? Any way of knowing the population of deros?

RS: I've had different figures from 250,000 up­ward to a million. Somewhere in there.

GS: How about teros? How many of them are there?

RS: If I knew I wouldn't say, because I think if I belong to anything, I belong to them, and I wouldn't say what the number were if I knew, but
I don't know.

GS: At some point did you personally meet with either of these two races of people?

RS: Yes, I've been down there for a visit, but
putting that into words is like trying to put Alice in Wonderland into a paragraph. You can't do it. It's entirely too strange and too different. Immense levels on levels of ancient buildings and places and streets and houses and machines going in all directions. It's hard to put such a thing into a few words in a short tape.

GS: When did your first visit, or the Visit, take place, and under what circumstances? Could you tell us what happened during the course of the
visit?

RS : Well, it was about the end of my employment
with a fisherman. I used to have my own shack along the beach, and I made an appointment by mental telepathy. She said it would be possible to visit and take a look around, because I asked them if it was, and they said yes.

So one night they came for me, two of them, and we went down to the beach, got in a boat, and went about maybe five miles along the beach in a power boat and into a sort of smuggler's cave, sea cave, and went through maybe several miles of darkness, with very, very faint light to go by. They knew where they were going, but I couldn't see much. And there we were, inside the Earth, almost on the same level as sea level.

I was there maybe four or five days or weeks, I didn't keep track, just trying to get oriented to learning how to be some use. In a totally different environment, it's very confusing, where they don't even use words, they use telepathy.

Just what would have come of all that, I don't know, but they were attacked. They were attacked by deros and all the people I knew were killed, and why they didn't kill me, I don't know.

When there wasn't anybody there anymore but dead people, and I didn't know which way to turn or where to go, I got in a boat and went back the way I'd come, and came out alone, went back to my shack. They wanted to know where I'd been, and I told them I'd been drunk. And that's the way that was.

GS: Did you have any subsequent experiences in the caves?

RS: I've been in contact with people underground
ever since, mentally, and I've been of some use to them mentally, but actually going down there again, I didn't, because it's like asking for trouble. You can't really be of use to them in their struggle; and all you can do is hope that things turn out our way instead of the deros way.

GS: You are still in contact with them today?

RS: Yes, I am.

GS: Now at some point in time you did become a public figure through Amazing Stories. How
did this come about?

RS: Well, I wrote to Palmer, the Editor of Amazing and told him my experiences and gave him what I'd learned of the ancient alphabet, by which you can read some of the writings still extant un­derground and on the surface in rock books.

And he was very interested in the alphabet, and he asked me to write it up and I did, in a story called "I Re­member Lemuria. " My title was "A Warning to Future Men." It was fairly well liked and I wrote more stories for Amazing Stories for five or six years.

GS: It's generally claimed that a lot of the writings appearing under the name Shaver were written by Ray Palmer, the Editor of Amazing Stories.
What part of this is true, if anything?

RS: It's not true at all. There is very little revision in any of my work;just cutting where it didn't fit. They cut off some of the ends sometimes;
that's all.

GS: During this period of time, what kind of reaction did your stories receive?

RS: Well, we had a Shaver Mystery Club, and it
had twice as many paid members as all the other science-fiction clubs put together, so you could say that Shaver was twice as popular as any other science-fiction writer of that period, which was true.

GS: But what happened? It ended at one point.
Why?

RS: Ended?

GS : Well, shall we say at least, the Shaver Mystery
disappeared from Amazing Stories magazine, although the magazine still appears in 1973, maybe on a reduced circulation level. It seemed to come to an end that era.

RS : I think we perished during that period. When
TV came in and took over, science-fiction magazines, all magazines, dropped from 60% to 90% of the circulation dropped. The Saturday Evening Post itself dropped 60% in a very short time. The whole publishing business ran into a terrific lack of readership. People quit reading and were watching TV. And that's what happened to science-fiction. And at that time, although I could sell anything I wrote, I couldn't get enough money from it to make it worth writing. And that's why I just quit writing, it just didn't pay enough to live on.

GS: Why did you take a true experience and put i t in the vehicle of a science-fiction story?

RS: Well, for the same reason H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine. Because it gives a true

picture of a true condition and you can't get it pub­lished except as fiction. I was trying to show peo­ple the true state of affairs in our world, but it couldn't be published any other way than as fiction, so we wrote it up as fiction.

GS: What did you do after this particular era
ended, when science-fiction lost popularity at least as far as the magazines were concerned, and then the Shaver Mystery at least disappeared from the pages of Amazing Stories? What did you do then?

RS: I bought a ranch and moved on it and raised some cows, among other things.

GS: Well let's trace the period now . . . we've
ended with the late '40's when this particular period ended. Going into the 1950's and '60's, at one point you became interested in the rock books. Was this something that you learned from your contacts with the subsu1face people, or was this something you discovered yourself?

RS : Well, both are true. I knew that because this
tremendous civilization had existed in the past, there must be a great many artifacts lying about unnoticed - a civilized type of artifact, rath­ er than a primitive one. So I looked for them, and I found them.

And I've been studying rock books and pre­ deluge artifacts ever since. And they're very num­erous, very easy to find, and very easy to under­ stand, if you go ahead and do it. And that's what l do. I promote rock books because they contain the wisdom of the past, which is greater than we have today by a large multiple.

GS: How is this information impressed upon a rock?

RS: Well, in the same way it's impressed on a
film. There's photo processes in it, in fact . . . which is very like photography. And, it is a photo­ graphic process, and they're put in as the rock turns, they're projected into the rock. And they have common axes as near as I can make out, but each is on a different plane, and the tough part is to cut the rock so you can hit the plane and make it visible without confusion. Otherwise you get more pictures than you need.

GS: Some people who criticize the rock books say that you can get the same kind of impres­sions with an inkblot or linoleum. Now what's
your reaction to that?

RS: That's an expression of ignorance. They just
haven't looked at enough rocks. They just haven't actually studied any rock pictures. They are saying something they don't know anything about. It just isn't that way at all.

GS: Why are so many rocks in so many places considered remnants of this civilization? How come they're all scattered all over the place? How
did this come to be?

RS: Tidal waves when the moon struck the Earth.
It pulled the oceans over the surface in mile­ high tidal waves. What would you expect when the moon came down and struck the Earth?

GS: You mentioned that earlier, and I'd like to
get into that a second before we move back to the rock books. What evidence in history is there that the moon struck the Earth, I believe you said three times?

RS: Seven times.
GS: Seven times.

RS: Well, Velikovsky goes into a moon fall rather
extensively in more than one of his books, and I don't know just how many other writers have studied tidal waves and the erosion marks in the same way that Velikovsky has, but there are more than one. There are others.

The shadowing of trees and petrifaction of all kinds show tremendous rushes of water when­ ever you study the water marks. Tremendous, and even down here . . . you can find wherever there are narrow passages where the tidal waves rushed through, you can see terrific forces of water pressures, mile-high tidal waves.

And this is something that Velikovsky went into at great length, the evidences of repeated catastrophes that were tidal wave in nature, but much bigger than any other tidal waves.

This isn't a matter of argument, it's a matter of record on the surface, and they've found the petrified shattered bodies of many animals and logs and so on, as well as rocks, which show these forces in action, and you'd have to read Velikovsky and similar writers to understand that the forces of the moon fall are very evident in all the erosion marks if you look for 'em.

GS: You speak of a moonfall. Do you r.1ean the moon literally crashed into the Earth, or
what?

RS: Just like a nosecone. It loses velocity and

comes in, and then as it gets real close to Earth, the forces of magnetism take over and the north pole of the moon strikes the south pole of Earth or vice versa. The unlike poles attract and it strikes at the pole.

But the oceans are pulled from their beds and the water follows the moon around as it makes its last circles, and we have those tremen­ dous gird of tides sweeping over the Earth and des­troying everything. And that has happened at least seven times and maybe eight.

But from everything I've been able to trace a­ bout it, the next one will be the eighth. And I think that's where the expression behind the eight­ ball, being the death-ball, is it.

GS: Do you think the eighth time will be the last time?

RS: Yeah, it will be for us, true enough, for our race.

GS: When do you think this may happen? Is there any way by various mathematical com­putations or with computers to determine when
this might happen again?

RS: Well, there's one unknown factor and that is
the magnetic factor. I imagine they can pre­dict the decay of the moon's orbit fairly closely, but except for the magnetic factor. The moonf all as the moon nears the Earth becomes greater and greater and increases, and I don't know that they have a formula for that, am I don't know that they could figure it, but astronomy should be able to predict within a thousand years or so when the moon is going to do it all over again.

GS: You're saying that this is not something that is going to happen within at least our lifetime. It might be centuries away.
RS: I would say so.

GS: Let's move back to the rock books again.
Have you been able to get any degree of ac­ceptance of the existence of these books from the scientific community or from archaeologists?

RS: No response.
GS: Why is this?

RS: I have no way of knowing.
whether the mail's tampered or whether
their minds are non-existent. One or the other.
T don't know.

GS: What have you personally learned from the study of these books?

RS: . . . Well, the kind of people, the different
sizes of people that existed, and the fact that they had an enormous gadgetry. They were always using cameras or fantastic machines in the
pictures and the luxury of their life, the immense numbers of people in the pictures is one thing that is very striking. They must have been much more numerous than we are.

Over immensely long periods of time, they supported a lot more people than we can now, which points to a different sort of agriculture and a different way of raising food than we have.

I suspect that they were masters of what we now call ecology and that their whole plan of life was different, but the luxury of their clothes and the variety of size and kind of people - there were several different species of men - all these point to immensely long periods of very numerous popula­ tions on Earth, and a very high rate of science and science growth, and the space contact.

When you think of the millions of years of population, civilizations on other planets con­tributing to our Earth culture, then you realize how terribly important the rock books are and why they must be studied, because they had space contact, and in rock books are the products of space culture, which is much older. Ours is so young. Our modem civilization is just a few hun­dred years old really, from the renaissance until now, and there's no comparison with our literature with the rock book literature, and yet we ignore the whole thing.

GS: Do these rock books contain actual printed texts in the ancient languages?

RS: They contain printing, writing, text, yes, in a
different way than ours; that is, you have to have angled light to see it and it doesn't conflict with the_ pictures. Yet it's there in the same planes, coexistent. You just have to see it to un­derstand how it's there.

GS: Have you been able to translate this text?

RS: Some of it is quite readable. It's almost English, like - well, it's easier to read than Chaucer, by a darn sight.

GS: Is there enough material, say on any one sub­ject, to actually . . .
And to get a text, the whole text, is impossible with the methods available. You have to have penetrative light to get into a rock without des­ troying it.

GS: What do you mean by penetrative light?
Something like X-rays?

RS: Yes.
GS: So you think that possibly an X-ray-type de­vice would be an ideal way to go through this?

RS: Oh yes. We would have to develop something
of the kind to see inside a rock to do it the way they did it in order to get the text out intact. But even so, you can learn an awful lot from them, even with simple methods, like a rock saw and microscope.

GS: Have you been able to locate any pictures of blueprints, say, for example, of some kind of advanced machinery that might be constructed?

RS: Well, some of the prints I gave you had gadgets
in, but you have such a time seeing things, I don't know what you'll get out of them. Now for instance, that Vietnam rock I showed you today, each little black speck on that rock is a machine. Almost every one of those black specks turns out to be a machine when you magnify them, of one kind or another.

GS: Are there directions on how to make these machines?

RS: You can't get it all intact with a saw method.
It's three-dimensional, and when you cut through it you're going to lose part of it. We need a different type of light.

GS: How does one tell a rock book from an or­dinary rock?

RS: By the engraving. It has an engraved surface
with pictures on the surface, very visible and in different sizes. Unlike any other engraving or carving, it's very complete, and you just have to look for it and you'll know what I mean.

GS: Where do you go from here? What do you intend to do?

RS: The real difficulty is that in slicing the rock to get at it, you destroy more than you expose.
RS: I'm going to get a cigarette.