Shaver Quest

[aeon]

1. How do we know Shaver even exists? Personally
I believe he exists only as one of your
aliases.

2. How do we know if he is sane? Why not
let a mental doctor examine him? After all,
he says it all comes from his head.

3. In "I Remember Lemuria!" he claimed some
Elders grew to over 200 feet tall; according to
the laws of physics, this is impossible. Roughly
saying, this is twenty times as great as a human.
But if the area increases twenty times the weight
will increase forty times. The Elders' bones would
have to be made of three inch steel.

http://dinosaurtheory.com/scaling.html

http://www.dinox.org/index.html

4. Where do the deros get air? Tremendous
ventilators would be needed.

5. Where do the deros get food? All foods
need vitamin A, sunshine.

6. Why is it that the deros, who get no detri-
mental sunlight, are more detrimental than we,
who do?

7. Why would the Atlans build cities in caves?
Caves are dangerous, damp, cold, and unnatural.
They are in constant danger of being flooded,
hit by earthquakes, or as Shaver said they were
ten miles down, it would be very hot. Surely
it would have been easier to build sun proof
cities.

8. Where did the Atlans get helicopters? They
were only invented ten years ago.

9. Out of all the caves, diggings, legends and
history there is no mention of deros. Surely
they couldn't suppress all of these completely.

10. And most important of all, where is your
proof? What about those 10,000 letters you have?
Most are hoaxes. The rest, no doubt, were written
by your staff. But no solid proof. What about
that egomaniac, R. P. Graham? He has loads of
proof that he knows the secret of hydrodynamics.
Where is it? What about Hefferlin's radio?
Rowland's diagram? Those weird diagrams?
Photos? This has gone far enough.


Now to answer your questions:

1. Mr. Shaver lives at Lily Lake, Illinois. You,
or anyone else, may prove he exists by hiring an
investigator to ascertain the fact.

2. He is sane. Are you?

3. We fail to find this information anywhere
in the laws of physics. Aren't you misinformed?

4. There are ventilators.

5. Food is both grown there and shipped in from
the surface. In addition they eat each other.

6. The dero, viewing the sun over their rays,
which augment anything coming over them
terrifically, make the mistake of allowing surface
sunlight to come down to them, thus getting
a concentrated effect; also, their machines, ex-
Posed to this, accumulate detriment and still
further augment it, for instance, the ben rays,
instead of being beneficial, are made detrimental,
and the deros spend much time bathing in the
rays.

7. Shaver has already explained, many times,
why the Atlans built cities in caves. If you built
one beside a tropic river, you'd be in danger
of floods, earthquakes, and it would be very
hot. Take your choice. Do you know an easier
way to make sun proof cities; to the extent of
excluding all daylight and all radioactives in air,
soil, water, food?

8. Where did the Atlans get space ships? They
aren't invented YET. Are we the only inventors
in the universe?

9. You are misinformed. There are countless
mentions. A visit to your library would convince
you of that.

10. YOUR letter was a hoax, so was Rowland's.
There are more hoaxes. We are very patient with
such as you. You are few in number. Most
people have more strength of character. As to
where the letters are, your editor has them in a
steel file, where anyone could read them. None
of them were written by our staff. Why do you
ask? Mr. Graham's hydrodynamics? We have
his complete manuscript. Are you mentally
equipped to evaluate it? Photos? Yes, we have
some.

One of a ray, coming through Mr. Shaver's
bed, another of a weird shadow on a landscape,
another showing a strange shape in a dark room.
None of them prove anything. Two come from
readers, who could have faked them. The other
we cannot explain. We make no attempt to
explain. But we wonder about it.

There you are, Mr. Greene. Answers you can
file away with your imaginary space ship. But
the rocket fragment that landed on an Oregon
campus was NOT imaginary. Strange that your
hoax should have so much truth in it! Actually,
we thank you for your prank, as it did stir up
much interest, and was very helpful. And now it
has helped to prove that we are sincere, and
that we can take even such dero activities as
yours with no hard feelings. Good luck. -Ed.


TOO BAD IT DISAPPEARED!

Sirs:

While coming home on the bus a few weeks ago,
I got an idea for an FM receiver. Although I
thought there must be something wrong with the
idea, because it only took two tubes and used no
inductions, I decided to build it as soon as I got
home. I used one type 1S4 and one type 1SS
tube, with a flashlight battery and a 45 volt Ever-
ready Minimax. The tuning was by a poten-
tiometer. There was only one trouble with the
thing, it worked. It not only tuned nearby sta-
tion WMIT, but WQ5CQ, New York. The output
went into the phone input on my radio amplifier.
I was delighted, but I had other things to do,
so I put off making a diagram for an ac-
operated unit and list of parts. I did continue
to listen to it as long as FM came in, about two
more hours until midnight. In the morning, I
made the mistake of switching the thing on.

I think I might still have it if I hadn't. It cut
in on a two-way conversation of Shaver double-
talk The voices had the clear, flat tone of airline
control towers, or hospital pagers, but they just
didn't make sense, and I almost switched it off
when one of them said clearly 'dero mech' right
in the middle of a sentence. I listened some more,
and heard more Shaver words. Examples: stim,
stim-ray, ray-mech. Also Chicago and Denver.
Although I can say for sure that the language
in general was not English, French, German or
Russian, that's all.

Like a stupid idiot, I shoved the thing in a
drawer, dashed over to the ptomaine kitchen for
breakfast, and off to the lab. When I got back,
the tuner was gone, and I had completely for-
gotten the vital details.

For heaven's sake, don't stick this in your
magazine! I hope, in time, to get a Ph.D. in
physics and be a sober, down to earth scientist.
The electronics boys would laugh me into a nervous
wreck if this got out. I do think the Shaver
crowd may have something, although I'd want to
see some of his gadgets built and work, or some-
thing like that, and I'd rather have it all be just
a good gag.

The reason I am writing you is a simple and
completely selfish thing. I want that circuit.
If any of the other people who write in send
you a diagram of a circuit with a pentode input
and a diode-pentode output, with one
potentiometer. I can't even remember the resistance,
as the only control, except for, probably, a
switch, I want a copy. I promise I'll turn it off
when these joes start talking their jabber
immediately. I'll forget anything I hear. Just ask any
electronics man how far he'd go about getting
FM from here, perfectly, for over two hours, and
you'll know what I mean.

Believe me, I am not looking for publicity
and this is not a hoax. I love music, and I'm
hoping this thing will pop up elsewhere, so that
I can listen to FM cheaply. I'm a down-to-earth
guy and the last thing I want is to start hearing
spooks.

Nothing else was stolen with the tuner,
though it was in a drawer with some fairly
valuable stuff.

*****
Too bad. Well, we haven't any diagram such
as you mention, but we'll hope, as you do, that
there is one, and we publish your letter against
your wishes, so that maybe some reader will
fulfill our hope. We held out your name and
address, and even the mention in your letter of
your town, so as to keep you from being em
embarrassed, as you request. However, for the
information of our readers, your gadget received
FM from many hundreds of miles away. If you
should ever get that idea again, for Pete's sake,
patent it, and send us a diagram. We WANT to
listen in on 'those joes.' - Ed.

[aeon]

Does it take a fiction magazine like
Amazing Stories to stress the importance of not
taking these mysteries lightly? What if the
Shaver Mystery is VITALLY important to our
national security, to our very lives, if only on the
basis that we are misinterpreting it, and it isn't
dero, or caves, but the Patagonians or the Siamese
if you care to place Russia last in scientific
achievement today?

SHAVER says the cave people always talk about
"coming up and "conquering" us. What if
they did exist, and decided to come up, and
decided the best way to strike a "pearl harbor" blow
was to strike first "through" a proxy, start a war
between surface nations, by giving one or more
nations some terrific weapons? Then they could
come up with the job half-done for them by our-
selves!

Oh yes, it's all poppycock. Just imagination.
Or is it? You readers who can read (which
entails understanding what you read) the papers,
can't fail to see that all is not as it should be in
the world.

There are too many things that we
ought to have explained, rather than dismissed as
just something "unexplainable." When rocket lining
falls in America, and we didn't shoot it, we
ought to find out for sure who did shoot it, rather
than just shrugging our shoulders and forgetting
it, just because it's another of those "silly" Fortean
occurrences.

SHAVER has presented a fantastic view of the
"mysteries that happen every day" but at
least he's no ostrich in the sand, and no "dogmatist".
He might just be fool enough to stumble
on the truth. He's like the radar operator who
said "enemy planes approaching in force" at Pearl
Harbor and was told to "quit drinking that stuff."

So You don't believe Shaver. You think it's all
a hoax. You're going to quit reading the magazine
if we don't quit insulting your intelligence.

Okay, throw your "radar" in the river. Maybe
we are all wet. You take the chance that we are
not. You are so "insulted" that you fail to see
that the stories themselves are VERY FINE.

Why don't you "disbelieve" them, but read them for
entertainment value? They HAVE that value.

Your editor is a fan of 25 years standing. HE
thinks they are darn good stories. HE enjoys
them. And when he read the first one, he didn't
believe it either! But he didn't write the author,
who said it was true (the nerve of him!) and call
him down for "insulting" his intelligence.

No, we said: "we think this will make a hit with the read-
ers, and we'll do our best to put it across with the
same conviction you show, but do you mind if
we call it "racial memory" which seems more logi-
cal to us, rather than this stuff about "I saw it
myself in the caves"?

HAD to admit later Shaver was right, and
we were wrong. It wasn't racial memory. It
was something else. What else? It was a
mystery to us, but not to Shaver. He said it was
"thought records" which was a mystery to us.
What was a thought record? So, we call the
whole thing a mystery. It's still a mystery.

INCIDENTALLY, as you read this, men are
lowering themselves into a cave in Texas. They
are taking cameras along. The cave may prove
something, or it may not.

It is a tremendous cave.
It has much "shaver-mystery" about it. Queer
things happen in it. BUT, the truth of the matter
is, SOME of our readers are SINCERE enough
about Amazing Stories* great "hoax" to risk their
lives to prove it isn't a hoax, because THEY know
it isn't a hoax. As Shaver says, it seems that
"either you know about it, or you don't, and
proving it to those who don't is like proving that
Standard Oil cheats on their income tax."

Of course they don't, but can you prove it? Either
you hear voices, see projections from the caves, or
you don't. Prove it to those who don't. Actually
produce some of the "mech." Just as easy as ac-
tually producing some of the "gold" buried at
Fort Knox. It's there, but can you prove it?

YES, there's proof. Incontrovertible proof, but
no good for those who refuse to accept it.
Drop ice and rocket linings out of a clear sky in
your back yard, from no visible or provable
source, and you'll "explain" it away, no matter
how. And then proceed to forget about it. You
shrug and say. "I don't know . . ." Okay, you
don't know. But we're trying to tell you. And
that big issue IS going to tell you. What it'll
PROVE is up to you.

We, the editors, think what
we have will prove to be terrific, a challenge to
the world. That's OUR opinion. In this issue,
for instance, is an article about "Maxwell's De-
mon" which describes a "mech" that could be
from the caves. We insist that on the surface today
are many pieces of cavern "mech" and the
only reason we can't use them as PROOF is be-
cause their origin is LIED ABOUT, because
WHO'D BELIEVE THE TRUTH?