"The Hidden World," volumes one through six, are part of a set of sixteen original books that were first published in the 1960s and have become rare collector’s items since that time, often selling for as much as $80 per volume through rare book dealers. The books – all around 200 pages long, with colorful covers and printed in large format editions – detail a vast underground world hidden from view and known only to a handful of surface dwellers, mortals who are thought to be utterly mad because they claim to hear voices being projected at them by the ancient "telog" machines operated by the "dero."

And who are the dero? To find that answer, one must go back nearly seventy years to a moment when, by some otherworldly form of literary grace, Richard Shaver’s sloppily typed manuscript was rescued from total oblivion by an editor with acute hearing who was somehow fated to bring to light a mystery that still thrives among some Inner Earth enthusiasts even now in the 21st century.

The story goes like this: It was December of 1943. A man named Ray Palmer was an editor for a magazine publishing house called Ziff-Davis and in charge of several pulp magazines. One day at work, he heard another editor drop a letter in his trashcan with the words, "The world is sure full of crackpots!" Palmer was to write later that he could hear the other editor’s contemptuous remark through the wall between their offices and that he decided to look at the letter himself.

The letter contained a key to understanding an ancient language called Mantong, said to be the father tongue of all human languages on earth. After experimenting a little with some of the claims made about the alphabet of Mantong, and being surprised to see that the letter writer’s theories were indeed correct, even when working with languages other than English, Palmer decided to publish the letter.

"The results made publishing history," Palmer later wrote, "insofar as pulp magazines were concerned. Many hundreds of letters poured in, and the net result was a letter to Richard S. Shaver asking him where he got his alphabet. The answer was in the form of a 10,000 word manuscript, typed with what was certainly the ultimate non-ability at the typewriter, and entitled ‘A Warning To Future Man.’"

Palmer read Shaver’s manuscript and marveled that Shaver was making no attempt to "sell" his work but instead seemed to be operating out of a sincere desire to warn mankind about the underground race Shaver called "the dero." Dero was a combination of the words "degenerate" and "robot," and those wicked dwellers inside the earth were to be described in exacting detail by Shaver for many years to come.

Palmer took Shaver’s lengthy letter and used it as the basis for a 31,000 word article called "I Remember Lemuria!" and published it in the magazine "Amazing Stories." Palmer continued to publish Shaver’s work for many years, often to the dismay of his magazine’s loyal readership, who expected to read the latest pulp science fiction stories, not an allegedly nonfiction piece that seemed to be the ravings of a semi-literate lunatic.

But there were also those readers who took Shaver’s account very much to heart, and the magazines bearing Shaver’s stories on the cover sold phenomenally well, to the extent that the magazine exhausted its wartime ration of pulp paper and could not print enough copies to meet the demand.

It is that element of the reading public who responded so enthusiastically to Shaver’s claims that concerns us here. Shaver had tapped into something, a way of viewing the world and its inherent evil, that struck a chord deep inside many thousands of people who could relate to his story, no matter how bizarre, as being within the realm of their own experience.

And just what was Shaver’s story? What had happened to him that in the telling moved so many people to say they’d been there as well? As Shaver himself relates it in an early chapter of "The Hidden World, Number One," he was working on an automobile assembly line in Detroit using a spot welder in the early 1940s when he began to hear voices that seemed to be emanating from his welding tool. At first he thought it was a fellow worker nearby, but he soon realized he was hearing something decidedly more telepathic, the inner thoughts of the men who toiled beside him. From there, he began to hear the voices of people being tormented, screaming in agony and begging for mercy – like the sounds of hell itself.

His next move was to try to flee the voices. He left his home in Detroit and traveled elsewhere, but the voices followed him wherever he went. He came to understand that the voices were being projected from an underground world and that the voices knew he was listening and were planning his destruction. Admittedly it all sounds like the typical delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic, but when you factor in the story’s popularity with readers, you are forced to take another look at it from a more sympathetic angle.

Most people, while they are understandably hesitant to admit it, would likely agree that they have at some time suffered the oppression of evil forces one might compare to Shaver’s "dero." No one, it seems, has been exempted from a kind of mistreatment that appears somehow to come from another part of existence we cannot define and certainly cannot control. People’s personal demons usually seem real enough to them, but talking about them openly is rarely done in polite company. Shaver crossed that line, risking ridicule and public shame, and surprisingly received a resounding response from fellow sufferers who knew exactly where he was coming from.

The monsters called the dero were the completely insane remnant of a race that had existed before mankind on earth. The rays of the sun began to pour down harmful radiation, so some of the earlier race escaped in ships while the less fortunate among them were forced to go underground and live in a system of caves that had existed since the beginning of time.

The dero retreated too late to spare themselves from the madness caused by the poisonous rays of the sun, but they did manage to take with them many of the super-advanced machines their race had developed. With these machines they were able to cause evil and madness on the surface where mankind had come to dwell. They could force hapless humans to do unspeakably wicked things to their fellow man. The dero also possessed a form of technology called "Stem" that could induce deviant sexual feelings in surface dwellers and lead them to acts of perversion and rape. Mankind had always had its own capacity to sin, but the dero caused that evil to rise to monstrous extremes.

This was what Shaver was laboring so hard to warn mankind about, to alert them to the very real presence of an egregious enemy lurking beneath their feet. He would spend the rest of his life in this effort, writing many thousands of words to further elaborate on his claims. As mentioned earlier, Timothy Beckley, the publisher of the "Hidden World" series, has gathered together a huge portion of the writings of Shaver and his mentor Ray Palmer into a sixteen-volume set, of which the first six volumes are currently available. When it is completed, it will be the most thorough document of what has come to be called the Shaver Mysteries ever compiled.

Volume One includes Ray Palmer’s firsthand account of how he discovered Shaver’s initial letter and made the momentous decision to actually publish it. Palmer also recounts visiting Shaver and his wife in their home; Palmer actually heard a few mysterious voices himself during his stay there. One can also read Shaver’s account of how he first began to hear the voices of the dero in his own words. The complete text of "I Remember Lemuria!" is also included in Volume One, so that the reader can experience firsthand the story that launched Shaver into the pulp magazine stratosphere.

About his reading public, Shaver writes, "To me, struggling to find an opening out of the morass (no longer just for myself, but now for all mankind), the flood of letters I received from other sufferers was a crushing blow, bringing hopeless despair. The caverns were not, I realized now, a localized thing – they extended underneath every area of the earth. The evidence of their activity and strength piled up, until I could not help but conclude that there is no answer for present day man. He cannot break their power over him, nor remedy the ills they visit upon him."

Shaver also writes in a similar pessimistic way about the UFOs, which first received worldwide attention with Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in 1947, a few brief years after the publication of "I Remember Lemuria!"

"The visits of the saucers bring with them, for me, fresh despair. For I see them as proof of the caverns’ contact with space. Knowing the cave people, I know that if any of the visiting saucers were benevolent visitors bringing gifts and scientific knowledge to the surface people, they would be destroyed. To me, that explains the failure to contact our surface government, because those saucers that are not destroyed are our ancient enemies."

What Shaver is talking about is something similar to a concept first put forth by alien abduction researcher Budd Hopkins. Hopkins coined the phrase "confirmation anxiety" to describe what happens when an abductee finds proof of the reality of his experiences, such as seeing a mark left behind on his body after recalling that a skin sample has been taken during an abduction episode. A person needs to have some part of his mind in a state of doubt to function as a hiding place where he can call what he has experienced unreal. Since an abductee is often in a dreamlike state while the experience is happening, he has the luxury of filing the experience away in the "unknown basket" and maintaining a more normal connection with everyday reality. When something happens to drive the troublesome memory into a place where the abductee cannot deny that something frightening and strange has really happened to him after all, when his dreams are "confirmed" for him, a whole new kind of anxiety kicks in.

For Shaver, the mass outpouring of letters his writings received and the coming of the flying saucers a few years after his story was made public were not a consolation or a vindication but rather an unimpeachable testimony to the reality of his tormenting voices. He suffered despair on a whole new level, because now there really was nowhere to run, no way to deny the widespread nature of a phenomenon he half-hoped was a misfortune limited to just himself alone.

But of course there remains an audience eager to know about the mysteries that so burdened Shaver. Timothy Beckley of Global Communications has made a sort of cottage industry out of interest in the Inner and Hollow Earth theories, saving some old and rare books from obscurity and publishing up-to-date compendiums written by more recent researchers. His most popular titles dealing with this subject include: "Twilight, Hidden Chambers Beneath The Earth," by T. Lobsang Rampa; "Underground Alien Bio Lab At Dulce: The Bennewitz UFO Papers"; "Admiral Byrd’s Secret Journey Beyond The Poles," by Tim Swartz; "Reality Of The Serpent Race And The Subterranean Origin Of UFOs," by Branton; "Best Of The Hollow Earth Hassle," by Mary J. Martin; and "Finding Lost Atlantis Inside The Hollow Earth," by the late British writer Brinsely Le Poer Trench, the Earl of Clancarty.

And so it is left to us, decades after the deaths of Shaver and Palmer, to try to pick up the pieces and understand Shaver’s torture in ways that can help us to deal with the very vocal evils of our own time. And Global Communications’ ambitious reprinting of the complete writings of Richard Shaver can help us in that endeavor, one volume at a time.

[To read more by Sean Casteel, visit his website at www.seancasteel.com]