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.

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To find out more information or to purchase this book simply click on the title: The Hidden World Number 1: The Dero! The Tero! The Battle Between Good and Evil Underground - The True Story Of The Shaver & Inner Earth Mysteries

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