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]

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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