User:Feoffer/sandbox Cryptoterrestrial hypothesis

The Cryptoterrestrial hypothesis suggests that reports of flying saucers or UFOs might be caused not by extraterrestrials or mass hysteria but rather by a hidden Earthly technological civilization.

Overview

"Cryptoterrestrial", a portmanteau of 'cryptid' and 'extraterrestrial', was coined by author Mac Tonnies and popularized in his 2010 book The Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us. Tonnies was not the first to suggest that 'flying saucers' reports might be caused by non-human life indigenous to Earth.

During the late 19th century, a variety of authors promoted ideas of an undiscovered superior civilization, variously located in mythical places such as Shambhala, Atlantis, Lemuria, or inside a hollow earth. Beginning in 1945, pulp magazines popularized Richard Sharpe Shaver's allegedly-true tales of a hidden underground technological civilization with space ships. During the 1947 flying disc craze, Shaver and his fans argued the disc reports confirmed Shaver's claims; modern authors argue Shaver likely suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

During the 1950 and 60s, while most UFO authors speculated about extraterrestrial spaceships, a minority incorporated ideas from Theosophy, the Shaver Mystery, and cryptozoology. In his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers author Gray Barker suggested the saucer might come from an inner Earth, a connection also explored by Albert K. Bender in his 1962 book Flying Saucers and the Three Men. In 1960, Raymond Bernard's book Flying Saucers from the Earth's Interior further popularized the idea.

The 1970s saw the idea of UFO authors like Jacques Vallee and "Mothman" investigator John Keel arguing the UFOs might be linked to argued that UFOs were 'ultra-terrestrial' in nature.

Antecedents

In 1871, the novel The Coming Race was published anonymously; it discussed a subterranean superhuman race with psionic powers. In subsequent years, Theosophy founder Helena Blavatsky spread tales of superhuman masters hidden in the mountains of Tibet. In the ensuing decades, occultists alleged the existence of secret superhuman societies in a variety of mythical places including Shambhala, Atlantis, Thule, Hyperborea, Mu, Lemuria, or even the interior of a Hollow Earth.

In his 1895 novel The Time Machine, H.G. Wells wrote about Morlocks, a hidden, subterranean race of technological humanoids who feed on helpless surface-dwellers. The 1933 novel Lost Horizon and its 1937 film adaptation depict Shangri-La, a Tibetan paradise inhabited by peaceful, nearly-immortal people. The 1935 serial The Phantom Empire starred Gene Autry as a singing cowboy who stumbles upon an ancient subterranean civilization living beneath his own ranch.

The Shaver Mystery

Shaver's first published work, the novella "I Remember Lemuria", was the cover story in the March 1945 Amazing Stories

During the mid-1940s, an obscure sub-culture developed around the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories and its tales of Richard Sharpe Shaver, claimed to be non-fictional. Since 1945, the magazine had published Shaver's claims to be in communication with subterranean beings concerned about atomic pollution who piloted disc-shaped craft.

In the October 1947 issue of Amazing Stories, editor Raymond Palmer argued the flying disc flap was proof of Richard Sharpe Shaver's claims. That same issue carried a letter from Shaver in which he argued the truth behind the discs would remain a secret.

Wrote Shaver: "The discs can be a space invasion, a secret new army plane — or a scouting trip by an enemy country...OR, they can be Shaver's space ships, taking off and landing regularly on earth for centuries past, and seen today as they have always been — as a mystery. They could be leaving earth with cargos of wonder-mech that to us would mean emancipation from a great many of our worst troubles— and we'll never see those cargos...I predict that nothing more will be seen, and the truth of what the strange disc ships really are will never be disclosed to the common people. We just don't count to the people who do know about such things. It isn't necessary to tell us anything."

During 1943, Shaver wrote a letter to Amazing Stories magazine. He claimed to have discovered an ancient language he called "Mantong", a sort of Proto-Human language that was the source of all Earthly languages. In Mantong, each sound had a hidden meaning, and by applying this formula to any word in any language, one could decode a secret meaning to any word, name or phrase. Editor Ray Palmer applied the Mantong formula to several words, and said he realized Shaver was on to something.

According to Palmer (in his autobiography The Secret World), Palmer wrote back to Shaver, asking how he had learned of Mantong. Shaver responded with an approximately 10,000-word document titled "A Warning to Future Man". Shaver claimed to have worked in a factory where, in 1932, odd things began to occur. As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, Shaver "began to notice that one of the welding guns on his job site, 'by some freak of its coil's field atunements', was allowing him to hear the thoughts of the men working around him. More frighteningly, he then received the telepathic record of a torture session conducted by malevolent entities in caverns deep within the earth." According to Michael Barkun, Shaver offered inconsistent accounts of how he first learned of the hidden cavern world, but that the assembly line story was the "most common version".

Shaver wrote of extremely advanced prehistoric races who had built cavern cities inside the Earth before abandoning Earth for another planet due to damaging radiation from the Sun. Those ancients also abandoned some of their own offspring here, a minority of whom remained noble and human "Teros", while most degenerated over time into a population of mentally impaired sadists known as "Deros"—short for "detrimental robots". Shaver's "robots" were not mechanical constructs, but were robot-like due to their savage behavior.

These Deros still lived in the cave cities, according to Shaver, kidnapping surface-dwelling people by the thousands for meat or torture. With the sophisticated "ray" machinery that the great ancient races had left behind, they spied on people and projected tormenting thoughts and voices into our minds (reminiscent of schizophrenia's "influencing machines" such as the air loom). Deros could be blamed for nearly all misfortunes, from minor "accidental" injuries or illnesses to airplane crashes and catastrophic natural disasters. Women especially were singled out for brutal treatment, including rape, and Mike Dash notes that "[s]ado-masochism was one of the prominent themes of Shaver's writings". Though generally confined to their caves, Shaver claimed that the Deros sometimes traveled with spaceships or rockets, and had dealings with equally evil extraterrestrial beings. Shaver claimed to possess first-hand knowledge of the Deros and their caves, insisting he had been their prisoner for several years.

Palmer edited and rewrote the manuscript, increasing the total word count to a novella length of 31,000. Palmer insisted that he did not alter the main elements of Shaver's story, but that he only added an exciting plot so the story would not read "like a dull recitation". Retitled "I Remember Lemuria!"; it was published in the March 1945 issue of Amazing. The issue sold out, and generated quite a response: Between 1945 and 1949, many letters arrived attesting to the truth of Shaver's claims (tens of thousands of letters, according to Palmer). The correspondents claimed that they, too, had heard strange voices or encountered denizens of the Hollow Earth. One of the letters to Amazing Stories was from a woman who claimed to have gone into a deep subbasement of a Paris, France building via a secret elevator. After months of rape and other torture, the woman was freed by a benevolent Tero. Another letter claiming involvement with Deros came from Fred Crisman, later to gain notoriety for his role in the Maury Island Incident and the John F. Kennedy assassination. "Shaver Mystery Club" societies were created in several cities. The controversy gained some notice in the mainstream press at the time, including a mention in a 1951 issue of Life magazine.

Palmer claimed that Amazing Stories magazine had a great increase of circulation because of the Shaver Mystery, and the magazine emphasized the Shaver Mystery for several years. Barkun notes that, by any measure, the Shaver Mystery was successful in increasing sales of Amazing Stories. There was disagreement as to the precise increase in circulation, but Barkun notes that reliable sources reflect an increase in monthly circulation from about 135,000 to 185,000.

From 1945 to 1948, Barkun notes that about 75% of the issues of Amazing Stories featured Shaver Mystery content, sometimes to the near-exclusion of any other topic. Historian Mike Dash declares that "Shaver's tales were amongst the wildest ever spun, even in the pages of the pulp science fiction magazines of the period". He also published in Other Worlds magazine; the first issue featured his story "The Fall of Lemuria".

Many science fiction fans felt compelled to condemn the Shaver Mystery as "the Shaver Hoax". These fans, already distressed by Palmer's shift away from the literary or hard science fiction of earlier years to often slapdash space operas, organized letter-writing campaigns to try to persuade the publishers of Amazing Stories to cease all Shaver Mystery articles. In fact, Palmer printed a number of critical or skeptical letters sent to Amazing Stories, and he and other contributors occasionally rebutted or replied to such letters in print. As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, "[t]he young Harlan Ellison, later a famously abrasive writer, allegedly badgered [Palmer] into admitting that the Shaver Mystery was a 'publicity grabber'; when the story came out, Palmer angrily responded that this was hardly the same thing as calling it a hoax". Dash writes that the "critics of the 'Shaver Mystery' were quick to point out that its author was suffering from several of the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, and that many of the letters pouring into Amazing recounting personal experiences that backed up the author's stories patently came from the sorts of people who would otherwise spend their time claiming that they were being persecuted by invisible voices or their neighbor's dog".

During 1948, Amazing Stories ceased all publication of Shaver's stories. Palmer would later claim the magazine was pressured by sinister outside forces to make the change; science fiction fans would credit their boycott and letter-writing campaigns for the change. The magazine's owners said later that the Shaver Mystery had simply run its course and sales were decreasing.

In the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories, editor Ray Palmer adapted an allegedly non-fiction manuscript by Richard Sharpe Shaver and published the collaboration under the title "I Remember Lemuria".

Nearly a year before the flying disc craze, Amazing Stories featured disc-shaped spacecraft.

"Flying Saucers" and UFOs

On June 24, 1947, during the first summer of the Cold War, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold gave a report of seeing hypersonic disc shaped craft flying over Washington State. Arnold's claim was reported in papers nationwide, igniting a craze of copycat reports. By July 7, Arnold was suggesting the reports might caused by extraterrestrial spaceships.

After Shaver's death in 1975, his editor Raymond Palmer admitted that "Shaver had spent eight years not in the Cavern World, but in a mental institution" being treated for paranoid schizophrenia.

In popular culture

In the 1989 film The Abyss, dea sea divers investigating the wreck of a nuclear-armed submarine make contact with an advanced civilization indigenous to Earth's oceans.

In a 1996 episode of The X-Files titled "Jose Chung's From Outer Space", a UFO contactee is revealed to be a fantasy-prone personality when he conveys a message from "Lord Kinbote", a creature who comes "not from outer space, but from inner space", from within the Earth's molten core.

References

Old version