Believers in the theory that Earth has a hollow, inhabitable core sometimes also believe in evil creatures called the Deros, which were supposedly created through genetic engineering.
Resembling demons, these creatures supposedly visit the surface of the earth to kidnap human beings, whom they then subject to a variety of tortures. They also supposedly wreak de¬struction on the inhabitants of Earth's sur¬face by using technologically advanced ma¬chines hidden in caves to alter weather, alter brain waves to cause mental illness,and case industrial,traffic,and other accidents.
The idea of the Deros originated with Richard Sharpe Shaver, who, in 1943, told the editor of the magazine Amazing Stories that he had seen these beings; their name, he said, was derived from the words detri¬mental robots, though they were not actu¬ally robots but living creatures. According to Shaver,
the creators of the Deros, whom he called the Titans, were beings as tall as 300 feet (91.4m) who had originally come from an ancient yet highly advanced civili¬zation called Lemuria, which had been lo¬cated on Earth's surface, but they had abandoned Earth for another planet roughly twelve thousand years ago, leaving the Deros behind. Shaver believed that the only hope for eliminating the Deros were the Teros, which were also created by the Titans and were heroic humanlike beings who, though small in number, were intent on fighting the Deros.Amazing Stories editor Raymond A. Palmer published many tales based on Shaver's supposed adventures in the hollow-Earth realm, not only in Amazing Stories but in its sister publication, Fantas¬tic Adventures, as well. (Shaver's name was on these stories, but they were actually.
Until Richard Sharpe Shaver came along, nearly all nineteenth- and twentieth-century hollowearth proponents spoke of the inner world's inhabitants as members of an advanced, benevolent race whom it would be desirable for human beings to meet and befriend. Shaver, however, had another story to tell. Shaver technologized hell.In September 1943, in Chicago, Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer read a letter from a Barto, Pennsylvania, reader who claimed to know of an ancient alphabet from Lemuria, a continent said to have sunk in the Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago, taking a mighty civilization with it. (In fact, the idea of "Lemuria" was invented in the nineteenth century, first by biologist Ernst Haekel as a hypothetical home for the original Homo sapiens, then elaborated by Blavatsky in her imaginative "history" of the human race. There is no geological or biological evidence that such a place ever existed.) Palmer reprinted the alphabet in the January 1944 issue, and soon he and the reader, Shaver, were corresponding regularly.
Shaver alleged that for years he was tormented by evil creatures known as "deros"-short for "detrimental robots" (who were not robots as the term is ordinarily understood but "robots" in the sense of being slaves to their passions). Deros were the degenerate remnants of the "Titans," the people of Lemuria, who 12,000 years ago were forced to escape into great caverns under the earth to avoid deadly radiation from the sun. (Some Titans, however, stayed on the surface, adjusted, and became the present human race. Others fled to distant planets.) Deros--demons in all but name and close to it even there-were sadistic idiots who had access to the advanced Titan technology, which they used to increase sexual pleasure during the orgies to which they were addicted. They also used the machines in marathon torture sessions on kidnapped surface people and also on the "teros" (integrative robots, who were not robots but good Titans who, though vastly outnumbered, were fighting the deros); they also employed the machines to cause accidents, madness, and other miseries in the world above the caves.
Soon Amazing and its companion pulp Fantastic Adventures were filled with exciting and terrifying tales of the underworld. Most of these stories bore Shaver's by-line, but Palmer was writing them. The first, "I Remember Lemuria!", all 31,000 words of it, appeared in Amazing's March 1945 issue, and in the introduction Shaver told readers of his vivid memories of life as "Mutan Mion, who lived many thousands of years ago in Sub Atlan, one of the great cities of ancient Lemuria!"
A flood of letters crossed Palmer's desk, some from individuals who claimed they, too, had met with the deros and barely lived to tell Amazing about it. Chester S. Geier, one of the magazine's regular contributors, started the Shaver Mystery Club as a way both of handling the mail and of "investigating" the "evidence" for the deros. Palmer and Shaver had caused quite a stir.
Not all readers were happy about it, however. Many were furious; convinced that some sort of swindle was afoot, they feared that the Shaver mystery would make all science-fiction fans look like fools or worse. By 1948 their protests led Ziff-Davis, Amazing's parent company, to order the series stopped.
After co-founding Fate with Curtis Fuller in 1948, Palmer left Ziff-Davis and moved to tiny Amherst, Wisconsin, to produce his own magazines, notably Flying Saucers and Mystic (later Search), which regularly featured Shaver material. In 1961 he started The Hidden World, a series of magazines in tradepaperback format, and over the next three years reprinted Shaver's original articles and ran new contributions from a diminishing band of enthusiasts.
Shaver died in Arkansas in November 1975, Palmer in Florida two years later.
Other Hollow Earthers
Another Amazing reader who claimed to have met the deros was Maurice Doreal (born Claude Doggins). Like Ballard, he said he was friends with the Masters who lived inside Mount Shasta, though unlike Ballard he said they were from Atlantis, not Lemuria. According to him, the Atlanteans and the Lemurians lived in great caverns under the earth and regularly visited, and received visits from, other star systems. His own occult group, the Brotherhood of the White Temple, was headquartered in the Pleiades and involved in complex interstellar diplomacy and warfare, which Doreal detailed at length in his various writings.
W. C. Hefferlin wrote Amazing about his adventures in Rainbow City, an abandoned extraterrestrial metropolis under the Antarctic ice. Though its inhabitants were long gone, they had left their advanced technology in place. Hefferlin's account of the space people's secrets failed to impress those readers who knew something about science; they wrote to jeer at the Rainbow City man's elementary errors, causing Hefferlin to drop out of sight for a year. He reappeared under the sponsorship of Borderland Sciences Research Associates, an occultoriented group headquartered in Vista, California. In various BSRA publications Hefferlin and his wife Gladys related that Rainbow City's inhabitants were a race that had settled on Mars to escape the evil
Snake People. When the atmosphere of Mars became unbreathable, they emigrated to earth and settled in seven great cities (Rainbow City being the greatest of all) on the continent of Antarctica, then a tropical paradise. Unfortunately, the Snake People found out where they were and attacked, scattering the settlers all over the earth and, incidentally, tipping the earth over on its axis, which is how Antarctica got to be such a frigid place.
Rainbow City was revived in 1951, in Robert Ernst Dickhoff's self-published Agharta: The Subterranean World, and again in 1960, in Rainbow City and the Inner Earth People, by Michael Barton, writing as Michael X. Barton also revived the Shaver mystery, reporting that Venusians and Masters were allied in a struggle to wipe out the deros. He further claimed to be receiving psychic communications from the long-deceased Marshall Gardner, who enthusiastically endorsed Barton's book.
Far and away the most popular of all such books was The Hollow Earth (1964), by Raymond Bernard, the pseudonym of Walter Siegmeister. Siegmeister was a strange character who had operated on the fringes of the occult scene since the 1930s, promoting assorted enterprises such as a South American utopian colony (which the U.S. Post Office concluded did not exist) and publishing his bizarre theories about sexual intercourse (which he believed to be unhealthy) and the male sex (a mutation that ought to be eliminated). The Hollow Farth contributed little new to the inner-earth legends and in fact quoted at length from nineteenth-century texts on the subject; the rest of the book focused on Ray Palmer's ruminations as well as speculations about the alleged conspiracy to hide the truth about the hollow earth, flying saucers, and pole holes. Yet the book sold well, went through numerous printings, and introduced many readers to the subject.
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