There is a lot of literature out there regarding beings that live underground such as reptilians. Much of it states that the earth is hollow (or at least vast networks of artificial caverns exist) and that malevolent, advanced being live inside our planet and interact with humankind—to our detriment.
One of the most frightening alleged encounters with a mysterious underworld being took place in Carlsbad Caverns in 1966. If—and it is a big if—the story is to be believed. I first learned of the tale in a Facebook group and since that time I have seen the story and an accompanying photograph on several blogs and websites. It is your typical creepypasta:
Visiting Carlsbad Caverns in 1966, 7 year old Celia Barton said something was ‘grabbing at her’ as she followed her parents while strolling down to the cavern’s Big Room. Annoyed that she kept activating her Instamatic’s flash, her father finally confiscated the camera. Later, this picture was developed. Celia said she thought it wanted to play with her, but it smelled bad, ‘like an old banana peel.’ “What you don’t know can hurt you. 1860-1998.”5
In almost every internet retelling of the story, a “photograph” of a strange, shadowy being with frightening eyes accompanies the tale.
Mysterious beings from creepypasta blogs and Facebook groups certainly do not have a monopoly on the underworld. Science fiction pulp magazines delved into the subject in the early-twentieth century, and in the 1940s, the deros and teros were introduced to the surface-dwelling public.
Deros, short for “detrimental robots,” live beneath the surface of the earth in a network of artificial caverns and war against humankind using an advanced technology that emits harmful rays. This revelation came to Pittsburgh welder Richard S. Shaver in the early-1940s when he began hearing voices that emanated from his welding machine. This led to a long and winding story that was dubbed “The Shaver Mystery” and was promoted by the Sci-Fi pulp magazine Amazing Stories.
Shaver sent a letter to Raymond E. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories,in which he introduced Palmer to a mysterious language that predated humankind. Palmer printed the letter, which prompted Shaver to send in a 10,000-word manuscript titled “A Future Warning to Mankind.” Palmer edited the manuscript, making it the length of a novella. He also dressed up Shaver’s revelations and couched them in science fiction—to make them more tolerable for the general public—but the key elements of the story were supposedly true. Amazing Storiesran the piece, now titled “I Remember Lemuria!”
According to Shaver, an ancient humanoid race once inhabited the earth, these were the Atlanteans and Lemurians of myth. Eventually, harmful solar radiation forced the ancients underground. Writing in They Knew too Much About Flying Saucers, Gray Barker devoted a section of the book recapping the Shaver Mystery:6
The Elder Race, equipped with great scientific knowledge and inventions, used rays to bore a vast network of caverns beneath the surface, where they would be protected from the radiation, could filter out the radioactive elements from the water they drank and the food they ate.
Eventually, life on Earth—even for those living below the surface—became a losing battle. The Elder Race was forced to hastily flee the planet. Says Barker:
Knowing the Sun would become increasingly dangerous, the Elder Races decided it was time to migrate to another solar system heated by a young star. So, they left.
However, some missed their flight and were left behind. Barker continues:
Certain surface dwellers, left behind in the wild exodus the colonizers found even more urgent than anticipated, crept into the caves to sack the treasures left behind.
Included in the cosmic loot were huge stationary ray machines, created to diffuse helpful radiations upon those who used them, but left without proper directions. Without periodic changes of the filters which screened out and built up harmful charges, the machines eventually would twist and pervert the minds of those under exposure to the rays.
Driven insane by the rays, the detrimental robots (called robots due to their robotic behavior rather than mechanical composition) have been warring against humankind since our appearance on the planet. They employ a variety of techniques including, but not limited to, spreading confusion and inserting themselves into our religious beliefs. Says Barker:
The deros were the devils and witches of our folklores and religions; they, not spirits, communicate with mediums in trance, and materialize occasionally at seances through the use of rays.
Barker, in his recap of the Shaver Mystery, explained the place of the deros in the present-day UFO phenomenon:
The deros engage in interplanetary traffic with evil beings from other planets. These contacts are responsible for the odd aerial phenomena people have been witnessing since the early-1940s.
Barker explained that the deros derive pleasure from tormenting us:
These degenerate people who once inhabited Earth’s surface now live in the caves, and derive pleasure from terrorizing, torturing and exploiting surface people, actually contacting them to defraud them of money and possessions. Their rays, directed upon mankind, combined with the Sun’s radiations, are responsible for men’s folly, in, for example, warring against one another. The deros also playfully torture individuals, making them hear voices, and cause accidents on the surface of the earth and in the skies.
Fortunately, there is a noble group of cavern-dwellers who tirelessly work to keep the evil deros at bay: the teros. In fact, later in his life, Shaver relocated to Amherst, Wisconsin, where he believed a large group of teros lived.
The Shaver Mystery is quite a story. If I’m being honest, I don’t believe a single word of it. Actually, I should rephrase: I do believe that Shaver might have been hearing voices; but I do not believe in a group of detrimental robots warring against humankind from beneath the earth. It is interesting to think, though, that when you strip away all of the outlandish elements of the Shaver Mystery, there mightbe a little something there. Various mythologies and religions speak of a place inside the earth where the spirits of the departed dwell. According to the Bible, God locked away a group of fallen angels inside the earth:
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment
—2 Peter 2:4 (King James Version)
The word hell in the verse is a translation of the Greek word Tartarus. Wikipedia defines Tartarus thusly:
In Greek mythology, Tartarus is the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans. Tartarus is the place where, according to Plato’s Gorgias (c. 400 BC), souls are judged after death and where the wicked received divine punishment. Like other primal entities (such as the Earth, Night and Time), Tartarus is also considered to be a primordial force or deity.7
Could Shaver’s revelation that the deros are the demons and devils of the myths and religions have some merit after all?
Another interesting aspect of the Shaver Mystery—again, with all the foolishness stripped away—is that the deros are not all that differentfrom the legendary author and researcher John Keel’s (1930–2009) ultraterrestrials. Along the same lines, the deros share similarities with the forward-thinking Mac Tonnies’ (1975–2009) cryptoterrestrials.
John Keel originally set out to prove that extraterrestrials were visiting our planet. Not far into his research, he abandoned the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis altogether; he found it untenable. In his classics such as Operation Trojan Horse, Our Haunted Planet, The Eighth Tower, and others, Keel proposed the idea that an earthbound, ancient, advanced race (far more advanced than humans) occupied Earth along with humankind. He dubbed these beings ultraterrestrials; they represent the fairies, monsters, aliens, and gods of our religions and mythologies. These ultraterrestrials, according to Keel, occupy the “super spectrum”—the upper reaches of the electromagnetic spectrum—and can appear to humans in nearly any form. Their purposes, and reasons for their interactions with humans, is beyond our comprehension.
Like Keel, Mac Tonnies also found the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis lacking. He wrote of a group of Earth-bound beings that he dubbed Cryptoterrestrials in his posthumously-published book titled, The Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among Us. Tonnies’ entities are humanoid and of earthly origin; they have occupied the planet at least as long as humans. The cryptoterrestrials are technologically more advanced than humans, but not by much. They are secretive, hiding themselves and their agenda, and present themselves as extraterrestrial entities or occult beings. Like Shaver’s teros, Tonnies’ cryptoterrestrials also hide out deep below the earth:
Caverns and tunnels repeatedly crop up in the alien contact literature. Witnesses sometimes describe lavish below-ground installations teeming with beings that may or may not be related to humans. This is certainly compatible with the idea that our “visitors” have been here at least as long as recorded history, spared the toxic excesses of known civilization. In effect, they could inhabit an immense fallout shelter, having foreseen our own demise and taken elaborate precautions.8
Whether or not you believe in Tonnies’ savvy race of earth-bound entities posing as extraterrestrials or Keel’s inhabitants of the super spectrum, or even if you think there is merit to the Shaver Mystery matters little. Something has sparked the imagination of humankind and there has to be something behind it. Or so it would seem.
None of these creatures are as bad, though, as the Reptilians. But that is a topic for another day….OR, you could read about them and other underground beings in my book El Paso to Las Cruces via Roswell.
Notes
5. “Unexplained Events,” #confirmed, June 17, 2013, accessed April 05, 2019, http://unexplained-events.com/post/53162800716/visiting-carlsbad-caverns-in-1966-7-year-old.
6. Gray Barker, They Knew too Much About Flying Saucers, (Point Pleasant, WV: New Saucerian Books, 2014), Kindle edition.
7. “Tartarus,” Wikipedia, March 22, 2019, accessed April 05, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarus.
8. Mac Tonnies, The Cryptoterrestrials, (San Antonio, TX: Anomalist Books, 2010), iBooks edition.
