Science-Fantasy Religious Cults the Story of Ray Palmer, Forgotten Flying-Saucer Pioneer

Science-Fantasy Religious Cults The story of Ray Palmer, forgotten flying-saucer pioneer Martin Gardner cience-fiction fans have a long, dreary history of falling States government aircraft? Soviet planes? Spaceships from for outrageous quasi-religious, pseudoscientific cults that Mars or Venus? Sarise within the community of science-fiction writers and The time was ripe for a new mythology. Traditional reli- editors. L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology, first introduced as gions were declining, and the fundamentalist revival was yet to "dianetics" by John Campbell when he was editor of Astound- begin. Sea serpents had long ago retired to isolated spots like ing Science Fiction, is of course the prime example. This article Loch Ness. Not many people were seeing visions of the Virgin will tell the story of an almost forgotten science-fiction editor, Mary or conversing with angels the way Joan of Arc did. But Ray Palmer, and the curious roles he played in the notorious out there, over our heads, was dark, endless space—a region "Shaver hoax" and, later, in promoting the cult of UFOlogy. teeming with mysteries far more exotic than any in earth's Although reports of mysterious unidentified flying objects ancient seas. Were aliens from other planets watching us? Could go back to ancient times, and numerous UFO reports are scat- they be here to conquer us? To save us from self-destruction? tered through the writings of Charles Fort, the UFOmania of Add to these fears and hopes the steady deterioration of science the present century had an abrupt beginning. It was almost teaching, widespread resentment against technology for inven- exactly forty years ago, on June 24, 1947. ting the atom bomb and polluting the environment, the upsurge Kenneth Arnold, a manufacturer of fire-fighting equipment of enthusiasm for astrology and all things occult, and it is not in Boise, Idaho, was flying his three-seat cabin plane from hard to understand why the UFO craze spread so rapidly. Chehalis to Yakima, in Washington. Arnold remembers it as a cloudless day with the air "as smooth as silk." At about 3 P.M. n our country's science-fiction subculture, Ray Palmer was he spotted nine crescent-shaped disks bobbing up and down I the first editor to perceive the mythic potency of UFOlogy. "like a tail of a Chinese kite" over the peaks of Washington's "And who was Ray Palmer?" I can hear the young readers ask. Cascade Mountains. They seemed headed for Mt. Rainier at a We older readers remember him well. speed Arnold estimated to be more than 1,700 miles an hour. Raymond A. Palmer (the "A" didn't stand for anything), Later that afternoon in Pendleton, Oregon, Ken decided to born in Milwaukee in 1910, was a blue-eyed hunchback about report what he saw to the FBI. Finding its offices closed, he four feet tall.* He always claimed that his deformed back had took his story to the editor of the Eastern Oregonian. been caused by an accident when he was seven, but what sort Whatever Arnold saw—some skeptics think it was a group of accident is not clear. In one version he was hit by a butcher's of weather balloons—they seemed not to be circular. "They truck; in another, he was hit by a streetcar. Howard Browne, flew erratic," Arnold told a United Press reporter, "like a saucer who for six years was editor-in-chief of all of Ziff-Davis's pulps, if you skip it across water." In the story he sent over the wire, told me that Ray told him the accident was a fall off a roof. the reporter called the objects "flying saucers." Before a week When Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories in 1926, had passed, newspapers throughout the nation were having a Palmer became a lifelong fan. He edited what is said to be the field day with reports of new sightings and wild speculations first fanzine, The Comet. "The Time Ray of Jandra," in Wonder about what the mysterious "saucers' could be. Secret United Stories (June 1930), was his first published story. According to Palmer, for the next ten years he sold hundreds of tales in such Martin Gardner is the author diverse fields as SF, mystery, western, romance, and even of Science: Good, Bad and pornography. He used many pseudonyms. Bogus, and some forty other books in the fields of science, *In the sixties, science-fiction writers Gardner Fox and Jule Schwartz wrote mathematics, and literary a comic book called The Atom, about a scientist who had the power to criticism. shrink himself to a height of six inches. They named the scientist Ray Palmer. Summer 1987 31 below the earth's surface. But the rays still damaged them, and they were forced to abandon the planet. An inferior race of humans discovered the caverns and the fantastic machines the superbeings had left behind. Alas, radiation from the machines turned the humans into midgetlike idiots whom Shaver called the "deros" (short for "detrimental robots"). The deros still live beneath us. All sorts of terrible disasters that occur above ground, including great wars, are caused by psychic forces coming from the evil deros. Palmer printed Shaver's first short novel, I Remember Lemuria, in the March 1945 issue of Amazing. The response from simple-minded readers was indeed amazing. After thou- sands of letters, many from persons reporting their own en- counters with deros, Palmer realized he had on his hands the making of a monstrous swindle. For the next few years he rewrote all of Shaver's demented submissions, presenting them not as fiction but as sober fact. Only older SF fans can compre- hend the furor that resulted. Little is known about Shaver, but some evidence suggests he may really have believed he was in psychic contact with creatures of the caverns. In the July 1971 issue of Forum, Palmer revealed that for eight years, while Shaver was feeding him raw data, Shaver was in a mental hospital. "He suffered 74e from being a tremendous psychic person," Ray wrote, "and this in my belief makes him superior, mentally, to those people SHAVER MYSTERY unable to perceive the ordinarily unseen aspects of our total existence." A few months later Palmer reported that Shaver had years earlier escaped from the mental hospital and "is at Amazing Stories warned its readers against the psychic forces of "evil deros." present a fugitive." Young Palmer belonged to a club called "The Milwaukee Fictioneers," which included Robert Bloch, Stanley Weinbaum, and Ralph Milne Farley. After Weinbaum died, Palmer edited a collection of his work, Dawn of Flame and Other Stories. When Weinbaum's widow objected to Ray's introduction, he substituted a new one, making the first edition of this book a rarity. Amazing Stories was in the doldrums when Ziff-Davis took it over in 1938. It was being edited by Gernsback's friend T. O'Conor Sloane, then eighty-six. Ziff-Davis replaced Sloane with Palmer, and the magazine's character altered overnight. The shift was away from hard science to action and adventure. Sales of Amazing leaped upward. The next year Palmer started Fantastic Adventures, featuring yarns on a level even more juvenile than those of Amazing. At about this time Palmer's nose began to sniff the burning A rsre photograph of Richard Shaver, who created "a vast, com- fuse of the coming occult explosion. Millions of young readers, plex mythology." he correctly sensed, cared little about orthodox science. They were hungering for far-out science. Over the transom came It was a period in which the two men seemed not on good some weird material of just the sort Palmer wanted. A Pennsyl- terms. Palmer published a letter from Shaver that vigorously vania welder named Richard Sharpe Shaver claimed to be in denied Palmer's disclosures. He had, Shaver said, been in a telepathic communication with a race of evil humanoids who sanitorium for only two weeks, and only to recover from a lived underground. heat stroke. The two men also clashed over the nature and Let us try to capsule Shaver's vast, complex mythology. location of the deros. Palmer put forth the theory that they Long ago the earth had been the home of the Atlans and the could be spiritual beings above the earth, on a higher astral Titans, godlike creatures who flourished on the now-sunken plane. Shaver responded with anger: "I was in the caves. Not continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. To protect themselves from in the clouds overhead or in any mental world of the liar's harmful solar radiation they constructed enormous caverns imagination, but in actuality." How much of this debate, in the 32 FREE INQUIRY few years preceding Shaver's death in 1975, is accurate and how much was cooked up by the pair to keep the Shaver "At about this time Palmer's nose began to sniff mystery alive is impossible at this time to say. the burning fuse of the coming occult explosion. Did Palmer ever believe in the deros? Some think he did, or maybe half-did, but I can't buy it. Jim Wentworth, in a Millions of young readers, he correctly sensed, history of the Shaver flap that I'll return to later, tells us that cared little about orthodox science. They were neither Palmer's wife, Marjorie, nor Shaver's third wife, hungering for far-out science." Dorothy, took the deros seriously. I met Ray on several occa- sions in the forties, when I lived in Chicago, and I have talked restrial.

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