Guy Lochhead, 08/09/10
Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907-1975) was an American writer and artist who achieved notoriety for his stories of a subterranean race of ‘Teros’ and ‘Deros’ that were printed in pulp science fiction magazine ‘Amazing Stories’, and presented as true. These stories ran from 1945 until 1948, and stopped when sales fell (or when the editors were threatened by ‘sinister forces’, depending on what you believe.) Shaver later published books of photographs of ‘rock books’ (rocks), in which he said were ancient alien texts. The Shaver Mystery was blamed by the FBI as the beginnings of UFOlogy. A load of baloney, and nothing worth including really. These stories became a magnet for paranoid schizophrenics, and can be seen as detrimental to the treatment of the mentally ill. They also marked the descent of sci-fi into sensationalist pulp that betrayed its roots of questioning, prediction and fictional scientific exploration. Shame, because ‘Sharpe Shaver’ is a hell of a name…