American writer whose stories in Amazing Stories, beginning with 'I Remember Lemuria!' (1945), claimed firsthand knowledge of an ancient subterranean civilization and its malevolent 'Deros.' Editor Ray Palmer promoted the 'Shaver Mystery' as substantially true, driving a sharp rise in the magazine's circulation and prefiguring several tropes of postwar UFO folklore.
Richard Sharpe Shaver was born in 1907 in Virginia and worked as a welder and factory hand before being committed to Michigan and Massachusetts state hospitals for mental illness during the mid-1930s. In 1943 he wrote to Amazing Stories describing a hidden ancient language and, at editor Ray Palmer's prompting, an elaborate account of subterranean 'Tero' and 'Dero' races who tormented humanity with advanced ray technology. Palmer expanded Shaver's manuscript into the novella 'I Remember Lemuria!' (March 1945), presented as substantially true, which the magazine promoted for several years as the 'Shaver Mystery,' generating tens of thousands of reader letters and a documented rise in circulation before Amazing Stories dropped the material in 1948. Among the correspondents describing corroborating experiences was Fred Crisman, later central to the 1947 Maury Island incident. In later decades Shaver focused on 'rock books,' stones he believed were inscribed by the ancient races; his art and photography have since been exhibited posthumously in Los Angeles and New York.