The 1944 Shaver Mystery Letters and Deros Cosmology

Record summary

Richard S. Shaver’s letters and stories, publicized by Amazing Stories beginning in 1943, described hidden subterranean beings, advanced machinery, mental influence, and ancient remnants of a lost civilization. The material sometimes used radiant, technological, and quasi-religious imagery resembling accounts of divine or demonic vehicles. It became a major controversy in American pulp culture, with readers disputing whether it was fiction, recovered memory, or fact. The episode is highly identifiable through magazine issues and editorial correspondence, but its factual claims were not independently established.