Graphomania

 

The June 1947 issue, on the stands or just
pulled when both the Maury Island and
Kenneth Arnold sitings occurred.

 



"If Shaver and Palmer had not existed, there would be no ufology. It's that simple . . . The mystery had to be created before anyone could undertake to solve it."  - John Keel, author of Moth Man Prophesies

 

Remember when you were in school, the frisson of joy that ran through you when the teacher rolled in the cart with the projector (Boomers) or the TV (Gen Xers) or the video monitor (Millennials)?

As this exercise is necessarily didactic in nature, to some extent, I thought that this excerpt from Stan Deyo's 1977 documentary UFO's Are Here might be a welcome break. The first part is Kenneth Arnold kvetching. Then we get an interview with Amazing Stories/Fate  publisher Ray Palmer - the very same Ray Palmer whom Crisman entrusted with the slag samples from Maury Island - in which he gives a succinct and articulate introduction to the peculiar Weltanschauung of one Richard Shaver, the main subject of our current episode. The last part is just a gratuitous Australian.

 

 

 

 



"Early in the 1940s, a letter came to us from Dick Shaver purporting to reveal the "truth" about a race of freaks, called "Deros," living under the surface of the earth. Ray Palmer read it, handed it to me for comment. I read a third of it, tossed it in the waste basket. Ray, who loved to show his editors a trick or two about the business, fished it out of the basket, ran it in Amazing, and a flood of mail poured in from readers who insisted every word of it was true because they'd been plagued by Deros for years." -  Howard Browne, quoted in Ron Goulart (1972) Cheap Thrills: an informal history of the pulp magazines. NY: Arlington House

 

In 1943, Richard Shaver wrote a letter to Palmer in which Shaver outlined a proto-human language that he had discovered, a method to decode meanings hidden in all human words, regardless of what language was being spoken. This urlanguage, Shaver said, was called "Mantong."

Amazing Stories Jan 1944 issue, with
the nifty secret Mantong
alphabetical decoder chart!

See what Shaver did there?

 

The Mantong code was such that the alphabet stood for concepts.  in such a way that the letters alphabet could then be arranged into the hidden meanings behind words.

 

       A is for Animal

 

       B is to be

 

       C is to see

 

and the most important letter of all:

 

       D is for detrimental, all that is wrong with the world.

 

It goes on like this all the way to:

 

       Z is for zero.

 

In later works, Shaver expounded upon the coded meanings to be derived from this alphabet. For instance, "bad" becomes "be a de," or "be detrimental." "Morbid" stands for "more be I de," or "I don't want to be anymore, I want to die." And there were many later works. Even after Amazing Stories buckled under pressure from "serious" sci-fi fans and writers and ceased running Shaver material, Shaver continued to produce it at a prodigious pace. The last was a joint publication with Ray Palmer that came out in 1975, the year both died.

 

Ray Palmer was not the first to be thus enlightened by Shaver as to the hidden meanings behind our everyday words. In an issue of Science World magazine published in 1936, there appeared an article by one Albert F. Yeager entitled "The True Basis of Today's Alphabet." Yeager found six letters in the Roman alphabet that could stand for concepts. Correspondence from Shaver came in over Science World's transom, outlining his interpretation of all twenty-six of our characters.

 

There are obvious problems with Shaver's Mantong. For one, it is based on the premise that the Latin alphabet is directly equivalent to Mantong codes. In other words, it is not phonemic, but alphabetic, and the alphabet is the one Shaver – and Amazing Stories’ audience - already knew. In order to find the hidden meanings, any language, written or not, it would thus be necessary to transliterate it into the same version of said Latin alphabet use in English speaking countries.

 

Richard Shaver, in a moment of lucidity.

Palmer still found it useable. He wrote back to Shaver, asking him how he had come to know this language. He got back 10.000 words under the title "A Warning to Future Man." The Deros and Teros were introduced in this document. The degenerate Deros, Shaver said, could be to blame for nearly all misfortunes and crimes befalling humanity, no matter how minor. Shaver's imagined sado-masochistic attacks by Deros on some of our more pulchritudinous women would provide fodder for many lurid magazine covers, Palmer reckoned.

Palmer's in initial question - how did Shaver know all this?,- went unanswered.

Shaver told different and apparently evolving stories over time about how he found out about the underground world. the most often cited goes something like this . . .

In 1929, Shaver was in Detroit, in school at the John Wicker School of Fine Arts. He joined the John Reed Club, an artists group that eventually became an arm of Communist Party USA. He supported himself working as a nude model and bootlegging. By 1930, Shaver was teaching part time at the Wicker school, supplementing his income by drawing portraits in a park. He became involved with one of his students, a Russian émigré named Sophie Gurevitch. Or maybe she was one of his teachers, sources vary on this as they do regarding many matters in Shaver's story.

In 1932, Shaver got a job at the Briggs Body plant on the assembly line. In 1933, he married Sophie and they soon had a daughter.

Then one day, it seems, a welding gun at his work station had become a receiver, allowing him to read the thoughts of his adjacent coworkers. This not being disturbing enough, the Deros then planted telepathic images of torture in his mind. So he left that good job, becoming - his word - a hobo. Thus began what Shaver described as his wandering years.

In truth, shaver began to exhibit violent paranoia after the death of his brother. Shaver blamed a demon named Max for his brother's heart attack. Max then tuned to him for someone to torment. Sophie had him committed in August 1934. Two years later, when he was released, Shaver learned that Sophie had died, electrocuted in her tub by an electric heater. Sophie's parents got custody of their daughter. They told her that her daddy, too, was dead.

The following years were a blur. At some point Shaver stowed away on a freighter and ended up in a Canadian jail. He had an episode of homelessness in the dead of winter after he was thrown off a bus headed for Montreal at the border for having no money. He explained that subsequent bad decisions, with prompting from the Deros, led him, he said, to a stint in the State Pen. It was really a hospital for the criminally insane. Depending on what day he was asked, this was the story. Sometimes he said he was underground for eight years with the Deros.



Richard Shaver rockbook transfer, c. 1970.

Shaver's final release, to his parents, was from Ionia State Hospital in May 1943. They took him to their new home in Pennsylvania. His father died within a few months. He got work as a crane operator at Bethlehem Steel and married in 1944. That marriage ended when his wife left after finding documents relating to his commitment.

His third wife, Dorothy Erb, was by his side until he died. They were married after a quick courtship in October 1944, soon after his divorce from wife number two. it would be Dottie who would introduce him to the rockbooks in a classic folie a deux involving pareidolia, which Professor Robert Carroll defines in his Skeptics Dictionary as "a type of illusion or misconception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear or distinct."

But that's a whole other story . . .

Back to Shaver's writings.

It seems that Ray Palmer saw in Shaver a way to save a fading magazine in a foundering genre, and with it, his livelihood. The likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and even L. Ron Hubbard were too good for its pages. Material puvlished in Amazing Stories came from hacks, has-beens, beginners, often from Palmer himself writing under pseudonyms worthy of W.C. Fields himself. In his first communication with the editors at Amazing Stories, Shaver had asked for encouragement. Palmer gave it to him, and multi-page pieces written on what looked to Palmer like a toy typewriter with some broken keys came in the mail almost daily.

 

When Shaver's magnum "Warning" arrived, Palmer set to work editing it into a usable form and length. The first thing to go were numerous descriptions of acts of rape, pornographic and full of sado-masochistic detail. Then stream of consciousness ravings had to be cobbled into something at least arguably coherent. The finished product came out in the March issue of 1945 in Amazing entitled "I Remember Lemuria."

 

Palmer knew what he was doing. A few more issues featuring the so-called Shaver Mystery and Ziff-Davis was dipping into their precious war-time paper stocks allotted to other magazines in their portfolio to feed the demand. Palmer needed to find out how much more he would get out of Shaver.

'"Palmer traveled to Pennsylvania to talk to Shaver," Howard Brown later recalled, "found him sitting on reams of stuff he'd written about the Deros, bought every bit of it and contracted for more. I thought it was the sickest crap I'd run into. Palmer ran it and doubled the circulation of Amazing within four months."' - John Keel, "The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers."

 

Amazing Stories soon had the largest circulation of any pulp sci-fi magazine published. Letters poured in in a volume never seen before. Many had stories of their own, stories that they claimed would tend to suggest that the Shaver Mystery was real. Many of those were stories of things seen in the skies.

A year to the month before Kenneth Arnold's first siting, an issue of Amazing Stories was flying off the stands like a Dero craft headed for a girls' parochial school. In the Reader Comment section was the following missive:

"Sirs:

 

"I flew my last combat mission on May 26 [1945] when I was shot up over Bassein and ditched my ship in Ramaree roads off Chedubs Island. I was missing five days. I requested leave at Kashmere (sic). I and Capt. (deleted by request) left Srinagar and went to Rudok then through the Khese pass to the northern foothills of the Karakoram. We found what we were looking for. We knew what we were searching for.

 

"For heaven's sake, drop the whole thing! You are playing with dynamite. My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9" scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect silence. The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don't know. My friend has a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared inside. How we don't know. But we both believe we know more about the Shaver Mystery than any other pair.

 

"You can imagine my fright when I picked up my first copy of Amazing Stories and see you splashing words about the subject." 

The writer's name was withheld by request. Only years later did Ray Palmer reveal it.

The author was Fred Lee Crisman.

 

                 

 

"

 

 

 

 

 

My head just exploded.

Better make yourself a cup of cocoa and settle in, this is going be a long one. It’s so long, in fact, that I’m going to serialize it.

And it’s weird, too, so you might want to add some bourbon instead of marshmallows.

In 1968, Jim Garrison and the NOLA DA’s office subpoenaed one Fred Lee Crisman of Tacoma, WA to appear before a grand jury in the opening salvo of Garrison’s unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw for complicity in the murder of JFK. Most everyone reading this has seen that movie, Oliver Stone’s attempt, he says, at the creation of a countermythos to the Warren Commission’s report. Our serial will have many of the same characters, and will ultimately have some more – like Fred Lee Crisman – and will continue forward in time. It may seem like we are playing six degrees of conspiracy separation, as INSLAW, Watergate, flying saucers and I don’t yet know what all will make appearances. And, for what it’s worth and unlike Stone’s work, everything in this story will be verified fact . . . as far as it goes.

Jim Garrison

I would like to thank – I think – Professor Bruce Pierini for starting me in this direction, and Professor William Doonan for making me believe I could do it.

Here goes . . .

Crisman had come to Garrison’s attention via a letter, mysterious and anonymous, that landed on his desk some time earlier. The letter alleged that the first call Shaw made after his arrest –even before his lawyer - was to none other than Fred Lee Crisman.

During his testimony, Crisman presented 100% kosher commissions in the Louisiana State Police and the US Merchant Marine. Crisman got these papers, unbidden, he said, from a grifter named Thomas Edward Beckham, aka Mark Evans, of New Orleans. Beckham, an ordained priest in the Old Orthodox Catholic Church of North America, split for Omaha after he was busted for running a numbers racket out of a “Cuban mission” on Rampart Street.  That’s the same church that had enfrocked David Ferrie, the pederast PI who led young Oswald’s Civil Air Patrol unit in the ‘50s. Beckham listed Crisman as an officer in several of his scam businesses and non-profits, including – get this -- a criminal justice correspondence school. 

Beckham had shown up for his own testimony only after a long extradition fight. Once in NOLA he announced to the Times-Picayune that he was going to run for congress in his new home district in Nebraska.  When he arrived at the courthouse he brought an armed posse of former Omaha cops and his own brothers.

One of the questions the grand jury had for Crisman was where he had met Beckham. This is where it starts to get strange, though it won't be clear why until the end. Crisman answered that he had been introduced to Beckham by the owner of a “junk shop” in Tacoma. This shopkeeper’s name was Harold Dahl.
 

The Northwest was the fountainhead of the first UFO flap. Many, if not most, of the major tropes of UFO tales were started within a few weeks in a cluster of Washington and Idaho sitings.

The first case to get real press coverage was Kenneth Arnold’s 24 June 1947 siting of crescent-shaped objects flying across the horizon “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.”  The next day the East Oregonian paraphrased Arnold when it ran the story on the wire, and the Flying Saucer was born.

Two days after Arnold’s siting, Captain Emil J. Smith, a United Airlines pilot flying out of the same airport (Boise) as Arnold was asked to comment on the flying saucers for the press. He sarcastically expressed his skepticism for the record. Arnold had just seen a reflection in his instrument panel, Smith said. On the evening of 4 July, Capt. Smith took off at the helm of a Dakota bound for Seattle. As they got underway, the tower bade the crew to “be on the lookout for flying saucers.”

Guess what happened.

Around the time of the Arnold siting, a sample of odd rock was making its way around Chicago. According to an FBI report, it had first gone to the University of Chicago, and was then passed on to Ray Palmer, the colorful editor of Amazing Stories. Another FBI document is more likely to be correct with regard to the progress of the materials. In that one Palmer got the stuff first and sent it on to be analyzed. With the rocks came the following story.

On 21 June – three days before the Arnold siting – a man, his son, his dog and a deckhand were on the Sound just off Maury Island, salvaging loose logs.  They were near both SEATAC airport and Boeing’s airfield. Between four and six – FBI reports vary – donut shaped objects flew over the boat and hovered.  Blue sky could be seen through the holes, and there were portholes lining the insides of the rings. One object was flying lower than the rest, and appeared to be in some distress. Another moved toward the malfunctioning one. Something was then ejected through the portholes of the struggling object, raining down on the boat. The wheelhouse and lights were hit. The skipper’s son was hurt and his dog killed by this molten “slag.” There were also metal ejecta that behaved like leaves of paper, fluttering onto the deck.

The next morning, a guy in a black suit drove up to the skipper’s house in a brand new black Buick. The skipper assumed the man in black was military. The MIB wanted to speak to the skipper, and offered to buy him breakfast at the local diner. Over pancakes and eggs, the MIB recounted details of the siting that the skipper had not had time to release for general consumption. Then the MIB issued not-so-veiled threats against the skipper and his family should the skipper divulge his encounter of the previous day.

The threats didn’t stop the skipper from going to his employer that morning with the news that his boat was pretty well trashed. He showed his employer samples of the rocks that hit the deck and wheelhouse, and presumably some of the foil that fluttered in with them.

The employer sailed out to the island to have a look for himself. While there, he said, he saw an object – craft, as they are usually called, making an assumption not really in evidence – of the same description. He collected more of the “slag” on the beach.

The employer boxed some of the stuff up and sent it on to Chicago.

If you haven’t guessed by now, said employer was none other than the selfsame Fred Lee Crisman who was the first person Clay Shaw allegedly called after he was busted. And the skipper? He was none other than Harold Dahl, the junk shop owner who would introduce Crisman to Thomas Beckham some years on.