HIDDEN WORLD Volume 2 : THE MASKED WORLD of Richard Shaver

Mr. UFO, Timothy Green Beckley, brings back the Shaver Mysteries as no one else in the publishing industry can, with his experience and knowledge of not only UFO anomalies, but strange occurences worldwide and underground. Tim Swartz, a business associate and friend of Mr. UFO, writes a new introduction to this special reprint.

From the Introduction

That we die as a planned thing by that unknowable Creator, and that after death we "graduate" into a more advanced state of existence, still impossible to differentiate from fleshly living in some sort of "spirit" body, Shaver rejects, solely on the basis that given the proper conditions the original flesh body would live forever and grow ever more vital and vibrant and in no wise less desirable than a spirit form.

It is here that we could say that your editor acts as the devil's advocate" and assumes an opposing viewpoint. lit is true that your editor has never been in the caves. Unlike Shaver, he hasn't had that "demonstration" that eliminates all theory. Nor can your editor state with positive knowledge that. Shaver WAS in the caves.

The possibility exists that Shaver only suffered an illusion, impossible to detect from reality. The question of what an illusion is, and how it can be isolated from reality, or vice versa, is a moot one, and not capable of resolution through argument. To all other people who have not actually had Shaver's experiences, theory is the only avenue of escape from sell-delusion due to dogma. We cannot accept as a fact a mere belief. However we may believe that Shaver's caves exist exactly as he says they do, we cannot make them a factual part of our lives until they can be demonstrated personally. In short, vas you dere, Sharlie?

Ever since the publication of the first Shaver story, there has been the wise nodding of heads of spiritist-minded people, who say: "Certainly Shaver is right! His dero are the real thing; they are the spirits of the dead, the evil-minded ones.

The tero are the good-minded dead. Some of the monsters he describes are elementals, demons, fallen angels, etc." They say what he sees as caves are really the realms of the astral, particularly the lower astral. They say that in their seances, they have met these dero-tero characters, and they have identified themselves as the dead.

But here, again, we are face to face with the same dilemma: A ghost of a departed person is as impossible to demonstrate to most of us as is a dero. And even if we see one, we cannot positively say what it is we see. Your editor has seen a dero. He has also seen a ghost. Accordingly he is on the fence. Is it true that there are both dero and spirit? Is it true that there are both caverns and astral domains? Is it true that some life lives forever and some dies?

Excerpt

ThERE ARE SEVERAL of these feasts of the Demons during the year, but only one Sabbath - the greatest of them all. These people gathered here are those who are the modern descendants of the people responsible in the past for all the wool put in surface men's heads. They pranked and played the devil for the surface man, and laughed at us and then went to their own feast of the Sabbath and laughed not at all before the awful statue of the God of evil himself. They behaved like witches with their solidograph projectors, wafted surface women around on broom sticks with the ancient levitation beams, and tweaked the bottoms of the Christian priests on the surface in much the same way they had deviled the Greek pagans of Athens and toward as foolish and futile ends.

Witches and warlocks of a mighty kind they might seem to surface men when they played their pranks over the tremendous old miracle rays that were almost their only real contact with the surface; but in the caves they were the dupes of rulers who used them solely because they could be used to kill people who got in their way and not demand payment; who could be used to curse a man who was ambitious, for if told to follow and torment any person from a distance with their ray mech they would do so, "not for a day, not for a year, but always" for their stupidity is of a single-mindedness not understandable to any who do not know the nature of the demon.

The dero is peculiar to the caves, and has to be seen and known for a long period, lived with to be understood or believed in. The stupidity of a creature that looks like a man, has many of man's supposedly divine attributes, yet in truth cannot think much better than a chicken, is a thing bard to believe until you see it for yourself. The dero is the slave of evil thought.

In the caverns, the intelligent men know what evil is, for they can see it in the dero, and know that only degenerate men are evil. On the surface the legend of the cunning and wisdom of evil is still believed in too greatly because we are not acquainted first hand with the thing as it is in persons of hereditarily evil families. Unfortunately these families, well known for their stupidity and evil life, are not so easily disposed of as might be thought, because a ray position built and weaponed by a God of the Elder race can not be taken even though defended by the veriest fool - because ray of a range sufficient to outrange the ray in fixed position just isn't portable.

Thus the stupid evil demon of the caves lives on because of, the invulnerability of the ancient ray positions where he lives for centuries, inviolate and completely destructive of all, good in the life under the range of the ancient ray he has inherited through no virtue of his own. There he lives as the dupe and unpaid worker of the Ray-master; and his an consists of being unctuously useful to the slightest whim of his master, and as nasty to the rest of the world as possible. The dupe, the evil unpaid staff-servant, is the custom of the caves; and their numbers are replenished from the "banned" (banshee), the poor mad ones who populate thinly the less desirable reaches of the endless caverns. These have been cast out of the settled, city groups, because too mad or too diseased to live with; but they have children and somehow the children sometimes grow up - in unnameable degradation and conditions of such shame as no surface people can understand.

Still these children grow up and are not always evil, but often are evil. These mad nomads have their religions, and the greatest of these is the worship of Satan; but they have also the "white" magic, the "helpers", and many of them serve these as I do, as well as we may. Men like Bonur have their uses for these evil savages of the far, unknown caverns reaches, and cultivate them by such atrocities as this Feast of the Sabbath.

THE PEOPLE OF THE CITIES are not like the savage and hereditarily evil dwellers in the less settled portions of the caves, except in some cities where evil rules entire. In the better cities such men as Brack have carried down the art of repairing the ancient mechanisms, kept alive a science of a mighty kind, the study of the ancient mech, for sale to the highest bidder.

If their stock is looted by some avaricious boss like Bonur, they set out into the endless caverns and come back with many truckloads, many rollats, loaded down with the intricate and tremendously valuable ancient mech, and after repairing it and cleansing the surface of its ages of corrosion - which is very little due to the nature of the metals they use, much of the mech being sheathed in gold -are again in business.

Ships sometimes come from space to buy their wares, and the Lords have always a need of these men, to repair and service their own arsenal of antique weapons, and so do support and protect them in their trade to some extent.

In the cities (cities are really very few in population, the life in the caves is not so numerous as our own - nor so fertile of children), too, live the miners of precious stones, the strippers of gold from the sheathings of the ancient mechanisms, and miners of precious ores who work the vast deep borings of the Elders' mines, many of which are still worked today after all these dark centuries.