In 1943, Richard Sharpe Shaver, an ironworker from Barto, Pennsylvania, mailed Amazing Stories an ancient alphabet, Mantong, assigning meanings to each English letter. Editor Ray Palmer retrieved it from the trash, published the letter in December 1943, and commissioned more. Shaver sent A Warning to Future Man; Palmer rewrote it into I Remember Lemuria!, March 1945: 12,000 years ago, the Titan-Atlans fled the sun's radiation underground, then abandoned Earth, leaving degenerate Dero, detrimental robots, and benevolent Tero in the caverns. Circulation soared; readers wrote in confirming their own encounters.
Fandom revolted at the fraud; in December 1948 management banned Shaver, and Palmer quit in solidarity. Palmer then founded Fate magazine, whose first issue carried Kenneth Arnold's flying saucer report, igniting the UFO era. Shaver's Nor, blonde space demigods, became UFO lore's Nordics; his Dero tunnels became subterranean alien bases. The Shaver Mystery died as a magazine stunt and was reborn as the architecture of American ufology.
The claim: Shaver's Dero, invisible beings projecting evil thoughts and orchestrating misery from below, are a precise map of paranoid experience, and the myth sold because it gave a shape to what sufferers already felt: agency behind anguish. The cavern is the skull; the Dero are the noise. Verdict: Shaver had spent time in psychiatric care, and scholars read the mythos as displaced self. But note the mechanism: an editor monetized one man's persecution map as nonfiction. The underground beings were never under the Earth. They were in the supply chain.
When a magazine sells madness as fact, who is the author: the madman or the editor?