Life Underground
I suppose it’s only natural that I’d consider the decade of my formative years – the 1970s – to have been the “perfect” one in which to grow up. I have little doubt that those whose childhoods encompassed the ’80s or even (Merritt forfend!) the ’90s may feel the same way. They’re wrong, of course, at least if you were the kind of kid who enjoyed hearing tales of the weird, the strange, and the occult. The 1970s were alive with such nonsense, from Bigfoot to ancient astronauts to the Loch Ness Monster, not to mention The Exorcist, In Search Of, and The Night Stalker. And let us not forget that the decade also saw the popularization, through books and movies and television, of the watered-down Theosophy of the New Age movement. In retrospect, it all makes sense if you look at the ’70s as a ten-year hangover in the aftermath of the various counterculture movements that spread like wildfire during the 1960s.
For a lot of adults living at the time, it probably wasn’t pretty, but, for me, as a child with a sense that there was more to the universe than what we saw everyday, it sure was fun. Though far more skeptical today, I still retain a keen interest in such oddities, as well as the sense – or is it merely the hope? – that I was not wrong in my youthful intuition that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Like Fox Mulder, “I want to believe,” even if I find it increasingly hard to summon up the credulity necessary to do so. Perhaps that’s why, even as I scoff, I nevertheless retain a more-than-grudging admiration for men and women who do believe, often in the face not merely of seemingly contradictory facts, but also of social ridicule, ostracism, and abuse.
That probably explains why I’ve long been intrigued by “the Shaver Mystery,” which first burst upon the world in the form of the story “I Remember Lemuria,” published in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. The story purports to be an ancient, first-person account (preserved in “thought records”) of an advanced subterranean civilization that once existed on Earth and whose remnants continue to have intermittent – and often unpleasant – contact with the surface.
