Intimate Alien by David J. Halperin

Author:David J. Halperin [Halperin, David J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Shaver Mystery

BEFORE BARKER, there was Raymond Palmer, and before flying saucers, there was the Shaver Mystery. Call it a prelude to the grander drama of the UFO, which erupted into the American consciousness just as the Shaver Mystery was beginning to fade. Or call it a dress rehearsal. Or, to take the most extreme position, the matrix out of which the UFO was to emerge.

The name Shaver Mystery, given by Palmer, clung to it from its beginning. It’s not immediately obvious, though, what there was about it that made it a mystery to be solved rather than a story to be passively absorbed or a myth to inspire, to awe, possibly to terrify. It’s called by Richard Shaver’s name even though it was Palmer’s at least as much as it was Shaver’s. It was the synergy of the pair, to use that word once more, that made it possible.

They were an odd couple, as visibly a “unification of opposites” as were Betty and Barney Hill. Shaver, of Pennsylvania farming stock, was brawny and ruggedly handsome. Palmer was a city boy from Milwaukee, whom a spine-shattering childhood encounter with a beer truck had turned into a spindly-limbed, hunchbacked dwarf. Their religious views were starkly different.62 Shaver, the creator—or recipient, he would say—of a rococo mythology filled with uncanny beings, was fiercely atheist. All that counted for him was material reality, though not a reality that any scientist would recognize as such. Palmer, for all his eager though not unrestrained pursuit of the fast buck, was a believer in the power of the Spirit, the guiding hand of the being he called the “Deliberate Manipulator.”

As a child and again as a man of twenty, Ray Palmer had lain in hospitals on the edge of death. The doctors were emphatic: he was a goner. They gave him no chance. Both times, through Spirit, he summoned himself to life and walked out into the sunlight, crippled but vigorous. Where Shaver brought a nightmare vision of an earth that was a sun-poisoned, monster-ridden hell, Palmer brought a glowing faith in redemption through Mystery. This was the deepest meaning of the “mystery” in the Shaver Mystery, as well as its link with what would become the UFO.

MANTONG

It began with a letter.

The letter arrived in Chicago, in September 1943, at the editorial offices of the venerable science-fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories. It came from someone in Barto, Pennsylvania, calling himself “S. Shaver.” Obviously a crackpot, thought Howard Browne, the editor on fan mail duty. He snorted in contempt and tossed the letter into the wastebasket.

This, at any rate, is the legend that surrounds the Shaver Mystery’s birth. Legendary also is how thirty-three-year-old Ray Palmer, who outranked Browne at Amazing Stories, went diving into the wastebasket to rescue the letter and arrange for its publication in the letters column of the January 1944 issue. The letter was headlined “An Ancient Language?”

Sirs:

Am sending you this in hopes you will insert in an issue to keep it from dying with me.

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