When those were completed, Emery and an expedition flew to Antarctica to search for the remains of Rainbow City, which they found in late November 1942. From Emery’s continuing telepathic communications, they were informed of the city’s long history. Over the next several years Emery roamed the earth uncovering remnants of the tunnel system. He also uncovered caches of nuclear weapons. Meantime, the circular aircraft continued their search for ancient remains. Persons who saw the planes called them “flying saucers” and thought they were from another planet.
Antarctica wasn’t always a frozen continent, according to one tale. It was located in a more fertile climate and settled by Martians until the Snake aliens attacked Earth and rotated the planet (iStock).
The Hefferlins wrote that the Ancient Three now—as of the late 1940s—were secretly in control of much of the world, with only the white race refusing to recognize or to be guided by them. “Thought machines” set in seven temples around the world beamed teachings to people in the Third World, urging them to cut their ties with the “European Empire Nations.” Soon the white nations would be forced to accept the role of the Ancient Three, who would usher in a utopian society based on the political model of the United States. Aggression, war, and racism would cease. The new order was not far away. The Hefferlins had been appointed North American spokespersons for the Three, but even they could not enter Rainbow City, or so they explained to individuals who wanted them to take them there.
Walter Kafton-Minkel, the leading chronicler of hollow-earth lore, argues that these yarns take their inspiration in good part from H.P. Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness. He writes:
In the tale, a scientific expedition bores a hole into the Antarctic ice crust and discovers a tunnel filled with the well-preserved corpses of alien life forms. Nearer the South Pole, the expedition discovers a great deserted city hidden behind mountains higher than the Himalayas and finds carvings telling the story of a race of “Elder Things” which settled at the Pole nearly a thousand million years ago and created the earth’s life forms. When the “great cold” came, the Old Ones settled first in the oceans, and then traveled down to a sea in the interior of the earth.
In 1960 Michael Barton, writing as Michael X, published Rainbow City and the Inner Earth People, based on psychic communications from astral entities speaking on the “Telethot” channel. Barton fused Shaver Mystery (see p. 55) material and hollowearth theories with the sort of material the Hefferlins, long faded from the scene (“now believed to be living in Rainbow City,” according to fringe chronicler Jim Keith), had peddled. Rainbow City is a kind of base for the Ancients and the Guardians as they enter the earth’s interior through the South Pole. The Ancients and the Guardians — wise Venusians — are cleaning out “both the astral and physical levels of the inner Earth … in preparation for the coming Golden Age.”
Further Reading:
Kafton-Minkel, Walter. Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races and UFOs from Inside the Earth. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1989.
Standish, David. Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006.
“I always wonder what people would do if they knew there was real evil underfoot,” said Richard S. Shaver, “and that Hell was a genuine ancient city with genuine ghouls in it.” Shaver was speaking from firsthand experience. He had seen the evil that is—literally—underfoot. He had been there personally and met the ghouls and the demons. Or so he would insist at voluminous length in print—and, over the years, to a smaller and smaller but still deliciously creeped-out audience—for more than three decades, ceasing only with his death.
One of five children, Shaver was born in Berwick, Pennsylvania, in 1907. On graduating high school and moving to Philadelphia, he worked manual labor jobs which provided no outlet for his fertile imagination. He found one finally in Detroit, where he moved in 1929 to join his relocated family. There he signed up at the Wicker School of Art, where he took instructions in drawing. He worked as a nude model on the side and even made enough money to employ a model to work for him. He took up bootlegging. In 1930 he joined a Communist group, the John Reed Club, but his tenure there was brief, though just long enough to get his attention-grabbing presence at a May Day parade noted the next day in the Detroit News. He went back to the Wicker School for a part-time teaching job, supplementing his income by sketching people in the city park. He got romantically involved with a student, Russian émigré Sophie Gurivitch, whom he would marry in 1933.
In 1932 an unemployed Shaver managed to find a job on the assembly line at Briggs Body. It was a tedious, dangerous occupation. Years later, that period of Shaver’s life would figure prominently in the mythology of his life, but nearly a decade would pass before the story of what supposedly happened as he worked the line became a subject of spirited controversy. It is certain, however, that in the wake of the death of his beloved older brother Tate, he suffered an emotional breakdown. By the time he was taken to the Detroit Receiving Hospital Emergency Ward in mid-July 1934, his behavior had become agitated and violent, and he needed to be forcibly restrained. Besides accusing attending physicians of trying to poison him, he complained that mysterious, sinister strangers were shadowing him. Concerned for herself and their young daughter, Sophie insisted that he be placed in a mental institution. On August 17 papers were drawn up to have him committed to the Ypsilanti State Hospital.
Richard S. Shaver told remarkable stories of his alleged subterranean adventures in a series of wild tales published in Amazing Stories magazine (Mary Evans Picture Library).
In later years Shaver would claim that the episode amounted to little. He had suffered “heat stroke” and been hospitalized a scant two weeks. Not even those who would become friends or followers believe this to be true. According to persons close to Shaver, the hospitalization lasted as long as eight years. (Writer Doug Skinner states matter-of-factly, “Shaver was released from the Ionia State Hospital in Michigan in 1943.”) Pressed on the subject, Shaver responded with conflicting stories. Though the details tended to contradict each other, they generally agreed that these were lost, unsettled years in which he lived in a fog of fear and confusion. Separated from her husband, Sophie died in an accident in her apartment in December 1936. Their young daughter was given to Sophie’s parents to raise, and she would grow up knowing nothing of her biological father until, years after his death, she came upon his name in a magazine article.
At some point Shaver moved to Pennsylvania, landed a job as a crane operator, and remarried. His new wife left him a few months later, Shaver would report vaguely, after “finding some papers indicating I had been in a mental hospital.” Subsequently, Shaver married his third and last wife, Dorothy Erb, who would be with him until his death in 1975.
Whatever else was happening to Shaver between his hospitalization and his emergence into the wider world, it is evident that he was immersed in fantasy literature, including A. Merritt’s popular novel The Moon Pool (1919), which is about good and evil ancient races living in caverns beneath the earth. Besides that, Shaver was trying his hand at writing, seeking without success to get published in the flourishing