I.

The deros are evil, degenerate Atlantean dwarves. The regular Atlanteans have long since ascended into space-godhood. But the sadistic deros linger underground to this day, where they subject kidnapped humans (especially women) to horrible tortures.

The deros are mostly bestial but retain enough intelligence to operate Atlantean telepathic ray machines. With these rays, they spy on surface-dwellers, torment them with glimpses of their underground hellscapes, or simply drive them mad. The quickest way to incur their malign attention is to notice their existence (so you may want to put down this article!). 

Still here? Our story begins in 1932, when a factory worker with the unlikely name of Richard Sharpe Shaver first started hearing thoughts not his own. The voices urged him to commit crimes; he preferred not to recount specifics, but they landed him in prison. During his time there, the telepathic tortures intensified, beaming pain into every cell of his body. The prison guards noticed something was wrong, but he refused to explain the situation, fearing his short prison sentence would be transformed into an indefinite psychiatric commitment. He was saved only when one of the teros — the deros’ benevolent counterparts — fell in love with him and spirited him away to her cavern. There, he entered the virtual-reality psychic library of Atlantis, and the secret history of humanity and its predecessors was injected into his mind in its entirety.

After that, the trail goes cold until 1943, when Shaver wrote a letter to the editor of sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories. He wished to share the ancient Atlantean alphabet (he called it “manton”). Conveniently, it was identical to the English alphabet, but each letter had a hidden meaning; for example, D stands for “detrimental,” E stands for “energy,” L stands for “life.” Put it together, and you can determine the secret meaning of words. For example, “deleterious” starts with DEL, thus “detrimental energy for life,” which, in fact, matches the meaning of deleterious! Shaver claimed this was true in all languages (e.g., you could also dissect the meaning of Spanish or Chinese words), and therefore Atlantean must be the mother tongue of the world.

The editor of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, was impressed:

Our own hasty check-up revealed an amazing result of 90% logical and sensible! Is this really a case of racial memory, and is this formula the basis of one of the most ancient languages on Earth? The mystery intrigues us very much. 

Palmer got in touch with Shaver and asked, hey, where did you even learn about this?, and Shaver wrote back, funny you should ask. Here, three circumstances intervened that would very slightly change history. 

First, the owners of Amazing Stories were breathing down Palmer’s neck, telling him the magazine needed to make more money. 

Second, Palmer had discovered that “sales increased by a couple of thousand whenever a story-title with ‘Atlantis’ or ‘Lemuria’ appeared on the cover.” Science-fiction magazines of the 1940s were something in between modern sci-fi, pulp adventure stories, and the website belonging to the guy who writes in all caps about how THE MARTIANS BUILT THE PYRAMIDS TO THWART THE ILLUMINATI PLAN TO CLOSE YOUR CHAKRAS. The seeds of what would later become the New Age — theosophy, ancient aliens, lost civilizations — appeared not just in fiction but in pseudo-scholarly articles and rambunctious debates in the letters section between various camps and theorists. You could write about spaceships or computers, but it was the conspiracy stuff that really moved the copies.

Third, Ray Palmer was an anomalous person who liked anomalous things. Standing at 4’0” (was there something psychoanalytic about his interest in Atlantean dwarves?), he had suffered a series of spinal injuries and subsequent complications that everyone thought would kill him. After a year spent immobile in a hospital — strapped to a frame meant to stabilize his back (was there something psychoanalytic about his interest in subterranean tortures?) — he achieved a seemingly miraculous recovery. He attributed his survival to exercises through which he cultivated his will to live, eventually fanning it to such intensity that he (per himself) developed minor psychic powers. He’d always thought there was something more to the world than what met the eye. Maybe that something more was evil Atlantean dwarves from inside the hollow earth.

Shaver told Palmer the story above — the factory work, the prison sentence, the abduction by teros. Palmer started out by publishing a tangentially related story by Shaver, suggesting that it came from “racial memory” (i.e., the collective unconscious). After it received an overwhelmingly positive response, he published Shaver’s full account of his torment and rescue under the title “Thought Records of Lemuria.” In his editor’s introduction, he stressed that this wasn’t fiction. Rather, he was acting out of a sense of duty in revealing these truths to the world.

The response was overwhelming. Fans sent in 10 times the usual volume of letters. Many claimed to also have some memories of being Lemurian or Atlantean (terms Shaver used mostly interchangeably). Others said they were convinced by Shaver’s ability to explain otherwise inexplicable things (for example, some of his Atlantean leaders shared the names of mythological gods, which explained why myths spoke of gods by those names). 

But the most sinister letters were from people who said they, too, had encountered the deros. Some of these encounters were brief: Someone had gotten too close to a cave and saw a brief glimpse of something hideous before firing their shotgun and scaring it off. Others contained the full package: The writer had been abducted and tortured, only making it back to the surface after strange adventures. Still others contained cryptic warnings:

Over the next few issues, Amazing Stories gradually went from a science-fiction magazine to near-full-time discussion of the deros (relatedly, its sales increased by almost 40%). The highlight of each issue was a new story from Shaver, usually dragged from the Atlantean virtual-reality psychic library. Other writers started getting in on the shared universe, keeping kayfabe via various stratagems. (Not all were particularly subtle: One story was just called “I Have Been in the Caves.”) 

But the highlight was no doubt the fan letters that kept pouring in, opposing or supporting the theory. Regular science fiction retreated further and further, with pages repurposed for Palmer’s clashes with skeptics, speculations about cave locations, and promises of vague expeditions to find the “telonium plates,” which Shaver said an Atlantean archivist had left behind for future generations.

Amazing Stories began to feel less like a magazine and more like the bulletin of an incipient religion. 

Why did these stories strike such a nerve? 

Some of the credit must go to Shaver. An investigation into where he’d really been during his supposed hollow-earth years turned up a gratifyingly straightforward answer — locked in a Ypsilanti psychiatric hospital. “Thought Records of Lemuria” is one of the most compelling accounts I’ve ever read of what it feels like to be a paranoid schizophrenic. While other science-fiction stories of the era are derivative and campy, “Thought Records” reads like the narrative of a terrified man recounting, as honestly as he can, his brush with things mankind wasn’t meant to know about. Readers of the time were right to find it compelling. ¹

But even more of the credit goes to Palmer. If Shaver was an utterly honest madman, Palmer was the perfect huckster, with a genius for transforming Shaver’s nightmares into magazine sales. He turned the “Letters to the Editor” section into a carefully managed pageant. Each issue would start by hinting that there were thousands of letters confirming Shaver’s stories but that he couldn’t publish them for one reason or another (Space? The letter writers’ safety? His own safety?). Then he would print the “reader” responses (quotation marks because he is accused of writing some of them himself under assumed names). Palmer would try to synthesize all of this into a coherent narrative. Sometimes his analysis was interspersed with debates against (possibly fictional) people who begged him to stop writing for his own safety. Yes (he would write back), he knew he was putting himself at risk by revealing the deros’ secrets, but mankind had a right to know.

But the most credit of all goes to Amazing Stories’ readers. These can be divided into four groups. First, the basically normal but extremely gullible people (“My name starts with an E and I’m energetic, so Shaver’s Atlantean alphabet is really on to something!”). Second, the would-be mystics, who piled on in a craven attempt at self-promotion (“These reports are a good start in grasping the mystery of Atlantis, but only my lodge knows the full story”). Third, the insane people (“Finally a publication that isn’t afraid to talk about the telepathic torture voices!”). And fourth, people who were “in on the joke” and treated it as an opportunity for what we would now call collaborative world-building. One fan wrote in that he’d read a chapter about the deros in the Necronomicon. Another claimed to have met a dero named “Steve” in tunnels under Detroit. Still another said he was a dero himself, writing in to correct the record.

How many people really believed in the Shaver Mystery? The best I can answer is enough to increase the circulation of Amazing Stories from 135,000 to 185,000; those people can’t all have been reading it ironically. How many people really had an experience of meeting deros, or talking to deros, or being abducted by deros? We know only one name for sure: Richard Shaver. Everyone else’s accounts come to us via the Amazing Stories mailbag, and for all we know, Ray Palmer made them up.

Still, I suspect lots of people really believed. For one thing, there’s that other religion based on 1940s science-fiction stories — the one which currently has approximately 40,000 adherents, some two billion dollars’ worth of real estate, and its own cruise ship. This suggests that the sci-fi fandom of the day was fertile ground for strange people and strange ideas.

By the end of 1947, the owners of Amazing Stories were tired of being a laughingstock. They told Palmer to drop the Shaver discussion and go back to regular science fiction. For a while, true believers ran their own publication, Shaver Mystery Magazine, but it never reached the heights of the original. As interest in the topic faded, so, too, did the abduction reports. It seemed that, after only a few short years, the deros had ceased their malign activities.

II.

This is, of course, balderdash. Evil never disappears; it only changes its face.

Irish legend says innocents are liable to be abducted by creatures called sidhe and dragged to their underground lair beneath the hollow hills. Their exact fate is controversial. Some victims have sex with beautiful women, others are forced to dance ceaselessly for eternity, and still others are “paid” as a “tithe” to hell. Bedraggled survivors sometimes end up on the surface world but are reluctant to speak of their ordeal. Even the word “sidhe” is tabooed and replaced with the euphemism “the fair folk” (from which we get modern “fairy”). Babies are especially vulnerable and will sometimes be replaced by fake fairy babies (i.e., “changelings”).

German legend since at least the 16th century tells of the bard Tannhauser. He went through a cave into the underground world of the goddess Venus, who granted him eternal sexual bliss. After a year (other sources say seven), he realized that sexual pleasures were empty and tried to flee, only to learn that he was a prisoner. He eventually escaped only through the special intervention of the Virgin Mary.

During the Middle Ages, witch hunters swapped stories of the "witches' sabbat." In the version mooted during the 1676 Katarina trials in Sweden, witches would abduct children to windswept mountaintops while dancing and engaging in sexual debauchery. In 1693, Salem resident Joseph Ring reported a similar story: After borrowing money from a witch and not paying it back (never do this!), he would be regularly spirited through the air, paralyzed, and forced to watch horrible bacchanals while witches tried to convince him to give up his soul.

Starting in the 1950s, an increasing number of people began to describe alien abductions. Some sort of ray would transport them into a cave-like spacecraft. There, they would be immobilized while aliens performed strange, sexually tinged tortures on them (classically, anal probing). Later, they would wake up in their bedroom with their memories strangely hazy, only to trickle back in later.

The 1980s saw a spurt of satanic ritual abuse allegations that would later become known as “the Satanic panic.” The most famous case, centered on McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, involved accusations that teachers were dragging their students off to hidden tunnels under the school, where they would sexually abuse and torture them. The government found no evidence of wrongdoing, but parents took matters into their own hands: They hired an archaeologist to scan the area with ground-penetrating radar. He claimed to have found an underground torture-labyrinth, but the establishment wasn't convinced. The official story blames the radar findings on normal sewer lines and old rubbish pits. 

By the 2000s, the ancient conspiracy had taken on a new right-wing flavor. Liberal elites were abducting children, bringing them to underground tunnels, and ritually torturing them to extract adrenochrome, a stress hormone that could be turned into an elixir of perpetual youth (Joe Biden must have missed his invitation to participate). 

This is the ur-abduction. Someone is kidnapped by evil humanoids, dragged underground, and tortured (often in a sexually suggestive way). The Irish worried about it a thousand years ago, Richard Shaver worried about last century, and your neighbor with a “STOP THE STEAL” bumper sticker is worrying about it right now. Why?

Before we go crazy, we ought to stop and note that the space of possible myths is small, and the ur-abduction is vague. In the late 1800s, a popular archaeological pastime was to hunt down trivial similarities between different myths and draw wild conclusions. “An African tribe and a South American tribe both believe that the world was created by a primordial spider. Could this be racial memory that such a creature truly existed?” Maybe. But maybe it just means there are a lot of tribes and not that many interesting animals, so eventually they landed on “spider” twice.

In the same way, “Bad humanoids take you down below and do bad things” is a myth you could have. But so is “Good humanoids take you up above and do good things,” and that’s a near-death experience when you go to heaven, meet angels, and return with a message of universal love. “Morally neutral humanoids take you sideways and do boring things” is just taking the bus to work. So maybe anything at this level of vagueness will get you five or 10 interesting hits.

This becomes even easier if you give yourself too many degrees of freedom — as I’ve done above. Witches’ sabbats, after all, weren’t typically in underground caves (though see Zugarramurdi for an exception). Alien abductions are only cavern-like insofar as every enclosed structure is cavern-like. Tannhauser’s experience was basically pleasant, only going wrong after he tried to leave. The supposed perpetrators range from dwarves to goddesses to Hillary Clinton.

Contra Elon Musk, the most boring explanation is usually the most likely. I think this explains the bulk of the ur-abduction: There are lots of myths, and sometimes they seem vaguely similar.

Still, if we’ve learned one thing from Ray Palmer, it’s that you’ve got to get speculative if you want to sell magazines. And for as long as people have been abducted by sadistic cave dwarves, other people have been coming up with clever stories about why the cave-abduction motif keeps showing up. Before we give up and go home, let’s see what they came up with.

III.

My least favorite explanation for the ur-abduction comes from the prominent psychologists Leonard Newman and Roy Baumeister. ² They call it a failure of the cultural sense-making apparatus, augmented by masochistic fantasy.

Starting with the culture: Many abduction experiences come after hypnosis. Typically, a victim gets a vague sense that something is wrong. Perhaps already suspecting aliens are involved, they seek “mental health help” from a hypnotist with a specialty in alien abductions. The hypnotist puts them in a vulnerable mental state, then gives them suggestive prompts (“Try to remember as hard as you can — it might be repressed. Do you remember the aliens having big eyes?”). This generates a whole experience full of false memories. If the hypnotists come from a different paradigm (e.g., Satanic ritual abuse), their suggestions will tend in that direction. So far, so good; everyone agrees that hypnotists can be partially culpable in implanting these types of stories in patients.

And cultural context can be a sort of hypnosis. We use terms like “mass hysteria” and “culture-bound mental disorder” to refer to the phenomenon when weird experiences can spread through vulnerable populations like an epidemic, each report sparking further reports as people feel social pressure to conform. 

But what (ask N&B) about the cases where no hypnotist is involved and there’s not a lot of cultural pressure? Here they posit that fantasy is a trancelike state in its own right. And some people (they say) are masochists — a term they interpret more psychologically than purely sexually, as involving a desire to escape/forget the self through pain and humiliation. So these people fantasize about very painful experiences, shaped by cultural context, and auto-hypnotize themselves into believing them.

Nobody who wrote about sexual fetishes in the 20th century ends up looking very good. And the same is true of late-20th-century psychologists who tried to use frequentist statistics on small sample sizes. N&B are guilty of both. They say that women are more likely to fantasize about pain than men, find this is true (p = 0.07) in their small sample of abductees, and claim at least circumstantial victory. I think this is best treated as empirical window dressing on the intuitive appeal of the theory.

In N&B’s defense, Richard Shaver clearly had something sadomasochistic going on. But this theory breaks down when we apply it to Satanic ritual abuse. Sure, the hypnotists deserve a lot of blame there. But who is having the masochistic fantasies? The children, who probably don’t know what any of this is? The parents, fantasizing about their children being tortured? Some people are pretty bad, but I don’t know, this doesn’t feel compelling to me. And it doesn’t explain the circumstantial features of the ur-abduction (why so many caves?) unless you really stretch the masochism element (maybe being in a cave is more humiliating than being in other places?)

My second favorite explanation for the ur-abduction is medical procedures. Here the case is made by Dr. David V. Forrest in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry:

Forrest is vague, so I will offer a friendly amendment: The ur-abduction comes specifically from colonoscopies. These are generally performed under midazolam, a weak anesthetic that keeps patients confused and drowsy but not entirely unconscious. The patients are then, quite literally, anally probed. When they wake up, they remember nothing. But might half-formed memory fragments form a sort of mental irritant, leaking into everyday life until one is finally motivated to posit alien abduction as an explanation for this half-remembered montage?

This almost checks out. Alien abductions shifted from generic medical examinations to a focus on anal probes around the 1980s, about the same time colonoscopies became widespread. But an intrepid Reddit historian finds that one of the first abduction accounts, Barney and Betty Hill in the 1960s, also included an anal probe (though it was considered too lascivious to publicly mention at the time). This couldn’t have been related to colonoscopies, so it would be a surprising coincidence if later ones were.

We also encounter Popobawa, the anal rape monster of Zanzibar. The Zanzibaris probably have not had colonoscopies. This just seems to be a widespread feature of these stories for some reason.

We could still retreat back to Forrest’s original formulation — a generic association with surgery — except that the ancient Irish and Salem witch victims wouldn’t have had surgery with anesthetic. Either the ur-abduction hypothesis is false and the older experiences have a different source than the newer ones, or surgery isn’t involved.

My favorite explanation for the ur-abduction is sleep paralysis.

This is a sleep disorder. About 5% of people have regular episodes (some 30% will experience it at least once). Their brains sometimes get confused and split the difference between dreaming and waking. What this looks like is: You wake up in the middle of the night. You cannot move (your muscles are turned off during REM sleep so you don’t accidentally hurt yourself while enacting your dreams). You may not be able to breathe (the diaphragm is a muscle). You are, understandably, terrified.

The terror shifts the half-dream into a nightmare. You see monsters, usually vague, distorted humanoid forms. You are well aware that you are awake, so the presence of the monster comes as something of a surprise. Because you lie paralyzed, the monster is usually looming over you. Other times the monster is strangling you (a post-hoc explanation for why you can’t breathe), or having sex with you (nobody has a great explanation for this one). Various nightmarish things happen. Then you fall back asleep and wake up normally the next morning.

Here’s a description of Joseph Ring’s witch encounters:

From the same source:

Come on, this is obviously sleep paralysis! 

In “Abduction by Aliens or Sleep Paralysis?,” psychologist Susan Blackmore fleshes out the case. Most alien abductions occur at night. A small sample of UFO abductees also reported frequent sleep paralysis experiences. Awakenings are often associated with buzzing noises, humming noises, and strange lights. Maybe the dark bedroom, combined with a feeling of otherworldliness and occasional flashing and humming, evokes the inside of a spaceship or a machinery-filled cave?

Even parts of Richard Shaver’s story are suggestive. Here is where he first meets his tero lover:

The only part that bothers me is: What about QAnon? 

As far as I know, it is unique among abduction theories in being entirely without personal experience. Nobody, as far as I can tell, personally claims to have been tortured by the liberal elites. They just know of secret documents that prove it’s happening.

All of our theories thus far — the sleep paralysis, the medical procedures, and so on — try to explain why individuals believe abductions happened to them. But throughout history, the ur-abduction has garnered more cultural influence from prurient spectators than from victims. There were more witch hunters than there were victims spirited to sabbats; there are more X-Files viewers than there are alien abductees. There is limited evidence that anyone except Richard Shaver ever believed they were abducted by deros, but 185,000 people bought the relevant issues of Amazing Stories.

Maybe the right level on which to analyze this phenomenon is mythical rather than psychiatric. Why do people believe in the ur-abduction? Well, why do so many people believe in past golden ages, or Chthonic earth mothers, or ancient floods? Either you believe in something like a collective unconscious, or you retreat to the explanation about mythologic space being small and crowded. Sleep paralysis, or whatever, can kindle myths like these, but after that they have to be self-sustaining.

Five thousand words on people being tortured underground, and so far not one mention of hell. The story of hell didn’t come from people having specific experiences. It came from cultural evolution. Various religions sampled various parts of the space and iterated — there’s … some kind of underworld? Maybe it’s very boring … no … cold … no … painful! The hell mytheme that finally made it big was some sort of crossbreed between Zoroastrian Duzakh, Greek Hades, and the Jewish concepts of Sheol and Gehenna. It’s so persistent that ministers continually exhort their congregations not to think of hell as a literal place in the ground full of sadistic demons, and yet their flocks continue to think of hell in exactly those terms.

My best guess is this: A few unlucky people with sleep paralysis or schizophrenia suffer hallucinatory tortures in the cavernous darkness of their bedrooms. These people report their experiences, and the reports that feel most mythically significant catch on and spread. Then unscrupulous hypnotists, magazine editors, and titillation-seekers fan the flames into pseudo-religions that enjoy brief periods of popularity — before being replaced by the next evil cave dwarf that comes along.