UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

It was 1945, and science fiction writer Ray Palmer was working as the editor of a popular pulp fiction magazine called Amazing Stories. A diminutive fellow with a hunchback, Palmer had suffered a near-crippling accident early in life that broke his spine, and the resulting unsuccessful surgery stunted his growth. Thus, at the age of 35, Palmer had grown to a mere four feet in height.

It was on an afternoon during the year in question that Palmer happened upon an odd letter in the office slush pile. The letter was from a man who claimed he had managed to decipher a secret, coded ancient language, of which evidence could still be discerned from modern writing. Palmer wrote back to the author, a Mr. Richard Sharp Shaver of Pennsylvania, seeking clarification on the unusual matter. This prompted a long, rambling letter from Shaver, who claimed to learn of this, and other mysteries of our world, after psychically overhearing the communications of beings living in extensive caverns below ground.

Shaver was no great writer himself, if this grandiloquent offering was any indication, though Palmer saw potential nonetheless. From it, he began to construct an outline based on Shaver’s missive, and shaped it into a decent fantasy story, which eventually saw publication under the title, “I Remember Lemuria.”

Thus, the Shaver Mystery was born.

Initially intended to be read and enjoyed only as fiction, Shaver’s weird ramblings would inspire Palmer and the publishers of Amazing Stories to continue publication of “Shaver Mystery” stories for several years, during which the readership of the magazine reportedly increased by thousands. Throughout the period which saw the publication of stories based on his odd, rambling mythos, Shaver had always maintained that his “communications” with inner-earth dwellers were real and that the stories of cavern systems inhabited by strange beings beneath the Earth were based on fact.

Following the publication of the novella “I Remember Lemuria,” Palmer professed that letters his publication recieved–usually numbering less than fifty or so each month–were now close to 50,000. Equally impressive had been that many of these fan letters detailed strange experiences, expounding on the exploits of these deep-Earth denizens Shaver claimed to have met.

Among the letters Palmer received had been the story of a woman who, claiming to have served as a medical specialist in France during the Second World War, entered the sub-basement of an old building via an elevator. A cavernous opening existed in the lowest portion of the building, and upon her discovery of the entrance to an underground realm, the woman was captured by a group of monstrous creatures. She claimed to have been held prisoner by these beings for an indefinite period, after which she was finally discovered and released by a group of benign, human-like saviors. (An apparent nod toward this story was later featured in the works of science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who wrote in a short story titled, “The Elevator People” that, “There are five hundred buildings in the United States whose elevators go deeper than the basement.” Ellison, however, was a vocal critic of the Shaver Mystery stories and had at one time badgered Palmer about his insistence on publishing them.)

Much like the story above outlines, Shaver categorized these subterranean inhabitants into two different groups: a monstrous, evil group called Deros (meaning “detrimental robots”), and their good-natured counterparts the Teros, who were nearly identical to humans in appearance.

Palmer himself had begun to wonder about the circumstances surrounding all this insanity, and Shaver’s claims that the events related in his letters to Amazing Stories were true. His curiosity finally prompted a visit to Richard Shaver’s home in Pennsylvania. After a late-evening coffee session, Palmer was led upstairs and shown to the spare bedroom, where throughout the evening he claimed, to his astonishment, to hear five individual voices of men, women, children, and even an “old gruff man.” According to Palmer, he was terrified to hear a discussion that pertained to the dismemberment of a human woman someplace four miles away–and presumably four miles down. Discussing the experience with Shaver the following morning, the strange host claimed he had asked the “beings” to “go easy on him (Palmer),” and Palmer, finally growing in his conviction regarding the Shaver Mystery himself, was able to get a night’s sleep uninterrupted.

This would be only one of many strange stories Palmer would recount, and though Richard Shaver’s own sanity would later come into question on many occasions, the prolific interest in his visions of an inner-Earth struggle would continue, inspiring a generation of devotees and researchers that included Timothy Green Beckley, who had known Palmer personally. Of his own discovery of Richard Shaver’s visions of conflict in a subterranean world, he admits being “chilled to the bone,” by the stories as a young reader, saying it was “stuff that nightmares were made of, and I was intrigued just as Ray Palmer had been.”

Palmer’s convictions about Shaver’s ideas would come and go over the years. After leaving Amazing Stories, the former editor was still under contractual obligations that prevented him from launching a competing publication. He did, however, do so anyway under a pseudonym, which led to the appearance of FATE, a magazine which, at the time, was mostly devoted to the burgeoning interest in flying saucers that followed pilot Kenneth Arnold’s observation of a group of objects over Mount Rainier, Washington in 1947.

Initially, Palmer had been convinced that the appearance of flying saucers might prove to be a vindication for Shaver’s claims, supposing that the seemingly advanced aircraft might actually belong to the subterranean dwellers discussed in his stories. With the founding of FATE, Palmer hoped in part to be able to get to the bottom of the saucer mystery, but after a few years, he left the operation which continued under the publication of his partner, Curtis Fuller.

Ultimately, what was Palmer to make of Shaver and his stories? Like many, it seemed by the 1970s that he had become disillusioned with Shaver and his claims, even noting in 1971 that during periods Shaver claimed to have lived underground amidst the warring factions of Deros and Teros, that he had instead been hospitalized in a mental institution.

The stories, of course, were purely imaginary, supplemented perhaps by the ramblings of a once disturbed mind; but in their heyday, the stories of Richard Shaver saw a kind of success and popularity that was nearly unrivaled in the science fiction genre.

IN 1994, A Mormon family bought a 480-acre plot in in Utah’s Uintah Basin, thinking they’d get back to the land. But this particular land was weird. It came with too-large-thrice-over wolves that refused to die by bullet, cattle with their reproductive organs sucked clean out, and a multitude of UFOs, as they told the Deseret News in 1996. It was driving them bonkers.

Robert Bigelow saw their story. Today, the Nevada businessman is known for founding Bigelow Aerospace, which spun off a business to sell its expandable space habitats just last Tuesday. But in 1995, he had also founded something called the National Institute for Discovery Science, an organization built to research paranormal phenomena. Soon after reading the newspaper story, he took Skinwalker off the family’s hands, and his institute set up shop.

That, at least, is the story told in Hunt for the Skinwalker, a book that I downloaded in audio form one Friday night in January. Bigelow deactivated the National Institute for Discovery Science in 2004, after years of failing to capture the supposedly supernatural. But as the world recently discovered, he didn’t give up the cause. In December, a New York Times story revealed that Bigelow Aerospace had conducted a study on UFOs—for the Pentagon. I’d been interested in Bigelow’s anomalistic dealings since that article came out; thus, the audio book.

The Pentagon’s Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program officially ended in 2012. But similar work continues today—involving people from both the defunct Defense Department program and Bigelow’s dismantled paranormal enterprise. They have become part of a for-profit company: To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which launched in October 2017 to research and reverse-engineer UFOs, among other goals.

Bigelow has gotten his fingers into lots of private UFO pies. Even before Skinwalker, he helped initiate the UFO Research Coalition, which puts his UFO-hunting career at about 24 years old. Bigelow is not officially involved with To The Stars. But its aims, and its team, seem to line up with his past and his people. So I set off to try to understand that past.

ALL EIGHT HOURS and 42 minutes of audiobook downloaded, I got in my car at 5 a.m. the next day with my sister. Pointed toward Skinwalker Ranch, hoping for context and maybe something strange, we sped through the Rockies, trying to beat the ski traffic and a snowstorm. All the while, the staid voice of the book’s narrator described the alleged happenings at Skinwalker.

As my sister and I journeyed down I-70, the book’s authors—George Knapp, a journalist, and Colm Kelleher, former deputy administrator of Bigelow’s institute—presented the paranormal tales almost as matters of fact. Kelleher has a PhD in biochemistry, but his mindset was often anti-scientific. He took coincidences as meaningful; he aw-shucksed every time an “anomalous phenomenon” mysteriously evaded the cameras. The supposed point of Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science was to get away from that kind of softness.

About four and a half hours and several hundred milligrams of caffeine in, I listened to a description of how instrument-bearing institute investigators witnessed a growing yellow light—or maybe a tunnel—from which a faceless black creature maybe emerged. I needed a break. Pausing the book, I pulled over at Rio Blanco Lake, a rare bit of water with an assemblage of red picnic tables. The lake, frozen, stretched to the scrub-covered buttes on the far shore. It was peaceful.

Then came the noises. Great metallic twangs, or thwangs, or something, that seemed to start here, no there, and rush across the landscape as if carried on an invisible wire.

They sounded like trebly light sabers. They sounded like alien spaceship chatter. Like maybe someone had pulled the power lines taut for miles and then plucked them with a giant finger.

“What is it?” I kept saying, deeply unnerved—not because I thought it was inexplicable but because I couldn’t explain it.

And then the lake’s ice cracked, the break spreading fast like a faultline in an action movie. The frozen water heaved itself into a new position.

With that, the noises explained themselves and stopped. We stood in the silence for a few seconds.

“That’s probably the weirdest thing that will happen all day,” my sister eventually said.

WE CONTINUED ON our way toward Skinwalker Ranch, where Bigelow’s people had, for years, tried to find that weirdest thing, every day. Researching UFOs seems a bit like gambling: You mostly lose, or break even, but the promise that you might hit jackpot is powerful. “The thing about UFOs that makes them so mysterious is that they disappear,” says historian Greg Eghigian, who is researching the global history of UFO sightings and alleged alien contact. “Not that they appear.” You just have to keep looking and hope they come back.

Toward the end of the book, the authors let us know that Bigelow abandoned studies at Skinwalker in the early 2000s. But he didn’t stop looking: In 2007, he got that Pentagon contract—some $22 million to study advanced aerial threats, including some that remain allegedly unidentified.

Around the same time, in 2008, Bigelow created a new company: Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Space Studies, a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace.

Archived versions of the Bigelow Aerospace Careers webpage say it “focuses on the identification, evaluation, and acquisition of novel and emerging future technologies worldwide as they specifically relate to spacecraft.” (Blair Bigelow, vice president of corporate strategy at Bigelow Aerospace, declined to comment.) Colm Kelleher—co-author of the Skinwalker book—was the company’s deputy administrator, according to his LinkedIn page.

Around the same time Bigelow created the new company, he also hitched a star to the Mutual UFO Network, a nonprofit that collects and investigates user-submitted reports of UFOs, according to MUFON’s executive director Jan Harzan. “If we were able to fund you so you could put investigators on the ground faster,” Harzan recalls Bigelow offering, “could you get better data on some of these reports?” Together, MUFON and Bigelow supported investigators’ fact-finding expeditions, and shared data—though for less than a year.

But that didn’t stop Bigelow from collecting UFO reports outside of the MUFON collaboration. The FAA, for instance, used to suggest pilots report UFO sightings directly to Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Space Studies. Christopher Rutkowski, who coordinates the Canadian UFO Survey, says Bigelow approached him at a MUFON conference in 2009. “He asked me to help him in his UFO-related efforts by alerting him and his team to any 'good' Canadian cases that needed onsite investigations,” he says. One of Bigelow’s people checked in with Rutkowski every few months following, for a year or two.

That person doesn’t call now. The FAA doesn’t instruct pilots to report to Bigelow. The Pentagon program is over. There’s no more MUFON collaboration. The National Institute for Discovery Science is kaput. So where’s a guy to get a bunch of UFO reports?

The newest answer might be To The Stars Academy—and its newly-launched “Community of Interest.” On this site, you can currently view two videos of alleged UFOs—the same footage embedded in the Times story about the Pentagon program—as well as a video interview with a Navy pilot who says he witnessed one of those events and a written report of the same encounter. In the future, the site aims to amass and analyze many more reports of anomalies.

Although a representative from To the Stars claims no affiliation with Bigelow, the overlap between its team and Bigelow’s is inarguable: Hal Puthoff, who was on the board of the National Institute for Discovery Science, is now the vice president of science and technology at To The Stars. Kelleher is now To The Stars’ biotech consultant. And Elizondo, who was reportedly in charge of the Pentagon program that contracted Bigelow’s company, is now To The Stars’ director of global security and special programs.

And if the gathered reports are public, Bigelow could check them out, same as anyone else. If Bigelow is as committed to ufology as his last two decades of work have suggested, he could do worse than striking a deal with this group.

WHEN MY SISTER and I arrived at Skinwalker Ranch (now owned not by the institute or Bigelow but by the mysterious Adamantium Real Estate (whoever that nerd is), we were numb to the claims of its strange happenings. To be clear, I don’t really believe in much. Not God, or miracles, or magical beasts. I don’t believe that anything “defies” the “laws of physics.”

I do believe that we probably misunderstand some laws of physics, that our knowledge is, in some cases, incomplete, or even drop-dead wrong. I believe there are things in the universe we don’t get yet, that our scientific explanations haven’t caught up to. But I also believe that they can. Anyway, I’d driven all the way to the Uintah Valley, and I was sure going to try to look for something strange in the sky. We found a legal gravel pull-off that looked down on the semi-martian land of Skinwalker, and stared at the sky, waiting.

I added an extra layer to my clothes, blew hot air into my gloves, and found a nearby rock suitable for sitting, surrounded by broken glass and scattering of half-smoked cigarettes. And so my sister and I sat, mock-gasping at the lights from low-flying planes.

And then the clouds, which had hung low all day, began to clear. The stars—some of them perhaps supporting life that almost certainly has not come here, but, you know, maybe—were crisp and clear. I turned Hunt for the Skinwalker back on, my phone’s speaker pulsing from my pocket.

We scanned the skies; we listened to the tall tales.

“It’s good out here,” I said to my sister. “But you were right about that ice.”

“What?” she said.

“That it was the weirdest thing that would happen all day.”