THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
July 7, 2013
The Amazing Worlds of Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver Explored on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 2:00 AM until 5:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
Why It's Important for You to Donate to The Paracast: Although ads help cover a small part of our expenses, the income they produce is never enough to pay your humble hosts decent wages. Also, we do not receive any revenue from the ads placed on the show by our network or local stations. So we hope you're able to help fill the gap, if you can, to help us cover increasing server costs and other expenses -- or perhaps provide a little extra cash for lunch and utility bills. No contribution is too small (or too large
. It’s easy to send a donation. We have aDonate link on our home page, below the logo and audio player. There's also a Donate link on our forums, at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Or just send your PayPal donation direct to sales (at) theparacast (dot) com. And if you’ve had a problem getting to our Donate screen, please try again. We just fixed a serious PayPal access problem, and it should wor k properly now.
Attention U.S. Listeners: Help Us Bring The Paracast to Your City! In the summer of 2010, The Paracast joined the GCN radio network. This represented a huge step in bringing our show to a larger, mainstream audience. But we need your help to add additional affiliates to our growing network. Please ask one of your local talk stations if they are interested in carrying The Paracast. Feel free to contact us directly with the names of programming people we might be able to contact on your behalf. We can't do this alone, and if you succeed in convincing your local station to carry the show, we'll reward you with one of our special T-shirts, and other goodies. With your help, The Paracast can grow into one of the most popular paranormal shows on the planet!
Please Visit Our Online Store: You asked, and we answered. We are now taking orders for The Official Paracast T-Shirt and an expanded collection of other specially customized merchandise. To get your T-Shirt now featuring our brand new logo, just pay a visit to our online store at The Official Paracast Store to select your size and place your order. We also offer a complete lineup of other premium merchandise for your family, your friends and your business contacts.
About The Paracast: The Paracast covers a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions across the planet.
Set Up: The Paracast is a paranormal radio show that takes you on a journey to a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions. The Paracast seeks to shed light on the mysteries and complexities of our Universe and the secrets that surround us in our everyday lives.
Join long-time paranormal researcher Gene Steinberg, co-host and acclaimed field investigator Christopher O'Brien, and a panel of special guest experts and experiencers, as they explore the realms of the known and unknown. Listen each week to the great stories of the history of the paranormal field in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present Richard Toronto, author of "War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction." Toronto, a former newspaper reporter, is a long time student of the Shaver Mystery. We'll also be joined by Geneva Hagen, co-editor of the UFO/occult magazine, "Caveat Emptor," and a friend of Shaver's. Both Palmer and Shaver were pioneers not just in science fiction, but helped in encouraging interest in flying saucers in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Chris O'Brien's Site: http://www.ourstrangeplanet.com
Richard Toronto’s Site: Shavertron 2010
Coming July 14: Gene and Chris present a full-scale discussion of a classic UFO encounter, the Cash-Landrum incident, which occurred on an isolated two-lane road near Houston, Texas on December 29, 1980. This sighting includes a witness who received possible severe radiation burns as the result of being in close proximity to the strange aircraft. To flesh out the nuts and bolts of the case, we invited two UFO investigators, Chris Lambright and Curtis L. Collins (whom our forum members know as Sentry).
Chris O'Brien's Site: http://www.ourstrangeplanet.com
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. We recently completed a major update that makes our community easier to navigate, and social network friendly.
Of Palmer and Shaver and the Early Days of UFO Research
By Gene Steinberg
I’ve said this before on the show, but I first became interested in UFOs in the 1950s, when I happened to notice a book, “Flying Saucers From Outer Space,” by Major Donald E. Keyhoe, on a coffee table in my brother’s Brooklyn, NY apartment. I picked it up, read a few pages, and asked if I could take it home with me to finish it up. The answer was yes, and I was hooked.
In passing, I always wondered if my brother, who passed away in the 1990s, left that book there knowing it would catch my eye. It’s not that he’d admit to any such thing.
I was real young then, but I continued to check the library or book stores for magazines and books about UFOs. In the 1960s, I even produced a small, professionally printed magazine on the subject. And, as with many young people back then, I networked with other people interested in the flying saucer mystery courtesy of a column in Ray Palmer’s “Flying Saucers” magazine. Known as “Saucer Club News,” it was a free service where folks who had a local or national UFO-oriented group could post updates on their activities, or simply solicit members. It was a terrific outlet for people like me to get the word out.
Sure, it would take weeks or months for people to get in touch with each other. Those of you who were around in those days will recall that we used regular mail; long distance phone calls were quite expensive. There was no Internet to provide instant gratification, except in the test labs.
Indeed, many well known UFO investigators frequented the pages of Palmer’s magazine, including Jerome Clark and Allen Greenfield. I made many lifelong friends that way.
As to Palmer, well, to some he’s a pariah, in large part because of his supposed antics in the world of science fiction, where he introduced Richard Shaver and the Shaver Mystery to a surprised and shocked world in Amazing Stories, then published by Ziff-Davis. But Palmer had already made changes to the magazine that infuriated many sci-fi fans (or “fen” as they were sometimes known).
Rather than focus on a more cerebral form of the literature, Palmer was more attuned to action and adventure, often with larger than life characters, which attracted a healthy mass market audience. During Palmer’s tenure at Amazing, he even convinced such famous fiction writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of John Carter and Tarzan, to write his final novelettes for the magazine.
To some degree, the sci-fi fare that populates movies and TV, such as “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” are very much in the spirit of the sort of stories that Palmer wrote, edited and published. But Palmer is hated by many in the field because he also published heavily-edited material from Shaver, who claimed that he had real experiences in caverns below the Earth that were peopled by the survivors of an ancient global catastrophe.
The saga of the Shaver Mystery, and its forced disappearance from Amazing Stories, ultimately led Palmer to hook up with Curtis Fuller, a fellow editor at Ziff-Davis, to create Fate magazine. Indeed, many of the first reports of UFO sightings appeared in Fate.
When Palmer departed Fate and moved his operations to a small Wisconsin community, Amherst, he established Flying Saucers and other publications, such as Search and Forum, which he ran until his death in 1977. The magazines actually continued for a short time thereafter, edited by his widow, Marjorie, and largely consisting of “best of” collections and reader contributions.
I knew Palmer slightly. I met him once, and talked with him via telephone on a few occasions. Despite being quite short and physically deformed, the result of a spinal injury suffered as the result of a truck accident when he was a child, Palmer was very much a larger than life character. Indeed the details of his life were themselves partly fictional, at least according to Richard Toronto, who wrote a biography of Palmer and Shaver entitled “War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction.”
Other than introducing many to the flying saucer mystery early on, and in keeping the subject alive through bad times and good, conventional wisdom has it that Palmer never actually contributed very much to understanding what was actually going on. At the same time, he did publish some thought-provoking commentaries on the subject.
So on a number of occasions, Palmer said we weren’t meant to know the answer to the UFO enigma, that the objects were here to make us “think.” Think about what? We all wondered. Palmer also claimed to possess what he called a “fact” that allowed him to determine whether a paranormal encounter was true. To the last, Palmer kept talking around the subject, but never actually revealed what his “fact” might be, or even whether it really existed.
The pages of his magazines contained lots of provocative statements from Palmer. Over the years, he argued against putting fluoride in water -- his political leanings tended to be libertarian -- and even claimed that the Earth was hollow, with holes located at the North and South Poles.
Did he believe even his most outlandish claims? I suspect not. People who knew Palmer claimed that he would often write controversial articles and editorials to fuel active letters to the editor columns. Indeed, he was an enthusiastic participant in those pages, often engaging in heated debates with his readers.
If Palmer had survived to the 21st century, and he would have been quite old if he did, I suspect that Flying Saucers magazine would have moved online, and that his blogs would inspire frequent chatter on Twitter and Facebook.
But sci-fi fans, by and large, probably wish that Palmer would have gone into another line of work. As to Richard Shaver, wperhaps the less said the better. I have to admit, though, that I knew Shaver too. He was another larger than life character with an intriguing back story.
I cannot say, though, whether Palmer was right in some of his more eccentric beliefs, or that Shaver actually had experiences with physical -- or astral -- beings who claimed to live deep within the caverns. Maybe it’s better for one’s peace of mind to just regard all of it as fiction, and leave it there.
Copyright 1999-2013 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
July 7, 2013
The Amazing Worlds of Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver Explored on The Paracast
The Paracast is heard Sundays from 2:00 AM until 5:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.
Why It's Important for You to Donate to The Paracast: Although ads help cover a small part of our expenses, the income they produce is never enough to pay your humble hosts decent wages. Also, we do not receive any revenue from the ads placed on the show by our network or local stations. So we hope you're able to help fill the gap, if you can, to help us cover increasing server costs and other expenses -- or perhaps provide a little extra cash for lunch and utility bills. No contribution is too small (or too large
. It’s easy to send a donation. We have aDonate link on our home page, below the logo and audio player. There's also a Donate link on our forums, at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Or just send your PayPal donation direct to sales (at) theparacast (dot) com. And if you’ve had a problem getting to our Donate screen, please try again. We just fixed a serious PayPal access problem, and it should wor k properly now.Attention U.S. Listeners: Help Us Bring The Paracast to Your City! In the summer of 2010, The Paracast joined the GCN radio network. This represented a huge step in bringing our show to a larger, mainstream audience. But we need your help to add additional affiliates to our growing network. Please ask one of your local talk stations if they are interested in carrying The Paracast. Feel free to contact us directly with the names of programming people we might be able to contact on your behalf. We can't do this alone, and if you succeed in convincing your local station to carry the show, we'll reward you with one of our special T-shirts, and other goodies. With your help, The Paracast can grow into one of the most popular paranormal shows on the planet!
Please Visit Our Online Store: You asked, and we answered. We are now taking orders for The Official Paracast T-Shirt and an expanded collection of other specially customized merchandise. To get your T-Shirt now featuring our brand new logo, just pay a visit to our online store at The Official Paracast Store to select your size and place your order. We also offer a complete lineup of other premium merchandise for your family, your friends and your business contacts.
About The Paracast: The Paracast covers a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions across the planet.
Set Up: The Paracast is a paranormal radio show that takes you on a journey to a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions. The Paracast seeks to shed light on the mysteries and complexities of our Universe and the secrets that surround us in our everyday lives.
Join long-time paranormal researcher Gene Steinberg, co-host and acclaimed field investigator Christopher O'Brien, and a panel of special guest experts and experiencers, as they explore the realms of the known and unknown. Listen each week to the great stories of the history of the paranormal field in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present Richard Toronto, author of "War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction." Toronto, a former newspaper reporter, is a long time student of the Shaver Mystery. We'll also be joined by Geneva Hagen, co-editor of the UFO/occult magazine, "Caveat Emptor," and a friend of Shaver's. Both Palmer and Shaver were pioneers not just in science fiction, but helped in encouraging interest in flying saucers in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Chris O'Brien's Site: http://www.ourstrangeplanet.com
Richard Toronto’s Site: Shavertron 2010
Coming July 14: Gene and Chris present a full-scale discussion of a classic UFO encounter, the Cash-Landrum incident, which occurred on an isolated two-lane road near Houston, Texas on December 29, 1980. This sighting includes a witness who received possible severe radiation burns as the result of being in close proximity to the strange aircraft. To flesh out the nuts and bolts of the case, we invited two UFO investigators, Chris Lambright and Curtis L. Collins (whom our forum members know as Sentry).
Chris O'Brien's Site: http://www.ourstrangeplanet.com
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. We recently completed a major update that makes our community easier to navigate, and social network friendly.
Of Palmer and Shaver and the Early Days of UFO Research
By Gene Steinberg
I’ve said this before on the show, but I first became interested in UFOs in the 1950s, when I happened to notice a book, “Flying Saucers From Outer Space,” by Major Donald E. Keyhoe, on a coffee table in my brother’s Brooklyn, NY apartment. I picked it up, read a few pages, and asked if I could take it home with me to finish it up. The answer was yes, and I was hooked.
In passing, I always wondered if my brother, who passed away in the 1990s, left that book there knowing it would catch my eye. It’s not that he’d admit to any such thing.
I was real young then, but I continued to check the library or book stores for magazines and books about UFOs. In the 1960s, I even produced a small, professionally printed magazine on the subject. And, as with many young people back then, I networked with other people interested in the flying saucer mystery courtesy of a column in Ray Palmer’s “Flying Saucers” magazine. Known as “Saucer Club News,” it was a free service where folks who had a local or national UFO-oriented group could post updates on their activities, or simply solicit members. It was a terrific outlet for people like me to get the word out.
Sure, it would take weeks or months for people to get in touch with each other. Those of you who were around in those days will recall that we used regular mail; long distance phone calls were quite expensive. There was no Internet to provide instant gratification, except in the test labs.
Indeed, many well known UFO investigators frequented the pages of Palmer’s magazine, including Jerome Clark and Allen Greenfield. I made many lifelong friends that way.
As to Palmer, well, to some he’s a pariah, in large part because of his supposed antics in the world of science fiction, where he introduced Richard Shaver and the Shaver Mystery to a surprised and shocked world in Amazing Stories, then published by Ziff-Davis. But Palmer had already made changes to the magazine that infuriated many sci-fi fans (or “fen” as they were sometimes known).
Rather than focus on a more cerebral form of the literature, Palmer was more attuned to action and adventure, often with larger than life characters, which attracted a healthy mass market audience. During Palmer’s tenure at Amazing, he even convinced such famous fiction writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of John Carter and Tarzan, to write his final novelettes for the magazine.
To some degree, the sci-fi fare that populates movies and TV, such as “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” are very much in the spirit of the sort of stories that Palmer wrote, edited and published. But Palmer is hated by many in the field because he also published heavily-edited material from Shaver, who claimed that he had real experiences in caverns below the Earth that were peopled by the survivors of an ancient global catastrophe.
The saga of the Shaver Mystery, and its forced disappearance from Amazing Stories, ultimately led Palmer to hook up with Curtis Fuller, a fellow editor at Ziff-Davis, to create Fate magazine. Indeed, many of the first reports of UFO sightings appeared in Fate.
When Palmer departed Fate and moved his operations to a small Wisconsin community, Amherst, he established Flying Saucers and other publications, such as Search and Forum, which he ran until his death in 1977. The magazines actually continued for a short time thereafter, edited by his widow, Marjorie, and largely consisting of “best of” collections and reader contributions.
I knew Palmer slightly. I met him once, and talked with him via telephone on a few occasions. Despite being quite short and physically deformed, the result of a spinal injury suffered as the result of a truck accident when he was a child, Palmer was very much a larger than life character. Indeed the details of his life were themselves partly fictional, at least according to Richard Toronto, who wrote a biography of Palmer and Shaver entitled “War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction.”
Other than introducing many to the flying saucer mystery early on, and in keeping the subject alive through bad times and good, conventional wisdom has it that Palmer never actually contributed very much to understanding what was actually going on. At the same time, he did publish some thought-provoking commentaries on the subject.
So on a number of occasions, Palmer said we weren’t meant to know the answer to the UFO enigma, that the objects were here to make us “think.” Think about what? We all wondered. Palmer also claimed to possess what he called a “fact” that allowed him to determine whether a paranormal encounter was true. To the last, Palmer kept talking around the subject, but never actually revealed what his “fact” might be, or even whether it really existed.
The pages of his magazines contained lots of provocative statements from Palmer. Over the years, he argued against putting fluoride in water -- his political leanings tended to be libertarian -- and even claimed that the Earth was hollow, with holes located at the North and South Poles.
Did he believe even his most outlandish claims? I suspect not. People who knew Palmer claimed that he would often write controversial articles and editorials to fuel active letters to the editor columns. Indeed, he was an enthusiastic participant in those pages, often engaging in heated debates with his readers.
If Palmer had survived to the 21st century, and he would have been quite old if he did, I suspect that Flying Saucers magazine would have moved online, and that his blogs would inspire frequent chatter on Twitter and Facebook.
But sci-fi fans, by and large, probably wish that Palmer would have gone into another line of work. As to Richard Shaver, wperhaps the less said the better. I have to admit, though, that I knew Shaver too. He was another larger than life character with an intriguing back story.
I cannot say, though, whether Palmer was right in some of his more eccentric beliefs, or that Shaver actually had experiences with physical -- or astral -- beings who claimed to live deep within the caverns. Maybe it’s better for one’s peace of mind to just regard all of it as fiction, and leave it there.
Copyright 1999-2013 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
