Keep Out!: Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About

Of the many multifaceted theories that have been advanced to try and explain what lies at the heart of the UFO puzzle, one of the most controversial suggests that, rather than representing intruders from faraway star systems, the assumed aliens are really the last vestiges of a very ancient — but very terrestrial — race of advanced entities that originated right here on Earth. They have either chosen or have been forced to live outside of human society, within huge, cavernous underworlds far beneath the surface of our planet.

As this theory goes, our presumed aliens are intimately related to Homo sapiens at a genetic level, to the extent that their close physical similarities allow them to stealthily move among us — with the aid of a few carefully prepared props to obscure their real appearances, such as wrap-around shades, wigs, pulled-down hats, upturned collars, and makeup. Our leaders are said to secretly know all about these ancient people. They know these curious entities are the original masters of the world that we have claimed as our own, which we are increasingly infesting, plundering, and ravaging. And officialdom is also keenly aware that nothing can be done to prevent these beings from meddling in and carefully manipulating our lives to suit their own potentially sinister purposes and agendas.

Such a scenario is without doubt an ominous one. Imagine this: You’re walking home late one night. The air is eerily still and the moon is full. As you approach your front door you feel a distinct chill, and you see a curious little fellow eyeing you carefully from across the street. Stranger still, via the light coming from a nearby streetlamp, you can see he’s wearing an old-fashioned fedora hat and a long black coat. And he looks deathly pale too. Menacingly zombie-like, even. Maybe he’s not, as your mind had quickly assumed, just some weirdo out for a late-night stroll, or even, worse still a deranged mugger. Perhaps he’s actually one of a veritable army of underworld intruders that have wormed their secret way into our cities, weaving plans under cover of darkness and shadow for the day when they reclaim the world that was once all theirs. Is such a scenario just too crazy for words? You’d better hope it is, or one day we could all be in deep, dire trouble.

Close Encounters

Before we get to the matter of what our leaders may know about this hidden society and its secret underground abode, it’s first necessary to note that encounters with unusual entities from the world below us are surprisingly common. One of the most macabre accounts that falls into this particular category occurred in 1942 at a reportedly haunted mine in Arizona. Paranormal investigator Brad Steiger says of this tale, “According to local legends, the mine had been abandoned when the miners [ran] into some sort of cave. From that moment on, ill fortune plagued those miners. Portions of the tunnel caved in, crushing several miners. A couple of the investors in the mine died as a result of strange accidents, and a number of the miners simply disappeared without a trace.”[34]

The idea of a haunted mine might very well keep superstitious miners at bay, but for two teenage boys who had heard the legends of the mine, the lure of adventure in that underground maze of tunnels was too appealing. So it was that in the summer of 1942 the intrepid lads elected to seek out the inner depths of the deep, dark mine for themselves. It was an action that proved costly, as Brad Steiger notes: “[They] passed the deserted buildings of the mining camp and climbed over a large pile of debris located at one side of the mine entrance. It was there, standing as if on guard at the mine opening, that the boys saw the grotesque monster. About four and a half feet tall, but very thick in bulk, the being let out an unearthly scream and started around the edge of the mine toward the boys.”[35]

Both fled in absolute terror. Curiously, years later one of the boys (by then an adult) stated that after fleeing the mine, he hid out in a local movie theater, only to be horrified by dark and menacing figures that were walking up and down the dimly lit aisle, seemingly searching for him. But that was not all: On retiring to his bed that night, the boy felt certain that he caught a glimpse of a hideous dark form squatting on a high limb of a tree near his home, staring intently in his direction. Was the presence of the ominous entity a warning, perhaps, to the boy to keep away from the old mine and its underground secrets? We may never know.

The Shaver Mystery

As the 1940s progressed, so did the astounding tales. Or, more to the point, so did the “amazing stories.” Ray Palmer, the editor of the legendary Amazing Stories magazine from 1938 to 1949, had a hell of a hard time as a kid. At the age of 7, he was involved in a violent collision with a truck that shattered his spine, which significantly stunted his growth and provoked endless health issues throughout his life. None of us, unless we have personally undergone such a traumatic event, can begin to imagine how we might react to such a situation in our formative years. Maybe we would do precisely what the young Palmer did: He became somewhat reclusive as a result of cruel taunts from local kids and ignorant adults. From the solitude of his bedroom, Palmer buried his head deeply within the pages of the science-fiction magazines of the 1920s and 30s. If the real world was just too much for the damaged Palmer to deal with, then the realm of futuristic fantasy would have to take its place. In the final year of his teens Palmer started co-editing his very own fanzine, titled the Comet, which was enthusiastically welcomed by the burgeoning science-fiction community of the day. But the biggest event in Palmer’s life came in 1938. It was a veritable dream come true.

Ziff-Davis, the publisher of Amazing Stories magazine, had just moved its base of operations from the Big Apple to the Windy City, and, in the process, dumped its editor, T. O’Connor-Sloane. As Palmer didn’t live too far away — in the heart of Milwaukee — and Ziff-Davis knew of his Comet publication, an offer was made to Palmer that he could not refuse: a full-time gig as the editor of Amazing Stories.

Today, Palmer’s position as head honcho of Amazing Stories is remembered, chiefly, for two specific reasons:

1. He bought and published Isaac Asimov’s very first professional science-fiction story, titled “Marooned off Vesta.”

2. He became the leading light in a decidedly odd affair that became known as the Shaver Mystery.

Whether the Shaver saga was science fiction or science fact is a matter that still has people guessing.

The Shaver Mystery had its origins at the height of the Second World War. It was a relatively normal day in 1943 when Palmer was opening the daily delivery of mail that regularly poured into the offices of Amazing Stories, and came across one particular missive penned by a certain Richard Shaver. “Weird” barely begins to describe it. Shaver wrote that he personally had uncovered a sensational and terrifying secret: In our distant past a race of ancient, highly evolved entities lived right under our very feet. Massive caverns, huge caves, and endless tunnels were the dark, damp places they called home.

At least, that is, before they decided to exit the Earth and head away to a new world on the other side of the galaxy. When these particular entities said their final goodbyes to our planet, they left behind them something truly sinister and abominable: their diseased, mentally deranged offspring, which were said to be called the Deros. Taunting the human race, finding more and more ways to screw up our lives and plague our minds, and, even worse, using us as food, were just some of their bad habits. Yes, according to Shaver, human beings were being systematically kidnapped and devoured by cave-dwelling grotesqueries.

For Palmer, this nightmare scenario looked like fun; as the astute editor of Amazing Stories, he quickly grasped the significance and potential enormity of the story that had fallen into his lap. He knew the story would highly entertain his readers, and probably wouldn’t hurt sales figures either. History has proven Palmer correct on those counts.

But before he could proceed any further, Palmer realized that he needed much more from Shaver. Important questions needing answering: had Shaver been to this terrifying underworld? Might he even have personally encountered the deadly, psychotic Deros? If not, then from where was Shaver getting his information? This is where things got even more warped. Shaver eagerly wrote back to Palmer with the answers to his questions, and I suspect they were not the ones he was expecting.

Shaver wrote that, in 1932, he was employed as a welder in a car factory, where most days were routine. But one day most certainly was not: On the occasion in question, wrote Shaver, his welding gun began talking to him. It did so, said Shaver, “by some freak of its coil’s field attunements.”[36] Then, telepathically delivered tales of a horrific nature were beamed into what amounted to Shaver’s mind, all relative to the Deros, their penchant for human meat, and their underground cities. Shaver was so pleased by Palmer’s quick reply to his original missive that he penned a 10,000-word story that detailed the salient points of the affair, including the outrageous claim that he, Shaver, had been the captive of the Deros for a number of years prior to making good his escape.

This was absolutely great for Palmer, who duly burned the midnight oil, tidying up and editing Shaver’s story, which finally appeared in Amazing Stories in March 1945, in a feature titled “I Remember Lemuria.” Sales of that particular issue bypassed the roof and went through the stratosphere, and both Palmer and the publisher were delighted. Neither, however, was quite prepared for the thousands of letters that poured into the offices of Amazing Stories from a multitude of readers who had become fascinated by the tales of Richard Shaver. We want more—those were the words coming from the huge readership, and Palmer did not disappoint. The Shaver controversy continued for decades, constantly being added to by other characters who claimed knowledge of the Deros and their evil underworld. Today, the entire issue is viewed by the majority of UFO researchers as nothing more than a practical joke initiated by Shaver and then expanded upon by Palmer, ever ready to increase the audience of his cherished magazine, no matter how tall the tale was.

However, others have told similar, more credible stories of these underground creatures.

Mac Tonnies

Author Mac Tonnies, right up until the point of his tragic passing in October 2009 at the age of 34, was hot on the trail of these ancient, underground humanoids, which he chose to call the Cryptoterrestrials. Tonnies told me, only a couple of months before his death, “After devouring countless books on the UFO controversy and the paranormal, I began to acknowledge that the extraterrestrial hypothesis suffered [from] some tantalizing flaws. In short, the ‘aliens’ seemed more like surreal caricatures of ourselves than beings possessing the god-like technology one might plausibly expect from interstellar visitors. I came to the realization that the extraterrestrial hypothesis isn’t strange enough to encompass the entirety of occupant cases.”[37]

So, if E.T. wasn’t weird enough for Tonnies, then what was? The under-dwellers, that’s what. “If we’re dealing with humanoid beings that evolved here on Earth,” Tonnies said, “some of the problems vanish. I envision the Cryptoterrestrials engaged in a process of subterfuge, bending our belief systems to their own ends. And I suggest that this has been occurring, in one form or another, for an extraordinarily long time. I think there’s a good deal of folkloric and mythological evidence pointing in this direction, and I find it most interesting that so many descriptions of ostensible ‘aliens’ seem to reflect staged events designed to misdirect witnesses and muddle their perceptions.”[38]

Official Knowledge

We’ve now heard many civilian accounts, but what is known at an official level about these alleged ancient beings and their subterranean domains? The previously mentioned former U.S. Air Force Intelligence operative, Walter Bosley, made a highly valuable contribution toward answering this question. Bosley’s father served in the U.S. Air Force in the late 1950s, and worked on matters relative to the U.S. space program. Significantly, during the period of his employment with the military, Bosley Sr. received at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio — perhaps within the confines of the legendary Hangar 18—a classified briefing relative to the reported UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947.

Bosley said that by the time of his father’s briefing, the Air Force had come to a startling conclusion: Neither the strange aerial device nor the bodies found in the desert outside of Roswell at the time in question had alien origins. His father told him the entities and their craft come from inside our planet. Their civilization supposedly resides within a huge underground system of caverns and tunnels beneath the southwest portion of the United States. Bosley was additionally told by his father that “They are human in appearance; so much so that they can move among us with ease with just a little effort. If you get a close look, you’d notice something odd, but not if the person just passed you on the street.”[39]

We also have the illuminating tale of Nick Pope, who, for three years — from 1991 to 1994—officially investigated UFO encounters for the British Ministry of Defense (MoD). In 1999, Pope wrote a science-fiction novel titled Operation Thunder Child, which told of an alien invasion of the Earth from the perspective of the MoD and the British government. Notably, in Pope’s novel, the U.S. government tells British officials that the aliens are nothing less than an offshoot of Neanderthal Man that, quite literally, went underground millennia ago, “developing their own complex social structures and technologies.”[40]

At one point in Pope’s book, the U.S. president confides in the British prime minister that these ancient humans “have been keeping a careful watch on our development, especially since the Industrial Revolution. But it’s our progress in the last hundred years that has most frightened them.”[41] As Pope’s novel progresses, however, we learn that the truth is somewhat different: The ancient human angle, as presented to British officials, is really a U.S.-created ruse to mask a genuine extraterrestrial presence on our world.

This leaves us with a couple of thought-provoking questions: did Nick Pope, as a former UFO investigator for the Ministry of Defense, hear whispers and rumors from American friends and colleagues in the world of officialdom of the theory that our alien visitors may not be from faraway star systems, after all? If so, did he then choose to weave certain aspects of this scenario into his 1999 novel? The story of the alleged underworld inhabitants of our planet, it seems, is as winding and as shadowy as the tunnels and caves in which they are reputed to secretly dwell.