Editing UFO conspiracy theories (section)

====Spaceships of "The Shaver Mystery"====
[[File:Amazing stories 194503.jpg|thumb|right|Shaver's first published work, the novella "I Remember Lemuria", was the cover story in the [https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v19n01_1945-03_Ziff-Daviscape1736 March 1945 ''Amazing Stories'']]]
Beginning in 1945, Palmer began to print ostensibly-true stories based on the writings of Richard Shaver, a Pennsylvania welder who claimed to be  in telepathic communication with a secret underground race.<ref name="Barkun2006"/>{{rp|32|quote=The most influential examples of this genre are a set of science-fiction stories published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories between 1945 and 1948. The stories and their surrounding circumstances came to be known as “the Shaver Mystery,” after their principal author, Richard Shaver, a welder from Pennsylvania. Shaver claimed to have been in psychic communication with a subterranean race and to have once physically visited their underground civilization.}} In 1934, Shaver had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems;  Barkun argues: "By most accounts Shaver himself believed with absolute conviction in the truthfulness of his stories. This, combined with their appearance in a pulp-fiction venue, served further to blur the already uncertain boundary between fact and fiction."<ref name="Barkun2006"/>{{rp|115}}
Shaver claimed that ancient civilizations had mastered space travel, spread civilization to other planets, and could travel to Earth.<ref name="Barkun2006"/>{{rp|116|quote="It is worth bearing in mind that the Shaver Mystery was well under way before the first publicized UFO sighting in 1947. Nonetheless, there were ample opportunities for linkage. In the first place, although Shaver focused on Lemurian survivors, he believed that thousands of years ago, some beings from earth had mastered space travel and colonized other worlds, from which they were in a position to return.}}

In a July 1946 editorial, Palmer argued that "responsible parties in world governments" were aware "of the fact of spaceships visiting Earth".<ref name="DClarke">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=K_R0CQAAQBAJ | title=How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth | isbn=978-1-78131-472-2 | last1=Clarke | first1=David | date=14 May 2015 | publisher=Quarto Publishing Group USA }}</ref>{{rp|x|quote=" In the years that followed he published letters sent to Amazing Stories by a man called Richard Shaver who claimed that a race of demonic creatures lived secretly in caves beneath the Earth and persecuted humans with mysterious rays. Then, in a prescient editorial written in July 1946, a year before Kenneth Arnold's sighting, Palmer told readers: 'If you don't think spaceships visit the Earth regularly then the files of Charles Fort and your editor's own files are something you should see. And if you think responsible parties in world governments are ignorant of the fact of spaceships visiting the Earth, you just don't think the way we do.'"}}<ref name="Laycock"/> Peebles opines:  "One would be hard pressed to find a more concise summary of the flying saucer myth. Yet this was a year before the first widely publicized sighting."<ref name="Peebles"/>{{rp|6}}<ref group="note">[https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v20n04_1946-07_cape1736 ''Amazing Stories'' July 1946]. The same issue carried a letter from Fred Crisman in which he claimed to have battled underground monsters in Burma (Peebles p.13, Gulyas 2015 p.30)</ref>