THE UNDER-PEOPLE by Eric Norman

Still high on his NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH from yesterday, Brad Steiger takes a spin under his pen name Eric Norman and delivers a rewrite of that same text, simply shifting the main focus from UFOs and Men in Black to the Hollow Earth and the startling discovery of THE UNDER-PEOPLE! It's (mostly) the same cast of kooky characters and twice-told tales, but Steiger tweaks the perspective just enough with some additional mythology. Material from this book would be heavily recycled by Steiger and Warren Smith for later Hollow Earth releases.

Who lives inside the Earth? Devils, angels, a master race? Cannibal lust demons? Steiger's just asking questions here, and there's room for reasonable debate! A revealing nitpick: Steiger cites the myth of Christopher Columbus disproving the Flat Earth as an example of the establishment brooking no dissent on the shape of the world. Of course, medieval people understood the Earth was round and weren't the ignorant dirt eaters the Columbus Myth would have us believe, but this citation of false historiography serves its purpose for Steiger's laundering of the fringe. A similar example is the common comparison of crank theorists to Galileo, persecuted by the Church. With that pedantic puffery out of the way, let's start digging into "one of the most provocative books of the year" and see if we can't unmask the Under-People!

Classic map by "Shavertron" artist Max Fyfield

Steiger must have had alchemy on the brain around this time, because that's where we lead off, before unearthing some OOP artifacts, mysterious roads and tombs, and celestial visions by trapped miners. There's also a weird black dwarf who gets drunk in a monastery wine cellar and is temporarily recruited as a monk, before being cast back into the darkness as a devil! Talk about a lost weekend. Shambhala and Agharta, Ultima Thule and Hadding Land, these and more mythologies figure into Steiger's decoding of the Under-People's identity. There's also the Zuni and other indigenous peoples' creation myths about an inner Earth origin. After a nasty overview of Pizarro's conquest of the Incas, with attendant myths of underground tunnels and secret treasures, Steiger cites his own New UFO Breakthrough and Harold T. Wilkins on ancient underwater ruins and nuclear bomb shelters.

One "Maggie Rogers" has her manuscript about contact with the Under-People summarized in a chapter. Originally published by Ray Palmer in Amazing Stories alongside the ongoing Shaver saga, it's a similar story, with "Tamil and Nephli" underlords and a druggy, sexed out atmosphere. That phony story of the good ship Jesmond landing on Mid-Atlantic ruins introduces us to a section on Atlantis, and Steiger casts quite a wide net here, dredging up ol' Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce among others. Next we hear from Gray Barker and his Saucerian Bulletin, setting us up for a dark section on Hitler and the Hollow Earth which would also be reused by Steiger and Smith in future. More recycling occurs with Olaf Jansen and the Smoky God - this chapter would be repeated verbatim by both Smith and Steiger in many later books.

We're nearing the end of the saga, checking in now with modern proponents of Hollow Earth such as Marshall B. Gardner who asks "Have the poles really been discovered?" His full text from 1913, A Journey to the Earth's Interior, is available for reading at the Sacred Texts website. His book seems to be the source for the story of the "mysterious origin of the Eskimo" which, again, wound up in many of Smith and Steiger's other books. Finally now Steiger rolls in the big guns and gives us Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer, the two men who most popularized modern Hollow Earth with their eminently readable paranoid pulp fiction. Steiger quotes heavily from an article by Palmer on Hollow Earth and UFOs, which seems to quote without citation from Dr. Raymond Bernard's book The Hollow Earth  on Admiral Byrd's expedition "beyond" the pole. Perhaps this is an error by Steiger or Award Books and Palmer cited Bernard in his original article. A quick sketch of early Hollow Earther John Symmes and a detour to mysterious Mt. Shasta are inserted before we make one final push into that blockbuster Shaver Mystery! By the way, the first five stories of the Shaver Mystery are available to read and download at archive dot org, so you can see for yourself Shaver's strangely compelling psychosexual Pellucidarian saga.

Shaver and Palmer together

After all this melodrama, Steiger ends abruptly by asking us "What do you believe?" This would become Warren Smith's go-to ending for his Zebra specials from the mid-70s, but it's a limp copout line if you ask me: "I dunno, here's some wild stuff. Crazy, huh?" Stick to your guns, Steiger! Or at least steal a better ending!

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1969

NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH by Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour

Brad Steiger and partner in crime Joan Whritenour deliver a tight little text, presenting the more conspiratorial side of Ufology circa 1968 as a NEW UFO BREAKTHROUGH!

The main threads entwined are Gray Barker's Men in Black, Carl Allen (alias Carlos Allende) and his Philadelphia Experiment, and the sinister Shaver Mystery, with additional color provided by Brinsley Le Poer Trench's hippy dippy Sky People and those dear old Dropa Stones. Brad and Joan highlight more than a few people who were threatened or silenced for their attempts at UFO truth, including Carl Allen, Ufologist Morris K. Jessup, and superstar writer of the "Strange" Frank Edwards. Something strange is definitely going on ... Shaver's deadly Deros almost got to me today, and prevented this update entirely! Allen said that the lack of evidence for his teleportation story was actually proof of the Navy's coverup, naturally, while Jessup's death by suicide was really a hit job because he was getting too close to the truth. Ditto for Frank Edwards' death by heart attack. Edwards himself claimed that government pressure forced sponsors to drop his successful radio show after he began focusing on UFOs. Interestingly enough editor Ray Palmer, who popularized the Shaver Mystery as a true story and stands as one of the major figures on the darker side of Ufology, tells Steiger and Whritenour that he doesn't believe in the mysterious Men in Black, having been visited many times by government agents who were always upfront with their credentials! John Keel rails against Ufology's failures in the face of government stonewalling, claiming that he's been two steps behind the MiB multiple times while chasing UFOs.

Barker, Allen, Jessup, and Keel

After outlining the sinister saucer silencers and their brave critics, Steiger and Whritenour quote one Bob Stiff, reporting staff at Whritenour's Florida based UFO newsletter Saucer Scoop, on the "tragic case" of one Mary R., a young Oklahoma girl terrified into catatonia by a UFO sighting. Her mother then receives threatening calls from the silencers! Stiff gets too close to the case and ends up threatened himself! High drama and high strangeness, as twisted as anything penned by Gray Barker or John Keel.

The authors wrangle Wilhelm Reich and his bogus Orgone energy into their UFO coverup based on his arrest by the FBI and his later troubles with the FDA. The FBI claims mistaken identity, saying they only took him in because they mixed him up with a communist bookstore owner with the same name. Glad that's cleared up! The authors tread on dangerous ground defending Reich against charges of sexual impropriety, casting him as a liberated genius striving to better humanity ... an alternate view might be that he was a sex creep cultist using "liberation" as a cover for abuse. For a slim little volume, Steiger and Whritenour pack in a lot of dense material, and pulling a single thread can lead down a dangerous number of rat holes.

Co-author Joan Whritenour (1937-2014)

More saucer attacks follow, including Snippy the horse, with quotations from NICAP and more reporting from Bob Stiff. Next, the Dropa Stones are dusted off to support ancient UFO visitations, along with those fake quotes about nuclear war from the Mahabharata. The authors are kind enough to explicitly cite Paulwels and Bergier, as opposed to von Daniken who simply plagiarized their groundbreaking work. Some great Bigfoot/UFO cases follow including the Florida Sandman that Steiger and Warren Smith use in some of their other books. We get into some truly weird Biblical interpretation courtesy Brinsley Le Poer Trench, who decodes Genesis as a creation story for galactic humanity. The destruction of Atlantis and Velikovsky's catastrophism tie in too, as does Olaf Jansen's The Smoky God, another story of the inner earth a la Shaver. This is another bit that Steiger (and Smith) would recycle many, many times. 

We're getting towards the end, and Steiger and Whritenour toss in a random chapter on alchemy to fill things out, with a dialogue between the authors and an invented alchemist character, Augustus Magnus. Weird. Joan Whritenour finishes with a chapter on "psy-war" and the "mental rape" some contactees are experiencing via voices from the void. Whritenour joins with John Keel and Jacques Vallee in doubting these experiences are extraterrestrial at all, and fears that someone very earthly is planning something sinister ...

Above, a 1974 edition by Tandem for the UK. What a grueling grind! Compelling but draining, pure nonsense but skillfully arranged, Steiger and Whritenour at the top of their game. Recommended for a window into the vintage dark side of Ufology.

New UFO Breakthrough is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Award Books, 1968

LOST CITIES OF THE ANCIENTS - UNEARTHED! by Warren Smith

A tome for the ages, Warren Smith's ultimate Zebra special clocks in at a whopping 395 pages, over twice as long as his other entries. There's a dirty little secret at the dark heart of his jungle escapade though: he only wrote the half of it! Smith's pulled a neat trick by excerpting huge passages from "ancient scribes" etc, amounting to 143 pages of 395 being quoted text. The final line of the book encapsulates his approach to these quotations: "I leave it to you, the reader. What do you think?" There's little in the way of analysis and absolutely zero fact checking or research going on beyond presenting these strange tales in bulk, but it's strangely hypnotic.

Smith's scribes and their contributions:

- Hiram Bingham, "The Discovery of Machu Picchu" article from Harper's, 1913 (approx. 4,000 words quoted)

- William Montgomery McGovern, Jungle Paths and Inca Ruins, 1927 (approx. 11,000 words)

- John T. Short, The North Americans of Antiquity, 1880 (approx. 6,300 words)

- Willard Barbrooke Grubb, An Unknown People in an Unknown Land, 1911 (approx. 12,000 words)

- E. G. Squier, Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Inca, 1877 (approx. 990 words)

Smith also uses heavy quotations from Dr. A.M. Renwick's Wanderings in the Peruvian Andes from 1937, and reprints an interview with Morris K. Jessup from his inaugural Zebra special Secret Forces of the Pyramids. Ivan T. Sanderson and Gordon Creighton are cited for musings on UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. 

It's effective mystery mongering and a tribute to Smith's talent how far he can spin a yarn off of some anecdote from a dusty archive. Newspaper articles also contribute some weird monster tales, with Patagonian plesiosaurs, the tongue ripping terror of the mapinguari, and the brutal El Sisemite making sketchy appearances. It wouldn't be a Smith special without another appearance by that goddamn Venezuelan vicious hairy dwarf, either! Some monsters are only too human, as the Wrath of God himself Lope de Aguirre proves.

Another ripping tale: Erich von Daniken's Ecuadorean caves of wonder, which supposedly housed impossible ancient tech and records. Smith runs with von Daniken's story for a whole chapter on secret tunnel systems and lost precursor civilizations. The simple fact that von Daniken fabricated these caves from whole cloth is no matter to Smith, even when von Daniken admitted as such in a 1974 interview for Playboy, two whole years before this book's 1976 publication. Smith brings in a story from Ray Palmer's Search magazine for some Shaver Mystery tinge too.

Smith's thesis, such as it is, follows the basic ancient astronauts/lost civilization template of "White gods" bringing civilization to the savages, with special focus on Quetzacoatl, the plumed serpent who's been interpreted as a white European man on down since the conquistadores. These racial/colonial frameworks obviously have resonance to this day, as far flung as doctrine for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to the inspiration for a modern million dollar TV boom.

True to penny-pinching form, Zebra's proud proclamation of FULLY ILLUSTRATED amounts to 11 grainy black and white photos interspersed through the text.

Table of contents:

Preface: South America, Mystery Land of the Ancients  (i)

1.  The Lost Cities of the Ancients (5)

2.  The Lost World of El Gran Paytite (22)

3.  The Marauding Monsters of South America (36)

4.  The Patagonian Plesiosaur and Other Mysterious Monsters (57)

5.  Mysteries of the Incan Builders (75)

6.  The Mysterious City of the Clouds (92)

7.  An Ancient History Carved in Stone (110)

8.  The Enigma of Pre-Columbian Explorers (148)

9.  Witchcraft, Wizards and Indian Magic (171)

10. Mummies, Tomb Robbers and Ancient Cities (211)

11. Mystery of South America's Subterranean Tunnels (246)

12. Amazon Warriors of Ancient America (264)

13. The Riddle of History in Stone (289)

14. Machu Picchu: City of Mysteries (309)

15. Mysteries of the Megalithic Monuments (321)

16. The Tantalizing Enigma of Tiahuanaco (339)

17. Incredible UFO Activity in South America (354)

18. Space Gods and Miracle Workers (372)

Lost Cities of the Ancients - Unearthed! is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Zebra Books, 1976

OPERATION EARTH by Brinsley Le Poer Trench

Once again, author Brinsley Le Poer Trench wants to make it plain: gotta make way for the Homo superior! As an arch-reactionary hippie, Trench sees the New Age as an opportunity to open our minds to our lost heritage as children of the spacemen, and he links this awakening to an ancient war between the benevolent Space Brothers and malevolent imposters from beneath the Earth. Everything from the Bermuda Triangle to the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, from Atlantis to Antonio Villas-Boas, is cited as evidence in his melding of the Shaver Mystery with classic Contactee cant.

Trench is logical within the confines of the subject matter, studiously documenting his connections with an extensive bibliography. That his thesis is irrevocably cracked is only natural considering the eclectic personalities involved with the clique behind the Flying Saucer Review.

Operation Earth is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Tandem Books, 1975 (original pub. 1969)

THE HOLLOW EARTH by Dr. Raymond Bernard

Here's a work of pure crank genius from Dr. Raymond Bernard, A.B., M.A., Ph.D., detailing the massive conspiracy to hide Admiral Byrd's discovery of a South Polar entrance to the Hollow Earth! Dr. Bernard was born Walter Isidor Siegmeister, and spent his life on a crusade for "alternative health remedies" and Hollow Earth truth. He died in 1965, and The Hollow Earth was published posthumously with a foreword by one Robert Fieldcrest, who plugs the vintage quack cancer cure Krebiozen and Dr. Wilhem Reich's bogus Orgone energy.  Here we see an early connection between the paranormal genre and "alt medicine" scams which continues to this day. The whole thing is kicked off by Bernard's incredulity at Admiral Byrd's description of journeying to a land "beyond the pole" ... surely Admiral Byrd meant he went inside the Earth, and was forced to withdraw any further elaboration by the CIA! Says Bernard:

Byrd remarked: "The present expedition has opened up a vast new land." The word "land" is very significant. He could not have referred to any part of the Antarctic continent, since none of it consists of "land" and all of it of ice, and, besides, its geography is fairly well known and Byrd did not make any noteworthy contribution to Antarctic geography.

Bernard elaborates his thesis when he stumbles across a text in a Brazilian bookstore titled From the Subterranean World to the Sky: Flying Saucers by O.C. Huguenin which bridges classic 1800s Hollow Earth theories with the new flying saucer craze of the space age. This results in some convergent evolution alongside the Shaver Mystery which also posited UFOs based in the Hollow Earth, albeit with demonic Dero controllers - Bernard hypothesizes that his UFO pilots are benevolent and engaged in a millennia long plan to uplift mankind into a golden age.

The complete text of The Hollow Earth is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Dell Publishing, 1969

FLYING SAUCERS IN FACT AND FICTION edited by Hans Stefan Santesson

A slapdash volume mixing some essays on flying saucers with short stories. Lester del Rey laments SF fandom's adoption of flying saucers, deeming them both too dull for fiction and too ridiculous for fact, while Ivan T. Sanderson cheerfully disregards everything from del Rey's piece to spin a yarn introducing us to "The Nonterrestrial" with his usual freewheeling style. One John Nicholson provides a useful look at the split in reported humanoid saucer occupants between handsome Nordic types and creepy Little Green Men.

Despite the heady lineup of authors the fiction entries are a mixed bag. The strongest story by far is Judith Merril's Exile From Space, followed by Theodore Sturgeon's A Saucer of Loneliness. Both of these manage to overcome del Rey's objections to flying saucer fiction with some stirring emotional content. Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch deliver cutesy trifles that feel beneath them.

Lancer Books, 1968