At the time of Kenneth Arnold's report of strange aircraft near Mt. Rainier, Raymond Palmer was the editor of Amazing Stories, a magazine specializing in science fiction. The magazine's most popular serial story was known as the "Shaver Mystery", which started several years prior.
In September of 1943, a man named Richard Shaver wrote a letter to Amazing Stories, claiming to have discovered that many English words could be broken down into their individual letters, which corresponded directly with concepts or words from a language called “Mantong”. As an example created for this article, if each letter from the word "disc" was given a meaning from Mantong alphabet, it might mean “detrimental to self when looking at the sun”, which is hardly an inaccurate statement. By translating these syllables, hidden meanings in words could be found, which Shaver believed to be proof of the existence of the alleged lost empire of Atlantis.
Shaver's managing editor read a third of the letter and threw it in the trash, but Palmer thought it would be worth including in a publication. The claims made their first appearance in the December 1943 edition of the magazine, and received a positive reception. Palmer contacted Shaver to ask if there was any more information about this Mantog language, and Shaver responded with a 10,000 word story about humanoid creatures who were driven underground by a change in the type of radiation emitted by our sun. Suddenly “detrimental to self when looking at the sun” takes on a different meaning in this context.
Despite claiming to have only made changes to Shaver's draft for the purpose of making it more readable, Palmer's version was more than three times the size. The final result was so popular that the magazine had to use paper meant for other publications to meet the demand of Amazing Stories’ circulation, which reportedly doubled within four months of the story's publication. It continued to be popular past the date of Kenneth Arnold's report of flying saucers, which Palmer didn’t hesitate to suggest might have been related to Lemuria.
In the October 1947 edition of Amazing Stories, Palmer wrote “ A PORTION of the now world-famous Shaver Mystery has now been proved! On June 25th (and subsequent confirmations included earlier dates) mysterious supersonic vessels, either space ships or ships from the caves, were sighted in this country! A summation of facts proves that these ships were not nor can be attributed to any civilization now on the face of the earth.”
Reports indicate the Shaver mystery, while popular and profitable, frustrated readers who preferred more grounded stories. It is not unreasonable to believe Palmer considered the reports of flying saucers to be a way of legitimizing the tales of Lemuria in order to continue to publish the material that Shaver had few if any problems producing.
