The Blowing Cave and Shaver Mystery One of the odd stories related to Inner Earth is set in Blowing Cave, near Cushman, Arkansas, where a man named George D. Wight is said to have found a subterranean civilization and proven the Shaver Mystery. Though Wight disappeared, his story survives in a diary he allegedly wrote. In the 1950s, Wight was a UFO buff from Michigan. Wight knew of Richard Shaver’s claims, published in the 1940s in the Ziff-Davis science-fiction magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, that the remnants of two advanced races, tero and dero (good and evil respectively), lived in vast caverns under Earth’s surface. Though Wight was skeptical of these claims, he had an interest incave-exploring that he indulged with David L., for whose mimeographed saucer newsletter Wight contributed a regular column. They did their spelunking with three other men. All of them were acquainted with Charles A. Marcoux, another columnist for the magazine. Unlike the others, Marcoux was an obsessed believer in Shaverian concepts, to the extent that he gave occasional public lectures on the subject. The spelunkers sometimes attended those lectures but considered his beliefs absurd. In 1966, the group, now consisting of twelve persons, went down to Arkansas to explore Blowing Cave on a week-long expedition. On their return, members wrote letters to Ray Palmer, once editor of Amazing Stories and Shaver’s principal promoter, claiming that they had encountered intelligent beings— Shaver’s teros—deep inside the cavern. Palmer did not reply. Apparently a few months later, Wight went back and chose to stay with the underearth people. He returned in 1967 to give a written account to David L., who by this time had left the UFO field and no longer wanted to be publicly associated with it. Wight asked L. to pass on the diary to Charles Marcoux. Wight felt that in ridiculing his beliefs he had wronged him and wanted to provide him with the proof that Shaver was right. He then returned to his tero friends and has not been seen since. David L., however, had long since lost track of Marcoux, and it was not until thirteen years later that he came upon his name. He tracked him down and handed him the manuscript. Its effect on Marcoux was electrifying, and it set in motion the events that would eventually lead to his premature death. The manuscript related that while exploring Blowing Cave, the group spotted a light at the end of a tunnel. As the spelunkers approached it, Wight noticed a narrow crevice, just big enough for him to squeeze inside it. There he found clearly artificial steps. He called to his friends, and they climbed through the opening. On the other side of it, the opening expanded, and they were able to walk upright. “Suddenly,” Wight wrote, “we came into a large tunnel/corridor, about twenty feet wide and just as high. All the walls and the floor were smooth, and the ceiling had a curved dome shape. We know that this was not a freak of nature, but manmade. We had accidentally stumbled into the secret cavern world” (Toronto, n.d.). Soon they encountered blue-skinned but otherwise humanlike individuals. The strangers said that they had permitted the crew to find the tunnel and enter it because they had instruments that measured people’s emotions; the explorers were determined to have good intentions. They learned that the tunnels went on for hundreds of miles and led to under earth cities populated by entities that included serpentlike creatures and Sasquatchlike hairy bipeds. Soon after their initial conversation , Wight and his companions were taken to a kind of elevator that led them to the under earthers’ place of residence, a city made of glass. It turned out that their guides were Noah’s direct descendants, who had found their way underground in the wake of the flood. There they found supertechnology and the remains of an advanced civilization, along with teros. Apparently at some point, Wight’s group met the teros who had been there all along. This was not the only trip the group took to Blowing Cave. Unable to get anybody on the surface to believe their story, Wight and his friends vowed to return with conclusive proof. During one expedition, they captured a giant cave moth, preserved it in a bag, and brought it up with them. When they opened the bag, however, the sunlight disintegrated the insect into a fine dust. Not long afterward, Wight decided to stay with the underearth people. According to one source, “all evidence of [his] ever existing began to mysteriously disappear from the surface. Birth certificates, school records, computer records, bank records, etc., all seemed to vanish, apparently the work of someone in a very influential position” (Untitled, n.d.). Other members of the group made another trip into the cave, where they saw their friend for the last time. Wight returned once to the surface to meet David L. In 1980, Marcoux saw the manuscript and read Wight’s words addressed to him: “Yes, Charles, all that you told us is true. . . I owe you a debt of gratitude, because the Teros healed my crippled leg, instantly. I am grateful for more than just that, and I have left these notes and somewhere a map so that you, too, can . . . visit with these people. . . . Maybe we will meet here some day” (Toronto, n.d.). Marcoux set about organizing an expedition, 46 Blowing Cave soliciting members in such small-circulation hollow-earth publications as Shavertron and The Hollow Hassle. Marcoux and his wife moved to Cushman in 1983. There, in November, as he was visiting the land around the cave, a swarm of bees descended on him. The resulting shock and trauma precipitated a heart attack, and he died on the spot. Some hollow-earth enthusiasts speculated that sinister forces that wanted to keep the caves a secret had caused the attack. Others saw it as just a tragic accident. In any case, Marcoux’s death ended efforts to explore Blowing Cave in search of underearthers.
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 22:45:31 +0000
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