American author and magazine editor, 1910–77. One of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American alternative thought, Raymond Palmer suffered severe childhood injuries that left him partially crippled for life. Like many boys of his generation, he grew up reading science fiction, and by the late 1920s he was a significant figure in the science fiction fan community. In 1930 he published the first of many science fiction stories, and in 1933 he launched the first American prize for science fiction, the Jules Verne Prize.
In 1938 Ziff-Davis, one of the major pulp publishers of the time, hired him as managing editor for Amazing Stories, a failing science fiction magazine they had just purchased. Palmer’s job was to save the magazine, and he accomplished this with panache. His secret was an unerring sense for the lowest common denominator of taste. Atrociously written short stories about alien monsters and buxom maidens jostled for space on Amazing’s pages with feature articles about the World of Tomorrow and filler pieces about a dozen different species of crackpot science. Serious science fiction readers sneered, but subscriptions soared and money poured in.
Palmer’s greatest triumph began inauspiciously enough in September 1943, when Richard Shaver, a welder from Pennsylvania who claimed to hear telepathic voices while he worked, sent him a letter announcing the rediscovery of Mantong, the lost language of ancient Lemuria. Published in the December 1943 issue, the letter got a favorable response from the readership, and Palmer wrote to Shaver and asked for more. What he got was an incoherent 10,000-word letter titled “A Warning to Future Man,” revealing the existence of a race of psychotic underground dwarfs called “deros” who tormented dwellers on the surface with diabolical mind-control beams. Palmer rewrote it into a 31,000-word novella titled “I Remember Lemuria!” and printed it in the March 1945 issue. The issue promptly sold out, and Amazing’s mailbox overflowed with 2500 letters a month asking for more information on the sinister deros. Palmer, realizing that he had stumbled upon a gold mine, spent the next three years milking the “Shaver mystery” for everything it was worth and sending Amazing’s sales to stratospheric levels. See Lemuria; underground realms.
Another of Palmer’s oddball insights, although less profitable in the short term than Shaver’s story, had more sweeping effects on modern culture. During the 1940s, looking for striking imagery for the magazine’s covers, Palmer came up with the idea of a saucer-shaped airplane and had staff artists produce it. By 1947 millions of Americans had seen flying saucers on Amazing’s garish covers, and on June 24 of that year, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported spotting them in the sky above Mount Rainier. The modern UFO phenomenon was born. Unnervingly, many of the themes of later UFO writings appeared in fictional form in the pages of Amazing decades in advance; Richard Shaver’s “Earth Slaves to Space” in the September 1946 issue, for example, centers on alien spaceships visiting the earth to kidnap humans for slave labor on another planet, a theme later reworked by the inventors of Alternative 3 in the late 1970s and endlessly recycled since. See Alternative 3; unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
By 1949, despite the sizeable profits made by Palmer’s antics, the Ziff-Davis company had had enough, and told him to return Amazing Stories to its original science fiction focus. Palmer responded by quitting. The year before he had launched a magazine of his own, Fate, entirely devoted to allegedly factual accounts of strange events. When the pulp magazine industry collapsed in the fall of 1949, the victim of a stock market scheme that liquidated the last national wholesaler of pulps, Fate was one of the few survivors, and Palmer soon launched a second magazine, Search, to compete with it. A third title, Flying Saucers From Other Worlds, joined them in 1957, and then dropped the last three words from its title after a few months when Palmer announced that UFOs actually came from inside the hollow earth. Nearly every theme that became central to the alternative-reality scene in late twentieth-century America, from lost civilizations and the mysterious powers of crystals to alien abductions and psychic powers, found a home in the pages of these magazines long before the revival of popular occultism in the 1970s made them common currency. See hollow earth; lost civilizations.
Comfortably ensconced as the king of American lowbrow esotericism, Palmer sold Fate to his partners in the 1960s and concentrated on his remaining magazines, mail order sales of UFO books, and further projects with Richard Shaver until not long before his death in 1977. By that time the alternative scene had long since passed him by, but he left an indelible stamp on American popular culture.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006