Underground Exploration in Arizona
by Associate Charles A. Marcoux
In May, 1958 I spent one night alone in the Weaver Needle area of Superstition Mountains, fifty miles from Phoenix, Arizona. I won't give a more exact location because there have been so many people killed in this area, and I don't want any deaths on MY hands! My experiences are positive proof that an alien force of intelligent nature does exist there and does keep watch.
A huge ring of light encircled me when I reached a certain spot. It was of varied colors that sparkled and popped. This force field stopped me from moving in any direction except backward, and held me until I decided to go back to my camp. All that night I had a very strong feeling of being watched. I kept on the alert. There was no sleeping.
At one time a huge, orange colored ball came floating down the valley and seemed to disappear into the mountainside, in the area I was investigating. I snapped a picture of it but nothing showed up on the film when it was developed.
A few weeks later I returned to this area again with my wife, at night. This time we saw three white lights, about the size of baseballs, playing up and down the sides of the mountain. These were moving too rapidly over the face of a vertical cliff to be carried by human beings. Suddenly they stopped their play and cane toward us. My wife got scared and we left.
It was about seven miles back to the highway, down rugged, desert road. We hadn't gone over a mile when the engine of my car went dead. I doubt if it would have started again if I hadn't been able to coast. This happened three times in the next half mile or so. Then my wife hollered.
"Look out for the low hanging telephone wires!"
These were across the trail at about the middle of the windshield. But the only wires in this area are along the paved highway! These seemed to be alive and jumping about. They were blue in color. So I stopped the car and got out. No wires anywhere but the car was covered with a stuff which looked like silvery spider webs, perhaps the size of grocery-store string. It was odorless and tasteless and when pulled it stretched considerably before breaking. I wondered if it was anything like the "angel hair" of Flying Saucers.
After getting under way again we noticed what appeared to be a pair of auto headlights coming behind us from the area where we had parked to make our observations. They followed on about a mile behind us as we drove on out to the highway. Figuring to check on who or what this was I pulled out on to the main highway, across the pavement, headed toward Apache Junction, with the engine running. Five minutes later a '51 Mercury hardtop did come out of that rugged desert trail across the pavement and in front of my car. It stopped.
Both front doors opened at the same time and out of each came an ugly, dark faced man -- whether Mexican or Indian I don't know -- and each had in his [8] hand a three-foot Machete. They made sure that we saw them in the head-lights of my car. Without any urging from my wife I shoved the car in gear, swept around them onto the highway and headed for home at top speed!
HERE ARE SOME POINTS TO CONSIDER
Barney Bernard, owner of Rancho Del Superstition, Apache Junction, says that Apache Indians still control this area. Richard Shaver says the Red Legions (Indians) control the caverns of the Southwest. Surface Indians speak of the underground Black Legions. Were the "wires" my wife saw actually ionized rays from the caverns? I have located a cavern entrance near Weaver Needle but I am not allowed to disclose its location.
I can only speculate on my experiences so far, and the things which I have discovered. I have no artifact to prove what I believe about the reality of the caverns but I think I know where I can get some. The only thing is to get in there and get something, scrolls, pictures, even movies, and bring them back myself, if I live long enough. If my ray contacts are lying to me I will be the first to expose them. By all means I expect you to take this objectively. This goes for the readers of Round Robin. I need up-to-date facts, corroborations from other sources than Shaver and myself.
* * *
A SOLUTION TO THE SHAVER MYSTERY?
Marcoux seems to believe he is close to it, but to succeed here is to fail for those who in the past claimed to have solved the Cavern mystery have never come back with their evidence! That's proof enough for your editor! If you like to live dangerously move to Phoenix and try to crack the secret of the focus of evil in the Superstition Mountains. You can get in touch with Marcoux at his Subsurface Research Center, 1311 West Cheryl Drive.
Time Magazine, June 22, 1959 devoted two columns to the Superstition Mountain legend because the latest victim there was murdered by his partner in April. Two young Portuguese-Hawaiians from Honolulu prospected the area for weeks. They got on each others nerves. The older, Ferreira, shot the younger and later turned up in Honolulu, alone. In June he was extradited to Arizona to stand trial.
Gold, plenty of it, was found in the Superstition Mountains by a Mexican, Don Miguel Peralta, in the mid-1800s. He, his family and workmen, ware supposed to have been massacred by Apaches but the story has it that one escaped with a map showing location of the diggings -- or perhaps a cavern leading to the nether world?
"In the 1870s (says Time) a German prospector, Jacob 'Dutchman' Waltz, killed at least five men in getting his hands on the map. For years afterward Waltz lived with a quadroon girl in an adobe hut in Phoenix, periodically slipped into the crags of Superstition Mountain to replenish his supply of nuggets."
Waltz died in 1891 carrying the secret of his mine to the grate with him. Since then it has become known as the Lost Dutchman Mine and by actual count [10] over thirty men have died or been killed in the Superstition area trying to locate Lost Dutchman. The grisly details have been spelled out in a sixty-page brochure, complete with pictures, drawings and maps, by Cowboy-rancher Barney Bernard, of Apache Junction, Arizona. Marcoux kindly sent your editor his copy of this fascinating booklet, revised to Dec. 1st, 1956. If you want a copy, write to Bernard not to Headquarters, no price given.
WHAT HAPPENED TO CAVEY?
Of all the murders listed by Bernard that of James A. Cavey, number twenty, was the most puzzling and perhaps the most revealing, from an occult point of view.
"On July 16th of this year (1947) another ill-fated searcher for the fabulous mine of the Dutchman entered the mountain never to return. Claiming to have a 'Vision' he, on the above date, hired a helicopter to transport himself and two weeks supply of grub and water into a designated spot, the sand bar in LaBarge Canyon. Having sworn the pilot to deepest secrecy Cavey was dismayed to hear a blast of his proposed trip over the radio and to read the account in the daily papers. . . Having paid in advance the amount agreed upon he decided to take the risk as per agreement. The pilot, after making his 'set down', assisted in packing the grub and water up to high ground where it was completely covered with a tarp. Cavey, a retired commercial photographer, secured a two gallon canteen of water and enough food for two days and headed into Superstition.
"On August 2nd, as per arrangement, the pilot returned and found Cavey's cache of food intact. He had never returned to it. Upon being notified, Sheriff Lynn Early of Pinal County formed a mounted posse to start the search. C.F. Higham and Dick Parrott headed in from First Water ranch intending to join the searchers along the trail. Unfortunately they failed to contact each other. This almost cost these two volunteer posse-men to lose their lives from heat, exhaustion and lack of water.
"On August 6th, this writer (Bernard) guided the new posse with blood hounds in to the cache. The dogs easily picked up Cavey's trail which we followed about three hours when the first evidence, outside of an occasional track, was encountered. In descending a slope we found where he had thrown his bedroll away, next his grub-sack and finally his canteen, nearly full of water. Fifty feet farther on the trail ceased, the dogs milled in circles proclaiming a lost trail. Aside from a broken 'buck brush' there was no further evidence at hand. Being closer to the 'Don's Trail' we radioed the truck to come around to pick us up and headed for the rendezvous. Just before striking the trail we followed a ridge downward and this writer will stake his oath on the fact that on Aug. 6 there was nothing on that ridge, so we came home.
"On February 21st, 1948, two hikers, Capt. Perrin and a Chicago friend, guests at Mark Barker's 'Sunset Trail Ranch for trailers,' climbed out over the trail in advance of the 'Don's Trek.' They discovered a rope stretched across the trail, one and apparently fast in the bushes. Further investigation revealed the body of James Cavey. It was rolled up in a blanket with the rope and tied around it. Nearby on an outcrop was his hat, shirt and [11] jacket, piled up with a small rock to hold them. In the pockets were his bill-fold containing his money and identification papers. His head, like that of Adolph Ruth, had been severed from his body and a lower rib had been broken. Once again the Apache curse had struck. Cavey was the twentieth victim."
Bernard made reference to one other thing about James Cavey which, by one of those strange quirks of memory, reminded your editor an item in Ken Arnold's Saucer researches going on at that same time, July, 1947 in Tacoma. Bernard says that Cavey was crippled; he had a club foot. Arnold was disturbed by the fact that the two reporters who seemed to have an unearthly knowledge of the conflict of forces there in Tacoma, Paul Lance and Ted Morello, were both cripples, probably only coincidence.
THE DON'S TREK
The Don's Club of Phoenix, Arizona conducts an annual trek into Superstition and the Weavers Needle area in the spring of every year. For those who want to hunt for the Lost Dutchman Mine amid the safety of numbers, this is it.
Bernard writes that some two thousand Arizonians, would-be prospectors and tourists made the trek in March of 1946. Surrounded by that many people even your editor wouldn't be afraid to search for the Lost Mine and maybe a cavern entrance or two.
THE CHALLENGE OF THE UNDERGROUND
In the face of all this opposition, in spite of the disappearance of such other determined researchers as Hefferlin and Hanson, where does Marcoux get his obsessive drive to rend the veil of the Shaver Mystery? I wrote to him and asked him this. The reply so far has extended to two tapes full of comment, half a dozen letters with accompanying pictures and the manuscript of an-as yet unpublished book. All of which may lead to another BSRA publication, who knows.
Marcoux's awareness of the subterranean world goes back to his early childhood in Michigan. There he dreamed of underground cities of fabulous splendor, and no one could explain his dreams. Then one momentous day in January, 1945 he stopped before the window of a bookstore on Woodward Avenue in Detroit. A force too strong to be resisted impelled him inside and to -- not the bookshelves -- but the magazine rack and science fiction. This field of literature he had hitherto held in contempt. Nevertheless, there was a new Amazing Stories magazine with a lurid cover proclaiming "I Remember Lemuria," by Richard Shaver.
"I was in a hypnotic trance reading it," says Marcoux. "I knew then my experiences connected with the cavern world, but I was not mature enough to reveal myself. Now the time has come, I've been told.
"Those I am in contact with have promised to allow me to inspect their abode in the cavern world, to take pictures and possibly even movies."
Marcoux was one of the early joiners when Richard Shaver was forced to start a fan club in 1947. Along with many others he hoped then to prove or disprove the Shaver hypothesis of the underground cities once and for all. Among other things Shaver's stories revealed the horrible end toward which our atomic energy program was headed in the late 1940s. Marcoux believes this is one of the main reasons for the political pressure, the mob pressure which forced Ziff-Davis to stop publishing the Shaver stories and to relinquish all rights to them by 1950. The material then became the property of the Shaver Mystery Club and its members. Then real trouble began.
THE CAVERN BOSSES FIGHT BACK
To quote a portion of Marcoux's book: "The power within the earth, the subterranean empire and its agents, the space state and its Confederates, the cavern bosses, used every power of attack at its command. The fear of being exposed had approached a climax when Amazing Stories began reaching a million persons a month. If continued it would have exposed the fiends for what they were. Under the direction of the cavern bosses the ray mechanisms scanned the surface world from below, catching the minds of those interested in Shaver theories, twisting them against him. Those who maintained allegiance to him suddenly found themselves in precarious positions from strange accidents and illnesses. These were seeming coincidences to the layman, but to those of us in the know these calamities were nothing more nor less than ray attacks.
"By 1951, individual clubs and staffs were so full of fear that they wouldn't even discuss the affair with their former, closest associates. The Shaver Mystery Club and the individual groups broke up as suddenly as they had begun. Ray Palmer, former editor of Amazing Stories, had an unusual accident. Shaver himself was very ill and could not carry on. I had a back injury which lead to almost total blindness for awhile. By 1952 the Shaver Mystery had become a real mystery. A dark and sinister evil hung over the world and the Shaver Mystery became a word."
Marcoux feels now that he is perhaps the only one of the original Shaver clubs carrying on with active research. He has accumulated a mass of data on underground cavern references in world literature. Also out of these years of experience and study he has evolved a philosophy of life not far removed from that of the Mystery Schools.
GOLD IS NOT HIS GOAL
"I'm not looking for the Dutchman's Lost Mine," says Marcoux. "I'm sick of wealth and power and privilege, and the sickness, misery and degradation its owners have forced upon mankind."
If he really means this, if his goal is really to uplift the race by exposing the sinister forces which play upon man's lower nature, this may be the protection which has carried and will carry him through safely. This in spite of the Apache curse on the Superstition area, and in spite of the alleged "cavern bosses" of the subterranean world. Time will tell.
Before we close the story on the Mystery for this issue of Round Robin we should make reference to one other item in Marcoux's manuscript, perhaps because of the recent visit of Kruschev to America. He speaks of a rumor that the Russians have uncovered ruins of an ancient civilization, locked in the snow and ice of Siberia. In these ruins were found, in frozen, suspended animation, perfect specimens of a reptile race. And, Russian scientists were successful in bringing them back to life.
"It is rumored that these reptile beings have gained control of the political setup in Russia. This was two score years ago. Many so-called 'fallout victims' of the regime sent to Siberia supposedly to 'die.' One can assume that the political exiles were sent to Siberia as a reward, to carry on in work assigned to them by the reptiles. . . Since these scaly, cold-blooded beings are supposed to be almost totally immune to radioactive radiation, they could be the ones fostering the atomic rat race. Dracon, the North Star, is said to be the present home of these Pythons. . . "
WHAT SAYS THE YADA?
There are references to reptilian beings overrunning this planet in pre-historic times. One source is the strange little book, "Agharta," written by a German-turned-Tibetan priest, Robert Ernest Dickhoff. Our retired Director, Meade Layne, read this early in 1953 and went to a Mark Probert seance on March 10th with some questions. The Yada di Shi'ite confirmed their existence but said that their place of origin was the under surface of the planet Venus!
"It is true that the Serpent People once overran this planet, and that [14] they came from Venus," the Yada told Meade. "They abandoned the earth because conditions here were not favorable to them. (Polar flips freezing us and our cities at the bottom of a sea of ice wouldn't be favorable to us, either. Ed.) They were of great size and had scaly bodies and large frog eyes, and were advanced mentally. (They must have been, to have mastered space travel. Ed.) Morally they were not evolved, but were extremely cruel and vicious. They are still to be found in the interior of Venus. The Venusians of the present day, however, are not descendants of this early type. Venusians who are visiting your earth at present want to bring peace. They have no desire to occupy the earth. . . "
If there was any discussion of the possibility of Serpent People being left behind, frozen in the Arctic and Antarctic wastes, Meade didn't include them in the Seance Notes from which I drew the above. (Round Robin VIII, No. 6, March-April, 1953.) The whole thing is probably a very touchy subject in occult circles, seeing that it gets to the very heart of the problem of positive evil on this planet.
WHO DOES RULE RUSSIA?
I may have come within one question of verifying Marcoux's "rumor" at a Mark Probert Seance in early September, just before Mrs. Crabb and I moved to Vista. Professor Luntz was occupying Mark's body at the time and Russia was under discussion. Professor Luntz observed that Nikita Kruschev was not the real leader of Russia.
"Are the real rulers in physical embodiment?" I asked.
"Yes, they are," replied the Professor.
"Are they human beings like ourselves?"
After some hesitation Professor Luntz replied that he couldn't answer that at this time. So, the deeper answers we have to dig for ourselves.
Two score years ago is rather indefinite, but 1935 will be remembered by some of you as the year in which Russia's "Far East Institute for the Study of Permanently Frozen Areas" came briefly into the news. Professor P.N. Kapterev achieved world-wide fame, or notoriety, by thawing out shrimp, algae, and bacteria, and bringing them back to life. Some of these organisms were supposed to have been taken from the bodies of mastodons and other prehistoric animals found frozen under twenty feet of ice on Wrangel Island in the Arctic ocean. They were frozen anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000 years ago!
It may be that this old news item is the basis for the "rumor" reported by Marcoux. Maybe, on the other hand, it was just a brief peep under the curtain which will soon rise on a far mightier drama, the life-and-death struggle for the world and control of men's hands, with evil focussed at the physical level through beings whose physical bodies have been in suspended animation since the beginning of one of the great ice ages of the past.
What a story! What a puzzle! And we live long enough, we'll put the pieces together yet!
* * *
PICTURES OF THE SUPERSTITION AREA, taken by Charles Marcoux and fellow, subterranean researchers. Starting from above, left, the U.S. Government marker at Superstition Mountain indicating "This historic landmark has been designated a National Wilderness." Next is a view of Weavers Needle from a cavern entrance. Marcoux says he watched three glowing objects play tag with each other up and down the sheer, 300-foot face of the Needle in June, 1958. The corner picture shows Marcoux and a friend headed toward the mysterious Needle from a nearby desert road.
ONE OF MARCOUX'S BEST PICTURES, he feels, is this one at right. Following an urge to tales several snapshots in a row, quickly, toward the Needle, this mass of horizontal, glowing lines showed up against the dark background, moving diagonally up the valley. In the last of the three shots taken within seconds of each other (not shown here), the mass of bright lines had moved off the film at upper left. If these are scratches on the film it seems that they would have shown up on others.
NEXT, WE HAVE A CAVE ENTRANCE. Is this an old mine shaft leading to a dead end? Or does it actually lead to underground caverns inhabited by Deros and Teros? Marcoux is sure his "ray" contacts have lead him to an actual subterranean entrance in this area. He will not give its exact location in relation to known landmarks. By the time you read this he may know from personal experience whether his quest for truth regarding the subterranean world has succeeded. He has every intention of continuing his explorations of the area this fall, his goal some tangible artifact, photos or movies to back up his story. Here you see him during one of his trips a year ago into the Superstition area. No, that isn't a golden nugget from the Dutchman's Lost Mine, but a desert turtle in his hands.
![[Full scan of page 9]](Marcoux_p9.png){kind=link}
References
- "Search for Last Dutchman's." TIME 22 June 1959. Print.
- Barnard, Barney. The Story of Jacob Walzer and His Famous Hidden Mine, The Lost Dutchman: Truth Is Stranger than Fiction and the Legendary and Romantic Tale of the Old ... Facts of Records That Are Contained Herein. Apache Junction, Ariz.: B. Barnard, 1956. Print. <http://amzn.to/1ZDaofU [There are at least nineteen editions of this booklet, which underwent revision up until Barnard's death in 1963.]
- Dickhoff, Robert E. Agharta. Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1951. Print. <http://amzn.to/1sQSm8o>
- "Notes from the Probert Seances (The Serpent People - the Tunnels - Agharta - the Discs)." Round Robin 8:6, 7-8. Print.
- Kapterev P. N. "Experiments in the Revitalization of Organisms from the Permanently Frozen Subsoil." Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR [Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences] 3(12)(3(98)): 137-140. Print. ["On the basis of experiments made at the Skovorodino station on the Amur Railroad about 53 degrees 58'N., 123 degrees 57'E., a report is given on organisms revitalized from permafrost soil; includes numerous microscopic algae, fungus hyphae, moss and one lower crustacean. The dissimilarity of the floras from the permafrost layer and the active layer is stressed."]
Explore our Project HERMES and Project LUNARIA indexes
for more on the Shaver Mystery and the Cavern World.