Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 32

Surely the most curious — certainly the most convoluted—post-Shaver tale is set at a real place, Blowing Cave, located near Cushman, Arkansas. In November 1983 a man named Charles A. Marcoux died there in a bizarre accident. These things are undeniable. Just about everything else beyond these facts is peculiar and unbelievable.

Marcoux’s interest in weirdness commenced in his youth, when he was exposed to Palmer’s pulps Amazing and Fantastic Adventures. That exposure puts into context Marcoux’s testimony about an alleged incident that happened to him on December 24, 1945, as he stood at a stoplight in Flint, Michigan, waiting to cross the street on his way to a shoe store. At that moment his gaze was inexplicably directed to a drab, unfashionably dressed couple under the opposite light post. His mind was flooded with thoughts seemingly not his own. “Telepathically,” Marcoux would write, the couple “impressed me that they were ‘Teros’ and that I KNEW THEM PERSONALLY.” When the light changed and they crossed, heading toward him, he wanted to speak to them but felt prevented from doing so. The two passed by without looking at him. When he turned to follow them, they disappeared—almost literally—into the crowd.

Experienced cave explorers have yet to stumble upon any evidence of subterranean civilizations (iStock).

Marcoux spent the rest of his life seriously, even fanatically, committed to Shaverian beliefs. In 1957, at a UFO lecture, he met another Michigan man, David A. Lopez of Saginaw, who happened to be an experienced cave explorer (spelunker). Lopez had never heard of the Shaver Mystery. When Marcoux explained it to him, Lopez coolly replied that nothing in his experience and specialized field of knowledge suggested that any such thing was possible. Lopez had been exploring caves since he was 14, a result of meeting his future brother-in-law, a resident of Cushman, Arkansas. Lopez was introduced to Blowing Cave, and for years afterwards he traveled to Cushman to pursue activities there.

He started a mimeographed saucer magazine, UFO Journal, announced as the publication of the grandly titled UFO Investigations Bureau Civilian Intelligence. Marcoux had a column in it, and—at Marcoux’s urging—so did George D. Wight of Benton, Ohio. Lopez would not meet Wight personally until 1960. Meanwhile, Marcoux moved to Glendale, Arizona, where he started a small group called the Subsurface Research Center. Lopez remained unconvinced of Shaver’s claims but managed to stay generally friendly with Marcoux. “His insistence on the existence of a subworld and my years of cavern explorations and knowledge to the contrary did much to strain our tempers,” Lopez would write. (In a February 1958 letter Marcoux privately told Lopez, “I have been invited into the ‘cavern world’ where I will spend a few days.”) Wight also rejected Shaverism, but like Lopez maintained mostly cordial relations with the obsessed seeker.

Lopez organized a group of friends and acquaintances who wanted to become spelunkers. They would begin their forays with Blowing Cave, then expand their area to others in Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Lopez folded his UFO Journal in August 1961 and thereafter abandoned ufology altogether for speleology.

In 1966 the spelunkers, now expanded to a dozen, journeyed from the Upper Midwest to Arkansas, intending to spend a week exploring Blowing Cave. There, so they later recorded in letters to Palmer (who did not acknowledge them for reasons we can only speculate about), they encountered teros—or, anyway, their equivalent. Lopez would prefer to call them subworlders, holding that “teros” was a word of Shaver’s invention. Lopez would provide no detailed account, but he did indicate that these beings are human but blue-skinned and white-haired (even the children). As descendants of Noah, they do not speak English; their languages are Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Greek.

In any event, Lopez would assert, “I did owe Marcoux a long and deserving apology and I felt that it was time he knew that his hypothesis was correct. However, when I tried to communicate I was unable to locate him.”

Meantime—details here are vague—Wight must have joined the expeditions and met the entities he continued to call the tero. He returned alone to the cave, coming back briefly in 1967 to hand over to Lopez a diary to be given to Marcoux. Wight said he, too, felt guilty about ridiculing Marcoux’s beliefs when they had turned out to be right after all. That was the last Lopez or anyone in his circle ever saw Wight.

After 13 years Lopez came upon Marcoux’s name and tracked him down. Marcoux finally had the diary in his possession. It is said to have related the spelunking group’s experience at Blowing Cave, beginning with the sighting of a light at the end of a long tunnel. Members crawled through a narrow crevice and found artificial steps on the other side. According to Wight, “Suddenly we came into a large tunnel corridor, about 20 feet [6 meters] wide and just as high. All the walls and the floor were smooth, and the ceiling had a curved dome shape. We knew that this was not a freak of nature, but manmade. We had accidentally stumbled into the secret cavern world.”

They soon met blue-skinned humans who told them that the tunnels went on for hundreds of miles, leading eventually to cities populated by assorted entities, including reptile beings and Sasquatch-like creatures. The blue-skinned men identified themselves as direct descendants of Noah, who had gone underground in the wake of the Flood. In due course they discovered an advanced technology and the remains of the civilization that had created it. Wight and his friends boarded an elevator that took them deeper into the earth. At the end of the descent, they entered a city of glass where the Noachians lived.

During subsequent visits the explorers met the tero, who had been there all along. But no one would believe them. Hoping to prove their bizarre story, they captured a giant cave moth, but when they reached the surface, the sunlight turned it instantly to dust.

Wight decided that he wanted to live permanently with his innerearth friends. Subsequently, claims one account, “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.” The remaining members of the group took one last trip inside the cave and bade their farewells to Wight, who came up once after that to give his diary to be passed on to Marcoux. Within the diary Wight wrote, “Yes, Charles, all that you told me 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’ll meet here some day.” The diary, perhaps no surprise, is said to have disappeared long since, presumably expunged as surely as evidence of Wight’s existence.