Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Jerome Clark
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by the arm and told me to press certain buttons and I went through the air like a rocket plane and we rose until the earth looked like it was almost fading out[.] [I] breathed perfectly because something in that mask over my face condensed the breath and it seemed that around us there was a shell of some kind of force, because I could hear a humming noise all the time. When we came down it seemed like almost no time had passed; probably, fifteen or twenty minutes. We landed about two thirds up the side of Mt. Shasta—we landed in front of a small building.
There Doreal entered a great city encased within a cavern illumined by a “giant glowing mass of light … condensed from a blending of the rays of the sun and moon.” Atlanteans there lived in white marble mansions amid vast gardens. He learned that evil Lemurians are kept under the watchful eyes of the good Atlanteans, who have them imprisoned on remote Pacific islands. It should surprise no one that Doreal was the owner of a massive library of science-fiction books and a contributor to the letters section of Amazing Stories and other SF pulp magazines.
In The Golden Goddess of the Lemurians (1970) Abraham Joseph Mansfield devotes a chapter to someone else’s alleged 1931 Shasta experience. On a hunting expedition with Mansfield, the unidentified “friend” shot and wounded a deer on the northeast side of the mountain. As he searched for it, he lost his bearings, and darkness fell. Eventually, exhausted, he lay down. Around 3:30 AM a voice roused him with the question: “Why don’t you come with me?” The speaker, seven feet (2.1 meters) tall, identified himself as a Lemurian. The man was led deep into the bowels of the mountain into the Lemurian’s residence, a beautiful golden cave. He slept there on a golden bed, his head pressed against a golden pillow. The Lemurian spoke of a vast network of tunnels connecting Shasta and other surface locations to the center of the earth, where most Lemurians reside. “I saw plates and gold-lined shafts, and tables and chairs unbelievably monstrous in size.” In due course the man returned to the mountainside and found his way to Mansfield and the car they had arrived in.
Not to be outdone, Mansfield outlined his own experiences with Lemurians. He viewed their Plates of Time, “assembled for future generations to preserve the knowledge they had about atomic power so that a new generation would use it wisely and respect the powers of God.” In 1934 the Lemurians, he reported, anointed him chief of their gods, a position he held until his death five decades later.
The previous chief of the Lemurian gods, according to Mansfield, was a certain J. C. Brown. Again according to Mansfield, Brown was the assumed name of a British mining engineer, Lord Arthur J. Cowdray. (Another source says that Brown was merely an employee of the Lord Cowdray Mining Company of London.) Be that as it may, somebody calling himself J. C. Brown really existed, showing up in Stockton, California, in 1934 as a 79-year-old man. He had a fantastic tale to tell.
Could a thriving, highly advanced civilization called Lemuria have existed as far back as 12,000 years ago? Scientists say no, but some occultists maintain the Lemurians may have civilized the ancient world (Mary Evans Picture Library).
Exactly 30 years earlier, he told enraptured listeners, he had come upon a curious patch of rock on a Shasta cliff. As he examined it closely, he discovered that it blocked the entrance to a cave. He dug through the rocks and found debris and brush at the cave mouth. The more he dug, the more interesting things got, and soon he was looking down into a tunnel going down deep into the mountainside. Eventually, he found rooms of copper and gold plates as well as shields, swords, and statues. From the look of things, the occupants had left in a hurry. In due course he came upon the skeletons of giants, the smallest a mere six and a half feet (two meters) tall, the largest more than 10 feet (three meters). There were 27 in all.
Brown was vague about what he did during the next three decades, except to note that he had learned the artifacts were of Lemurian origin. He had come to the decision that they should be shared with the larger world, and now he wanted to organize an expedition—at his own expense—to recover the materials at the place only he knew. So every night for six weeks prominent and other Stockton residents —80 of them—met with Brown to plot the expedition, as visions of untold riches danced in their heads. Brown promised them a yacht so that all could go north by water. They would leave at 1:00 PM on Tuesday, June 19.
Brown didn’t show, and he was never seen again.
A 1957 advertising brochure distributed by the Chambers of Commerce of three Shasta-area towns (including the municipality of Mount Shasta) took note of the tradition as it had evolved by mid-century: “It is a part of the legend that a druggist in Weed is [the Lemurians’] contact for necessary supplies”—though one suspects fakelore here—an inside joke for the amusement of local business operators. The article goes on, “The entrances to their caves are supposed to be in Bolam Canyon on the north side of Mount Shasta.”
In due course he came upon the skeletons of giants, the smallest a mere six and a half feet (two meters) tall, the largest more than 10 feet (three meters).
In a rambling feature published in the Winnipeg Free Press in March 1941, Charles W. Montrose wrote that a “Black City of the Clouds” figures in the legends of American Indian tribes in northwestern Canada. Not only that, according to Montrose, but living persons reported that they had seen it themselves. The city sits atop a peak in the Mackenzie Mountains, along the Yukon Territory-Northwest Territories border, over valleys that are lush and tropical in spite of its location. These valleys, like the city, are unknown to conventional geography because they are hidden in vast unexplored territory “between the 55th parallel and the Arctic circle.” Among Montrose’s supposed informants was a trapper who, though he had since “mysteriously disappeared,” had raised vegetables of an immense size over a matter of a few weeks.
The Black City of the Clouds gets its color from the volcanic rock—basalt—from which it is constructed. The individual buildings are “architectural marvels,” occupied by beautiful golden-haired, golden-skinned people who are advanced in science and spirit. They have ready access to a rich variety of precious and semi-precious metals. Witnesses—unnamed—have seen “strange, multicolored lights that at certain times of the year, or under particular conditions, blaze from these mountain tops with great brilliance and a fierce intensity—of airships of strange design which, minus roaring motors and blasting propellers, rose vertically into the air from the depth of the valley and disappear with incredible speed.”
If Montrose’s larger story is unbelievable, no other available source mentions legends or reports of a Black City of the Clouds in the area in question (perhaps his is an embellished or garbled version of the Silent City, see below)—the reference to strange flying objects is interesting. Precisely similar phenomena have been reported in abundance as UFOs since the early summer of 1947 but were almost entirely unknown to any except direct witnesses before that. So perhaps Montrose picked up on something with a degree of factual content.
An enthusiastic, uncritical consumer of occult literature, Montrose linked the Black City and its golden residents to Lemuria, though affording them more physical beauty than other accounts conceded (see above). The Black City was tied to another Lemurian outpost, Mount Shasta. “The same type of airship that legend has rearing silently out of the Shangri-La of the Mackenzies has often been reported as having been seen by settlers living in the vicinity of California’s sacred mountain,” he noted. “The same invisible force or wall of invisible resistance which is reported to guard and block the passes leading to the Black City has actually been experienced … [by] the curious who sought to view the sacred rites or festivals conducted by original Lemurians in the vicinity of Mount Shasta.” Even forest fires could not penetrate the invisible shield.
Around 1937 the mysterious gentle, bearded men who came down the mountain to purchase supplies (paid for with pure gold) in the nearby small town of Weed ceased appearing. Area residents