posted on May, 19 2006 @ 07:08 PM
God bless TinWiki for bringing me this old thread. I've been intrigued by this story since I was 11.
I first read about it in a book called Mysterious California, by Mike Marinacci (published 1988). It discusses the story of Frederick S. Oliver, who
penned "A Dweller On Two Planets" in 1899 (the oldest existing copy I have been able to get info on is 1924 and edited by Edgar Lucien Larkin).
Supposedly Oliver found caves on Shasta full of giant mummies and gold, and met a sage named Yol Gorro or Phylos the Tibetan. (A Dweller On Two
Planets was published under the psuedonym Phylos the Tibetan).
The sage wore a headband to hide his third eye according to Oliver. There are shades of Theosophy here, tied into Helena Petrova Blavatsky's "Third
Root Race".
(The theory of Lemuria was first posed in 1864 to explain the geographic distribution of Lemurs, and Blavatsky, who wanted to blend science and
religion, jumped on the band wagon with "The Secret Doctrine" in 1888, not long before Oliver would have started writing A Dweller On Two
Planets.)
It's became a very popular legend later on.
The "I AM Activity" (not I AM Foundation- there's a difference) was founded basically as a cult-for-profit by Guy Ballard in 1930, and drew on the
Shasta mythos, with the "ascended master St. Germain" as the sage.
Robert Heinlin featured the myth in a short story called Lost Legacy (1941).
Add startrek names to the same old song and dance and you get the sources for this thread's beginning.
It is also interesting trivia that other related stories exist around California, and are detailed in Mysterious California. Charles Manson reportedly
believed there was a cave complex that could be accessed through hot springs in Death Valley (in the area now belonging to Naval Air Weapons Station
China Lake) and desired to lead his followers there after starting a cataclysmic race war on the surface.