“A humming laboratory fueled by plasma and ancient knowledge.” A dramatic visualization of the Big Bend underground, where 'Amazing Stories' researchers unlock the energy of huge blue crystals hidden beneath the Chisos peaks.
While the sun-scorched peaks of the Chisos Mountains dominate the Texas horizon, many believe the true secrets of Big Bend Area lie thousands of feet beneath the limestone crust. Long a staple of Amazing Stories and local frontier lore, the Big Bend region is rumored to host a vast, interconnected network of tunnels that some claim stretch as far as the Mexican interior. These “mystery-ridged” hollows are frequently linked to the enigmatic Marfa Lights, which some researchers suggest are thermal or electromagnetic gasses escaping from a high-energy subterranean world. Much like the Boca Grande Cave of the Black Range, these hidden chambers are said to contain artifacts of civilizations that predated the Apache and Spanish explorers. Whether these tales are the result of the desert’s intoxicating isolation or a genuine geological anomaly, they transform the Big Bend area from a national park into a gateway for the unexplained. To explore the Big Bend underground is to look past the cactus and rock into the very “hollow” heart of the American Southwest.
AMAZING STORIES: Big Bend Area Underground
This next letter appeared on pages 171-172 of the October, 1947 issue of AMAZING STORIES:
“Sirs: Norman Finley, a neighbor of a good friend of mine, told me about an experience he had which was rather unusual. He and a couple of other fellows were hunting down in the Big Bend country. I don’t know whether you are familiar with the Big Bend Area or not, but there is no more wild or desolate area in the country. Rugged, mountainous, cut by canyons, there are innumerable parts of it which have never known the foot of man.
“It was in one of the most desolate areas that Finley and his companions found themselves. They had driven about ninety miles southwest of Marathon, Texas, a little town of about 700 people, at the foot of the Del Norte Mountains, 4000 feet high, and had then gone on afoot. The dirt road just petered out and they couldn’t get their car further. They were hunting deer but had had no luck. Just as they were about to call it a day, Finley spotted a mountain lion. He snapped a shot at it and knocked it over. But the lion just rolled over on his feet and started to leave those parts.
Finley and the other fellows took after him, since it was obvious that he was wounded and not making very good time. They managed to keep him in sight for about a mile and were sure they had him when he ran into a box canyon. The lion, however, started up a faint trail up one side of the canyon to a small cave they could see about a hundred feet from the floor of the canyon. They followed him up this trail, but when they got to the cave – there was no lion!
The cave was one of those dished out affairs that are so common in the south-west. Eroded out of the face of a cliff and cup-shaped. The only access to it was by that trail. But this cave was a bit queer. It had a sand floor and was just big enough to park twenty cars in it. On the cliff edge was a low stone wall. This in itself was not too unusual, because such caves had sheltered Indians for thousands of years.
The thing that did make it unusual was that in the rear of it was a perfectly round hole. It was obvious that the lion had ducked into this.
They approached it rather cautiously and tossed some stones in it to see if they could stir him up. But there was no response. They could hear the stones rolling and bouncing down an incline and the sound just got fainter and fainter until it died away altogether.
They then approached the hole and peered down into it. It was perfectly round–also it was about four or five feet in diameter. They couldn’t see very far down it, but it appeared to descend rather sharply and at a steady gradient. The fellows gathered some dry grass from the canyon floor and made some torches. The incline of the bore was too steep for them to climb down so they tossed the torches down it. They just slid down further and further and disappeared into the gloom. They never did see or hear of the lion again. At first they thought they had stumbled onto some old Spanish mine workings. But there was no sign anywhere of a dump that always goes with a mine. By all rights there should have been some sign of the earth and rock that had come out of that hole–but there wasn’t.
When they inspected the hole itself more closely, they were amazed at its symmetry and of the constancy of the section of the bore as far as they could see down it. The fact that the bore was perfectly round puzzled them, too.
If it was a mine shaft, it most certainly wouldn’t have been round, but instead would have been flat on the bottom. The fact that the shaft extended straight and unwavering as a rigid pipe was cause for further amazement. Since the fellows had no rope with them, which would have been needed to descend the shaft, as well as lights, they scratched their heads awhile and then left.
Finley wanted to go back with equipment and see how far down the shaft went and what was at the bottom of it. But ranchers are busy people and he never went back. In the meantime he got pretty well broken up when a horse threw him and he now lives in Fort Worth while he has someone else run the ranch. We talked rather idly about having a look at his cave someday. He says he knows exactly where it is and could find that box canyon with his eyes shut. So far we haven’t done anything about it. But we may either this summer or next when we can get time to go down to Big Bend.
Finley told me this story about a year before even you heard of Shaver so you can be sure he wasn’t influenced by the “Shaver ‘Mystery” …In fact, I don’t believe he has ever heard of the “Shaver Mystery,” even to this day. — E. Stanton
Brown., 4931 Bryce Ave., Fort Worth 7, Texas
A Review of the Original Lore
The original Big Bend underground tales are a masterclass in mid-century “high-strung” suspense. They moved away from simple ghost stories and instead introduced the concept of “Deros” (Detrimental Robots) and “Teros” (Integrative Humanoids)—remnants of an ancient Lemurian civilization who fled underground to escape solar radiation. In the Big Bend version of this myth, the rugged Terlingua Quicksilver District served as a backdrop; miners reported strange “voices” in the shafts and equipment failures that could only be explained by unseen subterranean interference.
What makes these original accounts so enduring is their ability to leverage real-world anomalies. The “luminous bursts” often reported in the Big Bend atmosphere were reframed as evidence of Richard Shaver’s “rock books” or hidden energy projectors. By the time Ray Palmer devoted entire issues of Amazing Stories to these claims, the Big Bend had been transformed from a remote cattle range into a fortress of secret science. It remains a definitive example of how pulp fiction can overwrite local geography, turning a national park into a gateway for the unexplained.
| Location | Associated Mystery | Theoretical Source |
| Chisos Mountains | Hidden “Base” Rumors | High-energy volcanic vents |
| Marfa Plateau | The Marfa Lights | Subterranean plasma/gas discharge |
| Devil’s Sinkhole | Bottomless Abyss | Ancient limestone aquifer system |
| Rio Grande Canyons | Vanishing Explorers | Unmapped river-carved tunnels |
The Day We Tapped the Chisos Current
It was July 1948, the height of the summer heat, when Dr. Aris Thorne and I finalized the connection. For two years, our “West Texas Exploration” unit—a front for the Pentagon’s Advanced Anomalies Division—had burrowed beneath the Chisos Mountains. We weren’t looking for oil; we were looking for the source of the persistent, ionized humming that our magnetometers had picked up from the limestone crust. Following unmapped Apache trail markers that pointed to “hollow hills,” we discovered a chamber that defied geological classification. The walls were studded with amethyst the size of small automobiles, but the center was dominated by a perfectly formed, multifaceted blue crystal that emitted a soft, dangerous, ultraviolet light.
Dr. Thorne, a visionary obsessed with unconventional energy, immediately recognized the crystal as a non-terrestrial or pre-diluvian artifact. He postulated it was a “harmonic resonator” designed to tap into the Earth’s telluric currents. The equipment we jury-rigged in that cave—vacuum tube amplifiers, radar screens reclaimed from surplus B-29 bombers, and miles of lead-shielded cable—was all designed to modulate that crystal’s frequency. We spent months learning to “listen” to it. On that July afternoon, we channeled a minimal 60-cycle current from our surface generator into the crystal. The reaction was instantaneous. A low vibration started, shaking the dust from the 10-foot calcite formations. It escalated into a crackling hum, and then, without increasing the input, the central crystal stabilized, glowing with an intense, self-sustaining plasma discharge. We had tapped into the Chisos Current.
The laboratory was instantly flooded with a light so pure it rendered our flashlights obsolete. The 1940s-era electronics we had installed surged to life, their screens stabilizing and displaying patterns that looked like ancient pictographs translated into harmonic wave functions. We stood in awe, feeling the strange, static-charged atmosphere press against our skin, realizing we were witnessing a limitless power source that had been dormant for millennia. This was not just a geological oddity; it was a legacy of a lost science. Looking back now, knowing that this discovery has been hidden behind classified files and that the waste plasma discharges from our work are still seen by ranchers today as the “Marfa Lights,” I realize we didn’t just find a new energy source. We found the truth that Amazing Stories had predicted all along: the Earth is far more “hollow” and high-energy than we dare admit.
