Internationally known writer and publisher of science fiction, sensationalized science fact, and serious science, especially during the heyday of the pulp magazines. Palmer edited such popular magazines as Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, and Flying Saucers. He also founded several popular publications, including fate magazine. A Wisconsin native, Palmer began his professional publishing career with Ziff- Davis, a large popular magazine publisher, in the 1930s and ended it with Space World, a serious publication about space exploration. A prolific writer as well as editor, he published many stories, both fiction and nonfiction, under an array of pseudonyms.
Palmer is particularly remembered for the Shaver Mysteries, a series he published in amazing stories in the 1940s, purportedly the true accounts of Richard Shaver, a Pennsylvania working man, who told of his experiences with a malevolent race of beings who lived inside Earth. He called these beings deros and said they were responsible for many of Earth’s catastrophes. What started out as a tantalizing, potentially true tale eventually became so farfetched that Amazing Stories’s subsequent editor, Howard Browne, killed the series off in 1949.