World War II was over and the Cold War was just heating up when a metaphorical Atomic Age bomb burst in Colorado.

The American science-fiction community was still in an uproar over the Shaver Mystery, “The Most Sensational True Story Ever Told,” according to Amazing Stories magazine, a publication whose circulation had skyrocketed after it published “I Remember Lemuria!,” a fantastic story purporting to be a memoir of the extraordinary subterranean-world encounters of writer/artist Richard Sharpe Shaver, in 1945. The is-this-for-real controversy concocted by editor in chief Ray Palmer inspired Shaver Mystery Clubs to spring up around the country and fueled numerous letters from readers who shared similar memories, dreams and alleged encounters with descendants of warring extraterrestrial races: the evil Dero and the benign Tero, who lived in the hollow Earth. Life magazine called the phenomenon “the most celebrated rumpus that rocked the science fiction world.”

One of those letters, published in the October 1946 issue of Amazing Stories, came from Dr. Maurice Doreal, the Denver-based “Supreme Voice” for the Ascended Masters, super-evolved human beings who live below Tibet. Doreal had recently announced that he was moving his Brotherhood of the White Temple from central Denver to rural Colorado to wait out the coming nuclear holocaust. “Like Mr. Shaver, I have had personal contact with the Dero and even visited their underground caverns,” he now wrote. “In the outer world they are represented by an organization known loosely as ‘the Black Brotherhood,’ whose purpose is the destruction of the good principle in man…. The underground cities and caverns are, in the most part, protected by space warps, a science known to the ancients, but only touched on by modern science…. I note that many are wanting to enter these caves. For one who has not developed a protective screen this would be suicide and one who revealed their location would be a murderer….”

He described the group that the Brotherhood represented as the White Lodge, or Supreme Council of the Ascended Masters: “The masters or adepts do not rule; they guide and direct man in his spiritual evolution…. Because so many have tried to make the White Lodge a supernatural thing rather than what it is, a group of persons who have evolved mentally, physically and spiritually ahead of the mass of mankind, much misperception has arisen. It is the most coldly logical group I have ever contacted.”

Following his startling pronouncements, Doreal gave brief interviews to Time and Life magazines, then largely disappeared from public view — only to later resurface in his new Shamballa Ashrama compound near Sedalia, where he awaited the post-nuclear resurrection.

Maurice Doreal was born Claude D. Dodgin in pre-statehood Oklahoma on August 25, 1902, to Thomas D. and Alta Belle Dodgin. His father was a farmer and sometime “day laborer,” and Claude was the youngest of their six children.

The family later moved to Wichita, Kansas, where both Thomas and Claude were listed as “landscape gardeners” in the 1924 city directory. (As Doreal, he claimed part Choctaw heritage and service with the U.S. Army Signal Corps — neither of which can be verified.)

As with the children of most working-class people at the time, Claude’s formal education was limited to elementary school. This did not prove to be a handicap. He later claimed to have had his first encounter with an Ascended Master at age three, and another at age twelve. He also said he’d retained the experiences of previous incarnations so well that he didn’t need to be taught anything by the time he emerged as Claude D. Dodgin (or “Claude Doggins,” which he also gave as his birth name).

“When I was born into this life I had a full and complete memory of my past lives and incarnations. And I never had to study over again the forgotten things that most of us do. I did not have to learn to read and write. I did not have to learn mathematics or physics or chemistry, or anything else because in the past I had acquired that knowledge and had retained my attainments of the past,” Doreal wrote in Personal Experiences Among the Masters and Great Adepts in Tibet.

The most precocious kid on the planet apparently kept a low profile about his early attainments. What they did prepare him for, he later explained, was a supernatural invitation in 1925 that took him from Wichita to Calcutta, where he was then guided to Darjeeling, and from there to the secret underground kingdom in Tibet where the Ascended Masters and “great adepts” had their headquarters.

“When I was born into this life I had a full and complete memory of my past lives and incarnations.” Facebook

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There he spent years studying esoteric knowledge before returning to Kansas as the anointed representative of the Great White Lodge to set up the Brotherhood of the White Temple. Doreal would later explain his lack of passport stamps by claiming that it was actually his astral presence that had made the journey.

A marriage license archived at Familysearch.org shows that Claude D. Dodgin, 25, and Ruth Proctor, 20, both of Altus, Oklahoma, were married in Chickasha, Oklahoma, on September 4, 1927, by the Reverend A.H. Owen, a Baptist minister.

According to city directories and the 1930 Census, from at least 1929 to 1930 the couple lived in Wichita, where they had a son and a daughter. Apparently, even Dodgin’s great attainments could not be used during the Great Depression for anything more than employment as a clerk, a cab driver and a salesman for the Kansas Brokerage Company. By 1931, the Dodgin family was living in Oklahoma City, where Claude worked as a department-store salesman.