SECTION 4
The Urantia text came into being during a complex process that was initiated in 1911 (some say 1908) and completed in the early 1940s—most likely in the year 1942—but some believe the final editing of the UB concluded as late as 1945. The origin story has been shrouded in secrecy and mystery until the last two decades or so, when ongoing historical research into private archives, diaries, written testimonials, and oral histories, as well as evidence provided in the aforementioned federal copyright lawsuits, revealed a large amount of new information and lore about the process.
According to the records we have, there were no direct witnesses to the formal transmission process of the original materials comprising the Urantia Papers. No one ever saw the purported contact person or anyone else write down these source materials. (But there are witnesses to the informal and unofficial communications, which are also discussed below). According to all the accounts we have, the Papers first appeared in hand-written form but not in the handwriting of any known person. The best available handwriting-analysis experts were unable to trace the written materials to the alleged contact personality or any other person involved. Yet, for a period of a few decades, voluminous handwritten documents frequently appeared in direct association with the contact person or in close proximity to him, according to all accounts. These materials were various drafts of the Papers that physically appeared in succession over at almost two decades.
The contact personality (sometimes also known as “the sleeping subject”) was described by one reliable source as “a hard-boiled businessman and a member of the Chicago Board of Trade and Stock Exchange.” Over the entire time of contact, the celestials also engaged in informal verbal communications through him, we are told, in the manner conventionally known as channeling, usually by speaking through the vocal chords of the contact personality after he was rendered deeply unconscious by some mysterious force. At times there were also dictations to members of the Contact Commission that appeared as short written messages of practical import. (There were also cases of “direct voice” contact—actual audio communications from unseen beings that were heard, as it were, “in the air” during the frequent meetings of the Contact Commissioners.)
According to the testimony, the contact person was not personally or physically engaged with the process other than to allow his body to be used in informal oral communications having to do with logistics and practical concerns of the revelatory process. The promulgation of the written content did not occur in any known manner through the vehicle of his body or mind.140 Preliminary informal “channeling” through the contact is known to have existed as far back as 1908, but the formal written Papers began to appear in succession on February 11, 1924 and continued to “manifest” for the next eighteen years. The physical papers were carefully typed up and proofread over these years.
All of these celestial transactions occurred in the city of Chicago. The main locus was the large home of a distinguished physician, psychiatrist, professor, author, and public speaker, Dr. William S. Sadler, and his wife Dr. Lena Sadler, also a well-known and respected physician and author. Their place in the near-north side of the city was also the meeting place of the Forum, the initial group of several hundred readers of the early drafts who Dr. Sadler trained as a surgeon and physician, and had also studied briefly in Vienna with Sigmund Freud. Because of his prolific writing and research and decades of clinical practice, he was known by some in his day as “the father of American psychiatry.” He wrote a widely used psychiatry textbook and was author of several dozen other books, many of these directed to the popular reader. He and his wife were also pioneers in preventive medicine and in their earlier careers were Seventh Day Adventist ministers. Lena Sadler was especially known as a pediatrician and for her pioneering work in women’s health, but died in 1939 before the completion of the reception of the Urantia Papers. Her husband lived on to see the book printed in 1955 and died at age 93 in 1969.
One scholar and trained historian, Sioux Oliva, PhD, has concluded that Bill Sadler himself was the contact personality for the revelation, but covered his tracks to remain anonymous. According to her controversial thesis, Sadler invented an origin story about an unknown contact person who never existed, doing so in order to protect the revelation from a direct link to any possible human association with the writing process. Sioux’s enormous effort to uncover new facts about the Sadler family, the Contact Commissioners, and their associates in the Forum is exemplary, but her concluding speculations seem to overreach her own historical data. (See Dr. Sadler and the Urantia Book: A History of a Spiritual Revelation in the 20th Century). Martin Gardner, the famed skeptic and science writer, took the position that the contact personality must have been Wilfred Kellogg, a brother-in-law of Lena Sadler who was a member of the Contact Commission. Virtually all other researchers believe that neither of these two men were the contact, or “conduit,” and that it must have been some other unknown person living very near the Sadler home. And this is the universal testimony of Sadler and the other direct witnesses.
According to these latter sources, each new Paper came into existence in the proximity of the contact personality, always in hand-written form. It would purportedly appear—either on a table in his bedroom or miraculously in a nearby safe or other locations. Some reliable oral accounts indicate that Papers were either “materialized” as hand-written text and then dematerialized once they were typed—or more likely, were very quickly hand-written by an unseen being while the contact person and his wife slept at night. According to Bill Sadler, Jr., one of the Contact Commissioners, “I think you would have seen a very exciting phenomenon, a pencil moving over paper with no visible means of propulsion. That’s where the physical writing was consummated.”141
Dr. Sadler explained in an account first published in 1929 that—despite all sorts of probes and tests—he and his associates could detect no discernible link to the contact personality’s mentality, personal beliefs, worldview, or handwriting style. Eventually, all of those who were personally involved came to believe that the writing was actually carried out by unseen celestial beings and was not generated somehow through the human mind of the contact person. Sadler himself, with his hard-core scientific training during an era of logical positivism, remained a skeptic longer than all the others involved in the process. He even invited other scientists as well as debunkers and magicians, including even the likes of Harry Houdini, to investigate the phenomenon, in order see if these outsiders might come up with an explanation for the materialization of the Papers. He finally accepted the miraculous explanation in 1936, after all 196 Papers had come forth, many of them in multiple drafts, but with no trace of a human author.
Here is a brief overview of the revelatory process: Once a new Paper of the revelation appeared, it was carefully typed and checked, and then read aloud at the Forum meetings that were held every Sunday afternoon beginning in 1924. After the reading of a Paper, Forum members would immediately ask questions, which were written down and later sorted and classified. It is believed by some that these new questions were presented by the Contact Commissioners in closed meetings; it is also reported that the celestials simply monitored the human reactions to each new Paper in the Forum meetings. And then, like clockwork, a new draft would appear soon thereafter. This procedure continued until 119 Papers had been compiled in 1934. And then, to the great surprise of all, the last 77 Papers appeared all at once. This material became the 774-page Part IV of the text, the beloved “The Life and Teachings of Jesus.” This was the capstone of the process and of the revelation. After its appearance, the Forum was invited for one more round of interaction. The entire corpus was presented once again to the Forum, new questions were asked and more reactions were monitored, and then the final drafts of the 196 Papers appeared, culminating in 1942 or soon after. After many years of proofreading and typesetting, plus a delay requested by the celestials, the book was first printed in 1955, has been through innumerable re-printings, and has been translated into 17 languages.
140 The evidence seems to indicate that the informal communications between the celestial authors and the human contact group for the Urantia Revelation took place via a technique similar to that of Edgar Cayce and his interlocutors. According to the sources I have consulted, it transpired in a manner not unlike any number of other case of channeling, mediumship, or oracular activities before and since. These instances might be called classic channeling as contrasted with “epochal revelation” of the sort that is unique to the Urantia Revelation. The so-called Teaching Mission is a controversial case of contemporary channeling that has involved scores of contactees who are Urantia students, many of them veteran readers, and occurring decades after the publication of the UB. These “transmitter-receivers” (the term they use) have long claimed to channel three types of beings (1) some of the original celestial authors of the UB, (2) other beings introduced in the Urantia text, and (3) “ascended” humans speaking from the afterlife. This movement has continued up to the present, and in recent years has been extended its purview into another celestially inspired activity known as the Magisterial Mission, which purports to provide the teachings of the Magisterial Son who is soon to incarnate on Earth (or so it is claimed). The umbrella for both of all these newer contact missions is known as The Correcting Time. The massive series of thousands of transcribed lessons linked with these activities began in 1987. All of these teachings are highly referential to the Urantia Revelation, but these phenomena and the associated claims are outside the scope of the present study. This material is covered in my forthcoming book, Romancing the Universe.
141 The source of this quote is what I consider to be the best existing history, authored by Larry Mullins with the assistance of Dr. Meredith Sprunger: A History of the Urantia Papers (CreateSpace, 2010). See chapters 4 and 5 of this book for a detailed account of the revelatory process. Ernest Moyer is the author of a well-researched but controversial alternative history entitled The Birth of a Divine Revelation: The Origin of the Urantia Papers (Moyer Pub, 2000).