911truth.org, Byron Belitsos, and Urantia - research notes
Brian Salter, questionsquestions.net
30 September 2004
Controversy has been building over some of the leaders of 911truth.org amongst many 9/11 activists and politcal researchers. One of them is Byron Belitsos, who is not just involved in the 9/11 Truth Movement but is also a leading promoter of an unusual, synthetic religious-type movement called the Urantia Brotherhood, which was created in the early 20th century. The shady background of Urantia has led many activists to express concern and even alarm over Belitsos' role in the 911truth organization.
For example, Alex Constantine, a widely respected researcher and author on mind control, cults, and related topcs, writes: "The Urantia Brotherhood is a Skull & Bones spin-off. Byron Belitsos of the 911 Truth Movement's claim to fame is his popularization of the brotherhood's holy textÝ -- supposedly channelled by a member of the Kellogg family, which had four members enrolled in Skull & Bones fraternity at the time to book was produced."
Nico Haupt (911skeptics.blogspot.com), another critic of Belitsos and 911truth.org, says that Belitsos is soon going to be giving him a statement, which he will publish. So, we will be assured of hearing both sides of the story. For now, here is a collection of raw information of the type that has given many people grave concerns about the implications of a leading Urantia promoter taking a central position in the "9/11 Truth Movement".
from 911truth.org:
Byron Belitsos - Byron is a founding board member of 911Truth.org. He authored its by-laws and also sits on the Movement Committee. He has been a book publisher and editor for the last ten years. His press recently published the book Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies, by Jim Marrs. Byron is also coauthor of the forthcoming book One Planet: A Progressive Vision of Enforceable Global Law. He has a B.A. in intellectual history from the University of Chicago. His graduate studies have embraced history, literature and religious studies and were conducted at Naropa Institute, where he studied with poet Allen Ginsberg, at University of California and at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Some overviews of Urantia, from a variety of viewpoints:
The UrantiaÝBook describes Jesus, his life and teachings as constituting the 7th Bestowal Mission of Michael of Nebadon (Nebadon being the name of the sub-universe in which Earth subsists). Michael is in turn described as a Paradise Creator Son of God, an order of being which brings order and life to sub-universes, who, after seven bestowals as various orders of beings, becomes his universe's acknowledged chief executive. According to the Urantia Book, Jesus began life on earth through birth as any other human, but attained to mortal spiritual perfection by way of balanced growth and dedication to doing God's will. The book describes him teaching and living a religion of personal religious experience that includes for its followers salvation into an afterlife, followed by an ages-long growth-adventure culminating in Paradise attainment. The Urantia Book characterizes Jesus' gospel as the Parenthood ("Fatherhood") of God coupled with the siblinghood ("sonship") of all mankind.
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Non-Christian+perspectives+on+Jesus
According to the Urantia Brotherhood, which is "a voluntary and fraternal association of believers in the teachings of The Urantia Book," (Letter from Urantia Brotherhood dated Sept. 1977.), "The account of the life and teachings of Jesus in The Urantia Book is much more complete than that of the New Testament, but not contradictory." (Basic Concepts of The Urantia Book, Urantia Brotherhood, Sept. 1975, pg. 2)
http://www.totse.com/en/religion/the_occult/urantia.html
First appearing in 1955, The Urantia Book is a mammoth tome that credits no human author. Rather, it claims to have been assembled by extraterrestrial entities, or ìRevelators,î with ostentatious names such as Perfector of Wisdom, Number, Divine Counselor, and One Without Name, and channeled by one unidentified human. The 2097-page volume gives a fantastically convoluted and obscure account of cosmology, anthropology, theology, and history. Yet, in this opacity lies much of its fascination. Students of the book claim that they have received an esoteric dispensation that eludes the masses. Because of the bookís sheer bulk, it supplies endless details on cosmology, theology, and anthropology not mentioned in other religious scriptures.
Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D. Denver Seminary Denver, Colorado http://www.culticstudiesreview.org/csissueidx/toc2001.1/dept2001.1/dept_bookreviews/bkrev_urantia.htm
The UB Fellowship was founded in 1955 as the Urantia Brotherhood and is an association of people who say they have been inspired by the "transformative teachings" of the UB. According to the UBF, these "superhuman personalities" are from another world. They synthesized the work of more than 1,000 human authors in a variety of fields, including an "astronomical-cosmological organization of the universe" unknown to modern science and an elaborate extension (700 pages) on the life of Jesus. The UB also reveals that the "Universe is literally teeming with inhabited planets, evolving life, civilizations in various states of development, celestial spheres, and spirit personalities." In short, the UB is over 2,000 pages of "revelations" from superhuman beings which "correct" the errors and omissions of the Bible. "Urantia" is the name these alleged superhumans gave to our planet. According to these supermortal beings, Earth is the 606th planet in Satania which is in Norlatiadek which is in Nebadon which is in Orvonton which revolves around Havona, all of which revolves around the center of infinity where God dwells.
Martin Gardner is skeptical of the UBF's claims. He believes the UB has very real human authors. Originally, he says, the UB was the "Bible" of a cult of separatist Seventh Day Adventists, allegedly channeled by Wilfred Kellogg and edited by founder William Sadler, a Chicago psychiatrist. According to Gardner, in addition to an array of bizarre claims about planets and names of angels, etc., the Urantia Book contains many Adventist doctrines. Sadler died in 1969 at the age of 94 but his spiritual group lives on. Sadler got his start working for Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, Adventist surgeon, health and diet author, and brother of cornflake king William Keith Kellogg. These are the same Kellogg brothers who were featured and lampooned in the movie "The Road to Wellville."
http://skepdic.com/urantia.html
From Belitsos' own "Romancing the Universe" site:
The Urantia Book was authored and presented by celestial personalities and given to our world through a method that is not wholly understood. Popular lore recounts a twenty-year process in the 1920s and 30s in Chicago of direct interaction between a superhuman commission of celestial personalities and a "contact commission" of six humans. In addition, a group of several hundred people known as the Forum, which met once a week during these years in Chicago, was indirectly involved in the revelatory process, feeding (through the human contact commissioners) not only hundreds of questions to the revelators but even comments on early drafts of the papers. The finished version, a massive tome, was first published in 1955, and nearly 500,000 copies are now in print.
The Urantia Book is not a new "bible", but it does purport to be an epochal revelation to our planet. The so-called Teaching Mission (or "TM") is, by contrast, a grassroots phenomenon involving localized transmissions of celestial teachings based on the Urantia text to small groups and individualsóincluding "live" question and answer sessions. There are thousands of pages of such sessions that have been transcribed and collected since 1991, when the TM was first officially inaugurated. Some version of this method of celestial contact may have also been used in biblical times when the prophets and teachers of old engaged in inspired contact with divine personalities.
This fourth section of the book is solidly rooted in the New Testament story. In one of five papers presented for a consultative panel onThe Urantia Book held at the American Academy of Religion meeting in 1986, Dr. Meredith Sprunger wrote the following about the Jesus Papers:
"This superb presentation of the life of Jesus brings life to the sketchy New Testament picture and with it a new authenticity. It has a universal appeal even when it is viewed only as a historical novel for it is unsurpassed in theistic philosophical reasonableness, spiritual insight, and personality appeal. This life of Jesus not only fills in the "hidden years" from twelve to thirty but The Urantia Book gives a picture of his pre-incarnation and post-incarnation experience. It is basically acceptable to all religions, emphasizing the religion of Jesus which is unifying rather than the religion about Jesus which tend to be divisive."
The Urantia Book, the Bible, and the New Celestial Teachings Known as the "Teaching Mission" http://www.romancingtheuniverse.net/tmbibleub.htm
The Urantia Book preaches explicity in favor of establishing a World Government / World Federalism. This is an important topic, because there is already great controversy over 9/11 being used as a springboard for promoting world government agendas by various people:
The Urantia Book -- Part IV. The Life And Teachings Of Jesus PAPER 134: Section 6. Law, Liberty, And Sovereignty
P1490:4,Ý134:6.1 If one man craves freedom -- liberty -- he must remember that all other men long for the same freedom. Groups of such liberty-loving mortals cannot live together in peace without becoming subservient to such laws, rules, and regulations as will grant each person the same degree of freedom while at the same time safeguarding an equal degree of freedom for all of his fellow mortals. If one man is to be absolutely free, then another must become an absolute slave. And the relative nature of freedom is true socially, economically, and politically. Freedom is the gift of civilization made possible by the enforcement of LAW.
P1490:5,Ý134:6.2 Religion makes it spiritually possible to realize the brotherhood of men, but it will require mankind government to regulate the social, economic, and political problems associated with such a goal of human happiness and efficiency.
P1490:6,Ý134:6.3 There shall be wars and rumors of wars -- nation will rise against nation -- just as long as the world's political sovereignty is divided up and unjustly held by a group of nation-states. England, Scotland, and Wales were always fighting each other until they gave up their respective sovereignties, reposing them in the United Kingdom.
P1490:7,Ý134:6.4 Another world war will teach the so-called sovereign nations to form some sort of federation, thus creating the machinery for preventing small wars, wars between the lesser nations. But global wars will go on until the government of mankind is created. Global sovereignty will prevent global wars -- nothing else can.
P1490:8,Ý134:6.5 The forty-eight American free states live together in peace. There are among the citizens of these forty-eight states all of the various nationalities and races that live in the ever-warring nations of Europe. These Americans represent almost all the religions and religious sects and cults of the whole wide world, and yet here in North America they live together in peace. And all this is made possible because these forty-eight states have surrendered their sovereignty and have abandoned all notions of the supposed rights of self-determination.
P1490:9,Ý134:6.6 It is not a question of armaments or disarmament. Neither does the question of conscription or voluntary military service enter into these problems of maintaining world-wide peace. If you take every form of modern mechanical armaments and all types of explosives away from strong nations, they will fight with fists, stones, and clubs as long as they cling to their delusions of the divine right of national sovereignty.
P1491:1,Ý134:6.7 War is not man's great and terrible disease; war is a symptom, a result. The real disease is the virus of national sovereignty.
P1491:2,Ý134:6.8 Urantia nations have not possessed real sovereignty; they never have had a sovereignty which could protect them from the ravages and devastations of world wars. In the creation of the global government of mankind, the nations are not giving up sovereignty so much as they are actually creating a real, bona fide, and lasting world sovereignty which will henceforth be fully able to protect them from all war. Local affairs will be handled by local governments; national affairs, by national governments; international affairs will be administered by global government.
P1491:3,Ý134:6.9 World peace cannot be maintained by treaties, diplomacy, foreign policies, alliances, balances of power, or any other type of makeshift juggling with the sovereignties of nationalism. World law must come into being and must be enforced by world government -- the sovereignty of all mankind.
P1491:4,Ý134:6.10 The individual will enjoy far more liberty under world government. Today, the citizens of the great powers are taxed, regulated, and controlled almost oppressively, and much of this present interference with individual liberties will vanish when the national governments are willing to trustee their sovereignty as regards international affairs into the hands of global government.
P1491:5,Ý134:6.11 Under global government the national groups will be afforded a real opportunity to realize and enjoy the personal liberties of genuine democracy. The fallacy of self-determination will be ended. With global regulation of money and trade will come the new era of world-wide peace. Soon may a global language evolve, and there will be at least some hope of sometime having a global religion -- or religions with a global viewpoint.
P1491:6,Ý134:6.12 Collective security will never afford peace until the collectivity includes all mankind.
P1491:7,Ý134:6.13 The political sovereignty of representative mankind government will bring lasting peace on earth, and the spiritual brotherhood of man will forever insure good will among all men. And there is no other way whereby peace on earth and good will among men can be realized.
http://www.urantiabook.org/newbook/ppr134_6.html
Belitsos has made his 9/11-related activities into a channel for his world government ideology. The following is an excerpt from a review of the recent "9/11 Convergence" conference in California:
The first speaker was Byron Belitsos, whose Origin Press published *Inside Job*. His vision is "planetary democracy", also referred to as World Federalism. He would like to replace the United Nations with a World Parliament, which would "rule the world democratically". He emphasized that this is in opposition to "the cabal that appears to be running the world" now, which has perpetrated "the New World Order". He described the UN as "a relic of World War II", a loose confederacy of nations historically similar to the condition of the thirteen American states before the Constitution was ratified and the federal government was thereby established as the supreme power in the USA. So now, said Byron, it's time to do the same thing on a world scale.
The World Federal Government would have a World Executive, but lest anyone compare such a person to Emperor Bush, Byron assured the audience that the Executive's powers would be strictly limited by a global constitution and Bill of Rights, and would be balanced by the powers of the houses of the World Parliament and courts. In this open, democratic global forum, all the people of the human community could tap into our "common divine Source from which our sovereignty flows".
Byron said that terrorism is a symptom of an underlying cause: "global anarchy in a legal sense"; so the true solution is "enforceable global law". This would bring a permanent end to war -- "not just containing it, but abolishing it". He said that the best hope under the present power structure is "world peace via imperial dominion", but that this is "futile". Instead we must "build something that's never existed: planetary democracy".
9/11 Convergence: a Report and Commentary by Joseph Kerrick
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/kerrick-911convergence.html
Belitsos collaborated with Jim Garrison in presenting the 911 Convergence conference. Garrison is the co-founder with Mikhail Gorbachev of the State of the World Forum, which promotes world government, new age religions, and population reduction. Garrison and Gorbachev are both friends and colleages with George Schultz, which is rather interesting given that Garrison is pitching his views as the antithesis or solution to current US foreign policy. Schultz himself played a key role in installing into the Bush Administration the so-called "vulcans" (including Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, et al) who have been at the forefront of this "unilateralist" policymaking! Garrison also once held a position at the Esalen Institute, which has extensive connections to US psychological warfare & mind control operations. Note also that Gorbachev is close to George Soros. A brief Garrison bio:
Jim Garrison cofounded the State of the World Forum in 1995 with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Forum is a San Francisco-based non-profit institution created to establish a global network of leaders dedicated to those principles, values, and actions necessary to guide humanity toward a more sustainable global civilization. With President Gorbachev as its Convening Chairman and Jim Garrison as its President, the Forum has brought together leaders from around the world to its annual and regional convenings to deliberate upon and take action concerning issues of global concern. Jim's most recent focus, and that of the Forum, has been the Integral Governance Initiative, dedicated to establishing global issue networks to solve global problems.
Garrison became active in foreign policy issues, particularly with Soviet-American relations, in the mid-1970s. From 1986 to 1990, he served as Executive Director of the Esalen Institute Soviet American Exchange Program, which engaged in nongovernmental diplomacy with Soviet counterparts in a variety of sectors. In 1991, he founded the International Foreign Policy Association in collaboration with Georgian President Edward Shevardnadze and former Secretary of State George Schultz, focusing on providing humanitarian relief for children in the former Soviet republics. He has also written six books on various aspects of philosophical theology and history, including Civilization and the Transformation of Power (2000) and the most recent America as Empire (2004).
Garrison was born in Szechuan Province, China, in 1951 to Baptist missionaries. He lived with his family in Taiwan from 1953 to 1965, after which they settled permanently in San Jose, California. He holds an M.T.S. in Christology and History of Religion from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University. http://www.wie.org/bios/jim-garrison.asp
Another way that Belitsos is using 9/11 as a platform for his world government agenda is through his publishing company, Origin Press. This is a blurb for his upcoming "One Planet", which he has paired with the 9/11 book "Inside Job" by Jim Marrs:
Now is the time. You can choose now to commit to the greatest political revolution in historyó-the democratic revolution to create enforceable global law. Ý Ý Ý ÝThis revolution will put an end, once and for all, to the war system that is the greatest scourge facing humankind-óand will regulate globalization to ensure labor rights and environmental protection everywhere in the world. Ý Ý Ý ÝIn this movement, "world peace" is not a vague and utopian goal-óbut a practical, enduring peace with justice. The goal of "One Planet" will be achieved through global laws created by a world legislature and enforced by a peopleís world government. In this future world democracy, the executive branch will be strictly limited by a separation of powers, and by world courts, a world constitution, and a global bill of rights.
http://www.originpress.com/oneplanet/
Some within the Urantia Brotherhood have presented their own research into infiltrations by covert agents and mind control ops. The following site offers very detailed info from such a perspective:
http://www.urantiagate.com/conspiracy.html
A timeline of Urantia history:
http://urantiagate.com/conspiracy/long-timeline.html
The following article shows that there are some Urantia followers who have their own doubts about Belitsos:
Because Byron is a channeler, and because I have come to the realization that most if not all of the channelers who associate themselves with the Urantia movement and who orbit around it are not full believers in the Urantia revelation, I have asked him on several occasions about his belief in the book. I have asked him if he believes the entire book, and if not, which parts doesnít he believe? He has refused to answer. And Iíve found that to be the case with partial believers in the Urantia Revelation, especially with the channelers, they donít want to answer the question of ìHow much of the Urantia Book do you believe, and if you donít believe it all, which parts donít you believe?î Why do channelers and other partial believers in the Urantia revelation like Saskia Raevouri dislike so much having their partial belief exposed? But isnít it fair that we all know where we stand and that believers should be able to know who out there are quietly letting it be assumed that theyíre believers in the Revelation when theyíre not? Again, whatís wrong with that? http://www.freeurantia.org/Belitsos.htm
While the allegations from Urantia followers concerning infiltration and corruption of their movement are noteworthy, there is also abundant reason to be concerned with the original roots of the Brotherhood and the Urantia Book itself, most importantly given the intimate connections of Urantia's founder William Sadler to the wealthy and notorious Kellogg Family. The Skull and Bones connections of the Kellogg family are very significant, because the modern history of elite mind control and manipulation of cults as a political tool is deeply intertwined with S & B.
"Fifteen juniors are tapped each year. Around 2,500 Yale graduates have been members, mostly white males from wealthy Northeastern families: Bush, Bundy, Cheney, Dodge, Ford, Goodyear, Harriman, Heinz, Kellogg, Phelps, Pillsbury, Rockefeller, Taft, Vanderbilt, Weyerhaeuser and Whitney are some of the names on its roster."
http://www.fleshingoutskullandbones.com/
Biographical references on William Sadler, detailing his links to the Kellogg family. Note also his connection to the founding of the FBI:
DR. WILLIAM S. SADLER By Meredith J. Sprunger
It was my good fortune to know Dr. William S. Sadler as a personal friend and colleague for more than a decade in the early days of the dissemination of the teachings of The Urantia Book and I was honored to serve as the officiating minister at his Memorial Service. Although Dr. Sadler was an extraordinary person with great talents and diverse experience in serving humankind, he was also a warm and loving person with a great sense of humor. Dr. Sadler's experience throughout life was in many way unique preparing him to serve as a pioneer in the fields of medicine, psychiatry, and religion. As a boy he was not allowed to attend public school, after the death of his sister, because his parents were afraid he too might catch a communicable disease. Thus, he received most of his formal education from his parents, tutors, and through his own initiative.
While living in Wabash, Indiana, he spent much time listening to a relative, General McNaught, one time chief of scouts to General U. S. Grant, tell stories about the Civil War. Further exposure to history came from the library of General Lew Wallace, a close neighbor, who at the time was writing Ben Hur. Very early Sadler exhibited public speaking abilities. His first formal speech was given at the age of eight when he addressed a high school commencement in Indianapolis on "The Crucial Battles of History." At fourteen he left home and moved to Battle Creek, Michigan where he started working at the renowned Battle Creek Sanitarium headed by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Here, before and after work, he attended Battle Creek College and organized a group of students to study rhetoric and Latin. During a visit to Fort Wayne, Indiana the minister of a Christian Church discovered his remarkable knowledge of the Bible and speaking ability and asked him to supply his pulpit during a two week vacation. His preaching was so effective he received many letters of commendation and the local news paper, referring to his unusual abilities, called him "the boy preacher." When Dr. Kellogg's brother, William K. Kellogg, began manufacturing health foods Sadler was employed as a salesman to grocery stores. He was so successful the factory had trouble keeping up with his orders.
In 1895 Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, founder of the Chicago Medical Mission, sent Sadler to Chicago as director of the Medical Mission. Here Sadler was engaged in teaching, speaking, and working with "skid row" people. He initiated and edited a magazine which reached a circulation of 150,000 copies and managed a large financial budget. While carrying this heavy work schedule, Sadler also took training at the Moody Bible Institute and graduated with the highest grades in the history of the school.
Young Sadler sought training in speech at the University of Chicago and a lady professor after hearing his first speech said, "Get out of here. I can't teach you anything. You're very bad; your gestures are atrocious. But you are so effective I wouldn't change anything about you. I'll ruin you if I change you." Many years later when Dr. Sadler delivered a commencement address at the University of Chicago, she came up afterwards and said, "You're just as bad as ever, but so damn effective. You can just hold an audience spellbound; I'm so glad that we didn't change you."
Following his marriage to Leona Kellogg and the death of their first child, both Sadlers enrolled in the Cooper Medical College at San Francisco. While in medical school Sadler was asked to teach Exegetical Theology at the Seventh Day Adventist Seminary in San Francisco. In order to teach, he was required to be ordained in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Later Sadler financed their medical training in special detective work. Because of his daring and successful exploits as an investigator, he was offered the top executive position in the government agency which became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
After graduation from medical school the Sadlers began their medical practice together. Over the years many people and organizations sought Dr. Sadler's organizational ability. He became a leading figure in the popularization of preventive medicine in the country. In 1911 he gave up surgery to enter into psychiatry and went to Europe to study under Freud. Dr. Sadler served as a professor in the Post Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Chicago and taught a course in Pastoral Counseling at McCormick Theological Seminary for twenty- five years. He was a popular lecturer at Lyceum and Chautauqua meetings and authored forty-two books and many magazine and journal articles.
Although Dr. Sadler had an outstanding career as a physician, teacher, speaker, and writer, he considered his most important contribution to our world was his leadership of a little known group called "The Forum" which received the Urantia Papers and published The Urantia Book
12/18/89
http://www.truthbook.com/firstpage.cfm?linkID=120
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Excerpted from Godtalk by Brad Gooch Copyright 2002 by Brad Gooch. "He's Only a Thought Away": Sleuthing The Urantia Book
On a snowy Tuesday evening in January 1997, I waited in a sitting room on the second floor of a 1908 residence on Chicago's North Side for the Urantia study group to begin. This four-story home, now the headquarters of the Urantia Foundation, had been lived in for more than a half century by Dr. William Sadler, a respected surgeon and psychiatrist born in 1875. Taking a critical approach as a young man, the doctor had debunked psychics, spiritualists, and channelers as frauds in his popular early books, The Truth about Spiritualism (1923) and The Mind at Mischief (1929). Yet he lives on in thousands of minds as the man responsible for the 2,097-page Urantia Book, which was said to have been transmitted during the early part of the twentieth century by celestial beings through a "contact personality," a reluctant Chicago businessman who to this day remains anonymous.
I had come across The Urantia Book in 1995, in the New Age capital of Sedona, Arizona, which was the perfect setting for scripture delivered in a Twilight Zone manner to have found a readership. My two guides on a tour of Sedona's supposed seven "vortices" ó places in the earth believed by many to emit special electromagnetic properties ó revealed themselves along the way to be readers of The Urantia Book. Intrigued by the oddly titled book, I certainly never expected to follow a string of clues that would lead back to the bourgeois home of a respectable- seeming doctor in the middle of that most American of middle-American cities, Chicago. Nor had I expected to discover that cults, or cult- like groups, are a solid part of our American turn-of-the century tradition. Even more surprising was that their adherents were bankers, doctors, and professors, and their wives, who discussed these writings during Sunday picnics at the home of one of their wealthier members in the upper-middle-class suburb of Oak Park, or at Sadler's summer lodge, in Beverly Shores, Indiana.
This wacky-sounding project was pointedly neglected in the April 28, 1969, full-column obituary of the ninety-three-year-old Sadler printed in The Chicago Tribune. The obituary's subheadline read, "He Predicted Organ Transplants in 1917," referring to a lecture he'd once given foreseeing a time "not far distant when wealthy people will take mortgages on internal organs of healthy persons and have the organs transplanted into their bodies at the death of the mortgagor." Sadler's other professional credits were duly listed: author of forty-two books on mental hygiene and health; successful medical doctor and public speaker; faculty member at McCormick Theological Seminary; fellow of the American College of Surgeons; attending psychiatrist at Columbus Hospital. Yet there was no mention of The Urantia Book. A separate one- paragraph listing of a memorial service at the Bentley and Son Funeral Home, on North Clark Street, did suggest "a donation to Urantia Foundation" in lieu of flowers.
The contradiction at the heart of Sadler's life story remains glaring. He matured as a doctor at a time when science was optimistically valued as having won the debate between faith and reason. His sizable medical practice gave him much respectability, as did his success in public speaking and lecturing around the country on what was known as "the Chautauqua circuit". The circuit was a popular summer education program of concerts and high-profile public lectures begun on Lake Chautauqua in southwest New York State in the late nineteenth century; it grew by the early twentieth century into a national network that had the effect, in pre-TV days, of a cross between public television and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Sadler's self-help book, The Elements of Pep: A Talk on Health and Efficiency (1925), as well as short books on such easily digestible topics as sex, teenage dating, and hygiene, sold extremely well. They were balanced by the publication of respected medical textbooks, including the 1200-page Theory and Practice of Psychology (1936). He was bespectacled, Republican, and patriarchal in appearance, and surrounded by an extended family and many friends who looked up to him as a leader and a breadwinner. Sadler's interests in spiritualism were properly skeptical for the time, and his reputation as one of the few psychiatrists sympathetic with churchgoing folk made him the only practitioner many ministers felt comfortable recommending to troubled members of their midwestern congregations. He was a futurist and a dabbler. Yet his was a public face that is certainly difficult ó then and now ó to reconcile with the sorts of interplanetary, crypto-scientific, and post-Thomistic theological claims mulled over at length in the singular Urantia Book.
Since Sadler himself concealed much activity?either duplicitous or divine, depending on interpretation?it seemed fitting that his Frommann & Jebsen?designed residence at 533 Diversey Parkway was likewise not as bourgeois as might at first appear. Described in the AIA Guide to Chicago as "this grand flat, the star of this graceless southside stretch of Diversey Parkway," the building's official-looking stone exterior is delightfully fronted by a balcony protected with a metal railing and lavish ornaments that recall the more flamboyant Art Nouveau and Jugendstil styles of their time. Its pixilated architectural details are unusual on an urban stretch now filled with tanning parlors, supermarkets, and a Starbucks coffee shop. "Doctor," as he was affectionately known, moved into this home in 1912 with his wife, Dr. Lena Kellogg Sadler, setting in motion all sorts of nocturnal and weekend activities to match the pace of his daily routine. He slipped an enticing hint as to what these extracurricular activities consisted of into the appendix to his Mind at Mischief, a best-seller published by Funk and Wagnalls in which he treated most matters credited to the supernatural as actually influenced by subconscious drives. Sadler confessed there that he'd been introduced to an individual in the summer of 1911 who was an apparent exception to his thesis, and that he had been present at two-hundred-fifty night sessions recorded by a stenographer: "This man is utterly unconscious, wholly oblivious to what takes place, and, unless told about it subsequently, never knows that he has been used as a sort of clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extra-planetary personalities." The doctor reassured his readers that the message being received was "essentially Christian and is, on the whole, entirely harmonious with the known scientific facts and truths of this age."
On my first visit to the house, I felt as if I'd been dropped onto a Parker Brothers Clue game board, with its musty library and wistful drawing room, a stack of hidden motives, and, most definitely, an atmosphere of unsolved mystery. In this eccentric building, Sadler allegedly had investigated the transcriptions of his contact personality ó reputed by some to be a member of the Chicago Board of Trade, by others to be Sadler's own brother-in-law and office manager, Wilfred Kellogg. After about twenty years of serving as a human radio, the contact's broadcasts evolved into the 196 finished papers that often arrived handwritten by his bedside ó with no witnesses present during the procedure.
Starting in 1923, a middlebrow salon of about thirty doctors, professors, and interested friends, known as "the Forum," formed around Sadler to hear these messages. They had convened for decades in the carpeted sitting room where I was waiting on that snowy evening for our meeting to begin. Sitting at a seminar-style table with a half-dozen veteran Urantia Book readers, I glanced occasionally through the room's tall windows toward a residential cross street lined with a few remaining gray stone buildings, elegant two-flat houses, and the bare sticks of trees.
The last person with a strong memory of Sadler and the early history of the Forum, Helen Carlson, had just died a week earlier, at the age of ninety-two. The sister-in-law of Sadler's son, William Sadler Jr., Ms. Carlson moved into the third floor of the building in 1935 and stayed on doing clerical work until her death. In a deposition taken in this room in 1994 - as part of a defense against a suit claiming that the Urantia Foundation had no right to copyright materials authored by extraterrestrials - Carlson broke down as she told how her sister had invited her to join the Forum in September 1935 to learn about the papers: "Being a sister, she wanted me to know about them. I'm sorry . . . too many memories." These accumulated papers on various topics were eventually collected in what became known as The Urantia Book.
Carlson recalled how they would set up fifty folding chairs for an audience to listen to Dr. Sadler or his son read from the papers typed on yellow sheets. The Forum members would then serve as a focus group, submitting questions to the celestials for further clarification (this transfer of information between the earthlings and the extraterrestrials was never entirely explained) by dropping them into either a fishbowl or a basket resting on a chest of drawers in the center of the room.
End of excerpt from Godtalk by Brad Gooch
Plagiarism in Urantia Book:
http://www.google.com/search?q=urantia+plagiarism
The Kellogg family played a notorious role in the promotion of eugenics, including founding the Race Betterment Foundation:
http://www.google.com/search?q=kellogg+eugenics
William Sadler wrote numerous books on the topic of "mental hygiene". The concept of "mental hygiene" was a spinoff of the eugenics movement; the Mental Hygiene Society which originated at Yale in 1908 (Yale was also the home of the American Eugenics Society), and which later was directed by Prescott Bush, eventually evolved into a core component of the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind-control project.
Some possibly interesting connections of two of the institutions in Belitsos' educational background:
The California Institute of Integral Studies, where Belitsos did some of his graduate studies, recieved major funding from the late Laurance Rockefeller. http://www.well.com/user/davidu/aaas-ciis.html
CIIS also has some close ties with Esalen, whose founder Michael Murphy has helped to fund CIIS.
The Naropa Institute has recently been the recipient of a land grant at the Baca Estate, a new age mecca in Colorado owned by Canadian oilman and Rockefeller ally Maurice Strong (who originally acquired the land from Adnan Khashoggi, incidentally).
http://www.manitou.org/MF/history.html
http://iresist.com/cbg/strong.html
