The Origin Story

The story begins with the least likely custodian imaginable. William S. Sadler was a Chicago physician and psychiatrist, a professor, and the author of more than forty books. He studied for a year in Europe under Sigmund Freud. He paid his way through part of his career doing detective work, exposed graft in Chicago politics, and was offered an executive post in the agency that became the FBI.

More to the point, Sadler was a professional skeptic. Working with a Northwestern University psychologist and the magician Howard Thurston, he investigated psychics and exposed fraudulent mediums. His book The Truth About Spiritualism has been described as one of the strongest attacks ever written on the subject. When the strangest case of his life arrived at his door, it chose a man whose reputation was built on explaining such things away.

Sometime between 1906 and 1911, and the year is genuinely disputed in the historical record, a woman consulted Dr. Sadler about her husband, who spoke during a strange, deep sleep. The messages did not resemble ordinary sleep-talking. They came from what claimed to be distinct personalities, and the man remembered nothing on waking.

From about 1911 to 1923, roughly 250 night sessions took place. Only the small circle later called the Contact Commission ever witnessed them or knew the subject's identity, which has never been revealed or confirmed. After eighteen years of study, the debunker put his conclusion in print, in the appendix of his 1929 book The Mind at Mischief:

“Psychoanalysis, hypnotism, intensive comparison, fail to show that the written or spoken messages of this individual have origin in his own mind.”William S. Sadler, The Mind at Mischief, 1929

The skeptic Martin Gardner later theorized the subject was Wilfred Kellogg, Sadler's office manager. Those who actually knew Wilfred reportedly found the suggestion laughable, and no evidence has ever confirmed any candidate. The anonymity held for over a century and holds still.

On February 11, 1923, Dr. Lena Kellogg Sadler, a physician and surgeon in her own right, gathered about thirty friends and colleagues for Sunday afternoon discussions at the Sadlers' home at 533 Diversey Parkway. It was Lena, not William, who called the group together. At the fourth meeting, Sadler mentioned the sleeping subject case, and the group asked to hear samples.

That group became the Forum, formalized as a closed, pledged membership in September 1925. Its procedure shaped the book itself: read a paper on Sunday afternoon, return the following Sunday with questions, sort them, eliminate duplicates, and submit them. The answers came back as expanded and new papers. Over its nineteen years the Forum counted 486 members, and more than 300 of them asked the questions that drew out the text. The Forum met for the last time on May 31, 1942.

In early 1925 the phenomenon changed form. The verbal night sessions gave way to voluminous handwritten documents. Handwriting experts compared the pages against the sleeping subject's own hand and found no match. William Sadler Jr., who grew up inside the events, described what observers claimed:

“I think you would have seen a very exciting phenomenon, a pencil moving over paper with no visible means of propulsion.”William S. Sadler Jr., recorded study group remarks, circa 1958

By the accounts of those involved, papers appeared in the bedroom or in a nearby safe; after Christy Christensen typed and checked each one on her manual typewriter, the handwritten originals disappeared from the locked safe. Parts I and II of the text were complete by 1934, Parts III and IV, including the year-by-year life of Jesus, by 1935. One hundred ninety-six papers in all.

Five people carried the entire secret: managing the sessions, guarding the manuscript, and preparing for publication. All five had spent formative years among the Seventh-day Adventists and had watched that movement wrestle with its own prophetess, an experience historians argue shaped their determination that this revelation would never center on a personality.

The papers were finished twenty years before the public saw them. In April 1939, seventy volunteers began systematic training as The Seventy, with a standing emphasis the group never forgot: the acceptance of new truth should be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Nickel-coated printing plates were prepared by R.R. Donnelley at a cost of about $25,000, and their anonymous donation formed the legal basis of a trust. Urantia Foundation was established on January 11, 1950 to hold the text; on January 2, 1955, thirty-six Forum members signed the constitution of Urantia Brotherhood, the original fellowship of readers.

On October 12, 1955, R.R. Donnelley's Crawfordsville, Indiana plant delivered the first printing of The Urantia Book. Ten thousand copies. Marian Rowley, who lived through the day, remembered it simply:

“Believe me, it was the most thrilling thing! We were all very much impressed, some were crying and I was shaking like a leaf.”Marian Rowley, Urantia Brotherhood history, 1960