The Conspiracy Hypothesis*

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*Hypothesis: Something that is taken to be true for purposes of argument or investigation.

THE
VERN GRIMSLEY AFFAIR

The possibility of a U.S. intelligence/security community conspiracy being responsible for voices heard by Urantia movement leader, Vern Grimsley, in 1982-83

Related Links: | Conspiracy Overview | In-Depth Timeline | Short Timeline | ACIM: Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas!|

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PHASE I
(Phase II >)

“VOICES”

“I Spy” and the Radio Guy

In 1969 future trustee of the URANTIA Foundation, Neal Waldrop, was employed and trained by America’s communications snoop, the National Security Agency (NSA). Author, James Bamford in his book The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency said, “Despite its size and power … no law has ever been enacted prohibiting the NSA from engaging in any activity.” The following year, in a move typically used by fledgling spies* to learn how to live their military covers, Waldrop took a commission in the U.S. Navy. During the next four years he served at various duty stations with the word “communications” in their names. Halfway through his tour of duty, Waldrop became a URANTIA Book reader, and in 1974, while serving in Washington, D.C. he joined a URANTIA Book study group.

[*NOTE₁: Philip Agee describes his experience in becoming a CIA officer with a military cover: After being inducted into the agency, he was hired as a civilian by an “Air Force cover unit”. A few weeks later he enlisted “in the Air Force”. “While in the Air Force,” he wrote, “ I will be treated like any other enlistee … Keeping the secret will be a part of my training--learning to live my cover.” (Inside the Company: CIA Diary, by Philip Agee)]

[NOTE₂: It appears that the CIA’s mind-control program, MKULTRA, had a relatively early interest in the Urantia movement, but when it was exposed in the press and Senate Hearings the program was likely surrendered to the NSA (for more detail click the Related-Timeline link near the top of the page). NSA might have had the more compelling need to analyze and control the “alien communications” represented by the Urantia Papers (published as The URANTIA Book) and various other, related secret “mandates” and “instructions” received by early members. This idea is not completely off-the-wall because NSA has evinced a separate interest in UFOs and has apparently performed a strikingly similar and parallel infiltration of a national UFO group by an individual with a military/NSA background very much like Waldrop’s:

“My own interest in the whole phenomenon of UFOs dates back to the late 1940s, when I began collecting and studying everything I could about the subject before joining the Air Force in January of 1952. Since I had an amateur radio license and obtained high scores in radio/electronics, the Air Force chose to send me to a special school involving electronic espionage, after which I was assigned to the United States Air Force Security Service under the auspices of the National Security Agency. My involvement brought me in contact with information that indicated that the military took UFOs very seriously indeed.

“I was honorably discharged as an Airman First Class in December of 1955. In 1960 my continuing interest in UFOs prompted me to become an associate member of the National Investigations Committee on Arial Phenomena (NICAP). In 1963 I began conducting personal on-sight inquiries into local UFO sightings, submitting written reports of my investigations to NICAP and to the U.S. Air Force on an unsolicited basis. Later, I became an official NICAP investigator, and in November of 1964, became chairman of this group.” (The Andreasson Affair, by Raymond E. Fowler)

The role, if any, that the CIA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), to which MKULTRA reportedly transferred most of its research programs in the early 1960s, played in all this is problematical.]

When Waldrop was first cracking the cover of a URANTIA Book Vern Grimsley, the “best known and most charismatic individual in the URANTIA movement,” who was “constantly praised and honored,” and had an “almost single-minded drive to spiritualize the planet,” had already been broadcasting the teachings of The URANTIA Book for ten years. The following year (1975) a listener confirmed what Vern had been waiting for, that he was being heard now in all fifty states -- his program tapes were also being aired on more than eight hundred Armed Forces Radio Network outlets. The AFRN, like Radio Free Europe (RFE), which did a documentary on Vern in 1971, is known to be closely associated with the U.S. intelligence community. A then-current F.O.G. (Grimsley’s Family of God Foundation) member named Harry McMullan had made the initial contact between F.O.G. and RFE. McMullan would abandon Grimsley and later “violate” the URANTIA Foundation’s copyright by publishing a book containing only the Jesus Papers (Part IV), and not all of that. McMullan appears to confuse the restatement of the life and teachings of Jesus in The URANTIA Book with the coming New Revelation of Jesus, which rather than being read about is to be lived (see, urantiagate.com).

In 1975 Neal Waldrop resigned his commission in the Navy and was sworn in as a Foreign Service Officer of the U.S. Department of State -- another notorious cover for U.S. intelligence community spies! In 1977 Waldrop began co-hosting a local readers’ study group.

“Special Persons?”

That was the same year in which the last surviving Contact Commission member (the group to whom the original Urantia papers were given), Emma “Christy” Christensen, who was widely acknowledged throughout the movement’s inner circle as still being in contact with the supernal authors of the papers, told the URANTIA Brotherhood’s President, John Hales, that Vern Grimsley was a member of the Reserve Corps of Destiny. She informed Vern of this as well. Such “Reservists” have a “special capacity for being secretly rehearsed for numerous possible emergency missions” by supernal planetary overseers. Usually they are unaware of their unique status which, by the way, is quite high in the eyes of most URANTIA Book readers.

The next year Neal Waldrop climbed another rung on the ladder to the Foundation’s Chicago headquarters by organizing the first Mid-Atlantic Conference of URANTIA Book Readers, balancing this with full time Mandarin Chinese language studies at the Foreign Service Institute in Rosslyn, Virginia. He would in 1979 organize the second Conference while attending more full time Mandarin studies in Taiwan; and the third Conference the following year while at the same time being stationed in Hong Kong observing the military and political activities of -- and possibly the price of eggs in -- mainland China. Of course we only have his word on that, and probably that of the State Department which has been less than truthful in the past where intelligence activities are concerned. Waldrop remained stationed in Hong Kong for three years.

While Waldrop was shuttling back and forth between Northern Virginia and Hong Kong (presumably), things seemed to be falling apart at the 533 Diversey Parkway headquarters of the Foundation. One Trustee, Martin Myers -- a college fraternity brother of Vern Grimsley -- according to some staffers and other Trustees, increasingly began to dominate Foundation affairs. Then in 1980 Christy received a presumably audible message from the Book’s supernal authors, supporting one of Myers’ policies which was in dispute. However, by the next year she was complaining to Thomas Kendall, the Foundation’s President, that she couldn’t get along with Myers and begged Kendall to intercede. Meanwhile, Clyde Bedell, past Forum member (the group which studied the original manuscript) and compiler of the Concordex to the URANTIA Book, published a call to action in response to what he saw as the Foundation’s repressive policies.

A New Era

A year later Christy died. There were no more living Contact Commissioners, no one left who had experienced that very special relationship with the supernal Revelators. And an empty niche will soon be filled. Most of the inner circle along with those other readers who knew him were already betting on Vern Grimsley.

Only two months after Christy’s death the URANTIA Brotherhood was perusing “a detailed Project Outline for a Chinese Translation of The URANTIA Book, together with a draft Chinese Translation of the Foreword and Paper 1,” submitted to it by Neal Waldrop. It was his ticket to join the game of “musical chairs”, the already traditional entertainment of the “official” organizational inner circle (many being first and second-generation Forum members) by which they occupied the positions of leadership in the URANTIA Foundation and Brotherhood. The game was now sure to start again in earnest. Most of those who knew him were betting on Vern to take Christy’s place as the nominal leader of the Urantia movement.

[NOTE: At this time the general readership was virtually shut out from any meaningful communications concerning significant organizational events. This was doubly true concerning the Foundation.]

Six months after Christy’s death, Vern Grimsley, as if picking up and putting on the spiritual mantle inherited from Christy, “awoke one morning with a strong feeling that he must buy a new property for F.O.G.. He developed a picture in his mind of what it should entail and encompass.” And one month later, while viewing the vacated St. Anthony’s College campus, which was being shown to him by a Realtor, Vern heard an audible “voice” from no apparent source telling him, “This is it!”

So Vern arranged to borrow $4 million to pay for his new Clayton Institute, situated four miles from a U.S. Navel Station and partially surrounded by various military bases at distances from fifteen to twenty eight miles. That was at the close of 1982.

Early in 1983 the “voices” which had by then identified themselves as being members of our planet’s seraphic government, which oversees the Reserve Corps of Destiny, told Vern that Christy’s having named him as a “Reservist” was right, along with informing him of the correctness of Martin Myers’ policies. They told Vern that he should safeguard his “leaders”, whom they would not name (saying that he knew whom they were), but around then Myers replaced Kendall in a move so sudden and seemingly unfair that Kendall has never been satisfied with the reasons offered for his removal from the President’s chair and the Board of Trustees. (Musical chairs could get a little rough in Chicago!)

“Armageddon!” The Urantia Movement Blows up!

On October 6, 1983, Vern’s “unseen friends” told him to prepare to survive a massive nuclear strike on American soil (“World War III”). They then began to develop survival strategies, advising that if necessary attackers storming F.O.G. fallout shelters could be shot -- even if they were fellow URANTIA Book readers, the people most likely to seek shelter with Vern! Accordingly, Vern surrounded the compound with chain link fence and F.O.G. began stockpiling arms. U.S. Marine Corps General (ret.) Duane Faw, then a F.O.G. member, virtually became their military- defense advisor. He later tried to soften the criticism against this by claiming that he had not realized that FOG would have such an all-out response to his combat technique consultations.

The General also would later direct the URANTIA Brotherhood’s (now named “Urantia Book Fellowship”) legal strategies. His letter to the Foundation throws gasoline on the hotspot smoldering between the two organizations during the aftermath of the Vern Grimsley Affair. And he became the highest placed Urantia movement official to support Teaching Mission (TeaM) channeling and “stillness practice”, neither of which activities is to be found in The URANTIA Book and both of which appear actually to be contra-indicated in its pages.

Aside from the completely bizarre picture offered by a combat-tested Marine Corps general spouting the benefits to be had channeling spirits, Faw -- during his military career -- which included law (Judge Advocate General Corps or “JAG”) as well as combat, admits to some suspicious-sounding brushes with the CIA, peripherally being involved in one of its operations, and possibly two -- the latter being the Bay of Pigs. In the former he was actually slated to seize, hold, and presumably under White House or intelligence agency direction to operate the Dominican Republic government following the CIA/military invasion of the island nation in 1965. However, as it turned out the situation did not require his intervention. A similar twist of fate four earlier assured that he and his seagoing assault force did not set foot on Cuban soil, either.

It might be noted that General Faw, like Waldrop, sweetened the pot of his acceptance in the movement with a “literary” work which he claimed to have personally authored. Waldrop’s partial Chinese translation is neatly balanced by Faw’s Paramony, a compendium, comparing Bible verse numbers with page numbers for concordant statements in The URANTIA Book. A book like the Paramony, of course, could have been churned out by NSA’s powerful computers in no time flat! It doesn’t even reproduce any of the text. Waldrop’s translation could have been completed by the State Department almost as easily and quickly -- of course the NSA relies heavily on its own trained linguists.

It was at the point of his WWIII announcement that the Urantia movement’s inner circle deserted Vern and turned against him. Then Neal Waldrop’s white paper, dated November 11, 1983, and detailing Waldrop’s reasons why he believed it was impossible that we could then be living “In The Shadow of Nuclear Annihilation”, fell in through the Brotherhood mail chute at 533 Diversey Parkway. Like one of the first snowflakes in a blizzard, or the heaviest chunk of sky-tossed radioactive fallout (or perhaps like an exchange of a coach ticket for the possibility of standby status in the first class section), Waldrop’s white paper, while carefully making no direct references to either Grimsley or his “voices”, was in the vanguard of what one reader called “a well-neigh general rejection of the ‘messages’ and an overwhelming flow of criticisms” from which Vern would never recover. He presently languishes unheard from in virtual obscurity on the far outskirts of the Urantia movement. I have not even been able so far to obtain his email address to interview him.

And as if to rub salt in his wounds, exactly one week after Waldrop drafted his white paper’s cover letter, Vern’s “unseen friends” (but, of course, with friends like that who needs enemies?) told Vern, “We won!”-- their very last message to him so far as anyone knows for sure. Vern nowadays is apparently keeping closed-mouth about this. But in any event, it was the last such message which he passed on to movement leaders.

Who exactly won? It certainly wasn’t Vern when you consider his present degraded, back-burner at best, position in the Urantia movement. And he appears to be anything but a winner if you read the inch-thick, single spaced, typewritten “Vern Grimsley Message Evaluation” written by Hoite C. Caston, Vern’s former fraternity brother and up-to-then-friend. Caston privately distributed his report -- which the then-future Brotherhood President, David Elders, called a “hatchet job” -- among the inner circle some six months afterwards. He would eventually mail it to the Foundation’s entire mailing list at the time when the Foundation needed it as ammunition against the Brotherhood.

None of this is to say that Caston’s work is unfactual. Most of the present information about the Vern Grimsley Affair herein is based upon it. If it is flawed it is by Caston’s biased analysis, his motives, and what he failed to see. His assemblage of facts and detail pretty much has stood the test of time.

Up to the date of that mailing (c.1990), the entire Vern Grimsley Affair was hidden away and covered up by the Foundation and Brotherhood in the hopes that none of it would ever spill out to the readership or the general public, neither of whom was to be troubled with the truth. Vern’s “voices” and Caston’s report combined to see to it that the Radio Guy was completely out of the running for any kind of significant leadership position in the Urantia movement, official or unofficial. And by the time that the FOG dissipated, Vern was no longer even the Radio Guy -- just a guy, his radio career had vanished, too. However “I Spy” was waiting in the wings for his own cue to come on-stage. It would come in 1989 when he was voted to become a trustee of the URANTIA Foundation.

One of the only genuine winners from the Vern Grimsley Affair was Neal Waldrop, who by opposing it gained a certain amount of prestige with the Foundation, which certainly helped him become a trustee. Professionally, Waldrop is a political analyst. This leads one to suspect that at least part of his job after becoming an insider in the URANTIA Foundation would have been to discover and analyze the semi-secret communications from the supernal Revelatory Commission (the “aliens”) to their human “contacts”. As far as I have been able to tell he kept his hands clean from the dirty work of dividing the movement and marginalizing it. But facts concerning the inner operation of the URANTIA Foundation are hard to come by -- even today (one cannat help but wonder exactly what it is that they have to hide! I suspect it is their practices and policies which do not accord with The URANTIA Book’s teachings). Martin Myers also became a winner when he picked up the anti-Vern ball and carried it all the way to the goal of full-time directorship of the Foundation. And as we shall see, evidence exists suggesting that Martin, as well as Vern, was responding to the voices of his own “unseen friends”.

And, of course, whoever this set of “unseen friends” was, who provided the “voices” which were manipulating leaders and events in accordance with their own sub-rosa agenda, they were “winners” as well!

[NOTE: There have been so far three distinct known sets of “unseen friends” in the Urantia movement:

• The first delivered the Urantia Papers to the Contact Commission. These only did anything like “channeling” before the proto-Urantia Papers began physically materializing. During these sessions the contact personality was asleep and unaware. Sadler and others were able to speak more or less directly with the supernals, who answered with his voice.

• The second communicated with Vern and perhaps others during the 1980s. Vern was fully awake and aware during these sessions. He heard these voices as seeming to originate above him and to the right.

• The third set are the “purported celestials” of TeaM, who operate as its invisible priests and leaders, interpreting The URANTIA Book teachings and defining the direction of that fringe area of the movement. Usually these “voices” are not clearly heard intracranially but are sensed in the mind as being just below the audial threshhold (subjectively described, Helen Schucman’s ACIM experience -- see Phase II -- appears identical). It takes a certain amount of practice to learn to channel the input according to Teaching Mission “transmitter/receivers” (“channelers”). The purported celestials have been known to make clear “contact” with them, however.

The first showed up decades before the U.S. even had an intelligence agency. Only in time for the second was the technology for creating “synthetic telepathy” suspected to have been secretly developed by the CIA. Finally, a Russian version, “acoustic psycho-correction”, is known to exist possibly simultaneously with the second set and definitely with the third. This last was deployed by USSR during their invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989) -- when the U.S. trained and supported terrorist Osama bin Laden. The possibility of such technology having fallen into Osama’s hands should not be discounted. It could help account for the suicidal fanaticism of the 9/11 terrorists. That the CIA would have gotten it as well, is equally likely. Public knowledge of acoustic psycho- correction technology surfaced in 1994 following the government attack on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas. But it has hardly received a mention since then.]

The failure of WWIII to take place as predicted and the apparent silence of the “voices” is the place where most Urantia movement commentaries usually end the “Vern Grimsley Affair”, but it is only the end of Phase I. The first phase was a huge stone dropped into a pond, but the concentric circle waves of agitation and consequences were just beginning to radiate outwards.

CONTINUED
PHASE II: “The Aftermath” :
Life In the Post-Nuclear Holocaust URANTIA Movement
(Or How the URANTIA Movement Learned to Love and Live with Acoustic Psycho-Correction)

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