extraordinary%20encounters

Sister Thedra
Sister Thedra was born Dorothy Martin, but
to most of the world she is remembered as
“Marian Keach,” the pseudonym given her in
the classic sociological book When Prophecy
Fails (1956). In 1954, through space people
who communicated with her through automatic
writing, she learned of an imminent
catastrophic, earth-changing event, to occur a
week before the end of the year. She and her
small band of followers in Illinois and Michigan
would be swooped up in a flying saucer
and rescued just before the cataclysm took
place. Martin and her followers sought to
publicize the prophecy, only to be ridiculed in
newspapers all over the country. After the failure
of the prophecy, Martin—soon renamed
“Sister Thedra” at the urging of her space contacts—moved
to the Southwest, then to Peru
for five years. Returning to the United States,
she established and headed a contactee-oriented
spiritual group in Mount Shasta, California.
Toward the end of her life, she relocated
to Sedona, Arizona, and died there in
1992.
Born in 1900 in West Virginia, Martin discovered
occultism in the late 1930s while living
in New York City. First attracted to
Theosophy, she explored the spectrum of esoteric
literature and became an early student of
Dianetics (from which Scientology grew). She
also read the works of Guy Warren Ballard,
creator of the I AM movement, arguably the
first religious group to make extraterrestrial
contacts a central tenet. Another book, Oah -
spe, recorded the 1881 channeling of John
Ballough Newbrough, depicting a richly populated
spiritual cosmos whose inhabitants include
guardian angels known as “ashars” who
sail the universe in etheric ships. When flying
saucers came on the scene and the contactee
movement followed in their wake, Martin followed
developments with interest.
In the meantime, Charles and Lillian Laughead
(pronounced Law-head) were doing the
same. Their own odyssey had begun in 1946,
when the couple were Protestant medical missionaries
in Egypt and Lillian started suffering
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seemingly untreatable nightmares and fears.
Seeking relief, the couple turned to occultism.
On their return to the United States in 1949,
Dr. Laughead took up a staff position at the
Michigan State College Hospital in East Lansing.
He and his wife continued their mystical
studies, incorporating flying saucers into their
newfound faith. In early 1953, on a trip to
southern California, Laughead met George
Adamski, whose claimed meeting with a
Venusian named Orthon in the California
desert was causing a worldwide sensation. Of
particular interest to Laughead were the footprints
the Venusian had left in the desert sand.
They contained enigmatic symbols whose
meaning Adamski’s followers were already discussing
and debating.
Laughead returned to Michigan with drawings
of the prints, which his wife devoted the
next five months to deciphering. She concluded
that the left print’s symbols depicted
the sinking of the lost continents Atlantis and
Lemuria, the right their reemergence from the
ocean floor following geological cataclysms
that soon would befall the planet.
Through an automatic-writing message
given him by an acquaintance, Dr. Laughead
heard from the “Elder Brother,” who later, according
to Laughead, “identified himself as
being Jesus the Christ and also Sananda.”
Laughead was to continue his work with
saucers, and soon Venusians would contact
him.
At this stage, the Laugheads had not heard
of Dorothy Martin. They did not know that
she also was in psychic contact with the Elder
Brother as well as with a group of beings she
called the Guardians. In April 1954, one of
the latter introduced himself as Sananda from
the planet Clarion. In a previous lifetime,
Sananda said, he was Jesus. Martin—or at
least her unconscious mind—got the name
Clarion from contactee Truman Bethurum,
but Bethurum’s Clarion was a planet on the
other side of the moon; Martin/Sananda’s
Clarion, on the other hand, existed in the
etheric realm. A companion planet, Cerus
(sometimes confusingly referred to also as a