extraordinary%20encounters

28 Ashtar
worldly entities, only Ashtar would make a
wider mark in the contactee subculture. Be f o re
long other channelers we re receiving material
f rom Ashtar as well as his associates, such as
Sananda (Jesus), Ko rton, Soltec, At h e n a ,
Monka, and others. So many Ashtar channelings
occurred that soon Ashtar was warning
some communicants that evil astral entities
we re impersonating him. He was also forced to
deny allegations that he was “some form of
giant mechanical brain” (Constable, 1958). In
the 1970s and beyond, as fundamental Christians
began writing books on UFOs, Ashtar
was re p resented as a servant of Sa t a n .
Though to nearly all who experienced him,
Ashtar existed only as a disembodied voice, a
very few claimed to have seen him. One
woman, Adele Darrah, even alleged that she
saw him before she had ever heard of an
Ashtar. One night in the early 1960s, after she
had gone to bed, Darrah found herself suddenly
awake and in her downstairs living
room, where a striking-looking stranger stood
in front of the fireplace. He was tall, slim, and
erect and was wearing a uniform with a high
collar. “His eyebrows were slim and delicate,
the nose was thin, the mouth was rather
straight, the lips thin,” she reported. “His eyes
were brilliant and penetrating, almondshaped
with a slight oriental appearance.”
When she introduced herself, he smiled and
indicated that he already knew her name.
Then he squared his shoulders and announced,
“I am Ashtar.” Everything that followed
faded from her memory, and only a few
years later, Darrah claimed, would she learn
that others knew such an entity.
Typically, however, contactees and channelers
report seeing Ashtar in psychic perception
or in out-of-body journeys to his starship.
Perhaps not surprisingly, descriptions
vary, some calling him dark, others fair, some
estimating his height at less than six feet, others
at more than seven.
In the 1980s and 1990s, more and more of
the messages from Ashtar and his associates
focused on the “Ascension,” the removal of
“Lightworkers”—those doing the Command’s
work on Earth, many if not all of them extraterrestrials
in earlier incarnations—from
Earth just prior to the Cleansing (the natural
and other catastrophes that will afflict Earth,
killing millions, before the space people land).
The failure of either the Ascension or the
Cleansing to take place discouraged many followers.
In a channeling in the 1990s, Ashtar
explained that, in fact, the Lightworkers had
effected huge changes, which, though now invisible,
will become apparent in due course.
In the meantime, according to Ashtar associate
Soltec, the human race will continue to be
educated subtly through dreams, popular culture,
and growing numbers of spacecraft
sightings. Unfortunately, “there will be many
ones who will confuse us with negative ET
encounters. Indeed, the greys will take advantage
of the opportunity to confuse the populace
and attempt to tarnish our image. Ones
must be made aware of the distinction between
the ships of Light and the ships of abduction”
(Soltec, n.d.).
In 2000, Brianna Wettlaufer of Van Tassel’s
organization, the Ministry of Universal Wisdom
(Van Tassel himself died in 1978), put
out a statement that sought to separate Ashtar
from the Ashtar Command. Van Tassel, it was
said, communicated only with Ashtar; the
Ashtar Command, on the other hand, was a
concept promulgated by another early contactee,
Robert Short. He and Van Tassel had
been friends but parted company when Short
decided to make Ashtar’s communications
“commercial and mainstream, in order for
personal notoriety, not for a truth to the public.”
Wettlaufer insisted that “Ashtar is not a
metaphysical philosopher or rambler” and
moreover, he cannot be reached via channeling
(though Van Tassel’s own method of communication
seemed indistinguishable from
channeling to most observers). The statement
goes on, “The Ashtar of Ashtar Command is a
real personality . . . a clone of the original
Ashtar, and is dangerous . . . a disobedient
angel” (Wettlaufer, 2000).
The name “Ashtar” may owe its inspiration
to a nineteenth-century work, Oahspe, the