How I Found the Urantia Book - Square Circles Publishing

16 How I Found the Urantia Book
look at it to see what I thought, and left it on the living room coffee table for my
comments. At the time, Richard was working on his Master’s Degree in psychology
at Pepperdine University and I was doing graduate work in finance and
real estate at USC. I’d already had the misfortune of reading about fifty pages
of the very lengthy Cosmic Fire and thought Richard had gone off the deep end;
critiquing his spacy books was not exactly what I had in mind for my weekends.
None of the other titles caught my interest either, so the Urantia Book sat there
for a while.
In the ’50s my parents owned a duplex in Hancock Park, a neighborhood in
Los Angeles. My grandparents occupied the upstairs unit. It was customary for
my grandmother, whenever she was going to a luncheon, to come down to my
parents’ unit and wait in our living room for a friend to pick her up. One summer
day, Maria Culbertson, who had waited years for the Urantia Book to be
published and who possessed one of the first copies in Los Angeles, came over
to take my grandmother to lunch. Maria tells me that when her eyes fell upon
this big blue book resting on the coffee table, she almost had a coronary. She
thought she had the only copy in Los Angeles, and so seeing another book only
a block away gave her a real adrenalin boost. The idea crossed her mind that it
had somehow made The New York Times bestseller list without her knowing it,
thanks to the advertising genius of Clyde Bedell.
After gathering her senses, she learned from Grandmother that the twins and
their dad had recently found the book, not from a bestseller list but from the
shelf of an occult bookstore in Fontana, California. Afterwards, Maria called
back to encourage me to follow Richard and read the Urantia Book, and that I
did in the summer of 1958.
Since then I have read it eight times in its entirety. Over the years I have given
the book to many people, some notables being Werner Von Braun, Manly P.
Hall, Richard Nixon and my neighbors Will and Ariel Durant. I have had many
exhilarating moments and one memorable disappointment: I gave the book to
a seminary professor who swore it was demon-inspired. To him the doctrine of
Christianity centered on “the blood of Christ shed for our sins,” and he judged
me to be in strong need of repentance for having read such a powerful work of
the devil. I pray for him occasionally.
Together with my brother and dad I have placed numerous books in public
libraries and some half a hundred in naval ship libraries where many a sailor
has become a captive reader. I have often wondered where those big blue books
go when the ships are decommissioned and put in mothballs. It would be nice to
have a few of those first printings back.
ILA AND LOREN HALL: In 1957 my husband Loren and I were given
a pamphlet by a naturopathic doctor who was treating our little boy who had
contracted polio in 1949. The pamphlet advertised a UFO meeting near Mountain
View, Missouri. UFOs were something we didn’t know much about so we
decided to attend the three-day meeting scheduled for that June.
The next year we went again. At that meeting we listened to a talk given by
a man from Minnesota who mentioned the Urantia Book, which he’d brought
along. As we were loading up the car to start home, I said to Loren, “Wait for
me. I just want to look through the books.” I went back and on a shelf I saw this
big blue book—the Urantia Book.