This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
William S. Sadler was an American physician, surgeon and psychiatrist who trained partly under his mentor John Harvey Kellogg at the Battle Creek Sanitarium and, starting in 1910, for a year under Sigmund Freud. Practicing in Chicago with his physician wife Lena Kellogg Sadler, he began investigating a neighbor exhibiting unusual sleep talk from around 1911, a case he approached with the clinical training his own medical career had given him rather than with any prior interest in religious phenomena.
By the 1920s the case had grown well beyond its origin in one neighbor's sleep talk into extensive automatic writing, material that a discussion group Sadler led, called the Forum, came to treat as communications from celestial beings. Sadler's own 1929 book The Mind at Mischief, written while the case was still active, recorded his professional judgment that he found it impossible to classify, a psychiatrist's own stated uncertainty preserved in print rather than a later reconstruction of his views.
The distance between a Chicago physician's clinical investigation of one patient's sleep talk in 1911 and a discussion group treating the resulting automatic writing as celestial communication by the 1920s marks the case's own transformation over roughly a decade, documented by the same man who began it as an ordinary medical inquiry and ended it unable to say what he had found.