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 organized the Urantia Foundation in 1950 to publish the manuscript that had grown out of the Forum discussion group's decades of work with automatic writing material, giving an informal circle's papers a formal publishing body five years before the resulting book appeared. The Urantia Book was published in 1955, the culmination of a process that had begun with one neighbor's sleep talk more than four decades earlier.
Sadler himself denied authorship of the material the Foundation published, a public position he held even as he was the physician who had investigated the original case, led the Forum that produced the writing, and organized the body that brought it into print. His denial sits alongside his own earlier statement in The Mind at Mischief that he found the case impossible to classify, two documented positions from the same man that leave the book's authorship an open question in his own words rather than a claim he made for himself.
That a trained psychiatrist organized the publishing foundation for a text whose authorship he personally disclaimed is among the more unusual facts of the Urantia Book's history, a founder's own refusal to take credit for the material his organization spent five years bringing from manuscript to print.