The Urantia Book

The Urantia Book's origin story begins in Chicago around 1911, when the physician William S. Sadler and his wife Lena, also a physician, began observing a neighbor who spoke in his sleep in a manner Sadler could not medically explain. By the 1920s the case had grown into extensive automatic writing, and Sadler organized a discussion group, formalized in 1925 as the Forum, whose members submitted written questions that the sleeping subject's writings appeared to answer. A small Contact Commission of five people, including the Sadlers, managed the resulting manuscript over roughly two more decades. The individual through whom the material reportedly came, sometimes called the Conduit or the sleeping subject, was never publicly identified during his lifetime, and Sadler, who had made a career of investigating and debunking paranormal claims, wrote in his own 1929 book The Mind at Mischief that this was a case he found himself unable to classify.

The Urantia Foundation, a nonprofit Sadler helped establish in Chicago in 1950, published the completed manuscript as The Urantia Book on October 12, 1955: 2,097 pages divided into four parts and 196 numbered papers, presented as having been transmitted by celestial beings rather than composed by any human author. The book covers cosmology, the history of the universe and of life on a planet it calls Urantia, and an extended account of the life of Jesus.

The Urantia Book's copyright status produced two federal appellate rulings that reached opposite conclusions in different lawsuits brought by the same plaintiff. In Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on June 10, 1997 that the Foundation's 1983 renewal of its copyright was valid, rejecting a defendant's argument that a work attributed to celestial authors could carry no copyright at all and holding the renewal would remain in force until 2030.

A second suit against a different defendant reached the opposite result. In Michael Foundation, Inc. v. Urantia Foundation, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held on March 11, 2003 that the 1983 renewal was in fact invalid. The court reasoned that the book was a unified work by a single human author, the unnamed sleeping subject through whom the material came, rather than a work the Foundation itself had commissioned or compiled from many separate contributors, so that renewal rights belonged only to that author's heirs after his death, and since they never renewed the copyright, no one else could have validly done so on their behalf. The ruling put the 1955 text into the public domain in the United States. The dispute reflects a genuine institutional split in the movement itself: The Urantia Book Fellowship separated from the Urantia Foundation, and by the early 2000s the Fellowship reported roughly 1,200 members concentrated in California, Colorado, Florida and Texas, alongside an International Urantia Association with reader groups on multiple continents, with no formal clergy or central church structure anywhere in the movement.