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the same source]
The Urantia Book material quoted in Dr Sadler's essay, "The Evolution of the Soul," had been drawn from Papers 5, 110, and 111. Using Mosteller and Wallace methodology, in two tests, the "Mind at Mischief" sample was compared with these Papers and showed significant differences at the 0.01 and 0.001 level. Some suggestions have been made that Dr Sadler could have written Part 4 of The Urantia Book. To check this suggestion, a further two tests were made of the "Mind at Mischief" material against Papers 195 and 196 from Part 4 of the book with the result that both tests showed significant differences at the 0.001 probability level.
It is a fact that some of the same unusual words and expressions are to be found in both the writings of Dr Sadler and in the Urantia Papers.. This is hardly surprising since Sadler admitted to being continuously exposed to the content of the various Urantia Papers, or their precursors, since 1911, some 24 years before the final drafts of the Papers were completed. I have been reading these papers for about twenty years, have an appalling memory for poetry, literature, quotations, etc., yet still find that some of the book's 'peculiar' vocabulary has become my own. Many other readers have had the same experience.
The evidence accumulated to date shows that any proposal that nominates a human source for the Urantia Papers must take multiple authorship into account. If this proposal is true, it should still be possible to discover who might have collaborated with Dr Sadler and his associates. I once wrote to Martin Gardner suggesting this. If human authors were involved, an enormous amount of time and effort would have been required for the research to accumulate the scientific, historical, and archaeol-ogical data presented in the book. It would appear to have been impossible for members of the postulated authors' families, or associates of those authors, not to have been aware of their participation.
There is no good reason why such family members, or still living associates, should remain silent. In fact, any one with such knowledge is under a moral obligation to release what they know. To date no firm evidence has been forthcoming to show that the book is other than what it claims to be. The evidence accumulated from these investigations is also consistent with those claims.
Ken Glasziou, Australia
References.
Anthony Kenny (1982), "The Computation of Style." (Pergamon Press Ltd)
Mosteller, F. and D.L. Wallace (1984), "Applied Bayesian and Classical Inference. The Case of the Federalist Papers." (Springer Verlag, N.Y.)
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