"Let my people know!"

Harry McMullan's religious struggle
with the ever imperious Urantia ("And by the way, it's not a religious book.") Foundation, circa April, 2001

The Thirty Years War
I began to receive angry telephone calls, both at work and at home, from people I don't know. I received several threats to my physical life and, more often, was informed that the survival of my soul was at risk if I did not fall into step with the revelators' plans as embodied in the policies of Urantia Foundation. The information about my diminishing prospects for eternal life came not only from various human beings, but also by means of mysterious letters without return addresses, which purported to be written by various celestial personalities who deemed it important to make their feelings about the matter known to me.

AFFIDAVIT OF HARRY MCMULLAN, III
Compelled by the evidence to accept that Dr. Sadler's patient had actually used his pen or pencil to write out the manuscript of The Urantia Book, the only way I could reason that the patient wasn't the author would be if he had been a "mere conduit" for spiritual entities; in other words, if he had been engaged in what is often described as "automatic writing." However, other materials gained in our discovery showed that this precise question had been asked of Dr. Sadler and Emma Christensen on several occasions, and their unvarying answer had been that the reception of the Urantia Papers had nothing whatever to do with automatic writing or any similar psychic phenomenon. If the papers didn't just "appear," and if the patient personally wrote out all of the Urantia Papers in his own handwriting, and if he didn't do so by automatic writing, then I could only conclude that the patient must be identified as the author.

JOINT BRIEF OF MICHAEL FOUNDATION, INC. AND HARRY MCMULLAN, III IN OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR PARTIAL SUMMARY JUDGMENT OF URANTIA FOUNDATION
Most fundamentally, many of UF's "facts" attempt to establish that the parties agree that the Work was authored by spiritual beings, that the spiritual beings mysteriously transmitted the text of the Work through the instrumentality of the patient in response to questions, and that the contact commission controlled all communications with the spiritual beings. Not a single piece of UF's evidence, however, begins to prove that spiritual beings authored the Work or that the contact commission communicated with spiritual beings. Such statements by UF constitute statements of faith, without any evidentiary value.

Harry McMullan's Letters to Urantia Foundation

In short, gentlemen, your chances of prevailing in a copyright challenge to the entire Urantia Book are very slim; and with respect to Part IV - at least against someone whom you can neither successfully intimidate nor financially exhaust - you will most certainly lose. Jesus - A New Revelation will remain on the market until such time as a court of competent jurisdiction finally rules that it must be removed, an event which we are confident will never occur.

 

The Complete Court Transcripts

"We the jury having answered interrogatory number 1 as no and interrogatory number 2 as no find Urantia Foundation's renewal copyright is invalid."