Harold and Martha Sherman

In 1941 Harold and Martha Sherman were introduced to the Urantia revelation by Harry Loose, a former Forumite with mysterious connections to the phenomena, and they joined the Forum. To study the material more closely they moved to Chicago and lived across the street at 530 Diversey Parkway from May 1942 until May 1947. Their fifteen handwritten notebooks describing the Forum sessions and the teachings themselves survive as what may be the only firsthand record and have been published as The Urantia Diaries of Harold and Martha Sherman. For a description of the contents please click here. The original notebooks, totaling 1350 handwritten pages, can be viewed here on archive.org.

Harold Sherman considered Harry Loose his spiritual mentor and wrote extensively about him in several books, including You Live After Death (1949) and How to Make ESP Work for You (1964). The account of their meeting and relationship with regard to the Urantia phenomenon is told in his 1976 book, How to Know What to Believe (1976). Excerpts can be read here.

"The Sherman Rebellion"

At first the Shermans were warmly welcomed by the other Forum members, who admired Harold for his accomplishments as a writer and broadcaster. Dr. Sadler and the other contact commissioners quickly took the Shermans into their confidence, even sharing with them apocryphal messages the other Forumites were not privy to (much of which is included in a chapter in the Diaries). This brief honeymoon period ended when Harold began to question and then to criticize the Doctor’s publication and organizational plans. (Read Harold's two letters to Dr. Sadler here and here.) In presenting his ideas to the other Forumites, Harold gained the support of the majority to petition the Doctor to allow the Forum to have a greater hand in decision-making. Read the petition here.

The Doctor responded by calling in the signers of the petition, one by one, and pressuring them to remove their names, saying that he had received a message from the celestials declaring the Shermans “rebels.” He warned the signers that if they sided with the Shermans, or even associated with them, they would be classified likewise. In forcing the Forumites to choose between himself and the Shermans, most turned against the Shermans, who were never given the opportunity to remove their names.

Believing in the Urantia revelation and encouraged behind the scenes by Harry Loose, with whom they were still regularly corresponding, the Shermans stood their ground. Shunned by most of their peers, they remained in the Forum for five years, during which time they recorded what was said and done at every meeting they attended, per Loose’s instructions. This resulted in many hundreds of pages of eyewitness accounts that portray Forum life with unmatched vividness and immediacy.

In How to Know What to Believe, which Sherman wrote with the hindsight of a 78-year-old, he included a chapter on their experiences with the Urantia Forum, entitled "Pipeline to God." It is interesting to compare this version with the original diaries, written in real time as the events were unfolding. In 1976, to avoid lawsuits, Sherman disguised the names of those involved, some of whom were still living. We have reproduced the chapter here and substituted the real names (corroborated by Harold's own notes which can be seen here). The book drew outrage and criticism from the Urantia community, most of whom had only heard one side of the story. Movement leaders were quick to write rebuttals, and we have included one by Clyde Bedell and another by Meredith Sprunger.