She Died for the Cause
By the late 1950s, popular enthusiasm for Adamski-like tales of face-to-face contact had waned. Television and tabloid journalism had given contactees a condescending and superficial raking, and mainstream America was nearly done with the idea. Hard-core UFOlogists and buffs continued to be captivated by contactee stories, but growing interest in incidents involving long-distance alien- to-human-communication encouraged psychics and channelers (inspired, no doubt, by George Van Tassel) to share their own ET experiences.
Around 1958, LAX ground hostess and former flight attendant Gloria Lee revealed that she first saw UFOs in the early part of the decade, and was contacted in 1952, via automatic writing, by a Jovian named “J. W.” An attractive and self-possessed brunette in her thirties, Lee found she could tell her story successfully on the lecture circuit. She told rapt audiences that J. W. had lost his powers of speech, selecting her to act as his “voice,” and assemble the story of his life and philosophy. Lee channeled his messages, identifying J. W. as the “etheric space aspect” of an “ascended master” named Djwhal Khul.
Lee was a competent fund-raiser. In 1959, she established the Cosmon Research Foundation, and self-published a quasi-Theosophist book, Why We Are Here: By J. W., a Being from Jupiter Through the Instrumentation of Gloria Lee.
During a 1960 visit to the Mark-Age Meta Center, a Miami contactee group established in 1956 by Charles Boyd Gentzel, Lee discovered that J. W.—by now calling himself Jim Speed—had assumed human form. (Mark-Age dubbed Gloria “Glo-Ria.”) By now, J. W. was concerned about mankind’s dangerous play with nuclear weapons, and suggested that salvation lay in an exodus to the stars. J. W. sent Lee plans for a spaceship.
Accompanied by a friend named Hedy Hood, Lee dutifully trooped off to Washington, talking up the plans and showing a scale model as she looked for support and funding. Lee’s bad luck was all in the timing: this was 1962, when the space race was fed to Americans as a Life magazine PR exercise. Few people other than NASA engineers thought seriously about spaceships. Disappointed by the government’s disinterest, and self-exiled with Hood to a Washington hotel room, Lee commenced a fast that lasted sixty-six days. She died in the hotel on December 2.
Gloria Lee’s death disturbed some mainstream thinkers because Lee said that the fast had been suggested to her by J. W. Her passing had a minor galvanizing effect on the UFO-channeler community, and postmortem messages from Lee were channeled to followers via Mark-Age and a New Zealand channeling group, the Heralds of a New Age. The Heralds combined UFOs with Theosophy and spiritualism, and were one of numerous groups that helped shape what religious historian Robert S. Ellwood described as “part of the birth pangs of the New Age.” In that, Lee fashioned herself into a cultural figure of minor but lively importance.
But Lee wasn’t done. In a 1963 book, Gloria Lee Lives! My Experiences Since Leaving Earth, Lee addressed the faithful by sending her thoughts to a Mark- Age channeler (and temp-agency owner) named Pauline Sharp. New Zealand’s Heralds also produced a Lee book of their own in 1963, The Going and the Glory.