TRUMAN BETHURUM’S CALL TO CLARION
by Skylaire AlfvegrenContinued...
Bethurum became so busy with speaking engagements and television interviews (including many spots on NBC’s “Betty White Show”) he was forced to “abandon a lifetime career as a construction worker.” After one television appearance, Bethurum was visited at his home by an Air Force official who said he’d received over 200 reports from pilots who had seen the same type of craft Bethurum claimed to have boarded.
After being snubbed by Rhanes, and never getting to visit planet Clarion as she had promised, Bethurum married Alvira Roberts at a ceremony at Giant Rock in 1960.
Bethurum’s “unimaginative sincerity” impressed many with the idea that he had had experiences, even if he might’ve embellished them. Rhanes had told Bethurum that Clarion was located “behind the moon.” When pressed for an explanation as to why astronomers hadn’t located it, he said that “behind the moon” just meant beyond the moon, in the far reaches of space. His simplistic explanation led Dr. Edward Condon, in the epic Condon Report, to devote two pages to the idea that Clarion could not possibly exist, and used Bethurum’s case to assert that people who believed in the E. T. hypothesis of UFOs were woefully misguided. In 1967, prominent ufologists Jim and Coral Lorenzen offered a Jungian analysis for Bethurum’s contacts. “A Clarion is a small trumpet,” they wrote, “so named because it makes a clear sound… [T]he symbolic meaning relates more closely to the Latin word clarus, meaning clear.” Therefore, “the intended function of the Clarionites was to clear up the clouded, confused aspects of Bethurum’s life… [T]heir lady captain’s name translates almost directly as ‘characteristic of rain.’ We all know that a dominant characteristic of rain is that it ‘clears the air.’”
Inspired by the Clarionites, Bethurum established the New Agey “Sanctuary of Thought,” a group dedicated to world peace, and predicted that the powers of the world would soon settle their differences. That might not have panned out, but all told, he wrote four books and countless articles detailing his meetings with the Clarionites: Aboard A Flying Saucer (1954), The Voice of Planet Clarion (1957), Facing Reality (1958) and The People of Planet Clarion (1970), and helped shape the idealistic golden age of flying saucers. He died near Giant Rock on May 21, 1969.
The location of the scow’s first visit on Mormon Mesa was Latitude 37˚:0 North, Longitude 115˚:12’ West.
