The first great channelled commander, and the first to keep not arriving.
In 1952 George Van Tassel, who held gatherings at Giant Rock in the Mojave Desert, began relaying telepathic messages from Ashtar, commander of a fleet come to warn against the hydrogen bomb. Ashtar was pictured as tall, fair and human-looking, a contactee's Nordic, but he never appeared in person, which makes him the bridge between the visitors of the 1950s and later channelling. A movement grew around him and split as rival channellers received rival messages. Dated prophecies of landings and mass evacuations failed again and again, the 1994 one included, and each failure moved the Command further from the physical: by the 1990s Ashtar was being described as an ascended spiritual being.
The recurring harm here was prophecy: followers who prepared for dated evacuations that never came. Treat any date given by a channelled source with that record in mind.
Extraterrestrial, unembodied · embodiment 2 of 5, energetic or subtle · source: channelled material · key
Dates
First messages: 1952
Failed evacuation date: 1994
Related
The Nordic image without the meeting, and the same drift from physical visitor to spiritual being as the Venusians. The Command later merged into the wider Galactic Federation story.
Said to come from outside the Earth, whether another star system or another dimension, and to have no physical body now. A few traditions say they once had one; most never say.
Degree of embodiment: 2, energetic or subtle
Scale, 1 to 5
5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.
N: channelled material
Source code
Received by a medium speaking on behalf of the intelligence. The content is generally ethical and cosmological rather than descriptive: instruction, not testimony.
The contactee tradition
Term
The 1950s pattern set by George Adamski: a friendly, human-looking visitor met deliberately rather than abducted, a telepathic warning about nuclear weapons, and a named home world. Almost every benevolent alien since inherits this grammar.
Engaged through channelling
Practice-side
Contact in this tradition means trance, mediumship or automatic writing. The risks are the practice's, not the entity's: dissociation, sustained altered states, and the difficulty of telling one's own material from something external. Least suitable for anyone with a history of psychosis, mania or dissociation.
Deliberate contact work
Read this first
The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.
Who should be careful
Practice-side
Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.