Reports | [Research Pages] | (Hybrids)
UBtheNEWS reports are prepared with the presumption that the reader knows nothing about The Urantia Book and is uneducated in the area of science used to corroborate the text’s historical information. When the UBtheNEWS project first started, this approach seemed best. A few years and about twenty reports later, with the backlog of material for reports growing at an intimidating pace, [Research Pages] were introduced as a new structure that allowed information to be presented more quickly and briefly.
The original UBtheNEWS Reports were brought into the UBannotated website as PDF links from the now decommissioned UBtheNEWS.com website. Many Reports have little more than a link to the PDF; a few have additional notes and links added. In the winter of 2021, the effort to systematically review Reports began, so that they can be updated and expanded with new information, the first of these being the Garden of Eden Report. Reports that have gone through or are in the middle of this process are listed as (Hybrids).
UBtheNEWS Today
The UBtheNEWS project (for the most part) is about documenting how new discoveries and scientific advances increasingly support Urantia Book history. The Urantia Book asserts that “the historic facts and religious truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on the records of the ages to come …” and it was published in 1955. This essentially amounts to a claim of and test for a superhuman quality of credibility.
The work of documenting the new discoveries and scientific advances that increasingly support Urantia Book history continues. I do research; people from all around the world pass along corroborating information. As quickly as I can get to it, this information gets presented in reports, research pages, annotations, and topical studies. For more on this subject, see the Topical Study: What does The Urantia Book say about its creation and the time period?
History of UBtheNEWS
Documentation of new discoveries and scientific advances that verify Urantia Book history was nothing new when I got started with the UBtheNEWS project in 2006. Urantia Book readers had been doing projects, writing reports, and giving conference presentations for decades on this subject. My idea was to take this a step further by writing reports for outreach purposes rather than for other Urantia Book readers. Ever-improving Internet research technologies, along with my research training from law school, supported my efforts to recheck earlier work and to find new material for the project.
Many Urantia Book reader-believers have concerns about promoting The Urantia Book’s unique and emerging quality of superhuman credibility. They do not want Urantia Book believers to be viewed like Christians, who try to use science to prove that the world is 6,000 years old. This problem was made worse when I started the project off by rechecking the work of my predecessors, who, for the most part, did not have the benefits of Internet technology at their disposal when they made their efforts. The errors I found with previous work were disconcerting for some people, who had put their trust in these earlier efforts and were friendly with the people who made them. In part, this explains why you will not see my efforts or this type of work emphasized on other Urantia Book websites.
For the first several years of the project, I toured the United States, giving over 125 presentations and meeting with university professors and researchers. Trail Tales were published on the UBtheNEWS website, prior to starting an email list, and are now available for reference on the Updates page. The on-the-road adventure wound down in 2010 with a UBtheNEWS sponsored “Education for Outreach” conference in Boulder, Colorado. Over 100 people attended.
I started the UBannotated project in 2016 and built the website myself (my first and only effort at being a webmaster). In 2018, the time came to fully integrate the UBtheNEWS material and redirect UBtheNEWS.com to this website.