Message from Ashtar

Ashtar The Commander

After 5 p.m. on Nov. 26, 1977, viewers in England who tuned into the news experienced a Television broadcast interruption by Ashtar the commander. To this day, no one knows for certain who was behind the interruption.

Vrillon of the Ashtar Galactic Command

During the broadcast, Vrillon warned his audience of the dangers humans were getting themselves into by using weapons of mass destruction. Vrillon also confirmed the UFO phenomenon and his race’s presence “seen as lights in the skies.” Vrillon warned humanity to be wary of false prophets and the evils of money, before imploring his audience to live in harmony and put down its weapons. The transmission returned to the evening’s normally scheduled programming of Looney Tunes before viewers were assured by news broadcaster, Andrew Gardner, that everything was alright and that it was simply a hoax. But some began to panic, frantically phoning the station under the assumption that the apocalypse was upon them, despite Ashtar Command’s seemingly peaceful dispatch.

News stations distorted the story, reporting different names and versions of Vrillon’s message. This added to the confusion creating a War of the Worlds-type anxiety among those who couldn’t fathom the possibility of a hoax. Adding to the conspiracy is the fact that the culprit of the transmission has still never been discovered.

Van Tassel

Van Tassel worked for Douglas Aircraft and Lockheed as an aeronautical engineer and flight tester for experimental aircraft, before moving his family out to the desert where Critzer had lived. There, he built a café and received approval from the BLM to hold conventions and operate Critzer’s airstrips.

Soon the family started holding UFO conventions for thousands of people, with Van Tassel believing Giant Rock to be a source of electromagnetic energy that allowed him to contact extraterrestrial beings. He would hold meditation ceremonies under the rock to contact these entities, one of which resulted in a meeting with an alien who gave him the schema to build the “Integratron,” a structure supposedly capable of time travel that still stands there to this day.

One of the entities met by Van Tassel was a being called Ashtar, who said he was on a space station overseeing Earth. Ashtar gave a dire admonition of similar sentiment to the 1977 Southern Television interruption, involving warnings about nuclear weapons and destroying the planet, and spawning an entire UFO religiosity that still exists to this day. While all of this seems fantastical and possibly the product of a wild imagination, there is one event tied to Van Tassel that adds an eerie layer to the story. In June of 1952, before the Washington, D.C. UFO incident, Van Tassel sent a series of letters to government agencies warning that spacecraft would soon fly over Washington. A few weeks later, one of the largest UFO events occurred, in which thousands witnessed what appeared to be a fleet of spacecraft hovering over the capitol building. That was the same year he claims he was contacted by Ashtar.

the question of whose voice created the Southern television broadcast interruption, claiming to be an extraterrestrial entity from the Ashtar Galactic Command remains. While it’s likely that the culprit was simply someone wanting to create a hoax, the sober tone of the message adds to the mystique of this signal from outer space. Was this the same Ashtar that George Van Tassel was in contact with? Or was it a test for a staged alien invasion to come?