By the end of this week, I plan to have the second edition of Contactee : The Biography of Daniel W. Fry, back up for sale in the Daniel Fry Dot Com shop. Large parts of the biography have been rewritten to make it less of a sleep aid and more of an actual biography. I used ChatGPT to transform what amounted to a boring list of dates into more representative scenes from Fry’s life and found ChatGPT to be a professional grade copy editor (I wrote that). I provided the initial draft from the first edition of Contactee and, from ChatGPT’s suggestions, picked the revision that closely fit my voice and style. Even with such great help, it still took over a month to revise Contactee not including the past two weeks where I went back over every paragraph and made sure every statement was properly sourced (see endnotes). I had to pull out Daniels old binder of loose leaf pages entitled “Biography of D. Fry” and spent days searching through my digital archives including audio interviews with Fry’s family and friends, and the online Understanding to remember where I had gotten so many details.
As the title suggests, I removed the “Complete White Sands Incident” from the biography, which you can get separately anyways, and it makes the book more focused on just his life story outside of his contact. I also added more pictures including one of a letter that Fry received that conclusively places him at the White Sands Proving grounds in June of 1949.
As part of the research into the second edition of Contactee, I had ChatGPT search all of the PDFs of George Van Tassel’s Proceedings (under “Historical Resources”) published from 1953 to 1979, the year of Tassel’s death. I wanted to know if there were any biographically relevant details about Fry, but there was none. Below is the report from ChatGPT:
Across the run of Proceedings, Daniel Fry appears mostly as a recurring associate in Van Tassel’s convention-and-lecture network, not as the subject of a major standalone article. The earliest references I found place him among the invited speakers for the Fourth Annual Spacecraft Convention in the January 1957 issue; then, in June 1957, Van Tassel writes that “Dan Fry, Art Aho and yours truly” were making a fast airplane trip to New York and also lists Fry among the recent Giant Rock convention speakers; in July–August 1957, Van Tassel says that “Dan Fry, Durward Fairfield, and Yours Truly” had completed a successful two-week eastern tour in June. Fry later reappears in the convention coverage of May–June 1958 and April–May 1959, again simply as one of the recognizable speaker-participants in the Giant Rock world. Taken together, these early mentions show Fry functioning in Proceedings as part of Van Tassel’s regular public circle of contactees, lecturers, and convention figures rather than as a separately developed topic.¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵
By the 1960s and 1970s, Fry shows up less often, but the references become more pointed. In January–February 1964, he is again listed among the speakers at the previous September’s Space Convention. In January–February–March 1969, Van Tassel cites Daniel Fry alongside Donald Keyhoe and himself as one of the experienced UFO figures the Colorado/Condon investigators should have consulted, so Fry here serves as an authority witness in Van Tassel’s anti-establishment UFO argument. The clearest late references come in October–November–December 1975, where page 15 identifies a photograph as “Dan Fry’s new location in Tonapah [Tonopah], Arizona” and says the acreage had been dedicated to Understanding, Inc. by Rev. Smith, and then in January–February–March 1976, where Proceedings announces a Space Convention / Bicentennial Conclave to be held by Daniel Fry at the International Cultural Center of Understanding, Inc. in Tonopah, Arizona. So, in the places where Fry is mentioned, Proceedings presents him first as a fellow convention speaker and traveling associate, later as a recognized UFO authority, and finally as someone linked directly to the Understanding, Inc. milieu in Arizona.⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹
Endnotes
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 5, no. 3 (January 1957), in “Spacecraft Convention” notice, PDF hosted by Integratron.
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 5, no. 6 (June 1957), in “Another Jaunt and Visions?” and “Convention Echoes,” PDF hosted by Integratron.
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 5, no. 7 (July–August 1957), in “Lecture Tour,” PDF hosted by Integratron.
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 6, no. 2 (May–June 1958), in “Spacecraft Convention,” PDF hosted by Integratron.
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 6, no. 6 (April–May 1959), in “Spacecraft Convention Data,” PDF hosted by Integratron.
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 7, no. 4 (January–February 1964), in “Convention,” PDF hosted by Integratron.
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 8, no. 8 (January–February–March 1969), in “The Colorado University Report,” PDF hosted by Integratron.
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 10, no. 10 (October–November–December 1975), p. 15, PDF hosted by Integratron.
- George W. Van Tassel, Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, vol. 10, no. 11 (January–February–March 1976), in “Bicentennial Conclave,” PDF hosted by Integratron.