Gerald Heard
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ON BACK COVER 'Is Another World Watching?' (1951)
Gerald Heard, noted author, broadcaster and lecturer, has always taken an
interest in unusual scientific phenomena. he remembers in the Diamond Jubilee
Year of Queen Victoria looking into a shop window and seeing a picture of
a purse which, though shut and clasped, showed its contents.
It was one of the first X-ray photographs and was treated by the public as
a fraud. This was Gerald Heard's first brush with skepticism. In 1907 pictures
of the Wright brothers on their first flight met the same distrustful reception.
By now Mr.Heard was becoming used to established theories being proved wrong;
anomalies were always appearing and preconceived notions were continually
having to be abandoned. In 1921 he noted carefully Marconi's report that he
believed he had received space signals from Mars. Odd finds and odder correlations
continued to interest him, and between 1930 and 1934 he gave his reports on
these findings to the public as commentator on current science for the British
Broadcasting Corporation.
Born in England in 1889, educated at Cambridge, Mr.Heard became editor of the London Realist, a monthly of scientific humanism, in 1929. In the late nineteen thirties, having been offered the chair of historical anthropology at Duke University, he came to the United States. Since 1937, Mr.Heard has made his home in California. As a writer, he is well known in the fields of religion, social behavior and psychology as well as anthropology.
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TWENTIETH CENTURY AUTHORS - First Supplement 1955
Although Gerald Heard writes under two names (using H.F.Heard for his mysteries and weird stories), he is really three writers - a writer on scientific subjects, a writer of scientific thrillers, and a writer on religion and mysticism. "Objective, subjective, and both simultaneously," writes Anne Freemantle, "Gerald Heard plays his three parts to their capacity."
As H.F.Heard he recived the Ellery Queen Award in 1946 for the best mystery story of the year, "President of U.S.A., Detective." As Gerald Heard he lectured in 1951 and 1952 at Washington University in St.Louis on the question "Can Human Nature Be Changed?" He writes that he has issued "the only continuous account of the phenomena known vulgarly as 'flying saucers' under the title Is Another World Watching?" In recent years he has published several studies in theology, a history of morals since 1920, and a collection of symbolic fairy tales describing evolution, Gabriel and the Creatures.
Heard lives in Santa Monica, Calif. here he has continued his association with Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood in the study of Vedanta. At Tzabuco, near Laguna Beach, he led a group participating in monastic community life. The group spent hours in silence and meditation, shared the work on a communal basis, and lived according to strict ascetic principles. Heard figures in Huxley's novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan as the mystic, William Propter. It has also been suggested that he was the model for Bruno Rontini in Huxley's Time Must have a Stop.
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For more on Gerald Heard, read Star
Communion Report 1.
