Ashtar (extraterrestrial Being) - Ashtar Command

Ashtar Command

For the Indie music band, see Ashtar Command (band).

As the weekly channeling sessions at Giant Rock continued through the early 1950s, the Ashtar messages became much more elaborate and began to provide details of the purported existence of an extraterrestrial "government", which claimed to closely monitor activities on Earth and offered material and spiritual support to its citizens. This concept of an "Ashtar Command" was appropriated for use by a number of prominent early channelers, both inside and outside the Giant Rock community, and was soon being utilized by several in the context of their own personal claimed messages from Ashtar, along with the use of the figure of Ashtar himself, originally developed by Van Tassel.

By 1955, a few well known channelers of the era, including Elouise Moeller, had incorporated the concept of an Ashtar Command and related ideas, as key components of their own developing systems. Several channelers, including Van Tassel himself, began publishing accounts which described predictions of the imminent arrival of an Ashtar-led UFO armada on Earth, in order to guide and protect mankind. The public failure of these predictions had an enormous negative effect on the expansion of the Ashtar Command 'movement'. Without Van Tassel's role as a single authority constituting the sole source of messages from Ashtar, the movement became less cohesive and began to splinter from internal pressures. Several dozen channelers were simultaneously claiming to be obtaining, in some cases, competing authoritative messages directly from Ashtar. The overall movement began to wane in relative popularity because of infighting.