Ruth Montgomery

Ruth Montgomery (June 11, 1912 – June 10, 2001) was an American journalist who spent three decades as a Washington reporter before becoming one of the best-selling channeled-writing authors of the late twentieth century. Her UFO-adjacent work is small relative to her overall output, but it introduced a durable idea to the wider culture: that some benevolent visitors live among us in human bodies.

Journalism career

Montgomery trained at Baylor University and worked for the Waco News-Tribune and the Louisville Herald-Post in the 1930s. In 1943 she became the first female reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Daily News. She went on to write a syndicated column for Hearst Headlines and United Press International and to work as a correspondent for the International News Service, covering the Berlin Airlift and the administrations of several presidents. In 1950 she was elected president of the Women's National Press Club, and she retired from journalism in 1969. Her memoir Hail to the Chiefs (1970) reflected on her years in Washington with six presidents.

The turn to channeling

By the mid-1960s Montgomery was writing books based on what she said were messages received through automatic writing, attributing them to spirit guides. Her friend, the medium Arthur Ford, was among those guides, and she later wrote biographies and books on metaphysical subjects, including a book about the psychic Jeane Dixon. She described herself as a Christian psychic, and her books were presented to readers as spiritual guidance rather than as investigative reporting. That move from newsroom to channeled writing defined her public identity for the rest of her career.

Walk-ins and aliens

Her most influential idea appeared in Strangers Among Us (1979, subtitled Enlightened Beings from a World to Come). In it, she described "walk-ins": high-minded entities permitted to take over the body of a person who wishes to leave it, usually because of illness, trauma, or a wish to depart. Many later New Age and UFO communities trace the walk-in concept to her book, and it became a staple of alternative-spirituality discussion.

Her follow-up, Aliens Among Us (Putnam, 1985), extended the idea to benevolent extraterrestrials who she argued were living on Earth in human form, supported by first-hand accounts from people who said they had been walk-ins. Musician Sammy Hagar has said the book inspired Van Halen's 1985 song "Love Walks In," a claim widely repeated in the book's later reception. UFO researchers have also speculated about which public figures might be walk-ins, though this remained informal and unverified.

Predictions and reception

Montgomery made a series of forecasts that did not come true. She predicted World War III in the mid-1980s and, when it did not happen, attributed the miss to human free will. She forecast a walk-in president in the 1990s, later revising that timeline in The World to Come (1999) to 2008 at the earliest, and she predicted a polar shift that was subsequently pushed back to 2010–2012 or later.

Skeptical readers have pointed to the absence of footnotes, bibliography, or independent verification, and to reliance on channeled testimony as the chief source of evidence. Montgomery's books nevertheless sold widely and found a readership among people seeking spiritual reassurance. For ufology, she is best understood as a bridge: she carried the 1950s–70s image of benevolent contact into the New Age, where the walk-in concept outlasted many of her specific claims. Her credibility is rated as fringe; the biographical facts of her journalism career are well documented, but her spirit-guide claims are not independently verifiable.