John E. Fetzer: The Quest for the New Age
John E. Fetzer was a radio pioneer who built a telecommunications and communications empire and was the sole owner of the Detroit Tigers from 1961 to 1983. Behind the scenes, he was a seeker who believed that happiness, positivity, and peace on earth could be found through a pathway to higher intelligence. His enlightened efforts laid the groundwork for the birth of New Age. The Fetzer Institute continues the ground-breaking work of this timeless soul.
John E. Fetzer: The Quest for the New Age – Interview with Brian C. Wilson and Bruce Fetzer
For quotes from John E. Fetzer, click here
This is an age-old quest going back to the philosopher-scientists of ancient Greece and other civilizations in antiquity. The 20th Century’s New Age, as it is called, was thought to have been birthed in California and other progressive thinking communities. What most are not aware of is that it was the Midwest that was the first cradle of advanced spiritual expansion and in the forefront of this quest was a successful media mogul and venerated owner of a baseball team.
John E. Fetzer, born in 1901, was a radio pioneer who built a telecommunications and communications empire and was the sole owner of the Detroit Tigers from 1961 to 1983.
Behind the scenes, he was a seeker who believed that happiness, positivity, and peace on earth could be found through a pathway to higher intelligence.
He used his resources to fund this quest with research studies including Stanford, Duke and Princeton and the groundbreaking research of JB Rhine into ESP.
This hidden quest is being revealed for the first time by Fetzer biographer Brian C. Wilson, and Fetzer’s grand-nephew, Bruce Fetzer. Brian C. Wilson is a professor of American religious history in the department of comparative religion at Western Michigan University. He’s the author of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living and Yankees in Michigan.
Bruce Fetzer is President, CEO, and Trustee of the Fetzer Memorial Trust, a former Trustee, and Treasurer of the John E. Fetzer Institute, a former Trustee and Member of the Foundation Financial Offices, Group Chairman of the FFOG Compensation Survey and advisor to other non-profits.
Victor Fuhrman: Good evening, gentlemen. And thank you so much for joining us. Who was John E. Fetzer? Tell us about his early life.
Brian C. Wilson: Well, John Fetzer was born in small-town Indiana, as you said, in 1901, and he grew up in a series of small towns, winding up in West Lafayette in Indiana. He was raised by a single mother. His father died when he was quite young. And John basically had a kind of very typical Midwestern upbringing. He had his pals, he got into mischief, he had a playful dog.
But, some things kind of mark him out during his childhood as something a little bit special. He had his first mystical experience when he was 10 or 11 years old, and it’s a very interesting one.
He was playing around in an elevator at a local department store called Shortell’s. And at a certain point, he had a vision of Jesus, and he was basically holding onto the leg of Jesus. And Jesus told him that he would never let go. And that really had a tremendous impact on John’s spiritual quest. Later, in 1918, he was stricken with the Spanish flu, which of course, that was the year of the great pandemic that killed thousands if not millions. He wasn’t expected to live; during that time of illness and convalescence, he made a vow that if he were saved, he would basically devote his life to spiritual projects. Well, he survived.
Victor Fuhrman: Bruce, what was your uncle like as a person?
Bruce Fetzer: Well, he was my great uncle, I dearly loved him. He was like a father-figure to me, a mentor. And I worked with him the last 10 years of his life, and he very closely took me under his wing and exposed me to a lot of these concepts.
I came and started working with him initially as a chemical engineer. I went to business school, got my MBA while working in his broadcast properties. But then, I had a 20 hour a week personal internship with him where I was exposed to a lot of his readings and a lot of other people that he met.
And so, outwardly, he was very prominent, successful in command, and, he was also quite a charismatic individual and a clear leader, a great leader, a great listener and a great contributor to the societal good. He very much believed in public service and rose far and beyond the occasion many, many times.
Victor Fuhrman: Now, you were a scientist and an MBA, and he approached you and started relating all these spiritual and metaphysical sciences. How did you react to that?
Bruce Fetzer: Well, it was quite a shock personally because I also came at this from a more fundamentalist standpoint. So, I didn’t have an orientation in this up until 1981 when I started working with him. And by being exposed to things that were physically impossible, it changed my boundary conditions, my paradigm, and I became intensely interested and moved from orientation to materialism or the material world to the spiritual world because the personal experience was transformational.
Victor Fuhrman: How were you able to equate that with your personal religious foundation?
Bruce Fetzer: Well, I had actually to expand it. I very quickly transitioned from more of a dogmatic approach to more of an inclusive, experiential approach that included a lot of the precepts of spirituality like acceptance, understanding, enthusiasm, awakening, awareness and personal responsibility.
Victor Fuhrman: Now I know your great uncle was interested in UFOlogy. Did you ever have a UFO experience yourself?
Bruce Fetzer: No, I didn’t, but I know he studied it very closely.
Victor Fuhrman: And what prompted that study on his behalf, do you know?
Bruce Fetzer: Well, he was a radio censor or assistant radio censor during World War II. It was a great service to the public, to the country. He had access to a lot of the military files coming out of that. He very intensely studied, unconventional sightings by some of the bomber pilots and started his own search. I think that prompted one of his first speeches which was on UFOs.
Brian C. Wilson: I think John Fetzer’s interest in UFOs came from a couple of different perspectives. One, as Bruce mentioned before the break, as radio censor, he found out about foo fighters during World War II, those mysterious objects that followed ally fighters and really set the stage for the rise of UFO sightings in the late ’40s. Part of John Fetzer’s interest in UFOs was based on the speculative engineering of these sights. If they existed, how were they propelled, what kinds of materials are they made of, those kinds of things. And so, a lot of the books he read speculated on those kinds of interesting engineering issues.
The other thing that interested him about this was that a lot of the people who claimed to be contactees of UFOs in the early ’50s back when this was a positive experience were people who actually came out of theosophical backgrounds. John Fetzer himself had become very interested in a variety of different versions of theosophy during the 1940s.
And so, the contactees would talk about UFOs regarding Ascended Masters and Great Brotherhood. And their mission was essentially to catalyze a spiritual transformation of the world. And I think this is an idea that really caught on with John Fetzer, for those two reasons.
Theosophy is a religious tradition that developed in the United States in the late 19th Century, and it was really the brainchild of a Russian immigrant named Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky was interested in a variety of different issues, specifically, the harmony between science and religion. She was also fascinated with evolution, and she was also fascinated with Eastern thought, Hindu thought, and Buddhist thought.
Theosophy was an attempt to marry these various aspects into a viable religious tradition, and the ideas caught on. A lot of Hindu ideas or South Asian ideas, religious ideas like reincarnation and karma really entered the American consciousness through theosophical groups.
One of the main things in theosophy was the idea that there were masters or groups of masters who were in communication with certain people and directing the kind of conscious evolution of humanity with the idea that humanity was always evolving towards higher and higher levels of consciousness.
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