CANTON − Denny J. Highben said he always considered himself an atheist.
That is, until he met William Allen LePar, the late mystic and founder of the Sons of Light Association for Research and the Universal Being Conference.
Highben, a retired Massillon Independent reporter, is one of the biggest acolytes of LePar’s mission and work. He has written a new biography, “William Allen LePar: The Spiritual Rosetta Stone for the End of Our Age.”
“When I first heard of Bill LePar, I considered myself an open-minded atheist,” Highben said.
“I didn’t believe in God or any of that silly stuff. Darwin was right, science was right. I say open-minded because I was willing to listen and argue with anybody, but I knew they’d never change my mind. I was wrong. I interviewed him and got to know some of the people around him; normal people who just had a deep interest in trying to understand ‘What is life all about?'”
Highben said LePar discovered his psychic gifts as a child, but was discouraged from using them or telling others. He writes that, according to family lore, LePar was born with a “veil” over his face, reportedly a sign of psychic ability, but that his devoutly Catholic family kept it a closely-guarded secret.
LePar and his wife, Nancy, married in 1969. He worked as a machinist at Republic Steel, where coworkers sometimes gave him a hard time about his unique gift.
“People tend to either be afraid of you or resent you, so you keep it to yourself,” Highben said, adding that LePar gave psychic readings for friends and never charged them.
Nancy LePar, who still works with Sons of Light, lauded Highben’s effort to share her late husband’s story. LePar died in 2011 at 72.
“I was very pleased with it,” she said. “He really put a lot of time in it, in researching his childhood. My husband was able to know things ahead of time.”
Nancy LePar said she didn’t know LePar was psychic until after they married.
“I was completely at a standstill,” she said. “I had no knowledge about it. No one on my side of the family had those abilities. I was completely in the dark. He and his classmate Walt (Leonard) helped me with it. He didn’t push me into anything. You can do a lot with your mind. A lot of us are in such a hurry, we don’t develop our intuition.”
Highben said LePar began embracing his gift thanks to encouragement from Leonard, a high school friend who also had psychic abilities.
One day, Leonard contacted LePar, saying he’d had an unusual message.
“The amazing part of the story is, he flew back from California to tell Bill that something strange was going to be happening to him,” Highben said.
In an attempt to keep in touch, LePar started tape-recording letters to Leonard.
“One morning he sat down to record a letter to Walt. Bill’s wife, Nancy, left for work that morning,” Highben said. “She came back down their driveway, and he thought she forgot something. And she was kind of shocked. She said, ‘What do you mean? I’m done with work. The day’s over.’ He did not recall anything. When they saw that the tapes had been used, he put a tape in the machine. As he described it, he could hear his voice, but it sounded very different. It was talking about crazy stuff. That was one of his favorite phrases, ‘crazy stuff.’ It scared them both a lot. It terrified them.”
‘The Council’ arrives
Highben said it was the first of nearly 300 “trances,” during which LePar served as a conduit for a spiritual entity known as “The Council.”
“The Council describe themselves as human beings who grew beyond the need for a physical existence,” he said. “They were once physical like the rest of us and are continuing to grow spiritually until they’re in total reunion with God.”
Highben writes that LePar sent 62 hours of tapes to Leonard, and consulted with his priest at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in Minerva about the trances.
“The priest wanted to hear the next tapes, and he did and he said, ‘This is all pretty good, spiritual information, some things may be questionable but it’s pretty good, spiritual information,'” Highben said. “And as time went on, the priest and the bishop of the Steubenville Diocese listened to the tapes.”
Highben reports that in 1975, LePar started allowing the public to ask the Council questions.
“They spoke about past civilizations. About some of the mysteries of the universe or things we think are mysteries. But they focused primarily on the spiritual condition of mankind, and reminding us that the spiritual reality is truly the only reality,” he said.
Higben said the Sons of Light group maintains LePar’s archives, including a Bible class he conducted for more than five years on the New Testament’s Gospel of John.
“For some reason, the Gospel of John was extremely unique and powerful to him, so he would do his best to learn as much as he could,” he said.
Highben said some readers might take issue with LePar’s view that the New Covenant is meant “for every human being on the face of the earth.”
The divine source of life
“It’s that man and his desire to be intellectually superior to other people has divided God up into different factions,” he said. “But there’s just one divine origin of life. God does not separate from man − man separates from God.”
During the 1970s and 1980s, LePar was a fixture on Cleveland television and became the subject of study by college researchers. The Universal Being Conferences began in 1983.
“In April 1981 is when things really started heating up locally,” Highben said. “WJW TV in Cleveland came down and filmed a trance. Somebody asked the Council, ‘Why do you choose to speak now?’ And they said, ‘Look at your world, the hate, the violence. Is this what man returns to his God?’
Highben said the trances became more taxing for LePar in later years.
“It became a tremendous burden to do these trances,” he said. “He could not help himself up, somebody had to pick him up. Although he was relatively small, maybe 5-foot-8, dead weight is really heavy. So, in the last few years he had to be actually put into a wheelchair and wheeled out of the room after a trance.”
Highben was asked what message he wants readers to glean from the book.
“To recognize that we are the children of the divine source of life,” he said, “And we have absolute free will to choose what we want to do with that life.”
The 2025 Universal Being Conference will meet from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Oct. 11 at LaPizzaria at 3656 Dressler Road NW in Jackson Township. The cost is $40, which includes a catered lunch.
Learn more at www.williamlepar.com; call 330-268-4258; or email to njlrn@gmail.com.
Reach Charita at charita.goshay@cantonrep.com. On Twitter: @cgoshayREP.
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Massillon author explores the powers of Canton mystic William Allen LePar in new book
Reporting by Charita M. Goshay, Canton Repository / The Repository
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