An art exhibition entitled Paulina Peavy: Etherian Channeler opened June 1 and will run until July 31 at Beyond Baroque Gallery in Venice, CA. More details here.

Here’s an entry on Peavy ripped from the pages of A is for Adamski: The Golden Age of the UFO Contactees, co-written with my chum Greg Bishop.

 Paulina Peavy (1901–1999)

Artists draw inspiration from many sources. Paulina Peavy said that her paintings and other works were delivered through her from an extraterrestrial entity named “Lacamo” which she pronounced “La-I-Come-Oh.” Her amazing artwork was sometimes signed by Lacamo, sometimes by Peavy, and at times both. She designed elaborate masks that she wore when she worked, saying that her ET source was better able to work though her when she had them on.

She was born Pauline Ellen White on August 25, 1901, in Colorado City, Colorado (as she claimed) or in Colorado Springs (as her family claimed), to a father who thought that education was wasted on girls and a mother who died of miscarriage before Pauline was 10. In the early 1920s, she was married to Bradley Peavy and living in San Pedro, California, about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Her second son said that his father was a drunk who beat his wife. She contracted tuberculosis in 1930 and had to enter a sanatorium for a few months to recuperate. After her husband abandoned the family, Peavy, unable to afford for their care, placed her two young sons in the Boys and Girls Aid Society orphanage in Pasadena (which still exists) and moved to Long Beach, CA, in 1932. By 1939, she had rebuilt her life enough to get her children back, although she visited them often while they were separated.¹

She apparently exhibited her art widely at this time, while working as an art teacher in the Long Beach and Los Angeles school systems to make ends meet. She exhibited at the prestigious Stendahl gallery in L.A., according to an advertisement placed in the L.A. Times on February 10, 1933.

Soon after moving to Long Beach, she began attending weekly seances at the home of medium Ida Ewing, where she was instructed to begin writing down her dreams. She said that this practice enabled her to teach herself how to achieve out-of-body experiences at will.² Peavy wrote that within two nights, she was able to leave her body and travel beyond her own room “as the soul is electronic; and walls are no barriers to electricity!”3 The voice of Lacamo coming through Ewing eventually spoke through Peavy and became her lifelong guide. Curiously, she referred to Lacamo not as a space being, but as a “UFO.”

In 1942, she said it was “her destiny” to move to New York City, where she remained for the rest of her life. It was there, in January of 1958, that Peavy was a guest on the Long John Nebel late night radio show, which also regularly featured many of the personalities described in this book.

The other guest on the show was the “Mystic Barber of Brooklyn,” Andy Sinatra, a fellow space brother channeler who was fond of wearing funky metallic headbands that improved his ET communications. Nebel seemed endlessly amused by Sinatra, but apparently took Peavy more seriously.

She wore one of her masks throughout her 20-minute long appearance and channeled Lacamo. Nebel described the mask she wore as “a base color of chartreuse with charcoal gray stripes running through it and…covers at least three-quarters of her face.” Peavy began with a very short description of her background and almost immediately began hollering and began to channel her space friends in a measured, robotic-sounding voice. She explained:

“When such powers move in such strange sounds are caused by the powers taking over. We are putting into her being, high voltage. She has had to put up her electrodes to meet our high voltage! This is not the voice of Paulina, for we have not released her entirely. When we come through, we are using her exactly as you use your microphones. You have many ideas regarding us that are your ideas and are not our reality.” ⁴

After 15 minutes or so, Nebel remarked that Peavy looked drained and suggested they move on. Sinatra piped right up and the show continued. After Sinatra spent considerable time babbling in an incoherent ET language, Long John requested that Paulina return to her trance state and translate the Mystic Barber’s manic mumblings:

“We have helped you make your headband.  We have given you all the secrets for such a headband we placed upon Paulina twenty years ago—an unseen magnetic headband…We are so happy to find your open-minded attitude toward our contact with you to the state whereby you can broadcast our voice—our voices. Andrew, the bread of life is life! “

Some time in her 80s, Peavy wrote an autobiography entitled The Story of My Life with a “UFO” and described her concepts of life, her essentially feminist viewpoint, and the nearly 50-year relationship with Lacamo. She predicted that the Earth would soon reject males and women would only produce female children for the next 3000 years. She also mentioned her interest in the 1962 Barney and Betty Hill abduction case and how their reported “treatments of the genitals”⁵ was part of the space people’s idea that the perfect form of humanity is neither male nor female.

In 1998, Peavy’s son Bradley moved her to a nursing home in Bethesda, Maryland, after she broke her hip and slipped into a state of dementia. She died the next year at the age of 98.

“Early in my painting career I found strange forms developing by my brush. I explained to myself that I had gotten on a beam, that I had tuned in on a power vast and wonderful.”⁶

¹ http://www.paulina-peavy.com/chronology/

²Peavy, Paulina. The Story of My Life with a “UFO.” Self published, ND (but probably mid 1980s.) p. ‘B’

³ ibid, p. ‘B’

⁴ Paulina Peavy and Andy Sinatra. [Radio series episode].(1958, January).In The Party Line. New York, NY: WOR.

⁵Peavy, Paulina. The Story of My Life with a “UFO.” Self published. (p. 8).

⁶ http://www.paulina-peavy.com/