Travelers

Travelers are spiritual entities that, in Ron Lafferty’s account, can inhabit different bodies at different times. They matter in the book not as independently verified beings but as a point of conflict in court: the same belief could sound bizarre when expressed in Ron’s vocabulary and recognizable when experts set it beside familiar ideas about spirits, possession, and religious influence. The testimony turned Travelers into a test of how a court might distinguish an unconventional religious belief from evidence of mental illness.

Definition and Place in Ron’s Beliefs

Noel Gardner, a psychiatrist affiliated with the University of Utah Medical School, described Travelers as spiritual entities able to enter different bodies at different times. He compared the idea with reincarnation, arguing that Ron used unusual labels for a broad, longstanding sort of belief in a spirit world. Gardner’s comparison did not establish that the doctrines were identical; it offered the jury a way to understand the basic claim without treating its unfamiliar name as proof of psychosis.

Travelers belonged to a wider set of spiritual ideas Ron held, including Evil spirits and what he called reflector shields. The evidence does not provide a detailed account of how Travelers choose bodies, how long they remain, or what rules govern their movement. Its emphasis is instead on the central claim of entry into human beings, and on the way that claim was interpreted during the trial.

Religious Comparisons in Court

Gardner placed the ability of Travelers to enter people alongside religious teachings about spiritual influence. He noted that Christians commonly pray for the Holy Spirit to fill or control their lives, and that many religious traditions recognize the possibility that Satan can influence a person’s mind and behavior. He also reminded the court that exorcisms remain part of some religious practices. These comparisons made possession the hinge between Ron’s account and beliefs that Gardner presented as widely familiar.

The distinction Gardner drew was between an unusual label and a recognizable structure of thought. Ron’s description of reflector shields could sound paranoid when isolated from its religious context, Gardner acknowledged. But Ron likened them to guardian angels, and Gardner understood them as comparable to Christian ideas of protection from Satan’s influence. In his assessment, Ron’s spiritual ideas had roots in the Mormon teachings he learned as a child. That explanation did not make every claim ordinary; it argued that strangeness alone could not settle whether the beliefs were psychotic.

The Moroni Story and a Second Expert

The defense pressed the issue through Ron’s especially provocative account of Moroni. According to the testimony described in the book, Ron believed Moroni was a homosexual Traveler who entered people through the anus. He also claimed that the angel had made an agreement with Brigham Young in 1844, after the death of Joseph Smith: Moroni would help Brigham become the next leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in exchange for a gold likeness atop the highest spire of a temple. The statue, in this account, was not merely religious decoration but the visible trace of a bargain involving a Traveler.

Richard Wootton, a psychologist from Utah County, was a practicing Mormon educated at Brigham Young University. He agreed that Ron’s account was bizarre, but argued that beliefs that seem extreme to outsiders can be accepted within a religious culture. He invoked the visions and supernatural experiences attributed to Joseph Smith as examples that outsiders might also regard as delusional. Wootton further told the court that Ron’s statements about spirits could be compared with material in LDS doctrine, where discussion of a spirit world and existence beyond the veil was familiar.

Meaning and Limits of the Testimony

The experts’ comparisons did not verify Travelers or resolve every question about Ron’s mental state. They shifted attention to how a belief was learned, expressed, and situated in a community. Gardner connected Ron’s ideas to childhood teaching and to broader religious patterns; Wootton emphasized that supernatural claims can look very different from inside and outside a faith. Together, their testimony resisted the simple equation of unusual spiritual language with mental illness.

The courtroom discussion also exposed the difficulty of drawing a stable boundary around religious belief. Travelers could be described as a distinctive doctrine of beings entering bodies, yet Gardner could place that claim beside reincarnation, divine guidance, guardian angels, and possession. Wootton’s account of Moroni made the belief’s peculiar details impossible to overlook, even as his comparison with Mormon supernatural traditions complicated any easy judgment. In the book, Travelers therefore remain less a developed supernatural system than a contested idea: striking in its particulars, but used by the experts to show how context can change the apparent meaning of a belief.