San Francisco is the city on the northern California coast that recurs, in Jacques Vallée’s account, as a hub of contactee and New Age activity through the 1970s. Vallée wrote the preface to The Invisible College in the city in March 1975.1 He attended a Sunday afternoon meeting of about ten members of the Urantia group in San Francisco, led by a woman in her late fifties.2 Vallée said that a representative of the Esoteric Fraternity told him he did not know Grace Hooper Pettipher of San Francisco and was unsure whether she belonged to the same group.3 He also noted that at least three separate organisations calling themselves Satanic operated in northern California alone.4
Public lectures and press coverage of the same milieu took place in the city as well. Claude Vorilhon gave a public lecture in San Francisco in December 1976 attended by about 150 people who paid $3 each, an event catalogued as the 1976 Vorilhon San Francisco lecture.5 A reporter named O’Hara, working for the San Francisco Chronicle, went through the city’s streets posing a different question to people he met each day.6 According to Messengers of Deception, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter interviewed people on the streets about contact with UFO beings.7 On 1976-04-01, Jim Hurtak and Andrija Puharich appeared together on a talk show broadcast in San Francisco.8
The city also has an administrative footnote in Scientology’s history: L. Ron Hubbard was officially listed as a patient at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in San Francisco until December 1945.9
San Francisco later featured in commentary on Apollo-era imagery and in Star Wars-themed viral media. Richard C. Hoagland said that the optical phenomenon in AS17-134-20426 (Apollo 17 photograph) resembled a terrestrial sunset over San Francisco, in which a scattered refractive rainbow occurring in the west behind the photographer is reflected back into the camera lens from the east by the earth’s atmosphere.10 Michael Horn created the video Death Star over San Francisco, which composites objects from the Star Wars franchise into ordinary San Francisco scenes and has been viewed more than three and a half million times.11
Diana Walsh Pasulka recorded a research trip through the region: she, Vallée and Robbie Graham drove back from Big Sur to San Francisco and stopped for lunch at a dockside restaurant in Santa Cruz.12 According to an account given in DEBRIEFED episode 85, featuring Erik Nanstiel, a man named Terry, working in 1969 at a San Francisco venue called The Family Dog at the Great Highway, was told by a stranger that beings existing at a higher vibrational level, with a physical existence but outside the human range of perception, wished to speak with him.13
The city also served as a departure point for excursions further afield: about thirty people gathered in USA, California, Mendocino to listen to Timothy Leary tapes, many having driven from San Francisco, USA, California, Berkeley, and USA, California, Stanford University.14