1959 BBC Interview with George King, Head of the Aetherius UFO Religion

This little curiosity also appeared on YouTube for me yesterday. It’s an interview from the BBC Archives channel with George King, the founder of the Aetherius UFO space religion, broadcast from 1959. The Aetherius Society are the people who believe that their leader, George King, channelled messages from Aetherius, an entity on Venus. They used to hold rituals after a disaster somewhere in the world in which they’d queue up to charge up their prayer meters. These were devices that supposedly acted as reservoirs of benevolent psychic energy, which would then be released to help solve or ameliorate the problem.

I’ve something of a soft spot for them, as although I don’t believe one word of it, there have never been any accusations of brainwashing, exploitation or abuse and brutality made against King and his followers, as there have against so many other leaders of New Religious Movements. Whenever one of their representatives has appeared on TV in the past decade or so, they’ve been keen to stress their absolute personal normality. Perhaps that’s been something of their undoing. John Spencer in one of his books describes being lined up to appear on a popular TV programme with someone from the Aetherius Society, only for both of them to be dropped. Spencer says that the programme’s producers were clearly looking for Ufologists who would say something daft or outrageous they could take the mick out of. Neither he nor the Aetherian played ball, and were far too sensible, so they were dropped.

In this clip King describes how he was doing the washing up in his kitchen one Saturday morning when he heard a voice say ‘Prepare to become the voice of interplanetary parliament.’ He stepped outside, and met Aetherius, an Indian-looking gentleman who lives in the Himalayas when he is on Earth, and who had come to inform King of his mission. King explains that Aetherius also lives on Venus, and when he goes there he alters his molecular structure to suit the environment on that planet. Aetherius and his fellow Venusians, as well as people from other planets, such as Saturn and Mars, fly across space in UFOs. These are completely real and material, and if you fired a 16mm shell at them it would not hurt them because of their defensive shields. Saturnians are like us, but have no pupils to their eyes.

The interviewer politely asks if he could talk to Aetherius. George King agrees, but says he will have to get into a trance. He duly puts a pair of blindfold goggles over his eyes. These look somewhat like the shades worn by Agent Smith in the Matrix films, so I was half expecting King to saying something sneering and condescending about ‘Mr Anderson’ before launching into Kung Fu moves as robots attack. Fortunately, he doesn’t. After a few moments snorting, Aetherius’ voice emerges. In answer to the interviewer’s question, he confirms he is Aetherius. The interviewer then asks if he can tell them where he is, if it’s a UFO or Venus. Sadly, he can’t, to the interviewer’s obvious disappointment.

The interviewer then states bluntly that there are many people, who would say that King is sincere, but deluded. What could he say to convince them otherwise? King replies that the UFOs are solid and real, and that not only he but his mother has flown on them. She had to walk through a field to get to the saucer, which had made her shoes very muddy.

When the interviewer asked King why Aetherius and his fellow space brothers wanted to make contact with us, King replied that they were worried about our situation. Not just the political situation, but our moral development. If we were Christians, we should diligently follow Christ’s teachings. If we were Buddhists, we should properly follow those of the Buddha. If we were Hindus, we should be the best Hindus.

Throughout the clip, there are shots of others in the studio carefully listening to what was being said. At the end of the interview, the questioner states that although many will consider Mr King sincere but deluded, nevertheless his cry of concern for our age is genuine and relevant.

The clip’s interesting as an example of old school broadcasting, where forthright comments could be made about the person being interviewed and their message or pretensions, while not holding them up to ridicule and stressing that they were quite right in their concern for the current moral and scientific situation of humanity.

The description of Aetherius as an Indian fellow is significant. Before he received his telepathic message, King had been interested in eastern mysticism. Aetherius clearly follows in the mode of the Theosophical Society’s Ascended Masters and Koothoomi, who were also supposed to come from India. In their case, they resided somewhere in the Himalayas. This was also a time when the Lux Orientis movement was influential, and many westerners believed that western spirituality had been discredited and people should seek enlightenment in eastern traditions.

King died a few years ago, and I think in his later years subjects of his revelations changed so that they were more about the ecological crisis and planetary consciousness centred around the Earth. Or at least, that was the impression I had.

1978 Beeb Film on Day Trip to Lundy Island

This comes from the BBC Archives YouTube channel, from the 70s programme Day Out. I think this might have been a local programme. It was shown after the evening news, about Ten O’Clock-ish as I recall. I think one of its hosts was Angela Ripon, but I can’t be sure. It travelled over the West Country, and the programme I recall most was about Simmon’s Yat in Gloucestershire. This village was preyed upon in the 18th century by a gang of naked highwaymen. What caused this nudity? They reckoned that people recognised you from your clothes, and so dispensed with them when committing their acts of robbery.

Lundy’s an island off the coast of Devon. It’s a small, steep place – the presenter mentions that at times the winds have blown the cows off the cliffs onto the rocks below. There’s a church, a pub and a local shop, from which he buys a postcard. This already has a stamp affixed, though it’s on the right side, not the left. This is because the GPO packed up the local post office sometime ago, so the local landlord opened his own post box and started selling his own stamps. They cost a penny more than the Post Office’s, which is to cover the cost of getting it to the mainland.

The island has a long and interesting history. The story mentions that its surrounded by many wrecks, and it’s a favourite of marine archaeologists. The archaeology department at Bristol University used to train some of their students on Lundy. It also has seals and a diverse array of sea life, and so I believe it was one of the first places in England to become an offshore marine nature reserve. In the early Middle Ages it was briefly a Viking base. In the 14th century it was settled by a community of monks. in the 16th or 17th centuries it was held by the Barbary pirates from north Africa before they were cleared off by Cromwell.

Back in the 1990s there were plans to hold a two-week gay Pride style festival there. The organisers were to make it a gay republic, issuing its own currency and with its own monarchy. It was cancelled, unfortunately, through lack of interest. I wondered if it was just too far away for most people, especially from the main centres of gay life in England, Brighton and Manchester.

1977 Programme on the Mysterious Gnome Kidnappings in Formby

This is another video from the Beeb Archive channel, and comes from a programme ‘Voice of the People’. It’s about a local crimewave in Formby when people had their decorative garden gnomes stolen. It started with one It began with the theft of one family’s beloved garden ornament, who was cut off at his feet because he was fixed to the ground. The thief left a ransom note demanding 25 pence left in an envelope at the local car park. 25 pence was worth rather more in them days, when I think you could buy cheap chews for half a penny and 2000 AD for 16p. The thief then started stealing others’ gnomes as well. The programme has a naturally jokey approach to the topic, talking about underground coppers hunting the thief and jokes about trying to restore the broken gnome with the National Elf Service. It goes on to speculate about a mad millionaire in his castle determined to have the biggest gnome collection of them all, illustrated by a suitably sinister figure on a piano. Eventually the thief put all the gnomes back. The only clue to his identity was that he had big feet by the foot prints he left behind.

I’m putting this up because there was a craze for such thefts as late as the ’90s, mostly done as pranks. The thief or thieves would steal the gnomes, but pretend it had gone for its holidays and so send back postcards to the family of the gnome from locations around the world. In America there was a similar craze for stealing the pink flamingos with which some families decorated their front yards. The landlords of one house, that had been let to students, found 100 such birds in their basement.

1964 Tonight Documentary on the Cave Dwelling Villagers of Troos in France

This video comes from the BBC Archives channel on YouTube, and is about the village of Troos, forty miles from Paris, where the people live in caves dug out of the hillside. The village used to be site of a medieval fortress. The people are troglodytes, a word that means simply cave dwellers, but it has unfortunate connotations of subhuman cavemen and women, which these people clearly aren’t. Their homes’ frontages seem otherwise unremarkable, except that they are more or less flat to the hillside. Inside, they have all the amenities of the average French house of the time. They’re cheap, and cool in summer and hot in winter. The locals would, however, prefer a modern house, and are being priced out of their homes by wealthy Parisians, who want a nice, fashionable holiday home. Just like so many rural communities are seeing their houses bought up and priced out of the reach of local people in Britain today.

There are people living in similar accommodation today. A few years ago I read an article in an archaeological magazine about a community in rural Scotland whose homes were similarly dug out of the local cliff. And people used to how their homes dug out of the cliffside in Bridgnorth. Bridgnorth is divided into an upper and a lower town, and to get to the upper town from one side means either using the funicular railway or taking a long, winding route up. And cut into part of the cliff face are homes very much like those of Troos. I know people from there, who said that the advantage of these homes was that if you needed an extra room, all you had to do was dig out. I think this was stopped along with further construction of such dwellings, by the local council because of fears it was weakening the hillside.