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.

CJ on the Ideology Driving the Distinction Between Ghosts and Poltergeists

Yesterday CJ put up yet another fascinating piece about ghosts and parapsychology, in which he attempts to develop and clarify some his own ideas on the subject. I’ve been responding to the other pieces he’s written about it, in which he’s also covered UFOs and the social stress theory of paranormal sightings. My comments have been well received by him and he hopes other people will do the same.

Before the 19th century, ghosts were a noisy lot. They moaned and rattled chains in haunted houses, and when they appeared to witnesses spoke. Often this was to complain that their physical remains were unburied and they could not rest without them being found and given a decent send off. Other times it was a dire warning about their post-mortem state and the sins that had led them there. One ancient Greek writer recorded that decades after a particularly bloody battle the ghosts of those slain used to rise up regularly to talk to the local farmers, giving them advice on the proper way to cultivate their vines. Then in the 19th century a change occurred. Instead of being noisy and communicative, ghosts instead became silent visions. There have been at least one bit on the history of ghosts. The one I remember was by Finucane, which, if I recall correctly, was published by the Humanist publishing house Prometheus Books. This apparent change and others in spectral behaviour supports the sceptical argument that ghosts, whatever they are, aren’t spirits of the dead but more likely a psycho-social phenomenon, changing as society and expectations of what ghosts are and how they should behave change.

The Magonian’s reviewed one of these books way back in the 90s, and concluded that the apparent reduction of ghosts to silence was bound up with Victorian attitudes towards the lower orders. Ghosts, like proles and tradesmen, were things that should be seen and not heard. The Society for Psychical Research, set up in the 19th century to examine ghosts and other phenomena, thereby recorded ghosts as noiseless. In his piece yesterday, CJ described how his research decades ago convinced him that no such change in the ghost phenomenon had occurred and that ghosts were definitely not, or not always, silent but were often noisy. Going back through the SPR’s literature, he found out that he wasn’t the only person to make this discovery, but that Tony Cornell and Gauld had also come to the same conclusion at the tail end of the 1970s. So why did the SPR, dedicated as it was and is to the objective study of the paranormal, decide that ghosts were a visual, quiet phenomenon?

The answer lies in the fraught relationship the early SPR had with the Spiritualists and their own theory on the origins of ghosts. During its investigations, the SPR debunked a number of fraudulent mediums. This led to the organisation being viewed by Spiritualists such as Stainton Moses and others as hostile and determined to discredit Spiritualism and other psychic phenomena. As a result, Moses and the other Spiritualists departed from the Society. One of the other organisation the SPR managed to alienate was Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Blavatsky claimed, amongst other psychic powers, to be in receipt of messages from Koothumi and the other Ascended Masters. These took the form of physical letters fluttering down from the ceiling at the Society’s meetings. The SPR was called in to examine the phenomenon. Their man was a lawyer, who already had under his belt the metaphysical scalps of various fraudulent mediums. He examined the house, and found that there were gaps in the floorboards in the room immediately above that in which Blavatsky and co held their seances. These were large enough for someone to post one of these metaphysical letters down to the room below. His report concluded that this was the most probably answer. Understandably, Blavatsky and her supporters were very definitely not pleased and there was a rift between them and the SPR until the 90s or so. The SPR then issued another report repudiating the findings of a century or so before and concluding that the appearance of the letters was genuinely mysterious and paranormal.

In fact there are very good reasons for doubting Blavatsky’s claimed mystical powers. Ireland’s greatest modern poet, W.B. Yeats, fell afoul of her for daring to question the truth of her spiritual pronouncements. Blavatsky claimed that if you crushed a flower at the time of the full moon, and placed a jar over its remains and allowed the moonlight to shine through, you would see the spirit of the flower. Yeats noted that it was a full moon that night when Blavatsky said all this, and suggested they try it. At which point Blavatsky threw a strop, and Yeats ended up being ejected from the Society. On another occasion, Blavatsky claimed to be able to levitate a glass. ‘Go up,’ she said, and it rose up. She then commanded it to go down, which it did. The demonstration of psychic powers would, however, have been even more convincing had she not been holding the glass at the time. There has been a book on the Theosophists written from a sceptical standpoint, which also suggested that Colonel Olcott, an American army officer who was one of its leaders, was there as part of a scheme to weaken British rule in India. It also suggested that Olcott’s interest in the young Indian lad, Krishnamurti, whom the Society had decided was the new messiah, was less than spiritual. In the end, Krishnamurti broke with the Theosophists by teaching that everyone had the spiritual power to save themselves. He also aroused the scorn of the late Fleet Street TV critic, Clive James, when he was interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge on British television in the 70s. Muggeridge was deeply interested in religion and questions of faith. On his programme, he remarked on how Krishnamurti seemed serene and self-realised. What was the old boy’s secret? The secret, the great sage told him, was simple: stop thinking. James was not impressed, as society, in his hopelessly two-eyed view, has advanced through a lot of people thinking very hard. This included whoever had made Krishnmurti’s very elaborate shirt and particularly the whole through which he stuck his self-realised bonce. Another friend of mine had absolutely no time for the Theosophists because of one of their spokesmen’s apparent attitude to the Holocaust. One of them had appeared on British TV back in the 60s or so, and stated that Hitler’s attempted extermination of the Jews was all due to their bad karma. He very definitely wasn’t impressed at this noxious opinion, and I’ve no doubt very many other severely normal Brits shared his views.

But back to ghosts. The SPR’s characterisation of ghosts as a purely visual phenomenon wasn’t due to social snobbery. The Society at the time was indeed packed with the great and good of Victorian and Edwardian society, including scientists, philosophers and politicians, some of whom became Prime Minister. It’s a very far cry from the situation today, where there is considerable official scepticism to the paranormal and parapsychology is regarded by many as a pseudoscience. Despite its socially elevated membership, the Society weren’t snobs. They would pay the membership fees of ordinary, less lofty individuals who wished to join but couldn’t afford to. The reason for their view that ghosts were quiet and silent came from their theory for the origins of ghosts. They believed that ghosts were a kind of hallucination generated by another mind. This could be a living person or deceased. Thus, spooks, when they appeared, were silent. They coined the term ‘telepathy’ for the mental faculty they believed allowed people to create such psychic images. In the 1920s the English philosopher C.W. Broad believed in the reality of telepathy, reasoning that it must exist to allow the spirits of the departed to communicate in the hereafter.

But the SPR did not believe that telepathy was the only psychic ability. They also believed that some individuals could move objects by the power of their minds, a phenomenon they named psycho- and telekinesis. The two terms are almost synonymous, but CJ states that psychokinesis particularly means movement by a mind. Hence, presumably, that poltergeists were also the creation of a mind, including that of the person at the centre of the phenomenon. The SPR therefore drew a distinction between ghosts – silent and visual – and poltergeists – physical and audible. Ghosts that made a noisy were placed in the poltergeist category. CJ found that there was in fact no distinction between the two, and so coined a new term, polterghosts, to make this clear. Ghosts could also make a noise and throw objects about.

I suspect that the Magonians’ view that the SPR’s ideological decision that ghosts were purely visual was due to social snobbery comes from the experience some of them had with various leading members of BUFORA, at one time the leading British UFO organisation. Although I wouldn’t like to say this is the case now, some of the leading lights of that organisation had very right-wing view. They recalled a talk at one BUFORA meeting by a man, who stated that when the UFO aliens finally took over the world, they would restore it to its traditional agricultural economy and social order, which they would rule ‘with a rod of iron’. Which suggests that this chap was a member of the aristocracy and hankered after its restoration after it was deposed by the growth of mass, industrial society. He, and other, similar members of BUFORA, also apparently viewed the UFO phenomenon as a weapon against modern science and the low social origins of the men and women who pursued it. Instead of properly brought young ladies and gentlemen from the public and grammar schools, who studied respectable subjects like the Classics, these were frightful plebs from the secondary moderns. When two scientists from Cambridge appeared at a BUFORA meeting, the host sneered at them as the ‘petty godlings of the laboratory’. Not surprisingly, the pair didn’t appear again.

I think in fact many of Britain’s leading scientists were probably educated at public and the former grammar schools. As for the situation today, in the few times I’ve had anything to do with the established UFO societies, including BUFORA, I haven’t seen any social snobbery. Back in the 90s I went to a couple of meetings of the Bristol UFO Bureau, which was one of the country’s oldest UFO organisations, dating from the 50s. Rather than being anti-science, many of their members were also members of the city’s Astronomical Society. At one meeting one of the lecturers from Bristol university gave a talk on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, while a lady from the Astronomical Society talked about Mars and where it could be seen in the sky at that time of year. I think they may have invited someone from the local Rationalist Society to attend the meeting as well. When I went again, a little while later, I found a copy of the Rationalist’s account of the meeting. He described it as marked by hysterical credulity, at one point writing ‘What wouldn’t they believe?’ This clashed with my experience, which was that the people there listened quietly and respectfully, as people usually do at meetings, and that the tone was quietly inquisitive rather than highly charged emotionally. Yes, before the meeting some people were discussing whether NASA had faked the moon landings, but this was because there was a piece about that conspiracy theory and the photos from the Moon’s surfaced that apparently showed this in that day’s issue of the Independent. Bristol’s Rationalists evidently shared Carl Sagan’s fears that the West was about to drown in a tidal wave of superstition, abandoning science for astrology and the New Age. Despite the popularity of the X-Files on TV at the time, I saw little evidence at the BUFOB meeting that there was any kind superstitious hysteria there.

There have been very many changes in the ghost experience and accounts of the afterlife over the centuries. In the ancient and medieval worlds apart from ghosts there were also walking dead, the corpses of the deceased wicked rising from the grave to spread disease and death as recounted by William of Newborough in his Chronicle. Apart from zombies in Haiti, I am not aware of any similar phenomena in the modern west beyond the flicks of George A. Romero and other ‘orror directors. But if the ghost phenomenon hasn’t changed, and the spooks are as noisy and disruptive as they ever were, then this does provide evidence that they’re an objective phenomenon and not a socially determined hallucination.

For further information see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/12/ghosts-working-notes-part-3/