George King, The Command and the Founding of the Aetherius Society

George King was born on 23 January 1919 in Wellington, Shropshire. In the Second World War he was a conscientious objector who served in the Auxiliary Fire Service. By 1954 he drove a London taxi and lived in a modest bedsit at 18 Clifton Gardens, Maida Vale.

8 May 1954. A Saturday morning. King was doing the household chores. Then, he said, a loud voice spoke. "Prepare yourself! You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament." He saw nothing. No craft, no light, no figure. His followers call it The Command. From then on, he said, he was "Primary Terrestrial Mental Channel No. 1".

About a week later came a second visitor. A world-renowned Yoga Master entered and left through a locked door. The Society later named him as Swami Sivananda. He trained King in yoga, including "specialized exercises for contacting Cosmic Masters", and told him to form a group.

Shortly afterwards the transmissions began. Their source was Aetherius, a Cosmic Master King said lived on Venus. Aetherius was never seen. His words came through King in a yogic "Samadhic trance". Over 43 years King said he received more than 600 Cosmic Transmissions. Other messages came from "Mars Sector 6".

King gave up taxi driving. He held public sessions, often at Caxton Hall, and published The Cosmic Voice, sent to the Prime Minister, Buckingham Palace and President Eisenhower. Sources disagree on when the Aetherius Society was founded. One account gives 2 August 1956, at Caxton Hall.

1958. Holdstone Down, Devon. It was windy. "Dimly out of the corner of my eye I saw something in the sky." Then a being appeared before him. "I didn't see him walk up to me, I opened my eyes and he was there." He was very tall, in a long robe, with long brownish hair and radiance all around him. King said he knew, without being told, that this was Jesus, come from the planet Venus.

21 May 1959. The BBC programme Lifeline broadcast "Mars and Venus Speak to Earth". King went into trance and transmitted Aetherius. Also present were the Cambridge astronomer Dr D. W. Dewhirst and an unnamed Jungian psychologist. Coverage, the scholar Mikael Rothstein notes, was mostly negative.

Scotland Yard was watching too. In May 1957 the Empire News claimed the Society's peace messages showed a "bias to communism". A Special Branch inspector interviewed King at his Fulham home on 31 May 1957. King called his group a "religious and occult society, which has contact with Intelligences on certain of the other Planets." Officers monitored its rallies in 1958 and 1959. The verdict: "a crank, albeit a harmless one." The files were released under FOI in 2005 and summarised by David Clarke. The FBI kept a file too.

James Randi denounced the teachings as pseudoscience. King's titles of Reverend, Doctor and Sir are unverified. His doctorate reportedly came from a degree mill, and a Grant of Arms made in 1991 was annulled in 1992. Space probes showed Venus and Mars could not support life as he described it. No source offers a specific explanation for the voice in Maida Vale. Scholars place King in the history of religion instead, as a "mystagogue" and "religious virtuoso".

King died on 12 July 1997 in Santa Barbara, California. The Society outlived him. It keeps its London headquarters at 757 Fulham Road and its American headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard. Its members still call Holdstone Down holy. And it all began with a voice in a Maida Vale bedsit.