Cosmic Voice

History

The Aetherius Society was founded in London in 1955 by George King, a former London taxi driver who, on a Saturday morning in May 1954, reported a disembodied voice in his bedsit instructing him: "Prepare yourself! You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament." The Society incorporated the next year, set up offices at 14 South Road, Southall, and began publishing Cosmic Voice as the public record of communications King claimed to receive from a council of Cosmic Masters resident on other planets, particularly Mars Sector 6, Venus Sector 9, and Saturn Sector 26. Jesus of Nazareth was identified in the framework as the spiritual representative of Venus.

The June 1956 issue held in the archive is one of the most theologically explicit early Aetherius Society documents. King describes "literally shaking with His Great Power from the heart lotus upwards" after the Caxton Hall event. The chakra-system vocabulary, the references to "Kali Yuga" as the present age, the description of being "specially trained to enable me to withstand tremendous power from the higher dimensions" are all present in this single issue. So is the institutional infrastructure: helpers who reported audience reactions to King after the event, a regular correspondence with members described as students, and a public meeting circuit centred on Caxton Hall and other London venues.

The intellectual provenance of the Aetherius Society runs directly back through Meade Layne's Borderland Sciences Research Associates and the Mark Probert seances documented in Round Robin from 1948 onwards. Layne's "Memorandum Concerning the Flying Discs" of May 1949 had argued that the post-Arnold sightings were vehicles from an adjacent vibrational plane crewed by intelligences who condensed their craft to material density to interact with post-Hiroshima humanity. King's framework retains the core mechanism, the inter-planar projection of vehicles and intelligences, but reorganises it around a hierarchical pantheon of Cosmic Masters and a programme of co-operative spiritual work between humanity and these intelligences. The Aetherius Society's Operation Starlight, Operation Bluewater, and the later Spiritual Energy Radiator devices descend from this framework.

The Society's London public profile in this period included frequent press coverage, lectures at Caxton Hall, and a growing membership in both the United Kingdom and the United States. King relocated the Society's headquarters to Los Angeles in 1959, where it remains, with branches in London, New York, Detroit, Auckland, Sydney, Lagos, and Accra. Cosmic Voice continued publication and is still in print as of the most recent issues, making it one of the longest continuously published contactee-religious journals.