PHENOMENOMIX
the way. Indeed, the ship has been voted as one of the top 10 haunted places in the USA and now offers both ghost tours and paranormal investigations. Opting for full immersion, we enjoyed an entertaining evening in the bowels of the ship staring blankly at EMF meters, taking EVP recordings, and generally looking for any sign of ghostly activity. While our host appeared certain that there was ‘something’ on at least one of the recordings, we were less convinced.
What was undeniable, however, was that two of the security guards were seriously spooked and reported having their own weird experiences while on patrol: one young man in particular clearly believed that he had heard his name being called from behind. His fellow guard, a grandmother who worked in a hospital by day, admitted there were parts of the ship she didn’t like venturing into. “There’s good ones and there’s bad ones,” was her summing up of the ship’s ‘spirit’ presences.
Leaving the ghosts of the Queen Mary behind, we took the obligatory trip to Hollywood. But while many people walk up, down, and around Hollywood Boulevard looking for the names of famous stars they might recognise, just around the corner on Afton Place lies the Headquarters of the Aetherius
Society, an international organisation that is dedicated to using and spreading the teachings of advanced extraterrestrial intelligences. Once inside, we admired the immaculately tended flowers and garden, iron gates with a shimmering star-scape engraved into the metalwork and a crystal-ball topped fountain inscribed with the words “Service To Humanity Through Protection”. The ‘society’ or New Religious Movement was founded in the mid-1950s by English contactee George King, a London taxi driver who began his journey as a psychic medium and yoga master. After reading Adamski, he swapped the Great White Brotherhood for the Space People and in 1954, while washing the dishes in his Maida Vale bedsit, a voice announced: “Prepare Yourself! You are to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament!”
This was the first of hundreds of messages King received from the Cosmic Masters, including an extraterrestrial called ‘Aetherius’ who, it later emerged, lived on Venus. Over the next 30 years, King would continue to commune with Aetherius and other disembodied entities from Mars, Saturn and elsewhere in our Solar System. On one occasion he was ordered to go alone to a hill in Somerset where he met the Master Jesus, who landed
in a flying saucer. In 1958, King moved his HQ permanently to downtown LA and a number of his followers continue to live out their lives in a small community based around King’s former bungalow home. The shop sells Aetherius Society literature and tape recordings of King’s channelled messages from the Masters. All these contacts led King to develop his New Age religion to spread enlightenment, selflessness and ongoing action to protect the Earth from a range of threats from outer space and, more recently, climate change. But Greg Bishop notes that in 1997, soon after King’s death, the mass suicides of followers of the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult in nearby San Diego caused both the Aetherius Society and the Unarians to open up and explain “why they were not all like that bunch”. (For more on the Aetherius Society, see FT104:49, 270:38, 271:51-53; for Heaven’s Gate, see FT99:4, 32, 100:4, 3441)
As it happened we chose to visit on a day that most of the congregation were making their way up Mount Baldy, one of the Aetherius Society’s Holy Mountains. These are used for ceremonies that store spiritual energy as part of the society’s ongoing battle to save us from all kinds of natural disasters. Little did we know that, some 10 days after our visit, SoCal would
be rocked by an earthquake that measured 7.1 on the Richter scale, the largest tremor to strike the region in 20 years. The epicentre of the quake was the town of Ridgecrest, 240km (150 miles) north of Los Angeles – which sparked fears of further devastating quakes along the San Andreas fault line.
Oblivious to the impending threat, we did what all tourists do and went off in search of the Hollywood sign, then hit the six-lane freeway back to Orange before LA’s infamous rush-hour began.
Thanks to Chris and Sarah Bader and to Carolyn Waudby. We stayed at Ruta’s Old Town Inn at Orange: www. rutasoldtowninn.com/ and flew to LA by Virgin Atlantic. Ghost Tours of the RMS Queen Mary can be booked online at: www. queenmary.com/tours/toursexhibits/haunted-encounters/
FURTHER READING/WATCHING Adam Gorightly and Greg Bishop, ‘A’ is for Adamski: The Golden Age of UFO Contactees (Gorightly Press, 2018) Farewell, Good Brothers (Dir: Robert Stone, 1998)
2 DR DAVID CLARKE isa Principal Research Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, a consultant for The National Archives UFO project and a regular contributor to FT.