In 1963, a film crew climbed Holdstone Down, a bare hill above the north Devon coast, to record something most outsiders would never otherwise see: members of the Aetherius Society gathered at one of the nineteen sites the Society holds to be a place of contact between humanity and the "Cosmic Masters" its founder, George King, said had chosen him as their voice on Earth.
The footage survives today in the South West Film & Television Archive, the regional collection that holds much of the moving image record of England's southwest, and is distributed on BFI Player as The Aetherius Society at Holdstone Down. It is not a dramatization and not a piece the Society itself commissioned. It is closer to a piece of accidental documentary evidence, a camera present at an ordinary act of the Society's own devotional life a few years after King founded the movement in 1955.
That the site itself is real and not a filmmaker's invention is independently confirmed by the Society's own present-day account of itself: Holdstone Down still appears among the holy mountains it names today, unchanged across six decades. The film is therefore a rare thing in the study of a new religious movement, an outside record of a specific, located practice, made close enough to the group's founding to show what its very early devotional life actually looked like.
Watched now, it sits at an odd angle to most media about new religious movements, which tend to arrive either as promotional material from the group itself or as retrospective expose built around scandal. This is neither. It is simply a camera, a hillside, and a service, left for anyone who wants to see what the Society's own members were actually doing in 1963.