Religion:Cosmic Circle of Fellowship

Cosmic Circle of Fellowship was a mid-twentieth century UFO religion that claimed to offer interdimensional travel through deep relaxation. During the 1950s, it became connected with the contactee movement, people who believed they had been in contact with extraterrestrial beings. The Circle was founded by a postman named William R. Ferguson.

William Ferguson

Before World War II Ferguson was a proponent of what he called "absolute relaxation," a state in which, so he claimed, not only the mind but also even the body and soul may temporarily cease to exist. After about a year of experimentation with this state, Ferguson said he was able to transport himself to the sixth and seventh dimensions, where he studied the forces of creation in action. Each time upon returning to earth, Ferguson found his body no longer existed and he had to re-create it by strenuous psychic exertions.

After World War II Ferguson began to channel techniques for bodily healing and increased spiritual development from a friendly pan-dimensional entity called Khauga. The resulting "cosmic healing lore" was promptly offered for sale. One of Khauga's prize techniques, the mystical "clarification" of water to give it the ability to heal almost any disease, resulted in Ferguson being charged with medical quackery and the perpetration of medical fraud, being convicted, and being imprisoned in 1947. After leaving prison, with flying saucers suddenly in the news, Ferguson reported he had travelled astrally to Mars, telling his few followers that Mars was about to send a friendly expedition to the earth.

Founding

When the earliest contactee reports gained nationwide publicity in 1953, Ferguson promptly jumped on the George Adamski bandwagon. He too reported visits from friendly Space Brothers from Venus, and trips aboard their space ships. Like contemporary contactee Orfeo Angelucci, Ferguson revealed that the space men and their ships exist in higher dimensions and can therefore appear in and disappear from our own space-time at will. Like almost every other mid-1950s contactee, Ferguson quickly founded a religious cult to popularize the revelations he was receiving from the Space Brothers: the Cosmic Circle of Fellowship (1955), and also published the usual contactee book, A Message from Outer Space (also 1955). How the Martian and Venusian spacemen got along with Khauga was not at once made clear, but Khauga's medical quackery was readily incorporated into the new Cosmic Revelations. Eventually Khauga was revealed as one of the many Sons of God, advanced spiritual entities which have evolved on every solar planet, and on most planets in other solar systems. The cult continued to emphasize the "absolute relaxation" methods first described by Ferguson in 1937 as the certain way to achieve super-consciousness, shed the material body and earthly concerns, and prepare spiritually for the Second Coming (of Jesus, not Khauga).

After Ferguson's death in 1967, the cult appears gradually to have dwindled out of existence.

References

• Lewis, James R., editor, UFOs and Popular Culture, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2000. ISBN:1-57607-265-7.