Spectrum was a long-running weekly radio documentary series which captured the essence of New Zealand from 1972 to 2016. Alwyn Owen and Jack Perkins produced the series for many years, creating a valuable library of New Zealand oral history.
Alwyn Owen visits the New World Family Commune just outside the University of California campus in San Francisco, California, USA. The commune of about 90 members is run by psychic medium Allen Michael once a commercial artist, now known as the Cosmic Messiah.
Commune member Elaine Freeman explains, “I heard the message that was coming about holding all things in common and sharing and creating a new environment and, little by little, I was able to make the transition from a buying-and-selling world into a communal world… This is also the University of the Universe”. Like most members she is in her mid-20s and, like the others, she is a vegetarian.
Three years ago, the group bought an old supermarket and converted it into a natural-foods restaurant with an adjourning hall for meetings and happenings. Jeff [Herdlooker] is one of the bakers, who trained for the orthodox ministry but is now a complete convert to the mixture of flying saucer dogma, Zen Buddhism and Christian prophecy that forms the spiritual fare of the New World Family. He speaks of the prophecy from the Galactic Command Space Complex that after seven years of tribulation, already begun, the earth will enter its New Age and become one family.
Elaine takes us through their living quarters; two huge, former-University fraternity houses, which interviewer Alwyn notes are spotless inside. There is also a nursery run by Helen for the 18 younger children. She leads the children through a song, ‘The Lord is good to me’. The older children attend state schools and Helen acknowledges in the conventional system, “they do have some problems”.
Work has a religious significance. LSD, say the family is Love is Service Done. There’s no sign of the other LSD (lysergic acid) but some of the soft drugs are taken. Elaine explains, “Drugs are used as what we call sacraments … so no one abuses it.”
A former-heroin addict member speaks of his slow acceptance of the communal doctrine, “I have seen the flying saucers so that part of the ideology is to me a reality and so I can accept the other part of the ideology which is that there is a psychic man who is here amongst us who is channelling telepathic thought from the beings … in the flying saucers. So that’s the basis of our everyday life.”
Elaine speaks on the initial scepticism of her parents.
A woman in the Communications Area speaks about their publications (including the 12-volume Everlasting Gospel of their messiah, Allen Michael) to the sound of typing in the background.
On meeting Allen Michael, Alwyn Owen notes he speaks with the jargon of his writings and looks disappointingly ordinary. Owen asks, “What is the response when you are called, simply, a nut?” Michael responds that he couldn’t care less and explains, “I am not trying to win friends or influence people … I only want true comrades who are interested in building a Heaven on Earth and those people will come by the million.”