Wild Wild Archive: Analog Videotape of the Rajneesh Movement at the Oregon Historical Society

In 1989, local Portland television station KGW donated 512 U-matic videotapes to the Oregon Historical Society (OHS). Shot between 1983 and 1985, the collection consists of more than 300 hours of footage related to the Rajneesh movement in Oregon—when followers of the spiritual teacher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh set up an intentional community three hours southeast from Portland. The donation included minimal documentation and no finding aid. The tapes were the end result of several years’ worth of work by local camera operators and reporters at the news station. Ranging in location from downtown Portland to Berlin discos to the building of the town of Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, the tapes are a thorough documentation of a specific moment in history. For Oregon, it was an engaging story—one which the stations recognized as newsworthy almost immediately, though no one at the time could imagine how it would end.