Word: bopp
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...Brightest Light The heavens were lighted last spring by the magnificent Comet Hale-Bopp, which whizzed within 120 million miles of Earth. Countless people turned out and craned up to see it--among them 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult who took the comet as a sign that it was time to take their lives. That they did, leaving a dark blot on a brilliant event...
...Gate cult mixed phenobarbital, applesauce and vodka, slipped plastic bags over their heads and persuaded themselves that they were headed for a better life among the stars. Their suicide--the most lethal of the year's mass emotional activities--came in response to the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, an astronomical surprise that incited other public anxieties about the coming millennium...
...French writer Roland Barthes used to argue that every truly moving photograph has a single absorbing spot, a place that calls forth feeling. He called it the punctum, Latin for puncture or point. It could be something as simple as the little smudge that is the comet Hale-Bopp, which was for a while the world's most celebrated dot. Since it was an ancient dot, and one that got around a lot, it shed an astral glamour wherever it appeared. Like the President or Sharon Stone, it made everything, even whole mountain ranges, look more consequential beside...
...former astronaut and new-paradigm scientist, I was a guest on Art Bell's radio talk show [NATION, April 14] on Feb. 16. To Bell's credit, I had the opportunity to make very clear that I saw absolutely no scientific evidence for any spaceship companion to the Hale-Bopp comet. But I also cited positive evidence for the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence through the UFO phenomenon. It is easy to use the Heaven's Gate tragedy to debunk the entire range of phenomena associated with possible visitations, ignoring government cover-ups of reverse engineering and of radical new concepts...
...earth is to be "recycled"? A UFO is hiding in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet? Human bodies are nothing but "containers"? In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare showed he understood this thinking: "But men may construe things, after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves." GARY GARSHFIELD Irvine, California...