Word: bopp
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Comets have long been associated with war, upheaval and disaster, and as the light from Hale-Bopp faded in the California sky early last Tuesday, U.S. Army Major Russ Oaks got a taste of all three. Oaks was participating in one of the Pentagon's most ambitious and elaborate war games ever, a laser-gun battle pitting a 2,000-soldier "experimental force" against the toughest men in the war-game business, Fort Irwin's vaunted 2,000-man "opposing force." OPFOR had the home-turf advantage, with a 90% win record in this 20-sq.-mi. stretch...
...pockets of their shirts, making identifying the bodies easy. While the how seems clear, the why is not so easy. It appears that members may have simply believed that their time was up. They described on video their obsession with the arrival of the comet Hale-Bopp - to them, the signal to them that it was time to leave this world to head to what they called the Next Level. They believed that the way to get there was by shedding their physical selves in order to board a UFO trailing the comet...
...each had taken his hemlock, to a degree, independently, to avail themselves of a rare opportunity to attain the afterlife. "We fully desire, expect, and look forward to boarding a spacecraft from the Next Level very soon (in our physical bodies)," reads the "Heaven's Gate" website. "Hale-Bopp's approach is the "marker' we've been waiting for. . . We are happily prepared to leave "this world' and go with Ti's crew." That craft was to be lurking in the wake of the Hale-Bopp Comet, apparently ready to take willing members along on a passage to bliss...
Speculation reached a fever pitch last November when Chuck Shramek, an amateur astronomer based in Houston, Texas, announced on a nationwide radio talk show that he had photographed a "Saturn-like object" that seemed to be following in Hale-Bopp's wake. Shramek's breathless claim elevated Hale-Bopp fantasies from supermarket tabloids to the mainstream press and generated thousands of posts to message boards and astronomy home pages on the Internet. One fast-spreading rumor had it that the object was an alien spacecraft four times the size of Earth...
...determined that the "object" in it was an ordinary eighth-magnitude star. After posting his conclusions on the Net, Hale became the target of a flood of hate E-mail, much of it accusing him of being part of a conspiracy to suppress the true nature of Hale-Bopp...