Word: comets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Other acquaintances were aware of some of the group's odder beliefs. A man who worked with Higher Source for more than six years on several computer projects discussed the imminent coming of the Hale-Bopp comet with them. "They didn't know, but they felt it could be something other than a comet--that maybe it was a spaceship coming to collect them," the acquaintance says. He says he even joked with them about Jonestown once, but got little reaction. This man last heard from the group just a few weeks ago; they wanted help setting up some...
...time of the end, apparently, was last week. A recently posted "Red Alert" announcement on the group's Website hailed the Hale-Bopp comet as the "marker" the members were waiting for. In this belief, at least, Heaven's Gate cultists were not alone. According to a popular theory circulating on the Internet, a spaceship is hidden behind the comet--whether inhabited by benign or evil aliens is unclear. Astronomers say the image behind the comet in some photographs is a mere star...
...often in religious thinking, the sky figures importantly in the New Apocalypse. For centuries the stars have been where the meditations of religion, science and the occult all converged. Now enter Comet Hale-Bopp. In an otherwise orderly and predictable cosmos, where the movement of stars was charted confidently by Egyptians and Druids, the appearance of a comet, an astronomical oddity, has long been an opportunity for panic. When Halley's comet returned in 1910, an Oklahoma religious sect, the Select Followers, had to be stopped by the police from sacrificing a virgin. In the case of Hale-Bopp...
...mistake its own reflection for the face of God. Much of the time, those errors are nothing more than episodes of the human comedy. Occasionally they become something worse. This is what happened at Rancho Santa Fe, where foolish notions hardened into fatal certainties. In the arrival of Comet Hale-Bopp, the cult members saw a signal that their lives would end soon. There are many things about which they were badly mistaken. But on that one intuition, they made sure they were tragically correct...
...desire, the easy affability of a young Texan from Spur, who loved to perform in lavish productions like Oklahoma! and South Pacific, was transmogrified into the troubled charisma of a cult master in Rancho Santa Fe, California, one who last week led his 38 followers on a fatal comet chase...