Word: fe
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...last week, in that spacious Rancho Santa Fe mansion, with the bougainvillaea in full bloom outside, 39 bodies were laid out on their backs on bunk beds and mattresses, looking like so many laboratory specimens pinned neatly to a board. Each was dressed in black pants, flowing black shirt, spanking-new black Nikes. Their faces were hidden by purple cloths, shrouds the purple of Christian penance. Those who wore glasses had them neatly folded next to their body, and all, helpfully, had identification papers for the authorities to find. The house, more than one awed witness noted, was immaculate, tidier...
...presence among the dead of the brother of a Trekkie demigoddess was only the most startling intersection of reality and science fiction. The cult's work space in Rancho Santa Fe was decorated with posters of alien beings from The X-Files and E.T. On the farewell tape, a cultist even brings up Nichols' oeuvre in explaining his decision to leave behind his human "container": "We watch a lot of Star Trek, a lot of Star Wars, it's just, to us, it's just like going on a holodeck. We've been training on a holodeck...
...least one woman who died in Rancho Santa Fe offers a hint in the farewell videotape that all these people may not have been quite as happy as they seemed: "I don't have any choice but to go for it, because I've been on this planet for 31 years, and there's nothing here...
About the most exciting event in Rancho Santa Fe is when Victor Mature, 82, the movie actor famed for playing Samson decades ago, putt-putts in his golf cart to the post office each day. The area 30 miles north of San Diego is a historic landmark, California's oldest planned community and a place so beautiful a writer in the 1940s described it as "the pocket where the Creator keeps all his treasures. Anything will grow there." Live and let live, in fact. In the gated community of 2,500 million-dollar homes, the cult members rented...
...onslaught of pop psychology that has followed the grim discoveries at Rancho Santa Fe, so-called mind control experts have speculated that the fault somehow lay in the tech world, that something about the Web explained Heaven's Gate and the isolation of its members from the cushioning norms of society. Not true. The cult had been around for 22 years, and had seen better days. Most of its members were Web novices at best. Yet in some ways, the Web was made for groups like this. For it is not the culture of the Internet, but its utility...