Word: haling
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...books). One of the exit statements posted on the Web last week explained that the last days of touring helped members "re-examine if there's anything that might hold any attraction for any individual...[Those] things...now seem such a waste of time." Soon the time was right: Hale-Bopp was in sight, and on March 20, 1997, UFO enthusiasts noted heightened activity in Arizona. The suicides began on March...
Given that far-out environment, it seemed only natural last November when amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek called in to report he had spotted and photographed "a Saturn-like object" trailing the approaching Hale-Bopp comet. But even the most jaded Bell fans were excited when Courtney Brown, an Emory University professor, called to make a patently ludicrous announcement: his team of three psychic "remote viewers" had focused on Shramek's object and determined it was a spaceship full of aliens. Furthermore, Brown claimed, he had a photograph of the craft taken by a "Top-10-university astronomy professor...
Last night, I repeated this ritual, this time scanning the heavens for Hale-Bopp. Dining halls had been abuzz with tales of sightings for days, and Harvard's armchair astronomers regaled whoever would listen with hyperbole and an occasional fact. Not wanting to miss out on the chance of four millennia, I turned my eyes skyward yet again. The same pea-sized white blob hung in the sky, and it was only after I cleaned my eyeglasses that I was convinced it was indeed a comet and not a piece of lint from the laundry room--piece of lint whose...
Astronomical charts may also have helped determine the timing of the Heaven's Gate suicides. They apparently began on the weekend of March 22-23, around the time that Hale-Bopp got ready to make its closest approach to Earth. That weekend also witnessed a full moon and, in parts of the U.S., a lunar eclipse. For good measure it included Palm Sunday, the beginning of the Christian Holy Week. Shrouds placed on the corpses were purple, the color of Passiontide, or, for New Agers, the color of those who have passed to a higher plane...
...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...