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• c h a p t e r 1 2 • COMET HALE-BOPP, PLANET NIBIRU, THE MASS LANDING, AND HEAVEN’S GATE Recent years have seen a series of warnings that the earth faces a catastrophic collision with some wandering bit of space debris. This is always a possibility, but one wonders why these warnings arose so forcefully at the end of the millennium. After all, we have known about comets and asteroids for a century or so and have seen the craters their impacts leave, here and on the moon and other planets. We have had the potential power to deal with them for about thirty years, in long-range nuclear ballistic missiles . So why take alarm now? That the approach of the millennium could have an effect even on scientists gets little attention. Astronomers remain mute on the subject, but there is some speculation that the threat of these galactic intruders might have a desirable effect on the budgets of NASA and its suppliers, to say nothing of the arms trade in general. All have suffered with the end of the Cold War. The alarm may also have arisen in response to the spectacular crash of Comet Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter, as well as Comet Hyakutake’s close approach to Earth. These warnings died out for a while, but underwent something of a renaissance with the emergence of Comet Hale-Bopp. Its appearance was accompanied by news that brushes with comets appear to happen periodically , in reaction to “galactic tides” that bring increased activity every 30 million years or so.1 We are now within a million years of the next close call, if not an actual collision. It seems that minuscule orbit changes add a disproportionate uncertainty to comets’ courses, such that it would have been impossible to say for sure whether Hyakutake might have hit us more than a month in advance. But Hale-Bopp appeared to be something of a special case, at least where the Internet’s millenarians are concerned. 199 The excitement began November 15, 1996, with a message posted on the Internet. “Flash!!! This Picture Just In!!! What on earth could that Saturn like image be to the right of the comet? This picture was taken November 14 at 6pm Houston time (CST).”2 The message originated with a man named Chuck Shramek in Houston. He made the image with his own telescope and described it as showing something four times Earth’s size, ringed like Saturn, emitting its own light at uniform brightness. Shramek claimed that the “object and event [were] verified by legitimate astronomers worldwide,” but he also included the thoughts of some “remote viewers” in his Internet post. These remote viewers were purported clairvoyants who work with or for an Emory University professor named Courtney Brown at something called the Farsight Institute (http://www.farsight.org). They assessed the object as artificial, made using “borrowed technology probably as old as Atlantis.” While they could offer assurance that it was not a weapon, they could not tell what it was made of, though they were confident that it was formed of a combination of artificial and natural substances “within a matrix of thought.” They were also confident that it was under its own intelligent guidance and would somehow “interact with human DNA.” By the clairvoyants’ account, the object’s aim was to “awaken” us in preparation for galactic evolution. It was something like the mysterious black object in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The “Saturn-like object” (SLO), they declared, was alive, fully self-aware, and had telepathic abilities . There would be more of them headed our way. Its presence was the result of collaboration among many different races of space beings, including humans. Many other watchers for signs of the times, from every spiritual persuasion , jumped onto Hale-Bopp’s bandwagon. Sheldon Nidle, who had for some time been proclaiming an imminent arrival of aliens to save us from the destruction of our civilization by an imaginary intergalactic body he called “the photon belt,” quickly offered some “Mass Landings Information.”3 These “Mass Landings,” in Nidle’s prediction, would be the arrival of the Space Brothers to help us make the transition to the next evolutionary level, one of perfect spiritual being and unity.4 There was a “window” available for this to happen, from November 10 until December 17, 1996, or “8 Cauca, 7 Xul, 5 Eb till 6 Cib, 4 Mol, 5 • HEAVEN’S GATE • 200 [3...

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