Where were you 7 years ago? (Hale Bopp/Heaven's Gate)

I was driving from College Station, TX, to Austin for a party. I was following the comet in the sky the entire way, but without the vodka/barbituate/suicide pact thing. Pretty comet, though!
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=ibsys/2068915

Seven years ago, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult were found dead in a Rancho Santa Fe mansion after a mass suicide.

Cult leader Marshall Applewhite, known simply as Do to his followers, taught a belief that combined elements of Christianity with metaphysical and UFO subcultures.

Cult members believed that the coming of the Hale-Bopp comet signaled a time to shed their "earthly containers" -- their bodies -- and that a heaven-bound spaceship hiding in the comet's tail would come to pick them up once they were dead.

more...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=ibsys/2068915

I had been away from the Northeast for a year-and-a-half, and I missed it something fierce!

Not a good year for me by any means. I had several personal problems I was trying to deal with and school was being very hard on me. :(

Had a run from Miami to Burnaby, BC and saw the comet a little from Montana. Just a wonderful sight.

I can only imagine the clarity of the MT sky! Pretty sweet route, if you ask me.

The people on the East Coast don't know what they're missing. I tell them they haven't even begun seeing how many stars there are in the sky.

Five years ago I was working in New Haven, CT, and I hired a wonderful woman there who wanted to live closer to her family in Salt Lake, Utah...

She asked me about commuter trains from Denver to Salt Lake! As in, "Well I'll just take the train"

I took her aside for consulting.

and I was busy chasing around an almost one year old .

We talked about it a great deal in my little group; the teenage equivalent of water cooler talk. Lot of jokes made about "Bo" and "Peep," and a couple of absorbing conversations about mind control.

But I was a troubled youth trudging through the 8th grade in the western suburbs of Minneapolis.

still innocent of the changes ahead.

Time flies when you're growing old!

I remember hearing Jay Leno make 8 billion Do jokes like it was yesterday . . .

had just died and my Mother and I were out looking at the comet. I joked (using humor as a release for this terrible moment) that he was on the UFO on the other side. My Mom is a BIG believer in UFO's and it actually got her to laught at a moment when her world was crashing all around her. I'll never forget Hale/Bopp for that reason.

My husband did the lighting for the play and my son, at four years old, was the youngest regular actor. (There were a couple of evenings that younger children were on the stage, but he was there for every performance.)

We took our binoculars and telescope out the amphitheatre and watched the comet between scenes.

It's been 7 years already?

http://www.religioustolerance.org/dc_jones.htm

http://www.rickross.com/groups/jonestown.html

900 people... Jones had a following. All these other cult leaders are nutters.

Just after dusk Hale Bopp hung just over the down town Los Angeles sky line, the entire scene framed by the palm trees lining Eagle street. I would stand in the middle of my street, often with my ex holding hands, memorizing every detail.

Call me crazy but the L.A. skyline is beautiful on a clear night. I never gave it much thought, or assigned any significance to my view. Suddenly for a few days that all changed. I came to see the comet representing the works of the Great Spirit, vast, unattainable, untouchable, eternal, silently singing, unaware of it's beauty.

The comet was perfectly juxtaposed, hanging over a man made artifice, bright, garish, fleeting, vainly trying to mimic the cosmos above, and with the palm trees - so very L.A. I found it quite humbling, spiritual, and incredibly beautiful, and I knew I would never see the likes of something like that again.

My wife is from Alhambra, and she's very familiar with the East Side.
Best to you --

watching Hale-Bopp in the sky. It sure was a beautiful sight...probably the most beautiful of all the things I have seen in the heavens...and I've seen all 110 of Messier's objects in a telescope. :)

I told my then 7 year old daughter that I'd wished for the comet for her birthday. Money was a lot tighter then and she was a lot more innocent than the 14 year old is today. :)