ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 10, 1997 TAG: 9704100030
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MONROE, N.C.
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE|
Both groups are among several that share a spiritual belief centered on pending visits from friendly UFOs.
Daniel Smith of Monroe agrees it was tragic that 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves, in order to shed their ``containers'' and be spirited away on a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
But he says it's just plain wrong to liken him and his fellow Unarians to the Heaven's Gate bunch. Unarians know for a fact that the first spaceship isn't due until 2001, he says.
``People have tried to say that if we believe in extraterrestrials, then we're like them,'' says Smith, 51, an economic consultant who directs the North Carolina branch of the California-based group.
``That's like saying all people who believe in God are the same. We have nothing in common with those people. They were trying to escape problems of life. Our space brothers have taught us we must learn to work out our problems.''
Still, both groups are among several that share a spiritual belief centered on pending visits from friendly UFOs. From the Cosmic Circle Fellowship in Chicago to Hawaii's Extraterrestrial Earth Mission, there are about 15 to 20 groups with doctrines that mix spirituality and science fiction, said Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion.
The Unarians are perhaps the oldest and best known. Their doctrine is based on the teachings of Ruth and Ernest Norman, a physicist who in 1954 claimed clairvoyant contact with extraterrestrials.
Followers call it a spiritual science, not a religion and certainly not a cult - a point Smith has made in more than a dozen interviews given since the Heaven's Gate suicides.
``We don't live together,'' Smith says. ``Most of us are home study students, live ordinary lives, work in ordinary jobs and raise families.''
Unarians claim to have received 5,000 mental transmissions from 60 worlds - all dealing with a new energy science known as reincarnation physics. The resulting 150 books teach how the mind functions and how to work out present-day problems rooted in negative past life experiences. Smith explains with a personal example: Feelings of guilt and fear that he endured for years were cured when he learned of a past life on the lost continent of Atlantis.
``During the decline of Atlantis, many false religions cropped up, and I was involved in one. I was a leader, a priest, who misled many people. This caused the guilt,'' says Smith, a former Baptist who joined the Unarians in 1974.
The nonprofit group, based in El Cajon, Calif., doesn't actively recruit, but claims a growing membership that stands at 5,000 members worldwide. It says another 475,000 have read its books or viewed its videos.
About seven meet three times weekly in Smith's home for informal classes in ``past life therapy.''
Followers are well aware that some people might consider that odd.
``Life is a school, and everybody is in a different grade,'' he says. ``If there are people who find it odd, it's because they're in the first or second grade and can't conceive of what people are doing in the fourth or fifth grades.''
As for the ship headed to Earth - and expected to land in the area of the Caribbean Sea in 2001 - Smith says we have nothing to fear.
Six years ago, he had an out-of-body experience that took him to a spaceship, where a beautiful, blond, blue-eyed woman engaged him in a lot of mental telepathy.
``Their purpose in coming here,'' he says, ``is to polarize the planet with positive healing energy so people will begin to lose their fear and open their minds to new ideas.''
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Heaven's Gate Cult was wrong, Unarians explain;by CNBspaceship is not due until 2001. color.