World newsCult goes to await spaceship rescue
As many as 100 members of a Colombian doomsday cult, which believes that an extra-terrestrial spaceship will save the faithful before the world ends, have disappeared into the mountains of northern Colombia.
Followers of the Stella Maris Gnostic church, based in Cartagena, are convinced that civilisation will be destroyed next month by a disaster, according to relatives.
The sect's half-finished temple in the Caribbean coastal city was left deserted. "My daughter told me she had to leave because a cataclysm was going to occur and that she had to go to a high place to meet extraterrestrials who would save them from the end of the world," said Andrea de Echenique
The congregation set off for the Sierra Nevada mountains over the weekend. "The leader of the group told them the world was going to end in August and that they had to go to meet some aliens," said Pedro Perez, who also has relatives in the sect.
The leader, Rogelio Perea, has been accused of forcing members to sever family ties. He apparently assured followers that the Sierra Nevada was where they could contact a spaceship.
"People had told us that certain practices of the Stella Maris group were fanatical and dogmatic," said Wilson Martinez, an official of the Gnostic church in Bogota. "They had been talking about a meeting with UFOs." Gnostics believe in the spiritual but not historical existence of Christ, he said.
South America saw one of the worst modern mass suicides when in 1978 more than 900 Americans in the so-called People's Temple killed themselves in Jonestown, Guyana.
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