January 10, 2025 • 43 mins
Episode 22: Lola & Meagan interview Frank Lyford, survivor of Heaven's Gate who left after 18 years--just a few years before discovering his friends and loved ones in the group had died by suicide. In part 1, he tells the girls how he began following the leaders Ti and Do, what it was like living a nomadic lifestyle with his "check partner," and what happened when they all settled in one place for "Class." They discuss being separated from the love of his life, how the rules became more strict and controlling, and how much darker things got after Ti got cancer. Stay tuned next week for part 2! Original Airdate: 03/10/2021
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you have your own story of being in a
cult or a high control group.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Or if you've had experience with manipulation or abuse the
power that you'd like to share.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Or showed us an email at trustmepod at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Trust me, Trust for trust me.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
I'm like a swat person. I've never lied to you.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I never live if you think that one person has
all the answers, don't welcome to Trust Me. The podcast
about cults, extreme belief and manipulation from two people who've
actually experienced it. I am Lola Blanc and my co
host is Megan Elizabeth. She is not able to join
for this intro today. Don't worry. She is safe, but
she was a part of the interview itself. So today
(00:48):
is rerun because we live in Los Angeles and obviously
everything is crazy right now. We will be getting back
to new episodes soon, but today is a rerun of
the first part of our interview with Frank Leiford, survivor
of Heaven's Gate. Frank was a member of the group
until he left after eighteen years, just a few years
before discovering that his friends and loved ones in the
group had died by suicide. In part one, he tells
(01:11):
us how he began following the leaders Tea and Doe,
what it was like living a nomadic lifestyle with what
was called his check partner, and what happened when they
all settled in one place for class. They discussed being
separated from the love of his life, how the rules
became more strict and controlling, and how much darker things
got after Tea got cancer. And we will come back
hopefully for part two next week. Obviously, for those of
(01:34):
you who don't know, we are Los Angeles residents, so
there is an ongoing active fire situation right now.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
We are both.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Safe, our producer Steve is safe, but there is a
lot to process, and many friends have had to evacuate
and or have lost their homes, and there is a
lot to deal with and a lot to process. So
I promise we will start doing new episodes again very
very soon, but in the meantime, take care of each other,
stay safe. Please donate to families who need it and
(02:05):
to organizations that are helping people on the ground. And
if you just want to hear some cult stuff, here
is Frank Lyifford. Welcome, Frank Lyford. Thank you so much
for coming on. Thank you, It's good to be here,
so happy to see you. I was just watching your
(02:27):
beautiful story in the HBO documentary and so nice to
get to talk to you in the flesh, well, in
the digital flesh. So Heaven's Gate, as many of our
listeners will already know, was a religious UFO cult in
the seventies, eighties and nineties. It was run by a
man named Marshall Applewhite and a woman named Bonnie Nettles,
who went by Doe and Tea, respectively. So the man
is Dough and the woman is Tea. And of course
(02:49):
they're most famous for committing a mass suicide in nineteen
ninety seven. And you, Frank, were a member for eighteen years.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Is that right correct?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
So can you please start us at the beginning? How
old were you when you first joined? Where were you
at in your life?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Like?
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Tell us about that?
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Oh it's going back, okay. I was twenty one. I
was a story I naive, twenty one year old kid
who had read some UFO books. I'd read about Edgar
Casey his book by Thomas Screw There was a River.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
What is that?
Speaker 2 (03:26):
That's just like a UFO book.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
No, Edgar Casey is a channeler. He's a trance channeler
in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Gotcha.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
He's also famous for several predictions about a state of
the world.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Gotcha. Gotcha?
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Anyway, I had a girlfriend at the time. We've been
together three years, and both of us were interested in,
or you know, entertained the idea of UFOs. We were
getting ready to move in together, and we were going
to go on vacation. First. We were in Calgary, albert
and we went on the occasion out to the West coast.
(04:05):
We're gonna dip down into the US and visit my
first cousin, David Vin Sindron. He was one of my
favorite people and I just really enjoyed his company. So
we went to Corbalis, Oregon, where he was going to school.
He was a perpetual student, and in the course of
(04:25):
our talking, he told us about a poster that he
had seen around Corbalis. It's a college town, and he
said he would show it to us the next day.
So he did, and it intrigued me. It intreated Erica,
and he was also intrigued. The thing that piqued my
(04:45):
interest was a line in the poster that first of all,
it was headed UFO two, Why they're here, who they
have come for? And when they will leave. There was
a line in there that peaked interested said something like,
if you have ever entertained the idea of a real
(05:09):
physical level of existence beyond the human level, you'll want
to attend this meeting. So I did. I wanted to
attend the meeting because I had entertained such a thing.
So the meeting was in a couple of days, so
we drove about an hour to the coast of Oregon
(05:32):
to a little place called Waldport, and the room was packed.
We got there just before the meeting was going to start,
so we had trouble finding seats. There may be one
hundred people in the room.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Oh, I can't imagine just a poster could get that
many people there. It seems crazy now.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Well, apparently they had pepper the whole area. Plus, as
we found out later, there was a commune in the
Woldport area of maybe fifty people who were all hippies
and drop out. A lot of them ended up joining
(06:12):
the group, so you know, there were I sensed differing
mindsets of the people there. There were some who were
who seemed quite excited and others who were standing at
the back as if you know, I'm not so sure
about this. I'm gonna see what it's like. And if
(06:33):
they sound crazy, I'm ready to leave, you know, ready
to bolt. There were two people at the front kindo
at that point. They were called Bow and Peep, and
they spoke for maybe an hour. Their talk kind of
had a blend of three different approaches to life. One
(06:54):
was the spirituality common of that time, using some of
the work from the book Seth Speaks, and he was
another channeled entity. They talked about Christianity and how the
same energies that they represented had visited the Earth two
(07:16):
thousand years ago in the form of Jesus. And they
talked about UFOs, how UFOs were the transportation of this
next evolutionary level above human that they were here to
tell people about. They said that if anyone was interested
(07:39):
in following them, they would teach those people how to
prepare to graduate to this next evolutionary level above human.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
So when you say they represented the energy of Jesus,
does that mean that they're like physically embodying Jesus, Like,
what does that mean exactly?
Speaker 3 (07:57):
We found out later they believe they were the two
witnesses talked about in the Book of Revelation in the Bible,
and they believed Doe the Man was the reincarnation of
Jesus and t the Woman was Doe's older member, those
(08:23):
elder those teacher long story short. At the end of
their talk, they said, if anybody's interested, there are son
here who have been with us for a few months,
and they will tell you where to meet to find
out more information. So after the meeting, I felt higher
(08:44):
than a kite. They felt like just brimming with energy
and like really excited that this was pretty cool thing
that we had stumbled across. So I was interested in
more information. And we had sat separately because of the
sparse seating. So I met up with my girlfriend Erica
(09:06):
and my cousin David, and we kind of compared notes.
Erica felt the same way. David wasn't quite so sure.
He was intrigued, but he went to go back home
and talk with his girlfriend, Susie Strom. So we went
back to Corvalis and it was the next day or
(09:29):
two days later we went to Eugene, where the follow
up meeting was. This was just a three of us.
Second Susie still wasn't able to come, and we talked
with some of the followers who had been with T
and Doo for weeks or months. I didn't really get
a definitive answer of is this legit? You know? Is
(09:52):
this a real thing? Do you have proof this is real?
But I got the sense from the people that I
spoke with that it was real enough in their experience
that it meant that it was worth leaving behind all
(10:13):
aspects of their human life to find out more about it.
So everyone I spoke to seemed sincere and truthful. They
weren't trying to pull the wool over our eyes. So
we decided we would take the next step. So they
took our phone numbers. They told us they would call
(10:33):
us in a week. They told us to go home
and tie up loose ends wow, and to get ready
to be on the road for a while. The belief
from T and Doo's talk and from these other followers
was that this process of preparation would take months. It
(10:56):
wouldn't take years, It wouldn't be long and drawn out.
That was thought, So they said, go home, tip sins
and we'll call you and tell you where to meet.
The next day, Eric and I left to go back
to Calgary to tie up loose sinds.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Wow, what was it that was appealing? You already have
this interest in UFOs and like extraterrestrial life, and it
just like really appeals to that interest that you already have.
Is it the community? Is it the shared experience with Erica?
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Like?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
What about it was the most appealing to you?
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Well, I felt like I had the opportunity to learn
things that I didn't think I could learn anywhere else.
So it was like this coole window into wisdom and
knowledge that I'd never experienced before. At least that was
my perception. I think Erica and David felt the same way.
(11:57):
So all four of us ended up joining the So
we received our phone call after a week. We had
tied up loose ends in Calgary.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
And when you say tie up loose ends, does that
mean just like quit your jobs? Talk to your family
like what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
What was your life like that you had to tie up?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well, there wasn't a lot to tie up. I was
a bartender at the time, so it didn't require a
lot of notice. I think Erica was a hostess somewhere.
We were both in the restaurant business. We didn't tell
anyone really what we were doing. We were warned that
(12:38):
if we did that, they would try to talk us
out of it. So we just told my parents, and
Erica told her parents, well, we're just going to travel
for a while around the US. We're going to meet
some friends. We're not sure how long we're going to
do it, but off we go, this is what we
want to do. And they didn't much of it until
(13:01):
weeks later when they didn't hear from us. Right right,
So we met in a place called Cherry Creek Campground
just outside of Denver. There were other people there, family camping,
but it seemed a bit like a carnival there because
all kinds of people from all different meetings were meeting
(13:24):
up there. You know, it was a little bit wild.
There was a lot of pot smoking, a lot of
hippie type people there, mostly young. I was a little
bit skeptic of did we make the right choice here,
But then you know, we found somebody who could tell
us what was going on, and then they moved everyone
(13:47):
off into groups of ten or twelve, there were two
group coordinators who had been with TENDO for a while,
and they briefed us on what they knew, and then
in a few days we moved to a different campground
and the whole thing was a vetting process in a
way of weeding out the people who were not serious.
(14:10):
And then we moved to a third campground a week later,
and at that point we had a chance to meet
with t and do for the first time kind of
an additional layer of the vetting process. When I met
and I felt like they could see my thoughts, Wow,
(14:32):
I felt dirty, you know, I felt like I was impure.
And I don't know how much of this was my
projection onto them, of putting them on a pedestal, but
they seemed like they were authorities of a kind that
I hadn't met before. Why dirty, impure, impure?
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, if somebody could read my thoughts, i'd feel pretty dirty. Yeah,
that's stressful. I get that.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Did you know about the asexuality of the group at
this point or that was that revealed sort of later on?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
They may have talked about it generally, we're going to
be getting rid of all the alien behavior eventually, but
they didn't really go hardcore into no sex whatsoever, I
think until a year later when we gathered again.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
So how long are you guys living on a sort
of a nomadic lifestyle. How long does this camping year?
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Eight? A year, a year, rut a year and we
crisscrossed the country. I don't know how many groups there were.
Is there were as many as two hundred and fifty
people doing that, But during that first year a lot
of people fell away, people went back to their lives.
Shortly after we met Tindo, Rick and I were split
(16:01):
up and we were given new check partners.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Can you explain what a check partner is?
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Similar to how Jesus instructs his disciples in the Bible,
you will go out two by two and spread the
good news. The purpose of a check partner is as
a sounding board. We were taught over and over and
over again to not trust our own minds, to trust
(16:27):
our check partners judgment more than our own, so that
if both of us had that trust, we would arrive
at a decision that was best for everything and everyone,
basically without the interference of the eco mind. If that's
not really how they described it, but the goal was
(16:50):
to between the two of you arrive at what your
older member would decide. You weren't using your own mind,
You weren't using your own history, your own logic, right,
you were both reaching up to connect with your older
member's mind.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
And did you find that, like decisions started to become better?
Were they clearer? And I mean that sounds like just
from a therapeutic standpoint, that it could actually work.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
If it's someone who's wise though, and has your bestag
in mind exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
That's the key is is were we really connecting with
our older member's mind and were they actually receiving valid
information from their older member's mind. You and Do presented
it to us as if there was a chain of
mind that we were reaching up and connecting too, in
effect psychically or intuitively. And then you know, Dough would
(17:51):
be reaching up to his older member's mind, and his
older member t would be reaching up to her older
member's mind, you know, not physically. Isn't on the surface
of the earth that was the goal.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
It's interesting, though, Meghan, you see it as a therapeutically sound.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
I think what I'm thinking of is like AA when
you think contrary action, where your first instinct sometimes if
you bounce it off another person, you get clarity into
how many decisions you're making based off of wrong information?
Speaker 4 (18:25):
Right?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Right?
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
See, my when I hear that, my first thought is, oh,
that's priming everyone to stop thinking for.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Themselves, trusting and trusting exactly exactly for sure.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Right and I would agree with that. Probably the biggest
lesson of my life is to trust my own integration rights.
And in effect, the teachings of Tin and Do were
telling me not to telling me that I didn't have
the answer that they did, and most people would be
(19:00):
imediately run away from that, you know, from anything is fringe.
Even at the point of hearing the first talk, they
would say, these people are nuts. They would run away
for some reason. That didn't happen for me.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
You were young and open minded and curious of me
I was.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
I haven't lost that open mindedness. I've learned a lot
about how to trust intuition. That was a slow journey
post cult, but that has ended up serving me well.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Right, So tell us more about this year. So, so
things aren't really strict yet. Have you changed your name yet?
Have you cut your hair yet? Or does that happen later?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
We all took new names right off the bet pretty much.
I don't think we cut our hair. As a matter
of fact, I grew a beard well help we were
on the road. It was brown and not white. But
the meetings that we held for recruiting were like the
blind leading the blind. We knew very little, you know,
we learned more as we went along. Things were passed
(20:06):
down to us through drips and drabs. The coordinators would
have a scheduled phone call with the people surrounding Tin
Doe once a week. The coordinators were given a phone
number to call, and then they would go to a
pay phone. There were no cell phones, this was nineteen
seventy five. And then the coordinators would come back to
(20:29):
their groups and share what they were given from the
helpers of T and DO. I think about twice maybe
we had a gathering. One was somewhere in maybe Colorado
with T and Do, and then there was another one
in Mississippi where we all got a chance to gather
and hear Tindo speak, And that was really exciting because
(20:53):
we had very little contact with them. I had been
partnered with two different partners. One there wasn't any connection,
and there wasn't any negativity. It was just both neutral.
So I said, is something supposed to be going on here?
Because I heard a lot of other partners had triggering
circumstances between their partnerships and that was supposed to be
(21:15):
of benefit if we could work them out. So I
was switched to another partner. His name was Amos, so
I took the name Andy. We were Amos and Andy.
At one point we were in Phoenix, it was midnight,
we had a place to stay, we were looking for it,
and we had also swapped cars, and it was part
(21:36):
of letting go of all of our human connections, including
our possessions. So the little feat that I had come
in with was long gone, and we exchanged it for
this old, beat up powder blue Plymouth with a hole
in the floorboard the driver's side you could see the
road going by. Had done nothing, so I had no
(22:01):
idea who the owner of the car was. At one point,
we're going to go straight in an intersection, and Amos
and no, I'll turn left here. So I turned left
from the middle lane and I was pulled over by
a policeman and we both looked kind of scruffy. We
both had beard's longer hair, so the policeman, you know,
(22:21):
was kind of suspicious of us right off the bat,
and he wondered why we were driving somebody else's car
and we didn't have a letter of permission or anything.
But he couldn't really find fault with our story, but
he still wanted to put me in jail for the
night because we had no money. So I spent the
night in the tempe Arizona jail. I didn't have any
(22:44):
cell mates, so it was a little bit scary. Yeah,
but I didn't sleep, and eight point thirty came around,
somebody came and let me out, so I was outside
looking for Amos. I saw the blue Plymouth parked and
he was in the back seat sleeping, so I thought
I probably had a better sleep than he did. Anyway,
(23:06):
we've spent the week in Phoenix when on a meeting,
we got one recruit from that meeting, so Amos decided
that he was going to go off on his own
with some payote buttons into the desert and talked to
his older member and determined what to do next.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
An older means like metaphysically older, right.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, wiser, okay, yeah, teacher.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Back then, it wasn't super clear that our older member
was Dough and those older member was Tea. We thought
we had to reach up into the heavens to speak
with our older member, right, So that was what he
was going to do, so that I was going to
be the tech partner with our new recruit. So he
(23:52):
and I set out in his Citron because Amos took
the Blue Plymouth and we were going to Florida. Remember
what we talked about, and I'm sure we talked about
what little teachings I knew of tend O's. And then
when we got to Miami, he decided that he was
going to wander the beach and simply talk to his
(24:15):
older member. So I ended up with the Citron. All
of the people in the group that I was in
had gone their separate ways. I was the only one
left in my group still following Tindo, so I had
no way of contacting the people around Tindo. Except something
(24:35):
almost miraculous happened. At one point, somebody at a place
where I had gone to ask for some assistance, food
and gasp the car they had received a call from
Kindo's helpers. So the people at this community center gave
(24:56):
me a phone number to call, so I did. I
reconnected with my Orish, the coordinator in Cherry Creek, Colorado.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Wow, a stroke of fate.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah. So they directed me to a group in New Mexico.
So I met up with them and there were ten
or twelve of us. So I was given a new
check partner and off we went again. That was kind
of the nature of the first year. We were like gypsies,
crisscrossing the countryside, holding recruiting meetings.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Quick note here. So I was kicking myself after this
interview for not asking why Frank still felt compelled to
go back even though everyone else had left and he
was all alone. So I asked him after the fact
and he told me this, and I quote, A big
piece of it was the carrot as always of my
belief in the opportunity to ascend to the next level.
And looking back rolled into that was the fear of
(25:45):
missing out. I see the fallacy of net now because
I feel I've grown more self aware, but it was
my motivation then.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
And where was Erica during all of this? She was
just in a different so called pod like right, and
were you guys still together or no?
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Okay? But when we met up in Biloxi. Everyone converged
in Biloxi, Mississippi. She had been in a similar circumstance
in that she and her check partner were off on
their own and their group had completely disintegrated. Oh, she
didn't know what to do because she still wanted to
(26:21):
follow teen Doe. So she was actually in contact with
my parents in Calgary because she didn't feel like her
parents would be sympathetic to her continuing interesting with ten
Do because my parents were a little bit on the
wu Wu side anyway, nice because my mother gave me
(26:43):
the Edgar Casty Book and they sent my parents sent
Erica some money, and then she somehow got in touch
with everyone ended up in Biloxi, Mississippi, and we worked together.
But I still had huge feelings for her right and
those actually never went away, except that I surpressed them
(27:06):
over the years.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Did you feel any resentment for being separated from her?
Speaker 3 (27:13):
No, Because our thought was, even if, even if she's
the love of my life, if this opportunity to gain
membership in a completely different kingdom level above the human level,
even if if she's loved my life, that opportunity is
worth letting go of the love of my life to me,
(27:36):
this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, but that
didn't stop me from, you know, feeling attraction for her
and feeling a deep connection with her.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Had you guys gotten more details at this point about
the teachings, Were you more juiced in onto what was
happening and where you were heading?
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah? More and more. As time went on, we learned more,
and the more time we spent with Tea and grow,
the more we learned, the more discipline we could apply
using the teachings that they had passed on to us,
and the more things made sense, the more we realized
what we had signed on for, and there was always
(28:21):
new information that we hadn't encountered before.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Tell us about when the class begins, what happens. You
all kind of settle in one area.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Right right, and it was wyoming where we were all
cold together. There could have been as many as two
hundred people there, and that was wild. That was like
I think of the children of Israel, you know, wandering
in a wilderness, the people who were unruly, and the
people were unruly there, it's crazy. So that was what
(29:01):
Tindo wanted to do, was kind of bring us together
into the same mindset and to help us establish some
kind of discipline. First, there was a lesson about kind
distant consideration, things that made sense. That was kind of
a first basic essential lesson, And a few weeks or
(29:23):
months later we had something called the seventeen Steps, which
were guidelines for how to live in ways that were
becoming two members of the next level, so that we
would fit in there, so that we wouldn't stick out
like a sore thumb, so that we wouldn't be.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Disruptive once you get to the higher plane.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
It's kind of like alien etiquette kind.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Of, yes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
I wrote down from some of what I heard, and
they included things like, can you follow instructions without adding interpretation?
Can you deliver instructions as you receive them so I'm hearing?
Can you follow orders and do as we say and
be controlled by us. They forbade things like clumsiness, procrastination.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
And even I'm not allowed in.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
And even having private thoughts? Is that right?
Speaker 3 (30:20):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yeah, that is wild. You're not allowed to have private thoughts.
And then also arousal was forbid.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
How did you feel about these steps? I mean, what
did you feel good about them?
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Yeah? Because we were already to a degree brainwashed in
a sense, we were motivated. You know. It's like this
carrot out in front of us that if you do
as we teach you, you will graduate, you will ascend
to this next evolutionary level. And during that first year,
(30:56):
in the first several years, the idea was we would
ascend while conscious and alive. We would ascend consciously into
this next evolutionary level above human.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
So tell us what vehicles means.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Vehicle is your body that you, as a soul inhabit,
which I would say is accurate to a degree, but
it was also considered the same as a car would
be to a driver. So the soul is the driver
of the car, of the vehicle. T would often say,
(31:32):
get your mind into your vehicle, meaning get your vehicle
under control of your mind. Kind of like a rider
on a horse. A rider doesn't let the horse run wild.
The rider keeps the horse doing what the rider wants
the horse to do.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
So getting your sexual urges under control is a big
piece of that, right I mean, so I am a
little familiar with that idea just having grown up Morman,
you were sexuality is you know, there's a lot of
shame around it, and I felt a lot, you know,
anytime I would feel an urge or like masturbate or anything,
I just felt so ashamed after Did you you know
(32:15):
how successful were you in suppressing those urges or did
you like feel shame? Like what was going on there?
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Well, when we were on the road, we're virtually always
in the presence of our check partner, and the goal
in sight in the assignment of check partners was if
you could easily be attracted to a member of the
opposite sex or a member of the same sex that
was your sexual orientation, then they would partner with someone
(32:46):
who you would not be attracted to. You know, that
was the goal. It didn't always work out that way.
I mean, that's why some of the people left is
because they found some they were attracted to and they
left with them. That's why I generally was partnered with
the male, right.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yeah, it's kind of like Mormon missionaries. Actually they're sent
out two by two and they're together twenty four to seven,
same sex, and yeah, their their behavior is just like
strictly constantly regulated by the presence of another person who's
trying to be righteous.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Right, living in the same community started after the first year,
So from like September of seventy six to sometime in
nineteen eighty one, we lived in campgrounds or on BLM land.
That's not lack lives Matter, that's Bureau of Land Management.
(33:40):
Or we would get permission from ranch owners who had
these vast expanses of ranch lands, who camp on their property,
and so we would be unhindered and not interfered with
by curious people. You know. That was about five years
when we lived outside. I was outside all the time.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
But then you get your cousin's trust fund kind of
starts funding a new lifestyles that right, I.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Think Rob Balsh had that backwards. Oh, his trust fund
was funding us from seventy six to eighty one, and
then it ran out. We ran it dry, and at
that point half of us had get work and then
pool whenever funds came in to the group communally. That's
when we moved into houses. So there were as many
(34:30):
as thirty six of us living in a house, and
yet we couldn't let on that there was that many
of us there, so only certain people could go outside
at that point.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Were you one of the people who went outside or
did you stay in the house.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
I was one of the people who worked outside, but
we had people called intercept or you know, they were
assigned to be the interface between us and anyone who
had come to the door, so that it wasn't a
different person each time. They would pretend to be like
the householder. Right. I worked outside the group initially as
(35:08):
a waiter, and this was near San Antonio.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And at any point are you you're you're really deep
in at this point, I'm assuming everyone sort of has
the same haircut, kind of like my hair, right, and
you know, dressing the same and living this lifestyle because
you're interfacing with the outside world war. Is there any
point at which you're questioning or does that not happen
till later?
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Periodically doubt would come up in my mind and I
would stuff it down because it was like the doubt
would be, is this really going to happen? Or you know,
can I really do this? Can I really hack all
of the requirements of this? Because you asked earlier how
(35:53):
successful was I regarding sexuality? And there were weeks and
months where I didn't think about it at all. I
was too busy, too focused on other things. And then
there were times when I would, it would be this
internal battle, like you say, guilt and shame about having slipped.
(36:17):
You know, there were slippages, and then there were major
slippages sensuality, sexuality. It was a major slippage. Over time,
we had more and more and more guidelines and procedures
and things to follow, ways of being and thinking and
acting and behaving and speaking and eating and sleeping, showering
(36:40):
in the morning. You know, everything was regimented.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
I remember hearing even the size of your pancakes was
regulated and how much syrup was poured on top of them.
That is a very high control group right there.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
When did the plan of the comet come into being?
Or was that always? No?
Speaker 3 (37:02):
That was when the world heard about the commet. That's
when they got the hair brained idea that it was
their time to leave. That was in nineteen ninety seven,
or the end of nineteen ninety six, when the comet
was discovered by two people, Hail and Bob.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
And you'd been out already by that point.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
Yeah, I was left in August of ninety three.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
I see, are you living with Doh and tee or
are you in a sort of like a separate household.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
For a while they did live in the same house.
Eventually they felt like they could think better being separate
from us, being separate from our vibrations, so they got
their own separate house, their own separate quarters. They rented
a smaller house Classic. So we had different star groups,
four different star groups that this started in campgrounds. I
(37:53):
think we had forty eight people. So we had formal
out procyon alt air and serious. We went by numbers
one through twelve, I think, and I was P one.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
That's your name, that was what you went by?
Speaker 3 (38:08):
That was I think we even had name tags.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Wow, P one one very dehumanizing. Is it kind of.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Like Harry Potter houses like Slytherin? Is that what it is?
Is that the vibe?
Speaker 3 (38:23):
Or well, it's kind of like that, but that's not
the vibe.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Not the vibe, got it right, No, but kind of
the same.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
No, it wasn't serious. It was nera. Yeah. So this
was eighty five and we were in Dallas, Texas. At
this point I had moved up from being a waiter
to being a medical receptionist and then I got a
job at Microsoft in their Dallas sales office. We would
(38:55):
go to work and we would pretend to be normal.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
I understand that feeling completely.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
I would pretend to be a husband to somebody, and
I had to go home to my wife at the
end of the day, and so I couldn't participate in,
you know, going out to the bar or whatever. You know,
if anybody would ask me to do that, right, Sorry,
I can't. I have other plans.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Can you tell us about when t got cancer and
what that experience was like.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
She had cancer twice. Once when we were in campgrounds,
she had cancer of the eye. She had cancer in
her eye, so she had her eye removed and she
had a prosthetic put in, and you know, everybody thought, well, okay,
that's good. I'm glad she had it taken care of.
It's over and done with. And then we moved into
houses around nineteen eighty one, and then nineteen eighty five
(39:50):
we learned that Tea was sick again and they had
separate quarters, so we didn't We didn't see TNDO for
quite a while, and then they had two helpers go
help T and do while he was sick. In general,
there were people who were trusted or by Tin do
to follow instructions, to be disciplined, to get things right.
(40:14):
These two helpers would go and stay at Tando's place,
called it crafts. It wasn't a house craft as in spacecraft.
So we had the main craft and we had air craft,
so we were all curious about what was going on.
And then it was only like two or three weeks
before Tea passed on and she had their cancer, so
(40:38):
the cancer head spread all throughout her body, right, and
this was never in the plant, of course, and so
we were all devastated, particularly Dough. He was heartbroken because
this was his older member. And he came for meeting
(41:00):
with us and said, I'm not sure we should continue
with the class, and virtually everyone said, no, we have to,
we have to keep going. We believe and you believe
in the next evolutionary level of humans, so you know,
we were all completely on board. So he continued, Was.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
It confusing, like, how did you reconcile this idea that
you know you are going to physically transform from your
vehicles with Tea's vehicle actually just dying. What was the
justification for that?
Speaker 4 (41:42):
Well, the party line, I guess was we were taking
too long, and yeah, he had to go on ahead
and prepare a place for us get ready for our graduation.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
And because we were taking too long, he decided to
exit her vehicle that way, right, but tease passing in
that way had a huge impact on those thinking about
how the graduation would occur, and that worked on him
over the coming months and years, to the point where
(42:18):
he began to entertain ideas of how we might do
our vehicles in which was entirely diametrically posed to the
way it was originally presented.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
How was it originally presented?
Speaker 3 (42:31):
We will be taken up in a craft while we're conscious,
we will ascend while conscious and alive.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
I'm going to leave that there for now. Come back
next week for part two. I promise there will be
some amazing, juicy, fascinating, interesting, compelling new episodes very very soon.
But for right now, we are sending much love to
our fellows, Southern California residents, and remember to follow your gut,
watch out for red flags, and never ever trust me. Bye.
(43:03):
Trust Me is produced by Kirsten Woodward, Gabby Rapp and
Steve Delamator.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
With special thanks to Stacy Para, and.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Our theme song was composed by Holly amber Church.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
You can find us on Instagram at trust Me Podcast,
Twitter at trust Me Cult pod or on TikTok at
trust Me Cult Podcast.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
I'm Oola Lola on Instagram and Ola Lola on Twitter.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
And I am Megan Elizabeth eleven on Instagram and Debraham
Hits on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Remember to rate and review and spread the word.
If you have your own story of being in a
cult or a high control group.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Or if you've had experience with manipulation or abuse the
power that you'd like to share.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Leave us a message on our hotline number at three
four seven eight six trust.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's three four seven eight six eight seven eight seven eight.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Or showed us an email at trustmepod at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Trust me, Trust for trust me.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
I'm like a swat person. I've never lied to you.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I never live if you think that one person has
all the answers, don't welcome to Trust Me. The podcast
about cults, extreme belief and manipulation from two people who've
actually experienced it. I am Lola Blanc and my co
host is Megan Elizabeth. She is not able to join
for this intro today. Don't worry. She is safe, but
she was a part of the interview itself. So today
(00:48):
is rerun because we live in Los Angeles and obviously
everything is crazy right now. We will be getting back
to new episodes soon, but today is a rerun of
the first part of our interview with Frank Leiford, survivor
of Heaven's Gate. Frank was a member of the group
until he left after eighteen years, just a few years
before discovering that his friends and loved ones in the
group had died by suicide. In part one, he tells
(01:11):
us how he began following the leaders Tea and Doe,
what it was like living a nomadic lifestyle with what
was called his check partner, and what happened when they
all settled in one place for class. They discussed being
separated from the love of his life, how the rules
became more strict and controlling, and how much darker things
got after Tea got cancer. And we will come back
hopefully for part two next week. Obviously, for those of
(01:34):
you who don't know, we are Los Angeles residents, so
there is an ongoing active fire situation right now.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
We are both.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Safe, our producer Steve is safe, but there is a
lot to process, and many friends have had to evacuate
and or have lost their homes, and there is a
lot to deal with and a lot to process. So
I promise we will start doing new episodes again very
very soon, but in the meantime, take care of each other,
stay safe. Please donate to families who need it and
(02:05):
to organizations that are helping people on the ground. And
if you just want to hear some cult stuff, here
is Frank Lyifford. Welcome, Frank Lyford. Thank you so much
for coming on. Thank you, It's good to be here,
so happy to see you. I was just watching your
(02:27):
beautiful story in the HBO documentary and so nice to
get to talk to you in the flesh, well, in
the digital flesh. So Heaven's Gate, as many of our
listeners will already know, was a religious UFO cult in
the seventies, eighties and nineties. It was run by a
man named Marshall Applewhite and a woman named Bonnie Nettles,
who went by Doe and Tea, respectively. So the man
is Dough and the woman is Tea. And of course
(02:49):
they're most famous for committing a mass suicide in nineteen
ninety seven. And you, Frank, were a member for eighteen years.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Is that right correct?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
So can you please start us at the beginning? How
old were you when you first joined? Where were you
at in your life?
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Like?
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Tell us about that?
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Oh it's going back, okay. I was twenty one. I
was a story I naive, twenty one year old kid
who had read some UFO books. I'd read about Edgar
Casey his book by Thomas Screw There was a River.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
What is that?
Speaker 2 (03:26):
That's just like a UFO book.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
No, Edgar Casey is a channeler. He's a trance channeler
in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Gotcha.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
He's also famous for several predictions about a state of
the world.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Gotcha. Gotcha?
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Anyway, I had a girlfriend at the time. We've been
together three years, and both of us were interested in,
or you know, entertained the idea of UFOs. We were
getting ready to move in together, and we were going
to go on vacation. First. We were in Calgary, albert
and we went on the occasion out to the West coast.
(04:05):
We're gonna dip down into the US and visit my
first cousin, David Vin Sindron. He was one of my
favorite people and I just really enjoyed his company. So
we went to Corbalis, Oregon, where he was going to school.
He was a perpetual student, and in the course of
(04:25):
our talking, he told us about a poster that he
had seen around Corbalis. It's a college town, and he
said he would show it to us the next day.
So he did, and it intrigued me. It intreated Erica,
and he was also intrigued. The thing that piqued my
(04:45):
interest was a line in the poster that first of all,
it was headed UFO two, Why they're here, who they
have come for? And when they will leave. There was
a line in there that peaked interested said something like,
if you have ever entertained the idea of a real
(05:09):
physical level of existence beyond the human level, you'll want
to attend this meeting. So I did. I wanted to
attend the meeting because I had entertained such a thing.
So the meeting was in a couple of days, so
we drove about an hour to the coast of Oregon
(05:32):
to a little place called Waldport, and the room was packed.
We got there just before the meeting was going to start,
so we had trouble finding seats. There may be one
hundred people in the room.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Oh, I can't imagine just a poster could get that
many people there. It seems crazy now.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
Well, apparently they had pepper the whole area. Plus, as
we found out later, there was a commune in the
Woldport area of maybe fifty people who were all hippies
and drop out. A lot of them ended up joining
(06:12):
the group, so you know, there were I sensed differing
mindsets of the people there. There were some who were
who seemed quite excited and others who were standing at
the back as if you know, I'm not so sure
about this. I'm gonna see what it's like. And if
(06:33):
they sound crazy, I'm ready to leave, you know, ready
to bolt. There were two people at the front kindo
at that point. They were called Bow and Peep, and
they spoke for maybe an hour. Their talk kind of
had a blend of three different approaches to life. One
(06:54):
was the spirituality common of that time, using some of
the work from the book Seth Speaks, and he was
another channeled entity. They talked about Christianity and how the
same energies that they represented had visited the Earth two
(07:16):
thousand years ago in the form of Jesus. And they
talked about UFOs, how UFOs were the transportation of this
next evolutionary level above human that they were here to
tell people about. They said that if anyone was interested
(07:39):
in following them, they would teach those people how to
prepare to graduate to this next evolutionary level above human.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
So when you say they represented the energy of Jesus,
does that mean that they're like physically embodying Jesus, Like,
what does that mean exactly?
Speaker 3 (07:57):
We found out later they believe they were the two
witnesses talked about in the Book of Revelation in the Bible,
and they believed Doe the Man was the reincarnation of
Jesus and t the Woman was Doe's older member, those
(08:23):
elder those teacher long story short. At the end of
their talk, they said, if anybody's interested, there are son
here who have been with us for a few months,
and they will tell you where to meet to find
out more information. So after the meeting, I felt higher
(08:44):
than a kite. They felt like just brimming with energy
and like really excited that this was pretty cool thing
that we had stumbled across. So I was interested in
more information. And we had sat separately because of the
sparse seating. So I met up with my girlfriend Erica
(09:06):
and my cousin David, and we kind of compared notes.
Erica felt the same way. David wasn't quite so sure.
He was intrigued, but he went to go back home
and talk with his girlfriend, Susie Strom. So we went
back to Corvalis and it was the next day or
(09:29):
two days later we went to Eugene, where the follow
up meeting was. This was just a three of us.
Second Susie still wasn't able to come, and we talked
with some of the followers who had been with T
and Doo for weeks or months. I didn't really get
a definitive answer of is this legit? You know? Is
(09:52):
this a real thing? Do you have proof this is real?
But I got the sense from the people that I
spoke with that it was real enough in their experience
that it meant that it was worth leaving behind all
(10:13):
aspects of their human life to find out more about it.
So everyone I spoke to seemed sincere and truthful. They
weren't trying to pull the wool over our eyes. So
we decided we would take the next step. So they
took our phone numbers. They told us they would call
(10:33):
us in a week. They told us to go home
and tie up loose ends wow, and to get ready
to be on the road for a while. The belief
from T and Doo's talk and from these other followers
was that this process of preparation would take months. It
(10:56):
wouldn't take years, It wouldn't be long and drawn out.
That was thought, So they said, go home, tip sins
and we'll call you and tell you where to meet.
The next day, Eric and I left to go back
to Calgary to tie up loose sinds.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Wow, what was it that was appealing? You already have
this interest in UFOs and like extraterrestrial life, and it
just like really appeals to that interest that you already have.
Is it the community? Is it the shared experience with Erica?
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Like?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
What about it was the most appealing to you?
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Well, I felt like I had the opportunity to learn
things that I didn't think I could learn anywhere else.
So it was like this coole window into wisdom and
knowledge that I'd never experienced before. At least that was
my perception. I think Erica and David felt the same way.
(11:57):
So all four of us ended up joining the So
we received our phone call after a week. We had
tied up loose ends in Calgary.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
And when you say tie up loose ends, does that
mean just like quit your jobs? Talk to your family
like what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
What was your life like that you had to tie up?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well, there wasn't a lot to tie up. I was
a bartender at the time, so it didn't require a
lot of notice. I think Erica was a hostess somewhere.
We were both in the restaurant business. We didn't tell
anyone really what we were doing. We were warned that
(12:38):
if we did that, they would try to talk us
out of it. So we just told my parents, and
Erica told her parents, well, we're just going to travel
for a while around the US. We're going to meet
some friends. We're not sure how long we're going to
do it, but off we go, this is what we
want to do. And they didn't much of it until
(13:01):
weeks later when they didn't hear from us. Right right,
So we met in a place called Cherry Creek Campground
just outside of Denver. There were other people there, family camping,
but it seemed a bit like a carnival there because
all kinds of people from all different meetings were meeting
(13:24):
up there. You know, it was a little bit wild.
There was a lot of pot smoking, a lot of
hippie type people there, mostly young. I was a little
bit skeptic of did we make the right choice here,
But then you know, we found somebody who could tell
us what was going on, and then they moved everyone
(13:47):
off into groups of ten or twelve, there were two
group coordinators who had been with TENDO for a while,
and they briefed us on what they knew, and then
in a few days we moved to a different campground
and the whole thing was a vetting process in a
way of weeding out the people who were not serious.
(14:10):
And then we moved to a third campground a week later,
and at that point we had a chance to meet
with t and do for the first time kind of
an additional layer of the vetting process. When I met
and I felt like they could see my thoughts, Wow,
(14:32):
I felt dirty, you know, I felt like I was impure.
And I don't know how much of this was my
projection onto them, of putting them on a pedestal, but
they seemed like they were authorities of a kind that
I hadn't met before. Why dirty, impure, impure?
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, if somebody could read my thoughts, i'd feel pretty dirty. Yeah,
that's stressful. I get that.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Did you know about the asexuality of the group at
this point or that was that revealed sort of later on?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
They may have talked about it generally, we're going to
be getting rid of all the alien behavior eventually, but
they didn't really go hardcore into no sex whatsoever, I
think until a year later when we gathered again.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
So how long are you guys living on a sort
of a nomadic lifestyle. How long does this camping year?
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Eight? A year, a year, rut a year and we
crisscrossed the country. I don't know how many groups there were.
Is there were as many as two hundred and fifty
people doing that, But during that first year a lot
of people fell away, people went back to their lives.
Shortly after we met Tindo, Rick and I were split
(16:01):
up and we were given new check partners.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Can you explain what a check partner is?
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Similar to how Jesus instructs his disciples in the Bible,
you will go out two by two and spread the
good news. The purpose of a check partner is as
a sounding board. We were taught over and over and
over again to not trust our own minds, to trust
(16:27):
our check partners judgment more than our own, so that
if both of us had that trust, we would arrive
at a decision that was best for everything and everyone,
basically without the interference of the eco mind. If that's
not really how they described it, but the goal was
(16:50):
to between the two of you arrive at what your
older member would decide. You weren't using your own mind,
You weren't using your own history, your own logic, right,
you were both reaching up to connect with your older
member's mind.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
And did you find that, like decisions started to become better?
Were they clearer? And I mean that sounds like just
from a therapeutic standpoint, that it could actually work.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
If it's someone who's wise though, and has your bestag
in mind exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
That's the key is is were we really connecting with
our older member's mind and were they actually receiving valid
information from their older member's mind. You and Do presented
it to us as if there was a chain of
mind that we were reaching up and connecting too, in
effect psychically or intuitively. And then you know, Dough would
(17:51):
be reaching up to his older member's mind, and his
older member t would be reaching up to her older
member's mind, you know, not physically. Isn't on the surface
of the earth that was the goal.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
It's interesting, though, Meghan, you see it as a therapeutically sound.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
I think what I'm thinking of is like AA when
you think contrary action, where your first instinct sometimes if
you bounce it off another person, you get clarity into
how many decisions you're making based off of wrong information?
Speaker 4 (18:25):
Right?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Right?
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
See, my when I hear that, my first thought is, oh,
that's priming everyone to stop thinking for.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Themselves, trusting and trusting exactly exactly for sure.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Right and I would agree with that. Probably the biggest
lesson of my life is to trust my own integration rights.
And in effect, the teachings of Tin and Do were
telling me not to telling me that I didn't have
the answer that they did, and most people would be
(19:00):
imediately run away from that, you know, from anything is fringe.
Even at the point of hearing the first talk, they
would say, these people are nuts. They would run away
for some reason. That didn't happen for me.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
You were young and open minded and curious of me
I was.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
I haven't lost that open mindedness. I've learned a lot
about how to trust intuition. That was a slow journey
post cult, but that has ended up serving me well.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Right, So tell us more about this year. So, so
things aren't really strict yet. Have you changed your name yet?
Have you cut your hair yet? Or does that happen later?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
We all took new names right off the bet pretty much.
I don't think we cut our hair. As a matter
of fact, I grew a beard well help we were
on the road. It was brown and not white. But
the meetings that we held for recruiting were like the
blind leading the blind. We knew very little, you know,
we learned more as we went along. Things were passed
(20:06):
down to us through drips and drabs. The coordinators would
have a scheduled phone call with the people surrounding Tin
Doe once a week. The coordinators were given a phone
number to call, and then they would go to a
pay phone. There were no cell phones, this was nineteen
seventy five. And then the coordinators would come back to
(20:29):
their groups and share what they were given from the
helpers of T and DO. I think about twice maybe
we had a gathering. One was somewhere in maybe Colorado
with T and Do, and then there was another one
in Mississippi where we all got a chance to gather
and hear Tindo speak, And that was really exciting because
(20:53):
we had very little contact with them. I had been
partnered with two different partners. One there wasn't any connection,
and there wasn't any negativity. It was just both neutral.
So I said, is something supposed to be going on here?
Because I heard a lot of other partners had triggering
circumstances between their partnerships and that was supposed to be
(21:15):
of benefit if we could work them out. So I
was switched to another partner. His name was Amos, so
I took the name Andy. We were Amos and Andy.
At one point we were in Phoenix, it was midnight,
we had a place to stay, we were looking for it,
and we had also swapped cars, and it was part
(21:36):
of letting go of all of our human connections, including
our possessions. So the little feat that I had come
in with was long gone, and we exchanged it for
this old, beat up powder blue Plymouth with a hole
in the floorboard the driver's side you could see the
road going by. Had done nothing, so I had no
(22:01):
idea who the owner of the car was. At one point,
we're going to go straight in an intersection, and Amos
and no, I'll turn left here. So I turned left
from the middle lane and I was pulled over by
a policeman and we both looked kind of scruffy. We
both had beard's longer hair, so the policeman, you know,
(22:21):
was kind of suspicious of us right off the bat,
and he wondered why we were driving somebody else's car
and we didn't have a letter of permission or anything.
But he couldn't really find fault with our story, but
he still wanted to put me in jail for the
night because we had no money. So I spent the
night in the tempe Arizona jail. I didn't have any
(22:44):
cell mates, so it was a little bit scary. Yeah,
but I didn't sleep, and eight point thirty came around,
somebody came and let me out, so I was outside
looking for Amos. I saw the blue Plymouth parked and
he was in the back seat sleeping, so I thought
I probably had a better sleep than he did. Anyway,
(23:06):
we've spent the week in Phoenix when on a meeting,
we got one recruit from that meeting, so Amos decided
that he was going to go off on his own
with some payote buttons into the desert and talked to
his older member and determined what to do next.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
An older means like metaphysically older, right.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, wiser, okay, yeah, teacher.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Back then, it wasn't super clear that our older member
was Dough and those older member was Tea. We thought
we had to reach up into the heavens to speak
with our older member, right, So that was what he
was going to do, so that I was going to
be the tech partner with our new recruit. So he
(23:52):
and I set out in his Citron because Amos took
the Blue Plymouth and we were going to Florida. Remember
what we talked about, and I'm sure we talked about
what little teachings I knew of tend O's. And then
when we got to Miami, he decided that he was
going to wander the beach and simply talk to his
(24:15):
older member. So I ended up with the Citron. All
of the people in the group that I was in
had gone their separate ways. I was the only one
left in my group still following Tindo, so I had
no way of contacting the people around Tindo. Except something
(24:35):
almost miraculous happened. At one point, somebody at a place
where I had gone to ask for some assistance, food
and gasp the car they had received a call from
Kindo's helpers. So the people at this community center gave
(24:56):
me a phone number to call, so I did. I
reconnected with my Orish, the coordinator in Cherry Creek, Colorado.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Wow, a stroke of fate.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah. So they directed me to a group in New Mexico.
So I met up with them and there were ten
or twelve of us. So I was given a new
check partner and off we went again. That was kind
of the nature of the first year. We were like gypsies,
crisscrossing the countryside, holding recruiting meetings.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Quick note here. So I was kicking myself after this
interview for not asking why Frank still felt compelled to
go back even though everyone else had left and he
was all alone. So I asked him after the fact
and he told me this, and I quote, A big
piece of it was the carrot as always of my
belief in the opportunity to ascend to the next level.
And looking back rolled into that was the fear of
(25:45):
missing out. I see the fallacy of net now because
I feel I've grown more self aware, but it was
my motivation then.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
And where was Erica during all of this? She was
just in a different so called pod like right, and
were you guys still together or no?
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Okay? But when we met up in Biloxi. Everyone converged
in Biloxi, Mississippi. She had been in a similar circumstance
in that she and her check partner were off on
their own and their group had completely disintegrated. Oh, she
didn't know what to do because she still wanted to
(26:21):
follow teen Doe. So she was actually in contact with
my parents in Calgary because she didn't feel like her
parents would be sympathetic to her continuing interesting with ten
Do because my parents were a little bit on the
wu Wu side anyway, nice because my mother gave me
(26:43):
the Edgar Casty Book and they sent my parents sent
Erica some money, and then she somehow got in touch
with everyone ended up in Biloxi, Mississippi, and we worked together.
But I still had huge feelings for her right and
those actually never went away, except that I surpressed them
(27:06):
over the years.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Did you feel any resentment for being separated from her?
Speaker 3 (27:13):
No, Because our thought was, even if, even if she's
the love of my life, if this opportunity to gain
membership in a completely different kingdom level above the human level,
even if if she's loved my life, that opportunity is
worth letting go of the love of my life to me,
(27:36):
this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, but that
didn't stop me from, you know, feeling attraction for her
and feeling a deep connection with her.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Had you guys gotten more details at this point about
the teachings, Were you more juiced in onto what was
happening and where you were heading?
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah? More and more. As time went on, we learned more,
and the more time we spent with Tea and grow,
the more we learned, the more discipline we could apply
using the teachings that they had passed on to us,
and the more things made sense, the more we realized
what we had signed on for, and there was always
(28:21):
new information that we hadn't encountered before.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Tell us about when the class begins, what happens. You
all kind of settle in one area.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Right right, and it was wyoming where we were all
cold together. There could have been as many as two
hundred people there, and that was wild. That was like
I think of the children of Israel, you know, wandering
in a wilderness, the people who were unruly, and the
people were unruly there, it's crazy. So that was what
(29:01):
Tindo wanted to do, was kind of bring us together
into the same mindset and to help us establish some
kind of discipline. First, there was a lesson about kind
distant consideration, things that made sense. That was kind of
a first basic essential lesson, And a few weeks or
(29:23):
months later we had something called the seventeen Steps, which
were guidelines for how to live in ways that were
becoming two members of the next level, so that we
would fit in there, so that we wouldn't stick out
like a sore thumb, so that we wouldn't be.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Disruptive once you get to the higher plane.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
It's kind of like alien etiquette kind.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Of, yes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
I wrote down from some of what I heard, and
they included things like, can you follow instructions without adding interpretation?
Can you deliver instructions as you receive them so I'm hearing?
Can you follow orders and do as we say and
be controlled by us. They forbade things like clumsiness, procrastination.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
And even I'm not allowed in.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
And even having private thoughts? Is that right?
Speaker 3 (30:20):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yeah, that is wild. You're not allowed to have private thoughts.
And then also arousal was forbid.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
How did you feel about these steps? I mean, what
did you feel good about them?
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Yeah? Because we were already to a degree brainwashed in
a sense, we were motivated. You know. It's like this
carrot out in front of us that if you do
as we teach you, you will graduate, you will ascend
to this next evolutionary level. And during that first year,
(30:56):
in the first several years, the idea was we would
ascend while conscious and alive. We would ascend consciously into
this next evolutionary level above human.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
So tell us what vehicles means.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Vehicle is your body that you, as a soul inhabit,
which I would say is accurate to a degree, but
it was also considered the same as a car would
be to a driver. So the soul is the driver
of the car, of the vehicle. T would often say,
(31:32):
get your mind into your vehicle, meaning get your vehicle
under control of your mind. Kind of like a rider
on a horse. A rider doesn't let the horse run wild.
The rider keeps the horse doing what the rider wants
the horse to do.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
So getting your sexual urges under control is a big
piece of that, right I mean, so I am a
little familiar with that idea just having grown up Morman,
you were sexuality is you know, there's a lot of
shame around it, and I felt a lot, you know,
anytime I would feel an urge or like masturbate or anything,
I just felt so ashamed after Did you you know
(32:15):
how successful were you in suppressing those urges or did
you like feel shame? Like what was going on there?
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Well, when we were on the road, we're virtually always
in the presence of our check partner, and the goal
in sight in the assignment of check partners was if
you could easily be attracted to a member of the
opposite sex or a member of the same sex that
was your sexual orientation, then they would partner with someone
(32:46):
who you would not be attracted to. You know, that
was the goal. It didn't always work out that way.
I mean, that's why some of the people left is
because they found some they were attracted to and they
left with them. That's why I generally was partnered with
the male, right.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yeah, it's kind of like Mormon missionaries. Actually they're sent
out two by two and they're together twenty four to seven,
same sex, and yeah, their their behavior is just like
strictly constantly regulated by the presence of another person who's
trying to be righteous.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Right, living in the same community started after the first year,
So from like September of seventy six to sometime in
nineteen eighty one, we lived in campgrounds or on BLM land.
That's not lack lives Matter, that's Bureau of Land Management.
(33:40):
Or we would get permission from ranch owners who had
these vast expanses of ranch lands, who camp on their property,
and so we would be unhindered and not interfered with
by curious people. You know. That was about five years
when we lived outside. I was outside all the time.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
But then you get your cousin's trust fund kind of
starts funding a new lifestyles that right, I.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Think Rob Balsh had that backwards. Oh, his trust fund
was funding us from seventy six to eighty one, and
then it ran out. We ran it dry, and at
that point half of us had get work and then
pool whenever funds came in to the group communally. That's
when we moved into houses. So there were as many
(34:30):
as thirty six of us living in a house, and
yet we couldn't let on that there was that many
of us there, so only certain people could go outside
at that point.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Were you one of the people who went outside or
did you stay in the house.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
I was one of the people who worked outside, but
we had people called intercept or you know, they were
assigned to be the interface between us and anyone who
had come to the door, so that it wasn't a
different person each time. They would pretend to be like
the householder. Right. I worked outside the group initially as
(35:08):
a waiter, and this was near San Antonio.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And at any point are you you're you're really deep
in at this point, I'm assuming everyone sort of has
the same haircut, kind of like my hair, right, and
you know, dressing the same and living this lifestyle because
you're interfacing with the outside world war. Is there any
point at which you're questioning or does that not happen
till later?
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Periodically doubt would come up in my mind and I
would stuff it down because it was like the doubt
would be, is this really going to happen? Or you know,
can I really do this? Can I really hack all
of the requirements of this? Because you asked earlier how
(35:53):
successful was I regarding sexuality? And there were weeks and
months where I didn't think about it at all. I
was too busy, too focused on other things. And then
there were times when I would, it would be this
internal battle, like you say, guilt and shame about having slipped.
(36:17):
You know, there were slippages, and then there were major
slippages sensuality, sexuality. It was a major slippage. Over time,
we had more and more and more guidelines and procedures
and things to follow, ways of being and thinking and
acting and behaving and speaking and eating and sleeping, showering
(36:40):
in the morning. You know, everything was regimented.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
I remember hearing even the size of your pancakes was
regulated and how much syrup was poured on top of them.
That is a very high control group right there.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
When did the plan of the comet come into being?
Or was that always? No?
Speaker 3 (37:02):
That was when the world heard about the commet. That's
when they got the hair brained idea that it was
their time to leave. That was in nineteen ninety seven,
or the end of nineteen ninety six, when the comet
was discovered by two people, Hail and Bob.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
And you'd been out already by that point.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
Yeah, I was left in August of ninety three.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
I see, are you living with Doh and tee or
are you in a sort of like a separate household.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
For a while they did live in the same house.
Eventually they felt like they could think better being separate
from us, being separate from our vibrations, so they got
their own separate house, their own separate quarters. They rented
a smaller house Classic. So we had different star groups,
four different star groups that this started in campgrounds. I
(37:53):
think we had forty eight people. So we had formal
out procyon alt air and serious. We went by numbers
one through twelve, I think, and I was P one.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
That's your name, that was what you went by?
Speaker 3 (38:08):
That was I think we even had name tags.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Wow, P one one very dehumanizing. Is it kind of.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Like Harry Potter houses like Slytherin? Is that what it is?
Is that the vibe?
Speaker 3 (38:23):
Or well, it's kind of like that, but that's not
the vibe.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Not the vibe, got it right, No, but kind of
the same.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
No, it wasn't serious. It was nera. Yeah. So this
was eighty five and we were in Dallas, Texas. At
this point I had moved up from being a waiter
to being a medical receptionist and then I got a
job at Microsoft in their Dallas sales office. We would
(38:55):
go to work and we would pretend to be normal.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
I understand that feeling completely.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
I would pretend to be a husband to somebody, and
I had to go home to my wife at the
end of the day, and so I couldn't participate in,
you know, going out to the bar or whatever. You know,
if anybody would ask me to do that, right, Sorry,
I can't. I have other plans.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Can you tell us about when t got cancer and
what that experience was like.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
She had cancer twice. Once when we were in campgrounds,
she had cancer of the eye. She had cancer in
her eye, so she had her eye removed and she
had a prosthetic put in, and you know, everybody thought, well, okay,
that's good. I'm glad she had it taken care of.
It's over and done with. And then we moved into
houses around nineteen eighty one, and then nineteen eighty five
(39:50):
we learned that Tea was sick again and they had
separate quarters, so we didn't We didn't see TNDO for
quite a while, and then they had two helpers go
help T and do while he was sick. In general,
there were people who were trusted or by Tin do
to follow instructions, to be disciplined, to get things right.
(40:14):
These two helpers would go and stay at Tando's place,
called it crafts. It wasn't a house craft as in spacecraft.
So we had the main craft and we had air craft,
so we were all curious about what was going on.
And then it was only like two or three weeks
before Tea passed on and she had their cancer, so
(40:38):
the cancer head spread all throughout her body, right, and
this was never in the plant, of course, and so
we were all devastated, particularly Dough. He was heartbroken because
this was his older member. And he came for meeting
(41:00):
with us and said, I'm not sure we should continue
with the class, and virtually everyone said, no, we have to,
we have to keep going. We believe and you believe
in the next evolutionary level of humans, so you know,
we were all completely on board. So he continued, Was.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
It confusing, like, how did you reconcile this idea that
you know you are going to physically transform from your
vehicles with Tea's vehicle actually just dying. What was the
justification for that?
Speaker 4 (41:42):
Well, the party line, I guess was we were taking
too long, and yeah, he had to go on ahead
and prepare a place for us get ready for our graduation.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
And because we were taking too long, he decided to
exit her vehicle that way, right, but tease passing in
that way had a huge impact on those thinking about
how the graduation would occur, and that worked on him
over the coming months and years, to the point where
(42:18):
he began to entertain ideas of how we might do
our vehicles in which was entirely diametrically posed to the
way it was originally presented.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
How was it originally presented?
Speaker 3 (42:31):
We will be taken up in a craft while we're conscious,
we will ascend while conscious and alive.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
I'm going to leave that there for now. Come back
next week for part two. I promise there will be
some amazing, juicy, fascinating, interesting, compelling new episodes very very soon.
But for right now, we are sending much love to
our fellows, Southern California residents, and remember to follow your gut,
watch out for red flags, and never ever trust me. Bye.
(43:03):
Trust Me is produced by Kirsten Woodward, Gabby Rapp and
Steve Delamator.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
With special thanks to Stacy Para, and.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Our theme song was composed by Holly amber Church.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
You can find us on Instagram at trust Me Podcast,
Twitter at trust Me Cult pod or on TikTok at
trust Me Cult Podcast.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
I'm Oola Lola on Instagram and Ola Lola on Twitter.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
And I am Megan Elizabeth eleven on Instagram and Debraham
Hits on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Remember to rate and review and spread the word.
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