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- Up to 60 members of a Colombian doomsday cult have gone
missing in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada in Northern Colombia.
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- They were due for an alleged rendezvous with a spaceship,
and nothing has been heard of them since the weekend, despite a continuing
police search.
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- The members of the Stella Maris Gnostic church were hoping
to be carried off by extraterrestrial beings before what they believe will
be the imminent end of the world at the turn of the Millennium.
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- Police checked the sect's half-finished temple in the
Caribbean city of Cartagena, but found no clue as to where the cult has
gone or what their intentions were.
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- Alien contact 'assured'
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- Mariela Tovar, whose 23-year-old daughter Patricia is
among the disappeared, said the group's failure to return prompted worried
relatives to contact the police.
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- The head of the sect apparently assured followers that
the Sierra Nevada - a sacred territory to indigenous Indians - was where
they could contact a spaceship.
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- According to their interpretation of the Bible, the sect
believes that extraterrestrials will take 140,000 people from the earth
before the end of the world - a sort of second Noah's Ark.
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- The authorities have not discounted any theory about
the disappearances and are exploring the possibilities of a mass suicide,
mass kidnapping or a lift from a passing UFO
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