Sole Survivor Of Heaven's Gate Speaks

Rio DiAngelo has a message he wants to share with the world. It's an important message, one that begins in space. That's where he came from, and where he will one day return, following in the footsteps of his 39 friends. Bearers of the same message, those 39 friends received their culminating cosmic transmission 12 years ago, when amateur astronomer Alan Hale stood in his driveway one summer evening around midnight, pointed his telescope low and due south and saw something that wasn't there before. Five hundred miles away, Thomas Bopp's telescope revealed the same object, burning with a 10.5 magnitude near the globular cluster M70, just outside Sagittarius' bow, near the Archer's heart. It was a comet, 25 miles wide, a titanic piece of ice plunging through space at up to 90,000 mph. When the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams confirmed the object, C/1995 01 officially became known as Hale-Bopp. Something that big comes through our solar system only occasionally. Trailing multiple sputtering yellow and blue tails of dust, ion gases and sodium atoms 20 million miles long, Hale-Bopp would become the brightest celestial visitor to our solar system in a millennium.

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