In 2020 I participated in a 5-part podcast about the comet Kohoutek: What Comet Kohoutek Left Behind.
When comet Kohoutek arrived in 1974, it left a trail of curiosities in its wake. In five episodes, What Comet Kohoutek Left Behind tells stories of the music, new age mythology and counterculture named after the comet. Featuring interviews with former cult members, musicians, collectors, hippies and occultists, the series explores tales of afrofuturism, doomsday prophecies, an anti-fascist robot band, and psychedelic warlocks.
I was interviewed for the episode Children of God: The End of the World As We Know It
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-comet-kohoutek-left-behind/id1529616930
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6FykqvZb77yAWorDZlbpVR
Here is an excerpt from my memoir Misguided: My Jesus Freak Life In A Doomsday Cult, chapter 7 Fleeing Babylon The Whore, where I discuss the comet Kohoutek:
I soon moved with Amos' family, his secretary, and several others to a small, former seniors' nursing home in a Seattle suburb, rented for the two months prior to our flight at the end of December. I took care of Benjamin most days, but I also visited a commune in the city a few times for weekend litnessing blitzes. The house had a printing press in the basement so we freely distributed large amounts of Mo Letters, mainly ones with a doomsday warning message about the approaching comet Kohoutek, which was expected to appear the same week we were leaving the continent.
On March 7, 1973 the Czech astronomer, Lubos Kohoutek, discovered a comet passing through the solar system. Scientists speculated it would produce a spectacular display as it passed by Earth at the end of December that year. Anticipating that effect, various news media, including TIME magazine, described it throughout the ensuing months as the “comet of the century”, until its unimpressive arrival.i Encouraged by those media reports, Berg proclaimed his own ominous prediction. He wrote a couple lettersii about the coming comet before predicting, in the Mo Letter "40 Days!", that the United States would be destroyed 40 days after Kohoutek appeared.iii
In a subsequent letter, “The Comet Comes”, Berg discusses an article headlined on the cover of the British magazine SAGA, “The Christmas Comet: Omen of Peace--or Doomsday Messenger?” The article confirmed Berg's beliefs about comets being harbingers of historically important events. Relying on the article's questionable scientific and historical claims, other pseudoscience such as predictions by well known astrologers, and his own numerology, Berg agreed with the author that the comet was having negative effects on the world even before it was visible. They both connected a variety of significant political, social, and environmental events around the world to the comet. Berg also believed that the predictions by astrologers matched his own end-time prophecies:
All of these predictions coincide almost exactly with the interpretations of Bible prophecy and our own personal revelations in recent years which place the Second Coming of Christ about 1993 after all these foregoing events. What an amazing correlation of the forecasts of scientists, astrologers and prophets alike!iv
Although Kohoutek was a little brighter than most comets and visible to the naked eye, it didn't come close to being the comet of the century as expected, disappointing most observers, though not Berg. He simply reinterpreted events after the fact, explaining in the letter “The Comet's Tale”v that because the Children of God had warned the world with his message, God didn't need the comet's tail to be a visual warning sign of doomsday. Whether observable or not, he insisted the comet did portend all the significant world events that preceded its arrival, and the ones he predicted would follow.
Before leaving for Hawaii, I helped distribute those doomsday warning letters around Seattle. We passed them out freely to pedestrians and placed them on car windshields in shopping mall and stadium parking lots. Some of us went to a Seattle Huskies college football game and passed out stacks of letters inside the stadium, while two others unfurled a banner with a doomsday message on it and ran along the sidelines, until we were all escorted out. We did the same thing at a SuperSonics NBA basketball game.
The Seattle commune also advertised the 40-days doomsday message on a prominent billboard in the city, and produced a simple television advertisement featuring an ominous voice-over warning message while showing covers of various Mo Letters, and contact information. That TV ad aired on a late-night Saturday music program popular with young people. It was exciting to see our message broadcast like that, knowing that others were doing similar doomsday publicity stunts around America. I participated in another thrilling one the day I left for Hawaii with Amos and his family.
Amos had prearranged for a television reporter from Seattle's most popular evening news program to come to the nursing home to interview and film the Children of God fleeing America. The morning of our flight, a few days before the end of the year, the reporter interviewed Amos and filmed us packing our vehicles. The TV crew then followed us to the airport, filming our motorcade, which included other members just there for the camera. With the camera rolling, the reporter followed us inside to the check-in counter, and then to the waiting area where we sang the doomsday song “The Message of Jeremiah”.vi
When we arrived in Hawaii later that evening we learned that the final scene of the news report showed our exit through the boarding gate and the plane taking off. Caleb and Lydia, who went to Hawaii several weeks before we did, excitedly told us that the report's dramatic scenes of the Children of God's departure from doomed America had been rebroadcast around the country.
i Comet Kohoutek <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Kohoutek>
ii David Berg, “The Christmas Monster”, September 8, 1973
<http://www.exfamily.org/pubs/ml/ml269.html>
”More on Kohoutek” --The Coming Comet of the Century!, November 4, 1973
<http://www.exfamily.org/pubs/ml/b4/ml0278.shtml>
iii David Berg, "40 Days!", November 12, 1973
<http://www.exfamily.org/pubs/ml/b4/ml0280.shtml>
iv David Berg, ”The Comet Comes”, December 20, 1973, pars.3,33 <http://www.exfamily.org/pubs/ml/b4/ml0283.shtml>
v David Berg, “The Comet's Tale”, January 24, 1974, par. 34 <http://www.exfamily.org/pubs/ml/b4/ml0295.shtml>
vi The Message of Jeremiah song lyrics
<https://www.nubeat.org/audio/1ad/dm-btb/LYR15.html>
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