EFFORTPOST The story of the first cult formed and entirely located on the Internet

Sheldan Nidle lived in an alternate reality from the rest of us.

Throughout the late nineties, while everyone else was surfacing from a post=Seinfeld world, gawping at a presidential s*x scandal, and mourning the death of grunge, Nidle was filling a nascent internet with tales of mass alien visitations and the transformation of the human race into five-dimensional, super-evolved beings. He called his initiative the Ground Crew Project (GCP). Probably the strangest aspect of the GCP, though, wasn't its prediction of a coming fleet of spaceships or the extradimensional expansion of all human consciousness. After all, alien interventions and apocalypses are as common in cults as messiah complexes and communes. What is unusual, though, is that the GCP was, and still is, almost entirely a virtual cult.

Nidle was born in New York City in 1946. He went to college at Ohio University and then the University of Southern California, after which he settled in the Golden State. And those seem to be the only factual parts of his biography—because Nidle claimed he was visited upon his birth, threewise-men-like, by extraterrestrials from a planet called Sirius. These beings would speak to him telepathically, land their ships in his backyard, and take him aboard for flights through space. And that was all before the age of fourteen.

Over the course of Nidle's life, aliens continued to send him messages through an implant they placed in his body, telling him all the secrets of the planet and the cosmos. He learned that humans were part of a divine/extraterrestrial experiment (the divine and the extraterrestrial seemed to be parallel in his mythology, although angels and aliens were distinct creatures). The creator had populated the planet—which is sentient—with what Nidle called "laggard souls," with the hope that they would transcend their limitations to find their place among the other evolved peoples of the universe, thereby joining the Galactic Federation of Light. The GCP were those earthbound members tasked with helping humanity transcend to the point at which they could be welcomed back into the Galactic Federation (hence the "Ground Crew" in the name).

The world learned about the GCP in 1996, when Niles starting writing about it on the burgeoning internet. His site welcomed visitors with statements like, "You are about to embark upon the greatest journey of your

life. You and the rest of life on Planet Earth are about to partake in the raising of planetary consciousness." But his GCP website wasn't just an FYI. It was an urgent message. Niles predicted that on December 17, 1996, the "laggard soul" experiment would end. He said that on that day, the planet would pass through what he called a "photon belt," which he described as an "extremely loving energy" composed of photons, gamma rays, and antimatter particles that occurs every 25,000 years.

That love light from space would hit our pineal glands and cause a spontaneous evolution in human beings. Our three-dimensional forms would expand to five dimensions. Our DNA would increase from a mere two strands to twelve. We would stop aging or getting sick. The blind would see. We would become telepathic. We would be able to manifest things just with the power of thought. Humanity would finally see the universe as it really was.

According to Nidle, even though the photon belt would turn us into superhumans, it would at the same time destroy our cities and machines and weapons. To help us survive the destruction, the Galactic Federation was supposed to send some 15.5 million spaceships to Earth. These ships were meant to shelter the human race from the planetary apocalypse, by keeping people either aboard the ships or in holographic matrixes that mirrored their lives. Some of the members of the Galactic Federation were building underground sanctuaries, as well.

It's impossible to gauge how many followers Nidle had in the early years, but the most appropriate metric was probably hits instead of commitments anyway, and he kept those numbers to himself. He did have enough followers that several New Age/UFO websites had a rule that members couldn't shill for his cult on their forums, so I imagine it was a considerable number of people buying into this shit. There is no record of any meetings in the meat space. Nidle stuck to posting weekly updates about the coming global transformation.

Of course, the big day came and went without even a twitch of anybody's pineal gland. That was no problem—Nidle just rescheduled the transformation to the following year. Meanwhile, he was creating a mythology of galactic history and its races. He described the human-like Andromedans and their cigar-shaped, hundred-mile-long mother ships; the horse-like Arcturians with their supply ships that resembled "wok lids welded together"; and the Sirians and Centaurians and Mintakins and Bellatricians, the latter of whom were reptilian. At some point, he added villains to his universe as well: beings called "dark cabalists," who were anti-transformation, as well as the "planetary elites" on our own Earth.

Some of Nidle's conspiracy-type theories fit well with the concurrent X-Files mania that began after that show debuted in September 1993. Nidle wouldn't have been alone in that influence, although he was more inclined to drop Star Trek and Star Wars references in his writings. According to a Reuters article from 2009, Britain's Ministry of Defense documented 609 UFO sightings in 1996, a huge jump from 117 the year before. The defense ministry noted, "This coincided with the rise in popularity of The X-Files." A similar phenomenon was occurring in the United States at the time. Still, Nidle's stories of the Galactic Federation were becoming so detailed that they could have been their own multi-arc TV show. He was, to use a term that these days refers to entertainment IP, "world-building."

Nidle eventually settled on May 5, 1997, as the new date for the transformation, and he tied it to the approach of the Hale-Bopp Comet. According to the messages from his implant, the comet was actually a massive, camouflaged spaceship. It contained a crew of more than 200,000, including 10,000 alien ambassadors whose mission was to help guide humanity through the transformation. A shuttle from the faux-comet flagship was supposed to land near Ayers Rock in Australia to kick off the party.

Of course, that didn't happen. But something else did: the Heaven's Gate tragedy. Just over a month before the GCP transformation date, the thirty-nine members of the UFO cult Heaven's Gate committed suicide together in a town north of San Diego. The members of that cult also believed the Hale-Bopp Comet hid an extraterrestrial ship sent to save them. They believed that their suicide would help them transcend their current existence and ascend to the ship.

Because Heaven's Gate had sported their own website, as both a recruitment tool and a suicide note, the media started scouring this newfangled internet for other groups with similar beliefs. They found Nidle and the GCP. The Florida Palm Beach Post, for instance, ran an article with a list of strange groups with an internet presence that included the GCP. The headline for the piece was: "Beyond Heaven's Gate, Web Is a Creepy

Place." Meanwhile, an article in the Atlanta Journal reported that "A group identifying itself as the Ground Crew Project of the Spiritual Hierarchy and the Galactic Federation held a toll-free conference Thursday, promising to reveal details about how to get aboard the UFO. The group's advice: meditate."

At that point, the GCP rebranded, but not because of the negative attention from being linked to Heaven's Gate. It was because of a woman named Valerie Donner, who was a part of the inner circle of the GCP. After a falling-out with Nidle, she left the group, but managed to take with her both the name of the organization and its all-important web domain.

Instead of fighting for the GCP domain, Nidle relaunched his efforts online under a new name: the Planetary Activation Organization (PAO). The new group also had a new tone to its teachings. Nidle pulled back on prophesying the date of the transformation, claiming there was just too much intergalactic politics to ever be sure. Instead, he preached that the transformation was unspecifiably imminent, much like the Christian rapture. He also put more of the onus on humanity making itself worthy of transformation, with members of the PAO responsible for lighting the way through mass meditation and spreading the word of humankind's potential to "activate." In addition, his mythology began to trend more New Age than science fiction. He started working in concepts from other religious groups, such as Ascended Masters, an idea borrowed from theosophy and the cult of I AM. He encouraged his followers to set up their own PAO groups in their individual communities to create a network of enlightenment around the planet. He also began claiming that Earth was not just an experiment in the overarching galactic story, but the fulcrum of it. Its transformation would be a blueprint for the transformation of the entire galaxy. It was also supposedly the home of special crystals vital to the rest of the universe.

Via the PAO website, Nidle also continued to exhort his followers to prepare themselves for the coming ascension. One such update ran thusly:

The call went out for that global meditation day on the equinox, to visualize the Christ Grid energy following a certain procedure. That day was magic for those of us who experienced this 1 to 2 hour meditation. The Galactic Federation and the Confederation of Free Planets plus the Angelic Realm have all confirmed that our meditation has caused the necessary mass consciousness shift needed for the mass landings to become a reality. Therefore, they were given the go-ahead by Earth spiritual Hierarchy to proceed with the landing options depending on the secret government's intent to resist.

Nidle's productivity increased as well, and he began pumping out books and webinars and DVDs and speaking engagements at New Age and UFO conferences. His books and DVDs bore titles such as You Are Becoming a Galactic Human and Tour a Sirian Mothership and Inner Earth, Your Future Home.

On March 17, 2011, Nidle's health started to fail. The PAO website describes it this way: "As he sat at the computer, he was hit with a Direct Energy Weapon that caused marked personality changes, brain damage and, eventually, dementia. By September 2021 his health had deteriorated further and he entered a care facility, where he now lives." Wow, is he the first documented case of Havana Syndrome?

However, his presence is still alive as his followers continue to preach his gospel. Nidle's words continue to fill the internet as they did back in 1996. The PAO website still sells his books and DVDs. The organization still hosts regular webinars and podcasts and posts regular updates. YouTube has lots of videos of Nidle speaking or being interviewed. The Facebook page of Sheldan Nidle has 7.9 thousand followers, although its last update was on September 30, 2021. Among cults, the GCP/PAO stands out. Its messages\ are similar to those of many others—doomsdays and aliens and messiahs leading the way to a new and more advanced civilization are common in cults—but the outcome of its teachings is notably different. There have been no known abuses, suicides, murders, or prison sentences. Every once in a while, a comment on a YouTube video launches an accusation of hucksterism, but that's about the extent of it. Most of the members or followers of the PAO seem to be genuinely dedicated to the evolution of themselves and the human race through meditation and science fiction.

The internet might make it easier for cults to recruit, but in the best-case scenario, it also removes the element of physical isolation that is so often necessary for these groups to go rotten. It's much easier to escape a cult when you can leave with the click of a button.

Their website: https://www.paoweb.com/