Friday, March 28, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
NEW YORK -- The Heaven's Gate cult's belief that a UFO is trailing the Hale-Bopp comet may have been inspired by rumors spread over the Internet and late-night talk radio.
In November, amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek of Houston called Art Bell's "Coast to Coast" radio show with astounding news -- a photograph he had taken on the night of Nov. 14 showed a mysterious "Saturn-like object" behind Hale-Bopp. He speculated that it was up to four times the size of the Earth.
Astronomers then demonstrated that what Shramek had seen was a star distorted by his telescope's optics.
"I don't think it was deception on his part, I think it was a mistake," said Russell Sipe, who maintains an Internet website dedicated to the comet. "But you don't go on late-night radio and say that you found something three to four times the size of Earth following a comet."
Yet the rumors continued for weeks, fostered by an acrimonious Internet debate and continued publicity on Bell's program, which is broadcast from Pahrump, 65 miles west of Las Vegas, and carried on more than 300 stations nationwide. The radio program is known as an outlet for conspiracy theories, supernatural claims and similar notions. The SUN profiled Bell on March 4.
When he called the show, Shramek said a photograph of the comet he had taken four days earlier clearly showed a bright object with a halo around it -- like Saturn. When he checked with an astronomical mapping computer program, it showed that no star existed there.
The next night, Courtney Brown, director of the Farsight Institute in Atlanta, was a guest on Bell's show. He claimed that three professional psychics associated with his institute had detected the comet-trailing object and found it to be a metallic object full of aliens.
Using the same computer program as Shramek, Sipe and others identified the object in question as SAO 141894, a fairly dim star that lay behind the comet on the night he took his photograph. They said Shramek didn't see a star because he had incorrectly programmed his computer; then, to make matters worse, his telescope distorted the image.
Shramek did not return calls to his Houston home.
"Whether he meant it or whether he did it as a joke, we don't know," said David Levy, a Vail, Ariz.-based astronomer-author. "I don't know how related this is to that horrible thing that took place."
The 39 men and women found dead in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., committed suicide about the time the comet was closest to Earth.
You can read the SUN's profile of Art Bell at http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin /stories/archives/1997/mar/04/505655063.html.
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