Was I In A Cult? - Apocalyptic, New-Age, Nuclear Bunker Cult PT2: “Let the Bombs Descend”

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

When your mother is a self-proclaimed prophet claiming to channel the ascended master that is your deceased father as she prepares hundreds of followers for the end of the world, mother/son time isn’t baking cookies - it’s begging her not to summon nuclear holy fire so you can maybe live another day.In Part 2 of Sean Prophet’s quite literally unbelievable story, we enter the “end times” phase of CUT (Church Universal and Triumphant) - a group that, at its peak, had thousands of members, global spiritual centers, and over $50 million in real estate. We’ve got multi-million dollar underground bunkers, military-grade weapons, mass doomsday drills, and a mother decreeing her way out of a failed apocalypse that - spoiler - never came.Sean walks us through the harrowing logistics of leading hundreds of followers into bomb shelters, his mother’s unshakable belief in prophecy, and the moment he finally walked away - for good._____Sean’s new memoir, My Cult, Your Cult, is out now. Order here.Follow Us for More Culty Content:Instagram & TikTok: @wasiinacultSupport the Show:Was I In A Cult? is listener-powered. If the show has moved you, made you laugh, or made you question your group chat - please rate, review, and share.Want ad-free episodes + bonus content? Join our Patreon!Share Your Story:Have a cultic experience to share? We’re listening.Email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The views, information or opinions expressed by the guest appearing in this episode solely belong to the guest and do not represent or reflect the views or positions of the hosts, the show, podcast one, this network or any of their respective affiliates. We pile into the shelters and my mom makes this announcement. shelter. The light bearers are safe and it is time to call for the judgment of the United States of America. And at a certain point, she starts to say, Archangel Michael, let the bombs descend. Let the bombs descend. Let the bombs descend. Welcome back everyone to Was I in a Cult? I'm Liz Iacuzzi. And I'm Tyler Meesom. And today is part two of Sean Proffitt's wild, harrowing, and dare I say radioactive story. You dare say it. And of course, I did.

If you haven't heard the first episode, why it's probably advisable to go back and listen to it. Yes, if only to fully appreciate the CUT references. Mm-hmm, they are. Serve and cute. Or to witness Tyler's slow but undeniable indoctrination into Gen Z slang. That is what there is, am I right? Am I right though? Am I right though? He can't stop and he won't stop. Unfortunately.

You said it, not me. So let's dive back in to Sean's story. But first, a little recap. Yes, when we last left Sean. You forgot the recap sound effects. Rob's already downloading it. To recap, Sean Proffitt was born into spiritual royalty. His parents, Mark and Elizabeth Clare Proffitt, founded a New Age spiritual movement in the 1950s, pulling from occult mysticism, ascended masters, and doomsday prophecies.

He grew up in a 17,000 square foot mansion surrounded not by siblings or school friends, but by 60 unpaid followers who cooked, cleaned and worshiped his parents as if they were divine messengers. And when Sean was just eight his father suddenly died and within days his mother claimed to be channeling his spirit, even going so far as to speak as his voice from beyond the veil. That moment locked her into power as the new spiritual leader. And under her watch, the group exploded in size and power. And in 1975, it changed its name to the Church Universal and Triumphant, or as it was often

known, CUT. One letter, one letter missing. Cult. Or cute. I mean, c***. So with millions of dollars, hundreds of acres in Montana and a growing obsession with the end of the world, Elizabeth led her followers into full blown

apocalyptic survival mode. And today, that doomsday clock starts ticking. Bomb shelters. Talk. Military-grade weapons. Judgment calls from archangels. And one son trapped in the middle, trying to hold on to his sanity while the world he was born into prepares for its end.

Everybody was into this, you know, Reagan's Star Wars initiative, right? So at the time she was basically saying, if we don't deploy anti-ballistic missiles in two years, we're going to get bombed by the Soviets. So those anti-ballistic missiles were not deployed because we have an ABM treaty. So at that point, it's like we have to save ourselves then. Her, my father, both always had this millenarian apocalyptic tendency. If the world doesn't listen, the world is going to be destroyed. God will have his final say and these things will not stand. Right.

So that's where the whole bomb shelter thing came in. By the summer of 88, we were already in, you know, in Montana. There was probably three, four thousand people. I don't know. There was a residential community there called Glastonbury where a lot of people moved and set up homesteads. Now, Glastonbury is named after the legendary English town associated with King Arthur and mystical lore. This became the epicenter of this burgeoning community. Now the choice of their name wasn't coincidental. It reflected the group's deep connection to esoteric traditions and their vision of creating a spiritual utopia.

And as you might expect, this entire expedition did not go unnoticed by the media. Paradise Valley, Montana. God's country they call it here. Not the kind of place you'd expect to find a New Age range war. Jesus has told me that the kingdom of God is the consciousness of God. And this is not the kind of person you'd expect to be leading the battle. Elizabeth Clare Proffitt, head of the Church Universal and Triumphant, whose teachings are

a grab bag mix of Western and Eastern philosophy. She believes she is the reincarnated spirit of Queen Guinevere and Marie Antoinette. To her church members, she is the mother of the universe, the very messenger of God. The engineers had already started doing design work and drawings for these shelters. And they were located in a field called Taylor Meadows, which was near this pristine Mulherin Creek, which flowed out of the mountains into the Yellowstone River. And this was a spot that my mother considered to be sacred. She called it the heart of the inner retreat.

And it's where we held our conferences and it was the crown jewel of our property because of the views. It was just an unspoiled, spectacular place. And that's where she decided to dig, dig a half a mile long excavation that was 40 feet deep in places and build this giant bomb shelter complex in this unspoiled area.

To this day I think it's a tragedy when I look at the before and after pictures of this area because it's never going to be the same. Many residents claim the church's frenetic rush to prepare for the end of civilization is also hurting the environment. The main bomb shelter is being built in what was once prime habitat for grizzly bears, elk, and pronghorn antelope. Most of the money for the shelters came from selling all of our properties around the world. Once my mom decided that this war was happening, put everything up for sale.

And of course, what cult or podcast endeavor wouldn't be complete without a little labor exploitation? Am I right, Rob? Shout out to Rob. Give Rob a little shout out. I haven't slept in days. Shout out to Tyler and Liz and us. This is a shout out to all of us. Every single one of the engineers was a member.

Nobody got paid anything. Just the regular little staff salaries, you know? We had very rudimentary living facilities in Montana for most of the engineers was a member. Nobody got paid anything. Just the regular little staff salaries, you know? We had very rudimentary living facilities in Montana for most of the staff. When Rajneesh Puram dissolved, we bought a lot of their trailers and hauled them out to Montana and those became our staff housing. RGP, that is from Wild Wild Country. You got it. That's the one.

I don't need to explain it because I assume everyone who listens to this podcast has seen that series on Netflix. But this is the Oregon Commune that imploded after bioterror attacks, voter fraud schemes, and full-on FBI raid. Because when one cult gets raided by the feds, well, another cult, they get a great deal on gently used double-wide trailers. Reduce, reuse, re-indoctrinate. It's called cult recycling. It was two people sharing a room in a triplex trailer, right? You know, we were supposedly the greatest spiritual community on earth, and we couldn't even take care of our people. An estimated 3,000 church members gave up their old lives to follow prophets' visions to Paradise Valley, chanting for protection, and preparing for nuclear holocaust,

dotting the landscape with scores of fortified bomb shelters, room for every man, woman, and child in the church. We had a chief engineer. His name was William Smith. And he was a very skilled civil structural engineer who had been involved in building nuclear power plants. So he knew what the hell he was doing. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but because of nepotism I was put second in charge of the department. And we would have these

design meetings. We had eight or ten main engineers, civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, and we designed these in about a year. Well, let's see, we broke ground in May of 89 and it was a serious effort. I mean, this is like military grade. I mean, it was a lot of welding, a lot of heavy equipment, cranes and you know, you name it. I mean, it was a massive construction project.

Probably cost about $25 million in 1990. These shelters, they're world class, absolutely world class. They had everything, diesel generators. We had over half a million gallons of fuel buried. You know, there were dormitories for men, women, and couples. The medical facility in each one, commercial kitchen in each one.

We had multiple levels of redundancy of systems. You know, if something happened to the generators, we had battery backup, if something happened to the batteries, by riding bicycles, we could manually pump air into the shelters if we needed to. We had stored food where we could occupy the shelters for seven months, and then we had seven years of stored food for after we came out of the shelters. We had space for 756 people. Each shelter held 126 and there were six of those in a row connected by tunnels and then there was a central storage facility called the Deep Core Shelter and that was twin arches 300 feet long, 40 feet wide, 20 feet high. They were big enough to drive a semi in. And the back one was filled with grain, and the front one was filled with other canned and dehydrated food and supplies. We've moved all of our video, audio, and print archives into this facility. It's all underground.

You know, if Mike White is looking for his next White Lotus location, I have a pitch. Montana cold bunkers, except everyone dies but the chosen ones. White Lotus just got even whiter. Yeah. So if you're going to store seven years worth of food, if you're going to build shelters, if something happens, everybody's heard about this. Everybody thinks, oh, they have food. Let's go get it, right? So we knew we would need guns. And I don't have to tell you, guns are very available

in the US and there's no problem getting them. I don't believe in pacifism. And I believe that if you are attacked in your home and somebody's gonna rape your wife and kill you and your children, that you better defend yourself or you're gonna have the karma for allowing all those lives to be taken. My stepfather, Edward Francis, you know, he was our vice president and business manager, a very, very smart guy. He was making plans to buy military

style weapons and other armament, like we had armored personnel carriers, and he was buying 50 caliber anti-material weapons that were meant to be used to disable vehicles. And these are legal to own. They're incredibly powerful guns. And he decided we should have like 20 of these. And so he made this plan with a man named Vernon Hamilton to go out and be kind of a straw buyer for these guns.

They created a fake name. They lifted a name from a dead attorney so that the guns couldn't be traced back to us. But unfortunately, we were being watched. The ATF, you know, was kind of aware that we were building these bomb shelters and that we were buying weapons. And they ended up stopping Vernon Hamilton for a traffic stop. And they found him with a receipt for a storage locker in his car. And they went to the storage locker, and they opened it up, and they found about $100,000 in cash and gold and a whole bunch of weapons.

And they seized them immediately, arrested Vernon. And in Vernon's vehicle was a handwritten note from Edward Francis detailing what he was planning to buy, the amounts of money, and so forth. Ed Francis, Prophet's fourth husband and the church's business manager, together with her former bodyguard, were recently convicted of illegally buying $100,000 worth of assault weapons and ammunition. To be used, Francis said, after a nuclear war against looters or when the Soviets invade. Quick side note, we don't have time to get into all of Elizabeth's dalliances, but yes, he was

her fourth husband. Wasn't just guns. She was stockpiling, apparently. They were trying to tie this whole thing back to the cult. But what the guys did is they used their own money. They didn't use cult funds, but it didn't really matter. I mean, like, that's kind of a moot point, right? They still knew. And I knew about the plan in advance.

My mother knew about the plan in advance. They had spiritually approved it. So when this whole thing came out, everybody's like, no, no, we didn't know about it. We had no idea he was doing this. Oh my God. Right? The church denies all the allegations, saying they are the result of media bias, or plots to force them off their land, or religious persecution. But they have barred the press from the spill site and from seeing the bomb shelter, saying the Soviets could use the information against them. We don't have the obligation to tell the entire world

what we're doing exactly and explain to them every move that we make. By the way, that was a very young Sean in the news. Aw, young Sean. Let's hear it again. We don't have the obligation to tell the entire world what we're doing exactly and explain to them every move that we make. The whole gun thing is so nuts because everybody who understands tactics knows that fixed installations are really hard to defend. All they would have to do is plug our air vents, smoke us out in some way, you know. But we figured we would stop them from doing that. We built these gun turrets made out of super heavy concrete. You know, we're all going to be underground and we're going to still defend

ourselves from these marauders who are going to come. Well, all the men in the community did take the whole idea of defense seriously, but I think any trained army could have mopped us up in about five minutes. But for Sean, this was status quo, playing with his kids in the backyard, buying mulch at Home Depot, and checking the diesel and the apocalypse bunker in advance of nuclear annihilation. You know, similar to what my dad did on Saturdays. Yeah, I had two more kids when I was up there. And, you know, so life went on as, you know, more or less normal.

I mean, I went hunting, fishing. I worked for the cult. So my job was initially during the shelter project, I was second in charge of engineering and planning department. And then when that was over with, I went back to audio video. I had a department of 25 people, everything from shooting video, recording music albums, producing cassette tapes, videotapes. Our house was kind of perched on a ledge on one side of the canyon that were very near the shelters and my sister lived right next door. My mother lived about a quarter mile away. My wife Kathleen was... eventually she was accepted by my mother. She loved being a grandma and when Chris was born, you know, she

doted on them really, which completely made their whole earlier thing make no sense at all. I think it really was just she wanted to be at the center of everything, right? If it wasn't her idea, then she was against it. OK, so the other day I'm texting someone and my phone autocorrects a very necessary word to ducking. Like, why would I ever say I'm ducking exhausted? OK, that's when I realized maybe I could use a little more calm in my life. And that Liz is where Headspace comes in. It's the app that's helped me slow down,

breathe and not take the bait from every stress grenade tossed my way. Headspace love this app guys. It has over a thousand hours of meditations, mindfulness exercises and little on the go resets that are weirdly effective. Like even if you only have five minutes between a meeting or a meltdown or a cult interview, it helps. It helps. It's helped me sleep better, reduce stress, and most importantly not flip out when somebody replies, her my last email. I hate that. And whether you're brand new to meditation or you've been pretending to do it for years or you do it just to sound evolved or you feel like you can't do it because your brain moves too fast, it literally has something for everyone.

It's like a personal trainer for your brain, but you don't have to sweat. So yeah, if you want to feel better, be more present or just stop stress scrolling until your thumb goes numb. Try it. Try Headspace. For a limited time, you can get it for free for 60 full days. Just go to headspace.com slash cult pod. That's H-E-A-D-S-P-A-C-E dot com slash cult pod.

Feel good and mean it. Just for everyone to orient themselves, this is the year 1989. The year of like a prayer, the Simpsons, and Batman. But out in the wilds of Montana, the CUT was building bunkers. And for Elizabeth, grandma mode was briefly activated, but then it was back to her regularly scheduled programming of decrees, dictations, and doomsday. The Soviet Union, she believes, is planning a first nuclear strike. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are riding across the land. And as you know, these four horsemen bring problems in the economy.

They bring war, they bring death, they bring famine, they bring plague. I took it all very seriously. I mean, if we're doing this big project, if we're building these shelters, you kind of make it real for yourself as you're going. And I, I was very afraid. I mean, I was, I was to the point at one time of, you know of make it real for yourself as you're going. And I was very afraid. I mean, I was to the point at one time of, you know, I thought my mother had this special pull with God and I was begging her. It's like, please don't let this war happen.

Right. Like, ask El Morya to stop this war. Right. Now, I don't know if I discussed El Morya last time around, but he was our founding master, who was sort of like my mother's alter ego. You know, I at that time thought that El Morya was a real cosmic being who had power to do things, and that my mother had power to ask him to do things. And so that was one of the things I kept saying. It's like, you know, because I'm in my early 20s, and I'm like, I kind of like civilization. I want to live. I don't want to go into this post-apocalyptic thing where we come out of the shelters and live like cavemen.

I mean, let the man see at least one Bon Jovi concert before the mushroom clouds hit. Am I right? But for Elizabeth Clare Proffitt, who likely knew the Bon Jovi peaked after their 1986 Slippery When Wet album, well, she didn't really need to see the Bon Jovi peaked after their 1986 Slippery When Wet album. Well, she didn't really need to see the Bon Jovi concert. She had other plans. The combination of her rejecting the world, the world rejecting her and us being fully prepared, those were all the conditions that had to be in place in order for her to finally decide it is time to call for God to judge the United States

and to bring down nuclear fire. Not that the church universal and triumphant isn't interesting. It is gloriously bizarre and fascinating, but it is also exceedingly strange. As one Montana neighbor put it, I'm surrounded by people whose dipsticks haven't seen oil in a long time.

That observation, even less obliquely put, has been made in particular about the church's current leader, Elizabeth Clare Proffitt. I have to clarify, my mom was not mentally ill. From knowing her and from all the research that I've done and people I've talked to, I mean, everybody kind of agrees she really believed this stuff. She believed she was getting these messages from on high, that El Morya and Saint Germain and Jesus were speaking to her and that Saint Germain was helping

her interpret Nostradamus and set up a timeline for all of this. So we were supposed to be done by October 2nd of 89. That's when the war was supposed to happen. We thought this was all very much happening. This wasn't just abstract anymore. So that day we were nowhere near done with the shelters. They were not even close. We were in church that night, decreeing and doing whatever we thought needed to be done spiritually to also help prevent this war from happening before we were ready.

Yeah, so October 2nd, obviously prophecy fails. And of course, my mom said El Moria has given us a special dispensation to have more time to finish. And so you have until January 15th and then February 8th and then March 15th, right? So they kept slipping. The time kept slipping. Weird. We've never heard that on this show before. I know, if I had a nickel. If I had a nickel. And it was funny because a lot of the local, in Gardner and Livingston and Bozeman, all the bars were hosting end of the world parties. I mean, the people were just making fun of it.

They were having a great time, you know, making fun of us. Honestly, an end of the world party in Bozeman, Montana circa 1990. Actually sounds like a hell of a good time. A rootin' tootin', whiskey shootin', last call before the fall kinda good time, am I right? I think you're right. So while the locals were there tossing back their corps light

and placing bets on which of the four horsemen would win place or show. The ascended master they worshipped. Well, he just peaced the fuck out. And one of the times after we'd missed our deadline, there was a dictation from El Morya where he said, I'm being benched by my heavenly superiors. So El Morya is basically being told that he can no longer help us and that if we want his help then we're gonna have to be more devout and work harder and all those sorts of things. And I think it was my mom's way of kind of cracking the whip, but the problem is people were already working 12-hour days.

We were literally on a wartime kind of footing where, you know, there was no time with family. There was no other activities. Everybody was just 24-7 on this thing. You know, people were already not taking weekends. People were already decreeing, you know, several hours a day. And the decree sessions became every night for even longer hours. And you go to sleep, you wake up and immediately start decreeing or working again. And we were running equipment 24-7 at the shelter site to try to get finished. Basically, the month of February and early March was the final push to get everything ready. And we got it ready enough so that shelters could run on generator power,

everything was buried, we had everything in place, all our food was stored. She calls a drill for midnight on March 15th. You know, we're still putting in last minute things in storage and then at a certain point about 10 minutes to midnight, I get this call on my radio, my mom says, get everybody in the shelters. Yeah, the first drill was like, let's just get everybody in there. Let's make sure that we can get everybody in there safely. And you're talking about, again, when the logistics of getting 750 people, which included probably 100 or 150 children and another like 100, 150 old people. So you're talking about a lot of people who needed assistance.

So there's school buses coming up and there's people that are going up on these lifts to get to the platform. So I'm out there with a bullhorn, you know, telling everybody to get in the shelters and save themselves because everybody is still running around like crazy. You can imagine what it's like getting 750 people to go in and settle down, you know. We have these four foot tunnels. So you could enter the shelters from the ground and there were ladders. So we brought everybody in on these horizontal carts. I mean, to this day, it's like a movie or something, right? I mean, to this day, it's like a movie or something, right? So this is the first time that anybody has seen the shelters

because there were 750 people on our staff, but only about 200 were on the work crew that were building the actual shelters. And a lot of the shelters were nicer than the housing that we had in Montana because we spent so much money on them. I mean, they were perfect, like nice finishes, the kitchen was all commercial kitchen, stainless steel, you know, the bathrooms were super nice. And now welcome to the underground shelters where you'll ride out the end of your days in comfort and style. Oh, I'm loving this Italian marble backsplash. Very apocalypse chic. So we did. We got in by midnight and buttoned everything up. We're decreeing all night.

This time it was to prevent this war. We're decreeing for protection and safety. One of our rituals was we use stainless steel swords, right? So while we're decreeing and giving these prayers, we're doing this chopping motion with swords, which my mother had this belief that stainless steel somehow could cut through astral energy or whatever, cut through dark energy, remove entities. So you'd go around your body and you'd cut around your arms and around the back of your head and underneath your feet to cut yourself free from this negative energy, right?

And so now we're wielding these swords like as if they're weapons. So a lot of that was going on in the shelters the first night, and nothing was said at that point about, you know, wanting the bombs to fall or whatever. It was just a drill to test the systems. For now, Paradise Valley's range war is at a standoff. Church members say, like it or not, they are staying. They intend to build a standoff. Church members say like it or not, they are staying. They intend to build a new world. They say we'll be here long after this one is destroyed. This is Forrest

Sawyer for Nightline in Paradise Valley, Montana. Well, Zyana Kultas brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial genius, monetary magician, honestly, we've been called worse. But these are things that people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and you know, other grownup stuff. Plus, they've got great customer service when you actually need it.

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available in all states or situations. I love progressive. Get it. So after the drill on March 15th, my mother, I mean, her mood was as as dire as I'd ever seen it. She was convinced that this judgment was coming, that the war was coming and that we had to be ready. So she schedules another drill. And this time, it's March 26th. The morning of the second drill, my mom, she was very serious. She got Erin and I, and we went for this walk outside her house, and she told us, she says, I need the help of your spiritual mantles to call down the judgment on the United States of America.

I'm like, no, like, why are we doing this? Like, there's a lot of good people. This doesn't seem right. I'm negotiating now with my mom saying, mom, don't do this. You know, she said, no, this is how it has to be. This is the only way. And I felt that she was, you know, at that point speaking for God. And I still feel extremely

horrible about what happened. But you know, the three of us got together and called for nuclear war to occur as a judgment on the United States of America. And even though I objected and argued with her, I still did it. I still gave the prayer thinking that we actually had the power to destroy the world. And then we decided to use it. And I participated in that. And I feel like I really betrayed myself and humanity at that point. Yeah. So we go get our stuff and we pile into the shelters again. And my mom makes this announcement. She tells the entire shelter, we are safe, the light bearers are safe,

and it is time to call for the judgment of the United States of America. And so everyone did this. And she gets up there and she gives this invocation where she's like, you know, boats will be lighting, find the fallen ones. You know, she's like, she has this key hop. It was so fallen ones. You know, she's like she has this key hop. It was so loud, like it would literally hurt my ears if I was standing there.

And at a certain point, she starts to say Archangel Michael, let the bombs descend. Let the bombs descend, let the bombs descend at the top of her. But the bombs, I can't even do it. I mean, she had a very it was a very practiced vocal technique that she used. And swinging the sword, it was just it was just, practiced vocal technique that she used and swinging the sword. And it was just, it was just this dramatic scene. And I'm standing right next to her. And I mean, I almost got cut by that sword.

I'm like, this is kind of horrifying. I'm not, I, I'm not down with this. You know, there's one guy who actually did leave. Like after that announcement was made, this truck driver, he, he just left the shelter and he was just disgusted. But I didn't, I didn't leave. I didn't say anything because remember I'd been negotiating with El Moria, you know, through her to try to like stop this whole thing. And it's like, now we're actually calling for it to happen.

And everyone did this. There was no sense of time because obviously there's no windows in the shelters. We're in there at noon. It's we're probably there till nine or 10 o'clock at night. And finally, at one point, you know, she's like, why don't you go check and see what's happening? So I go into the radio room, which we call the command center, and I'm listening to ham radio traffic. And it's just like a normal night.

You know, we come out of the shelters. It's March 26th. El Morya gives a dictation and he says, you've won by your obedience and your sacrifice. You have prevented this war. Of course they did. And it's like I'm thinking to myself, OK, how can anybody buy this when we actually literally sat there and called for the bombs to descend and it didn't happen?

Now you're telling us that we prevented it. It was the ultimate bogus framing and it was basically just her way of saving face, you know, with the members. Because cults always have this moment where what happens when the prophecy fails and people either double down or they leave. Some people they went back to cities, they went back to their lives. You know, some staff started leaving because obviously not everybody believed in El Morya's framing that we had saved the world. Some people realized, hey, this is a fucking disaster. We're out of here.

A fucking disaster indeed. But Sean, well, he had nowhere else to go. Yeah, we stayed living there, not at the shelter site. We had, you know, I still had my house. Interestingly enough, right around that same exact time, we had a fuel spill, a huge fuel spill. Right. So we had probably half a million gallons of gasoline and diesel buried around the shelters in about 30 tanks. gallons of gasoline and diesel buried around the shelters in about 30 tanks. Plus we had 140,000 gallons of propane.

But what we did is because of these timelines, we buried some of the tanks in frozen ground, meaning that that soil can't be properly compacted. It can't be stabilized, right? Our engineers and everybody warned my mom, you can't bury these tanks in the winter and she's like, oh, El Morya is, is't bury these tanks in the winter. And she's like, oh, El Morya is, there's no flexibility in these timelines. So they buried them anyway. Spring thaw comes around in April

and three of the tanks rupture. So a total of about 32,000 gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel spilled out of the tanks. They went underground into Mulherin Creek, and it went right down to the Yellowstone River. That's enough to create a sheen for miles on the Yellowstone River. So we actually paid a fine to the Coast Guard

for fouling a navigable waterway. That's how badly we fucked up. Talk about a fucking disaster. The cleanup took a year and cost a million dollars because we had to dig up all the tanks. We had to pump out all the fuel. Once those tanks got dug up, there's no fuel to run the generators and the shelters are now useless. Triple fucking disaster. So this whole 25 million dollar project that we'd worked on for two years is basically just worthless.

A massive warehouse underground and the back arch was completely full of bulk grain. It wasn't airtight. So eventually oxygen got in and rats got in and basically that entire seven year store of grain was rendered useless. Quadruple fucking disaster. I went back. We started producing tapes again My mom started planning her new lecture tours and her you know giving dictations and you know, so we're back into Production mode and now back to our regular scheduled programming Cult tapes and cosmic lectures don't pay attention to the failed Doomsday Prophecy Underground Bunker Project.

That cost a fortune, poisoned a river, and shattered a few thousand dreams. NBD! It's just time to decrease some more high-pitched nonsense. You know, the initial attraction, and it was for me too, even though I was born into it, you know, there's this transcendence, this idea that you're in direct communication with God. Well, that all started falling away because I started seeing behind the curtain, I started seeing my mother making stuff up and basically just using her dictations for political purposes. And then, you know, I started to realize that this wasn't what I thought it was. But I mean, I have three children, I have a wife, I have a house, if I want to leave the cult, then I'm gonna have to leave all of that, you know, I have a house. If I want to leave the cult, then I'm going to have to leave all of that, you know, go

find a house and a job and all. So it was, it's not something that I was anxious to do. Which is a very common feeling when nearing the end of a cult. So I'm like, I need to be a responsible father. I need health insurance. And we didn't provide health insurance for our people. So at a certain point, you know, I'm starting to get mad about this. So I asked my mom, I said, can I get a health policy?

She's like, no, if I get you health insurance, then I'm going to have to buy health insurance for the staff and we can't afford it. And so, you know, I can't make an exception for you. It was a slap in the face and I took it that way. And so I went behind her back and I gave myself a raise from the other board that I was on. I convinced them, look, I got to take care of my family. And these board members agreed with me and I got a health policy. So she found out about that and canceled my raise, which meant that I had to cancel my policy.

What a C-U-N. Cutie. Cutie. Right. Cutie. So that became like kind of the final straw when I had to stand up to her. So I'm trying to get a hold of her. She's ducking my calls. I can't reach her. She doesn't want to face me. And one day when she came to to lead a service or whatever, and I tracked her down and

I confronted her right then and there. And, you know, I said basically, you're making it impossible for me to work for you. You just denied my health care. How am I supposed to feel about that? And then she started railing at me, yelling as she did. And I just snapped. I just slammed the door in her face and walked out. And at that point, I made the decision

that I was going to go. See you next Tuesday, Mom. So Sean has finally reached his breaking point. He's ready to leave, but little did he know. My wife Kathleen was she was way ahead of me. She was ready to go. She was ready to get out of there. She was a creative person, very into music and art, and the cult was very stifling for her in that way. But it was three months until I could actually leave because there was a

lot of logistics. And at one point during those three months, you know, I said to Kathleen, well, maybe we can maybe I can get her to change her mind on the health insurance. Maybe we can stay. And Kathleen was like, uh-uh, you do whatever you have to do, but I'm leaving, you know. So it became strong enough that she was willing to put our marriage on the line to get the hell out of there. Thank God for Kathleen. We got a U-Haul, packed up our house, but my mother wasn't, she couldn't just let us go.

You know, there was another confrontation at the end as I was literally on my way driving out. There she is again, you know, telling me that I better bend the knee, I'd better submit to her, and if not, that I wasn't going to be able to come in the shelters. And I was just like, you know, I'd rather die, frankly. We just, we drove away. And we hightailed it down to Los Angeles. I think Mama Profit forgot that the shelters were no longer usable, but please continue. I don't think she caught that part of the podcast. The quadruple fucking disaster part.

So when we first came down to Los Angeles, I rented a room with a friend and I had a trailer and we parked it in his backyard in Chatsworth. And that was for about five months. And I was doing that so that I could get work and start saving money to get into a house. Houses in the San Fernando Valley were like one hundred and sixty thousand dollars back then. You know what happened? Kathleen and I almost got divorced. Her situation was this, you know, sacrificial, long-suffering mother who was basically just bled dry. We'd previously been in this community where there was food and there was a school and

there was support. Well, now she's got these three kids and she's in this trailer in Chatsworth. I am in this mode of this strict father morality. So we just had this major disconnect. So I'm working nights and she's like out and about every night while I'm working. And lo and behold, she meets this dude and they start having an affair. Meanwhile, she thinks she's pregnant, goes to a dude, and they start having an affair. Meanwhile, she thinks she's pregnant, goes to a clinic, gets a pap smear,

and finds out she has cervical cancer. And this all gets dumped on me one night, about three weeks after we closed on our house. And, you know, so I went through a very difficult period where I was living in this house by myself. So we had this whole year of just absolute chaos after we left the cult, where divorce and family separated, cancer.

I had no capacity to be alone because I was always a center of attention at the cult. So it was literally one of the worst periods of my life. And Kathleen finally comes back and she's healed of the cancer somehow. I don't know what happened, but she came back and we were together like another five years after that. It was a very confusing time. And what I had thought when I was in the cult is that, oh,

if I just leave, everything's going to be fine and I can get a job, join middle-class America and live happily ever after. But when 9-11 hit, that's when I realized that there was no sane world to escape to. And so I realized this is a way bigger problem than I understood. So I started writing, I started processing, I started reading a lot of books, psychology books, evolutionary psychology, just trying to understand the whole cult phenomenon. And it also wasn't immediately obvious to me that I was in a cult. You know, it took me a little while to realize, hey, I was absolutely in a cult. And where I'm really starting to understand how devastating this

organization was, and how horrible it was for people, and how corrupt my mother was. It still took time for me to realize, holy shit, this was just a giant mistake. This should never have happened. How does one even begin to process that when it was your parents who were your cult leaders? There was really no reconciliation with my mom until years later. You know, I went up to Montana a few more times. I was there for her 60th birthday, had a chance to talk and had what was probably our last lucid conversation and she finally apologized. Probably five years after I left.

Not only did she apologize, but she made up this story about her having been a high priestess on Atlantis thousands of years ago. And she talked about how in that embodiment she had abused power and she had had this draconian moral code that she enforced even on penalty of death. What it represented was a sort of taking of accountability, saying that I had this tendency. She said, I had an opportunity to come back in this life and make things right, and I made some of the same mistakes again. By that time, I was an atheist and I thought the whole idea of past lives was just ridiculous. But I understood that from her standpoint, it was really the best apology that she could muster.

By the end of the 90s, her ministry was winding down. She started having cognitive issues. Her epilepsy and Alzheimer's started to really have an effect. And so she resigned from the cult entirely in 1999, just after her 60th birthday. She never quit the cult. Let's just be clear about that. She kept her beliefs to her grave. And so... Did you go to her funeral?

I did not. It was too culty. Cult leaders never just die. It's always this big moment. And there was so much idolatry that I just didn't feel like I fit in there. I feel like, you know, she belongs to them, not to me. And now Sean has what so many in his position fight to reclaim his voice, his story and the power to tell it on his own terms. One thing's for sure is that I do understand how cults work and I've been on both sides. I've had to go through basically self-deprogramming and I feel like I have something to offer. I'm finally finished with my book. It's partially a memoir, but it's also kind of an insider case study of this cult.

I tried to be as scholarly as possible. The book has like 450 footnotes. So I'm extremely proud of it. I'm extremely happy to be finished with it. Growing up in my cult was my first exposure to the corrupting influence of power. You don't understand how these concepts are being used to manipulate and control people. I would have fears and dreams for many, many years after leaving the cult that I was being called up in front of El Morya or that I was being judged by the lords of karma or some other thing. And, you know, it took me a while to get to where I felt like I'm okay. I'm going to die eventually forever. I'm not coming back. And we only

get one life. Like I'm a human being and that's the thing, in a world of promised ascensions, cosmic karma and divine dictations, sometimes the most powerful belief is in your own humanity. One life, no masters, no decrees, just the everyday miracle of being here and choosing how to live. A huge thank you to Sean Proffitt for sharing his story with such honesty and insight. His book, My Cult, Your Cult is out now and it's a must read for anyone trying to understand how cults work and how people find their way out. We'll put a link to it in the show notes so please support Sean and keep supporting stories like his.

And if you like what we do here, well consider joining our Patreon, leaving a review or, I mean simply just save us a cot in your spacious bomb shelter. And you're going to need that bomb shelter because we're gonna drop some serious love bombs on you. Right now. Rob, you just felt that one, right? You got the bomb on me, baby. You got the bomb on me. Very nice, very nice.

We are gonna take a little break next week. Rob's going on vacation. Liz is getting that lobotomy she so long deserves and I am just fucking tired. So we're going to take that break but we'll be back the week after next with a truly remarkable untold story of a child born into Scientology. It's a side of Scientology often ignored and it's a good one. We'll see you next time or not, depending on El Moira's availability. Was I an occult? The podcast that you are listening to now is written, produced, edited and hosted by

Tyler, let the bombs descend, Misa. And me, Liz, Italian marble backsplash, Ayakuzzi. It sounds dirty. Just sounds like a dirty sex move to me. That's another one for the Urban Dictionary podcast. Totally is. move to me. That's another one for the Urban Dictionary podcast. Totally is. Our sound editing and design is done by Rob, deep core shelter para.

But I get it by Pilates class. I get that deep core shelter. And assistant editor, the wonderful Greta, oops, my oil spilled and ruined a river, Stromquist. Also dirty. Our studio engineer is Stacey Judgment of the United States, Para. And of course, the lovely video engineer, Gabby, sealed in a bunker since 1990, Rap. Which means we got to wrap it up. Wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap it up. C*** teeth, b****es. from the waters of Lake Erie, it was raising flags.

He said, there's no way that that fish should weigh 7.9 pounds. It's just not big enough to a nondescript office building in Richmond, Virginia, home to a $700 million fund for children with special needs. If there was a cliché list of how to blow money that you just stole very quickly, this guy did all of them. To the ski slopes of Salt Lake City, where a former Olympic snowboarder landed on the FBI's most wanted list. Ryan James Wedding is one of those interesting narcos who have had two very successful careers,

one legal and one illegal. We're pulling back the curtain on a fresh lineup of opportunists who stopped at nothing to get ahead. These are the stories of people who saw a loophole, a moment of weakness, a chance to get ahead and took it. I'm host Sarah James McLaughlin. Join me for a new season of The Opportunist on May 19th. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.

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