PROPHET MISSES ARMAGEDDON, AGAIN

  Elizabeth Clare Prophet, leader of the Church Universal and 
Triumphant, once again has misled her followers with doomsday 
predictions.

  After consulting astrological charts that indicated grave 
danger in the months of March and April 1990, Prophet directed 
her followers to retreat to bomb shelters at a church-owned site 
in Montana.

  The faithful waited. March and April passed and no Doomsday 
occurred. However, the cult did get in trouble with 
environmental authorities who detected a leak from a church-owned 
gasoline tank.

  The woman whom the faithful followed was born Elizabeth (Betty) 
Clare Wulf in 1939 in Red Bank, N.J.  From age 9 until 18 she 
attended a Christian Science church. She graduated from Boston 
University and went to work at Christian Science church 
headquarters in Boston.

  There she met and married Dag Ytreberg, the first of her four 
husbands.  At the same time Mark L. Prophet was starting a  
storefront church in Washington, D.C. He called it the Summit 
Lighthouse.

  In 1961, Wulf heard Prophet at a Boston meeting. She later 
left Ytreberg and married Prophet and returned to his church in 
Washington. The church had little money and fewer than 100 
members.  However, the couple combined their talents and soon the 
church had enough money to move to Colorado Springs, Colo.  Here 
the church quickly attracted followers from the counterculture 
movement of the mid-60s.  Among these new converts were Randall 
Kosp and Edward Francis.

  According to Kosp, the Prophets had fierce quarrels over 
control of the church.  In February 1973, Mark Prophet died of a 
stroke. Many people quit the church.  Nine days after Prophet 
died, Elizabeth secretly married Kosp.  Six month later, the 
marriage was made public and official in Idaho.  However, Eliza-
beth retained the surname Prophet and requested that Kosp change 
his name to King.

  King made some bad investments which spurred an investigation 
by the Internal Revenue Service. Fearing the loss of non-profit 
status, the church changed its name to The Church Universal and 
Triumphant and moved to California, where it bought a former 
Nazarene college in Pasadena in 1976.  In 1978, the church moved 
to what Elizabeth called "Camelot," a 260-acre estate in the 
southern San Fernando Valley. Shortly after moving to the new 
site, Elizabeth charged King with infidelity, divorced him and 
had him excommunicated from the church.

  In 1981, Elizabeth married her fourth and current husband, Ed 
Francis, whose wife had previously left the sect and divorced 
him. That same year, the church bought Malcolm Forbes' 12,000-
acre ranch near Livingston, Mont.  The church bought more land, 
bringing its holdings in the Livingston area to 30,000 acres.  
During the mid-80s, lawsuits from former members, which charged 
brainwashing, arose against the church. Elizabeth sold the 
"Camelot" property and moved her headquarters to the Montana 
ranch on the northern border of Yellowstone National Park.

  The sect claims 150,000 members, who refer to Elizabeth as 
"Guru Ma" and consider her statements to be direct words of God.  
The New Age group adheres to a mixture of Western and 
Eastern theology. Reincarnation, karma, astrology and belief in 
power from crystals are among the church's beliefs.  Prophet 
claims that in past lives she was Queen Guinevere, Marie 
Antoinette, and someone who sat at the feet of Jesus.
   
                                                        -MKG


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