Cults Episodes

Here we are: the end of the line for the Manson Family. This week, we bring our epic series on the Manson Family Murders to an explosive conclusion with the August 9th killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, the retaliation murder of Shorty Shea (and possibly lawyer Ronald Hughes), the capture of the Family during a ranch raid, and the final sensational trial that made Charlie Manson, the Manson girls and "Helter Skelter" household names. We also give a bit of a "where are they now" for the Fam...

And here we are. The infamous murders of August 8th, 1969, where 5 people - some famous - would meet horrific ends at the hands of the Manson Family, directed by Charlie to create "copycat murders" to lessen the heat on the real killer, Bobby Beausoleil, and hopefully spring him from jail before he could rat on Charlie to the cops. But it's not just about the deaths. It's about the lives - and this episode, we take a deep dive into the too-short lifetimes of the 5 people killed at 10050 Cielo D...

This week, the horror of Helter Skelter begins on part 4 of our Manson Family deep-dive with the lesser-known murder of the Family's first official victim, former friend Gary Hinman. We explore the circumstances leading to the powder keg-like situation the family was in, and how it all exploded into violence when Charlie decided that the money required to fund the Family's flight to Death Valley was basis enough for murder. Caught up in the Family's madness was innocent victim Gary Hinman, who ...

In week 3 of our Manson saga we travel with the Family to the worn-down Western movie set of Spahn Ranch, where Charlie and co set up shop and begin their descent further into shared cult madness - separated from their loved ones, fully dependent on Charlie, hungry, overworked, and addled out of their minds on constant LSD consumption. It's a potent cocktail, ready to explode in the California heat...and boy, will it ever. When The Beatles' White Album is released, the darkness at the Ranch coa...

"Cease to exist, just come and say you love me Give up your world, come on you can be, I'm your kind, I'm your kind, and I see..." This week, we take a tour through the epicenter of the hippie movement right at the peak of the Summer of Love, when Charlie Manson finally leaves prison and makes his way to the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco. There, he sows the first seeds of what would become the Family cult, attracting his first followers with a blend of pop culture sermonizing and t...

The innocence of the Summer of Love and the hippie counterculture movement came to an abrupt end in August 1969, when a string of brutal murders in the Los Angeles area rocked Hollywood, the country, and the world. The perpetrators? A strange hippie cult called "The Family", headed by a creepy, scrawny guy with an odd charisma by the name of Charles Manson. This August, we're diving in to the explosive story of the Manson Family Murders with a multi-part series investigating the who, what, wh...

This week we finish our quick tour through the purported adventures of the UFO prophet Raël, whose Raëlian Movement once claimed nearly a hundred thousand followers worldwide. While Raël was spreading his message here on Earth, his alien benefactors returned in 1975 to take him on a trip through the stars - and a tour of their paradise planet, where Raël and his followers hope to be cloned someday. We won't spoil anything, but the story gets preeeetty crazy from there... ______________________...

ETs are back on Ain't It Scary in a two-part primer on one of the most prominent UFO religions on Earth - the Raëlian Movement! In this first installment, Sean introduces Claude Vorilhon - the man who would be renamed Raël - as the erstwhile pop singer-turned-racing journalist meets an ancient alien master and learns the secret origins in the human race. Raël's received wisdom would be recorded in the simply-named The Book That Tells the Truth in 1974 - and inspire a movement that attracts foll...

This week we take our first blazing steps into the dark, yet sorta wacky, world of millennial death cults with the tragic tale of the Order of the Solar Temple and its power-mad leaders, Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret. Ostensibly a fraternal secret society like the Freemasons, the OST escalated from goofy chants with robes and swords all the way to ritual murder and suicide by the time of the fiery collapse in the mid-90s that would eventually kill more than 70 members. Why? How? Is my lo...