As Apollo 8 orbited the moon, and the first 911 system went online, and the world was singing “Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon,” I was kidnapped. I was seven years old. In fact, I was kidnapped by Momma and a fellow cult member who thought they were aliens from outer space.

We got our data from science fiction books, from Star Trek...We believed we were gods and goddesses from another universe called Home. —Momma

Momma lived on a remote Alaskan island with 1,500 other souls. The island, only 35 miles long and 8 miles wide could feel isolated. It was the 1960s. Think—no jet airplanes—no ferries. How was someone supposed to leave except on a starship? Momma read Worlds of Tomorrow and Spaceway Magazine. She stared at stars and listened to her parents talk about island lore, how flying saucers came and went over a neighboring island. Even the longshoreman working lumber ships had seen them. One night, on the back deck of a huge freighter tied to the dock, the night crew all stopped working and stood near lumber stacks, on log rafts, in forklifts, in mid-sway and mid-shift, and stared with mouths agape, and mouths dangling with cigarettes and pipes, and wondered. Maybe some feared. But Momma remembered their stories.

I had once wanted to be a jet pilot. Now I wanted to go to the stars. —Momma

Momma dreamed and imagined and thought and wrote. She was a storyteller. She was a writer. Her high school friends remember her like that. She dated and flirted and flitted around in pants—yes, pants—she was the first girl to be allowed to wear pants in her high school. Momma was sickly: mono and strep and rheumatic fever. She was bedridden a lot. Her mother told the principal she would no longer be wearing the required dresses to high school in the middle of the Alaskan winter. And then lonely Momma found a boy-man who could shoot deer and hunt moose and clean salmon and set mink traps and was handsome and strong and she didn’t want to lose him to another girl so she proposed marriage. And so they did.

I am the number two daughter to a teenage mother. I’m less than a year younger than my sister. Momma had four kids in a row. Momma was trying to be a good Catholic, having recently converted, always looking for the spiritual beyond the tideline, beyond the fireweed, searching the deep dark woods surrounding the island. Momma was tired and worn and probably suffering from postpartum depression, and isolated island syndrome when it all changed: She met another woman.  

I felt oddly drawn to this ordinary looking woman…I wondered who she was. I heard a deep, masculine voice speak to me right out of the air beside me. “Your destinies are together,” the mysterious voice said. —Momma

Momma fell in love with Margie. Momma and Margie met walking on an icy road near the harbor. Momma remembers a voice saying, “Your destinies are together.” The women met again and again and began a bible study and read and dissected and questioned. While their husbands were at work, their young children sat and played together at their feet while they read Einstein and quoted scriptures. Nothing was holy about it, though. One day, Margie said her little girl didn’t like grass because she came from a planet made of metal. Momma was fascinated. How could that be?

We were sitting… [at the] kitchen table with tea and cinnamon rolls. She was a great cook....I was inspired to write a paragraph explaining what the portal of light was. —Momma

But Momma wondered if her dreams were not simply dreams and her stories were not only stories. She wondered where her ideas and thoughts were coming from. Was she special? She wanted to be special and felt the possibility of greatness everyone feels at that age. There must be more. She wanted to leave the island. She wanted to live in Hawaii or the Virgin Islands. She was tired, and tired of being tired. But with Margie she was alive. Momma claimed they weren’t lovers, but that she loved Margie like a sister she never had. It was the ‘Summer of Love’ and a hundred thousand people were migrating to Haight-Ashbury: communal life, free love and drugs and what ifs. What if…

She got writing from the saucer people on... [a] typewriter. —Momma

Daddy and Momma lived in our house overlooking town. Margie and her husband and kids lived in a blue double-wide trailer. My siblings and I were dragged often from our house on the hill to the House-of-Horrors, that blue double-wide trailer where little girls peed on other little girls, where snot-nosed, dirty-diapered boys needed food but ate their boogers instead. Where little girls sat on the couch, soiled, afraid of the demons they threatened us with. They said we all had demons in us, in that trailer, where kids needed hugs, or did not need that many hugs. The trailer where girls humped boys and boys humped girls, and girls humped girls and boys humped boys. And the adults danced in circles, waving scarves and swords, and sat around laying on hands, praying, and touching and praying and touching. Where the big kids and the little kids and the adults—who were really aliens—all lived together in the horrible, terrible double-wide blue trailer.

More people came and went to the bible studies, which evolved into a hodgepodge of religious and scientific studies. Locals mostly attended, but then drifters came to town. A friend of L. Ron Hubbard’s joined the group. They studied Eastern religions and Aryan texts, even. Momma got a boyfriend and Daddy found out. My sister told on her, saw Momma in bed with another man. It’s my memory too. Daddy wanted a divorce.

Margie told me there was a secret flying saucer base on Woronofski Island. The spaceships turned invisible as they came and went, which was why no one ever saw them. —Momma

UFO cults arise in times of severe social strife: ecological disasters, wars, poverty, and racial tensions. Men were being drafted off our island. Edward Teller planned to detonate nukes in our backyard. UFO cults thrive in advanced technological societies like the United States, but what made a small island community in Alaska suitable for an emerging cult? Our island had limited  technologies like television and newspaper service. It was the 1960s and the Vietnam era. Daddy had too many kids so he didn’t get drafted. Maybe it was just Momma and Margie colliding. Maybe Momma cringed when Edward Teller planned to detonate three thermonuclear bombs in Alaska to create a deep-water harbor. She must have known about the plan. Was she trained to hide under a desk or a bed and wait for a flash of light, ending her world?

Maybe, no matter where you live, or what era you live in, you look to the stars, to the spaceships, to the aliens with the zappers, and the do-hickies, and the gizmos we might need to fix us and our planet. The dreamers and inventors are always asking if the answers to our social problems can be found in alien technology and utopian worlds. Momma was a dreamer. My mother claimed she was “searching for the meaning and purpose to life: Who am I, why am I here?" Haven’t we all asked the same question? When we look to the stars what do we see: Salvation? Answers? Ourselves?  In UFO cults there's often a belief that members will be rescued by aliens by means of a spaceship, possibly a transporter device, or even suicide. Momma wanted to be rescued—no matter what.

[She] confronted me showing me and article about Charles Manson and his "Family." —Momma

My Gramma warned her: That’s a crock of shit; they’re weird; you know better; you’re like the Mansons. It was 1969 and Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas had been murdered. But Momma and her friends were not like that, no siree, the Family of Aurora Dea were aliens who crash-landed in a spaceship and reborn into human bodies. My Momma was an alien. They did a lot of channeling; channeled Einstein and Cinderella and even Snoopy and Pooh Bear. There was a cartoon realm in their universe. Momma channeled Cinderella through her hair in order to wash the dishes: She hated housework. She loved her Margie-life and hated her other life. The only way she could tolerate this world was to tap into her immortal gals, 64 space women who were at her beck-and-call.

I had researched the names of 64 of my immortal gals. Now that I was waking up, I could learn who I really was and be my immortal gals. —Momma

In my mother’s words: “The [immortal gals] were actual people who lived real lives in the other universe called Home. They each lived in a different place at Home, called Estates. They were immortal. They had been created at one point but they lived forever without dying. They all got together in one place and made a projection of themselves and projected themselves into the Image Realm altogether as one person that was an image of them all and each part of the body was a projection of one of the gals. Using me for an example, that Image was Lorna. Then the Image was placed inside of Lorena, who was my gal in Reality Realm, and she got onto the Space-time ship called the Starlighter, and flew into the Record Universe to visit it at its Golden Age...Lorena's projection, hook-up, to my body was my hair....the hook-up to Reality Realm was our hair. Each one of the gals was one of our abilities. For example, one of them was my psychic abilities. Another was my laughter. Another was my writer, etc. They were all my different personality. ...We also had fantasy characters who were our hook-up to Fantasy Realm. Mine was Cinderella...."*

If I stayed I would lose my destiny. I wouldn't be able to take my body Home with me. —Momma

The members of the Family of Aurora Dea wanted to leave this planet and go home, which is what they called their planet: Home. The Starlighter was going to come and get them. But Alaska is a long way from everywhere and anywhere so they planned to set up their commune in Oregon. The spaceship would find them there. The Grumman Goose would have to lift them off the island first, though. And Momma was told her kids were spiritually asleep and it was her job to wake us up. The Family needed us. Needed kids. The Family believed in preparing adolescents for group marriages like the spiritual marriages in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Like that.

We are all married to each other at Home, [Margie] explained to me. —Momma

The Family convinced Momma that her momma, my Gramma, was not her mother at all, but a huge hairy spider: her true form. Of course, Momma was terrified of spiders. And plus Daddy said he didn’t want to be married to the other people. He wanted Momma and the family he already had. Daddy temporarily moved in to his parents’ house to get away from Momma and was suing for custody. He wanted us away from the Family of Auroa Dea. But Momma had other plans. Early one morning she awakened us. We hurriedly dressed and she carried my baby brother outside, while my two sisters and I were forced to follow her in our sleepy-daze, dressed in coats and rubber boots. We followed Momma down a hill through the bushes, along an old deer trail, to a road below where a van and Momma’s boyfriend waited. We were told to be quiet. Told to sit in the back of the windowless van. Told to be still. Everything was secret. Slatted light filtered in through the side vents. Stuffy. The scent of rust.

If I couldn’t change my circumstances, I could still change me. —Momma

At a large pullout on the side of the highway, we stood outside waiting near a small Alaska Airlines shack, a tiny building only big enough for a couple people and suitcases. The Grumman Goose hadn’t arrived yet. The ticket agent made excuses then refused to sell Momma and her boyfriend the tickets off the island. She’d heard rumors: saucer people, sexual molestation, communal marriage. Momma put us back into the dark van and drove us to town to the seaplane float. Gramma showed up there and threatened the pilot. He refused to fly. I have a memory of my grandmother arriving by taxing, and walking briskly down the ramp to the float. I remember her swearing and the sound of her slapping my mother. I remember feeling relieved. Gramma tugged us away and we headed back home in the only taxi on the island.

Momma left us shortly after and never came back.

Afterward, I pulled my hair from its roots and rocked myself in the corner. No one thought of taking us to see a doctor and there was only one MD anyway. My Daddy raised us on the island. I used to make new friends by saying, “My momma ran away with a cult.” But I had a skewed idea about what that meant. My older sister and I watched week-old new reports of the Manson trial on a black and white T.V. I thought Momma’s eyes looked like Charles Manson’s (In the 6th grade my favorite book was Helter Skelter). I could see the crazy in Manson’s eyes. Maybe I had seen the crazy in Momma’s eyes, too. My dad had burned all her photographs, though, so I was going by memory. It didn’t take long to forget her. If she wasn’t coming back, I wasn’t going to remember her.

Momma was in a cult like everyone said, and Manson was in a cult; they must be in the same cult. No one explained the word to me or my siblings. I’d wondered if Momma worshipped the devil. Maybe she was an alien witch. I’d heard she lived in Salem and I’d read about Salem and the witches while attending school. I didn’t know the difference between Salem, Oregon and Salem, Massachusetts.

In Wrangell, before I left my husband and children, I had a vivid Technicolor dream in which I was at the top of a cliff, reaching down to grab hold of Vivian’s hand to pull her to safety. I couldn’t reach her hand and she plummeted down to the deep brilliant blue waters below. —Momma

My siblings and I no longer said “Momma” but called our mother by her first name and never in the presence of Daddy. Eventually we didn’t said her name at all and acted like it never happened. Like she never happened. I lined my bed with stuffed animals: a five foot red and yellow striped snake, and my pajama dog, with a zipper-pocket in her back; and Born Baby, my baby doll with no arms and hair, because when her arms fell off, I played guns with them, and I pulled her hair out along with my own. At night, sometimes I looked out at Woronofski Island, watching for spaceships, and listening for alien creatures snapping alder branches as they approached my house through the forest. And most nights I tucked down beneath my scratchy army blanket with a crucifix around my neck—the one Gramma gave to me—whispering my prayers to nothing but believing in everything.

Note: Quotes from my mother’s self-published memoir Caught in a Cult by Lorna Woods (out of print).

*From an email interview with my mother.

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on a small island in Southeast Alaska in the Alexander Archipelago. She lives and writes at her family’s fishcamp. She holds a PhD is Cross Cultural Studies and an MFA in poetry. She writes a column called Planet Alaska for the Juneau Empire and co-hosts a Facebook page of the same name. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, a full-length poetry collection, in addition to a short story collection, The Dead Go to Seattle (Red Hen Press/Boreal Books). Her prose and poetry have been published in Prairie Schooner, Split Rock Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Mud Job, and elsewhere.