The Millerites, a group in western New York, believed that the world would end on October 22, 1844 and thousands of followers waited on the highest points available. One Millerite even donned home-made silk wings and leapt from her barn roof "thinking she would be swept up to heaven" (Kaihla 21). The twentieth century introduced a slightly more technological edge to such apocalyptic cultism. In the 1950s, for example, a flying saucer cult in Wisconsin became well known when a psychologist published a study of the group's reaction to the leader's failure to predict the end of the world. The cult's members were persuaded to give up their belongings to the leader and join him on a mountain to greet arriving alien beings who would take them to the next world. When the space ship failed to arrive to take them away, and the world's end also failed to materialize, many of the leader's adherents rationalized the non-event by claiming that the leader had "succeeded in sparing their lives" for the time being (Clark 394). And today a Taiwanese cult leader,
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