Infinite Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It is impossible--but yet their life! Their life! It is normal! It is happy! It is an answer to the question! --William James The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music converged on by ambulance sirens and they understand everything. They're on your side. They forgive you. --Denis Johnson 1. Applewhite I coasted my rental over Lake Hodges, on I-15 toward Del Dios Highway. The hills of California wriggled and waved like crumpled bedsheets. This was homecoming for me. I grew up on the messy suburban folds.

The January warmth and the chaparral minimalism outside the car were offset by nostalgia, the scrutiny of personal faith attendant to voyages home. When I was a boy, Lake Hodges had appeared overnight. The lake had dried long before I was born but the bridge had always been there, an anachronistic hulk, spanning a divot where cows roamed. One winter it rained for a month and there was the lake, proof that Noah had been right. I crossed the span and the road doubled back to follow the shoreline, pretty curves connecting the dry inland burb of Escondido to the coastal paradise of Del Mar. Del Dios Highway means "God's Highway." The twisting road jutted from steep canyon walls above the lake. Palatial estates rode the crest of the hills.

I left Del Dios well before the coast, turning in toward a residential neighborhood that ranked among the richest in the nation. I stopped the car to jot a note. I smelled the air outside for the first time since the airport and thought: shampoo. It was eucalyptus--that's how long I'd been gone. California, a state-sized mecca for new religious movements, was that place where plants didn't have leaves. Instead they had fronds, silver dollars, feather dusters, spines, the juicy tubules of ice plant, the thick gnarls of cacti. I was looking for a house where thirty-nine adults had killed themselves in the name of seeking. The incident was five years old now, and I found that all my maps were wrong.

The names of the nearby streets had been changed in the wake of the event. And that wasn't all. The house where the seekers took their poison had been razed. I learned all this by fumbling about, knocking on expensive doors and lying about my credentials as a journalist. I triangulated from a few sets of vague directions and found myself on a sloping street with four driveways climbing away from a dead end. Each had an automatic gate and an intercom system. One of the driveways appeared abandoned, covered with pine needles blown into curvy drifts like sand. Everything was quiet.

I jumped the gate and ascended. If California was a draw for new religious movements, then San Diego, for some reason, drew UFO groups. I'd come home to visit two such groups, each founded by an unlikely couple. One was now a ghost; the other had just experienced the failure of the prophecy that had fueled their existence for twenty-seven years. This was still early in my study of religion--in fact, it was my first step, taken on a whim--but even so it had a Jamesian goal. If you know nothing else about the thinking of William James on religion, you might still know of James's categories of the healthy-minded folk and the sick souls. The healthy-minded type were the world's optimists, cheerful almost to a fault, and the sick souls were the pessimists, the cynical intellectual brooders. That's about what I knew of James when I first went back to California--from a mostly forgotten course in psychology--but even with just that scrap of knowledge I'd had the thought that the two UFO groups I was there to visit might neatly express James's most basic human bifurcation.

Details on the first group were hard.