In the final, painful months of Amy Carlson’s life – before police found her mummified glitter-covered corpse in a rundown house in Denver – her weight had plummeted to just 75 pounds.
Carlson was also paralyzed from the waist down, and was hopelessly addicted to booze.
But even more curious was the fact her skin had turned blue – a result of ingesting fatal doses of colloidal silver, which she believed would cure her from all illnesses but which was actually slowly poisoning her.
Carlson – who went by the names Mother God, or simply Mother or Mom to her small band of devoted followers – was a former McDonald’s manager who had abandoned her three children to lead the conspiracy-obsessed cult Love Has Won from the mid-2000s.
As part of her teachings, she claimed she was on a mission to save humanity, and had been reincarnated 534 times.
Those past lives included Jesus, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Pocahontas and Marilyn Monroe.
She also believed she’d been the daughter of Donald Trump, when – billions of years ago – they had both ruled over the mythical land of Lemuria.
Her tragic story is brought into sharp focus in the new book Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile – which examines self-proclaimed prophetesses like Carlson and the common threads that weave through their teachings.
These women include JZ Knight, founder of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, who, in the mid-1980s, convinced some of Hollywood’s biggest stars that she was a 35,000-year-old warrior who could bring them supernatural wisdom.
‘Linda Evans from the soap opera Dynasty, Philip Michael Thomas from Miami Vice, and Mike Farrell from M*A*S*H all considered themselves Ramtha acolytes at one time,’ writes Sottile.
Salma Hayek was also linked to the cult at one point.
Despite the controversy surrounding her teachings and various court cases, however, Knight continues to offer courses from her French chateau-style home in Yelm, Washington.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet, like Carlson, believed she was the mother of the universe – and in the 1970s declared she could perform miracles, while preaching a doomsday that never came.
Her messaging proved incredibly lucrative – at least for her.
‘In 1981, Elizabeth and her church snatched up the magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes’s former 12,000-acre Montana ranch for around $7 million,’ writes Sottile.
‘In the ensuing five years, her staff would continue to buy up more land around it, expanding their plot near Yellowstone National park to 33,000 acres and making the church, according to one article in the Los Angeles Times, the second-largest landholder in the entire country.’
Prophet died in 2009, but her church continues to thrive, with so-called ‘teaching centers’ around the world.
Carlson’s reign was, in contrast, a rather seedy affair.
Based in a remote, rundown house in Denver, she spread her ‘gospel’ through a constant stream of hours-long, often unintelligible YouTube videos, talking of UFOs that were cloaked by the clouds above the Sangre de Cristo mountains, but which would reveal themselves soon and take the chosen ‘home’.
In fact, her belief system extended far beyond UFOs, and embraced all manner of conspiracy theories.
She preached that the COVID pandemic was planned, and that the Sandy Hook massacre, 9/11 and the Holocaust were all hoaxes.
Their sworn enemies, she claimed, were the so-called cabal – the elite from history, including Hollywood stars, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Rothschilds, and the Jews.
But she loved Donald Trump. He was working to defeat the cabal, she told them.
And one day soon, they would all ascend to a ‘better place’ – a 5D earth where there was no crime, no hate, just love.
She spoke of a set of ‘Masters’ who guided her and bestowed ancient knowledge upon her – including Prince, Whitney Houston, and Michael Jackson.
‘But to Amy, one Master was above them all,’ writes Sottile, ‘Ascended Master Robin Williams, the comedian and beloved actor, who played an alien living on Earth in the 1970s television sitcom Mork & Mindy when Amy was a little girl.’
Her live-streams attracted tens of thousands of followers, but a few went even further.
Some traveled from all over the world, leaving their own lives behind, to sit at her feet, deliver special bottles of tequila to her bed and hawk the group’s branded merch online – alkaline water, sweatpants and T-shirts.
Says Sottile: ‘To a passing listener who might not understand the rhetoric and vocabulary of the truly red-pilled [referring to the colored pills in the sci-fi film The Matrix that would reveal the word as it really is], the livestreams would seem incoherent.
‘But to other seekers, these people were talking in a way that clicked. They promised that they knew the truth about the world, about god.
‘For members of the New Age who were certain some societal shift was imminent,’ she continues, ‘COVID and America’s political upheaval was a sign. Everything they believed would happen was happening.’
But the reality was that Amy was an anorexic, delusional alcoholic.
And as her health deteriorated, rather than take her to a ‘3D doctor’ her followers ‘treated her based on messages from Robin Williams,’ writes Sottile.
‘They gave her potent cannabis oils, Xanax, muscle relaxers, gabapentin.
‘Sometimes Amy would consume more than 10,000 milligrams of the colloidal silver tinctures they made themselves, which they said could cure COVID and cancer.
‘Sometimes they served it to her ice cold in shot glasses. Other times they brought Amy a liter-sized container of colloidal silver, and she tipped it back, drinking straight from the bottle.’
As she died – from ‘a global decline in the setting of alcohol abuse, anorexia, and chronic colloidal silver ingestion’ – her ‘followers’ drove her, first, from Colorado to Mount Shasta in California – where they were convinced she would ‘ascend’ or be evacuated by aliens – then to Ashland in Oregon, following supposed messages from her Galactic guides.
‘After she was dead, they continued to observe the corpse,’ writes Sottile, ‘waiting for movement, a message.
‘They poured water and colloidal silver into the dead body’s mouth, held an electromagnetic field reader up to her, testing for some kind of frequency. They claimed her body stayed warm. They bent her arms and legs and said she never went stiff. They said they smelled her breath.’
Eventually, they wrapped her in a sleeping bag and drove her to a campsite in the woods, ‘where they stayed for days having campfires and eating buttermilk pancakes.’
They were still waiting for a sign. What to do next? Where were the starships they’d been told would come?
When no such sign appeared, they took Carlson back to Colorado, where police eventually found her mummified body on April 28, 2021. She was wrapped in Christmas lights, her face covered in glitter.
Her eyes had been removed or rotted away, and her body so badly decomposed, it was impossible to identify her using fingerprints.
‘When Amy Carlson’s body died in April 2021, she left her followers in the way she had left her family so long ago,’ writes Sottile.
‘But the conspiracies she tapped and stirred stay alive. The very name of her most loyal followers’ new venture – 5D Full Disclosure – centers on the idea that the truth behind conspiracy theories will be revealed, proving that they were right all along.’
‘Why wouldn’t you buy into it?’ Sottile quotes Carlson’s son Cole as saying. ‘Somebody comes along and says, “Hey, this world sucks, right?… But you know what? I’m gonna build a new world. Come follow me. The aliens are coming. The Earth is ending. The aliens will take us to a new planet and we can build a new society. How awesome does that sound.”
‘That sounds amazing. Sign me up.’
Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile is published by Grand Central, March 25