New Age Grifter: The True Story of Gabriel of Urantia and his Cosmic Family

By Joseph L. Flatley

New Age Grifter is the story of Gabriel of Urantia, a self-styled prophet living in a compound in the desert of southern Arizona with his 100 faithful followers. It's also the story of the American UFO craze of the 1950s, mind control, the U.S. Army's infiltration of the New Age movement, divorce, heartbreak, hearing voices, and what it takes to make it as a guru in modern America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Feral House
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781627311151

Joseph L. Flatley

Joseph L. Flatley is an author and investigative journalist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania whose "beat" is conspiracy theories and fringe subcultures. In his books and articles, he has chronicled internet con artists, doomsday preppers, Satanic Panic pseudo-therapists, and Julian Assange, to name a few. His stories have appeared in The Verge, The Outline, Postindustrial, and CounterPunch.

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1

Avalon

It was a sunny spring Sunday morning, ten minutes before ten o’clock, and I was sitting in the driver’s seat of my red Kia Soul subcompact SUV (a rental) outside the compound of a small religious community a stone’s throw from the Mexican border in southern Arizona. I was parked at the main gate, fiddling with my phone, when I heard the crunch of gravel in the distance. It was a golf cart, driven by a middle-aged hippie with a long ponytail and a hairline that had surrendered to the top of his head twenty years ago. After easing to a stop, the hippie entered a code into an electronic keypad, and the front gate slowly swung open. He said his name was Arlin.

Um, just with the state of the world, and all the things going on with the world, he stuttered sheepishly, if you wouldn’t mind if I just checked you, and pat you down a little bit…

His voice trailed off.

I answered in the affirmative.

He ran his hand over my torso and my legs and, satisfied that I was not carrying anything more dangerous than my phone, he brought me into the compound and locked the gate behind us. I was now separated from the outside world by a five-foot fence. I couldn’t decide whether or not I should be nervous. Either way, there was nothing else to do, so I sat down next to Arlin in the golf cart, and the two of us headed to the Sunday Service.

The Global Community Communications Alliance is a hundred-plus-strong community of spiritual seekers living near the Mexican border. Its leader is Gabriel of Urantia, a baby boomer from Pittsburgh who started this community with the woman he calls his spiritual complement, Niánn (pronounced like the light bulb, as Gabriel says) in 1989. They call their home Avalon Gardens and EcoVillage. According to Gabriel, his followers will become the new rulers of the planet after God returns and makes things right. Until that happens they will remain in Avalon, farming organic produce or working in one of the various businesses Gabriel owns.

In addition to being a prophet of the end times, Gabriel has recorded several albums as TaliasVan and the Bright and Morning Star Band. His vocal stylings are reminiscent of the strained and high-pitched tones of Neil Young, but Gabriel’s voice has the added quality of distress—as if someone were holding a gun to his head.

The community even has its own radio station in Tucson, KVAN (available on the internet at KVAN.fm). When not playing Gabriel’s music and sermons, the radio station airs a recruiting commercial for the GCCA: All your needs will be met in Avalon, says the voice on the radio. But you must be debt-free and free and clear of all legal matters, including any child custody issues. The voice then reads off a litany of jobs Gabriel wants recruits to do for him for free, including IT specialist, camera operator, scriptwriter, video editor, architect, construction worker, heavy machinery mechanic, hospice doctor, attorney, massage therapist, fundraiser, and grant writer.

I called the number from the commercial and was subjected to a lengthy interview. The GCCA website states that the community holds public services every Sunday—but Gabriel won’t let just anyone inside the gates. Three calls later, Gabriel’s daughter Delevan DellErba, who works in the admissions office, instructed me to text them a selfie, with my eyes clearly visible. I’m still not sure if this is because they were using some sort of facial recognition software, or (more likely) if Gabriel was going to read my aura from the picture.

The Sunday service came near the end of my week in Tucson, which I had spent talking to ex-cult members and other folks who knew Gabriel. I was researching this book, and I was recording interviews for my podcast on the cult, The So-Called Prophet from Pittsburgh. The eight-episode series came out in January 2020.¹

During my investigation, I came to believe that Gabriel and his lieutenants are using their disciples’ free labor to accumulate wealth, the kind of wealth that would be much more difficult in the (for-profit) business world. I’ve also heard plenty of stories about, and seen evidence of, the kind of psychological manipulation characteristic with what experts call destructive cults. All such cults are unique, and Gabriel’s church, the Global Community Communications Alliance, is no exception.

The front entrance to Gabriel of Urantia’s compound. Photo by Joseph L. Flatley

According to my sources, Gabriel has a full-time security team that performs a background check on every visitor to the compound. I was warned that if I gave the GCCA my real name, they would quickly realize I was a journalist. And that I was precisely the kind of journalist they most certainly did not want visiting their community.

It is generally agreed that journalists are not supposed to lie about their identity. There are very good reasons for this: If a story is derived from information gained in an unethical manner, are you going to trust the reporter? There are exceptions, of course. If a story is of major importance, and concealing your identity is the only way to get it, no one’s going to complain if you tell a little white lie to get there. After weighing my options, I decided to tell the woman who answered the phone at Avalon that my name was Mike Flatley.

I chose the name Mike for two reasons. First, because Michael is my confirmation name, and I suppose a part of me believed that if I used the name, I wouldn’t actually be lying that much. (A sort of lame justification on my part, arrived at during a sleepless night at the Candlewood Suites in Nogales.) And second, and more importantly, I figured that if they googled Mike Flatley, they’d get 300,000-plus pages referencing Michael Flatley, the Lord of the Dance guy, and give up. This must be what happened because they welcomed me into their community with open arms. (Then again, maybe I was just being paranoid.)

Avalon sits on 220 acres in the Santa Cruz River Valley, a verdant swath of farmland in the Sonoran Desert. It’s designed to be ecologically sustainable, with solar panels, rainwater harvesting, and composting toilets in use on the property.

The compound contains several structures of various configurations: some of them look like domes, or bubbles, or hobbit holes. There were also a couple of yurts and at least one double-wide trailer. And then there’s Salvington House, the main building on the compound, where the actual church service took place.

Once I arrived at the service, I joined two or three dozen hippies of all ages, chatting cheerfully, dressed up for church. According to the ex-members I’ve spoken with, the service actually began earlier, at 9 a.m., with an hour of Gabriel yelling at everybody for all the mistakes they made over the last week.² If anyone was chastened, it must not have been too bad, because when I arrived the congregants collectively seemed to be in a pretty good mood. If anything, the whole thing resembled a Unitarian church service.

There was a lot of small talk directed my way, as if the citizens of Avalon were subtly pumping me for information, even as they deflected all my questions. I sort of expected this, but at the same time, it was disorienting. The New Age paradigm that Gabriel borrows so heavily from values love and light and brotherhood and sisterhood. Still, I never felt one genuine human connection while in Avalon.

I was approached by a woman named Maritaseen. She was there to collect $50 from me—$40 to attend the service and $10 for lunch afterward. After that transaction, we walked into Salvington House, where the service took place. The sunlit atrium probably sat one hundred people comfortably. Chairs were arranged in the back of the room, while younger members of the community sat on the floor in front of Gabriel, Niánn, and the five elders of the church. A large television was mounted high up on the wall, stage left. For the first hour, we watched YouTube videos detailing conspiracy theories, natural disasters, and the tribulation that Gabriel insists is imminent. They called this the alternative news portion of the service, and it was explained as a way to combat the fake news of the establishment. It was immediately apparent that the videos were being used to indoctrinate Gabriel’s followers, to give them a good dose of fear and make them easier to control. This part of the service was directed by Marayeh, the group’s licensed psychologist (we’ll hear more about her later in the book).

After watching YouTube for an hour, the congregation got a special treat: the premiere of a video starring Gabriel himself, titled How Not To Have A Heart Attack While Looking At Conspiracy Videos On The Internet.

As dopey country and western stock music filled the room, the on-screen Gabriel gave a sort of lazy black-power salute and proclaimed: Spiritualution! Justice to God’s people. He then pointed directly into the camera: The new Jerusalem is coming.

Spiritualution, of course, is a clumsy portmanteau of spiritual and revolution. This is but one example of Gabriel’s tendency to adopt any cultural movement that catches his interest (and that he thinks will help him become more famous). When the Occupy Movement brought the slogan We are the 99% into popular consciousness, Gabriel started claiming that the one percent corporate media had it in for him. His Spiritualution website contains a number of screeds decrying the power elite, peak oil, and Black Friday sales.

The community held a series of Spiritualution marches in Tucson in 2013–2015. And Gabriel’s son, Amadon DellErba, is listed as a party in a class action lawsuit against the City of New York initiated by Occupy Wall Street. One of Gabriel’s essays states his plan in the title alone: The Occupy Movement Needs To Fuse With The Spiritualution Movement To Win Against The 1%. By calling for Spiritualution, Gabriel is saying that revolutionary change is needed in the world—but only if Gabriel is in charge.

In the Heart Attack video, Gabriel compares internet conspiracy theorists (unfavorably) to Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. You’d think that the reference would be lost on most people under forty-five, but who knows? Maybe the residents of Avalon think Johnny Carson is still alive. Maybe videotaped reruns of The Tonight Show are their only source of entertainment. It’s a tantalizing possibility.

The first half of the video was lighthearted: Look at those funny conspiracy theorists, Gabriel seemed to be saying as computer-generated aliens danced on the screen. Then the music shifted to something more somber, and Gabriel got serious: Now, don’t get me wrong. There are UFOs flying around in our skies, just like Je sus said there would be 2,000 years ago. And more so now than ever. Because these are the signs of the coming to the Earth of the New Jerusalem, and the return of Jesus Christ. As he said this, cheesy animated UFOs appeared and flew over Gabriel’s shoulder. The image of Gabriel then faded out, and the music got intense. As footage of natural disasters flashed onto the screen, Gabriel delivered a voiceover: Ultimately, when you are facing a hurricane or a tornado or an earthquake or any natural disaster, the first thing that you say when it’s about to hit you is Lord, help me. Or God, help me. Or Jesus, help me. Or Allah, help me. You don’t say conspiracy theory teacher, help me.

When the video ended, Gabriel received a standing ovation. Then, after the applause died down, a woman led me across the room to another chair, this time directly in front of the guru. I assumed that she did this so Gabriel could keep an eye on me. I sat down, and thereupon commenced about four hours of the most boring church service you can imagine.

Gabriel sermonized about conspiracy theories for a while, then his spiritual complement, Niánn, spoke a bit about the life of Jesus. They tag-teamed like this for hours. Every once in a while, they’d question one of the kids sitting on the floor in front of them, students of Gabriel’s school, who were studiously taking notes in their composition books. The school is called, in the wordy style typical of Gabriel, The University of Ascension Science & the Physics of Rebellion.

At one point, Gabriel got on a riff about other, lesser conspiracy theorists. Jesus Christ came, he said, he was crucified, he was resurrected, he’s the ruler of the universe. He will come again. And that is our hope. There is no other hope. Not in the Dracos, not in the Annunaki, not in any mortal race from another world. It’s in Jesus Christ. That is our hope. Now, if you put it anywhere else, you are stupid assholes. That’s the Pittsburgh answer.

In other words, Gabriel is the only legit prophet of conspiracy, because he is the only one through which the Lord speaks.

At one point during the service, I looked up to realize that someone was standing next to me with a microphone. Gabriel was sitting down, with his walking stick propped up next to him, reading from index cards like Johnny Carson used to.

We have a guest from Pennsylvania, Gabriel said. That’s why I mentioned Pittsburgh. Mike was traveling in Arizona and came across KVAN, listening on the radio. He pronounced this rad-ee-o in a mock Southern drawl, and his audience ate it up. This was followed by huge applause, as everybody in the room turned to face me. They all looked into my eyes and smiled warmly. Even though I suspected they were trying to brainwash me, I must admit that the attention did feel nice.

Mike, would you like to share anything? Gabriel asked.

This was likely my only opportunity ever to speak directly to Gabriel. I needed to come up with something good.

Um, I blurted out. I feel like I’m on the hot seat.

Gabriel laughed, and then his disciples, having been clued in to the proper response, also laughed.

Gabriel used quite a bit of profanity during the service. He could’ve tried to explain this in a high-flown way, saying that the job of a guru is to shake you from your complacency, that offensive language can be used to break the listener free from the consensual illusion we call reality. You know, the kind of thing that Albanian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff might have said. Instead, Gabriel followed up one of his profanities with a geographical justification: That’s how we talk in Pittsburgh. He then pumped his fist and, as he did, shouted: Pittsburgh!

The crowd went wild. And as everybody applauded and catcalled, I thought to myself: How the hell did I end up here?

1 Check it out at: anchor.fm/pghprophet

2 I’m reminded of Frank Costanza from Seinfeld: The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you’re gonna hear about it! It also reminds me of the Synanon Game, which we’ll cover later in the book.

2

Energy Master

Pittsburgh is pretty much the only thing that Gabriel and I have in common.

I first heard his name in the run-up to the 2016 election. A friend of mine, a journalist living on one of the coasts, was writing an oral history of Trump supporters, and he was crashing at my place in Pittsburgh.³ If you drive twenty minutes out of the city in any direction you’ll find yourself in Kentucky (well, a reasonable facsimile thereof), which makes it a good base of operations for people looking to talk to coal miners and hillbillies and upper-middle-class Chamber of Commerce Republicans about their love for The Donald.

One evening, things at my house turned into an impromptu party. Well, it really wasn’t much of a party—mostly, we were all just drinking beer and watching stupid videos on YouTube. The highlight was a screening of the 1993 no-budget cinema classic Road to Revenge, starring John De Hart and Wings Hauser. When one of the guys insisted that we watch a music video he’d just discovered on YouTube, I searched for energy master and energy master song and energy master Sedona before I found what we were looking for: a video titled Energy Master (live) by TaliasVan & The Bright & Morning Star Band. When I pressed play, a gray-haired, boomer-aged hippie with a wireless microphone strapped to his face started speaking in a voice that was elfin in pitch. He also seemed to have a bit of a lisp.

This man was Gabriel, although I didn’t know who Gabriel was at this point.

This song, he said, is about my cry to the Energy Master. After elaborating on this for a few moments, he began plucking the strings of the acoustic guitar that was balanced on his ample stomach.

I loved everything about the video. We all did. The song began with an acoustic guitar and a mournful flute. It was held together by a competent jazz-rock backing band who mugged and pouted and sometimes smiled in time to the music. There were bass, drums, keyboards, flute, multiple percussionists, and two background singers, pretty hippie women who echoed various lyrics as Gabriel sang them. Sort of the same way that Flavor Flav echoes Chuck D on the old Public Enemy albums, but to drastically different effect.

Part of the fun was watching the musicians appear so sincere and into it, man, while playing this ridiculous music. But all of this was overshadowed by the lead singer himself. When I googled the band, I realized that he was a controversial self-proclaimed holy man and that the musicians were all members of his cult. And he was from Pittsburgh!

I never imagined that there was a story for me here, but all the same, I wanted to share my discovery with the world. After playing Gabriel’s music nonstop for a couple of weeks, I sat down and made a short video featuring TaliasVan and his band. It took the form of an old K-Tel commercial. For those of