How an Indian cult guru famed for promoting naked meditation and group sex took over an entire US town with a mixture of deceit, fraud and the country's worst-ever bioterror attack
Daily Mail, UK/March 18, 2018
By Marlene Lenthang
An Indian spiritual guru moved to Oregon to bring his enlightenment to the American people, but his movement spiraled into the largest bioterror attack in US history in a plot to take over a town.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh created a name for himself in India based on his spiritual teachings of open love and higher awareness.
His practices included naked meditation, group sex, and dancing.
In 1981 he created a utopia for his Western followers, purchasing a sprawling 64,000-acre ranch for $5.75million next the small town of Antelope, Oregon.
Rajneesh and his 1,600 disciples - many of them wealthy professionals - created a world for themselves on the camp with their own homes, stores, and police force.
They took over the area with their communal living style, their daily dancing and singing routines, and stuck out in the red and orange clothing.
However their world clashed with that of the sleepy Antelope town next door, home to just 45 residents and stretching less than a square mile in size, according to the NY Post.
Tensions between the cult and the town's citizens heightened and three years later it came to a crash.
'At first, they were seen as strange — not as a threat. Then they started buying property,' Antelope resident John Silvertooth said to the NY Post.
'They moved enough people in to get a majority on the town council . . . which changed the name of Antelope to Rajneesh. Main Street turned into Bhagwan Boulevard,' he added.
The commune's growing influence took over the town's local council and adopted its own policies, igniting fury in the Antelope residents.
Video interviews collected from the 80s for a Netflix docu-series on the cult entitled Wild Wild Country reveal citizens' outrage towards the Rajneesh followers.
'I want that guru and his evil influence out of my city,' one woman in the Netflix program.
Another local described the ashram as 'run by satanic power'.
A former ranch resident said the daily dancing and strange practices 'just struck fear in me. It was a cult.'
Locals - and doubtful ashram members - found the practices such as group sex therapy sessions that released repression to be bizarre.
'Everyone was so crazy for enlightenment . . . [that they] took part in sexual encounters, emptied their pockets and proved their devotion [through] expensive gifts,' Rajneesh's spokesperson Sheela 'Ma Anand' Silverman wrote.
Rajneesh was indeed so wealthy from decades of donations in his mystic career that he had a taste for flashy items and boasted a collection of 93 Rolls-Royce automobiles.
Another former cult member told the NY Post that the 'free love' ideology created an unbridled sex environment.
Silvertooth said he once met a teenage hitchhiker escaping the ranch who said 'he was sick of being raped'.
The madness of the Rajneesh community culminated in 1984 when the cult hatched a plan to win the November 1984 town council elections to drown out the Antelope residents' dissent.
Their tactics included busing in thousands homeless people from New York City, Phoenix, and San Diego to register to vote in the small town in order to win a Rajneesh majority.
County authorities sniffed out the plan and refused to register the vagrants.
Then came a vicious bioterror attack that scarred the city.
The commune put salmonella in the salad bars of 10 restaurants in an effort strike sickness and fear among the residents.
A total of 700 people became sick from the restaurant stint, causing the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to come in to stop the damage.
The salmonella plot was the largest bioterror attack in the United States.
The restaurant plot was a test run for the real plan of poisoning the city’s water supply, but the group never carried it out.
'They put salmonella in the salad bars of 10 [local] restaurants; 700 people got sick. Then the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] got involved and they backed off [from the poison water plan],' says Wild Wild Country co-director Maclain Way.
The election came and went, without a single Rajneeshee making it onto the commission.
'That whole episode with the poisoning — it showed the extreme nature of some of the people there,' a former cult member said.
The following year in 1985 a disciple burnt down a Wasco County Planning Office because it reportedly contained documents relating to a real estate investigation of the cult.
Rajneesh’s spokeswoman Silverman plotted the poisoning of the guru’s doctor, saying he was keeping him on drugs.
The cult also conspired to kill presidential appointee Charles Turner, who was investigating the ranch’s illegal activity spanning smuggling and immigration fraud.
The nation’s eyes were turned to the cult's chaos that took over a once-quiet town, causing Rajneesh to flee.
He boarded a Learjet business aircraft to escape to India, but was caught and detained during a gas stop in Charlotte, North Carolina on October 28, 1985.
He was charged with immigration fraud in connection with the arranged marriages he set up for followers to gain American citizenship.
He agreed to stay out of the country and returned to India where he changed his name to Osho and his teachings continued.
He died in 1990 at the age of 58.
Now the site that was once the peak of the Rajneesh movement is home to a Christian camp.
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