Richard Kieninger is a softspoken, bespectacled Chicagoan who believes
that he has a holy task—preparing for civilization's destruction. He
and his followers are currently building a Noah's Ark community on the
Illinois plains, where they hope to survive a series of disasters that
they believe lie in store for most of the rest of mankind. Kieninger claims impressive credentials for the job of leading his
small, secretive survival sect. As he tells it, he has had 3,000 past
lives, in one of which he was incarnated as the Pharaoh Akhnaton, in
another as King David of Israel. Kieninger, who is now 45 this time
around, has spent most of his present life as a woodworker. His message is contained mainly in a paperback “biography”
called The Ultimate Frontier, which he wrote under the name of Eklal
Kueshana. In it, Kieninger predicts that economic depression and severe
social upheaval will hit the U.S. in the mid-1970s, followed by an
awful war and massive earthquakes at the turn of the century. By 2001,
mankind will be virtually destroyed—but not Kieninger's followers. The Stelle Group, as they call themselves, will have survived the early
troubles in their self-sufficient community near Kankakee, Ill., and
the later chaos by a more imaginative method—levitation. During the
cataclysms, they will be off floating somewhere in the sky; afterward,
they will come back down to Stelle and to the “lost
continent” of Lemuria,* which will have re-emerged from the
Pacific Ocean during the last catastrophes. On Lemuria they will create
a city over which Christ will reign in the person of the Archangel
Melchizedek. Not quite the Christ of the New Testament, though:
typifying their syncretistic beliefs, the Stelle members believe that
Christ borrowed Jesus' body for his earthly sojourn, and that Jesus was
a sort of theological tourist, who studied with Brahmins in India,
Buddhists in Nepal and sages in Persia. Kieninger says that he was initiated into his bizarre vocation as a boy
of twelve, when he was visited by a mysterious Dr. White who told him
of his mission. Later, in his school home room, he met representatives
of twelve immortal brotherhoods, who divulged further instructions. The
brotherhoods still stay in contact with him, says Kieninger, and he
dispenses Stelle's secrets by mail to several thousand followers around
the U.S. So far, the Stelle Group has signed up only 130 full-fledged
members, mostly middle-class Midwesterners like Kieninger himself,
including a construction boss, an accountant, engineers and a former
Methodist missionary. The hardworking, tithing Stelle members have already put aside a
half-million dollars for their survival city, where they will share all
property and labor. In the flat Ford County farm land southwest of
Kankakee, they have bought 320 acres and obtained necessary zoning
permits. A woodworking factory is already in operation. Members are
putting up other buildings on weekends. Ford County does
not know it yet, but according to the Stelle timetable the community is
scheduled to be 10,000 strong by the mid-1970s, when the rest of U.S.
civilization is expected to disintegrate.
