In the early morning hours of Friday, August 14th, 1987, police raided a sprawling compound,

surrounded by barbed wire and hidden deep in bushland, located near the Lake Resort community

of Eildon in Victoria, Australia, roughly a two-hour drive north of Melbourne.

Children were taken or rather rescued from their childhood home, taken from from the adults, they had been raised to believe were their parents.

What happened to those children was devastating.

Their lifetime of trauma literally began at birth for many of them, where within seconds

they were snatched from their biological mothers, then illegally transferred into the care

of people whose perception of reality, justice, and ethics had been wildly distorted by a strange mashup of LSD, yoga,

and blind devotion to a manipulative, delusional narcissist.

Anne Hamilton Byrne.

A woman, a small gaggle of followers that included several medical doctors and psychiatrists,

lawyers, nurses,

and academics, truly believe was the second coming of Jesus Christ, sent back to Earth to prepare

the world for doomsday. Why was Anne claiming this? Did her family history of schizophrenia have

anything to do with it? Did she truly believe she was Christ? Had the psychedelic

soak culture of the 1960s and a bunch of newly invoked new age teachings distorted her

worldview to the point where she actually thought that was possible? Or was she a charismatic

opportunist, a cruel psychopath who knew exactly what she was doing all along,

destroying families and hurting children to fulfill her selfish desires for wealth and some warped notion of what a perfect family should look like.

Today we'll uncover how Anne built her cult,

one that has been described by many over the years as the most notorious cult in Australian history.

Out of teaching yoga, targeting academics and psychiatrists to be her first followers,

...