Opanova and the Daughters of Ummo
It was a happy day in 1960 when a middle-aged Peruvian woman named Juana Pordiavel earned her discharge from a mental hospital. She had become attracted to a younger man, Carlos Opanova, the charismatic leader of a quasi-religious cult he called the Deer of the Sixth Christ. The two married and ran the cult in Peru until 1963, when unwanted government attention prompted them to shift operations to Oruro, Bolivia. An abandoned building became the headquarters of a compound that Opanova dubbed New Heavenly Jerusalem. In 1967, after Oruro authorities aggressively looked into reports of children gone missing near the compound, Opanova and Pordiavel stole away with their followers’ cash.
In 1965, two years before the forced abandonment of New Heavenly Jerusalem, a group of Spanish intellectuals led by a Madrid psychologist named José Luis Jordan Peña began a semi-serious campaign to test the limits of everyday belief under the repressive Franco regime. They did this by sending Spanish newspapers, writers, and other vocal sources apocryphal, detailed written messages from Ummites, who had come to Earth in 1950 from the planet Ummo. Situated some 14.6 light years from Earth, Ummo is in the system of the star Iumma, and is home to intelligent beings. Ummo’s chief proponent was Fernando Sesma Manzano, director of the Society of Space Visitors. Coincident with a series of saucer sightings near Madrid in 1967, Manzano announced that he had received typed letters and phone calls from representatives of Ummo.
Manzano explained that the Ummites wished to mingle secretly with humans and observe cultures across Europe.
This elaborate practical joke (described in detail in chapter fifteen) caught the attention of Opanova, by now settled with Pordiavel in La Paz, Bolivia. The creators of Ummo would not reveal their hoax for another thirty years; to Opanova, the Ummites seemed the gateway to renewed power. He established a new cult that he named the Daughters of Ummo. Opanova prepared a bible that combined José Peña’s Ummite fictions with tenets from his own Deer of the Sixth Christ. To keep people interested, Opanova took the name Yiewaka, and announced he had come to Earth from Ummo. Pordiavel renounced the Catholic Church, publicly peed on Communion wafers, and changed her name to Florencia Dinovi Gutiérrez.
Despite Bolivia’s stable, democratically elected government and a basic literacy rate above 95 percent, the nation’s wealth is unevenly distributed.
Peasants who farm are at the mercy of unpredictable weather, and La Paz and other cities are swollen with modestly educated people who have given up on rural life. Partly because of these factors, the Daughters of Ummo attracted recruits quickly. As in Oruro, however, the group became a focus of police investigations of missing, possibly kidnapped, children. (A theory is that the Daughters kidnap to gain new members.) But there was no proof and nobody from the cult was talking. To ensure silence, the cult intimidated members with threats of Ummite hell. (While considering Ummo, Canadian blogger Mike Culpepper wrote, with dry understatement, “An alien hell is something to exercise the imagination. . . .”) Outsiders who expressed too much curiosity about Ummo could expect to receive threatening e-mails and other messages. During the late 1990s, a UFOlogist and amateur investigator named Enzo Daedro received ominous e- mails even after he canceled his e-mail account and opened a new one.
In a summer 2000 group e-mail sent to Daedro and others who “blasphemed the integrity” of Ummo, Opanova threatened to disrupt the hydroelectric power of various Bolivian cities. Plans for a 2033 journey of cult members to Ummo had to be postponed, Opanova said, because the human race remained small- minded.
The Daughters of Ummo continues to operate in La Paz, feeding, clothing, and housing its members. Whether Peña still controls the group is unknown, though odds are good that he does not. Pordiavel/Gutiérrez would have turned one hundred in 2012, so even if she remains on the scene, her ability to lead would be severely diminished. In photos that appear to be from the late 1990s, she is a small, wizened figure with hair dyed jet black, surrounded by the Ummo street vendors whose income still maintains the cult. Recruitment is an ongoing activity, as acolytes buttonhole people on the street, press Ummo literature into their hands, and promise food.
If the group kidnaps children, La Paz police can’t prove it.