Then known as Betty Clare Wulf, the future sect leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet played clarinet in the marching band at Red Bank High School. She’s seen below in an undated photo.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the Red Bank-born New Age mystic whose specific prediction of a nuclear Armageddon went unfulfilled, died Thursday after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
She was 70 years old and died at her home in Bozeman, Montana, according to an announcement of her death from the Summit Lighthouse, a religious organization she ran after the 1973 death of her second husband, Mark Prophet.
Founder of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which once boasted 50,000 members, Prophet was in the spotlight in the late 1980s when adherents began stockpiling arms in anticipation of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.
Betty Clare Wulf with her father, Red Bank yacht builder Hans Wulf.
From an obit in today’s Los Angeles Times:
Prophet was called “Guru Ma” by her followers, who believe she received “dictations” from such “ascended masters” as Jesus, Buddha and St. Germain. She retired in 1999 from an active role in the church, which once had about 50,000 members.
Elizabeth Clare Wulf was born April 8, 1939, in Red Bank, N.J. She grew up in a Christian Science environment, she told The Times in 1980, but by age 9 had gone “to every church in town” only to find that none taught “the whole truth. . . . I found that within the self.”…
In the late 1980s, news reports said Prophet expected a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, and at least 2,000 church followers headed to the Montana ranch, stockpiling weapons and supplies. The ranch included a large underground bomb shelter.
Prophet told The Times in 1991 that newspapers had distorted her statements, “literally fabricating that I had predicted the end of the world. Even if there is a nuclear war, I believe we can survive it. I don’t think it’s the end of the planet.”
Her father was Hans Wulf, a yacht builder whose boatyard on the Navesink River, just west of the North Shrewsbury Ice Boat & Yacht Club, is now owned by Irwin Marine.
Chann Irwin, who now owns the boat retailer and marina, tells redbankgreen that his grandfather, Capt. Charles Irwin, and Hans Wulf “hated each other.” Wulf had been a German U-Boat pilot in World War I, and Irwin was a fiercely patriotic American.
When Wulf wanted to sell his boatyard, he wouldn’t have sold it to Irwin, and Irwin wouldn’t have approached him directly to buy it. But Irwin arranged to acquire the property “through an intermediary” in 1951, Chann Irwin said.
About a decade ago, he said, Prophet stopped by the marina to see him, Irwin said. “She was there in an effort to bury the hatchet between the families,” he said. Irwin said he was amused, because “I could care less what happened a hundred years ago, and I knew she was a screwball” because of her Armageddon forecast.
