the F.B.I. assembled what has been called probably the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history: ten Bradley tanks, two Abrams tanks, four combat-engineering vehicles, six hundred and sixty-eight agents in addition to six U.S. Customs officers, fifteen U.S. Army personnel, thirteen members of the Texas National Guard, thirty-one Texas Rangers, a hundred and thirty-one officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, seventeen from the McLennan County sheriff’s office, and eighteen Waco police, for a total of eight hundred and ninety-nine people.

For right-wing militias and so-called Patriot groups, Waco amounts to evidence of a tyrannical, illegitimate government unblinkingly prepared to kill its own people ... the specter of Waco has not faded. Right-wing extremists regularly invoke it as a defining moment, proof of Washington’s perfidy. “Waco can happen at any given time,” Mike Vanderboegh, a prominent figure in the Patriot movement, told Retro Report. He added ominously: “But the outcome will be different this time. Of that I can assure you.”

The killings gave our fearful guardians in politics and mainstream media yet another new Net phobia to warn America about. Cultists momentarily pushed aside pornographers as the demonic and threatening offspring of new technology. The Internet, just last week an interstate highway for perverts, was transformed for a few days into a natural breeding ground for fanatics and zealots [(Katz, March 31, 1997)].

Claiming that [a] biblical cloud referred to a UFO, Bo and Peep promised eternal life in the “literal heavens” to anyone willing to devote “100 percent of his total energy” to overcoming his attachments to the human level. Over a period of six months Bo and Peep recruited over 200 believers, and for a brief time the UFO cult was America's most publicized new religious movement…. Bo was a tall, greying, slightly overweight figure with remarkable stage presence and steel-blue eyes which he could use effectively to captivate an audience. By all accounts Bo was extremely persuasive. A few ex-members claimed their minds went blank in his presence, and one man insisted that he saw a vivid image of a UFO the moment Bo touched him on the shoulder. The experience was so real that even long after defecting, the man continued to believe he had actually put his hand on the spaceship's landing gear [(Balch, 1982, 21–24)].