“I am a homemaker, never really got a degree, went to H.U.—Hamburger University—if that counted,” wrote Amy Carlson. But a few days later, as she and the father of her youngest son were driving to the movies to see The Celestine Prophecy, the idea that she could be important in some way, chosen, was still on her mind.
The film was an adaptation of the 1993 James Redfield novel about a man undergoing a spiritual awakening—a book that became wildly popular in New Age circles and sold millions of copies worldwide. In the car, Amy blurted: “I have to be honest with you….I believe I am a major player in this spiritual upliftment.”
In another post, Amy wrote out a decree. “This is a command to the Universe,” she said. “‘I am’ is the most powerful statement we can make.”
“‘I am’ choosing to release all the pain and suffering of illusion and to step into my Magnificence, Beauty, and Greatness I am destined to Be,” she wrote. “From this day forth, I release the darkness that society and the status quo have placed on me and choose my Heart, my Truth, my Divine Birthright of Abundance and accept my Royal heritage.
“I am present in the moment of now. I am eternal in all ways. I am worthy. I am closing the door on the old.”
Amy was spending more and more time online. Years later, she would refer to the internet rabbit holes she was falling down as “downloads” of information that she was receiving, which all pointed toward her being the living embodiment of Earth.
On Lightworkers.org, she chatted with a man from Mount Shasta, California, named Amerith WhiteEagle—a man she said was her “twin flame.” (His legal name, Robert Eugene Saltsgaver, was much more white-bread.) “I feel your heart too is adjusting to this new flow of energy,” he told her. “We must be together in the physical.” On December 17, 2007, she posted that she and “Am” would soon be together, reunited after twenty-six thousand years of separation.
Around Thanksgiving, Amy’s family had gathered for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Houston to celebrate her birthday and her sister Tara’s. Most of the family was there: her son, Cole. Linda and Reed. Tara. Chelsea.
Midway through dinner, Amy pushed her chair back, stood up from the table, and said she was leaving. No one thought much of it, just that she had to go. “I didn’t think she’d just leave and never come back,” Chelsea said. No one thought she meant she was leaving all their lives, all her children’s lives. No one thought someone could simply walk out of their own life like that.
At first, the family thought Amy had suddenly left town, seeking some kind of spiritual enlightenment. It took years for her mother to fully understand that when Amy left the restaurant that night, she’d quite literally left their lives altogether. “When she left, we thought, ‘Okay, she’s just going to be finding herself in a hippie- type situation,'” she said. “We had no idea it would turn into what it did.”
“I think she wanted to feel special,” Linda said. “She wanted to be somebody. She wanted to go somewhere.”
Decades later, her family would gather for dinners and birthdays, and the conversation would inevitably turn to Amy—to the person they knew, to all the things that had happened in her early life. The fights over the phone, the bottle of Advil and the hospital trip, that bruise on her little leg.
Was there something else they’d missed? Some sign? Added all together, would the sum of those events of Amy’s early life indicate that she would one day become unrecognizable? People say hindsight is 20/20. But in Amy’s case, hindsight only seemed to give her family less clarity.
“We were raised in what you could say was a normal household,” her sister Chelsea said. Linda, too, believed she gave her daughters a normal life. That belief eventually dissolved. Amy’s family members tried to maintain their own sense of normalcy while deconstructing the exact moment that illusion broke for them.
*
After years of posting to the Lightworkers website, Amy and Amerith WhiteEagle decided the time had come to start their own website, one they called the Galactic Free Press. Amy had many ideas to share about UFOs and ascension, about removing oneself from the trappings of mainstream society, and began constantly posting them. It was like her own little newspaper, where the world was seen through the lens of astrological predictions.
The pair lived together in Crestone, Colorado. The small remote town, located in the San Luis Valley, is a place of vast bright skies, low brush, and clouds so massive they cast shadows on the land between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges, which loom large, a constant reminder of just how small one human really is. The area had long served as a hunting route for several bands of the Ute people, who were forcefully relocated to reservations in the late 1800s by the U.S. government.
The region has long held an appeal for New Age seekers and has been called the “Shambhala of the Rockies.” It is home to dozens of retreat centers, Zen centers, meditation centers, yoga centers, temples, ashrams, spiritual institutes, and fellowships. Some people think it’s a place of hidden UFO bases and portals to other worlds.
There in that wide land, Amy and Amerith would take videos of the clouds passing over the ragged Sangre de Cristo Mountains that they believed were cloaking alien ships that were surveilling the planet. “Take a long look,” Amy said in one video. “Hi guys!” she called to the sky.
With her new partner, Amy revamped herself. No longer was she the woman with the perfect hair, the perfect lipstick. She wore long dresses and scarves, ditched her makeup, smoked joints, let her blonde hair grow long and go back to its natural brown.
In her online posts, Amy started signing off as Mother God, and referred to Amerith as Father God.
In 2011, the pair began wandering around the West. In Eugene, Oregon, Amy and Amerith settled for a time at a commune called Dancing Heart. It looked like any utopian community in the Pacific Northwest: lots of dreadlocks and flowing skirts, green gardens and communal meals.
They set up a pyramid, sitting cross- legged underneath it, lit bonfires, held meditation circles and Earth dances in the rain. There were several children and babies there with their parents, and Amy rocked them on her lap like they were her own. Online, she told her readers to join them in Oregon.
“Our ships are going to de-cloak at any moment, and the focus right now is raising the vibrational frequency on the planet for that to occur,” Amy said on a phone call with a young woman from Phoenix, Arizona. “Humanity’s graduation date and the end of time is October 28, 2011. We announced that years ago….Humanity has until that date to awaken.”
Amy talked about how they had started a “family as one” in Eugene, and the woman from Phoenix asked how many people had arrived at Amy’s calling. “So far, we’ve got around ten, eleven,” Amy said, laughing at the absurdity of how that sounded. “We’re not quite there.”
The woman on the phone wanted to come to Oregon, but she was nervous about putting her life behind her. She asked Amy how to help friends and family understand. Amy sighed. She said to start by asking them small questions; she suggested, “What do you think about UFOs?” and “How about starships?”
“You can give them more information if they ask,” she said. “We’re not here to save anybody.”
As time passed, Amy was becoming less Amy and more Mother God—introducing herself as such in a vast number of online videos she would amass during this period. “Greetings, love beings!” she would say to the camera in each video, smiling wide.
“This is Mother and Father God, and the Earth allies,” Amy said in a November 2012 recording, Amerith at her side. The pair sat on the stoop of a sage- green house. She wore a cotton-candy-colored fleece headband, her face pink like the air outside was fresh and cold. “We declare peace on Earth, equal heart,” Amy intoned. Both smiled and held up peace signs.
“Peace on Earth!” Amerith, with a long graying beard, said, waving to the camera.
But Mother God wasn’t a large enough title for Amy. “It’s Mother God,””she said in another video, wearing her long hair in two braids. “Also known as Mother Earth, Divine Mother, Universal Mother, White Buffalo Calf Woman—I’ve got lots of names.” She winked at the camera. She started appearing in videos holding a wooden staff.
While Amy fanned her videos across Facebook and YouTube, Amerith delivered their message prolifically across Twitter, promoting events like a conversation with Amy called “What’s Really Going On, On Planet Earth=Heart? Deep Changes.” Sometimes he would post more than a hundred tweets a day, peppering in retweets of motivational quotes and mantras. But he broke the Father God illusion often, tweeting a lot about the results of NASCAR races and trading messages with long- haul truckers, bored behind the wheel and looking for a friend.
In some videos, Amy delivered a string of astrological forecasts and cryptic predictions that the end was coming—though it never arrived. Sometimes she was sitting inside at a computer, other times on a patio with trees swaying behind her. For a time, she wore a headset. She spoke with the confidence of a newscaster. “We are not here to start a revolution,” she said. “We are here to advance evolution.”
Amy traveled the country. But wherever she went, it seemed she always ended up back near Mount Shasta, in California, or in Crestone—like those were the places that tugged her heart the strongest.
And no matter where she was, she could always be found online. “We love you. We are here for you,” she would promise her viewers. “You are not alone. We love you unconditionally.”
After a few years, she and Amerith went their separate ways. She claimed she was fired from the Galactic Free Press. She started a new website: FirstContactGroundCrewTeam.com.
Regardless of venue, her message resonated with people. More and more viewers accepted her invitations to online chat parties and came to her site to read articles that rehashed ideas from New Age thinkers around the planet. There, people could learn about crop circles and goddesses, read messages from Ascended Masters and archangels, scour astrological forecasts and consider what deeper meanings the supermoon might carry. Lemuria, Atlantis, Shambhala—it was all there.
She began to weave in stories that she herself was Mother Earth, and that she had been reincarnated hundreds of times. She said she was the Queen of Lemuria, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Pocahontas, Marilyn Monroe.
*
Online, Amy connected with a man with a silvery beard, neatly combed hair, and glasses from New York, named Miguel Lamboy, who she began calling Archangel Michael Silver. He claimed to have done IT work for the United Nations in the past, and wrote online that he had been healed of cancer “through Mother’s spiritual teachings.”
He started posting stories of aliens and energy and astrological predictions to FirstContactGroundCrewTeam.com. Eventually, he flew west to join Amy in Crestone, and became the business manager of her operation. Sometimes Amy referred to him as her “producer.”
At one point, she called her mother, Linda, back in Texas, and said she and her producer wanted to come visit. The title caught Linda off guard. Producer of…what? “I didn’t think it was a good idea,” Linda said. “I didn’t know who this Miguel was, and I think they probably wanted money.”
By the spring of 2014, Amy and Miguel were posting to the website dozens of times per day. Amy continued producing videos where she passionately read excerpts from the work of hypnotists, mediums, and psychics who’d written about starseeds and lightworkers.
One day, Amy posted a list of “divine decrees” in which she called for an end to violence in the world, for corporations to dissolve, and for the Earth’s resources to be “returned to the people.” “The Entire [9/11] truth, as well as The UFO Conspiracy Cover~Up, Must Be Revealed immediately,” she added. “If these are Not Revealed immediately, WE The People, Will Abolish that illusionary Government.”
Amerith WhiteEagle had been the first Father God, and Amy found a succession of new Father Gods, one after the other, to sit beside her and attend to her every need. One of the earliest was a cosmetics rep in his thirties with piercing brown eyes from New Jersey named Andrew Profaci.
He encountered Amy’s videos in Facebook groups devoted to lightworkers during a time he had been falling further into conspiracy theories: 9/11, the Rothschilds, Egyptian prophecies, aliens. Her videos, which spoke vaguely about greater forces at play in society, drew him in.
Andrew had been raised in the Catholic Church but could never quite square up the hypocrisies that he saw in the institution. “The pope sits on a throne made of gold and talks about helping the poor,” he said. It “just didn’t really sit well with me.”
Around the time he encountered Amy’s videos, Andrew had overcome a painkiller addiction, had been laid off from his cosmetics job, and was getting unemployment checks every month. “Life had opened up to me in a way that was just like, ‘I can do whatever I want right now,'” he said.
He had time to waste. And though he never considered himself particularly spiritual, after watching hours of Amy speaking about her ideas, he felt for the first time in his life that maybe spirituality was a path he was willing to walk down.
n fact, he noticed lots of people like himself in those groups—people who didn’t realize they had been seeking something but felt suddenly touched by a greater spiritual hand.In the lightworker groups on Facebook, people were talking about the same concepts he was interested in. In fact, he noticed lots of people like himself in those groups—people who didn’t realize they had been seeking something but felt suddenly touched by a greater spiritual hand.
“They felt like they had all this untapped potential in their life that wasn’t being used,” he said. “And all of a sudden, they come across these spiritual notions that they have a much bigger role to play. It makes them feel special and validated.”
Amy’s videos often spoke about how the old ways of the world were breaking apart, and a new world was slowly unfolding—like a flower blossom opening. He found himself dreaming about her night after night, her confident voice dictating his dreams. Eventually they traded private messages and Andrew confided in Amy that he was dreaming about her; she surprised him when she said she had been dreaming about him too. For a little while, Andrew really thought she might be God.
Amy urged Andrew to come join her in Colorado and become a part of the group she had dubbed the First Contact Ground Crew Team. It seemed crazy, but then again, he’d never felt so understood and accepted.
“It just felt like there was a place for me—somebody who felt like a bit of an outcast and didn’t really fit in anywhere. And it felt like maybe this was the place where I could fit in with people who were like-minded,” Andrew said. “So I decided to leave everything. I left a fully furnished apartment. I dropped everything… I even left my dog behind at my mom’s house.”
He arrived in Denver at midnight, then paid a cabdriver to take him the five hours south to Crestone to the remote address Amy had sent him. He got there at five in the morning. The team came out to greet him, shelling out extra cash for the driver’s tip, and brought him into the house.
“It was disgusting,” he said. Dishes towered in the kitchen sink. Everything was dirty, like no one had ever cleaned. “I immediately sensed that I had made such a big mistake.”
That morning, he saw that Amy was not the clear-voiced muse he saw online. “She was in another world,” he said. “She had been drinking for almost two days, awake for two days and tripping on mushrooms. So she was like completely nonresponsive, nonverbal when I got there, literally drooling in her chair.” Was this what the living God really looked like?
“I was looking around the place in disrepair, looking at her and the state that she was in. You know—things you don’t see from the other side of the laptop,” he said. But he had traveled so far, and by the second day, when Amy was sober, he really did think she was leading something special. He fell into the First Contact Ground Crew Team’s rhythm, learned to speak their language of higher meaning. They all had a role; it felt like “this cosmic game of House being played,” he said.
Before he arrived, he had this nagging sense that he had potential for greatness. With Amy and her team, he felt like he was growing into that special role.
Shortly after his arrival, Amy told Andrew what his path was—that he was Father God. The masculine energy to her feminine. Her long-lost twin flame. At first, the news was jarring—almost too big for him to grasp. “I spent a handful of weeks trying to come to terms with it, giving her the benefit of the doubt,” he said.
Amy announced this news online. “Greetings, love beings!” she called in a video, a room full of pink twinkle lights sparkling behind her. “This is Mother God.”
“And Father God,” Andrew, wearing a baseball shirt, said. “Hello.” He held up a peace sign.
“And the First Contact Ground Crew Team! At your service,” Amy chimed in, looking around the room. The camera didn’t move, but cheers and claps echoed around them in response.
In the house, the team would sit around a big wooden table with their laptops, taking turns playing songs, passing a joint around the circle as they amassed the various articles they would post to the website that day. Around five o’clock in the evening, everyone logged on to the First Contact Ground Crew Team chat room, counseling users about their problems, sharing their spiritual ideas about starships and astrology.
Meanwhile, Amy would do spiritual healing appointments on the phone for donations. She would tell the team that their mission, first and foremost, was to heal the world with love. And they felt like they were doing that by being there for the people who came into their website’s orbit, who they were also tapping for donations.
Andrew told Amy he thought First Contact Ground Crew Team was a mouthful, and for marketing’s sake the group played around with new names. The First Contact Ground Crew Team changed to 5D News, briefly. “We are now entering into a New Phase in the Divine Plan,” read one post on the new site. “Now is the time for the New Lemuria to rise from the Depths of the Sea, to rise from the Depths of our Unconscious.”
On the summer solstice in 2015, during a ceremony Amy dubbed “New Lemuria Activation Portal,” the group stood around in the backyard of the house as she read a list of decrees and predictions from her laptop. She promised that humanity was about to embark on a wild ride of changes. Around them, dogs barked and birds chirped. Amy wore an orange dress with bows at the shoulders, and a headband of turquoise beads that dangled down between her eyebrows, like an Egyptian goddess.
She held her gnarled wooden staff in one hand as she read, “The last cleansing is occurring. Humanity is in the final stages of the necessary clearing out of all energies that no longer serve the greater good.”
The decrees felt like commands, but to whom, it wasn’t clear. Her followers bowed their heads, listening. Andrew kept his eyes closed and hands folded in prayer. Miguel wore all white.
When Amy finished, she stood and Andrew held out a notebook for her to read from, like an altar boy. Amy cleared her throat, leaned on her staff, and sang “The Rose,” a song popularized by Bette Midler. Her cheeks flushed as she sang, like she was a little sheepish. She coughed at the high notes, but otherwise her voice was bright and clear. When she finished singing, she smiled; Andrew placed a hand over his heart.
After several name changes, Amy settled on calling the group Love Has Won, and they relaunched their website and social media pages accordingly. Unlike her first sites, cluttered with posts, Love Has Won’s site was cleaner, fresher, and placed Amy at the center. There were photos of her, eyes closed, hands in prayer.
“Learn how to live a happy & enlightened life,” the homepage promised. Photos showed her gazing toward the stars, with a gleaming amulet around her neck.
“The Mother of All Creation is here embodied and in the flesh,” the site read. “She has been in service to humanity for the past thirteen years….Love Has Won has taken the reigns as the energies are here to bring the New Earth into physical manifestation. It’s All in or nothing.”
Visitors began streaming toward the site, first thousands, then tens of thousands. Amy’s spiritual healing sessions brought in money, but the group also encouraged people to make donations—small or large: $33, $44, $55. Once someone donated $7,777. (Within the New Age economy, these are often called “angel numbers.”) The group lived communally, pooling their money. Andrew’s unemployment checks were quickly dissolved into the pool of group funds.
Every night, as the crew busily tapped away in the chat room, around dinnertime Andrew would bring Amy her first drink of the night. “I used to say goodbye to her after I’d give her her second drink,” he said. “I’d say, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.'”
Andrew’s unemployment checks were quickly dissolved into the pool of group funds.He began to understand that there were two personalities to the woman he’d met online. There was Amy, the person with the sparkling blue eyes and clear voice. She was fun, charismatic, a little blunt. “She definitely had that alpha vibe to her,” he said. “That Scorpio vibe that would just…cut you to pieces but do it for your own benefit.”
And then there was Mother God. The more Amy drank every night, the more she talked, and the more the stories from her past came tumbling out of her, a deluge of folklore that pooled together with all the teachings of mediums and psychics and starseeds she had been reading for years. She was creating her own Mother God mythology.
“Every life story she had was somehow tied to her being God,” Andrew said. “You could see how she wove this web of belief systems and convinced herself she was Mother God.” She would swing from being wildly angry, to sobbing hysterically, to screaming at the people around her. It was painful to watch.
“Amy was a wonderful person,” he said. “Mother God was a delusional alcoholic.”
______________________________
Excerpted from the book Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age. Copyright © 2025 by Leah Sottile. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
