6 The Hernandez Brothers cult formed in 1963 when a pair of petty criminals claimed they were prophets of Inca gods and fooled some villagers in the small, Mexican town of Yerba Buena. Then they hired a prostitute to pose as an Inca goddess, but the plan backfired when she took over the cult, became delusional, and demanded human sacrifices.

The criminals were brothers Santos and Cayetano Hernandez. After convincing the villagers they were prophets and promising to lead them to a treasure hidden in nearby caves, they held drug-fueled orgies and treated the villagers like sex slaves. When the villagers grew impatient from not getting the promised treasure, the brothers hired a prostitute named Magdalena Solis to take part in the scam. They introduced Solis to the villagers as the reincarnation of an Inca goddess.

Solis soon became delusional and took over the cult. When two villagers tried to leave the group, Solis had them put to death. She then began demanding human sacrifices and claimed she needed to drink blood to stay young. The group sacrificed four people over the next six weeks. But then a fourteen-year-old local stumbled across one of their rituals. He ran 15 miles to the nearest police station and reported seeing “vampires.” An investigator accompanied the boy back to the area the next day, and they were murdered by the cult. Due to their disappearance, more police went to the village. Many of the cult members got shot and Solis was arrested.(source)

7 The People’s Temple, led by Jim Jones, started a community called Jonestown in Guyana in 1974. When a congressman and a group of journalists visited Jonestown to investigate reports of abuse, they ended up being shot and killed by Jonestown security guards. Later that day, Jim Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide. Over nine hundred people died. It was the greatest single loss of American civilian life due to a deliberate act, until 9/11.

The People’s Temple was a cult that formed in Indiana in 1955. Jim Jones preached a message that borrowed from Christianity, communism, and socialism. In 1974, Jones moved to Guyana with almost 1,000 followers and started Jonestown. The community started getting some negative attention in the press when some former members described the cruel practices they endured there. For example, they said members were regularly required to participate in a “catharsis” process, where one person was singled out and then criticized and beaten.

Based on this negative attention, a San Francisco congressman visited Jonestown to investigate the claims of abuse. A number of members asked to leave with the congressmen and accompanied him to a nearby airstrip. But security guards from Jonestown intercepted the group and shot at them killing the congressman, three journalists, and one defector. That evening, Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide by drinking grape-flavored Flavor Aid laced with cyanide.(source)

8 The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God was a doomsday cult that formed in Uganda in the late 1980s. The cult’s leaders preached that the world would end on December 31^st, 1999. After nothing happened on the predicted date, the group started to unravel, so the cult leaders murdered their followers.

After the new millennium arrived without incident, the leaders claimed the end would come on March 17, 2000. On that date, they held a huge party and gathered in their church to pray and sing. There were an explosion and fire at the church, and all 530 people in attendance died. A police investigation concluded it was a mass murder that had been orchestrated by the cult’s leadership. Hundreds of other members were also found dead by poisoning at the group’s various properties across southern Uganda. Forensics showed those cult members had been murdered weeks earlier.(source)

9 The Family was a cult started by an Australian yoga teacher who claimed she was the reincarnation of Jesus. She had followers help her gather fourteen children, with the goal of shaping them into “a perfect race.” The children were isolated and abused.

Yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Bryne and her followers gathered fourteen infants and young children from 1968 to 1975. Some of them were the biological children of the cult’s members, some were adopted, and others were abducted. The children were told that Hamilton-Bryne was their mother. They lived apart from adult cult members in an isolated compound and were looked after by a group of extremely cruel women called the “Aunties.”

Most of the children had their hair bleached and were made to look the same. The kids were regularly beaten and starved. If a child wet the bed, they were forced to take a cold shower. One boy who had asthma was wheezing, so he was put outside in the cold at night. The kids were also often dosed with psychiatric drugs. Once they reached adolescence, they had to undergo an initiation that involved taking LSD and being left alone in a dark room.

The children were finally taken away by authorities in 1987 after one of the children was expelled from The Family for rebellious behavior and went to the authorities.(1,2)

10 Aum Shinrikyo is a Japanese doomsday cult that was founded in 1984. Its leader preached that the group would come to power after the apocalypse. The group got involved in organized crime and terrorism. It carried out sarin gas attacks on the public. When police raided their compounds, they discovered explosives, chemical weapons, and a Russian military helicopter.

Its founder, Shoko Asahara, prophesized that the world would end in 1997. He said the US would start a World War III that would end in a nuclear “Armageddon.” He supposedly gave his followers “superhuman powers” in exchange for their material wealth. He claimed there were conspiracies orchestrated by Freemasons, Jews, the British Royal Family, and rival Japanese religions, and that Aum Shinrikyo could uncover them. For public relations purposes, the cult produced its own comics and cartoons that depicted the cult as an elite group that uses powerful weapons to fight world conspiracies

In 1994, the group used a converted refrigerator truck to release a cloud of sarin gas in the neighborhood of judges that were overseeing a real-estate lawsuit against the cult. At the time, police had no idea who was behind the attack and focused their investigation on an innocent local man.

When police made plans to raid the cult’s facilities, Asahara was tipped off. So, he organized another sarin attack to divert police attention. The group carried out a coordinated attack on five subway trains killing 13 people and sending more than 5,000 to the hospital.  The plan failed, and police raided the cult’s compounds across the country. They discovered explosives, chemical weapons, and a Russian military helicopter. They also found labs where the cult made drugs including a crude truth serum as well as LSD and methamphetamine that it sold to gangs. The cult is still around today. As of 2011, the group was reported as having over 1,000 members and is currently under surveillance by Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency.(1,2)