Universe People - History

History

Ivo A. Benda began his public activities in the middle of the 1990s. He has organized more than 180 lectures, visited by more than 12,000 people (according to his own words). In 1997 he has published a book Rozhovory s poučením od mých přátel z vesmíru (Interviews With Instructions From My Friends From the Universe). At the beginning of the 2000s he managed to penetrate the mass media, he appeared in the Nova TV and in the Czech Television (Czech state broadcasting channel). Some of the visitors of his public lectures considered his speeches as a perfect mystification or joke, however, psychiatrists labelled his performances as a bizarre psychotic delusion. From 1998 to 2000, the ideology of the Universe People was close to sectarianism, with a central idea of coming cosmic catastrophe and evacuation of people to another planet. However, their later efforts moved to defence against the attacks of negative extraterrestrial beings, called saurians or lizard men (in Czech: ještírci).

In the second half of the 2000s, Ivo Benda and his group became more publicly known also in Slovakia. In 2007, the Slovak private television channel TV JOJ informed, that the Universe People sent instructions how to defend against the attacks of evil extraterrestrial entities to the Slovak Ministry of Defense. The envelopes contained also suspicious material, which alarmed Slovak military police and security services. One of the buildings of the Ministry was evacuated. The envelopes contained instructional CDs and promotional materials of the group. Ivo Benda stated in the TV: "If you were attacked by a lizard man from an outer world, the Ministry of Defense should defend the people, or not? Or do you consider those lizard men as friends?" The suspicion of security threat was unproven.