San Francisco,

TWENTY-TWO years ago, Marshall Applewhite held meetings in Oregon asking people to leave their belongings behind, join him on a trek to the Colorado desert - and prepare for a UFO trip to outer space.

The pilgrimage by him and 25 followers fascinated the United States.

Applewhite, who went on to persuade hundreds of people in California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Oregon to leave their families for his group, was found dead on Wednesday with 38 other suicide victims near San Diego.

His lifestyle was a far cry from his earlier years as a gifted singer and likable music professor in the 1960s who had potential for a career on stage.

Everything seemed to change when he met a nurse, Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles, in the early 1970s. She became his companion and preached with him.

He was hospitalised with a heart blockage at the time and suffered a ''near death'' experience, said his 69-year-old sister, Louise Winant.

''One of the nurses there told him that he had a purpose, that God kept him alive,'' said Ms. Winant, of Port Aransas, Texas. ''She sort of talked him into the fact that this was the purpose - to lead these people - and he took it from there.''

Applewhite gave a different account in a 1972 interview, saying he met Ms Nettles when he was visiting a friend in the hospital where she was a nurse. ''When I met her, I felt I had known her forever,'' he said. Ms Nettles added: ''Now we know we have known each other in previous lives.''

Yet another account ap-peared in today's editions of the New York Daily News and New York Post, which said without attribution that Applewhite was a patient in a mental hospital when they met.

As they recruited followers in 1975, they said that sometime within the next 10 years, people from Earth would be taken to another world and a better life. But anyone interested would have to sell their property and discard their personal relationships.

The group's quest made headlines around America. A 1975 Associated Press story on the couple began: ''They speak of death - metamorphosis, resurrection and a greater life in another world.''

But within months of departing from Oregon with immortal expectations, many adherents drifted back.

One of them, Robert Rubin, 48, said the group soon ran out of money.

''We went all around the United States,'' he told The Oregonian newspaper. ''We tested the (charitability of the local) churches. We had nothing. We left everything behind, no money, no anything.'' Rubin now works at a store in Waldport, Oregon.

Calling themselves Bo and Peep, the Him and the Her, or the Two, Applewhite and Ms Nettles described life as only a transition to another.

''There were a lot of biblical references to what they did,'' Rubin recalled. ''Something out of Revelations. . . . They said when they did, a few days later they'd be taken off in spaceships.''

Applewhite and Ms Nettles called their expanding group Human Individual Metamorphosis, or HIM. Eventually, media attention and investigations by police forced the group underground. Ms Nettles died in 1985.

Applewhite was born in Spur, Texas, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He attended high school in Corpus Christi and studied music at the University of Colorado, where he played the lead in South Pacific and Oklahoma.

He got married, and the couple went to New York so he could become a professional singer.

In 1966, Applewhite was hired as a music teacher at the University of St Thomas, a private Roman Catholic college in Houston. He sang 10 roles with the Houston Grand Opera between 1964 and 1968, said opera spokeswoman Joe LaBreque.-AP