Identified! CA - Death Valley NP, skeletal remains at Panamint Dunes, 2003 - Patricia Partin

Shortly after the 1998 death of "A Separate Reality" guru Carlos Castaneda, whose peyote-fueled sorceric journeys into the Mexican desert captured the imagination of a generation in the 1970s, five of his closest disciples made out their wills, disconnected their telephones, and disappeared into thin air.

Some believed the five women, three of whom were known as "the witches," might have "burned from within," or vaporized into balls of light that joined with the eternal universe as Castaneda had promised to do but failed. Last week, positive identification of a set of human remains found in a remote area of Death Valley National Park revealed that at least one of them had, like Castaneda, died an ordinary human death.

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