Universe People or Cosmic People of Light Powers () is a Czech and Slovak UFO religion founded in the 1990s and centered on Ivo A. Benda. Their belief system is based upon the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations communicating with Benda and other contactees since October 1997 telepathically and later even by direct personal contact. They are considered to be the most distinctive UFO religion in the Czech Republic. Following the mass suicide of the members of the cult Heaven's Gate in 1997, the Universe People attracted the attention of Czech media as a group with similar ideology and potential to commit similar acts. The probability of this development has diminished in later years (2004). On several occasions, the group also managed to appear in the Czech and Slovak mass media. 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 published the 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 people (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 reported that the Universe People sent instructions on how to defend against attacks of evil extraterrestrial entities to the Slovak Ministry of Defense. The envelopes also contained suspicious material, which alarmed the Slovak Military Police and security services. One of the buildings of the Ministry was evacuated. These envelopes contained instructional CDs and promotional materials of the group. Ivo Benda stated on TV: "If you were attacked by a lizard man from an outer world, the Ministry of Defense should defend