to occur. Despite these failures, during the 1980s a number of individuals began to claim contact with the Ashtar Command through channeling, and various small groups were formed to receive and disseminate the messages. Developments after the mid-1990s By the mid-1990s (and continuing up to the present) several of these channeling groups began to utilize the Internet in order to promulgate their beliefs and to attempt to unify the movement by establishing a single 'authoritative' source for all Ashtar messages. This led to more prominence in the religious scene and significant membership. This cohesive response addressed the problem of conflicting, negative and failed prophecies which, after some effort, enabled the Ashtar Command to produce a single Ashtar world view. Individual channelers espousing messages which differed and continued to focus on themes such as the destruction of Earth, conspiracies, ET mass evacuations and general fear-mongering were declared invalid. It was claimed that these channelers had been deceived by negative space beings who had rebelled from the Ashtar Command, made alliances with similar others, and begun operating on the 'lower planes closest to Earth’. Most significantly of all, the new, more unified movement declared that in future no new channels would be accepted unless they operated on the ‘level of the soul’. As Helland points out, this was crucial to the formation of an orthodoxy. Channeled messages from Ashtar would be accepted as valid by the new orthodoxy if they complied with criteria consisting of a set of twelve guidelines which outlined what the movement stood for and how Ashtar would interact with society. This had never been attempted before in the 45 years of channeling Ashtar, who was also presented as a Divine figure similar to Jesus. The new framework claimed that the millions of spaceships believed to be constantly in the vicinity of Earth would never interfere on the planet's surface unless there was a serious problem such as a third world war or an ‘astrophysical catastrophe’. Helland observes that the emergent group was “noticeably more spiritually focussed and less concerned with extraterrestrial spaceships and visitors.” He states that very little distinguished the new Ashtar Command from other theosophically influenced groups, except that in 1994 a distinctive component, the Pioneer Voyage, was incorporated into the Ashtar world view The Pioneer Voyage In 1994, a small group of Ashtar Command members claimed that an extraordinary event had taken place: "the lift-off