Krishna Venta
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Krishna Venta - minor California cult leader born Francis Herman Pencovic in San Francisco on March 29, 1911. Venta founded the WKFL (Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith and Love) Fountain of the World cult in Simi Valley, California in the late 1940s. The bearded, barefoot, berobed, nicotine addicted, and station wagon loving Venta claimed to have arrived on Earth - along with Adam & Eve - aboard a rocket ship from the fictional planet Neophrates. He legally changed his name to "Krishna Venta" in 1951 and died in California on December 10, 1958 in a suicide bombing instigated by two disgruntled former followers (Peter Duma Kamenoff and Ralph Muller) who charged that Venta had mishandled cult funds and been intimate with their wives. A branch of the WKFL Fountain of the World cult was also established in Homer, Alaska prior to Venta's death. Fountain membership at both sites declined rapidly following Venta's death, and the cult had ceased to exist entirely by the mid-1970s.
Pencovic/Venta is also remembered because of the child support case Pencovic v. Pencovic, 45 C2d 97, Cal Sup Ct (1955).
Today Venta is remembered primarily by students of New Religious Movements, members of California historical societies, and/or by Mansonphiles. Many books about Charles Manson suggest that Manson, who lived near and often visited the Fountain grounds during the late 1960s, lifted some of his rap from Venta: both had criminal backgrounds, convinced their followers that they were Christ reincarnated, preached from the Book of Revelation, reenacted the crucifixion of Christ, and spoke of an impending race war from which they alone could offer deliverance. Other than geography, the two men share only these surface similarities. Any other attempts to link the men is futile.
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