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h e-/-Foy it appears that_Charjes Resea Manson has spent th 0 rener years acting out key elements Fj d S ; of the plot. The acquaintance, who asked not be identified, is a In s ory respected drug researcher who came to know Manson when the Pa ra | le | S accused killer lived in the ‘Haight-Asbury district of San - Francisco in 1967-68. é ayes i ha arin The researcher’s theory aout indie Ban Rrancisco Sxaminer Manson and the book is echoed There is compelling evi- by a young Mill Valley man who lived with the Manson “family” dence that the murderers, peath Valley last year, gath- of actress Sharon Tate and ering data for a study of com- at least six others were munal living. part of a grotesque psycho- “Stranger in a Strange Land” j naar ar , has_hbeen widely rea {he yn- tic drama improvised by der-30 set and a te a. Charles Manson from a novel he read over and over. The central character and the sequence of events in the science fiction novel are hauntingly sim- ilar to the personality and the style of life that Manson culti- vated while he lived in San Francisco and Death Valley. His gathering of a nomadic harem, his “hypnotic” domina- tion over his “family,” their communal marriage and free sexual sharing with visitors, their attitudes toward human death, and the Los Ange:es kill- ings—all are mirrored in the book, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” by Robert A. Heinlein. In the opinion of a close ac- quaintance of Manson’s, these and numerous other parallels bepusonthe book and_reslity are not coincidental.