After Applewhite's release, he travelled to California and Oregon with Nettles, eventually gaining a group of committed followers. They told their followers that they would be visited by extraterrestrials who would provide them with new bodies. Applewhite initially stated that his followers and he would physically ascend to a spaceship, where their bodies would be transformed, but later he came to believe that their bodies were the mere containers of their souls, which would later be placed into new bodies. These ideas were expressed with language drawn from Christian eschatology, the New Age movement, and American popular culture.