The Visions of Glory Doomsday Network?

April 2019. A conference hall in Utah.

More than a thousand people fill the room to hear Tim Ballard — then the most celebrated anti-trafficking activist in America, and a headline draw at the FIRM Foundation’s Book of Mormon Evidence expo. The organization’s own website still advertises the crowd: a full house of over 1,000 guests saw Tim Ballard in April 2019.

Six months earlier: St. George, Utah. October 26, 2018. A conference run by an event brand called Preparing a People. Among the featured speakers, an end-times author named Chad Daybell. In the audience, a mother of two from Arizona named Lori Vallow. They meet. Within a year, three people connected to them will be dead.

Two rooms. Two stages. One circuit. And moving through all of it — quoted from stages, discussed on forums, sold at vendor tables, passed hand to hand — a 2012 book of private visions called Visions of Glory: the accounts of “Spencer,” the pseudonym behind which Utah therapist Thom Harrison published his visions, an identity he disclosed in a 2014 letter to his priesthood leaders.

We put the book itself under the microscope in our companion fact-check, The Book by the Pool. The short version: tested against the standard works, the book is contradicted at six page-cited points; tested against fourteen years of record, none of its predicted events has occurred; tested against Harrison’s own 2014 letter, the paper trail shows a documented reversal. It failed every bench.

So this piece asks the next question. Not: is the book true? — that’s answered — but: how did a book like this get an economy?

A book is not a movement. A movement needs rooms. Here is the map of the rooms.

What each organization is — and what the record shows

Preparing a People — documented

What it is. An event brand of Color My Media, a private Utah multimedia company owned by Michael and Nancy James. It staged lecture events and podcasts aimed at spiritual preparation for the Second Coming, featuring a rotating cast of Latter-day Saint speakers.

The documented connection. Chad Daybell was a featured speaker — and he met Lori Vallow at the company’s conference in St. George, Utah, on October 26, 2018. That meeting is trial record.

What the record corrects. A claim circulates online that Daybell and Vallow founded or ran Preparing a People. The company’s own published statement says otherwise: Daybell did not start, own, or control any part of it, and no speaker — Daybell included — was paid. After the case broke, the company pulled all Daybell and Vallow content, said it would cooperate with law enforcement, and insisted it “is not a ‘group’ and is not a ‘Cult’ or something people join.” Fact-checking cuts both ways: the circuit was real, and the ownership claim is false.

Church affiliation. None — by its own disclaimer, which states it is not affiliated with any specific religion.

AVOW (Another Voice of Warning) — on the record

What it is. A long-running subscription forum for Latter-day Saint preparedness culture — food storage, survival planning, and, crucially, visionary content: dreams, near-death accounts, and end-times speculation, shared and discussed at scale.

The connection on the record. Journalist Leah Sottile’s book When the Moon Turns to Blood (Twelve, 2022) documents the forum as an early, receptive audience for Chad Daybell’s end-times claims — the place where an obscure Idaho author could find readers already primed for private revelation. Visions of Glorycirculated in the same current; the book’s vocabulary was native to the forum’s culture.

The honest limit. A forum is not an editor. AVOW platformed a genre, not a crime, and nothing in the record suggests its operators anticipated where two of their circuit’s figures were heading. That is precisely the point this piece is making about infrastructure.

FIRM Foundation — documented

What it is. The Foundation for Indigenous Research and Mormonism, founded in 2008 by Rod Meldrum — best known for “Heartland” Book of Mormon geography. Its semiannual Book of Mormon Evidence expos are, by its own description, the longest-running conferences of their kind: dozens of speakers, multiple stages, thousands of attendees.

The documented connection. The expos platformed Tim Ballard as a headline speaker — the organization’s own website celebrates the full house of more than 1,000 who saw him in April 2019, and independent observers documented him headlining alongside Meldrum. This is the stage economy in miniature: an audience assembled for scripture evidence, handed a hero whose authority would later be described — in court exhibits — in the language of prophetic destiny.

The honest limit. FIRM’s lane is geography and apologetics, not Visions of Glory; we found no evidence the foundation taught the book. Its role on this map is the circuit itself: the shared stages, vendors, and crowds through which the network’s figures moved. It remains active, with conferences scheduled into 2026.

EternalCore — on the record

What it is. The institutional platform of the visionary himself: a conference-and-podcast venture created by Thom Harrison — in Hidden True Crime’s summary, to “bring God back into therapy.”

The connection on the record. Conference promotional materials, as displayed in Hidden True Crime’s reporting, placed Harrison at the center of the speaker lineup — with Jodi Hildebrandt, the counselor later convicted of aggravated child abuse in the Ruby Franke case, among the featured speakers, and Tim Ballard positioned alongside Harrison.

Why it matters for the fact-check. The 2014 letter framed Harrison’s visions as personal and directive of no one. EternalCore is what institution-building looks like: a stage, a lineup, a brand — with the author of Visions of Glory at its center. It is one more entry in the letter-versus-record ledger.

The honest limit. Speaking at a conference is not an endorsement of anything its organizer later does, in either direction. Hildebrandt’s crimes are hers; the connection documented here is the platform, not complicity. Current status of the venture: unconfirmed at press time.

Operation Underground Railroad — documented

What it is. The anti-trafficking nonprofit Tim Ballard founded in 2013 — the platform that made him famous, a fame that went supernova with the 2023 film Sound of Freedom.

The documented connection. Ballard is where the network’s visionary vocabulary met real-world power. The December 6, 2021 blessing document signed by Thom Harrison — Exhibit N in the Utah civil suit — described Ballard’s mission in prophetic terms and promised that courts and law enforcement arrayed against him “will be frustrated in their attempts.” In 2023, Ballard separated from OUR following an internal investigation into employee complaints, first reported by VICE News. The organization, now operating as OUR Rescue, has distanced itself from its founder.

The Spear Fund — documented

What it is. Ballard’s post-OUR venture: the Liberty and Light Foundation, doing business as The Spear Fund, launched in 2023 with Ken Krogue as president.

The documented connection. Exhibit O: the August 5, 2023 blessing message voiced by Krogue — “I am a 2nd witness” — confirming Harrison’s earlier prophetic word over Ballard, circulated with a distribution instruction naming Tim, Todd, Ken, and their spouses. This is the network’s mature form: written prophecy about a public figure, moving through a private channel, inside the leadership orbit of an active nonprofit. The Spear Fund entity is a named defendant in the civil suit; Krogue has not been accused in this record of any crime, and his role here is as the exhibit’s speaker.

Where the record stands

A map like this only stays honest if it says, plainly, where each person on it stands before the law. As of August 2026:

Three convictions, all connected to the circuit’s vocabulary — the trial record ties the Daybells’ “zombie” taxonomy of light and dark spirits to the conceptual ground the book normalized. One defendant who denies everything, in litigation no court has resolved. And two men never charged with anything, whose documents nonetheless sit in a court file. The map holds all of it without flattening the differences — because the differences are the point.

Eighteen years, six organizations, one book

The map and the territory

The circuit did not die with the verdicts. The conferences still book stages. The forums still fill threads. The genre — private visions, delivered with certainty, to audiences who want more than they’re getting — did not lose its market when it lost its most infamous readers.

And that’s the finding worth sitting with. Nothing on this map required villains. It required a vocabulary nobody tested, stages nobody vetted, and repetition that felt like confirmation. The test that would have caught it — the one run from the four books on the shelf — existed the entire time. It just never made it onto the program.

The network gave the book an economy. The canon gave its readers a bench.

Where to go next

This page mapped the rooms. The companion piece tests the book that travelled through them.