This week marks 30 years since more than 900 people died at Jonestown in Guyana.

The followers of Jim Jones who lead the Peoples Temple cult committed suicide en masse in 1978 by, in most cases, drinking a cyanide laced fruit drink.

West Virginia University Journalism Professor George Esper was working for the Associated Press at the time and flew into Guyana shortly after the initial reports about what happened.

"As I flew over Guyana before landing, there was a panorama of colors, kind of, as I described in my stories, a twisted rainbow of broken dreams," Esper recalled on Thursday's MetroNews Talkline.

"It was so chilling that it was hard to believe something like this happened especially the staggering numbers."  In all, Esper says it took six days to clean up the bodies.

The mass murder-suicide came after California Congressman Leo Ryan and others traveling with him were murdered while attempting to leave Guyana.  Ryan had traveled to Guyana to look at Jones' community.

Esper says Jones had his followers completely brainwashed.  "They confessed to him their guilt, their feelings of inadequacy, their weaknesses and their suicidal impulses."

Jonestown marked the single greatest loss of American civilian life in an event that was not a natural disaster up until the terrorist attacks of September 11th.