Frederick von Mierers claimed that he came from the Arcturus star system – but he certainly knew how to show Earthlings a good time.

He threw parties almost every night in the 1980s and they were packed to the gills with beautiful people – top models and wealthy socialites – dancing the night away.

And he was only interested in glamorous young professionals.

'Bring me your beauties – not your friends, only invite the beauties,' the handsome, intelligent and charming New Yorker told acquaintances.

He often took his fresh-faced charges – frequently still in their teens – to witness a night of debauchery at Manhattan's notorious, star-packed Studio 54 nightclub.

The famously picky doormen would wave them inside, where clubgoers did lines of cocaine on the tables and it was not unusual to see people having sex on the dancefloor.

Then it was back to his glittering apartment, elaborately decorated in the style of an Eastern palace, where his real work would begin – fixing these rich young things with his piercing blue eyes and using his spellbinding charisma to exploit their hunger for spiritual fulfilment in the uber-materialism of Trump-era New York.

In the process, the self-described 'psychic astrologer' reeled them slowly but surely into an insidious New Age Doomsday cult that sucked them dry of their money in exchange for large 'healing' gems that he 'prescribed' for them after analysing their star charts.

Von Mierers aped the poet John Keats by claiming that 'beauty is truth'. Many of his followers were fashion models (generally from the prestigious Ford agency), not only because of von Mierers' obsession with physical beauty, say insiders, but because – as an ex-model himself – he tapped into the crippling insecurity that some felt about being judged entirely on their looks.

Although von Mierers insisted his message was about love and synthesising the best of the world's religions, he was a misogynist who preached, among other things, that Jews were 'evil' and Hitler was 'divinely inspired' in wanting to create a 'master race'.

He was intent on doing the same, ready to take over the world after an apocalypse he predicted would occur following a 'magnetic polar shift' at the close of 1999.

The extraordinary story of von Mierers and his Eternal Values cult is revisited in a HBO TV series beginning tonight, Bring Me The Beauties: A Model Cult, which contains interviews with many of his former followers, including two of the top models from the 1980s, Hoyt Richards and Jacki Adams.

It's a tale of vulnerability, narcissism and jaw-dropping gullibility in which high-flyers would finish a day's work on the catwalk or Wall Street and then spend hours scrubbing hall floors or doing the laundry because von Mierers – who'd read enough Eastern philosophy to sound convincing – insisted they had to work on controlling their egos.

He wasn't just a New Age cult leader but an old-fashioned conman whose 'healing' stones were worth a fraction of what he charged his moneyed admirers for them. But they happily forked out because he insisted the gemstones – which they had to keep close at all times – were imbued with a spiritual power that would transform their lives and protect them from dark, satanic forces.

Von Mierers also lied about himself. He wasn't the orphaned scion of an illustrious and super-wealthy Manhattan family who knew the British Royal Family, as he claimed, but Fred Meyer from suburban Brooklyn, whose father ran a dry-cleaning business.

An avid social climber, whose German-sounding accent was entirely fake, he'd cut his teeth at the art of separating rich people from their money by sponging off elderly New York widows after his modelling career hit the skids.

Latching on to a soaring interest in yoga, meditation, astrology and lifestyle gurus in the 1980s, he provided a 'bridge between the Yuppies and the New Age', former member John Hoyt – who later became supermodel Hoyt Richards – tells the documentary.

Hoyt was 16 when he first encountered von Mierers, who sat next to him on a beach on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. He was soon spouting Eastern mysticism to the teenager, drawing yin and yang symbols in the sand.

It wasn't long before he was taking the impressionable youngster to Studio 54.

Von Mierers urged Hoyt – who had spent his sixth-form years at the £60,000-a-year British public school Haileybury in Hertfordshire – to go into modelling. With his movie-star looks he was spectacularly successful and, after working alongside the likes of Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell, he was dubbed 'the first male supermodel'.

Almost all his earnings – millions of dollars, he says – went to von Mierers, whose group he joined the day after he graduated from Princeton University with a degree in economics.

He moved into one of the string of cramped flats in von Mierers' Manhattan building, where his disciples lived communally, doing their chores each day before going off to their high-powered jobs. At night they'd hunker down side by side on futons wherever they could find space on the floor.

Like many members, Hoyt convinced himself his career success was largely due to von Mierers' influence and – although he deeply regrets it now – he happily introduced many other models to him.

Word spread that von Mierers had genuine psychic powers, and his followers sincerely believed he was a supernatural being.

While their guru had a hot temper, he excelled at the art of flattery – an approach that worked wonders on self-doubting young people who felt there was something missing in their lives.

After initially allowing them to come and go as they pleased, he gradually lured them in and persuaded them to cut themselves off from their family and past lives.

There were strict rules. Members had to dress immaculately, stay tanned and follow a healthy diet that kept them slim and good-looking.

Although von Mierers called their existence 'God's cocktail party on earth', they had to swear off alcohol and any form of sexual activity. The latter injunction, say ex-members now, was clearly intended to ensure that disciples remained fixated on von Mierers rather than a lover.

It was an almost monastic life that would start with him giving a new recruit a 'Hindu, psychic, astrological, life reading' – 90 minutes of character analysis, including details of their 'previous lives', that was intended to transform their existence. It would be recorded on tape and sold to them for hundreds of dollars.

By the mid-1980s he had reportedly groomed a core entourage of nearly 100 followers. By then, they were ready to swallow his preposterous claims that in 1978 he'd undergone a profound transformation he called an 'alien walk-in' in which his body was possessed by an extra-terrestrial being from Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere.

He claimed that he had been sent to Earth to warn humanity of an impending apocalypse and to gather the 'sincere souls' – his flock – who would lead mankind in the post-apocalypse new millennium.

Von Mierers was able to disseminate his outlandish claims to a wider audience because he had his own late-night cable TV show on New York's public access network, where anyone could broadcast their own programmes.

And, in 1985, he suddenly became a global phenomenon when he featured prominently in a bestselling book on psychic phenomena, Aliens Among Us. Even Sylvester Stallone reportedly came for a 'life reading'.

The group was making millions of dollars thanks to soaring gem and audio tape sales – titles included Space People, The Dark Forces, and Gems And Crystals – and fees for life readings. There were 8,000 requests for the latter alone, which at $350 each came to nearly $3million (almost $9million today).

Von Mierers was able to buy homes across the US. They included a sprawling lakeside house in North Carolina where, he insisted, they would be safe from the earthquakes and tidal waves he predicted would devastate the Earth on the dawn of the new millennium.

Alien spacecraft, he added, would land on the lake and collect the group, preserving them so they could be released to lead humanity when the planet had sufficiently recovered.

Although von Mierers always strenuously denied he ran a cult, the classic control mechanisms he employed were only too obvious. These included 'slamming sessions', during which he would publicly humiliate a member for some perceived failing and encourage everyone else to join in, screaming vitriol at the victim.

Jacki Adams certainly experienced the dark side of Eternal Values. A highly successful 1980s model who was the face of make-up giant Elizabeth Arden and regularly appeared on the cover of Vogue, she joined the group in 1987, when she was 22, after reading Aliens Among Us.

Adams tells the documentary she found a 'sense of belonging' there. But when she started a sexual relationship with a handsome male member of the group who von Mierers had singled out as his likely successor, the guru was furious and denounced her as 'evil' and 'needing to be destroyed'.

The others dutifully joined in the verbal assault.

'My experience with Eternal Values went from happy to scary in a heartbeat,' she recalls. But she stayed on nonetheless.

Von Mierers made the wealthy model pay for an apartment in his building and, while he permitted Adams and her lover to live there together, he told her she had to address her shortcomings by buying a clutch of the gemstones he supplied. The first one alone cost her $80,000. 'It was amazing how much spirituality cost,' Adams now observes wryly.

Sensing his vice-like control over the group was threatened by Adams' romantic relationship, von Mierers did a complete U-turn on celibacy and encouraged his flock to have as much sex as possible to show they were 'free' – but only with other members of the group.

The new arrangement conveniently allowed von Mierers to play the field himself. While he'd told his followers he was asexual, he had previously been openly gay, but male prostitutes now would visit him three or four times a week – assignations he passed off as astrological readings.

Just as the AIDS epidemic started to engulf the city, he unwisely became wildly promiscuous – and demanded his disciples follow his lead. New members were expected to take part in a multiracial sex rite which was known as 'the treatment'.

Von Mierers insisted existing members take part in lurid sexual encounters with each other or with complete strangers he brought in. He broke down their inhibitions by encouraging them to join him in taking mind-bending drugs such as ecstasy.

'A lot of these women I considered sisters and it actually felt incestuous to me,' says Hoyt, who added that, when he showed his discomfort to the group, he was accused of being 'repressed'.

As von Mierers' drug-fuelled behaviour became more compulsive and he grew ever more focused on attracting converts who were rich (female group members were encouraged to seduce wealthy men), Adams and her lover, John Andreadis – who she had by then married – resolved to leave the group.

They incurred what she described as an 'avalanche of hate'. Von Mierers physically attacked Andreadis at a meeting, denouncing the couple as 'diabolical forces' and 'terrible evil people' in an audio tape he later sent to as many people he could.

Adams was the one to finally blow the whistle, telling New York prosecutors that von Mierers was defrauding members over the gemstone sales. She also agreed to be interviewed in 1990 by Vanity Fair magazine for an article entitled 'The Ford Models and the Alien from Arcturus'. It left little doubt it was an oppressive cult and its leader was a total fraud.

Von Mierers died of AIDS just five days before the magazine came out. He was just 44.

A hard core of some ten men – including John Hoyt – eventually moved to the North Carolina property to preserve the Eternal Values spirit and prepare for the anticipated apocalypse.

They were still there in 1999, along with a huge arsenal of firearms and a clutch of girlfriends after they'd belatedly decided that, if humanity was about to be largely destroyed, they had better start procreating. 'It was like a bad sci-fi script,' admits a former member, actor Dar Dixon.

When Hoyt admitted he had a secret girlfriend in Los Angeles, fellow cult members insisted he end the relationship and shaved his head to prevent him getting modelling assignments. He eventually fled the group, taking shelter with fellow supermodel Fabio Lanzoni in California. He sued the remaining members, down to five or so, for all the money he had sunk into Eternal Values. By 2002, the group was defunct.

The documentary doesn't really tackle the abiding question of why von Mierers was so desperate to ensnare beautiful people.

Perhaps the answer lies in a Hindu saying he was fond of quoting to his young disciples: 'When flowers open, bees come of themselves.' And, in his case, he was lucky to attract some especially gullible bees.