On August 19, 2000, Heche drove from Los Angeles to Cantua Creek, a rural area outside Fresno, California, and parked her Toyota SUV along a dusty roadside.[37] Wearing only a bra and shorts, Heche walked 1½ miles through the desert before knocking on the door of a stranger's ranch house.[37] When the home's resident, Araceli Campiz, opened the door, she immediately recognized Heche from the film Six Days Seven Nights. "I was thinking, 'Oh my God, we're in the middle of nowhere,' " recalled Campiz, "and she walks in."[37] Heche gulped down glass upon glass of water, "took off her Nikes and said she needed to take a shower," said Campiz, who obliged, offering her a towel.[37] Refreshed, Heche, who as far as Campiz could tell was neither drunk, drugged nor ill (although Heche later admitted she had taken ecstasy[7]), plunked down in the living room, requested a pair of slippers (and suggested Campiz don the same) and settled in.[37] "She wanted to watch a movie," said Campiz, "but the VCR was broken."[37] Bemused at first, Campiz grew uneasy when Heche showed no sign of leavingcalling neither friends nor a garageafter half an hour had passed. "I didn't know what to do," Campiz said. "So I called the sheriff's department."[37] When deputies arrived, Heche told them that she was "God, and was going to take everyone back to heaven in a spaceship," according to a police report that was aired on KSEE-TV.[37] The deputies summoned an ambulance, which ferried Heche the 50 miles to Fresno's University Medical Center, where she was admitted to the psychiatric unit and released after a few hours.[37]
Heche says that she was insane for the first 31 years of her life due to the trauma of being sexually abused by her father during her infancy and childhood.[38][39] In a series of interviews given in 2001, Heche stated that she created a fantasy world called the "Fourth Dimension" to make herself feel safe, and had an alter ego named "Celestia," an alien from another planet who could speak to God and was the half-sister of Jesus Christ.[40] Heche said that the incident in Cantua Creek snapped her out of her insanity and put her alter ego behind her.[7]