American History Hit - Heaven's Gate: The UFO Cult

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

What did the appearance of a comet in 1997 have to do with a tragic event in San Diego? Was Heaven's Gate a cult? And how does it compare to the other groups we have looked into on American History Hit?Benjamin Zeller, author of 'Heaven's Gate: America's UFO Religion', joins Don to discuss the group's history, beliefs, and their final act. Ben is Professor of Religion at Lake Forest College.Edited by Tim Arstall, Produced by Sophie Gee, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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A giant celestial ball of rock, dust, and ice, a comet, its surface modeled by craters, hurdles through the silent ink-black vacuum of space. As it moves through our solar system, closing towards the warmth of the sun, ice on the comet's surface begins to vaporize. Gas and dust erupting from its nucleus, trails behind, like cosmic exhaust. Illuminated by the sun, the comet begins to glow

with two tails unfurling. One broad and golden made of dust, the other, a fainter blue of ionized gases. Though it never comes closer to the Earth than 122 million miles, this comet named Hailbop,

visible to the naked eye, will nonetheless make its impact felt here on Earth. Just not in quite the way anyone would have expected. Don Wildman here. Welcome to American History Hit. The story of cults in America is a long and twisted chronicle of extreme visions and extraordinary personalities leading their flocks of followers, from self-help prophets to psychedelic communes to Marxist enclaves chasing utopia.

The boundaries between belief and delusion have often been blurred. On this podcast series, we've covered the ravaging fires of Waco, the sweltering, silence of Jonestown and the homicidal heat of the Manson family ranch. Today, we are again in Southern California, where back in the late 1990s, 39 lifeless bodies were discovered in a large house located in an otherwise ordinary suburb of San Diego. The fateful two-decade passage of these people is one that fused apocalyptic prophecy with sci-fi salvation, meaning literally spaceships. Who were these searchers? What did they believe? And how? How did it all go so wrong for the members of Heaven's Gate?

Today I am joined by Ben Zeller, author of Heaven's Gate, America's UFO Religion. He is a professor of religion at Lake Forest College in Illinois to find out why these people joined this bizarre cult and what exactly happened on that strange day in 1997. Hello, Ben. Nice to have you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So let's start generally. What was Heaven's Gate? Where'd they get the name? The actual name Heaven's Gate comes really, really late in the group's history. For most of the time, they were around, and they were around for about two decades, as you mentioned. They called themselves the class, and actually even the ex-members that survived today refer to the group as the class.

Heaven's Gate, they took at the very end, the last year of the group's existence, basically when they published a book and they got a web page. So it was sort of a branding at the very end. They went through with some other names as well. They called themselves human individual metamorphosis, and we can talk about that because that gets at what their, sort of theology was about. They also called themselves total overcomers anonymous. So they had a number of different names, but the class is really how they referred to themselves. This is one of these cult stories that is very current, meaning I remember the local news coverage, you know, sitting in Los Angeles and seeing this unfold. It's one of those things that we've had these cults all

throughout the 20th century, certainly, and beyond. But this one feels very, you know, of our world. It's kind of creepy that way. The general headings of their theology, come under evangelical Christianity, but also this science fiction thing that's very present in their thinking, isn't it? I would say there's sort of three, three sort of areas are derived from. So one is, as you said, the sort of evangelical Christianity, and particularly end-time millennial prophecies, the idea of sort of interpreting the Book of Revelation and the rapture and all this. The other is what I would say sort of, as you said, science fiction, ufology, interest in spaceships, UFOs, sci-fi broadly. And then the third is the New Age

Movement. wage, self-improvement, self-transformation, meditation practices, things like that. And really, when you put these all together within sort of the 1970s counterculture on the west coast of the U.S., you get Heavensgate. Yeah. Speaking of current, I mean, even as listeners are hearing our conversation, they can check the website, which is still up. www.

Heavensgate.com. And you'll see it. It's still there written as if to their present membership. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, it's maintained by X members. So the group is defunct. We should be clear, there's no heaven's gate.

There's no one around anymore. If you email the people who run the website, they'll say, you can't join. There's no group. But the website is kept up as sort of a memorial to the group. I see. And it looks very homemade. I mean, it's very simple. It's a time capsule from 1990s website design, right?

So for those of us who are around the 90s, if you remember, you know, the flashing GIF icons, the neon, It's very much, it speaks to the design of the 1990s. It looks very dated today. Yeah, exactly. So to be clear, Christian God, Heavenly Father, forces of good and evil, salvation, cosmology, an order of the universe, all very standard ideas of religion. However, in this case, it will be taken to a different level. Yeah, yeah. I would say in terms of Christian God, I mean, yes and no. So the group clearly saw themselves as coming out of the Bible. and out of sort of this biblical story. And their understanding of what we would say God was in keeping with how they read the Bible. Other Christians would, of course, say not so. But their basic claim was that the extraterrestrial being who's in charge of maintaining our world is the one the Bible refers to as God.

So for all intents and purposes, when the Bible says God, that is an extraterrestrial who's managing our planet. And from our perspective would be a God. I mean, it can decide when we come and when we go and, you know, what happens on our planet. So that is, I suppose that's what you mean by God. Yeah, this is the key. The crux of this belief system is the transition they're going to make, which will become very fateful, from one level to the next. It's really baked into the thing. Correct. Yeah.

This is always an odd thing about cults. They start with accepted religious ideas, as we were saying. But then they take that and twist it. I mean, I don't know if that's in the definition of a cult, but that's the definition of a cult, but that's, It seems to be what happens. And in that regard, the gate is open for people to come in as they would to any more conventional church. But then you start getting the shaped vision of this leadership. One of the practices is a separation from society.

In order to become this, you have to sort of leave your worldly belongings behind. Correct. So Heaven's Gate is what a sociologist of religion, of new religions would call sectarian. So the sectarian can mean two things. One is it just sort of means a split. and they were clearly a split. But also it means they see themselves as separate and distinctive and really try to create a division between themselves and society

for their own theological religious reasons. So the old sects, which are still sectarian, like groups like the Amish and things like that, we recognize that. They're off, you know, doing their own thing. A lot of new religions are sectarian. And the reasons Heaven's Gate was sectarian is they believe that everything of this world was bad, ultimately.

So therefore, your birth family, they referred to their bodies as their vehicle. So they would say their vehicles, families, human society, entertainment, books, jobs, all the stuff of this earth was problematic and they wanted to leave it behind. So their reason for being sectarian was different from some other religions. So I know you mentioned in the opening, you know, groups like Jonestown. I mean, they had, you know, a problem with capitalism and things like that. So every sectarian group has its own reason for being so.

For Heaven's Gate, fundamentally, they wanted to get off our planet. Our planet was not where they wanted to be. So therefore they rejected everything, which was worldly, earthly, or human. Right. And that will mean living in a communal setting, I suppose, right? Correct. They were communal. And initially they lived basically in campgrounds. They didn't have any money at first. So they were sort of squatting as they went.

When they came into money through a member's inheritance, and then later they got some tech jobs. They could afford rent. They graduated two houses. And eventually there was the one house, which they referred to as their craft. So actually, it's sort of that debt language. So they lived within their craft.

And yes, it was what we would call a commune. So this story ends in 97. I guess this began in the 70s. Is that right? Yeah, the two founders of Heaven's Gate, Marshall Herf, Alpha White, and Bonnie Lou Nettles, meet in 1972. The group itself really doesn't emerge until 1975. Those first few years, the two of them are working out sort of what they believe. They see themselves as spiritual partners, but it takes them a couple of years to figure out what that partnership entails. I should be clear, spiritual partners. There's no evidence they were ever engaged in sexual activity or sort of married. They saw themselves as bound by fate. And eventually, by the end of the group, they saw themselves as the theological figures from the Bible, which we could talk about, but at least initially they saw themselves as trying to form a group. And they did in the 1970s. We've mentioned it several times, the UFO stuff. We should probably address that up front.

I mean, this is the time of close encounters of the third kind. There's a lot of awareness of this is building really into the 90s. How do they choose this particular theme? I mean, this idea of this UFO visitation and their passage away from planet Earth on them. So both Bonnie Lunettles and Marshall, Ruff Elwhite, the two founders who go by Tia and Doe, both T and Doe were really into ideas about UFOs. So there's also this broader sort of UFOology, which if we think about it today, this is sort of old hat. But in the 70s, it was still very sort of new and very exciting.

This was all still very new and very exciting and very open. and it was a little less fringe, perhaps. I mean, it was always sort of somewhat fringe, but the idea that you would take UFO seriously was relatively mainstream. And the founders and the people who joined were really fascinated by these questions, and particularly by the interpretation the UFOs where these flying saucers were from outer space. There had also been really starting from the 1950s onwards as sort of a subcurrent within American alternative religion

that identified the beings on board the flying saucers as religious teachers. here to give spiritual guidance to the world. And they connected to that interpretation, that the UFOs were not just technological visitors, but rather that the beings on board the UFOs were here to teach us something. In the case of Heaven's Gate, they came to see themselves as from outer space and wanted to go back to outer space. But the UFO idea was always really quite central. So the UFOs are their Heaven's Gate, is the Gate to Heaven? UFOs are correct, yes. And they really tried to emphasize it wasn't so much about the UFOs. themselves, it was where they would go on the UFO. The UFO was the vessel that would take you there.

I called them a UFO religion. They would probably, if they were still around, they would say we're not a UFO religion, an outer space religion maybe. What they wanted to do was get to the next level, which is what they called outer space. They also called it the evolutionary level above human, Tela, or the kingdom of God. They used all sorts of names for it. It was outer space. It's what Christians would call heaven. And I suppose we would say the heavens outer space. And the flying saucers would get them there. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of parallel ideas here. You know, we can never forget. The individual metamorphosis through training is the worship practice, I suppose, of this. And this is being led, as you say, by two individuals,

Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles, who are about what age when they're doing this? Bonnie Loonettles and Marshall Ruff Alphebwhite are in their 40s and 50s when they're founding Heaven's gates. Okay. That's unusual for the new religions of the 1970s. in some ways because you tended to have sort of spiritual seekers who are in their 20s or even younger. Among the sort of other gurus, it's actually relatively common. So if you think about the gurus or the founders of other new religions, often they're people who have had more experience in life. Yeah, right. You have mentioned already, Revelations is part of this, the end times, the apocalypse is coming. They believe in all of this. Therefore, they are getting

ready for an escape from the inevitable, right? One of the most misunderstood part of the of Heaven's Gate is that they, that was sort of nonsense. Now, to clear, I'm not saying I believe in it, but there is a logic to it. What they did is they took the Christian Book of Revelation, other parts of the Bible, and they read it through a uifological lens. I wrote an article where I called it a hermeneutic, which is such a fancy way of saying an interpretive framework. So their hermeneutic, their interpretive framework is that the Bible is right,

but you have to read it through UFology. Particularly they came to believe in what's called dispensationalism, which is a form of millennialism has to do with the rapture. So for your listeners who were into sort of 1990s pop culture, they may remember a book series called Left Behind, which was a fictionalization, novelization of this. This was really popular from the 70s onwards. And still is today.

And sort of this rapture-oriented dispensationalism says that the saved Christians will be lifted up into the atmosphere and fly off to heaven, while the rest of us will be left behind to suffer sort of the end-time apocalypse. You know, the war with heavens and the, you know, the Satan and the, all that stuff. So for them, this was literally true. It's just that you got lifted up by a tractor beam onto a flying saucer.

And Jesus was there, but Jesus was a space alien. So it's the same basic model that other Christians had is just read through this lens of the UFO. Exactly. A major earthquake will hit Earth. The volcanoes will take over is going to be really bad. And so get out of here quick. And we have the ticket. Correct.

And there was a video that they made right before the end, I think, in the last year. And the title was, if I recall, planet Earth about to be recycled. Your last chance to get off with us. I'm mangling the title, but that's the basic idea. And you get it exactly. It's that our planet is doomed. The only way to salvation is through the gate they're opening to go back to their name. The fascinating thing to me is how someone who is in a sense,

state of searching and maybe desperate to find answers in their lives, actually adheres to these kinds of extreme beliefs. Let's just review a few historical ideas. Founded in 1974, these two folks initially do this in Oregon area, where the gatherings happen around 1975. They articulate this idea of imminent transition should you go through this transformational process with them. Twenty people join them from Oregon, abandoned their families and possessions. They finally settle in San Diego. Why there? How did they land in there 20 years later? Well, they were always the West Coast group, although the founders were actually from Texas, but they had their greatest success on the West Coast. You mentioned the Oregon group. There was also

a Los Angeles meeting where they attracted a dozen people or so. They had their first big public meeting outside of San Francisco. They seemed to appeal primarily to folks in the West Coast. They did do a cross-country tour, actually several cross-country tours to make comforts across the country. the particular sort of subculture they drew from, spiritual seekers, was most active on the coasts and the West Coast in particular. They ended up doing most of their sort of traveling their successes on the West Coast. They did for a while try to settle in Texas at one point,

late in their history, ended up back on the West Coast also because they got into the tech scene. So a number of the members were quite technologically oriented, programmers involved in web design and other sort of tech industry jobs. And it particularly is the group aged. And no one wants to live in a campground for 20 years. So they really wanted houses to live in or a house to live in. It was actually really important for them to live in one house because their goal was to live on one spaceship.

So they found that their skills were in demand, particularly in the West Coast, where they opened a web design business called Higher Source, if I recall correctly. And they settled in San Diego, really because of sort of the West Coast tech industry and also because that's where they sort of fit. Let's talk about the members in 97. When this happens, there's 39 of them that go for that trip. So this never grows into a mass movement of any kind. It's pretty select. Was that intentional? Do they want to stay small? It was intentional. They wanted to stay small. They had at their peak between 200 and 300 members. It's actually a debate about how you count this. If you count everyone who ever went to a meeting or showed up or traveled with them for like a couple of days, you probably have 400, 500 people who sort of were hangers on for a couple of days, a couple of weeks. There was never more than 150, maybe 200 at most who were ever sort of hanging around for long enough to be considered sort of attached to the group.

But really the best sort of count of the group was around 88 people in 1976. So there were 88 people who were traveling with the group to Wyoming. And then in Wyoming in 1976, they intentionally shrunk. The leaders T. and Doe said, we're going to stop traveling. We're going to live together intentionally. We're going to try to do basically boot camp to go to outer space. And within a year, they shrunk from 88 to 48 to 48. And then, you know, two decades later, they were down to basically 40.

There were some people who came and go towards the end. But they intentionally were a small crew, and I'll use that word, crew, because they saw themselves as a crew, a spaceship crew. And like the space marines, I suppose, they were the few of the small, the elites. And they saw themselves that way. I will also say sociologically speaking, part of what's going on here is those who weren't with the program were asked to leave. So they shrunk, and by shrinking, they were able to maintain the cohesion of the group. Anyone who challenged sort of the fundamental norms of the group was asked to leave. If you are prone to sort of negative outlook, if you'd say that anyone who sort of challenged the group's leaders was kicked out.

I would say from sort of a religious perspective, it really came down to sort of behavioral social norms. If you didn't fit, you were asked to leave. And there were people who left. And there were also, to be clear, many people who left voluntarily. In fact, most people who left voluntarily. Well, I mean, I don't want to endorse these views, but at least it was a purity of vision. wasn't it? It wasn't about ulterior motives of getting rich and so forth. So I would say having studied Heaven's Gate for basically, I don't know, for a while now,

it's going to get out along. It's been over 20 years over. One of the things that I've always found remarkable at Heaven's Gate is I think everyone who was involved knew what they were getting into. There was no one who had the wool pulled over their eyes. It was very clear from the beginning, this as a group, which is about leaving the planet. Now, initially in the 70s, they did to be clear, not indoor suicide. Suicide came much later. But there was over a decade where basically they had seen at least suicide as a possibility. Also, I think the leaders believed it. And I think that really marks this group, maybe not as unique. But this is not a case where you had charlatans in charge. I think the founders really fundamentally believed what they were preaching. And I think that

was clear to the members. Even ex-members who left the group and there are still ex-members around who I've spoken with and talked to by and large believe that this is legit and that the, that the, this is legit. And that the founders believed in it. Do those ex-members that you've met talk about, you know, discussions and arguments, were there debates about whether this was true? I mean, were they struggling with this idea at all? In the 1970s, there were certainly struggles. And partially that was because there was almost no cohesive leadership.

T and Doe founded the group, but then they actually didn't take a lot of control. So they told members to sort of try to get with the program, which was to abandon their humanity. So you had to abandon sexuality, you had to abandon drugs and alcohol, had to disconnect from your birth family, had to quit your job, had to try to attune yourself to the next level. But they didn't tell people how to do this. So you had people sort of traveling around to campground and saying, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to sort of abandon humanity because I don't have anyone to teach me. And so eventually, after about a few months to a year of doing this, Tia Doe really took control of the group. Initially there was chaos.

And actually, Rob Balch, my friend Rob Balch, is a sociologist who studied the group in the 1970s, often remarks that it's, in some ways, very surprising the group continued. It looked like it was going to totally fall apart because there was really no control by the founders, by the leaders. In that Wyoming campground in 1976, when Bonnie Lou Nettles basically said, we're going to institute a sort of boot camp effectively. That's when it sort of solidified, and that's when the disagreements ended. Sure. You mentioned sexual abstinence. Several male cult members. actually undergo castration. I mean, it gets pretty extreme there, doesn't it? Yeah, abandoning sexuality was one of the key components of the group. Yeah, and by the end, castration was one of the options that some male members chose. From the beginning, this was a

particularly sort of difficult process. I would say giving up your family, from what ex-members have told me, giving up your sexuality, giving up your family, giving up your friendships, all of these things meant abandoning your humanity. Now, that's what they were going for, but sexuality in particular was problematic. And so for the individuals who chose to become castrated, they thought this was a way to make the process easier, supposedly, from those who spoke about it, it did. So they were brought in with a presentation, I suppose, right? That's how you sort of describe it. How long and how hard is it to become a member? Some members joined immediately. Now, in the 1970s, there was a different process from the 80s and 90s. In the 1970s,

you joined and you got a letter in the mail or you handed a letter. And the letter said, bring a car, bring a change of clothes, and a tent and some camping equipment. But that's it. And so then you're going to meet us and they told you where to meet. And then they would sort of travel around. And you would sort of slowly learn the ropes of the group. By the 80s and 90s, when the group was much more settled, if you joined, they would tell you to sort of move in with them and they would teach you how to do it. And some people stayed, many of them left. There was a, there was actually a couple that joined, that was the last groups of people that joined in the 1990s, they actually joined having emailed the group. So again, they had a sort of a website by the end.

So there were two people who joined by the end. They were a couple and one stayed, one, one left. But the email said, hey, you want to join. They said, fine. Here's where we're living. Come join us. And people who stayed were sort of taught how to, how to be part of the group. It was in some ways a split second decision. You would decide to join. But it was also a long process. and people failed out or were asked to leave. What was hard about that? What was the process they were teaching? Fundamentally, there were two things going on.

One was you had to disengage from your humanity. And then at the same time, you were supposed to re-engage with the next level. So we already talked about disengaging from your humanity. That included things like giving up sex, drugs, likes and dislikes. So it would be a bit like how they imagined living on the crew of a spaceship. This was always modeled on in some way science fiction. So think Star Trek. So when you eat, you go to the mess hall and you're fed whatever people are eating.

So you didn't matter if you liked or didn't like the food. It's what you had. So they had sort of a collective dining in that way. They wore uniforms because that's how they imagined they would live in outer space. So it didn't matter if you didn't like the clothing. That's what you wore. They had the same haircuts. They had meditation where they tried to meditate on the next level.

And they had different sort of techniques of doing that. fundamentally what they did is they listened to the teachings of tea and dough and then after tea, after Nettles passed away, just dough. They listened to their teachings and they had sort of lessons and they tried to live that out. And simultaneously disconnecting from everything of the earth level. We're very limited connections to your Earth family. If you had to have a job and they did need to have jobs to pay for their lives, no socializing with your coworkers. You know, you clock in, you do your job. you clock out, you go back to the group. So very much not trying to be of the earthly level.

It sounds to me like they're on a schedule of some kind. Was that communicated to new members? Like you're into this for, it's going to be 20 years and sooner or later that comet's going to come and off we go. Was it that prescribed or not? There were daily schedules. There was not a sort of an end time setup, as you're describing. They didn't know when they were leaving the planet. They always thought it was soon. this was actually, depending on who you ask, one of the more sort of the contentious problematic issues within the group of when will this happen?

Initially, Bonnie Lou Nettles apparently said several times it's going to be happening soon. And there's even the story from one of the ex-members told me there was a particular UFO sighting, and I want to say 78, maybe 79, where a UFO was said, oh, that's it. We're going to be leaving on that one. And of course, it didn't happen.

After that, they were very hesitant to say, well, it's going to be next year or the year after or this UFO setting or that UFO siding. So as we know, historically speaking from the study of new religious movements and millennialism and date setting, it's typically a bad idea. Historians should not give advice to members or leaders of new religions, but I will do so. It's a bad idea to set dates because usually it fails, right? Or as far as we know, always it's failed. Now, that's not to say groups fall apart. in fact, in the history of the study of new religious movements, typically they survive one or two date settings,

but then they reinterpret it. So by the end, they hoped and knew it would be soon, but they didn't know how soon. The great mystery of Heaven's Gate is why Halpop Comet and why March 1997. There was nothing special about that time, which required that to be the end of Heaven's Gate. my interpretation has always been that a several sort of factors aligned to make that plausible.

But there was no reason it had to be them. It's hard to keep a group together without a clear objective and a schedule of some sort. I mean, that's a tough thing to do. So it speaks to the charisma, I suppose, or some more nefarious word, I guess, of this leadership. They must have been quite compelling. And these daily processes that they were going through, must have had some progression to it that people sensed. I think that members probably got a lot out of it.

You know, it's interesting. You use the word charisma. I've never found Marshall or FAPA white very charismatic in sort of the common sense of the word. I've listened to pretty much everything that he's said that's been recorded. You know, there's a bunch of audio tapes and videotapes. I don't particularly find him that exciting. Members obviously did, but also I have to say I'm not a believer in the group. So if you're a believer in the group, obviously then you hang on every word.

He was a performer, so his background was in theater, so he knew how to use his voice effectively and give a good sermon. We should say he grew up in the church. His father was a preacher. So he knew how to give a good sermon. He knew how to use sort of his presence in that way. I think, though, ultimately, for members, it was what they got out of it. They found it empowering and they found it persuasive in a way that ex-members did not. I realize this is circular.

I mean, so we're trying to explain. Why would you stay? Well, you stay because you wanted to stay. But for some reason, those 39 people, for idiosyncratic reasons, each of them found this plausible, each of them found this persuasive, each of them found that meaningful in a way that even ex-members who found it maybe plausible, not meaningful, left. But for this 39 members, it was all of those. And then Bonnie Lou Nettles, one of the two main leaders, dies in 1985, which, I mean, that's what it's all about. So, I mean, they must have been waiting for a signal from her or something must have, something very profound about this moment. How do they go on with just one of the leaders? Well, this is, I should say, it's highly contentious. There are, there are ex-members who actually vehemently disagree with me on this. But I think this is one of the pivotal moments in the history of the group. until 1985, they by and large thought that a UFO was going to pick them up and take them off into outer space. They had always said, well, if there's an accident and you fall off a cliff or something and you die, there's a way the next level can extract your soul and can take care of you. But by and large, it was always a physical sort of idea.

After she dies and no one comes to pick up her body, no spirit seems to come out. They have to cremate her and spread her ashes. I think they really had to rethink how they're going to get to the next level. I think that's when suicide became much more plausible for them. There's no hard evidence one way or another. It's not that they came out and said, well, now we're going to commit suicide. There was no talk of suicide until the 1990s. But I think, you know, in terms of the theology of the group, that moment when the founder

disappears, I think really reshaped them in a certain way. Also, Doe had to take over as the leader. He had a much more biblical approach. Bonnie Lou Nettles was always more on the, we would say, the New Age side. She was an astrologer. She was a channeler. She could talk to space aliens directly, she believed, and spirits and things like that. Whereas Doe was not.

Doe had basically biblical training. He went to seminary for a couple of years to train as a minister. So he knew the Bible inside and out. But without Nettles, I think they became much more biblically based, much more Christian-oriented. Not that they hadn't been before. They also lost that direct channel to the next level. They believed that tea could directly communicate. without her space, whereas Applewhite could not.

He could sort of receive messages in a broad sense. He could try to tune in to T, but she was no longer there. Also, there is a development in their theology after she's gone. There is, I get to use a technical term here, apotheosis. She becomes seen as God. So before her death, members, as far as I can tell, never referred to her as God. And then after her demise, they come to understand that, T. Bonnie Lou Nettles, the co-founder of the group, is actually the being described by the Bible as

as God. She is the benefactor, the overseer of our planet. And her lieutenant is Applewhite, who is here on our planet to right now to teach. But she becomes seen as effectively the deity of our world. We've mentioned the comet. Before we get into this, what is essentially this chain reaction from about 95 onward, are not the authorities on alert for this kind of thing when a group is together and they're talking about suicide and all that sort of thing, are there laws that prevent this from happening and were they worried about those? Or can one legally go around creating groups that recommend this sort of behavior? Well, Heavensgate was not on anyone's radar. So first of all, they were law abiding. There were some requests sent to the FBI. I did a

Freedom of Information Act request from the FBI to see what they had. And, And in the 70s, there were parents of members who, you know, wrote to their congressperson and said, hey, my kid joined a cult. Can you get them out? The FBI investigated in the 1970s determined the group wasn't breaking any laws and said, no, sorry, we can't do anything. So local law enforcement, although I haven't filed requests from every group, but from what we know, because they were law-abiding, they were basically ignored. It is legal to live communally. It is legal to abandon your family, if you're an adult, of course. It is legal to not want to socialize with people and to want to go back to your home.

So they basically were off everyone's radar. Now, I'm not an attorney, to be clear, so I'm not giving legal advice here. But as far as I can tell, even when they came to embrace suicide as an option, they weren't doing anything illegal. But certainly up to that point, they had avoided any sort of entanglements with law enforcement such that no one No one in California was even aware of what they were up to. Sure. Well, it's the First Amendment. You know, it's until you get across a line and there's got to be that line that prevents people from doing what they eventually do. One of the things I find interesting at the very end is it actually, they timed their exits, is what they call the suicides.

They timed their exits. They made these sort of FedEx packages to send to X members that had disks for updating the website and some videos and some instructions. This is actually how the bodies were found. So because one of the ex-members was sent a package. But they timed for the packages to arrive after the suicides were completed. And an ex-member has told me, and I accept this argument, that it was done so that there could be no culpability. Again, I'm not sure what the law would be if you receive a FedEx package which says someone's going to commit suicide. I would think the ethical thing to do is you'd call the police or something.

But they timed it so there was no way for the ex-members to stop it. By the time those packages arrived, the deed was done. They are very methodical, if nothing else. Yeah, they very much worse so. And that's what happens. So one of the ex-members receives a package and goes down and finds the body and calls 911. And you can find the audio tape online of the 911 calls. It's all they're on YouTube somewhere.

The critical moment starts with the discovery of Halbop comment. They have been talking about this now for 20 years, that there's going to be a signal or some entity or something's going to happen. Halbop, I remember, is kind of a magical thing. I was a disappointed Kohutek kid. I remember in the 70s, there was a comet that came along. It was 1973, I think it was, and it was Cahutec. And it was such a magical name. And I was out there with my binoculars trying to find it in the skies above New Jersey.

Never saw it. Big, big letdown. Along comes this other out of nowhere comet called Hail Bop, which was discovered in 1995 as one of these celestial bodies heading our way. And we're going to see it in the sky like Haley's comet, but way before schedule. It was really exciting. And sure enough, it was amazing. If anybody can remember or was alive for that, it was like you'd be flying in a jetliner, and there was this amazing thing in the sky quite visible.

And it was up there for a long time. It was really an incredible moment in all of our lives. It was really cool. I remember looking at it. I remember before Heaven's Gate. I remember looking up and thinking how cool it was. I was living in Rochester at the time in the city of Rochester. There was light pollution, but I can't imagine what it looked like if you were out in a desert

or something without light pollution. But even in the city of Rochester, with the light pollution, it was visible and it was unmistakable. And it was, to a certain degree, sort of magic. You know, I think for members of Heaven's Gate, they have been looking for some way to convey their message to the wider world. Very early on, they had referred to the demonstration, which was this idea that the founders would be killed and resurrected, and it would demonstrate the truth of their message to the world. That didn't happen, obviously. But the idea of demonstrating of getting everyone's attention and showing the world what they were about, I think when they saw Helvop comment, they said this is part of how the next level is going to do it. The whole world is looking at outer space, looking at the heavens.

And now is our chance to get their attention. And if that's what they were thinking, they were right, because we're talking about it 20 years later. Right. I mean, this is a comment. It takes 4,000 years in orbit, it turns out, to go, it would pass. very close to the sun, spring equinox, it's all very meaningful. Coupled with that March 13, 1997, so the Hail Boss has been, you know, coming and we're seeing it for a while, there is this mass siting, which is a very famous UFO siding over Phoenix, Arizona, the lights and stuff,

still a mystery to many people, how this is all going. But this is starting to pile up. And of course, you have the Internet now, and people are reporting a lot more UFO stuff all the time. So it's really lining up for these guys, isn't it? It really is. I never ran across them saying particularly the Phoenix lights were responsible. But I think that they, part of what happens with the Phoenix lights and with the increase in UFO settings, that feeds into then the claims about sort of the companion to Halbop. And this is the famous Art Bell radio show call where there's a claim that there's evidence that there's a UFO trailing helpop comet. All of that's part of a package.

So there's this whole sort of euophological sort of focus, which has never gone away. And it's always been a strong UFO subculture since the 50s. With the comment in particular, members of Heavensgate had gotten into conspiratorial thinking. And some members in particular really took conspiracies quite seriously. It's actually one of the things I find fascinating about Heaven's Gate is they were very prescient. Today, conspiracy theories are all over the place. Back in the 90s, conspiracy theories were for most folks still something sort of a laughing matter. You chuckle that, you know, people believe in cattle mutilations and UFOs and things like,

like that. Now it's much more mainstream, you know, with, you know, Q and on and everything like that. But for members of Heaven's Gate, for some members who believed in the conspiratorial world, the idea that there was a huge UFO trailing the comet and the government was hiding it from the people was plausible. It actually fit their narrative. So I think that's, you're entirely right. Also, it was the confluence of factors. So we have help out comets and we have the timing with a spring. Unquinox right before Easter. This is basically a Christian-oriented group. We have the Phoenix lights. And then the claims of the companion behind the comets. All of this really fed into, I think, the sense of synchronicity that now was the time. Exactly. So that time comes in March 1997, specifically Rancho Centefe, which is a town nearby San Diego. They are living in a large mansion there, really, which they call the monocet. about 40 people, 39 people, 21 women, 18 men, all between 26 and 72.

Take me through this ritual that they go through. It's all very orderly, isn't it? They develop an end time process. And actually, in some ways, and this goes back to the very beginning, they referred to in the 1970s, what they called it, the process of overcoming their humanity. They developed an exit process. first of all, they, I wouldn't necessarily say it as a formal ritual, but there was a ritualization of the group. They went on a bus tour back to, and they toured where the group started in Oregon.

They went to Las Vegas and went to an outer space themed casino. So they sort of richly sort of reenacted the beginning of the group and where they were going outer space. They had a communal meal together at Marie Caller's Restaurant. And so they sort of create this group cohesion. And they sort of developed this idea that they were doing something formative in this way. And then the actual rituals of the exits were choreographed. They poisoned themselves. If you want to get quite literal, they used a mix of barbiturates and alcohol.

The actual sort of details of how they committed suicides, they took from a guidebook for terminally ill cancer patients. So they use this guidebook to euthanasia, basically, to euthanize themselves. And with very similar sort of logic, they believed they had to free their souls of their bodies. And that their bodies, their vehicles to use their terms were an encumbrance. And so they euthanized themselves with this poisonous mixture. They tied bags over their heads to asphyxiate themselves. They wrote down sort of waves of individuals. There were three stages.

And each, there was a list where actually they wrote down who was going to go on which stage. After the first group performed their end. exits, the second group, clean them up and sort of made sure that their bodies were in order. They covered them in purple shrouds and then so too with the next stage and then the third stage. Before they even did this, though, there was a signing out ritual. And I read about this in my book. And I have no idea, of course, exactly how it happened because the only people who were there are no longer with us. But when members would leave their house on an errand or to go to work or to go to the dentist or something like that,

they would sign out, they had a little form where you would sign out which van you're taking, which car you're taking, how much money you're taking, things like that. And then they would sign back in. For the exits, they had what looks to me like a ceremony where they all signed out for the last time. What they wrote down their name, they wrote down their time out. And then for the ETA for return, a few of them wrote down sort of funny little statements like, you know, if T sends me back or Austa Lovies to Baby, which is a reference to a Schwarzenegger. film. For me, sort of as a scholar of religion, it looks to me like a ritual. Because there were between two and ten minutes between each person doing this, I infer they were all in one room doing this. I mean, this was found by basically the atrium where he would leave. I assume members said something.

Perhaps I sat in silence. I'm not sure. But this surely was a formative sort of a powerful ritual moment for them as they signed out of their earthly existences. There's no blood, no trauma. No force happening here. It could have also happened over a period of days, right? Yeah, the autopsy reports show that it happened between March 22nd and March 24th in three different waves. And that matches the documentary evidence we have the list with three different waves that show the who was part of which group. And if I recall, again, I looked at the autopsy reports through a Fritimate Information Act request. And it all lines up.

It looks like they did exactly what they said they would do. And they're all in those uniforms. They're all wearing the dark uniforms, right? The uniforms were very important to them. They had handmade the uniforms. A member of the group was the seamstress. They had bought the materials. For them, uniformity was important because it meant they were joining a crew. Their idea of heaven was to be part of T's crew, to be on a UFO and to fly around in outer space and take care of the galaxy, to take care of the universe, to take care of our planet, take care of other planets as part of this unified crew. And as next level beings, next level beings are, ageless, genderless, they don't get sick, they don't die, they don't age, they have no desires other than to serve the hierarchy of the next level. They're effectively space angels. So their imagination of sort of how these next level beings operated was in some ways influenced by sci-fi pop culture. So if you think about Star Trek, you know, they basically

they were dressed up and effectively sort of their understandings that in the next level one would one would dress like a spaceship crew. And members of Heaven's Gate were, they were smart people. This was sort of an attempt to sort of mimic the next level. But it was meaningful to them in the same way in which any really discover is meaningful to a person. This was meaningful for them. They wore Nikes. They had a sort of sporty look to them, didn't they?

They did. The story of the Nikes is they got them on discount because they were buying in bulk for 40 people, but different sizes. So the story is they bought the Nikes on discount. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but that's what I was told. They certainly made their uniforms themselves, because they talk about doing that, the purple shrouds, clearly again for a scholar of religion,

I mean, shrouding the dead is very, very typical. Purple was the favorite color of Bonnie Lou Nettles, and it was her crew, they saw themselves just joining. The shape of the shrouds actually looks like the patches which they wore, the sort of triangular patches,

which identified them as a crew, and also looked both like Star Trek references, but also the patches that members of the space, shuttle or sort of, you know, the Apollo mission or sort of other sort of astronauts would wear. So I think the shape was, it was particular as well. So I think that there was a lot of intentionality that went into how they did this. Again, I'm working here as a scholar of religion. There's no sort of hard evidence. No one ever wrote down and said, you know, here's why we're choosing the color. Here's why we're choosing the shape. But it certainly

looks to a scholar of religion the same way in which you can look at the garb of a Catholic priest or a Buddhist monk and say, well, here's why they wear what they're wearing. I can do the same thing when I look at what they did. They had duffel bags and they carried coins in their pockets, right? I mean, this is the odd thing that they think that there's this earthly stuff that's actually going to go with them. I don't think members ever thought that the duffel bags would go with them. I don't think they ever thought the rolls of coins would go with them any more than ancient

Greek people thought that the coins you put on the eyes of the dead would really go down to Hades and get picked up by, I believe, is it Cheron, I think, across the river sticks. They realized you got buried with their coins. and the Egyptians, of course. I mean, but rather grave goods, to call them by their technical name, are common across religion. The idea that you prepare yourself for what is to come by doing stuff on this earth is very, very common. So I think that in some ways that's unremarkable to me, as a scholar of religion. Of course, they did things ritually to prepare themselves for the world to come.

We see this in every religion. We're describing something that seems almost peaceful and accepting. it. What I find extraordinary is that in 39 people who've agreed to do this, not one of them at the last minute of that last crew, you know, the last wave didn't back out. They all went through this and were found in a rather peaceful environment when they were discovered. Yeah, I can give you, I mean, there's two interpretations of this. One is that anyone who wanted to leave would have left already. And there were individuals who left, including a Niyoti, one who found the bodies. I mean, so they knew they were, they were planning for this. They had to order the drugs. They had to make

the outfits. I mean, they, they were planning the suicides for the exits, to use their term, for months. So there were plenty of people who would have had time, or they all would have had time to think about it. And there were, as I said, individuals, at least one who left at that point. Even when suicide first came up a few years earlier, there were people who left. Carlotti, who's an ex-member, I believe, left when suicides first came up as an option. So the first reading is the only people who are left are those who had already bought into it. I think that's true. The other reading, which I also think is true, is that there would have been tremendous sort of pressure to conform at that point.

How do you leave after the first wave has done it? So you are surrounded by a dozen bodies of your closest family, effectively. These people had left their birth families. This was their family. These were their closest friends, co-religionists, loved ones effectively. How could you abandon them halfway through? That's not to say, I don't think they're brainwashed. I don't think they were, you know, forced.

But we do have to note the psychology of it. It would be very difficult to just get up and leave at that point. It is remarkable no one did. I think they were believers. Why are there any sort of people who die for their religion? I mean, there are, if you go back to the story of the Christian martyrs. So I guess I don't find that remarkable either as a scholar of religion. It's actually, if you believe as they did, this is how you save your soul and demonstrate to the world.

the only way to be saved. It's the logical thing to do. I'm not condoning it. I don't believe it. But I understand why it made sense to them. Sure. I appreciate your your scarletly thoughtfulness about the subject. I do remember that not being the case, you know, in the immediate aftermath. I mean, people really made fun of these guys. It seemed like a crazy bunch. It comes also on the heels of Waco in a way. It does. later. There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on, or at least a lot in the news. And we all sort of took this with a grain of salt or just plain old roller eyes. Yeah, we did. And I think, part of that, that actually is one of the reasons why I studied the group is on the one hand, I like everyone else, remember the Saturday and not live jokes and the, you know, the, humor of it. And I think even members were aware of the humor of it. There was a, in one of the exit videos that was made, many of them made sort of these videos before,

the suicides. One of the members flashes the Vulcan salute from Star Trek and says, you know, 39 to beam up, which is a Star Trek reference. They were aware of the jokes. And in some ways, they would have laughed at themselves. On the other hand, I take it really seriously as a scholar of religion. And that's really actually one reason why I do study religion. I was in college when this happened. And I was studying religion as an undergraduate. And I thought, well, if I can figure this out, how come the media is just treating it as ridiculous? I think part of the reason is, in some ways it's too close to comfort. So much of Heaven's Gate is basically Christianity with the veneer of flying saucers that I think on a subconscious level, we look at this and we say,

even if you're not Christian, you look at this and you say, well, outer space, salvation, dying for your beliefs. I mean, this is, in some ways, baked into the DNA of Christianity. So, yes, we did treat it as a joke. But now I must talk to the professor of religion for a moment here. The reason I consider myself a church-going Christian is there's a lot of metaphor. Yeah, yeah. There's space for interpretation within your own belief system. You can sort of apply it to whatever you need in a way. Maybe not.

Maybe not in most churches. It's the specifics of this that are, if you, again, look at the website. It's so specific, so literal that there's not that kind of space. And that's where it gets, you know, it can seem kind of silly and comic book to you. Yeah. Like most new religions, Heaven's Gate has a sort of fundamentalism to it. It claims that it has the only right interpretation. Certainly some things it does read metaphorically, but there's sort of a literalism to it, but there's also

a unwillingness to recognize alternative sort of interpretations. For members of Heaven's Gate, their interpretation was fundamentally the right interpretation and the only interpretation. And that, I think, and we actually see that across pretty much every new religious movement, with very few exceptions. If you're going to join a group, you know, a cult, basically. If you're going to join a group like that, if you're going to move to a commune, give up your connections to the world, put your job, you know, then become a celibate, get yourself castrated, then you really have to be quite into it. And it makes sense the groups that they're around are like that. So it does beg the question, was this a cult? If you're talking about people who

really understand what they're getting into and have done it for their, of their own volition and isn't, they're not being tortured, they're not being coerced. This seems to be something quite voluntary and in the end quite peaceful. And maybe that distinguishes it from other groups that are more cultish. Yeah, I mean, I don't use the term for that reason. I find it impossible to define. But if you want to go sort of what we mean by sort of cultishness, I mean, they were communal. They were a sectarian.

They did, they were, I'll use the word deviant in the sociological sense. They deviated from cultural, social norms, everything from celibacy and castration, which are deviant, wearing uniforms, you know, everything about them in. their theology obviously was deviated. So they were deviant in a certain way. On the other hand, they were non-violence. I mean, if you want to say suicide is violence, I suppose by definition it is. But that was inward. I mean, there were peace-loving people. They didn't commit crimes. I mean, they paid their library fines before the suicide. So actually, I find that fascinating. I mentioned this in my book. They replaced the chafing dish, which they had broken, which belonged to their landlord.

So they were conscientious people. And also, we implicitly, contrast them with the other sort of cult-like groups of the time, the Branch Devidians, Omsham Riccio, the Order of the Solar Temple, the Branch Devidians, to be clear, I know you had an entire episode on this. I, again, very contentious, of course, you know, the fire and everything, but David Koresh was sort of a despicable character. I'm not saying that they deserve, you know, being, you know, attacked by the government. But Heaven's Gate wasn't sort of ethically, morally questionable in the same way in which the branch Davidians were. But we, so I think we're sort of implicitly comparing them that way.

I mean, Olmsham Rikio, and that was the group with the subway gas attack in Tokyo, clearly sort of a different, a different sort of group. Well, and compared to Jonestown for sure. I mean, that's scary town down there with all the forced, you know, that is coercion, as far as I can tell. Jones Town, I mean, they were isolated. There was a sense of animosity, which I think for members of Heaven's Gate, although they rejected our world, ultimately they were in our role.

They had many of them had jobs. They would go out and do stuff. What we know as all of these new religions and everything that was popping up in the 70s, especially 60s into 70s, are the same things happening today? Are we going to be talking about cults and religious movements 20 years from now that were happening in the aughts in the teens? I'm often asked, you know, what's up with cults today? I mean, are they still being formed?

And it's a great question. I think a couple things are happening. One is people don't have to join groups anymore face-to-face because they can do it online. So actually, I'm researching a group right now, which meets on Discord. So which is if for listeners not familiar with Discord, it's a social site where you can connect with people online. You can find a group on TikTok. You can find a group on all the various social media outlets and not have to actually go join a commune. So they're less visible.

They're also, though, more formal. and they're also probably shorter lived. The entrance cost, I'm going to use sociological language here. The entrance cost to join a group which meets on Discord or TikTok in the comment section is very, very low. The entrance cost to join a commune where you have to like, you know, pay in or abandon your family or move to some rural area not where you live is very, very high. The chances of leaving a group with a high entrance cost, we know that sociologically speaking.

I know there's huge turnover in new religious movements and communes, but if you had a high entrance cost to get in, there is the sunk cost idea, the sunk cost fallacy, actually, which is once you're in, you're less likely to leave if you had to pay something to get out. I'm not talking money. I'm talking, you know, your energy, your effort. When you join a group on TikTok, all you got to do is hit command Q and it's gone. You don't have to do much. So I think the groups form, but they're much shorter lived and they're also hard to notice. You and I are unlikely. to find a group unless we're looking for it in a way in which in the 1960s and the 70s, they're there in the college quad chanting. They're walking down mainstream trying to sell you a flower and they're in your face, whereas now they're hidden in corners of the internet. We never cease to have souls looking for answers, and that's the source of all of this, really. Ben Zeller is a professor of religion at Lake Forest College in Illinois. He is the author of a book that you can read all about what we've discussed.

It's called Heaven's Gate, America's UFO Religion. Thank you so much, Ben. It's been great to meet you. It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Fun to talk. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts?

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