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Feb
16th
2017

The Heaven's Gate Cult · 7:20pm Feb 16th, 2017

The Heaven's Gate Cult

The Heaven's Gate Cult was an American UFO religious millenarian group based in San Diego, California, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985). On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group who had committed mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale–Bopp.

Known to the mainstream media (though largely ignored through the 1980s and 1990s), Heaven's Gate was better known in UFO circles as well as in a series of academic studies by sociologist Robert Balch. Coast to Coast AM host Art Bell featured Heaven's Gate and the "companion object" in the shadow of Hale-Bopp on several programs.

Heaven's Gate received coverage in Jacques Vallée's book Messengers of Deception (1979), in which Vallée described an unusual public meeting organized by the group. Vallée frequently expressed concerns within the book about contactee groups' authoritarian political and religious outlooks, and Heaven's Gate did not escape criticism.

In January 1994, the LA Weekly ran an article on the group, then known as "The Total Overcomers". Through this article, Rio DiAngelo discovered the group and eventually joined them.

Louis Theroux contacted the Heaven's Gate group while making a program for his BBC Two documentary series, Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, in early March 1997. In response to his e-mail, Theroux was told that Heaven's Gate could not take part in the documentary as "at the present time a project like this would be an interference with what we must focus on."

Members of Heaven's Gate believed that evil space aliens—called Luciferians—falsely represented themselves to Earthlings as "God" and conspired to keep humans from developing. Technically advanced humanoids, these aliens have spacecraft, space-time travel, telepathy, and increased longevity. They use holograms to fake miracles. Carnal beings with gender, they stopped training to achieve the Kingdom of God thousands of years ago. Heaven's Gate believed that all existing religions on Earth had been corrupted by these malevolent aliens.

Although these basic beliefs of the group stayed generally consistent over the years, "the details of their ideology were flexible enough to undergo modification over time." There are examples of the group's adding to or slightly changing their beliefs over time, such as: modifying the way one can enter the Next Level, changing the way they described themselves, placing more importance on the idea of Satan, and adding several other New Age concepts. One of these concepts was the belief of extraterrestrial walk-ins; when the group began, "Applewhite and Nettles taught their followers that they were extraterrestrial beings. However, after the notion of walk-ins became popular within the New Age subculture, the Two changed their tune and began describing themselves as extraterrestrial walk-ins." The idea of walk-ins is very similar to the concept of being possessed by spirits. A walk-in can be defined as "an entity who occupies a body that has been vacated by its original soul". Heaven's Gate came to believe an extraterrestrial walk-in is "a walk-in that is supposedly from another planet."

The concept of walk-ins aided Applewhite and Nettles in personally starting from what they considered to be clean slates. In this so-called clean slate, they were no longer considered by members of this Heaven's Gate group to be the people they had been prior to the start of the group, but had taken on a new life; this concept gave them a way to "erase their human personal histories as the histories of souls who formerly occupied the bodies of Applewhite and Nettles."

Another New Age belief Applewhite and Nettles adopted was the ancient astronaut hypothesis. The term "ancient astronauts" is used to refer to various forms of the concept that extraterrestrials visited this planet in the distant past. Applewhite and Nettles took part of this concept and taught it as the belief that "aliens planted the seeds of current humanity millions of years ago, and have to come to reap the harvest of their work in the form of spiritually evolved individuals who will join the ranks of flying saucer crews. Only a select few members of humanity will be chosen to advance to this transhuman state. The rest will be left to wallow in the spiritually poisoned atmosphere of a corrupt world." Only the individuals who chose to join Heaven's Gate, follow Applewhite and Nettle's belief system, and make the sacrifices required by membership would be allowed to escape human suffering.

Open only to adults over the age of eighteen, group members gave up their material possessions and lived a highly ascetic life devoid of many indulgences. The group was tightly knit and everything was shared communally. In public, members always carried only a five-dollar bill and one roll of quarters. Eight of the male members of the group, including Applewhite, voluntarily underwent castration in Mexico as an extreme means of maintaining the ascetic lifestyle. The group earned revenues by offering professional website development for paying clients under the name Higher Source. The cultural theorist Paul Virilio has described the group as a cybersect, due to its heavy reliance on computer mediated communication as a mode of communication prior to the group's collective suicide.

On March 19–20, 1997, Marshall Applewhite taped himself speaking of mass suicide and asserted "it was the only way to evacuate this Earth". After claiming that a spacecraft was trailing Comet Hale–Bopp, Applewhite persuaded 38 followers to commit suicide so that their souls could board the supposed craft. Applewhite believed that after their deaths, an unidentified flying object (UFO) would take their souls to another "level of existence above human", which he described as being both physical and spiritual. This and other UFO-related beliefs held by the group have led some observers to characterize the group as a type of UFO religion. In October 1996, the group purchased alien abduction insurance that would cover up to 50 members and would pay out $1 million per person (the policy covered abduction, impregnation, or death by aliens).

The group rented a 9,200-square-foot (850 m2) mansion, located near 18341 Colina Norte (later changed to Paseo Victoria) in a gated community of upscale homes in the San Diego–area community of Rancho Santa Fe, from Sam Koutchesfahani, paying $7,000 per month in cash. Thirty-eight Heaven's Gate members, plus group leader Applewhite, were found dead in the home on March 26, 1997. In the heat of the California spring, many of the bodies had begun to decompose by the time they were discovered. The bodies were later cremated.

The members took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. Members kept these in their pockets at the time of death as a sort of dark humor. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team" (one of many instances of the group's use of the Star Trek fictional universe's nomenclature). The adherents, between the ages of 26 and 72, are believed to have died in three groups over three successive days, with remaining participants cleaning up after each prior group's deaths. Fifteen members died on March 24, fifteen more on March 25, and nine on March 26. Leader Applewhite was the third to last member to die; two women remained after him and were the only ones found without bags over their heads. Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of the actress Nichelle Nichols, who is best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.

Only one of the group's members, Rio DiAngelo/Richard Ford, did not kill himself. He videotaped the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe; however, the tape was not shown to police until 2002, five years after the event. The mass death of the Heaven's Gate group was widely publicized in the media as an example of mass suicide. When the news broke of the suicides and their relation to Comet Hale–Bopp, the co-discoverer of the comet, Alan Hale, was drawn into the story. Hale's phone "never stopped ringing the entire day." Hale did not respond until the next day when he spoke at a press conference on the subject only after he had researched details of the incident. Speaking at the Second World Skeptics Congress in Heidelberg, Germany on July 24, 1998:

“Dr. Hale discussed the scientific significance and popular lore of comets and gave a personal account of his discovery. He then lambasted the combination of scientific illiteracy, willful delusions, a radio talk-show's deception about an imaginary spacecraft following the comet, and a cult's bizarre yearnings for ascending to another level of existence that led to the Heaven's Gate mass suicides.”

Hale said that well before Heaven's Gate, he had told a colleague:

"We are probably going to have some suicides as a result of this comet. The sad part is that I was really not surprised. Comets are lovely objects, but they don't have apocalyptic significance. We must use our minds, our reason.”

Two former members of Heaven's Gate, Wayne Cooke and Charlie Humphreys, later committed suicide in a similar manner. Humphreys survived a suicide pact with Cooke in May 1997, but ultimately killed himself in February 1998.

This is the definition of a cult as taken from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: A small religious group that is not part of a larger and more accepted religion and that has beliefs regarded by many people as extreme or dangerous. A situation in which people admire and care about something or someone very much or too much.

Heaven's Gate is defined as a cult because cults encourage the congregation to commit suicide or worse. It's important to understand that cults are not the same as religions. Cults have leaders that inflict harm on their congregation. And they force their members to commit suicide and even commit murder or other crimes for the sake of the cult.

There is nothing wrong with religion. But all people can universally agree that cults are bad.

The leader of Heaven's Gate encouraged the people in his cult to kill themselves by putting plastic bags over their heads so their souls could be taken up on a space ship that would ferry them to the next stage of enlightenment. They were also forced to mutilate their gentiles while they were in the cult and do other extreme actions to keep themselves as pure as possible. So it wasn't a good organization to be involved with. The cult members believed the aliens would take them up to the mother ship after they committed suicide. Many of the people in the congregation were brainwashed by the leader into thinking that committing suicide would allow them all to board the space ship. Because they were brainwashed (sometimes with videos that used techniques found in hypnosis and other suggestive arts) many people who have researched the event sometimes consider it to be a mass murder rather than a mass suicide.

You can read more about the Heaven's Gate cult here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's_Gate_(religious_group)

Even more unsettling is that there is a Heaven's Gate building where meetings still take place located in the city that I live in. I've been to the Heaven's Gate facility here in Phoenix. They always keep the doors locked but you can hear stuff going on inside of the building. It's a very chilling and surrealistic feeling to be near a building that shuts itself off from the world, but has lots of activity going on within its walls. It makes you have compassion for anyone who has been drawn into the cult after the tragedy that took places in the 1990s. I can only hope that these new recruits will realize what they've gotten themselves into and leave the cult before it is too late.

Their site is still active too: http://www.heavensgate.com/

Apparently they answer the e-mails of people who are serious about joining the cult. They claim that even if new members join the cult, there is no way for them to obtain enlightenment until their leader, Marshall Applewhite, comes back to the solar system via the Hale–Bopp comet to pick them up and take them to the next stage of understanding. So the current members monitor the skies and wait for further instructions from Marshall Applewhite as they continue to read the doctrines, watch the videos, and engage in other cult activity.

The moral of this story is simple, yet poignant. One should never get involved with cults of any kind. The end result is a life of being controlled by the cult leader that always end in some form of tragedy or death. Look out for the signs of being in cult; a sense of dread, fear, feeling of being controlled, harsh disciplines and punishments, and hints that the cult leader wants you to commit crimes on behalf of the cult or even take the life of other people in the cult or yourself. Spread this message to as many people as possible to prevent a horrible tragedy like this one from never taking place again.

Comments ( 21 )

My pastor told us about Heaven's Gate and other cults last Sunday. It was a pretty weird and creepy cult.

4424977 Yeah, it was an extremely weird and creepy cult for sure. I am going to do a series where I talk about a bunch of disturbing cults. I've done a lot of research on them and they are all very weird/ creepy in their own ways. But they are worth talking about to prevent other people from getting involved in them.

4425230
Definitely add Scientology to that list.

4425234 I might talk about the documentary that exposed a lot of the strange happenings in the Church of Scientology (Going Clear). It was pretty eye-opening. Before watching the documentary, I had no idea that so many unusual things went on in the church.

4425244
South Park pretty much summed up Scientology in "Trapped in the Closet."

4425252 I always thought that South Park's take on Scientology was really funny. I actually have a few friends who got out of the Church of Scientology who told me about what they experienced in the church (which wasn't good at all). I didn't really believe everything they said at first (not because I didn't trust my friends, but just because the things they told me sounded so far out there). But after seeing 'Going Clear' I totally believe everything my friends said about it. Including one friend who said she witnessed people in the church who were forced to get abortions so they could be 'pure' and achieve a higher enlightened state. She also told me that the church keeps blackmail on all of its members, so they shove it in the face of anyone who tries to leave. Also, she personally witnessed church members 'go missing' from her branch of the church with no explanation to where they ended up. Anyways, she saw a bunch of weird stuff like that go on. And so did my other friend.

4425269
Yeah, that's pretty creepy stuff.

4425279 The more you look into Scientology, the more weird stories like that you find. And the church actively takes down any forum, site, or medium that dares to speak out against the church, so they are always hiding as much of the negative press as they can get away with. They have lots of financial backing from rich celebrities who are members and rich people in general, so they have tons of money for lawsuits. And they use that power to silence anyone who disagrees with them.

4425288
Tom Cruise actually did sue the South Park creators over that episode.

4425291 It doesn't surprise me. The Church actively tries to silence anyone who attempts to spread any negative press about them.

4425297 Yup. That pretty much sums things up. :P

Insane zealots. I know people have the right to believe what they want to, but I also feel some beliefs deserve to be eradicated along with their creators.

4448106 I think that any spiritual or religious belief that harms other people (such as cults) should be shut down. Because it is no longer something that is attempting to help people. It is something that is harming/ murdering the people involved with it. And the moment someone attempts to harm or take the life of another person, is the moment that their rights should be taken away.

4453839 I am happy that you think so, my friend. :heart:

4454070

As am I that you made this blog
:)

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