Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  The content of the Waldport meeting matched the Two’s earlier teachings. One attendee described it as “vaguely Biblical . . . I guess the implication was that you might leave in a U.F.O.”68 Other attendees reported more specificity. One man who joined the group explained that those who followed the Two would “leave for a better life on another planet” after completing their training under the Two’s guidance. The Two indicated to their audience that they were from that other planet, and that the Bible described extraterrestrial visitors such as Jesus, Ezekiel, and Elijah who had brought similar messages to Earth in earlier eras.69 Other attendees used more explicitly Christian language. “It’s the Second Coming,” one new member wrote to a friend, apparently grasping the Two’s allusions to the Book of Revelation.70

  A limited transcript of the meeting provides more details on the content of the Two’s teachings in Waldport. Having booked their hotel and meeting room under the name of “UFO and the Kingdom,” Nettles and Applewhite focused on those two concepts: the kingdom of God and UFOs.71 This “kingdom,” which the Two generally referred to as the “Next Level” in this meeting, represented both the Heaven of the Bible and the heavens of science. “A kingdom nestles life that is real, that can be reached among those who attain to it. . . . a next level [and] a level that you refer to as the Kingdom of God.”72 The Two explicitly argued that the Next Level of which they spoke was a physical, corporeal place, and not an ethereal plane of existence. One reached it through physical travel aboard a UFO and one needed to bring one’s physical body in order to do so. They offered to teach a process that they called “Human Individual Metamorphosis”—which became the first name for the group—to help individuals transform their bodies and prepare themselves to leave the planet. Importantly, at this stage in the group’s existence there was no mention of suicide. The Two explicitly taught that the process required transforming the living human body and physically leaving onboard a UFO.73 When journalists at the meeting asked one of the Two’s followers from the Los Angeles group whether you had to die to get into the Two’s version of heaven, the response was clear: “Absolutely not.”74

  The Two stressed the need to abandon the comfortable trappings of one’s human life in order to join them and engage in Human Individual Metamorphosis. “You would have to literally overcome every human indulgence and human need . . . it is the most difficult task that there is . . . you have to lose everything. You will sever every attachment with that world that you have.”75 They specified that those who followed them had to give up their belongings, relationships, and attachments. They were to leave behind everything they owned and loved. Elsewhere, they specified that only adults could join them, and that parents either had to abandon their children or not join them at all.76 The process was demanding and the Two insisted that giving up one’s human attachments represented the first step to overcoming humanity and literally becoming a perfected extraterrestrial creature. Newspaper accounts show that those who took them up on that offer abandoned property, houses, cars, personal possessions, spouses and significant others, and even children.77

  The converts from Waldport and some of those who had earlier converted in Los Angeles rendezvoused a few weeks later near Fruita, Colorado, a small town along the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains famous for its orchards, recreational activities, and campgrounds.78 There the Two set up a camp where followers could begin the process of severing their human attachments and—they believed—begin transforming their bodies chemically and biologically into new extraterrestrial bodies. Converts who wrote letters to family members and friends remarked on a lack of firm plans for the immediate future of the group, but did not seem particularly alarmed by this prospect. One wrote: “It’s real. It’s the Second Coming. We don’t know yet what’s next. The mountains are nice. We are all going home.”79 The combination of trite observation and profound religious statement characterized much of the statements of early members of the group that was now calling itself Human Individual Metamorphosis. Nettles and Applewhite had also fully adopted new names for themselves by this time, settling on Bo (Applewhite) and Peep (Nettles).

  Bo and Peep did not keep their new followers together for long. Just after their first successful mass conversion in Los Angeles after meeting with Clarence Klug’s group, the Two had decided to split the growing movement into groups of two. They partnered each individual with another who was to serve as a “check partner” and help the other overcome their human attachments. Since Bo and Peep taught that sex, drugs, and recreation were forms of human attachments and hence forbidden, the Two charged the partners with keeping each other from engaging in these actions. They paired together heterosexual women and men, and gay men and women in single-sex pairings, so as to force the partners to confront their sexual attractions and overcome them. Citing the words of the Two, a journalist who had feigned interest in the group in order to see its inner workings described it as an attempt to “produce a kind of ‘catalytic conflict’ relationship to promote the process of ‘overcoming’ in each individual.”80 Partners traveled the country trying to overcome their human attachments and seeking converts along the way, rendezvousing occasionally with the group throughout the summer and fall of 1975 in campgrounds across the Western United States. Some of the partners ended up losing touch with the main group, and evidently Bo and Peep engaged in very little logistical leadership.81 The image that emerges is one of a well-defined set of beliefs about the need to transcend the human level of existence through monastic self control, but complete disorganization at the level of social functioning and community building.

  Becoming a Movement

  In the autumn and early winter of 1975, very little about Human Individual Metamorphosis looked like what we normally consider a new religious movement, or especially the stereotypical image of a cult. The leaders preached an admittedly stringent gospel with strict rules of conduct, and insisted that adherents sever their connections with the world outside the movement, but they did not actually enforce these rules. Because the group seldom gathered as a whole, and even then the Two did not generally focus on day-to-day issues, many members described a nebulous process of trying to figure out how to engage in human individual metamorphosis. Some partners dropped out of the group, and others became lost and disconnected. A former member named Danny, one of the Two’s first converts to leave the group and share his story with the media, described membership as a “rather dull routine” of daily living and proslytzing.82 He also noted that the partnerships functioned as intended, but that the increased sexual tension was too much for him. “Nobody was having sex, and everyone was talking about it,” he recounted.83 Many of the adherents at this point had formerly belonged to Klug’s Tantric sex-oriented group in Los Angeles, perhaps explaining these conversations. Regardless, Danny left after using marijuana that a fellow member had smuggled into the camp. “I tried all this but I didn’t find any communications with the higher beings,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.84

  When Nettles and Applewhite were interviewed by a journalist in February 1976, they did not know how many members of the group they had attracted, nor did they know about the recruitment efforts of the various partners. They estimated between three hundred and one thousand members of their group, a rather significant range. At times the reporter seemed to know more about their followers than did the Two.85 In a retrospective history of this formative era of the group written more than a decade later, in 1988, Applewhite recalls that they eventually realized that they had to “become more organized in their groups and more systematic with their communication between cities [i.e., when not hosting large recruitment events].”86

  As an example of the clear level of social dysfunction, two of the group’s adherents resorted to giving a newspaper interview in order to try to find their way back to the group. This partnership, formed by converts from the Los Angeles meeting, became separated when they were three days late to a group gathering in Colorado, and since that t
ime had lost the ability to communicate with the movement’s leaders. They described a system of communicating utilizing a series of postal general deliveries and short-term post office boxes.87 Clearly this system possessed a serious flaw: missing a single community gathering meant that members could not track down the group afterwards. As Balch summarized, based on his empirical study of the group, “the dispersion of groups all over the country also contributed to disorganization. Each group went wherever its members felt led to go, and they rarely had contact with each other while they traveled.”88 Because they gave their interview using assumed names, one cannot know if these two converts ever made it back to the group, but, judging from statements made during their interview, neither seemed to think that possibility likely.

  Human Individual Metamorphosis had become truly dysfunctional. Balch described a movement whose founders had abandoned the members to live in seclusion without appointing new leaders or installing a clear leadership structure. Adherents relied on their own senses of right and wrong, spiritual development, and occasionally democratic decision-making to make their choices. Boundaries between members and non-members had collapsed, with adherents coming and going to visit friends, chat with strangers, and engage in alternative forms of spiritual growth. Balch noted that almost half the group defected during this time.89

  Had things continued in this vein the movement would have collapsed. Nettles and Applewhite therefore decided that the group had to cease its frenetic wandering and come together for a longer period. They also decided to stop recruiting and focus on creating a better functioning group among those individuals who had already joined. On April 21, 1976, Nettles declared that “the harvest is closed—there will be no more meetings.”90 A few months later, the Two gathered their flock in the isolated and geographically remote Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming in order to create a single community within the Human Individual Metamorphosis movement. Eighty-eight individuals arrived to do so.91 The leaders instated a far more rigid set of behavioral guidelines and made it clear that adherents needed to follow these rules. They also solidified all religious and temporal authority as seated within themselves. Nettles and Applewhite transformed themselves from messengers and guides to the centers of the group from which all teachings and direction emerged.92 Later that year they expelled nineteen members who—depending on who is recounting the story—either were weaker in belief or practice, waffled in their dedication, or failed to respect the authority of the leaders.93

  The Two’s transformations had the desired effect. The defection rate decreased, and the group reestablished a firm boundary between its members and the outside world. The movement became far more sectarian in the classic sense of drawing a firm line between members and non-members, with clear norms and expectations of adherents. Later that year, when the movement ran out of funds, members had to take outside jobs to provide financial support. Rather than result in more departures from the group, adherents remained committed. The founders of Human Individual Metamorphosis had managed to navigate from a loosely organized social group to a centralized religious movement comparable to a roving monastery.

  Heaven’s Gate began as two individuals, blossomed into a socially diffuse collective of spiritual seekers, and finally coalesced into a distinct religious movement. Just as this chapter has looked to the origin of Heaven’s Gate, the last chapter of this book considers the end of the movement. But one important development occurred in 1985 that reshaped everything that came in between: the death of Bonnie Lu Nettles, considered in depth in chapter 4 since it so powerfully reshaped the beliefs of the adherents of Heaven’s Gate. In the formative years of Heaven’s Gate until 1985, Applewhite and Nettles taught that members of their movement would achieve salvation through bodily transformation and physical departure onboard UFOs. They indicated that if an adherent suffered an accidental death that Next Level technology could repair damaged bodies or even create new ones as replacements, an extension of their earlier treatment of their martyrdom and resurrection, i.e. “the demonstration.” After Nettles’s death this possibility became more and more central, as Applewhite shifted the theology of the group to focus on escape from Earth, corrupt human society, and eventually the human body itself. Nettles’s death in 1985 opened the door that led to the suicides in 1997. It also forced Applewhite to take sole control of the movement and enabled him to shift the beliefs and practices as he saw fit. The remaining chapters of this book look at how that process unfolded.

  2

  The Spiritual Quest and Self-Transformation

  Why People Joined Heaven’s Gate

  Who Joined Heaven’s Gate?

  In the first academic study of Heaven’s Gate, Robert W. Balch and David Taylor’s Salvation in a UFO (1976), the authors asked who joined the movement that they were studying, then called simply “the UFO group” or alternatively Human Individual Metamorphosis, the name its founders used for the group at that time. Based on their fieldwork, Balch and Taylor summarized that “nearly all were long-time seekers of truth” who had joined and left numerous other new religious groups, and would leave the UFO group as well.1 A year later in a different study, the two sociologists provided an even more complete assessment of the religious background of the members. Members were “metaphysical seekers” shaped by the cultic milieu and metaphysical subculture. “Before joining [Heaven’s Gate], members of the UFO cult had organized their lives around the quest for truth. Most defined themselves as spiritual seekers.”2

  Balch and Taylor lean on Colin Campbell’s notion of the cultic milieu. Campbell defined the cultic milieu as “the cultural underground of society . . . it includes all deviant belief-systems and their associated practices. Unorthodox science, alien and heretical religions, deviant medicine, all comprise elements of such an underground.”3 Today scholars identify multiple religious strands within Campbell’s cultic milieu, and in fact religious innovators have developed so many different new religious movements that fall within that milieu that finding commonalities is rather difficult. The cultic milieu from which members of Heaven’s Gate emerged includes what many scholars would today call Western esotericism, the New Age, alternative lifestyles, holistic healing, and nature-oriented spirituality. Though some scholars have in fact developed interpretive schema to separate and analyze these strands within the cultic milieu, since so many of the Heaven’s Gate members combined elements of these different alternative religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, it is easiest to consider the cultic milieu holistically.4 Individuals living within this religious paradigm look to alternative religious, scientific, educational, social, and cultural systems to provide them meaning, practices, beliefs, and ways of living in the world. These range from amalgamations of various non-Christian spiritual practices to alternative health care to vegetarian eating to alternative sacred geographies indicating sacred places within the landscape.

  Journalists’ reports and interviews during the early days of Heaven’s Gate support Balch and Taylor’s contentions. Oregon State Trooper Melvin Gibson was one of the first law enforcement officers to investigate the sudden disappearance of several dozen people in Waldport, Oregon who had joined Heaven’s Gate. “Most of these people were hippie types, I guess you’d call them,” he summarized, by which he later explained that he meant they had never put down roots where they lived.5 They also demonstrated a high level of spiritual searching. One of the first journalists to interview members of the group described its members as “people already into metaphysical and spiritual studies—a sort of spiritual underground.”6 As a spouse of a newly converted Heaven’s Gate member indicated, “Judy has been really into religion lately. She got baptized three times. She was a Catholic when we got married but recently had been going to several different churches.”7 Other adherents of the new religion told similar stories. One explained, “I’m of Jewish background, but I used to sort of have my own religion, which was sort of a conglomeration of everything. I was into yoga, med
itation, and I read different things, I studied metaphysics, I just tried to be, you know, nice in my own way.”8

  This woman’s self-description bears remarkable similarity to a famous account described by Robert Bellah and his co-authors in Habits of the Heart (1985), a groundbreaking study of Americans’ approaches to civic society and their view of community. Bellah and colleagues found that Americans during the 1970s and 1980s took remarkably idiosyncratic and incongruous approaches to understanding individualism and community, combining intensely individualistic views with longing for genuine community. In terms of spirituality, Bellah and his co-authors discovered a propensity for religious syncretism alongside a tendency toward spiritual seeking. Scholars have come to call this approach “Sheilaism” based on an interview Bellah conducted with a pseudonymous woman who viewed her spiritual path as inherently her own. In Bellah’s phrasing,

  Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” “I believe in God,” Sheila says. “I am not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Sheila’s faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many. In defining what she calls “my own Sheilaism,” she said: “It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other.” Like many others, Sheila would be willing to endorse few more specific points.9

  Both Sheila and the aforementioned Heaven’s Gate member created their own religious paths, even calling it their own religion, and stressing such qualities of their religion as its faith, flexibility, inward nature, and ethical approach to living. According to Bellah’s research, up to 80 percent of Americans echoed similar sentiments during this period, and he later declared that “On the basis of our interviews, and a great deal of other data, I think we can say that many people sitting in the pews of Protestant and even Catholic churches are Sheilaists who feel that religion is essentially a private matter and that there is no particular constraint on them placed by the historic church, or even by the Bible and the tradition.”10 Other demographic studies show similar trends.11