Why would Applewhite indicate that individuals might achieve salvation and entrance into the Next Level—albeit far in the distant future—without the need to join the Heaven’s Gate movement? The most likely possibility is that he suspected his movement would soon be coming to an end, and that he left his message for posterity and for the interim time between the departure of the Heaven’s Gate elect and the destruction of earthly human civilization. Another possibility, one upheld by former members Mrcody and Srfody, was that these videos and other materials targeted the hundreds of former members who had previously joined the Two over the years since they founded the group, and that Applewhite hoped these former members would find their way back to him and his teachings.92 In either case, these two final videos represented a sort of message in a bottle that members of the movement hoped would help those left behind after their exit.
Applewhite indicated one possible sort of person who might benefit from this “message in a bottle”: those who were part of the radical fringe of society. He specifically called out members of what he called religious cults and the right-wing militia and patriot movements as possessing the sort of worldview and outlook appropriate to the Next Level: “even in patriot movements, or in militia movements, or in ‘cults’; or in this type of religious radical or another who know that this world is rotten, they are saying, ‘I would rather die in service to my interpretation of what God is than stay here.’ Those young souls, those young spirits, those minds will be saved. They will be set aside—‘put on ice,’ so to speak—and have a future, have another planting in the next civilization for further nourishment.”93
Members of right-wing militia movements, often associated with racism, Neo-Nazism, radical conservative politics, and xenophobia seem like odd bedfellows for the leader and member of a group that was effectively pacifistic, lived communally as monastics, rejected any sort of racism, and was rather apolitical. Yet this was not the first time that Applewhite and other members of Heaven’s Gate made reference to such individuals, including the explicitly white supremacist Weavers of Ruby Ridge. Why? And what clue might this give as to why members of Heaven’s Gate decided in 1997 that the time had come to depart the Earth by their own hands? It is to this odd connection that we now turn.
Conspiracy Culture and the Art Bell Connection
Members of Heaven’s Gate had long adopted a perspective that I call “worldly dualism,” meaning a dualistic way of looking at the world (and distinct from, but parallel to, metaphysical dualism that envisions the body and soul as distinct). Worldly dualism offers an important opportunity to understand why members of Heaven’s Gate looked to adherents of a disparate array of alternative and radical worldviews—right-wing militia members, gun enthusiasts, and members of other new religions such as the Branch Davidians and Christian Identity—as at least allied with them against government persecution and perhaps even potential recruits for the Next Level at some point in the future. All of these individuals upheld highly dualistic ways of envisioning the world and all of them identified “mainstream society” including government, media, and popular culture as the intrinsically negative other. But even more than this generally dualistic outlook, all of these other groups had by the 1990s become associated with ideas about government conspiracies, hidden knowledge, and secret agendas. Historian Michael Barkun has called this nexus “a culture of conspiracy,” and specifically identified individuals within these groups as upholding varieties of “stigmatized knowledge.”94 This culture of conspiracy connects the various forces at work in the final years of Heaven’s Gate, namely their appeal to radical groups, expectations of a government raid, and highly dualistic ways of thinking. It also provides a link to why the group members became enamored of a particular conspiracy theory that played a role in how the group ended, namely the beliefs about a spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
It is indisputable that the U.S. government has engaged in extensive covert activities that one might consider “conspiracies” such as various forms of espionage, weapons testing, and scientific research conducted under the veil of secrecy. Yet the culture of conspiracy to which Barkun refers and the type of conspiratorial thinking to which members of Heaven’s Gate came to ascribe envisions a far vaster conspiracy of a shadow government pulling the strings behind the scenes, duping ordinary people and operating in concert with malevolent forces across the globe. Barkun explains that “the common thread of conspiracism [is] the belief that powerful, evil forces control human destinies.”95 Adherents of Heaven’s Gate identified these forces as Luciferian in origin, meaning malevolent space aliens seeking to control Earth so as to harvest human souls, but other groups and individuals holding to conspiracist views might identify these forces as Illuminati, bankers, a New World Order, Jews, capitalist cabals, or any number of groups pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Barkun identifies a broad subculture of ufologically oriented conspiratorial thinking that had become prominent in the mid-1990s and shares the same perspective as members of Heaven’s Gate. Adherents of such conspiracy theories accept a certain set of shared assumptions, namely that the federal government held or holds captured extraterrestrial technology and bodies, and that hostile extraterrestrials are involved in controlling the government. They also accept the veracity of major events associated with American ufology such as the Roswell UFO crashes and the holding of extraterrestrials at a research base called “Area 51” in Nevada, a secret facility that the federal government only recently admitted it used for testing advanced spy planes and other high technology.
This ufological conspiracy material diffused into broader culture through television’s The X-Files, a favorite of members of Heaven’s Gate to which several members referred, and other science fiction television and films. But Barkun ascribes the rise of this type of conspiratorial thinking especially to Milton William Cooper’s book Behold a Pale Horse (1991), which recounts what Barkun calls “a long-simmering Luciferian plot” to control human society.96 Cooper, like members of Heaven’s Gate, identified Luciferians as space aliens, and both those who follow Cooper as well as adherents of Heaven’s Gate identified the Luciferians as engaged in a massive conspiracy to control governments, economies, and cultures. While Cooper disavowed any religious perspective and made no claims about what Heaven’s Gate members called the Next Level, the two systems agreed on much, and particularly on the issue of the Luciferians, even to the extent that many who adopted Cooper’s position looked to the Bible as evidence of Luciferian space alien influence and reread the story of the Fall precisely as did members of Heaven’s Gate—as evidence of Luciferian work.97 Barkun calls Cooper’s work “not only among the most complex superconspiracy theories, it is also among the most influential, widely available in mainstream bookstores but also much read in both UFO and militia circles.”98 It has had broad influence, and Cooper’s claims have percolated throughout ufological, radical political, and alternative religious countercultures.
Applewhite and members of Heaven’s Gate clearly were not informed by Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse, and ufologists within Cooper’s worldview, as the adherents of Heaven’s Gate had developed and explained their beliefs in Luciferians in the previous decade and based on their own readings of the text.99 Yet the spread of Cooper’s views into a broadly diffuse world of alternative and radical “fringe” movements surely indicated to members of Heaven’s Gate that these fellow travelers had at least an inkling of an idea as to the true nature of the world and the cosmos. Barkun shows that followers of ufologically oriented conspiracy theories had come to adopt many of the same positions as adherents of Heaven’s Gate, including not only the long-standing claims of government cover-ups of UFO crashes but also beliefs in ancient astronauts, alien abductions, and the recovery of alien bodies by the U.S. government. Members of Heaven’s Gate had cited and recommended books on many of these topics in its ’88 Update, and by the mid-1990s they were able to witness the same ideas’ broader diffusion into u
fological and conspiratorial-oriented culture, even among anti-government activists, militia members, and white supremacist groups, none of whom shared the religious or social positions of Heaven’s Gate.100
Members regarded these other radical and alternative groups as fellow travelers in at least some regards, as indicated by Stmody, who wrote in his contribution to the anthology, “those who hate this world and its corrupt systems, religions, morality, and laws are in a real sense our allies (although, of course, we may not agree with them on specific points). It seems that we have a common ‘enemy’—the space-aliens with their ‘alleged’ conspiracies designed to prepare (program) the whole planet to accept a ‘New World Order,’ a ‘New World Religion’ that would destroy the ability of this world to function as a Next Level garden.”101 This statement, and another one Stmody wrote about many of the conspiracies being based on facts, shows the degree to which at least some members of Heaven’s Gate explicitly invoked concepts drawn from a conspiratorial subculture—including concepts of a New World Order and that of conspiracy itself—and how these two worldviews had begun to connect.
Another member, Srrody, similarly invoked conspiracies in his Earth Exit statement, referring to both documented and suspected cases of government conspiracy, namely the well-documented Tuskegee syphilis experiments wherein government health workers intentionally misled and withheld treatments from poor African Americans so as to study the progression of their disease, as well as the alleged genetic experiments on urban African American babies in the 1990s.102 While this generally white religious movement seldom focused on explicitly racial issues, in this case the way that government treated minorities reflected directly on how Srrody—who was white—believed it would respond to minority religions such as Heaven’s Gate. Both cases revealed to Srrody the untrustworthiness of the U.S. government and the reality of a Luciferian takeover. Like the case of Stmody, Srrody’s writing shows how conspiratorial thinking had entered the thought of Heaven’s Gate.
Crucially, this connection between Heaven’s Gate’s religious worldview and the conspiratorial worldview that Barkun calls the realm of “stigmatized knowledge” appears to have become bidirectional by 1996. Believers in conspiratorial thinking tend to distrust what they call the mainstream media and at the time of the 1990s congregated on the Internet in the same sort of UseNet forums to which Heaven’s Gate posted its messages, and also public access cable television, satellite television, mail-order videocassettes, and talk-radio shows.103 There adherents of these worldviews could freely share their views, swap stories providing support and evidence of conspiracies, and present their views without being immediately rejected as paranoid or insane. Heaven’s Gate had begun to utilize these media as early as 1991–92 with its satellite broadcast, and made forays into distributing videotapes as well. In those broadcasts Applewhite referenced other radical and alternative religious teachers using the same sort of media, indicating that members consumed as well as produced such alternative media materials.104
In 1996 one of the group’s members, Tllody, “discovered an underground Internet radio show that talked about Government conspiracies, UFO’s, misinformation and current events,” in the words and recollection of Neoody.105 Members became listeners, and soon adherents of the movement had plugged into an array of radio and Internet sources offering what Barkun would call stigmatized knowledge. According to the website links that the group later cited as “address[ing] related or connecting topics” to their own message, they indicated websites and other Internet sources associated with the New Age and channeling, alternative healing and science, ancient prophecies, Gnosticism, libertarianism, government conspiracies, and a plethora of UFO-conspiracy oriented websites. They also provided a link to an image gallery sponsored by NASA—America’s governmental space exploration agency—indicating that not all government-linked organizations were entirely suspect.106
Yet it was two links that the members of Heaven’s Gate provided as “related or connecting topics” that would provide the most crucial insight to how Heaven’s Gate ended: Chuck Shramek’s “Hale-Bopp Companion Page,” and the web page for the Art Bell radio show, a late-night AM talk radio show that features discussion of conspiracies, paranormal, and the occult. It was to this radio show that Neoody likely referred in recalling Tllody’s discovery, and it was this radio show that first brought to prominence the theory that a UFO trailed the recently discovered Hale-Bopp comet. This information, and the response it engendered from Applewhite and members of Heaven’s Gate, signaled the beginning of the end of the terrestrial existence of Heaven’s Gate.
Hale-Bopp Comet and the End of Heaven’s Gate
From May 1996, when it first became visible, until December 1997, when one needed a telescope to glimpse it, Hale-Bopp comet captured the world’s attention. Two amateur astronomers, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, independently discovered the comet on July 23, 1995, as it approached the orbit of Jupiter. An impressively large comet with a dust envelope as large as the sun itself, the comet was hailed as the “comet of the century,” and expectations were high that it would put on a spectacular display.107 Over the next two years the comet became increasingly visible. Astronomy magazine trumpeted the comet’s display as a “long festival of Hale-Bopp” that would last over a year and culminate in late March 1997.108 A bright comet observable even in light-polluted urban areas, the comet was particularly brilliant in the first months of 1997, reaching its closest point to Earth on March 22, 1997—the day the suicides began—and to the Sun shortly thereafter on April 1–2, 1997.109
Comets of course have a long history as objects of religious interpretation, with comets of antiquity and premodern times interpreted as portents by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic audiences.110 Even into the modern age, historian Roland Numbers writes, “considerable evidence shows widespread concern with astronomical phenomena seen by the naked eyes: eclipses, meteors, and comets.”111 Comets in particular, Numbers indicates, served as omens or portents for both the common folk and the learned religious leaders during the dawn of the modern era. Folklorist Daniel Wojcik has argued that the value of comets as religious portents substantially declined in the twentieth century, especially after the advent of the nuclear age and with it the new symbols of human-mediated doom.112
Yet it was not solely the comet itself that attracted the notice or attention of members of Heaven’s Gate. Rather, claims about a mysterious object, a “companion,” following the comet that seemed to move unnaturally and even influence the movements of the comet became the focus of the group. While these claims would later be largely debunked, and the members of Heaven’s Gate ultimately indicated that the nature of the mysterious object was in fact irrelevant, the intense interest in the companion and the comet among members of the fringe and conspiracy-oriented alternative media attracted the attention and interest of the group’s adherents. Neoody remembers that “the comet’s [purported] strange and irregular course of travel” interested Applewhite immediately. While Neoody did not comment on the companion, his coreligionist Anlody offered an extensive commentary indicating that while one could not know if the “controversial object” was in fact a “spaceship of the Next Level,” the message of Heaven’s Gate nevertheless called for preparation for exit from Earth. “We’re not sure,” Anlody admitted, but “[we] think there’s a good possibility that Hale-Bopp is what we’ve been waiting for.”113 But what was this “controversial object” as Anlody called it?
Figure 6.1. Hale-Bopp Comet, on March 14, 1997, as photographed from Earth. This brilliant comet was visible throughout much of the world, even in urban areas. Image © European Southern Observatory/E. Slawik.
On November 14, 1996, an amateur astronomer named Chuck Shramek had called the Art Bell AM radio show, Coast to Coast, claiming that he had photographed a mysterious “companion” following the comet. Bell’s show had become an important and some would say central media form in the fringe and conspiratorial subculture, broadcast on three
hundred and ninety stations and with more than nine million listeners each week at the time.114 The show featured extended conversation about conspiracies, the occult, and ufology to which Bell invited listeners to respond by calling in to the program. Shramek called immediately after his observations of Hale-Bopp in order to report to Bell and his listeners what he believed he had found. He described the companion as a Saturn-like object, and immediately injected a sense of religious meaning to it: “[it was] so bright and strange I began to pray,” Shramek later witnessed.115 Shramek implied that the object may be an alien spacecraft, and Bell encouraged that interpretation. On the next radio broadcast of November 15, Bell featured another caller, Courtney Brown, who claimed to possess the power to engage in “remote viewing” and confirmed that the companion was an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Brown claimed that individuals involved in his Farsight Institute—Brown’s New Age business that teaches individuals how to engage in the process of remote viewings—had determined that the companion was “larger than Earth, hollow and ‘under intelligent control’—a kind of planetary spaceship hitching a ride on the comet,” according to a Washington Post journalist who investigated the claims.116 Later that month, on November 29, Brown and his assistant Prudence Calabrese again called Bell’s program and claimed that they could provide an anonymously produced photograph that they indicated proved the existence of the spacecraft. Brown and Calabrese sent the image to Bell but requested the radio personality not distribute the photo until the anonymous photographers came forward and allowed it. No photographers ever revealed themselves, and Bell posted the photo on January 14, 1997 on his Internet web page. The photo shows a large glowing starlike object near the comet, which believers professed showed an alien spacecraft trailing Hale-Bopp comet. Members of Heaven’s Gate would have seen this photograph on Bell’s web page as well as the web page of Whitney Strieber, another Bell caller and a ufologist active in the alien conspiracy and ufological subcultures.
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