Heaven's Gate

by Benjamin E. Zeller

  Both the Shramek photograph and the anonymous Brown/ Calabrese photograph became immediately controversial. After examining the image, several astronomers judged that Shramek’s Hale-Bopp companion was in fact a star with the rather unexciting name of SAO 141894, and the scientific consensus agreed with that interpretation.117 A day after Bell posted the anonymous photograph from Brown and Calabrese, University of Hawaii astronomer David J. Tholen announced that the photograph appeared to be a doctored version of one that he had posted on the Internet in September 1995.118 His analysis showed rather conclusively that the image Brown had claimed to show a companion was instead a digitally altered fraud. Bell and Strieber backtracked, but the idea they had spawned was still out there, now being copied and discussed on websites, UseNet newgroups, and elsewhere on the Internet and AM airwaves.

  Courtney Brown and his Farsight Institute kept the issue alive well past January 1997 when the images were demonstrated to be false, though Brown himself eventually admitted the problems with the image. In February his Farsight Institute website still listed the results of four different professional remote viewers—that is, individuals who had graduated from the Institute’s training program—and their viewings of the companion. Each viewer claimed to have seen an alien presence trailing Hale-Bopp. Invoking classic iconography from Western esotericism and Freemasonry, one viewer noted both a “big, hollow, expansive vortex of magnetic energy” as well as a “climate controlled space capsule . . . heavy, big, hollow, magnetic, and electric with energy . . . contain[ing] a pyramid, a central person, and an eye surrounded by energy.”119 Other professional viewers saw different physical objects, energy centers, and various spacecraft configurations.120 Brown also posted thirty different viewing sessions from eleven of his students supporting and corroborating these visions.121 Art Bell’s website linked to these descriptions, and many like them, as well as various photographs claiming different “anomalous features” of the comet and a potential companion.122 Chuck Shramek also continued to support his claims of a Hale-Bopp companion, and linked to his original image as well as others on his website, which also featured extended discussion of government cover-ups and ancient alien astronauts.123

  Importantly, it was not the companion itself that indicated to Applewhite and members of Heaven’s Gate that the time had come to exit Earth, but rather the unusual and remarkable nature of the entire Hale-Bopp episode: its marvelous discovery by amateur astronomers far further from Earth than one normally glimpses comets; the behavior of the comet itself, which seemed to spin and twirl as it approached; its brightness and nearly universal visibility across the entire Northern hemisphere and much of the Southern one as well; and of course the claims about the companion, whether they were true or not. The whole world seemed to be tuned in to Hale-Bopp and news about it, and this indicated to Applewhite and members of the group that the time had come to exit Earth.

  Balch and Taylor indicate that Applewhite and Nettles had dated their initial meeting and religious work together to another comet, the Kohoutek comet of 1973.124 The astrological interpretation of Applewhite’s chart had first convinced him and Nettles to work together, and astrology had been an important practice of the Two earlier in their religious explorations. Looking to the skies for meaning therefore was hardly new for Heaven’s Gate. The time had come, members believed, for their final exit from Earth. They updated their website with its now-famous statement.

  RED ALERT: Hale-Bopp Brings Closure to Heaven’s Gate. Whether Hale-Bopp has a “companion” or not is irrelevant from our perspective. However, its arrival is joyously very significant to us at “Heaven’s Gate.” The joy is that our Older Member in the Evolutionary Level Above Human (the “Kingdom of Heaven”) has made it clear to us that Hale-Bopp’s approach is the “marker” we’ve been waiting for—the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to “Their World”—in the literal Heavens. Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion—“graduation” from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave “this world” and go with Ti’s crew.125

  Over two decades previous, Nettles and Applewhite had taught that those who followed them could transform themselves into perfected extraterrestrial Next Level beings. Most would physically enter the Next Level spacecraft, but the two co-founders themselves would first lay down their human lives in a demonstration for the entire world to see. The Two had later rejected that physicalist interpretation of the demonstration and for a while taught that they too would enter heaven without first dying, but the death of Nettles had disproved that notion. Now, just over two decades later, Applewhite and the members of Heaven’s Gate returned to the initial idea of departing the Earth outside of human bodies, but rather than biologically and chemically transforming themselves on Earth they looked to new Next Level bodies awaiting them on the spacecraft. In many ways, Heaven’s Gate had come full circle.

  Members of the movement prepared for the end of their time on Earth. It was patently clear to Applewhite and others that the federal government was not going to raid them, and that death by violent persecution was not going to happen. Suicide became the default option, making use of the instructions the group had studied three years earlier in Humphry’s Final Exit and the drugs they had purchased for that contingency. In early 1997, members of the movement began to focus on preparations for the end, all the while keeping an eye on Hale-Bopp and its alleged mysterious companion. On Sunday, January 26, 1997, they purchased fifty patches to add to their uniforms, with each patch reading: “Earth Exit Monasteries.” They also bought astronomy charts that same week, presumably to help them track the approach of Hale-Bopp. (The same week they also bought molasses, a chafing dish, laundry detergent, fertilizer, weedkiller, a table, and a chair, indicating that life went on at the same time they were preparing for the end.) They bought fabric for the uniforms and shrouds on February 20, and thirty-nine matching Nike shoes on March 1, 1997, all of which they used to complete their final uniforms.126 Applewhite and other members of the group apparently were not satisfied with the first patches, as they had a second batch created, reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” In addition to using the name “Heaven’s Gate” for the group, these new patches also included the previously invoked reference to the Star Trek concept of temporary visitors to a planet, an “Away Team.” Members took account of their remaining funds and spent them on final forays into human earthly life, including a trip to Las Vegas to visit the Stratosphere, a world-famous casino that looks much like a flying saucer; visits to Wild Animal Park and Sea World amusement parks; dinner at several local restaurants; watching the Cannes-winning British film Secrets & Lies; and a final group meal of pizza.127

  Figure 6.2. On the left, one of the first batch of patches, subsequently rejected and replaced with one of the patches as shown on the right. Patch design © TELAH Foundation. Image © Benjamin E. Zeller.

  Importantly, in the week before the suicides, members recorded heartfelt Exit Videos explaining their reasons for exiting the human earthly world. Of the thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate, all but four members created these videos, with Applewhite’s the longest and the most focused on offering instruction. The videos served as opportunities for members to talk about what membership in the community of Heaven’s Gate meant to them, why they had chosen to end their terrestrial lives, and how they hoped outsiders would perceive them. Most expected that they would be dismissed and ridiculed, but they pleaded for family and friends to understand that they had made their choices willingly and intentionally. Srrody spoke for many others when he said, facing directly into the camera, “People on the other side of the camera, you’ll say ‘you are deluded or you are brainwashed or whatever’ . . . [but] from my perspective, this is a godsend.”128 Yrsody made a similar statement, trying to explain that she and others had chosen their actions deliberately and freely: “We are all choosing of our own free will to go to the Next Level wi
th Ti and Do, and they are certainly not what the media is going to paint them out to be.”129 Nearly every one of the Exit Video statements included similar language.

  In addition to the videos, copies of which were mailed to former members to distribute, two members—Glnody and Srrody—wrote “Earth Exit Statements.” Each included summaries of the group’s beliefs as well as a header, “Why I Want To Leave at This Time.” Each answered that question by indicating that the Earth offered them nothing, and that they had put aside their human life and human needs in order to journey to their heavenly destination. In Glnody’s words, “[i]t is my chance to go to God, to prove that I love His World [i.e., the Next Level]. How could I honestly say I love Him more than anything if I cling to this world at all costs and only leave here when I am forced to go when this vehicle ceases to function?”130 Glnody’s argument was devastatingly simple and in keeping with the trajectory and teaching of Nettles and Applewhite from the mid-1970s until then: the body was merely a vessel, and one had to move beyond it to advance to the true destination. Staying behind on Earth would represent the true eternal suicide.

  Finally, the movement’s members drafted a press release, dated March 22, indicating “Heaven’s Gate ‘Away Team’ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space.” The movement’s final statement echoed its many other materials, though this one emphasized the adherents’ identities as truly Next Level beings who had only temporarily occupied human bodies, a variant of the “walk-in” concept. In this regard, their suicides were not deaths at all, since the bodies had never truly been theirs and their souls never really belonged on Earth. The press release also indicated that Heaven’s Gate remained open for just a while longer, and that “[d]uring a brief window of time, some may wish to follow us. If they do, it will not be easy. The requirement is to not only believe who the Representatives are, but, to do as they and we did. You must leave everything of your humanness behind. This includes the ultimate sacrifice and demonstration of faith—that is, the shedding of your human body.”131 Here, at the very end of the movement’s terrestrial history, the willful termination of one’s human existence, the suicide of the body, became the only possible avenue for eternal salvation.

  Adherents mailed copies of these videos and computer files containing the statements and final updates for the web pages to several ex-members who had remained on good terms with the group, including Mrcody, Srfody, Neoody, Rkkody, Oscody, and several other individuals.132 The letters were succinct and clear, asking these former members to post materials to the Internet and maintain it as long as they could. In the letter sent to Rkkody, they wrote, “[b]y now, having read the enclosed press release and the Earth Exit Statements by Students, you should be aware that we have exited our vehicles just as we entered them. . . . We are hoping that with your computer skills, you might choose to assist us in this capacity for whatever length of time feels right to you. We are particularly interested in having you upload the files on the third diskette entitled ‘Earth Exit, final press release, and index page.’”133 Mrcody and Srfody—whom Applewhite had charged to operate the group’s TELAH Foundation and website—Rkkody, Neody, and other ex-members did this, creating a post-mortem Internet existence for Heaven’s Gate that continues to exist. When the news of the suicides was delivered and the media descended onto Rancho Santa Fe, the Heaven’s Gate web page with its complete copy of the movement’s anthology and the final press release became the most important way that outsiders could understand who and what the group had been.

  After receiving the package Neoody was the first to travel to Rancho Santa Fe to see for himself the bodily remains of his co-religionists, and it was he who reported the suicides to the legal authorities using a 911 telephone call. When the San Diego Sheriff’s Department arrived, they found the thirty-nine bodies in careful order, each laid out on the appropriate bunk, dressed identically in black uniforms, with purple shrouds over their faces and upper bodies. The movement’s members had taken the poison in waves, with each group cleaning and straightening up after the previous group’s exit. If they had followed any particular ritual before or during the process of ending their terrestrial lives, we do not know. Nor do we know why they used shrouds, though certainly doing so is in keeping with established burial customs throughout the world. What we can say is that members left their earthly remains and their home in immaculate order. Members each had identification to aid investigators, and had left a checklist indicating how they had killed themselves. Adherents had taken out the trash and paid their last library fines. They signed out on the group’s daily log sheet, what they called their “Comm Center Daily Log” that members had used since the 1980s to record who had what cars, keys, monies, and other equipment. In the column for “Estimated Time of Return,” most members wrote simply “Never” or “Bye,” though Glnody quoted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s title character from the science fiction movie The Terminator 2: Judgment Day, writing, “Hasta La Vista, Baby.” A few wrote question marks, and Dymody indicated “If instructed by Ti & Do,” but the intent of members was clear: they had signed out of life on Earth, and would return only as Next Level beings in service to the Evolutionary Level Above Human.134 They left no loose ends to mire them to Earth. Their time here was over.

  The Rancho Santa Fe exits effectively marked the end of Heaven’s Gate as a movement, though a few individual believers remain and maintain the group’s intellectual property and web presence. Several former members, Rkkody (Chuck Humphrey), Jstody (Wayne Cooke), and Gbbody (Jimmy Simpson) all committed suicide over the coming year, joining their compatriots. But for all intents and purposes, “the Class Is Over!” in the words of a former member.135 The suicides marked the conclusion of a religious movement that had begun almost exactly two decades earlier. Heaven’s Gate has closed.

  Afterword

  Heaven’s Gate as an American Religion

  In 2012, the British synth-pop band Django Django released a song and music video they titled “Hail Bop,” which drummer and producer David Maclean indicated in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) meant “something that passes by once in a lifetime like a comet.”1 Despite the misspelled name, fans and listeners widely took the song as a commentary or contemplation on the Heaven’s Gate suicides. Its lyrics invoke the religious sensibility of members of Heaven’s Gate, the quest for heavenly salvation but the implication that it entails a separation from the Earth. “Always look at the white sky and you lose your head in the clouds // Wanna step onto them and float onto their ground,” singer and guitarist Vincent Neff intones.2 With the music video set in a computer-generated world that NPR’s Robin Hilton called a “psychedelic landscape,” but more accurately described as a futuristic saucer-shaped pod, the video concludes with the band members and the entire landscape twirling up into the atmosphere and spiraling into outer space. “I’ve been waiting here so long and now you’ve taken off again,” Neff sings in his final line. Having been left behind by the departure of the saucer, the song’s protagonist is left waiting, perhaps forever. “Before you know it’s off again into deep space never to be seen again,” Maclean explained of the song’s meaning.3

  Heaven’s Gate’s members ended their earthly lives to avoid this fate of being left behind, but one can also envision the history of the movement itself as Hale-Bopp-like in its brief intensity and sudden passing. Heaven’s Gate itself has passed, off to deep space—or so its members believe—never to be seen again. Those of us still bound by our earthly lives are left to try to understand why and how the group began, developed, and ended as it did. Why does it matter that thirty-nine individuals chose to die in Rancho Santa Fe (plus four more soon after)? Or that several hundred joined and left over the previous decades? Why does the study of Heaven’s Gate matter, given that the group was no more than a few hundred people at its peak, and not even four dozen at its demise? Why write a book about it, and why read it? The introduction indicated several reasons why Heaven’s Gate is worth studying and un
derstanding: that the movement reveals aspects of American religion and culture; that the movement blended foreign and familiar, exotic and ordinary in a particularly fascinating way; and that its story is worth telling, showing how members were not mere victims or zombies engaging in senseless self-violence.

  Here I wish to return to these reasons, highlighting the first through noting the second and third. The story of Heaven’s Gate is that of several hundred people who joined, stayed, left, or rejoined a highly intensive religious movement, all the while seeking otherworldly salvation. Even if one looks only to the end of the movement, one finds in the terminus of Heaven’s Gate approximately forty individuals seeking meaning and transcendence in their lives, and ultimately deciding to transcend Earth itself and find solace and direction in the stars. In many ways, that impetus and that quest are not far removed from the religious or spiritual quests of many other Americans, some of whom are also “seekers,” individuals looking for new and personally meaningful religious identities. Many of those seekers look outside of conventional churches, synagogues, and mosques, and toward groups such as Heaven’s Gate, or materials produced by thinkers such as those who founded and led Heaven’s Gate. A quick perusal of the spirituality and religion aisles at any local American bookstore shows the degree to which American seekers have sought out the same sort of material that interested members of Heaven’s Gate: astrology, channeled wisdom from beyond, extraterrestrial life, ancient mysteries, and alternative bibles. At the time of this writing, the top non-fiction book in the “religion & spirituality” category of the Internet’s largest bookstore website, Amazon.com, was Pam Grout’s E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality, a text rooted in New Age religious teachings about an invisible cosmic energy field that enables humans to reach their fullest potential.4 American religious consumers devour such materials. Heaven’s Gate was in this way quite ordinary—even representative!—of American religious culture.