UFO and alien-based religions emerged after World War II, drawing upon the “materialist” sightings of flying saucers by Kenneth Arnold and the Roswell Incident in 1947 (Partridge 2005: 170-71), and the “spiritual” concept of Ascended Masters from the Theosophical Society tradition (founded 1875), which was extended to include extra-terrestrials, after the dead, Tibetan lamas, and other sources of wisdom transcending the knowledge of living humans (Chryssides 2011: 7-8). This syncretistic blend of conspiracist, political, and religious beliefs permeated mainstream society via the popular narratives of science fiction, novels, and films. The influential “alien messiah” film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) presented a distinctly Christian version of the message (Etherden 2005), with apocalyptic and conspiratorial themes resonating in the paranoid Cold War atmosphere of the post-war United States. World War II, in particular the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, sharpened popular awareness of the destructive potential of technology, particularly in the area of weapons development. UFO and alien-based religions, many of which were founded in the 1950s, developed in various directions, with some groups preaching an eschatology of battle and destruction of the earth (such as the Church Universal and Triumphant, founded in 1975 but heir to the Summit Lighthouse, founded in 1958), while others envisaged a harmonious
Intergalactic Parliament in which humans participated in peaceful interactions (such as the Aetherius Society, founded in 1954) (Partridge 2005: 182-3).
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the most notorious movement is Heaven’s Gate (formerly Human Individual Metamorphosis), led by Marshall Herff Applewhite (1931-97) and Bonnie Lu Nettles (née Trusdale, 1927-85) from the mid-1970s. Heaven’s Gate attracted attention when 39 members committed suicide in March 1997 in Rancho Santa Fe, an affluent neighborhood in San Diego County, California. This chapter examines the apocalyptic expectations of UFO and alien-based religions, with a focus on Heaven’s Gate, and argues that suicide, the willful destruction of the body and abandonment of human life, is generally understood as positive, undertaken to enable the transition to the “Next Level.” Heaven’s Gate was opposed to suicide per se, but redefined it as turning “against the Next Level when it is being offered,” claiming that human bodies were mere “vessels” and “vehicles,” so that the destruction of these containers was an action of little importance (Zeller 2011: 172-3). Viewed from this theological worldview, suicide births the human individual into the “Next Level,” just as eschatological destruction of the Earth (or the universe), is understood as a positive transformation that births a new world, the “new Heaven and new Earth” of the New Testament’s Revelation. Thus individual destruction of the body and the eschatological destruction of the world are functionally identical phenomena connected in a microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship.
Expectation of the end of the world has been a prominent motif in religions and mythologies for millennia, though the ways in which signs of the end are identified, the precise nature of the destruction envisaged, and the situation that will obtain after the apocalyptic event differ. A distinction is often drawn between the Semitic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and other religions with a linear cosmological narrative and concept of time, and those with a cyclical understanding of time, including Hinduism and Buddhism (Kranenborg 2003: 137-49). For the purposes of this chapter, this distinction is unnecessary, as both types of religion understand the end times to be followed by a re-created world, purified from the taint of the old, which may begin anew. There are a range of related technical terms that describe the end times: eschatology (from the Greek eschaton, “last” and “-logy,” “the study of”), which refers to discourses, both religious and secular, about the end times (Landes 2011: 18); apocalypse (from the Greek, apocalupsis, meaning “to disclose”), which refers to revelation of the events of the end times; and millennialism and millenarianism (from the Latin mille, “one thousand”) (Collins Dictionaries <http://www.collinsdictionary.com>), both referring to the Christian concept of the thousand-year rule of Christ on Earth, which may either antedate the destruction of the Earth or postdate it, depending on theological interpretation (Hunt 2001: 2). These terms are used indiscriminately, and may serve to indicate the absolute end of time and the world through total destruction, or merely the passing of some aspect of the current order deemed undesirable, or the replacement of the flawed world by a different, perfected world.
These concepts continue to be relevant to new religions due to the substantial debt that such religions owe to both the Judeo-Christian worldview and theology (Piff and Warburg 2003: 123-36), and also to the Theosophical Society’s formulation of “Eastern” religions (that is, Hinduism and Buddhism) as relevant to spiritual seekers in the West, through their posited compatibility with modernity and science. The founders of Theosophy, Russian bohemian and Spiritualist medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91) and American Civil War veteran Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), paved the way for the incorporation of extraterrestrials though their acceptance of channeled beings (“Ascended Masters”) as sources of wisdom. In the US, Guy Ballard (1878-1939) founded the I AM movement with his wife Edna in the 1930s (AM = “Ascended Masters”), and he extended the “hierarchy of masters [to] include Venusians” (Partridge 2005: 173). J. Gordon Melton has argued that I AM is the first UFO religion (Melton 1995: 7), but Christopher Partridge claims that it is primarily Theosophical, not UFO-logical (despite the presence of extraterrestrial Masters). What is important is that I AM provided a bridge to break-away alien-based religions like the Summit Lighthouse, founded by Mark Prophet (1918-73) in 1958 (Whitsel 2003: 7), and that the teachings of Ballard, Prophet, and others, blending Theosophical eastern themes with esoteric Christianity, set a precedent for the teachings of Applewhite and Nettles, which drew on New Age and esoteric Christianity, in the 1970s.
The contribution of popular culture to emergent UFO and alien-based religions can be assessed with reference to a variety of popular cultural media. Of central importance is the influential “alien messiah” film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Scripted by Edmund H. North, with a score composed by Bernard Herrmann (who worked with Alfred Hitchcock), the plot featured an alien messiah, Klaatu, whose spaceship landed in Washington, DC (Wojcik 2003: 275). Klaatu’s mission, assisted by the robot Gort, is to warn humanity that the possibility of nuclear war on Earth is of great concern to the citizens of other planets, who are committed to peace. While on Earth, Klaatu is befriended by a young boy named Bobby who takes him on a tour of the city. He is distressed to hear that those buried in Arlington National Cemetery have died in war and violent conflicts. He warns Professor Barnhart that Earth must become peaceful. Yet, humanity chooses to kill Klaatu, who like Jesus is resurrected on the third day. He then leaves Earth with the warning that “humanity must submit to live peacefully, being watched over by the robots [like Gort] or be destroyed” (Etherden 2005). This narrative frames UFO and alien-based theology in terms of a “messiah” who comes to “save” Earth from its own self-destructive urges, which replicates a Christian understanding of these new narratives. Its eschatological tone is undeniable: violent humans have exceeded their moral capacity by the development of nuclear weapons, and they must submit to the wise care of the advanced aliens or inevitably destroy themselves and the planet. This early case of popular culture intersecting with alternative religious beliefs and worldviews paved the way for later science-fiction texts, such as Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), the title of which is itself a biblical allusion, to become scriptures for new religions. Heinlein’s novel inspired the foundation of the Church of All Worlds (CAW) by Tim Zell and Lance Christie in 1962 (Cusack 2010: 53-82).2
The Summit Lighthouse and its successor, the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT), represent important stages in the development of UFOlogical religions, and the apocalyptic expectations of such religions. On one level, CUT is a classic case of the failure of prophecy, as Mark Prophet’s second wife Elizabeth Clare Prophet, née Wulf (1939-2009), CUT’s leader following his death in 1973, announced the apocalypse would occur on either October 2, 1989, or March 15, 1990. In the period 1973-90, CUT—which had begun with an eschatology largely based on Alice Bailey’s Arcane School, in which “the immanent earthly reappearance of Christ” was taken to signal “a collective and terrestrial salvation” (Whitsel 2003: 22)—moved to a more esoteric understanding of the coming eschaton, in which survivalism and stockpiling arms were strategies to prepare for a war with the Soviet Union, and an extensive system of bunkers were constructed at the group’s Montana headquarters, Royal Teton Ranch. When CUT members “emerged from the organization’s fallout shelters the day after a prophesied nuclear holocaust should have destroyed much of the US—many having resigned from employment and sold their possessions—”about one-third of the membership immediately severed ties with the church” (Partridge 2005: 296). The movement diminished in importance as Elizabeth Clare Prophet developed Alzheimer’s Disease. After her death in 2009, the CUT teachings continued via a loose network of ex-members who established groups, and the official Church Universal and Triumphant, headquartered in Corwin Springs, Montana, which continues to expect the end times (Anon. 2008).
How religious groups coped in the face of failed apocalyptic predictions was researched by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, in their ground-breaking book When Prophecy Fails (1956). The Seekers, a UFO group started in the late 1940s, received messages through “Mrs Keech” (Dorothy Martin [1900-92]) from cosmic figures called the Elder Brothers, including Space Brother Sananda (formerly the historical Jesus), who predicted that flying saucers from Venus would appear in major cities around the globe and that a flood would destroy the world on December 21, 1954 (Stone 2006: 6). When the predicted apocalypse did not eventuate, Mrs Keech claimed that the planet had been spared due to the spiritual efforts of the Seekers, which generated light to counter the darkness of the present order. This appeared to be an irrational response, and an abandonment of more logical reactions to failed predictions, but Joseph F. Zygmunt has noted that:
Millenarian movements with well-developed ideologies are in a position to meet such crises by drawing on their own ideological resources. Prophetic failures may be ideologically rationalised, explained, reinterpreted, or denied, leaving millennial hopes intact. (Zygmunt 2006: 90)
Christopher Partridge has argued that the eschatological scenarios of almost all UFO religions tend to feature themes that may result in violence. The non-mainstream nature of UFO beliefs fosters a contra mundum stance, and expectations that aliens in spaceships will liberate those enlightened humans and obliterate those who live contented in the corrupt world order force both a commitment to the abandonment of human life in this world, and the adoption of an attitude that it is both inevitable and acceptable that the vast majority of humanity will be destroyed (Partridge 2005: 190).
For example, the Aetherius Society, founded in 1954 by English taxi-driver George King (1919-97), advocates a benign Theosophical view of aliens as sources of wisdom. King, a “contactee” (mediumistic communicator) encountered beings including Venusian Master Aetherius, Mars Sector 6, and Master Jesus. They asked him to become the “Primary Terrestrial Channel” and participate in an Intergalactic Parliament dedicated to the pursuit of peace (Rothstein 2003: 170, 173). Aetherians practice yoga, meditation, pilgrimage to sacred mountains, and vegetarianism; still, they hold the apocalyptic belief that if their mission to bring peace and enlightenment to the Earth fails, they will be rescued from atop sacred mountains by extraterrestrials, leaving the world to perish (Anon. n.d.). Thus it is accurate to say that UFO religions share an interest in the end of the world with religions such as the Semitic monotheisms, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and that, like the apocalyptic scenarios of these “traditional” religions, UFO religions envisage the eschaton as involving the destruction of the present order and of those who are not believers. These contentions are unremarkable, but in the case of Heaven’s Gate, the expectation of the apocalypse resulted in a more active approach to the transition to what Applewhite and Nettles called the “Next Level.”
In 1975, scholars Robert Balch and David Taylor become covert participant-observers in a UFO movement led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles, who over time were known by various names (including Bo and Peep, as shepherds of their flock, Guinea and Pig, as subjects in a “cosmic experiment,” and Ti and Do), but were generally called by followers “the Two,” a reference to the two witnesses of Revelation 11:3 (Balch 1995: 142-3). The prominence of this Bible verse in the Two’s self-understanding was an early pointer to apocalyptic currents in their teachings. Applewhite and Nettles had met in 1972 in a Houston psychiatric hospital, where she was a nurse and he was a patient struggling with homosexual desires (Appleyard 2005: 117). Both were raised in Christian families (Applewhite’s father was a Presbyterian minister), but Baptist Nettles was affiliated with the Houston Theosophical Society, practiced meditation, and was interested in channeling spirits. Applewhite was divorced when he met Nettles, and he recognized her as the “spiritual” partner he had longed for, with whom he would have an intimate but non-sexual relationship. In 1972, Nettles was a mother of four children in a troubled marriage, and she quickly decided to throw in her lot with Applewhite (Zeller 2011: 157). They briefly held classes at the Houston Christian Arts Center, but in 1973 Applewhite had a revelation that they were the two witnesses from the New Testament book of Revelation, and that they “would be assassinated and return … to life three and one-half days later” (Balch 1985: 15). The “cloud” or vehicle that would take them to Heaven would be a spaceship; this event was referred to as “the Demonstration.” They taught a message of eternal life in the “Next Level” that could be achieved by abandoning human attachments. This involved converts leaving jobs, homes, friends, family, and possessions (constituting a small, secular “end” of their world, and obliteration of their identity), to follow the Two.
Recruits to the movement usually joined after attending a public meeting in which Bo and Peep presented their message and took questions. Balch and Taylor, the earliest researchers on the UFO religion, characterized most of the converts as seekers, members of the “cultic milieu” (Campbell 1972: 119-36). Despite the organization of members into pairs (later known as “check partners”) and “families,” the orientation was individualistic. Conversation was restricted to the “Process” of tuning in to the next level, and apart “from a brief period when members tuned in together before meetings there was an absence of ritual” (Balch and Taylor 2011: 40-41). Balch has argued that Bo and Peep designed the group structure
… to lead members through an awakening similar to their own. They put men and women together in platonic partnerships where each was expected to help the other in the overcoming process … Only by escaping the planet’s spiritually poisoned atmosphere could humans expect to break the endless cycle of death and reincarnation. Once seekers reached the next level, they would become immortal androgynous beings. (Balch 1995: 143)
The majority of converts responded to the counter-cultural and alternative aspects of the teaching, although Christian ideas were prominent as well. The Two taught that spaceships seen by humans were a means of transport and communication between Heaven and Earth; the occupants of the ships were Gardeners of the Earth and the present human race was merely one crop planted by these beings; Jesus was a Next Level being who was born from a human body, died and became an immortal body, and departed Earth on a spaceship; Ti (Nettles) was more advanced in the Next Level than Do, and was equated with the Father whereas Applewhite was identified with Jesus, and that the members of the group who remained faithful were, as Applewhite put it, “not humans recruited by Ti and Do into some cult, but rather were members of the Next Level before ever meeting them” (Applewhite 2011: 27; original emphasis).
In late 1975, Bo and Peep withdrew into “the wilderness” for four months. At this time, there were few authority structures, and of approximately two hundred members, many departed from the Two’s guidelines, particularly with regard to increased social communication, which in turn revealed disillusionment and demoralization among the ranks. When the Two returned in 1976, they took steps to prevent further departures by ceasing to recruit and telling the 88 remaining members that “all the ripe fruit had been picked so that final preparations for the harvest could begin” (Balch 1985: 22). Their authority increased as they ceased holding public meetings, moved to an isolated part of Wyoming, structured the group and the camp to maximize separation from wider society, stopped referring to “the Demonstration” as imminent (indeed, the “assassination” they were supposed to endure was re-interpreted as savage media coverage), and revealed only they could communicate with the Fathers on the Next Level. In late 1976, the group moved to Utah, and Bo and Peep sent “nineteen of the weaker members … to Arizona with instructions to get jobs and support themselves” (ibid.: 23). Most of these people defected soon after. Patricia Goerman has argued that after the Two’s return, the group entered a third phase of development, in which “overcoming human ways” was crucial, and “[t]heir lives became rigidly structured, practicing drills and exercises, wearing uniforms, and limiting their contact with others” (Goerman 2011: 61-2).
A next phase was entered in 1992, when the group re-emerged under the name Total Overcomers Anonymous. Much had occurred between 1976 and 1992: Ti (Nettles) developed cancer in the early 1980s and died in 1985, necessitating a radical rethink of the religion’s theology (discussed below); the group had inherited money in the late 1980s which made it possible to abandon campsites for a more settled life, and the World Wide Web was launched in 1989. The development of Do’s theology was articulated in his 1988 statement, “88 Update—The UFO Two and Their Crew,” first published on the Heaven’s Gate website, where it was stated that it was not copyrighted and could be reproduced. Do spoke of his relationship with Ti, provided the position statements that they had co-authored, and sketched the vagabond lifestyle of the group between 1976 and 1988, a period he referred to as “the classroom.” He acknowledged that the outside world viewed the group as a “cult,” and described their activities as follows:
They experimented in all kinds of disciplines, such as wearing hoods to learn about the “conning” ways of their visual personalities, and making 12-minute checks— each person physically going to a given spot every 12 minutes to concentrate on his or her desire to serve. They were given new names with three letters in the first syllable and a common two-syllable second part … For a while they lived on the trust fund of one of the students, but for the most part supported themselves by, as many as needed to, taking jobs outside the classroom. All in all, the students have been in the classroom 12 years now, and their numbers are down to a few dozen. (Applewhite 2011: 26)
Do spoke of the realizations the “class” made with regard to UFOs, the nature of Jesus’ resurrection (which was the actualization of a “Next Level” body), and articulated a theory of reincarnation in which human cravings that have not been overcome lead to the person being “replanted” by the “Gardener.” The disposable nature of the human body was plainly stated (it is “like a suit of clothes”) and the lack of distinctively human qualities of the Next Level bodies (which had neither digestive nor reproductive organs) was also stressed (ibid.: 27-8). Do spoke extensively of the temptations of Lucifer, which he identified with the New Age and “alternative” spiritual teachings, which is interesting in the light of the UFO beliefs he outlined, but points to a shift to understanding the Two’s message chiefly in terms of Christianity rather than the Theosophically influenced notions to which Nettles had adhered.
Academic studies of Heaven’s Gate have identified key themes in this document that point to the imminence of the end times in Do’s thinking. Winston Davis argued that the members of Do’s “classroom” were not brainwashed, as the popular media claimed, but rather had been trained in what he terms “religious obedience.” An examination of the farewell videos left by group members and of online materials showed that Heaven’s Gate regarded the common understanding of responsibility as a “pseudo-virtue.” Davis argued that modern people value being responsible and code it as “conscientious, dependable, predictable, and good” but for Do it was
… the creation of evil space aliens … These “discarnate Luciferians” were said to determine what is right and wrong for the populace as a whole … “They want you to be a perfect servant to society (THEIR society—of THEIR world)” [and that] students must devote themselves to the negative ethical praxis of “overcoming” the world. (Davis 2011: 87-9)
This attitude exhibits what Michael Barkun has called “fact-fiction reversal,” characteristic of “the conspiracist world” (Barkun 2003: 29).The world of Do’s classroom was nothing if not paranoid and conspiracist: the only truth resided in the teachings of the Two, and the outside world, in which the majority of people lived, was deluded and in thrall to Lucifer. Applewhite and Nettles had from the earliest days phrased their demands in terms of counter-cultural values like personal transformation, individualism, and “flexibility.” However, the “crew” of the Two were trained rigidly in obedience in a world where to be “flexible” meant following orders “without adding your own interpretation,” and learning “to be dependent on his Older Member as that source of unlimited growth and knowledge” (Davis 2011: 94-5). That obedience, and the centrality of the Two as a source of authority, point clearly to an “end times” scenario in which obedience to the leader(s) will be a test, and will be examined in greater detail in the final section of this chapter.
By the early 1990s, the group “operated a Web design business, owned a lot of computer equipment, and attempted to propagate their message in online chatrooms and discussion forums” (Cowan 2011: 140). This was novel in the 1990s, and at the time of the group’s mass suicide, much was made by the media of Heaven’s Gate’s strong Internet presence. On March 29, 1997, the New York Times published an article that quoted the well-known anti-cult activist Rick Ross, who stated that “the group that called itself Heaven’s Gate was emblematic of a growing number of small, computer-connected cults that have flourished in the last decade, and particularly the last five years as the Internet has grown” (Markoff 1997). Yet, until the fateful day of the suicides, the local community, while it viewed the group as strange—their landlord and the owner of the cybercafé they frequented, Gigabytes, knew they were teetotal and celibate— otherwise found the uniformed, short-haired members “really polite,” quiet, and gentle (Hoffman and Burke 1997: 34-5).
On March 26, 1997, the bodies of 39 members of Ti and Do’s UFO religion were found by authorities in Rancho Santa Fe. They had committed suicide, believing that they would complete their Human Individual Metamorphosis and ascend to the Next Level, via a spacecraft concealed by the Hale-Bopp Comet. Cause of death was the ingestion of a vodka, phenobarbital, and applesauce mix, and the members were aged between 26 and 72. Reactions to this dramatic act were mixed; the historian Richard Landes termed the mass suicide “a grotesquely literal application of this motto, and a parody of Christian Rapture apocalyptic,” and argued it was due to “the interminable delay of the great event” (Landes 2011: 407); religious studies scholar James R. Lewis claimed that Applewhite desired to rejoin Nettles in the Next Level and was in failing health. Reluctant to consider a successor, Applewhite saw the Hale-Bopp Comet as “the sign he was waiting for to set in motion the final solution to his quandary” (Lewis 2003: 113). Hugh B. Urban, in contrast, noted the group’s failure to sell a film script embodying their beliefs to Hollywood, as well as its stockpiling of guns and ammunition, and the fact that the Hale-Bopp Comet passed the Earth during the Christian Holy Week, which may have been significant to Applewhite (Urban 2011: 117).
Whatever the case, the press reported the suicides in a sensationalist fashion, and the ritualistic details of the discovery of the bodies of the “cult members” were circulated widely. The members of Heaven’s Gate were found lying on bunk beds, wearing black shirts and trackpants, under purple shrouds. Each wore new Nike trainers and had money for the interplanetary toll in their breast pockets. They wore armbands bearing the words “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” testifying to their love of the popular television series Star Trek. Members appear to have killed themselves in groups, with others cleaning up after them. As Benjamin E. Zeller has noted, the media “fixated on the material culture of the Heaven’s Gate dead, as well as the medical histories of its members, several of whom had been surgically neutered” (Zeller 2012: 59). Revelations about the religion were not limited to the discovery that some had undergone castration; the farewell messages left online by eight of the “crew”—Drrody, Glnody, Jwnody, Lvvody, Nrrody, Slvody, Stmody and Tddody (“ody” was understood to mean “children of the Next Level”)—offered further evidence of Do’s teachings and the authoritarian nature of the religion.
Winston Davis analyzed these statements and concluded that Applewhite and Nettles had been “genuinely loved and respected,” and commented on how the Heaven’s Gate doctrines were very close to the content of traditional Christianity (Davis 2011: 99). Instead of ascending to Heaven, members would be “beamed up,” as in Star Trek. The group’s ascetic lifestyle, uniformed attire, and adoption of names for use within the religion recalled Roman Catholic and Orthodox monasticism, and the practice of voluntary castration, startling to modern western people accustomed to think of sexual fulfillment as a right and sexuality as a possible means to transcendence, merely echoed the New Testament verse, Matthew 19:12: “For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (New International Version, <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%202:9&version=NIV>), a favorite verse of Do’s. The messages posted by members expressed dependence on the leaders, and complete willingness to abandon human existence. The following extracts (cited in Davis) are representative:
Nrrody: Ti and Do and the Next Level are my life. Without them, there is nothing—literally. Nothing else is real. [22, 2].
Stmody: I am totally dependent on them for everything and am better off because of it. I am lost without them and only someone who doesn’t know them would see this dependency as a sign of weakness. [24, 1] …
Glnody: I know that what Ti and Do taught is the only reality. [29, 2],
Lwody: Now that I was … with my Teachers I knew I was safe—in their hands and
the Next Level’s safe-keeping. There was no more fear. [30, 5]. (Davis 2011: 98-9).
For members, it is evident that their life in the world was of little value, and their faith in Ti and Do’s teachings made it easy for them to die when asked by their Teachers, who insisted that they “must leave everything of your humanness behind. This includes the ultimate sacrifice and demonstration of faith—that is, the shedding of your human body” (Zeller 2011: 172).
Of particular interest is the fact that Applewhite, when he planned the ritual suicide, took care to ensure that the right members were present at the time of the event, and that there were survivors who continued to preach the Heaven’s Gate message to the world. There was a tension in Heaven’s Gate between Do’s authoritarianism, which manifested in somewhat creepy analogies between his followers and domestic pets, especially neutered dogs who were “preoccupied with service, preoccupied with pleasing … waiting for one moment of attention from that human” (read “Next Level being,” that is, himself), and the emphasis that was placed on freedom, which resulted in members, over time, being urged to leave if they were not absolutely committed (Davis 2011: 96). Do issued communiqués over the years urging “lost sheep” to return, and in 1991-92 made a series of satellite television broadcasts that expressed urgency regarding the imminent end times. Do declared, “It’s harvest time. Harvest time means that it’s time for the garden to be spaded up. It’s time for a recycling of souls. It’s time for some to ‘graduate.’ It’s time for some to be ‘put on ice.’ It’s time!” (Zeller 2011: 170). It was to be five years after that broadcast that the end time manifested, and in December 1996, Applewhite apparently sent Rio di Angelo (real name Richard Ford, also known as Nneody) from Rancho Santa Fe to witness to the religion after the event. Di Angelo has since published a book (Di Angelo 2007) about his experiences with Heaven’s Gate, maintains that Do’s teachings are authentic (he had never met Ti); five years later, he still considered himself the messenger of the religion (Hettena 2002).
That individual members of Heaven’s Gate believed that when they killed themselves they would be taken aboard a spaceship that was hidden by the Hale-Bopp Comet is uncontroversial, as is the contention that they believed that the destruction of their human bodies was unimportant because they would then possess a “Next Level” body (Chryssides 2011: 14). Thus, individual suicide in Heaven’s Gate was reinterpreted so that death at one’s own hand was not abhorrent, but desirable, and the destruction of the earthly body birthed the Next Level body. These beliefs were expressed, in the videotaped farewell statements of various members, via the language of science fiction: Jwnody ended her message with “Thirty-nine to beam up!” (referring to Star Treks catchphrase “Beam me up, Scotty”), and Ollody, as Zeller has observed, “concluded his exit video by declaring that the heavenly truths ‘could be accepted by humans more easily in the form of science fiction’ … explaining that the group had hoped to create a SF television series to teach their beliefs” (Zeller 2012: 68).
This model of transformation is also apparent in the religion’s attitude to Earth and the purpose it served. Ti and Do consistently taught that Earth was a laboratory or experiment by the aliens “dwelling in the Kingdom of Heaven,” described as a garden in which humans had been planted in order that they might grow souls. Daniel Wojcik noted that “Representatives from this Kingdom periodically make ‘soul deposits’ in the bodies of humans, preparing them to be transplanted to a higher evolutionary level” (Wojcik 2003: 278). Thus both humans and the Earth were creations of the aliens, and served the spiritual purpose of the inhabitants of the Kingdom. Zeller has argued that Do’s increasingly apocalyptic tone from the early 1990s onward resulted from his need to reconcile two things: “the place of bodily death in salvation, and the role of Ti” (Zeller 2011: 171). Nettles had died of liver cancer in 1985. It may be hypothesized that it was expected that she would be collected by the Next Level beings prior to death, to take on her Next Level body. When this did not happen, Do’s apocalyptic tone shifted to focus on the idea that the human body would have to be disposed of (that is, one would have to die) before the Next Level body could be achieved.
But what of the Earth, the garden in which humans are planted, and of those living upon the planet who had not accepted Ti and Do’s preaching? Despite Applewhite’s greater focus upon Christianity, his eschatological model for the unenlightened and the laboratory in which they live appeared to be reincarnation-based (as indeed was his model for human individuals). In 1988, he wrote, “this civilization, from Adam’s time until now, is just one planting of Earth’s true ‘Gardeners’” (Applewhite 2011: 19). Members’ final messages testified to the importance of Do’s teaching that those humans who were not members of Heaven’s Gate caused the garden of Earth to become polluted, and that the Gardeners would only plant seeds after it has been destroyed and renewed. Jnwody wrote, for example, that “The weeds have taken over the garden and truly disturbed its usefulness beyond repair—it is time for the civilisation to be recycled—’spaded under’” (Zeller 2012: 70). This suggests that Heaven’s Gate correlated the suicides with destruction and renewal of the world; the two processes were therefore in a microcosmic-macrocosmic relation.
This interpretation is complicated somewhat by the fate of two surviving members of the religion who were not at the Rancho Santa Fe house at the time of the suicides: Charles Edward “Chuck” Humphrey (known as Rkkody) and Wayne Cooke (known as Jstody). In May 1997 they rented a motel room in Encinitas and tried to commit ritual suicide as their classmates had done two months earlier. George Chryssides stated that
Cooke succeeded, while Humphrey failed. However on February 17, 1998, Humphrey was found dead in a tent near Ehrenberg, California, having placed a plastic bag over his head, with a pipe connected to a supply of carbon monoxide. He was wearing the standard black trainers and a black t-shirt bearing a patch that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” (Chryssides 2011: 130)
These actions are determined and confirm that Humphrey and Cooke were absolutely convinced that they, too, despite having missed the spaceship arriving with the Hale-Bopp Comet, could enter the Next Level and rejoin the Two. Yet they must have been aware that the physical world had, apparently, continued as usual after the “crew” had been “beamed up.” The same tensions manifest in the roles played by Rio di Angelo and other survivors into the twenty-first century; they insist on the truth of the Two’s message, in the face of the apparent failure of the world to have been “spaded up” and renewed. We cannot know how this cognitive dissonance is being managed, but one explanation is Zygmunt’s notion that the survivors regard themselves as the “link between the supernatural and earthly phase of the millennial drama, the bridgehead to the new future, entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining and spreading the faith until the time for complete fulfillment finally arrives” (Zygmunt 2006: 100).
This chapter has argued that UFO and alien-based religions emerged in a climate of fear and suspicion after World War II, and were in part a response to Cold War anxieties. These new religions, whether drawing upon the doctrines of Christianity or continuations of Theosophical movements, expounded a worldview that was eschatological and contained the possibility of violence, due to its focus on the passing-away of the tainted current order (Partridge 2005: 190). Applewhite and Nettles’ UFO religion, Heaven’s Gate, while not founded until the 1970s and having distinct and original teachings, reproduced many of the apocalyptic motifs of both previous UFO religions and conservative Christianity. These included the Kingdom of Heaven, the figure of Jesus, and the role of extraterrestrials as the saviors of humanity. After the death of Nettles in 1985, it has been argued that Do needed to re-frame his theology to understand why no spaceship came for her before she died, and his commitment to the abandonment of human-ness was extended to include the active shedding of the body via suicide, which was a process that would coincide with the “spading up” of the Earth by its alien Gardeners, in preparation for the planting of a new type of human. The relationship of these two expected events—the mass suicide (which was enacted, thus not counting as an example of failed prophecy) and the “spading up” of the Earth (which did not occur and thus may be perceived as failed prophecy)—was one of microcosm and macrocosm, in that suicide would birth the Next Level body for the individual, and the process of “spading up” would result in the planting of new crops in the purified, weeded “garden.”
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1 Thanks are due to my research assistant, Venetia Robertson, who helped with library searches and note-taking for this chapter, and to Don Barrett, whose encouragement has sustained me over the years.
2 CAW it must be noted, despite its science-fiction origins, has a decidedly non-apocalyptic theology, despite its concern over ecological devastation and its clarion call to humanity to protect the Earth, Gaea, which is itself the living goddess.