Heaven's Gate

Since the late 1940s, belief in unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and in human contact with aliens from outer space has become a widespread feature of American culture. Religious movements that base themselves on UFO beliefs have accompanied this broader cultural phenomenon, but for the most part these movements have existed at the fringes of American religious life. This relative isolation ended on March 27, 1997, when thirty-nine members of a UFO religion called Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide in the upscale San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe.

Heaven's Gate was the latest name for a spiritual community that had pursued a neognostic path of spiritual transformation since the mid-1970s. The founders of the community were two Texans, Marshall Herff Applewhite (b. 1931) and Bonnie Lu Nettles (b. 1927). Applewhite, the son of a Presbyterian minister, had pursued successful careers as a stage performer and academician before losing his job in the music department at St. Thomas University in Houston because of an improper relationship with a student. Nettles was a married mother of four and a registered nurse when she met Applewhite in 1972. The pair soon came to believe that they were emissaries from a heavenly world called the Kingdom Level Beyond Human. Their mission was to collect those humans who were ready to undergo radical transformation into a higher stage of spiritual evolution. In this activity they believed they were recapitulating the mission of Jesus, who two thousand years earlier had called humanity to a higher evolutionary level without success.

After cutting ties with their families in Houston, Applewhite and Nettles drifted to the West Coast, where they began preaching a combinative belief system containing elements of Theosophy, Christian apocalypticism, and UFO lore. The couple claimed that, like the two prophets from the eleventh chapter of Revelation, they would be killed by their enemies, resurrected three days later on live television, and taken to heaven with their followers in a spacecraft. After successful recruiting drives in Los Angeles and southern Oregon in the mid-1970s, the nascent community numbered about 150 members and enjoyed a brief moment of national notoriety as Human Individual Metamorphosis, the "UFO cult." Members then went on a twenty-year odyssey, wandering through America's remotest campgrounds, living on handouts and inheritances, and gradually becoming a strictly controlled, high-intensity spiritual community with a distinct vocabulary of space-age metaphors and biblical references. Nettles, who claimed to receive the primary revelations for the group, died in 1985.

The community rejected all aspects of conventional human life—what they called "mammalian ways"—including family ties, individual careers, sexual relations, personal friendships, and drug and alcohol use. They believed that the world and its customs were under the control of malevolent space aliens called "Luciferians" and that only a complete renunciation of the world and the body would allow them to move on to the next evolutionary level.

After settling in Rancho Santa Fe, the community set up a successful computer business that specialized in website construction. In October 1996 Applewhite began to predict an imminent "recycling" of the Earth. This "spading under" was necessary so the Earth could serve as a fresh garden for a future human civilization. The only chance to survive this cataclysmic event was to join the Heaven's Gate community and to prepare for rescue by a heavenly spacecraft. The appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet in early 1997 was interpreted as the sign that departure was imminent. Applewhite believed that hidden behind the comet was a spacecraft from the Level Beyond Human, coming to reap the "harvest" of those ready to graduate from Earth's school. On the night of their departure, the community's members drank a lethal cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates, lay down, and tied plastic bags around their heads. The evidence indicates that their mass suicide was planned carefully in advance and undertaken voluntarily in the belief that the moment of ascension was at hand.

The self-destruction of Heaven's Gate dramatizes the dangers faced by religious communities that embrace a worldview of radical perfectionism, utopianism, and apocalyptic world rejection.

See alsoAnti-Cult Movement; Cult; Cult Awareness Network; Extraterrestrial Guides; Religious Communities; Space Flight; Unidentified Flying Objects.

Bibliography

Balch, Robert W. "Bo and Peep: A Case Study of the Origins of Messianic Leadership." In Millennialismand Charisma, edited by Roy Wallis. 1982.

Balch, Robert W. "Waiting for the Ships: Disillusionment and the Revitalization of Faith in Bo and Peep's UFO Cult." In The Gods Have Landed: NewReligions from Other Worlds, edited by James R. Lewis. 1995.

Phillip Charles Lucas