Heaven’s Gate

Brian Balogh: We’ve heard a bit about how UFOs and spiritually intersects, but there are a few examples more notorious than the movement known as Heaven’s Gate. In 1997, 39 members of the group committed suicide. They believe that once they kill themselves, a UFO trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet would transport their souls to a very literal heaven in outer space.

Ed Ayers: The incident made headlines around the world and almost as quickly became a late night punch line. The members who supported matching tracksuits and sneakers had recorded messages explaining their beliefs that they would be starting new lives aboard an alien spacecraft, but when the movement began, their message had resonated strongly with other Americans.

Benjamin Z.: They would go and put up posters. They had posters that would say, “Find out about UFOs,” and they would hold these meetings –

Nathan C.: The headline grabber basically.

Benjamin Z.: It is, giant, giant big font.

Nathan C.: That’s religious scholar Benjamin Zeller. He says that when the group first emerged in the 1970s, those posters worked. Heaven’s Gate’s message that UFOs would bring spiritual salvation attracted hundreds of members. At its peak, it’s estimated that around a thousand people were part of the movement. Zeller says that’s not surprising in an era when Americans were experimenting with all sorts of spiritual practices from yoga and healing crystals to new interpretations of Christianity and Buddhism, but over the next two decades, the group’s message of alien salvation gradually changed and so did the way their fellow Americans thought about the group and about UFOs.

Benjamin Z.: Heaven’s Gate began in the ’70s as a group trying to figure out the nature of the soul and the nature of the self and as that related to what they call the next level which is outer space and UFOs and space aliens. When it became, it was two people, Marshall Heriff Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles, The Two as they call themselves and they went traveling all through the West Coast holding these meetings, trying to get people to convert and they would talk and they would tell you they’re from outer space ultimately and they came from outer space to give us this message about how people can be saved, how people can live forever and can leave our planet and go into outer space and they say if you want to join them, then meet up at a camp ground in a couple of weeks. They’d give you an address and then they’ll go to the next town and do the same thing and lo and behold they got a couple dozen, a couple hundred people to show up.

Nathan C.: Ben, there’s a way that Americans are thinking about UFOs coming out of the ’50s and into the 1960s. Just give me a sense of what the conversation is in the 1970s as the Heaven’s Gate Movement is emerging. What are Americans thinking or reading or believing about UFOs at that time?

Benjamin Z.: There are a couple of different strands in UFO thought or ufology in the 1970s. People forget that the government was still have having active study of whether UFOs were real phenomenon, so this was not sort of pseudoscience. One of the leading and emerging ones at the time is the idea of ancient astronauts of alien visitors who visited humanity a thousand of years ago and humans were unable to understand the science or technology of it, so they recorded it using the only language that primitive human which is just really language. This idea is best expressed in Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, a book that tries to document everything from the Incans of Peru to ancient people in China and India and the Middle East.

Nathan C.: Don’t forget the pyramids.

Benjamin Z.: And the pyramids of Egypt. At the time of the ’70s people took this really seriously. In the 1990s or 2000s or today, we look at this and we say, “It looks like Star Gate.” If our listeners haven’t watched the Star Gate movie, there was a television series spinoff as well, it’s about this idea that the Egyptian gods are basically a misunderstanding of ancient astronauts and that if you look at the pyramids you can figure out the history of this.

Nathan C.: So Heaven’s Gate has some connection to the Bible and set of beliefs that are coming out of the Book of Revelations, what would you say the beliefs are of the organization at its founding relative to holy texts?

Benjamin Z.: At its founding, the two founders believe that they were the two witnesses described in the Book of Revelation Chapter 11, and if you don’t happen to have your Bible in front of you, I’ll tell you what it says. Chapter 11 describes how these two witnesses are destined to preach publicly and then they’re going to be assassinated on the street and then they’re going to become resurrected and they’re going to rise from the grave or from the street and they are going to ascend to Heaven and members of Heaven’s Gate believe that their founders were these two witnesses.

Benjamin Z.: Their bodies would rise from the dead. A UFO would come down and hoover and pick them up with a tractor beam and they call this The Demonstration. It was The Demonstration of two things, one that extraterrestrials are real and they have the technology to do this and two that we can transcend the human body and the human life and the human earthly existence.

Nathan C.: Right.

Benjamin Z.: What’s really important to understand them is they said they didn’t believe in this classic image of Heaven with clouds and angels with fluffy wings and harps and things like that. They thought that was all sort of nonsense that that was all sort of this spiritual stuff. They believe Heaven was real. If you had a powerful enough telescope, you could see it.

Nathan C.: Like an actual place.

Benjamin Z.: In these, UFOs therefore weren’t just vehicles here for some sort of mundane purpose. They were here for religious or spiritual purposes. They were here to bring knowledge or to ferry beings from our planet into outer space into Heaven. They were the gate to Heaven, hence the name Heaven’s Gate.

Nathan C.: There is a whole range of absurd phenomenon that people are trying to explain with the frameworks of their moment, whether it would be religious, whether they think about in terms of science. How do they reconcile a set of religious beliefs with the way in which people are told and taught that you can only believe in what you can see, touch and measure? Like this actually seems as though it’s trying to reconcile these two competing strains.

Benjamin Z.: When I look at Heaven’s Gate, I see people who really wanted to be empiricist but also wanted to believe in the soul.

Nathan C.: How do you get [that right? 00:49:47]

Benjamin Z: That was exactly their problem. They wanted to get to outer space. At first they thought, we’re going to physically get onboard a spaceship and we’re going to fly there. The spaceship is going to hoover them us in atmosphere and pick us up in tractor beams and we’re going to physically go to the next level and our bodies are going to physically transform, they used the words biologically and chemically, our bodies are going to be biologically and chemically transformed into this perfected next level creatures. That’s what they said initially.

Benjamin Z: What happens is that in June 1985 Bonnie Lou Nettles, the co-founder of the group dies and when she dies, no UFO comes to pick her up and there’s no physical proof that anything happens to her and her body is right there and they had to have it cremated, so they come to the conclusion that her spirit, her soul, her consciousness has uploaded back to her next level body. They still claimed that it was scientific even though ideas about soul transfer and consciousness upload don’t sound that scientific. For them they were. They wanted to keep that idea. It was really important for them that their beliefs were scientific, rational, modern.

Nathan C.: And you mentioned that at the founding of the Heaven’s Gate Movement it had possibly upwards of a thousand members, but those numbers were not sustained by the time you get to the 1990s. What happened?

Benjamin Z.: They were really a group which emerged on the 1970s and by the ’80s and ’90s, they have a real hard time trying to do outreach. They feel as if they’re just not reaching people anymore and that’s part of the end. That’s one of the reasons that the group ultimately decided to end on its terms is they thought that they harvested as many souls as they could as there was almost no one left out there who was really listening to them and was willing to take the stuff and try to overcome their humanity and that’s because people in the ’90s thought that humanity was pretty good.

Benjamin Z.: As you said, the economy was going well. The country was at peace. It’s a different sort of time and by the 1990s UFOs and space aliens were part of late-night television. They were part of the running joke. They were the alien autopsy videos. They were part of the X-Files. It moved from the heart of culture to a subculture and to popular culture. That’s part of the problem for them.

Nathan C.: What drove members of the group to commit suicide in 1997?

Benjamin Z.: At the end of the group in 1997, first of all, they had become completely frustrated with trying to reach out and gain converts or even gain a fair hearing that they became a joke. They also at the same time became increasingly interested in conspiracy theories. In the 1990s they latched out conspiracy theories because members of Heaven’s Gate believed that UFOs were real and they believed there was a government conspiracy to hide the existence of UFOs and they became deeply invested in this idea that behind the Hale-Bopp comet there was a trailing UFO and NASA was covering it up. They believed it.

Nathan C.: Wow! When they got to the point when members of Heaven’s Gate were ready to commit suicide, what was the theological or scientific explanation for that?

Benjamin Z.: Members of Heaven’s Gate like people in many religions believe that the body ultimately was less important than the soul, the spirit or the mind. They believe that by killing their human vehicles, they were freeing their souls to evolve into gaining extraterrestrial vehicles which were frankly superior in their minds. They thought that extraterrestrial vehicles didn’t age, they didn’t die, they didn’t need to eat. This was perfection for them. They were becoming extraterrestrial angels. If you really believe that, it makes sense to them. I’m not saying I want to do it. I’m not saying anyone should do it. I’m just saying it made sense to them.

Nathan C.: What about the Heaven’s Gate movement and about the larger history of UFOs? What do we learn about the limits of rationality and things beyond what we can explain from this moment in history?

Benjamin Z.: Heaven’s Gate was in some ways speaking only to its moment but in some other ways it’s speaking to a longstanding wish that human beings have had to make meaning and to look to the stars for meaning. We see this in culture. We’ve seen it for thousands of years. Heaven’s Gate is just one more example of that.

Nathan C.: Benjamin Zeller is a professor of religion at Lake Forest College and author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion.