Heaven’s Gate:
America’s Largest Ever Mass-Suicide was “to Meet Extraterrestrials”
Adapted from Daniel O'Connor's book "Only Man Bears his Image" with permission
On one March day in the year 1997, thirty-nine people were found dead. They had consumed a poisonous mixture of substances, and...
...lain down on their backs on a bed, underneath a purple shroud, having placed polythene bags over their heads.
All were wearing black trousers and Nike trainers...everyone had placed packed suitcases at their bedsides, as if about to embark on a journey... unlike the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, there were no concerned parents pursuing them, no congressmen investigating, and there was no siege situation, as there had been with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, in 1993.
The group was non-violent... [so] the obvious question was how so many people could have been persuaded to end their lives in such a strange way... [302]
It was the biggest mass suicide in American history. Explaining what brought it about, Dr. Walter Martin relays:
Heaven’s Gate [devotees] decided to commit mass suicide in order to shed “their earthly ‘container’ to catch a ride on a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp Comet.” ... The sole surviving member of Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult was Rio DiAngelo, ...[who] still believes that his former leader, Marshall Applewhite, was truly a being from another planet who taught him “to be more aware, honest and sensitive to the world around him: in short, a better person.”
By now, readers of this book will not struggle to answer the “obvious question” noted in the quote above. As Fr. Amorth taught, compelling a soul to suicide is a crowning victory of the demons, and it is only natural to see this frequently finding its way into the tragic decisions of both groups and individuals inspired by their belief in extraterrestrials. Similarly, the demons despise mankind’s creation as male and female, therefore they frequently inspire attacks on gender as God made it: many of the bodies of the male members of the cult were found to have been castrated in anticipation of their imminent new life as “genderless aliens.”
Heaven’s Gate is the most well-known of such suicides; however, it is not alone (Jonestown aside, the second most destructive mass suicide in modern Western history is from yet another “UFO Religion,” which we will cover shortly). Further confirming the presence of demonic influence is Rio DiAngelo maintaining his “faith” in the group, despite the revelation of its manifestly nefarious nature. Those who make a pact with demons will often preserve the narrative from below, come what may.
Recent scholarship, however, has delved deeper still—perhaps unwittingly providing a slew of further evidence that what transpired in Heaven’s Gate was indeed a demonic deception directly enabled by ET belief—not simply a cult with a charismatic leader who latched on to a strategic theme. Dr. Chryssides further explains the genesis of Heaven’s Gate:
...[Nettles] became more interested in the Theosophical and New age ideas, particularly astrology and channeling. Nettles and Applewhite [the two original leaders of Heaven’s Gate]...[became] convinced that they had a mission that was connected with the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and that they were possessed by “Next Level” (extraterrestrial) minds ...[they later] advertised [public meetings] on posters which read: “UFO’s/ Why they are here. / Who they have come for. / When they will leave...”
These two, who simply referred to themselves as “The Two,” along with other titles, insisted that they...
...came from the ‘next evolutionary level in a spacecraft,’ and would reveal how transition to this next level could be accomplished... One might have expected followers who were not present at the mass suicide to believe that they had experienced a lucky escape. On the contrary, Wayne Cooke and Chuck Humphreys, who had previously decided to leave the group, attempted copycat suicides in May 1997, leaving exit notes: Cooke explained that this intention had been to rejoin Ti and Do [titles for the two cult leaders] and the other classmates. Cooke succeeded in his suicide, and though Humphreys survived this attempt, he succeeded the next year. Another ex-member, Jimmy Simpson... committed a similar, but not identical, suicide... A number of other former members continue to speak favourably of Heaven’s Gate, continuing to accept its ideas, and expressing the hope that perhaps at some future time they may be able to graduate to the Level Above Human.
One cannot overestimate the degree of diabolical presence in such actions as these—questions of possession aside. The scholar quoted here goes on to explain why these suicides were certainly not motivated by a charismatic leader, as in other cases of mass suicides. The leaders of Heaven’s Gate had no particular “magnetism.” Their power, instead, was entirely due to great success in convincing followers that they truly were “evolved” aliens who could teach the means required for others to arrive at a similar state of being. They simply fed off the ET belief of their audience, positioning themselves as...
...aliens to the planet Earth, [who] would experience metamorphosis when their craft came to collect them. In the meantime their alien identity was reinforced by the way in which they spoke of humans as alien to themselves, together with their behavior as sojourners, having no fixed abode, and mysteriously appearing and disappearing. Their refusal to speak of their physical past, and their explanation of how they acquired human bodies, served to reinforce their claims.[303]
Contemporary ET believers may be tempted to smirk at the “foolishness” of the “uneducated” Heaven’s Gate members in believing its leaders were extraterrestrials. Such people should be reminded that pride comes before the fall (a theme we will discuss in a later section). Many of those who committed suicide were quite educated and intelligent; even (apparently) serious Christians. This leaves a smirker with an important question to ask himself: How exactly would one who believes in aliens go about proving that some individual cult leader is not the alien he claims to be? So long as they can carefully cover up their own human past, any suggestion of evidence countering the claim that they are extraterrestrials could easily be answered by premises borrowed from ET belief itself. Surely, a sufficiently technologically advanced (or “evolved”) ET could manage to seem just like a human! The greatest secondary effect of tragedies such as these is the failure to learn from them due to the hubris of supposing one is innately above the influence.
The leaders of Heaven’s Gate bedecked their claims in Biblical terminology. Among other things, they even presented themselves as the “Two Witnesses” of Revelation. It was precisely the willingness of Christians to hype up and believe in UFOs piloted by extraterrestrials that directly enabled the Heaven’s Gate cult suicides. Consider that there are no major American cults seducing Christians into sacrificing themselves for the sake of Hindu deities because Christians have always been on guard against such deceptions. When demons assume the guise of Krishna, Christians will generally have nothing to do with it. But when the same demons assume the guise of a UFO, or an extraterrestrial, many Christians will open wide the door and lay out the red carpet.
Dr. Chryssides continues explaining how the Heaven’s Gate suicides were prompted by the atmosphere of ET belief which saturated the times (and which, I add, saturate the present times still more thoroughly): Many people, including DiAngelo, had become disenchanted with conventional Christianity, and were therefore seeking alternatives... The extraterrestrials with which the [Heaven’s Gate] leaders claimed to have contact were clearly scientifically advanced:
they could design and operate spaceships, in which they could transport the group to this Next Level. Belief in space travel and extraterrestrials was part of the zeitgeist of the 1970s...Erich von Daniken’s bestselling book Chariots of the Gods? Offered an alternative interpretation of Christian and other scriptures, claiming that extraterrestrials had already landed on earth many centuries previously...The Roswell incident of 1947 had convinced many that a spaceship had crashed on to the planet Earth...In popular culture, space travel was exploited in films and television programmes, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, and many more. The phenomenon of UFOs...became a popular subject of public curiosity. Curiosity is a factor which, I believe, has aroused insufficient attention in the study of how [New Religious Movements; i.e., UFO Religions] arise. ...At the time of Nettles and Applewhite’s mission, curiosity was rife...claims of alien abduction were beginning; space exploration, still in its infancy, coupled with the proliferation of science fiction, raised the question of whether planet Earth was the only location of intelligent life, and belief in extraterrestrial visitation was [widespread] ... Nettles and Applewhite’s initial publicity...was a teaser...[304]
In brief:
the worst mass suicide in American history—indeed, one of our nation’s great tragedies—was generated by our ET-belief-saturated culture. Heaven’s Gate members envisioned their transformation into Next Level creatures as the ultimate goal ...The image [they showed was] a silver-colored being on a purple background, an image that any viewer would immediately recognize as an extraterrestrial of the sort made famous by Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in the television series The X-Files, and in any number of science fiction books, graphic novels, television shows, and cartoons. The image bears striking similarity to the extraterrestrial beings usually called “Grays” as described by abductees and contactees, notably Betty and Barney Hill in their 1965 account and Whitney [sic] Strieber in his 1987 book, both of which were staples of ufology. ... The being displays no gender markers and possesses a face that appears gender-neutral.[305]