THE FACTS ABOUT HEAVEN'S GATE

by Steve Mizrach

Here are some basic facts to chew on:

1. There is no spacecraft behind Hale-Bopp. I have viewed the comet with a small telescope with minor magnification, and from what I have seen, there is nothing in the nucleus of the comet or trailing behind it, especially not anything the size of a planet or larger.

   On this fact alone, I agree with Alan Hale, one of the original amateur astronomers who discovered the comet. However, Hale took the opportunity of the Heaven's Gate mass suicide to hype the late Carl Sagan's book about our "demon-haunted world," and to lament all the "superstition" about a mere "dirty snowball." I agree with Hale that comets are not heavenly messengers, have nothing to do with the millenium, and are balls of ice and rock. However, I find it interesting that he kept asserting with vehemence the irrationality of believing that comets influence life here on Earth. This despite the fact that other members of the scientific community have recently asserted that a) comets may periodically contribute to the extinction of life on other planet and b) comets, through spreading organic compounds, might have led to the genesis of life here as well.

   So: is it wholly "irrational," then, that our ancestors might have had some degree of awe or dread with regard to comets? Of course, it's wholly impossible that they might have known either of those two things. And there are no such thing as meteors, because rocks do not fall from the sky.

2. Heaven's Gate was not made up of young, male 18-24 year-old computer programmers, and it didn't start in the 1990s. It was not a "cyber religion."

   The media covering this story presented most of the initial facts incorrectly, as usual. Heaven's Gate started back in the 1970s, and I highly recommend that people who are interested in its early history read Jacques Vallee's Messengers of Deception, who documented the techniques of the flying saucer 'missionaries' "Bo" and "Peep" back in 1975, when they were calling their group "Human Individual Metamorphosis." (Besides HG, there have been many UFO-based religions, including the Raelians and "UMMO.") The basic fact is that most of the members of HIM/Heaven's Gate were middle-aged, of both genders, and recruited from college campuses back in the 60s and 70s. Even back in 1975, Applewhite's doctrines emphasized the transience of the human form, and the abnegation of physicality.

   Reading "MoD" may be a good thing for another reason, because Vallee makes two critical points that are as important today as they were back then. One is that many of the "flying saucer cults" may be the product of intelligence agencies wishing to test psychological warfare techniques. Many people have compared HG to Jonestown, which has also been suspected of being a CIA 'project.' However, Jonestown remains a different creature for one important reason: there were many cult members who were killed quite involuntarily by machine guns when they refused the poisoned kool-aid, whereas it appears that all HG members consented to their cocktail of barbiturates and vodka in order to shed their "containers" for the coming spacecraft. But HG, like Jonestown, might have been a 'test' to see how long a cult could be kept 'underground' before being 'activated' -- or, more properly, 'deactivated.'

   Another is that the existence of groups with irrational beliefs about UFOs is a good reason to intensify rational inquiry of the phenomenon, rather than curtail it. Suppression and ridicule of scientific inquiry of the UFO phenomenon leaves it in the hands of the irrational, unscientific, and fanatical; worse, in the hands of people who may want to use it as a belief system for manipulating and controlling people's actions. Hillary Clinton committed typical fallacious reasoning by lumping together HG with interest in UFOs, because groups who believe dogmatically in extraterrestrial salvation are not the same thing as groups who are interested in rational inquiry of an unknown phenomenon.

   The cult did not recruit people using the Internet. (I believe that the word "cult" does apply to this group because they used psychological manipulation, prevented members from having any contact with their families or outsiders, and followed a charismatic and dogmatic leader.) It did not view the Internet with any sort of spiritual reverence or connect it with ideas of transcendence: they designed Web sites because they wanted to have economic support without having contact with "worldly things," and this was an easy way to do so. Their major source of "information" about the Hale-Bopp "spacecraft" was probably not the Internet or Art Bell's radio show (more about him, anon) but instead a science fiction writer who they believed to be a prophetic figure.

3. Art Bell and the Internet are not responsible for this mass suicide. Neither is Courteney Brown, in all fairness...

   The unfortunate fact about this case is that it has resulted in the usual howls for censorship. Of course, as usual, these people don't realize you can't shut down Usenet, where many of the Hale-Bopp rumors "flew," but they probably will demand that their legislators try. As for Art Bell, like the Internet, he is just a messenger. He always emphasizes that listeners to his show make up their own minds about phenomena - which is the proper zetetic attitude. It was Courteney Brown and Whitley Streiber who dropped the 'bombshells' about Hale-Bopp on his radio show. Other people have been circulating this information for a while.

   My feeling is that the mass suicide was merely a matter of timing. However the group came to their belief about the spacecraft behind the comet (and I suspect they were "fed" it - they didn't just happen to hear it one day), they probably would have found another reason later to "shed their containers" if they had not come to believe in that. Shedding their bodies was necessary for reaching the "higher level," so they would have done so eventually, no matter what. Applewhite did not have cancer, but most people agree he was in poor health. The coincidence of the comet and Holy Week probably gave him the motivation to take his followers into the "plunge," so to speak. If people believe suicide is justified in their doctrine, then they will inevitably settle on something as the "sign" to proceed. Applewhite also believed apparently that his group, following "Waco," might also be targeted by the government soon.

   As for Courteney Brown: I heard his version of the story (he had been accused of stealing Hale-Bopp images from the University of Hawaii for his Project Foresight web site prior to his association with the whole HG "affair") at the "Project Awareness 1997" conference, and I am not certain of what to make of it. Brown says Foresight remote viewers detected an object behind the comet. Brown also claims he was sent a roll of film with images of the comet as well as a spacecraft behind it by an astronomer. That was the source of the Web site images. He hedged over the question of whether those images had been altered prior to his receiving them. He will not reveal the identity of that astronomer, but claimed at the conference that he still doesn't doubt the veracity of the person; instead he thinks the astronomer was manipulated in order to set him up and to "discredit remote viewing."

   I am not sure what to make of any of Brown's claims; having read Cosmic Voyage I am still curious as to where in South America or under Santa Fe Baldy the Martians are living, why (or how much) they look like native americans, and why Brown somehow keeps insisting on not providing any sort of confirmation to his claims. Does remote viewing exist, regardless of whether Brown is a fraud, a one-time cheat, or completely honest? Yes. But I simply am not interested in remote viewers continuing to resist providing any sort of empirical evidence for their claims, so that those of us who are non-remote viewers can test them by other means. I also suspect that remote viewing is a somewhat more limited talent than the extravagant ability that Brown describes, where a person can view any event at any point in space and time and know the thoughts of all beings that are present. That is what the dictionary would define as "omniscience."

   The HG members are solely responsible for their own actions. They chose to end their own lives based on incorrect information and misguided beliefs. Incorrect information can be found in every medium - newspapers and TV shows as well as talk radio and on the Internet. Brown, Bell, and the aforementioned science fiction writer (I don't remember his name; I did see him on a weekly news show; he claimed to have a special mark on his chest; he said HG members followed him around at book signings) are not responsible. Applewhite did not coerce them with force or machine guns. The CIA or other agencies may have been manipulating Applewhite or he may have been working for them. No one knows. The true lesson from the HG mass suicide is, once again, "belief is the enemy."

4. Belief in salvation or apocalypse because of the paranormal is not the same thing as a zetetic interest in the paranormal.

   Do UFOs exist? Undoubtedly. There are things in our skies that cannot be identified as known objects. What are they? Who knows -- I happen to think there are several good competing theories, but I happen to doubt the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and tend to lean toward multiple sources of causation. Does remote viewing exist? Undoubtedly. What is it? It could be a form of out-of-body experience, or a form of clairvoyance, or a form of precognition. Most of what I've seen suggests it has elements of each. The bottom line is it appears to work but we don't know why. Aspirin works, and we're not sure why. Do comets and other bodies strike Earth, causing global catastrophes, perhaps with fixed periodicity? Almost all astronomers agree on this; they're just not sure how often. None of them seem to think that the odds of one striking Earth between 2000 and 2012 is any higher that at any other point over the next few million years.

   Are there conspiracies and cover-ups? Yes. For thousands of years, people seeking power have conspired. History demonstrates this empirically. The track record of the modern military-industrial-intelligence complex is clear and demonstrable. Are there militia groups spreading ridiculous and unbelievable conspiracies involving the United Nations, federal agencies, and racial or religious groups, that are spreading unnecessary paranoia? Yes. Some are doing this out of ignorance or hatred or a feeling of powerlessness, and others are being manipulated, which is the true conspiracy. There are black helicopters, there are crop circles, and there are cattle mutilations; I am not certain any of the current theories about any of these phenomena at this moment are correct. The government does abuse its power, there are those who want it to make it more like a police state, but at the moment, even dissident Noam Chomsky agrees that most Americans live under fairly free conditions.

   Is there anything to worry about with the millenium? I think the answer to this is a simple "no." Westerners seem to have a big hangup about the number zero. When the odometer rolls over, it's a big event. What we are calling the year 2000 is a non-zero year in many other cultures, including the Islamic. Plus for the Western world, the 21st century and the third millenium start on January 1, 2001. For various reasons, millenial epochs seem to be times of great religious and ideological ferment. This was true in Biblical times, in the year 1000, and today. This seems to be part of our "zero hangup." Many of the prophecies, such as Nostradamus', which supposedly pinpoint 2000 as a big year, are so vague that they could be talking about any other time. But are there a lot of social and epistemological trends suggesting we are living in an important transitional period, with many of those trends peaking around 2012 or so? Yep. Check fractal timepieces at the door, please.

   Is there life after death? This is the $64,000 question. No one knows. And although there's various phenomena, like the NDE and OBE, which suggest maybe it doesn't all end when the body shuts down, no one's come back to give us definitive proof of an afterlife. Of course, I know of no other religious tradition other than HG which suggests our next destination after this life is the lobby of a spacecraft. It should be noted that most 'mainstream' religious and spiritual traditions eschew suicide. Most also reject total abnegation of the physical body and castration as a "solution" for sexuality. Life is too precious to be "shed." And most also reject total isolation from any sort of outside contact, or total subjugation to a charismatic leader or "guru".

   Is interest in the paranormal tantamount to "snuffing the candle of reason," or "believing in demons," or "submitting to blind superstition?" No. To me it's irrational, unempirical, and self-delusional to assume the unknown is already known or unknowable. The paranormal is not axiomatically within the domain of religion or faith. The path of Mars in the sky in the 15th century was "paranormal" because it couldn't be explained at that time; so was the fall of meteors in the 18th century; so was ball lightning for much of the 20th century. It's rational, logical, and sensible to attempt to investigate and explain the unknown. Because groups like HG reject life because they are afraid to face the unknown, doesn't mean that we should.

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