Cult following, p.22
Cult Following, page 22
Then came the Hale-Bopp Comet, one of the brightest and most observed comet approaches in decades. It was discovered in 1995 via telescope but didn’t become visible to the naked eye for another year. And it just got brighter and brighter in the sky for another year after that, fascinating millions across the Northern Hemisphere, which had the best view of it.
Heaven’s Gate took it as a sign. They believed that the bright astronomical event hid a spaceship, and they weren’t alone in this belief. As discussed earlier, the Planetary Activation Organization believed something similar, and many UFO conspiracy theorists were concurrently conjecturing about an extraterrestrial object hiding in the shadow of the comet. Still, Heaven’s Gate believed that the hidden ship was coming specifically for them. It was time to finally ascend. And after the death of Nettles, they believed they would have to leave their physical bodies to do so.
The thirty-nine members—twenty-one women and eighteen men—were found dead in a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, on March 26, 1997. A tip had been phoned in by Rio DiAngelo, a cult member who had been tasked with staying behind to ensure the Heaven’s Gate story was told accurately. He was still a believer twenty-five years later when he was interviewed by Diane Sawyer on ABC News, but he admitted that he had to “move on” so that he could both support and focus on his family. He explained his pull toward the cult this way: “I was always looking for answers, looking for purpose in my life. I loved these people…. We were all celibate individuals, looking forward to self-advancement.”
The members of Heaven’s Gate committed suicide by ingesting barbiturates and vodka, the former mixed with pudding or applesauce. They then put plastic bags on their heads and lay down on their mattresses. They killed themselves in shifts. The first fifteen were arranged peacefully in their beds by other members, the shrouds laid atop them. Then the next fifteen. Then the final nine, which included Applewhite himself. Not all of them died from the poison; some died from asphyxiation in the bag. Their identical black track suits had armbands that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” which was another Star Trek reference: “away team” was the term for officers who would leave the ship to go on missions.
All the members filmed goodbye videos that showed them happy and excited, including one member who ended hers with “Thirty-nine to beam up.” Among those thirty-nine who got beamed up was Thomas Nichols, the estranged brother of actress Nichelle Nichols, who had played the groundbreaking character Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek series.
A press release was posted on the Heaven’s Gate website about the “Next Level” event. In white copy on a starry background, the first paragraph of the press release read:
By the time you receive this, we’ll be gone—several dozen of us. We came from the Level Above Human in distant space and we have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task, to return to the world from whence we came—task completed. The distant space we refer to is what your religious literature would call the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God.
The press release ended with an invitation for others to follow their example and shed their crass humanity for an interstellar destiny:
We suggest that anyone serious about considering this go into their most quiet place and ask, scream, with all of their being, directing their asking to the Highest Source they can imagine (beyond Earth’s atmosphere), to give them guidance. Only those “chosen” by that Next Kingdom will know that this is right for them, and will be given the courage required to act.
Members left individual suicide letters as well—long ones, almost essays, some of which appeared on the Heaven’s Gate website. They echoed the same sentiments—that there was nothing wrong in their lives, that they were looking forward to the next phase of existence, and that they trusted Ti and Do completely. Member Stephen McCarter wrote, “My more intimate reasons for wanting to leave at this time come not from any sense of hopelessness or despair, as one might suspect. Quite the contrary, it is a profoundly joyous time for me—the fulfillment of everything I have always hoped for.” Erika Ernst wrote, “The main reason is that I know who Ti & Do are. They are members of the Kingdom of Heaven and I know it. I knew the day I met them.”
In the months following the discovery of the mass suicide, three previous members of Heaven’s Gate would take their own lives. An unrelated person whose suicide imitated the cult members’ left a note explaining that he wanted to go to the spaceship hiding in the Hale-Bopp Comet.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Nike retired the Decade shoes that the members wore. They had been chosen because the cult got a good deal on them and because they liked the pun formed by combining Applewhite’s nickname of Do with Nike’s slogan “Just do it.” Today you can find shoes from the same line on eBay, priced as high as $6,600, each listing invariably featuring a reference to the cult that made the design infamous.
To this day, the Heaven’s Gate website is still up, in all its cheesy 1990s glory, kept operational by members who didn’t ascend and believe the away team will return at any moment to collect them.
Heaven’s Gate, in many ways, is the iconic cult and the perfect one with which to end this book. They were a UFO cult at the height of a UFO craze. An internet cult at the cusp of that world-changing technology. A group that looked to the sky for answers, the way humans have from the very beginning. And they committed the largest mass suicide in the history of the United States. They were a group of otherwise normal people balanced at the tip of a strange point in history and, for reasons that will in some ways always be a mystery, subject to bizarre ideas and practices that led to mass tragedy. They were a cult.
EPILOGUE
No Cure for Cults
I wrote this book during the most devastating period of my life to date. And hopefully ever. As a result of that sad serendipity, the basic motivation for joining a cult was not elusive to me. I couldn’t even pretend journalistic objectivity or scientific curiosity. Sure, the search for truth, protection, purpose, salvation, and betterment are accurate and overlapping reasons why people join cults, but, since the act of joining a cult is fundamentally an emotional one, these categories mostly just helped me organize this book.
The truth is, when you are drowning in deep distress—whether physical or mental or existential—you don’t question the hand that reaches down to save you. You don’t inspect its nails or its rings or devote precious breath to investigating who that hand is connected to. You just grab it. Desperately.
And before you know it, you’re on a boat that somebody else is piloting, heading in a direction that you had no part in choosing, and for a while that’s fine. Even great. It’s a relief. And certainly way better than drowning. But the longer you are on that boat, the farther it gets from everything you once knew. And if you ever have doubts about being in that boat, your choice is stark: either stay in the boat and continue the course no matter where it leads, or jump back into the lonely, dangerous waters, even farther adrift than you were before. Fortunately for me, the hands that reached out to save me didn’t belong to members of a cult.
Despite the large range of cult types in this book—foot cults and UFO cults and hollow-earth cults and doomsday cults and sex cults and therapy cults—the commonalities and repeated patterns among them are evident, even at a quick glance. They include:
1. The rules of the organization do not apply to its leader.
2. The leader sees themself as preternaturally unique and gifted.
3. The organization is isolated geographically or socially.
4. The organization acts according to urgent predictions of an impending world-changing event.
5. The organization impoverishes members by fundraising intensely from their pockets and estates.
6. The organization expounds ideas that are an unoriginal mishmash of the teachings of other organizations.
7. The organization has a boring-ass name.
Of course, cults can share more commonalities than the above seven, depending on the type of cult or other distinguishing elements. For instance, if the leader of the cult is a man, that leader will almost invariably invoke the right to have sex with any woman in the cult.
Still, despite all of those loudly flapping red flags, we join cults simply because we’re human beings. Joining a cult fulfills a yearning in us that is as fundamental as hunger. Or thirst. Or whatever it is inside me that makes me crave Caramellos and M*A*S*H reruns. In other words, joining a cult doesn’t just fulfill a spiritual need, it fulfills a biological one—and not just the need to form social groups.
It’s as if evolution realized the mistake it made in allowing a self-aware animal to come into existence, one that knows that it is weak and fragile and doomed to die. So evolution righted that error, or balanced it with a new kind of survival mechanism: the tendency that makes us join spiritual organizations like religions, sects, and cults. That fabled God-shaped void is really shaped like a cult. It’s the shape of a group of like-minded people who are special to us and led by a convincing leader. We’re always pursuing that sense of peaceful, simple purpose to calm the raging in our heads, to shield us from the terrors of our situations, to mute the overwhelming sensation of being an anonymous one in eight billion hurtling on a rock through a void so massive that it cannot be measured or mapped.
Which means that as long as there are people on that rock, there will always be cults.
SELECTED
Bibliography
Atkins, Stephen E. Encyclopedia of Modern Worldwide Extremists and Extremist Groups. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004.
Festinger, Leon, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
Guinn, Jeff. Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
———. The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
———. Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Jones, Faith. Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult. New York, NY: William Morrow, 2022.
Kaihla, Paul. Savage Messiah: The Shocking Story of Cult Leader Rock Thériault and the Women Who Loved Him. Toronto, ON: Doubleday Canada, 1993.
Lewis, James R., ed. The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death. London, UK: Routledge, 2016.
Lindstrom, Lamont. Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
Millner, Lyn. The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 2015.
Palmer, Susan J. Aliens Adored: Raël’s UFO Religion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
———. The Nuwaubian Nation: Black Spirituality and State Control. London, UK: Routledge, 2010.
Stille, Alexander. The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Urban, Hugh B. Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.
Zeller, Benjamin E. Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2014.
Acknowledgments
I’ve two groups to thank for the existence of this book. First is the crack team at Quirk who put an astounding amount of care into this book, as they always do with their books: My editor and inerrant shepherd, Rebecca Gyllenhaal. Publisher Jhanteigh Kupihea for her benevolent attention and sage ideas. Julie Ehlers, Kassie Andreadis, and Jane Morley for corralling my wild text on this tightwire of a topic. And Elissa Flanigan for designing the book and Joshua Noom for creating the cover, elevating this pile of words into an actual impressive artifact.
And then I’d like to thank those who, over the past year or so of my life, lent me ears and shoulders, beds and roofs, counsel and commiseration—basically, massive chunks of their physical lives and emotional energy for this project of a person, and without many of whom this book wouldn’t exist. My daughters, Esme, Hazel, and Olive. My father, Edward Ocker, and his wife, Suzanne Malone. Lifelong friends Mike and Trish Colombo. Zach Sanzone. Brad Eardley. Becky Shott. Christian Haunton. Jacob Strunk. Alex Slater. Adam Perry. Frank and his dogs. Katharine Bromley. Natalie Ash. Hazel Lydon. Jim Logan. Kandace Carpenter. Roger Barr. Victoria Bevan. Munther El Akabi. Angela Nilsson. Will Webster. Tripp Wilson. Caleb Ryan. Una Dunne. Catharine Bindschedler. Alex Carr. Alex Rodrigues. John Rozum. Doug Cross. James Lurgio. Samiya Anwar. Mitch Scott. Linda Stevens. Sarah Chrystal. Janet Hand. Jay Asher. Kathryn O’Shields. Bryan Moore. Joey, Diane, and Jessica Vento. Katy Richards. Zach Shaw. George Dryden. Em Holmes. Bill Huxley. Katie Sedler. Tim Dunne. Haylee Swanson. Dawne Sohn. Thank you, all.
David Borgenicht Chairman and Founder
Jhanteigh Kupihea President and Publisher
Nicole De Jackmo EVP, Deputy Publisher
Andie Reid Creative Director
Jane Morley Managing Editor
Mandy Sampson Production Director
Shaquona Crews Principal, Contracts and Rights
Katherine McGuire Assistant Director of Subsidiary Rights
CREATIVE
Alex Arnold Editorial Director, Children’s
Jess Zimmerman Editor
Rebecca Gyllenhaal Associate Editor
Jessica Yang Assistant Editor
Elissa Flanigan Senior Designer
Paige Graff Junior Designer
Kassie Andreadis Managing Editorial Assistant
SALES, MARKETING, AND PUBLICITY
Kate Brown Senior Sales Manager
Christina Tatulli Digital Marketing Manager
Ivy Weir Senior Publicity and Marketing Manager
Gaby Iori Publicist and Marketing Coordinator
Kim Ismael Digital Marketing Design Associate
Scott MacLean Publicity and Marketing Assistant
OPERATIONS
Caprianna Anderson Business Associate
Robin Wright Production and Sales Assistant
J. W. OCKER is an Edgar Award–winning writer and curator of weird history. His previous books include Cursed Objects and The United States of Cryptids. He is also the creator of the blog oddthingsiveseen.com, where he chronicles his visits to oddities around the world.
WHAT’S NEXT IN YOUR TBR PILE?
Search our complete catalog to find the book that was made for you.
Find your perfect book!
Sign up for the Quirk E. Newsletter and get up-to-date info on new releases, discounts, and exclusive giveaways. As a thank-you, we’ll send you a handful of free e-books to give you a taste of what Quirk is all about!
Sign up now!
EXPLORE THE ODD WORLD OF J.W. OCKER:
Cursed Objects
United States of Cryptids
OTHER QUIRK BOOKS YOU MIGHT ENJOY:
We Are Not Alone
Chasing Ghosts
The Ultimate Evil
Scope our site: Quirkbooks.com
Be our friend: Facebook.com/quirkbooks
Try our tweets: Twitter.com/quirkbooks
J. W. Ocker, Cult Following
