Prime Time Replay:
Keith Harary's Second Interview
Penetrating the Mind of Heaven's Gate
MsgId: *infinities(6)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:06:08 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
Hi, it's time for Infinities with our guest, psychologist and cult expert Keith Harary, who has worked, previously, with the survivors of the Jonestown Massacre. Welcome, Keith. Today I'd like to continue our discussion with the eternal question: How is it possible that members of the Heaven's Gate cult were so naive. How could they buy into the mythology of salvation by UFO, as put forth by their founder? Start with some history of this cult, perhaps?
MsgId: *infinities(7)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:08:56 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
Good evening, Pam. Glad to be here again. You have asked the eternal question when it comes to cults: How can people get so absorbed in a belief system that seems completely insane to the rest of us? I have spent years trying to study that question. What I have found, so far, is that this group -- Heaven's Gate -- was not very different from other groups in one important respect. People do not start out with utterly extreme beliefs. The beliefs become more extreme over time.
MsgId: *infinities(8)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:11:53 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
Can you explain the evolution of that situation for the Heaven's Gate crew, please?
MsgId: *infinities(9)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:13:48 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
Heaven's Gate has a more than 20 year history. At first, the group was not focused on a suicidal ideology -- at least that is what I am told by those who were there. It reportedly became suicidal after the death of Applewhite's female counterpart. He apparently became despairing, and that despair spilled over into the group's ideology. They then took a more suicidal bent.
MsgId: *infinities(10)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:16:36 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
Let's expand on that --How did the group start, and what were the beliefs they clung to in the beginning?
MsgId: *infinities(13)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:17:37 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
At first there was the notion that the spaceship was going to come and pick up the "crew." Back when the comet Kohoutek passed by the Earth in 1973, Applewhite and his companion Bonnie Nettles, called Bo and Peep back then, expected a ship to come get everyone. When that did not happen, people were disappointed to say the least! Then Nettles died in 1985, which was a shock to everyone; in the group's mythology, she was supposed to be immortal. They had to change the ideology to keep it somehow consistent. So the idea became one of leaving the physical body behind and getting beamed up via death to a passing UFO. Then, of course, came Hale Bopp and the rest is history.
MsgId: *infinities(14)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:19:55 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
Still, the ideas seem so outrageous! How did members of the cult go from relatively normal people in society to suicides seeking transcendence by UFO?
MsgId: *infinities(15)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:21:11 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
Actually, I'll be having breakfast with a former Heaven's Gate member from the early days, tomorrow morning, and I hope to be filled in on a lot of missing details. The essentials are that the group leaders claimed to be aliens who had entered human bodies, and they also claimed that Jesus Christ had been part of their same crew. They claimed to be here on Earth looking for other crew members who had beamed down into human form to experience this world. The physical Earth, our world, was a "classroom" and, eventually, to graduate you had to drop the body. If you waited until the body died on its own, you couldn't beam up. To show your faith, and catch the UFO, you had to take your own life.
MsgId: *infinities(16)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:22:10 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
Please don't get me wrong when I say that the ideas are only outrageous relative to other ideas that people hold dear . . .
MsgId: *infinities(17)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:23:39 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
What is the essential difference between this belief system and that of conventional religions, which often promise salvation and transcendence as well?
MsgId: *infinities(18)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:25:37 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
Many people believe in the Messiah. Many people believe in God. Many people also believe in benevolent aliens and UFOs. Many people also believe that aliens have been influencing human history for a very long time behind the scenes. In fact, many people believe what the members of this cult believed -- that the Bible actually reports a story of early ET influence on Earth. I am NOT saying that I believe in these ideas -- but they are widespread. Is the leap from there to putting it all into the Heaven's Gate doctrine really very extreme? The cult merely drew upon material that was already there and put it together in a new and more dangerous way.
MsgId: *infinities(19)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:27:35 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
Yet killing yourself is so final, and so scary. How could these people be so certain? Do you really believe that all 39 went calmly and sanguinely into that long goodnight?
MsgId: *infinities(20)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:29:28 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
Many, many religions are based in very authoritarian concepts. Many -- probably most or perhaps all -- religions promise transcendence and/or salvation via denial of more corporeal fulfillment in the material world. I have felt, for a long time, that the belief in alien abductions has been becoming more and more of a religion for modern times. It is also based upon a kind of faith, and the notion that salvation lies somewhere out there in the great beyond with beings who are wiser, more powerful, perhaps more dangerous than us. This idea is not new to cults. They merely, as they always will, draw upon whatever is available and package it in their own manipulative way. The Bible has been used and misused by cults as a basic tool for many decades.
MsgId: *infinities(21)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:30:31 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
I do not believe that all 39 went gently into that goodnight. It all seemed very staged to me . . .
MsgId: *infinities(22)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:34:01 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
From the beginning, I asked myself how the people who died in the various shifts were selected. It seems likely that the most "devout" or the most extreme, certainly, would be left for the end. You would have to be sure that they would actually do themselves in when there was no one around to watch. So it also, conversely, seems likely that the least certain may have been the first ones to go. We cannot judge anything by the way the bodies looked after the fact. Who mixed the poison? Who placed the plastic bags over people's heads and held them down? Even on drugs, many of us would fight like hell to protect our lives -- it is human instinct. All that aside, even if they went "willingly", if they did so because they believed -- were "convinced" of something that was totally false, that is still murder in my book.
MsgId: *infinities(24)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:38:03 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
While I am waiting for your next question, let me add that the real issue here is human vulnerability. We are only shocked that anyone could be so vulnerable as to commit suicide in the name of a cult when we do not understand the inherent weakness of the human mind. I am not at all surprised. People not only commit suicide for strange ideas. They also commit murder. It is ultimately a question of context. When people come to exist within a frame of reference in which the meaning of certain acts becomes twisted, then it becomes possible to do things that otherwise would seem crazy because they do not seem crazy within that altered context.
MsgId: *infinities(23)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:35:29 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
Have any of the autopsy results of the Heaven's Gate cult members validated your point of view --that some of the members may have been coerced?
MsgId: *infinities(26)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:41:56 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
I have heard rumors about the autopsies that seem to suggest that some people may not have gone as quietly as we might have been led to believe. I plan to do my best to track those rumors down and find out if they have any substance. Of course, the act of suicide within the context of this group was envisioned as a kind of salvation -- not death, but rebirth. In some sense, the members believed they were escaping death by killing themselves -- because they believed that Earth was about to be "spaded under." So it also does not/would not surprise me to find that most went "willingly" --with the caveat that their free will was broken by the cult, and their ability to reason and contemplate such a decision was definitely off balance.
MsgId: *infinities(25)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:39:59 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
What was that altered, twisted reality like for the cult members? Can you take us inside their heads, perhaps, and recreated a bit of this cult consciousness?
MsgId: *infinities(27)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:43:04 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
Lets get into the heads of the cult members, as you asked . . .
MsgId: *infinities(28)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:45:39 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
In fact, I spent quite a bit of time -- recently -- trying to do so. I went down into the depths of the group's publications, and tried to take on the beliefs and perspective for a while. It was almost like trying on a mental suit. Consider what it is like to feel like a complete outsider here on Earth . . .
MsgId: *infinities(29)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:48:35 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
You do a lot of things within the group to enforce this sense of separation from the world. You literally, physically, separate yourself from your loved ones -- and begin to think of them ONLY as connected to your physical form. But your spiritual self belongs to the group, and "always" has belonged. You are a visitor here on Earth. You find the Earth a violent and terrible place. You turn every feeling you have ever had of wanting to fit in, be comfortable, into a longing to go "home," which you now have come to view as being out there, somewhere very different, on a higher plane of existence. . . .
MsgId: *infinities(30)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:53:12 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
You find yourself feeling very close to the members of the group, and very distant from humanity as a whole. You have a new name, and when you look around you see a new kind of family -- a "crew" of people who believe in the things you do, who dress like you, who cut their hair like you, who all eat together, and who have been through some very bizarre and other-worldly experiences together, such as wearing hoods for months and not seeing one another's faces . . .
MsgId: *infinities(31)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:53:45 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
You come to believe that this is the only place where you belong. You feel like you finally fit in. The rest of the world seems empty and false, a distant memory. You don't want to be left behind when the rest of the group goes. It is a very sad place that masquerades as a happy place. It is a very dark place to be. After a while you forget about the precious parts of life that none of us really want to leave behind. When you are fully in the clutches of the group, anything is possible. And nothing is possible.
MsgId: *infinities(32)
Date: Sun Apr 13 22:55:29 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
From where I sit, in the regular work-a-day world, it seems like a distant, impossible journey to get to that point. I feel as if I would need to be insane to behave as the Heaven's Gate cult did. Any response?
MsgId: *infinities(33)
Date: Sun Apr 13 23:04:12 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
I believe that we are all fully capable of our own personal brand of insanity. For some, it is staying in a loveless marriage that is full of violent physical abuse. So called "normal" people do that sort of thing every day. For some it is chasing the almighty dollar to the exclusion of any deeper fulfillment. For some, it is believing in aliens. Now you, personally, and any particular Omni reader, may not fit into any of the above statements. But we ALL have our weaknesses and our vulnerabilities. We ALL have our beliefs. Most of us, at some point, have known the pain of falling in love with someone who is quite inappropriate for us.
MsgId: *infinities(34)
Date: Sun Apr 13 23:04:37 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
What would we do if, in that vulnerable state, the object of our "insane" affections began to manipulate us for their own benefit? Being human means being vulnerable. It does not really matter WHAT the beliefs are in any given case. What matters is how people get there. They get there by being human, and allowing people with a hidden agenda to get hold of their humanity.
MsgId: *infinities(35)
Date: Sun Apr 13 23:06:28 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Moderator At: 168.100.204.58
Thank you, Dr. Harary, for joining us in this episode of Infinities. We'll see you throughout the month, on OMNI Chat, and in our Live Science section, as you continue to dissect and explain the bizarre world of the cult. Goodnight!!
MsgId: *infinities(36)
Date: Sun Apr 13 23:08:30 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary At: 152.172.164.21
Thank you and goodnight!
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