Cult Chats
Take the Cult Test: Do You Dare?
Q&A 1: A Brief Cult History
Q&A 2: Suspending Disbelief

It was powerful theater. A collective performance piece in cosmic snuff art. Doomsday never looked so serene or quite so bizarre. We may never know if the deaths of thirty-nine members of the Heaven's Gate cult were all as easy as they were made to appear after the fact. The dead are cooperative. It is easy to make the dead look peaceful. The public embraced the illusion and lost itself in the strange and gory details. An eager press and an Internet site left behind by the believers reported the specifics that became fuel for idle gossip on a world-wide scale. From their belief that a UFO was secretly trailing the Hale Bopp comet, to their practice of castration as a step toward achieving "The Level Above Human," to their desire to beam-up via death to an extraterrestrial afterlife and tour the stars, the Heaven's Gate members were clearly not like us. They were so different, in fact -- media mogul Ted Turner derisively called their deaths ``a good way to get rid of a few nuts'' -- that we were all relatively secure within the mundane womb of our own much more ordinary lives. Would that it were all so simple. In reality, the specific details of this particular situation were almost irrelevant. Viewed within the context of our inherent human vulnerability to coercive and authoritarian influence, it matters little if the victims in any particular instance died at the hands of a Marshall Applewhite, Shoko Asahara, David Koresh, Jim Jones, or even an Adolf Hitler. The focus of the movement and its dogma changes, but the essential dynamics remain the same. If we can comfortably rest assured of anything it is only that this is far from over. Eighteen years ago, in the immediate wake of the Jonestown holocaust, I moved to San Francisco to investigate the Peoples Temple and determine the truth about our vulnerability to cults. I eventually found myself directing an educational counseling program for the surviving Peoples Temple members and the former members of similar groups, at the Human Freedom Center in Berkeley -- the same institution that had asked Congressman Leo Ryan to investigate the goings-on in Jonestown, leading to his ill-fated journey to the Guyana compound. At first, I believed that most people were resistant to the seductive lure of charismatic leaders and their assorted fringe groups. If only a small percentage of people succumbed, it had to represent an aberration. When I learned that the same power dynamics that influence all of us in all kinds of social relationships are merely carried to an extreme by cults, that revelation forever changed my perceptions of the fundamental malleability of the human mind. Almost two decades later, in the aftermath not only of the Jonestown holocaust, but also of the Tokyo subway gassing, the Waco inferno, and now the mass sacrifice in Rancho Santa Fe, our need to comprehend the inner workings of cults and their implications for all of us has only become more urgent. For the next month or so, I'll explore this subject in depth from many different perspectives -- from live on-line discussions with colleagues who are actively working to expand our understanding in this area, to reports from the front, to sharing my personal reflections and analysis of the relevant issues based on my own ongoing research. --Keith Harary, Ph.D.

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Still Alive At The Whole Life Expo

Death stalks the refugees of lingering New Age consciousness as an unforgiving executioner. It is not merely a superficial, materialistic philosophy from which the true believers seek salvation. It is the cold-blooded, mortuary slab mortality of material existence itself, in all its ultimate finality. I have come to a place where the faithful gather annually to explore and exploit the fear of death in its many manifestations. The Whole Life Expo is a traveling indoor street fair extolling "natural health," "personal growth," "spirituality," and "global change," in much the same side show tone with which carnival barkers once touted the Elephant Man and the Bearded Lady. But the designated attractions of this particular road show are not the usual circus freaks. They are self-professed healers and psychics, crackpot therapists, cultists and guru wannabes grabbing at the dubious rewards of fleeting notoriety within the transient postmodern subculture of Spiritualism Revisited. This is life in America at the turn of the Millennium, or at least a part of American life -- the part that clings to simple answers and the vague, empty promise of immortality. It is a promise offered up like choices on a spiritual desert menu -- an enticement to indulge in extraordinary sounding possibilities -- from "past life regression" to "astral projection," from pursuing the "perfect body" to "avoiding death by diet," that will render the dark demon of our own inevitable demise forever irrelevant and impotent in the presence of some sort of easy, off-the-shelf, instant miracle.

I tour the attractions on the Whole Life midway and it is easy to feel cynical, deliberately playing the rube while practiced pitchmen proposition me with everything from mystical crystals to new religions. I am offered a dozen different "psychic" readings by people I would not allow to get physically close to me, let alone attempt to read my mind. "I can do a healing treatment," I overhear one character offering a woman who is suffering from a non-descript but painful affliction, "repair your imbalances and strengthen your frequencies. Just seventy-five dollars a half hour". The booth stinks of incense and he looks like a Mafia hit man, and yet within moments there is money changing hands. I am offered Tarot readings, palm readings, aura readings, numerology, and astrological charts. I meet a disturbing number of people who claim to have knowledge of contact with aliens -- some of it firsthand -- and an equally unsettling assortment of people who claim to have conflicting answers about the secret of eternal happiness, unparalleled success, extraordinary health, and the nature of the self, the spiritual, the sacred, the visionary, the cosmos, and the next Millennium. Ironically, not one of them seems especially happy, successful, spiritual, healthy, or visionary. If they were any or all of those things, why would they remain in this unlikely setting within which to discover the meaning of enlightenment, peddling New Age products in one of hundreds of identical trade show booths on the midway at the Whole Life Expo?

It might all be seen as parody were not the premises packed to the walls with an awesome number of true believers searching for something truly to believe in. But this is serious business, and there is money changing hands. Money for hope. Money for fantasies. Money for the unfulfilled promise of an ultimate answer that will finally surpass and subdue the unfathomable mysteries of life, death, and basic human suffering. Money for the empty promise of immortality. All that unfounded hope in the impossible leads inextricably into despair and self- loathing and, therefore, to further seeking. That may be good marketing, the kind of vicious cycle that sells crystals and dubious "psychic" readings but it is also, in fact, tyranny. It is consciousness without conscience.

It is an atmosphere, not surprisingly, in which the cults are also out in force. Spiffed up. Polished to the point of being slick. Slick to the point of being evasive. Actively recruiting. I encounter a recruiter for a cult group I already know holds extreme beliefs about an ancient, spiritual connection between human beings and extraterrestrials that rival those of Heaven's Gate. "This looks fascinating," I tell him, playing the idiot. He reflexively tries to sell me a book. "Can you tell me what you believe in?" I ask. For the next ten minutes, he evades the question while pressing me to "come to a meeting if you want to meet some really interesting people". I tell him I'll be there even though I'd rather be chained to a cactus and forced to watch reruns of "I Love Lucy". The story is the same at another booth -- featuring a group that is notorious for suing journalists who so much as mention its name in print. The name of the group, however, is nowhere to be found on the booth itself. Nor do any of the recruiters mention the name as they try to sell me books.

Hours later, as the lights go down, the tent is struck, and the traveling carnival prepares to head out for another gig, I find myself wading through the countless brochures and flyers that litter the darkened recesses of the expo floor. The vacated hall feels much the way reality itself may feel after the turn of the Millennium, when all that is left of the wild party in the waning years of the previous century may be our abandoned illusions littering the floor on the morning after. It is conceivable that somewhere within that spiritual hangover we may finally resolve to give up binging on easy answers and accept our own imperfect mortality for what it is ù the uninflated price of being human.

Sent By: Keith Harary, Ph.D. on Sunday, May 25, 1997 at 20:23:13.

The Challenge To Our Imaginations

Molly's Story, Part 3: Remembrances of her life in the Heaven's Gate cult

The irony of my experience with The Two is deeply painful. Bonnie Nettles died of cancer. Marshall Applewhite and his followers gave up not only their humanness it seems to me, but their unique individuality as well, collectively choosing to destroy their staunchly devoted bodies like they were meaningless mechanical vehicles. When I entered into the Process (as we called it back in the 70s) the belief was that if either the Man or the Woman died, they would repair their bodies and re-enter life, physically, in the same manner as Christ did some two thousand years ago. Their emphasis in those days was on the fact that this one we call Christ did not leave his body in the grave, but took it with him into the next level. The point in those days was that integration of body and soul/mind, was the next evolutionary step, that the fact that we humans kept dying, separating ourselves from our physical form because of its inevitable decay, was what we were trying to overcome.

I know that sounds fantastic, and perhaps not much more intelligible than 39 people deciding to destroy their physical beings in order to obtain the next evolutionary level, but it held for me, in those days, a certain beauty, and in fact, still does. I find myself surrounded by fellow humans who both collectively and individually have defined what is "real," and yet, both science and religion, the two major forces constructing our definitions of realness, are based on assumptions. Assumptions, by their very nature are the ideas, mythologies, rational constructs, things we take for granted, concepts we "know" we can depend upon, and yet, they are only assumptions. But only on rare occasion do we have the opportunity to see them for what they are. Last week, for example, the New York Times ran a front page article that presented a "discovery" that challenged, among other things, our assumption that the speed of light is constant. Whether in the "end" the speed of light turns out to be as Einstein's Theory of Relativity predicts, or something else, is probably less important in the moment, than the realization, that we don't actually know for sure. We think we know. We have our understandings, our best thinking on the subject. But we also have the limits of human consciousness, of rational thinking, and of habitual erroneous beliefs (i.e. the sun "rises" in the morning and "sets" in the evening--when actually it's the earth that is turning.) And we have our anomalies, the events that just don't fit, that challenge our assumptions and our certitude.

I can offer up no definition of truth. As a matter of fact, I believe that was Marshall Applewhite's fundamental misstep--offering up an absolute truth. Certainties close the doors on exploration. Yet, it's so easy to demonize Applewhite, to make him the "evil brainwasher" of a group gullible and crazy misfits, when the real tragedy of Heaven's Gate, lies more in the collapse of the imagination; in each individual's confidence that every message from the cosmos was pointing to that one truth, one way, one answer, one sacred rightness.

The challenge to our species, in my opinion, is to remain open to the plenitude of possibilities, to the fact that it can't be known for certain, that the very essence of our physical realm, if our science knows anything, is built on uncertainty. I see our species being called back to wonder, to humility, and to the questioning of what is. I believe it takes genuine faith to tolerate ambiguity and paradox, to push away from anthropomorphic certitude and the species- centered arrogance which is destroying the frogs and song bird, the salmon and the seas. I don't know where my dreams are leading me, but I know I will continue to listen attentively and attempt to follow them. I trust their curious communication which led me into my involvement with The Two, and, out of it again. I trust it, if for no other reason than the fact that its constant message is one that tells me to open myself to consciousness, to evolve, and to honor everything in the universe because everything is alive and evolving; everything is capable of creating, communicating, and participating in meaning. -- Molly Dwyer

Sent By: Keith Harary, Ph.D. on Saturday, May 17, 1997 at 23:30:51.

The Role Dreaming Played

Molly's Story, Part 2: Further remembrances of Molly Dwyer's life as a member of Heaven's: Searching For Old Friends In the Cult

My friend's forehead tightened into a slight frown, "I know of one person who searched for a year and a half [for old friends in the cult]," she said. I scanned my personal history trying to find a strand of experience I could follow back to a new place, to something that might uncover a new sense of clarity or understanding. "I dreamed about The Man," I said, "just about a week before the Heaven's Gate suicides. It was strange because I hadn't thought about him in quite awhile."

She was stirring cream into her coffee, "You dreamed about the Man?"

"I was walking down this long road. I kept falling, and each time I fell, it was harder to get up. But I had to get up, if I didn't I would die, or be frozen there forever or something. I fell three times, and each time it was harder to stand up, finally the last time, my body was so heavy, I couldn't fight my way to standing. I was leaning on my arms, about to give-up and collapse back down against the dirt when I saw a tall slender man approach me. He stretched out his hand and was offering me assistance. I recognized him as a follower of The Two [Heaven's Gate]. It took all my effort to reach toward him, but once I did, even though he was at a distance and our fingers never touched, he was able to help me up. As soon as I was on my feet, I awoke."

"Your dreams," my friend smiled, "they were always so puzzling." It was true; dreaming had gotten me into The Process, as we called it back then; dreaming had driven me forward, and dreaming had given me almost all of my experiences with UFOs and extraterrestrial energies. Remembering back, I knew that from its very inception my sojourn of following The Two was attached to that nebulous world of dream and synchronicity. My experiences with them had always been surrounded in a haze of otherworldliness, the kind of aura that Newtonian thinkers toss out with a condescending smirk or a raised eyebrow that speaks of endless disdain.

I had left Mendocino during the summer of 1975 because inner events had directed me -- or at least those words seemed best to sum up the intuition that compelled me to abandon most of my worldly belongings and head off alone into the "unknown." I had been living in a mind-set where dream and waking intersected in peculiar ways. I remember waking one morning, for example, to the sounds of a cat fight in the kitchen of the house where I lived. My cat had been a timid female who never stood her ground, but I could hear from the voices that this time, she was. The fight ended and she bounded into my bedroom. I saw her as I lay there and sensed that she had experienced a victory. She leaped onto my overstuffed chair and then up onto its high back where she liked to perch. I tried to lift my head to follow her flight as she mounted from the chair to the top of a cabinet that was just above me. I remember how my head felt heavy as I lifted it, as if I had to fight against more gravity than usual, and that when I finally saw my cat sitting there, preening herself, obviously pleased, she had the head of a woman.

The incident was so odd, so incongruous that the shock of it made my head even heavier, as if sleep were a force coming over me. I fainted, except it happened slowly, and like in the dream of falling on the road, I experienced the loss of consciousness as a "pulling down" that I couldn't resist. I woke up several seconds later and indeed the cat was sitting atop the cabinet preening herself, but now she was perfectly normal, a cat with a cat's face. She had about her a glow of contentment, but that was it.

My life was filled with similar experiences in the months before I met The Two, anomalous events I called them; and there were many dreams. I remember the first UFO dream. It occurred about five months before I encountered the group that would eventually become known as Heaven's Gate. In the dream I was standing in a Mendocino field near the ocean watching a small craft swoop down toward me. It was classic, like a sunny-side-up egg, and moving so fast I could not comprehend the events I later described as a chronological series, rather they all seemed to have happened in one instance. This was due in part to the fact that as soon as I saw the craft, a strange consciousness overtook me. At first, paralysis prevented me from moving. My whole body experienced heaviness, that same weighty sense of gravity, or some other force, pushing me down against the earth. My senses felt crushed almost by a rushing, sound-like feeling, like a white noise, only faint, as if in the distance, and sensuously penetrating, as if light energy were pummeling my body. My ability to think and comprehend was heightened to a point where I knew my waking consciousness to be puny in comparison.

This realization, that what I thought of as "being awake," was but a paltry degree of perception, was tremendously disconcerting. I found consciousness oddly frightening. All this came with the sight of the UFO. It takes a paragraph to attempt to explain it, but in the dream, it was an instantaneous knowing, and because of the craft leaping through my visual domain, it was not even something I stopped to ponder. It was simply an aspect of the experience.

The craft was on a direct collision course with a stone cliff (an image that was to appear in later dreams as well). I knew this "vehicle" was moving too fast to stop or even change course, the collision was inevitable, and yet it never took place. Instead the UFO "became" light. It struck the cliff as a huge circle of light, like a beam from a powerful flashlight. As it struck, it also refracted off the cliff at an angle, light streaking back into the sky, but not as light this time, rather as if it were exposing to me a stripped down molecular structure, a skeletal reflection of its quantum reality. The whole time this unidentifiable flying energy-object was present, I was held in its grasp. Paralyzed at first, and then released to an excitement that caused me to jump up and down and call out, "Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!" over and over until finally it was gone and I awoke.

There were other dreams too, and enough synchronistic anomalies to shatter my sense of complacency. I walked around straddling two worlds, one foot in consensus reality, the other in this curious domain where events were alive with meaning and inexplicable coincidence. Ultimately, it was because I chose to follow the trail of these odd and magical happenings, that I met The Two. They too, had mystery. In retrospect, I cannot say, how much of that mystery was literally their own, and how much I created for them. I will probably never know. When I confront the world of psychodynamics that seek to tell me it was all in my head, all my own creation, and there was nothing there but what I sought to see, I balk. I find myself remembering the interesting clarity I always felt in the presence of those two people, as if my mind could see through the illusions of ordinary habitual reality, with all of its foibles and blatant self-destructive tendencies. I saw a species bent on domination of its surroundings, a society that believed its experience of consciousness was not only supreme, but the only consciousness that truly existed, and even that wonder, only some epiphenomenon of matter--some accident a mechanical lifelessness had birthed into existence. I saw not only the arrogance of such thinking, but the sad destructive alienation of it as well.

No one told me to think those thoughts. Marshall Applewhite didn't lecture to me on the inadequacies of the human imagination, nor of the human condition. He didn't talk in detail about the peculiar way our species (by constructing a vision of reality that renders everything but ourselves incapable of thought or feeling or meaningful purpose) is bent on its own exile from the cosmos. Nor did he seek to convince me that the earth is limited by this kind of thinking. Rather, in his presence, and that of his then partner Bonnie Nettles, these things were obvious to me, as obvious as the fact that my usual mode of thinking was dangerously limited and incomplete. I found myself believing that it was essential to see beyond my habitual rational patterns--beyond my human conditioning--if I intended to know anything of the fullness of the universe I was fortunate enough to inhabit.

Next: A Challenge to the Imagination

Sent By: Keith Harary, Ph.D. on Friday, May 9, 1997 at 20:06:35.

Heaven's Gate Remembered

Molly Dwyer's description of her perceptions as a former member of Heaven's Gate offers generous insights into the personal search for meaning that can sometimes lead a thoughtful person to join a cult. Her experiences as a follower of Heaven's Gate leaders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, known at that time as "The Two," seemed to provide both a setting and an outlet for exploring her inner life that was unavailable in mainstream society.

Perhaps only through understanding such experiences we may also begin to grasp the powerful attraction cults appear to offer to their new recruits. It is doubtful many people would join such groups if their experiences in doing so were all entirely negative, or if they believed they would lose all sense of perspective and independence and perhaps even end up commiting suicide in the bargain. More likely, cults and their leaders are fulfilling a deep human need in a questionable and dangerous fashion. Our effectiveness in responding to the cults, therefore, may depend in some measure upon our ability to grasp and more viably respond to these needs within the mainstream rather than leaving those who would explore their innermost nature feeling as though they have no conceivable alternative but to drop out completely.

Molly Dwyer's account of her experiences as a former Heaven's Gate member opens in a restaurant in Texas, where she is meeting with her former partner in Heaven's Gate for the first time since they wandered the country together as followers of The Two. Her partner has brought pictures of the dead for them both to review as they attempt to determine whether the victims included anyone they knew from their time in the group. -- Keith Harary

Molly's Story, Part 1

"Do you recognize any of these people?" My former partner asked me, her voice soft, a little husky, and like everything else about her, basically unchanged in the many years since we'd last seen each other. I took the two photocopied pages and stared at the images, thinking that if she had not changed in all that time, it should also be possible to recognize familiar faces among the members of Heaven's Gate. My hands felt clammy. A hint of fear tightened my chest. Around us the restaurant was lazy in its mid-afternoon lull, cavernous and mostly empty, the air conditioner softening the humid Texan heat.

I looked at the faces intently, aware of dim, indistinct memories. I was searching for features that belonged to ephemeral names that had never "really" existed, but, like my own during that period, had been vital and real to me. I was looking for Luke or Fleece, both blond and, in my distant recollection, soft-spoken and kind. I was also looking for Peter. Peter, who I remembered hearing had buried money in case of his "return" to the world. I remembered Peter well, from a sunny Oklahoma afternoon late in fall of 1975. We were standing together near the highway. I can't remember why we had stopped, but he was encouraging me not to feel dismay. I liked him because he made me laugh and I remember telling him I was afraid I'd never see him again. He'd answered me gravely, with such certainty, "Don't worry, you'll see me again!" Was he in those pictures? I hoped not. I'd held onto his words like a talisman, held onto them for over three years as I wondered the country searching for the people I had learned to call The Two.

I scanned the photocopy. Their short hair, the passage of time. I wasn't really sure I recognized anyone. One woman maybe, she brought to mind a cold fall afternoon near Taos, New Mexico, when we had camped together in our small group. For some reason her face was caught like a snapshot, sitting near her camp stove in the early morning frost, eating oatmeal. She had short hair even then, and generous, gentle eyes. But other than the association, the fact that the picture elicited the memory, I couldn't say if it was her. There was also a man I found vaguely familiar, his image reminded me that there had been an inner circle of individuals close to The Two. I had envied their closeness, I remembered, wishing for that same intense intimacy. I shook my head and looked at my companion, "Not really," I said, "I don't recognize any of them for sure."

She nodded and pointed to the picture I'd just been perusing. "I thought he looked familiar," she said. The coincidence affected me. I looked at the picture again. She pointed at two others, "And these," she said, "they looked a little familiar too." I realized that she might be right. I pointed to one other picture that had caused me to pause as my eyes swept the page. "Maybe this man, too." I said. There was a long silence as we looked at one another. I felt a little shy as the waiter came over, and noticed my impulse to gather the pages up and tuck them out of sight. I didn't want anyone to associate me with the conversation I was launching. I didn't trust what people might think. All those years ago seemed oddly close, sitting as I was, with my "friend" in Texas. We had a curious connection. We had essentially lived together for over three years as we crisscrossed the United States searching for The Two.

I laughed a little nervously and said, "I've thought we probably did more than anyone, to spread the awareness of the Two. I mean, if people scratched their head and thought they vaguely remembered something about the cult from someone they met in the Seventies, it was probably because of us." She looked at me and nodded slightly. "I doubt," I went on, "there are very many people around who had the kind of experience we did. I would be surprised if there were others who kept on for so long. We were out there for over three years looking for them."

Next: Molly's Dreams

Sent By: Keith Harary, Ph.D. on Tuesday, May 6, 1997 at 15:48:46.

The Church on the Web

Further conversations with Jacques Vallee.

Harary: Do you think that groups like Heaven's Gate are only an extreme manifestation of a more basic problem we are all having in reconciling our inner experiences with the radical technological changes going on around us? Or are such groups emerging at this particular time in history more as a response to a specific ideological shift within the culture?

Vallee: When I met the Heaven's Gate members 20 years ago, I thought I was seeing a leading indicator of what was going to happen to society at large -- the seduction into a new spiritual delusion. I was alarmed by it. I really think that they were a leading indicator. They are part of the transformation of society. From a society that once valued knowledge and experience and education into a society that is driven by instantly marketable beliefs, quick gratification, and entertainment - a society that really doesn't care about the pursuit of knowledge. All you have to do is watch 50 channels of TV to see that there is really no demand for documented fact. Every issue is polarized to create artificial polemics from which no truth can possibly emerge.

Harary: What about the Internet?

Vallee: I was going to raise that. That is the final point. Networks in general have a tremendous effect in suspending normal awareness of time and space, and this has profound consequences that are not documented anywhere.

Harary: Does it lead people to suspend critical thinking?

Vallee: Not by itself. You can have all these things happening simultaneously. More critical analysis, more facts, and a lot more garbage. All human activities get re-framed into this form of communication. We can expect to see new forms of spirituality that will be web-based. There will be entities that will only exist on the web. There will be churches that will exist only on the web, cults that will exist only on the web.

Harary: Virtual cults. Virtual religion. You see all this going on. You don't seem surprised by any of it. Yet you still say you are angry.

Vallee: I am angry, because we collectively, and I personally, could have done more. If they were religious nuts, I could say, "Well, fine. Good riddance". But the problem is that they were not religious nuts. I feel that there was no mechanism to reach them.

Harary: Are you worried about the future?

Vallee: I am not worried about the future because there are enough young people who have very clear ideas about what they want to do and who have grown up in this superficial world and want to make it better. I think they will be fine. What I am worried about is accidents along the way. I see a powerful conversion effect around UFO beliefs at high levels in the society - businessmen, people working in government who are going through a conversion analogous to what has happened in the Heaven's Gate group. We have now seen the same pattern three times: the Peoples Temple, the Order of the Solar Temple, and now Heaven's Gate. Isn't it time to sound the alarm? You and I have both seen it in ufology and parapsychology - people accept belief systems wholesale without stopping to analyze the phenomenon they are studying. It is a kind of contagion -- almost like an epidemic of pathological beliefs - spreading like an epidemic. In the process, the real research - the kind of science we'd like to see - doesn't get done.

Harary: Then we can expect to see more of the same?

Vallee: Yes. It is exciting to consider new possibilities, but it's also important not to turn what should be an open-minded scientific exploration into a new religion. Just look at the members of Heaven's Gate. They were asking all the right questions. The only problem is they found all the wrong answers.

Sent By:Keith Harary on Tuesday, April 29, 1997 at 08:42:13.

Alien Contact Through Death

Further conversations with Jacques Vallee

Harary: What is the connection between cults and the current fascination with alien abductions?

Vallee: The abduction business had a lot to do with it. There is a genuine experience here - people who have had a genuine experience. These people are sincere. They are telling the truth as they experienced it. The problem is with ufologists who call themselves researchers but have little experience with clinical hypnosis. They employ hypnotic regression techniques in an effort to help people remember their experiences, and in the process project their own fantasies into the minds of their subjects. That has two important aspects: First: It is unscientific, immoral and unethical as a process. Second: It makes a lasting impact on the lives of these people. It changes their lives. And it makes it almost impossible to really study the abduction phenomenon. This is why I have not published my own collection of case studies. Anything I would say would be drowned in the noise. I'd rather go on with quiet field research. The members of Heaven's Gate were seeking a conscious, deliberate alien contact through death. They were taking what abductionists have been claiming to its logical extreme. This is very dangerous stuff.

Harary: Heaven's Gate has been around for 25 years talking about alien abductions - the Level Above Human - so they wouldn't have gotten those ideas originally from contemporary abductionists or parapsychologists. But when you explore the Heaven's Gate web site, they have a whole page of links that will take you with the click of a mouse into the never-never land of extreme claims about UFOs and remote viewing, alleged conspiracies, militias, and the Branch Davidians. There is literally a link between the Heaven's Gate site and this other material, including a page promoting a late-night radio show famous for exploiting all of these subjects without much critical thinking. How do you reconcile the fact that Heaven's Gate has a 25-year history, and yet they left a definite trail to the most current claims being made in these areas? Would you say that the present state of confusion in the public's mind around these subjects had any real impact on the group?

Vallee: When I attended a Heaven's Gate meeting at Stanford, many years ago (it was called HIM in those days, for "Human Individual Metamorphosis") I got the impression the two leaders expected to die soon. They didn't know how it was going to happen, but they were pretty sure they would be resurrected. That would supposedly provide proof to the world that they were right. I did not get the impression at the time that the rest of the group was going to commit suicide.

Harary: Initially, it was exactly the way you said. But what I have learned is that when Bonnie Nettles died and did not resurrect, it was shocking to the group and they had to find some way to explain it. Applewhite then claimed to be in telepathic communication with her, and revised his approach into a doctrine in which you still get to travel to the Level Above Human but you can't take your body with you. That was in 1985, 12 years ago. So you have this group that was not suicidal at first but then became so.

Vallee: They did know that it would cost them their lives but they did not know how it was going to happen.

Harary: Was there much being written about claimed alien abductions when Heaven's Gate first began?

Vallee: The first publicized reported abduction, the Barney and Betty Hill case, took place in 1961 and became popularly known in the late 60s. But in the UFO community in the 50's and 60's you would already hear stories of trips to other planets in the discourse of the contactees. That stuff was all over the place. The idea of contact with aliens and another level was also there throughout theology, including the belief in reincarnation, communication with the dead -- all those things were out there. In the 40's, some Los Angeles occult groups would go out to the desert and try to call down the aliens -- they claimed they met Venusian entities. This is part of mainstream occult belief - that you can evoke entities. Aliens have become a sort of cheap version of calling up entities in another way. This is serious business with a lot of people.

Sent By:Keith Harary on Thursday, April 24, 1997 at 10:20:59.

Messengers of Deception

Harary: What was your reaction when you first heard about the Heaven's Gate suicides?

Vallee: My first reaction was anger. I was mostly angry at myself. I had written about the group back in 1979, in Messengers of Deception, after attending a meeting they held at Stanford University. They told us what they believed and I tried to warn people about what was going on, but I could have done a lot more. I even quoted them saying, "It only costs your life!" I am also angry at my colleagues in UFO research for not paying attention. Their reaction to Messengers was to say that I was making too much of a fuss about fringe groups. They were scared of this aspect of the phenomenon, so they dismissed the book.

Harary: Why do you think these groups are important?

Vallee: What happened in Heaven's Gate is part of a much more widespread belief system that is developing at many levels of society. We are seeing the border between fact and fantasy being erased - in part because people are no longer capable of understanding science. Technology has been developing so fast that the public is ready to believe anything. Two examples are the beliefs many people have about remote viewing and about alien intelligence. The fact that we now expect there is other life in the universe does not imply that there are aliens in the Pentagon or spacecraft hiding behind Hale-Bopp. Many people actually believed the stories told by self-styled remote viewers about aliens coming with the comet. And this includes several well-known, influential ufologists. People believed the story although they could have checked it out with any observatory or any astronomer - even an amateur astronomer.

Harary: Why is this happening?

Vallee: There are no simple answers. Part of it is the fact that in spite of its increasing complexity, science doesn't address many important questions. Part of it is that skeptics have denied the right of people to explore certain areas. They have kept trying to censor data regarding the paranormal. People know better; they know their experiences are real. So the public is caught between what they know to be real experiences and the denials of the academic and scientific communities. This creates a dissonance, and also a market for fraud - both in parapsychology and ufology. It makes it almost impossible to do honest research, and it opens the door to new extreme religious and spiritual movements. Early on, for example, Jim Jones met someone who convinced him he had a connection with Sirius. The people who died in Guyana believed they were going to be reincarnated on another planet.

Harary: Are there other examples of this process?

Vallee: Another example, not well known in the U.S., concerns the Order of the Solar Temple. A few days before the Heaven's Gate tragedy, a third group of Solar Temple members committed suicide. I was in France at the time, and the public was outraged. They said, "How can the authorities let this happen a third time?" Over 70 people had previously died in France and Switzerland. This time people died in Quebec, including French nationals. The Solar Temple has over 1000 members, so the deaths may continue. Maybe that will also be true with Heaven's Gate. It's not clear to me the real leader of the group is dead. Many people literally believe that there is another level beyond Earth. They believe that by giving up life here they will go on to another stage of existence. As Applewhite said at Stanford 22 years ago, "A lot of people are tired of playing the human game."

Harary: You are angry, but I don't think the authorities or anyone else could have stopped what you are talking about.

Vallee: When you look at the Order of the Solar Temple, it wasn't just people having an extreme belief pattern; they were skillfully manipulated, including the use of advanced holographic images that created fake aliens. Top-of-the-line, Hollywood-quality holographic projectors were found in one of the houses that didn't completely burn down. One of the survivors wrote about his experiences with the group. What made him a believer was that over the villa, in the sky, he once saw a shimmering green cup -- the Holy Grail. It makes you feel special to have that kind of experience. Those projections were part of an initiation. Only much later did he understand how he had been tricked.

Harary: It all certainly leads one to wonder why most ufologists have not been up in arms about such shenanigans, just as the parapsychologists have generally not paid much attention to the outrageous claims being made by many cult leaders regarding their alleged psychic powers. Could it be that they don't want anyone looking too closely at many of the claims they, themselves, have been making?

Vallee: The widespread fraud that also exists in parapsychology and ufology has reached such a level of manipulation that you get pushed out if you even look at it. I was pushed out when I looked at fraud in ufology, just as you were pushed out when you looked at fraud in parapsychology. When I wrote Messengers, I tried to bring these things out, and it is reaching people, so that gives me some measure of comfort that the public is beginning to question the ufological party line.

Sent By: Keith Harary on Wednesday, April 23, 1997 at 16:02:41.

Introduction to the Prophet of Cults

I first met Jacques Vallee while doing research into cults immediately following the Jonestown holocaust. The Human Freedom Center was a former nursing home that served as a half-way house and educational center for survivors of the Peoples Temple and other religious cults. At the time, I was conducting field research into cult psychology, and serving as the center's Director of Counseling -- educating former cultists, press, and general public about the social dynamics of cults and their leaders. Vallee, an astronomer and computer scientist with an expertise in developing computer networks that would later give rise to the Internet, had also achieved a stunning reputation as perhaps the world's leading investigator of claims pertaining to alleged UFO phenomena. That interest led inexorably to his interest in investigating cults, since many such groups -- not unlike Heaven's Gate -- make religious claims about UFOs. My interest in investigating the ways people react to claims about psychic phenomena had led me down a similar path, since virtually all religious cult leaders claim to have extraordinary psychic powers. Jim Jones, for example, manipulated his followers through faked demonstrations of miraculous healing. Marshall Applewhite claimed to be in telepathic communication with aliens.

Vallee and I have remained in close contact for nearly two decades, each experiencing a similarly hostile reaction from our former colleagues within ufology and parapsychology when we began to raise questions about widespread incompetence and fraud within our respective areas. If society at large is finding it hard to make sense of the many extreme claims currently being made about everything from alleged alien autopsies to reported remote viewing of aliens, then of those currently working within these fringe fields have done little to help clarify the situation. Indeed, they have often behaved like the members of religious cults themselves, unable to challenge accepted dogmas. Vallee had tried to warn the public and UFO research community about the dangers represented by Heaven's Gate and other UFO cults back in 1979, in his prophetic book, Messengers of Deception. The book became an underground classic, but the reaction of the pundits of ufology was almost universally negative. The posts to come are a record of our conversation.

Sent By: Keith Harary on Tuesday, April 22, 1997 at 16:00:33.

Were They Insane?

We have heard the final testimonials of the 39 dead of Heaven's Gate, speaking to us in video-taped farewells -- voices from the grave. "We are looking forward to this, we're happy and excited," said one about their impending mass suicide. We were "not forced into this in any way," claimed another. Killing themselves, another added, was "not a big deal". Still another described in rapturous terms how "lucky and happy I feel to be here".

Very few of us could appear to go as gently into that good night. It strikes us as inconceivable that any sane person could do so. We may take some small comfort in the cynical belief that the members of Heaven's Gate were all insane, or "religious nuts" at a minimum. By dehumanizing them, we can write off their deaths. It is easier to condemn than to mourn them. But doing so requires that we make a leap of faith. It requires that we transform the obvious into the superfluous.

"Here we have coming out in the media after this event, detail after detail about the inner life and workings of Heaven's Gate," says cult expert Janja Lalich. "We hear the members had to report every twelve minutes to the leader, and that they survived for months on end on one kind of incredibly bizarre diet after another -- all liquid, take 32 vitamin pills, wait a few hours, eat a cinnamon roll -- crazy stuff. We hear their sleep cycles were four hours asleep, four hours awake, four hours asleep, four hours awake -- for months on end. Covering their faces with hoods and not knowing who they were talking to -- for months on end. Wearing the same kinds of clothes. Getting rid of their names and taking on assumed names soon after they joined the group.

"We hear about the rituals and regulations and the asking permission for everything. We hear about the supreme presence of the leader and how, most of the time, most members were not even allowed to talk to him. It's as though we are hearing about all these cute little details about daily life in Heaven's Gate and nobody is saying what this really is all about. Nobody sums it all up and says, `and that is a brainwashing program'. What then are the consequences of living for years in that kind of environment? The consequences are that you end up with 38 people who, when the leader is ready to pull the plug, are led along the trail of death with him".

Androgenous images dressed for death, who were once men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, in a three-dimensional world that somehow collapsed for them into one dimension. Until life beyond the group became inconceivable. Until life as we know it became inconceivable. Until only the void seemed to hold any promise of freedom. Definitely deluded. How many times have the reporters asked the experts since the coroner autopsied the bodies, "Were they all just crazy?" as though their sanity were an internal organ that was also weighed and measured like a liver or a kidney, and all evidence to the contrary was only circumstantial.

"Were they insane?" Lalich asks me rhetorically. "One woman who died had been in the group only for six months, which really shows the power of these brainwashing techniques. In six months, a normal woman can leave her family and children behind and be led to sit in front of a camera and say that she is now going to take her own life. No they were not insane. They were true believers deluded by the leader and trapped in his version of reality. The line between being a true believer and a religious or other fanatic," she continues, "is very fine". Our ability to experience this subtle but powerful shift in perspective is what cult leaders prey upon to draw in their followers. "The problem is that you get people who have the best intentions. They get hooked into something and don't know that's the trail they're going down. They get hoodwinked".

For those who fall prey to such psychological predators, the road to cult membership is paved with good intentions. "There are thousands of con artists out there who are tricking people into some kind of psychological scam," says Lalich, "and it has a veil of sometimes religion, sometimes psychotherapy, sometimes martial arts, sometimes a diet, sometimes a political goal, sometimes parapsychology, sometimes healing, sometimes UFOs, sometimes massage therapy. You name it and it's out there. Self-awareness workshop. Business workshop. Whatever the veil is, there are con artists who put up the veil, stand behind it, and draw people in without their really knowing what's behind the veil".

Whatever seductive form the monster behind the veil assumes, it is typically not the insane who succumb, but often those who believe they are invulnerable. Under the influence of such potent techniques as those used by Heaven's Gate leader, Marshall Applewhite, those who take pride in considering themselves individualistic thinkers may come to view their cult involvement as an expression of their independence. The more deeply they fall under the leader's spell, the more powerfully they may feel the need to envision themselves as gaining a new level of emancipation from the world at large. This is just the kind of spiritual paradox that gives rise to extreme conformity under the banner of achieving independence. In the most extreme example, even commiting suicide can be reframed by the leader as the ultimate form of liberation. -- Keith Harary

Editors note: Janja Lalich will be Keith Harary's guest in a live, on-line special event on Thursday, May 1st, 8:00-9:00 p.m. eastern time, here at Omni. She is currently Education Director at Community Resources on Influence & Control in Alameda, California. She is also coauthor of three acclaimed books: Captive Hearts, Captive Minds: Freedom and Recovery from Cults and Abusive Relationships; Cults in Our Midst: The Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives; and "Crazy" Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work?.

Next Posts: An Interview with Jacques Vallee

Sent By: Keith Harary on Monday, April 21, 1997 at 21:39:20.

Being & Nonbeing: A Cult Member's Reality

Main Street in Tiburon looks like a fairy tale movie set. There is a painted unreality about the place, as though it is an artist's rendition of Small Town America in two dimensions propped up from behind by wooden supports. The tourists pick their way through the shops and restaurants along the story book boulevard and fall into a casual stupor, even stepping into oncoming traffic that must not seem fully real to them. It is an unlikely and yet appropriate setting in which to meet with a former member of Heaven's Gate. One of the essential tenets of the group was the real world as we know it is a thinly veiled illusion, and that there is a higher and more tangible realm -- a Level Above Human -- behind the superficial facade of the everyday real.

I show up early and loiter in front of the Swedish bakery, waiting for a voice I met two days ago on the phone to take human form. I imagine her strolling up in a black space suit and matching Nikes, looking like a manifestation from the Outer Limits. But when she arrives, she is pleasantly normal, and garbed in a flowing and colorful outfit that I immediately associate with Haight Ashbury in the 1960's. She is not other-worldly, but obviously human. It makes the point more salient that the 39 bodies decomposing in their beds in Rancho Santa Fe were also of the equally human variety. For all of their extraterrestrial aspirations, I have no doubt, they left this world as fully human as they all came into it.

We segue into an easy conversation over coffee. If there are any aliens present, they are only the pigeons glaring at us from a nearby railing. A sign above our table says to watch your food or the birds will eat it. There is something vaguely dreamlike about the possibility. There is also something dreamlike about our conversation, which gradually converges on the unanswered metaphysical questions that are implicit in our everyday perceptions.

For all we know, my breakfast companion tells me, reality as it is experienced by a pigeon may be completely different from the world as we know it. A pigeon, or a horse -- or another person -- may perceive the color "red" as a visual experience I've never imagined. My perceptions of the mundane world may be a one-of-a-kind illusion, or something I share with only a small number of people, or with only certain species. There is no valid way to compare and contrast our experiences, because every perspective would be self-fulfilling within its own context and therefore immune to independent verification. There would be no way to tell if one or the other were closer to some possible fundamental truth about a larger and more independent reality, or if the truth itself is finally and necessarily subjective.

It is a possibility that I find both liberating and disconcerting. If my experience of reality is unique, then I am no more beholden to the personal aesthetic of any other human being than I am to the worldview of a cockroach. And others are equally unaccountable to me for their aesthetic. But the lack of any mutually consistent frame of reference is also disorienting. If I cannot make valid comparisons between my own perceptions and those of other people, then I could also find myself doubting the integrity and authenticity of my own perceptions. Such a state of mind can lead to a powerful need for reassurance, and for a sense of connection to a larger reality beyond my experience of the everyday world.

Those were the kinds of questions, my companion tells me, that had preoccupied her thinking when she first found herself drawn toward Heaven's Gate. She was not a misguided trekkie in a home-made uniform, but an obviously thoughtful person filled with unanswered -- and perhaps unanswerable -- questions about the meaning of existence. The questions she was pondering about the purpose of a fleeting human life, the existence of God, and the nature of perception, were the right ones to be asking. But there appeared to be no satisfactory setting within mainstream society to attempt to find the answers.

The empty spaces created by those unanswered questions were the ones that Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles -- somehow seemed for a time to fill. If the answers they provided to their followers seemed ludicrous, they were also not entirely devoid of any sense of higher meaning. It was almost as though it was only by allowing themselves to lose their grip on ordinary reality that the members of Heaven's Gate could truly aspire to ascend to the Level Above Human. By allowing the irrational to become the rational, and the rational to become the irrational, their relationship to reality itself might be altered until they literally became something else from the inside out. The members would necessarily need to let go of any ties to their former selves in the process.

My companion tells me that in the course of her own long experience within Heaven's Gate, she changed her name at least thirty times, each time letting go and moving on when a given identity seemed to become too tangible -- each time becoming someone else in an effort to leave a little more of her humanity behind in the quest to embody something greater and more real at a higher level of existence. That process of fitting her innermost perceptions of herself more and more snugly into the reality context created by the group seemed like a kind of transformation. For better or for worse, she finally managed to perceive ordinary reality from a radically altered perspective.

During the three years she spent in the group in the early 1970's, she wandered the country like a homeless hippie focusing on little more than altering her perceptions of herself and the nature of reality. It would be, Applewhite told his followers, the hardest thing they would ever have to do. Sometimes the members traveled in pairs, sometimes as a larger group, but the focus was always on forming no lasting connections with the outside world and leaving little pieces of their humanity behind along the way, like a trail of breadcrumbs they were never to retrace. It was always, more than anything else, about letting go. She was forbidden to read books, to watch the news, to enjoy playing the piano, to indulge in sexual feelings, or to do anything else that smacked in any way of submitting to mundane human experiences.

At the time, there was no mansion filled with computers in southern California. There was a sleeping bag and the open road. Even money was considered too much a part of the human world. She was told simply to ask people for whatever she needed -- not for money to cover expenses unless that was absolutely essential -- but specifically for the necessities that money would otherwise buy. If she was tired, she would ask for a place to sleep. If she was hungry, she would ask for food. She covered the obvious questions by claiming to be a Jesus Freak and approaching good Christians in local churches. The story was not entirely a fabrication. The only difference between her and them was that she believed the Kingdom of Heaven was a physical place from which Christ had descended as an alien visitor. Her wanderings on the open road were a literal tribute to the life-style of the early Christians.

Such an experience doesn't feel like brainwashing because the individual going through it appears to be in complete control. But the process of mind control is not so much imposed from an outside force as it is imposed from within. Marshall Applewhite set the rules and created the context in which embracing normal human feelings became unacceptable. But the members of Heaven's Gate needed to consciously control their own thought processes in every waking moment in order to pursue the promise of enlightenment within the context of the group.

Any notion of free will within that context becomes an abstraction. When a stable human identity is systematically abandoned by the roadside and physical reality appears to lose its substance, then the only apparent refuge in an otherwise unpredictable universe becomes the dangerous territory of the group itself.

Note: More from this cult member in a later post.

Sent By: Keith Harary on Friday, April 18, 1997 at 13:19:46.

The Aliens R Us

The Heaven's Gate suicides are still a hot topic of conversation on late night radio. I listen to the voices in my car -- a low, black sedan that has the look and feel of a panther prowling through San Francisco. I prowl past the prostitutes and porno palaces of the Broadway strip, watching the ordinary emptiness of sex for hire from a distance, while the voices warn of the impending millennium and speculate about alien visitors.

I have been driving for hours, through the dingy real world, while the voices in my car speak of powerful forces and extraterrestrial technology. I drive past a housing project and picture rats crawling through the walls, while a listener from Los Angeles who has the leering voice of a serial killer calls to discuss the Book of Revelations. I pass through the Castro District and think about friends I have lost to the AIDS epidemic, while a listener in Virginia calls to say that when the aliens reveal themselves on Earth, he won't be rushing out with his friends to greet them. I drive to the ocean and look up at the silent constellations flickering like pin-pricks of light behind a dark curtain above the vast emptiness, while these lonely voices of the night talk about the poison that was taken in the end time at Heaven's Gate.

They were not, the radio voices assure one another, in any way responsible for the premature deaths of 39 people. Their nightly harangues to millions of listeners about prophecies and mysterious forces, government cover-ups and alien abductions, remote viewing and fraudulent photographs of a spaceship trailing a comet, were all in good, clean, fun and plenty of it. Let the buyer beware. Let the public decide. Let the chips fall where they may. Let the games begin. While the commercials interlaced throughout it all hawk snake oil cures to millions of people in the dark who are terrified of being fat, growing old, and dying alone.

But there is a shrill and defensive undercurrent to all of it. And it is, I finally decide, not merely the creeping nausea of guilt masquerading as indignation at the rude suggestion, broadly hinted at recently in the news media, that they may have had something to do with it. Nor is it purely a cold-blooded commercial concern about soothing the listeners in order to maintain the ratings. It is the naked panic that their own strange ideology may prove in the final analysis to be no more firmly rooted in tangible reality than the suicidal and psychotic rantings of Ti and Do.

I cross the Golden Gate Bridge and drive into the wealthy suburbs to a place called Paradise Drive that looks across the Bay, strangely enough, to an oil refinery -- a very different vision of paradise from the Level Above Human of Heaven's Gate. The flickering lights of the sleeping cities on the shores beyond also look like stars from a distance, and I cannot help asking myself for a moment if they harbor intelligent and civilized life. Or, if we are -- an extraordinary number of us -- still primitives crouching in the darkness, still believing in monsters and praying for salvation, still waiting for a torch to be lit that will burn out the shadows of our ignorance.

We have seen the faces of the aliens in the mirror and they are us. Heaven's Gate was not an anomaly. It was merely another sad, desperate, and wildly misguided answer to the lonely night.

Sent By: Keith Harary on Wednesday, April 16, 1997 at 10:47:58.

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