It’s been two and half decades since 39 devotees of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate died by a mass suicide in a mansion outside San Diego and someone still keeps their website preserved as it looked in 97. This article examines who’s keeping it alive and dives into the role the internet played in the history of the cult.
Please share! I have plenty of poetry from 20 years ago that’s probably quite cringe and I can’t bring myself to look at it. But yours! I’m intrigued. And maybe it isn’t cringe maybe it’s great.
Alas, it's lost to the sands of time. Also, I could never touch Silvia Plath, but for all she spoke to me in that time... I think I just dislike poetry as an art form. Are you saying my disdain for the work could make me good at it? I somehow expect that other self-loathing poets have already trodden that path to muck. But yeah, I realize that I could reformat the above and call it a poem. Oh noem.
Not all members, one specifically stayed behind to maintain the website. In an interview played on the Heavens Gate podcast (which is excellent) he expressed regret he wasn’t able to teleport to the comet with the rest of the group.
On a semi related note, Ted Kaczynski is still alive and was responding to letters as of November. He got moved to a medical prison last month so I'm not sure how well he's doing, but it is utterly fascinating to be able to correspond with people who are both intelligent and insane.
Title should be clarified to match the article. Not everyone associated with the cult has perished. Several ex-members are alive and some remained close to the cult in a way that's hard to describe, and took on the maintenance of the website.
HBO's series, Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults, is highly recommended. It is a fascinating, tragic, and ultimately humanizing look at the cult, through the eyes of observers and several ex-members.
It wouldn't surprise me too much. My completely embarrassing website from the 90s has been running on the same host and subdomain with zero work done by me to keep it running:
http://boglin.iwarp.com
I think I edited the HTML once since 1999 to add a Google Analytics tag because I was curious if anyone ever visited it.
It's wild that that number is wedged so deeply into my brain, like a lot of things that were on my mind as a teenager. Makes me want to make sure my kids are doing something worthwhile when they're that age (which I know is futile of course).
As an atheist Heaven's Gate claims are as legitimate (and outlandish) as those of Christians or Buddhists, whose to say they aren't reborn on an alien planet?
So let's call it "assumed perished".
Catholicism strictly forbids suicide, I grew up being taught you could go to hell if you commit suicide. I assume it is similar for the other mainstream branches of Christianity. I'm no longer religious, and I understand where you are coming from questioning what ought to qualify as a cult versus a religion, because there are some cases where the difference isn't too clear (besides membership numbers). But any belief system that is actively encouraging suicide has clearly crossed a line.
I took a sociology class on "alternative religions" from Rob Balch in college—he's one of the recurring experts in that series. I enjoyed the HBO series, as it went more into the various individuals' stories than is really on topic for a sociology class.
If I ever fall under the influence of a suicide cult. I hope I can convince them that I should be the one to stay behind and "maintain the website" ^_^
I’ll join the same cult and tell the others it doesn’t require that much effort. Just put it up on cloudflare free plan after renewing the domain for 30 years. Then hopefully I’ll dip out of the cult without anyone noticing.
Maybe Lutherans? Or, more likely, some German heard of it and wanted to know more and translated it and sent it in. I've sent in dutch to English and German to English translations since I got a modem.
Maybe for the same reasons the German Wikipedia is so large. I'm not sure what they are, but I suspect: It's a large language sphere, speakers enjoy relative wealth and the luxury of time, there is a cultural tradition of cultivating and archiving information. All of them may make it more probable someone would submit translations. In addition, here specifically, the online community was well-developed in the late 90s for similar demographic reasons, e.g. science/engineering communities jumping on board early.
On the other hand, the Heaven's Gate cult made many references to Star Trek in their material as well, and the franchise enjoyed major popularity in Germany, I would wager beyond other non-English language spheres. This may also have increased the size of the potential receptive/interested audience.
I love that you synthesized that comment on the fly then actually took the time write and share it.
In the back of my mind I have a maybe-never project brewing that would entail finding Wikipedia pages that only exist in one language. English would of course have many unique pages. I wonder how many non-English page translations would be rejected on notability grounds, just due to sheer cultural differences.
I think you'll find that, in practice, there are many pages that fit "between" other pages in other languages. As random example, say English Wikipedia has "Matrix multiplication", "Strassen Algorithm" and "Coppersmith-Winegrad Algorithm" pages, whereas the German Wikipedia might have a "Matrix Multiplication Algorithms" page (this is not the current reality, but it could be).
This makes sense, because if one wiki has, say, 60% of the content (and depth) of some other wiki, it will break it down into pages differently.
Being able to speak both languages, I often find it instructive to browse the pages on a subject on both English and German Wikipedia, as the structure and depth of the material will often vary either way. It's sometimes unfortunate, but other times also possibly warranted that these wikis cover subjects to a different degree.
The article makes it look like the existence of this cult is an extremely widely-known fact and thus it doesn't need much introduction. But I only learned about it after clicking this link.
It weirds me out that some people are so amenable to this kind of thing, enough to kill themselves.
There are many human weaknesses, the desire for meaning in life leads some people to be susceptible to this kind of thing both causing it and falling victim to it.
The meaning of life is that which is assigned by the one living it. Liberating once you realize that no one has any answers for you. Like He-Man said, "I have the power."
If you were a teen or older when it happened, and lived in the US, it was pretty big news.
I can still reach my cousin-in-law on an AOL email named after the comet mixed with his last name. Yes, it was cathartic to type this out and hit post.
I was 19 and watched absolutely zero cable or network news in 1997. I have been learning of events from that time that I had no idea occurred or where on the news. I had a life, and therefore no time to watch anything. Sort of like these days. I watch PBS News Hour a few times a week to keep up. Even that's a chore.
> I had a life, and therefore no time to watch anything.
Great! And good for you trying to stay informed despite a different definition of what constitutes a fulfilling life. Some of us enjoyed following news more closely, even during our teenage years.
Pedantic Central Texan: the cult compound and subsequent siege weren’t actually in Waco - that’s the nearest city with television stations and an airport. If you’re not Southern Baptist, feel free to make a joke about the real cult in Waco being headquartered at the Truett Seminary (Baylor). If you grew up Southern Baptist (like myself), giggle even more about the Vatican on the Brazos.
I learned once I got to college on the East Coast in the late 90s that the rest of the country automatically thought “cult compound siege and fire” instead of “Baylor,” when they heard the name of the nearest big city to where I grew up, so took to describing my hometown as being “about an hour north of Austin” instead of “30 minutes south of Waco”.
Austin was always far, far cooler than Waco, but that always felt a bit pretentious, as my hometown is a lot more like Waco than it is Austin… which is probably why I ended up running off to the East Coast for college.
That's quite a bit more complicated than just another suicide cult. From your link:
> Increasingly aggressive techniques were used to try to force the Branch Davidians out. For instance, sleep deprivation of the inhabitants through all-night broadcasts of recordings of jet planes, pop music, chanting, and the screams of rabbits being slaughtered. Outside the compound, nine Bradley Fighting Vehicles carrying M651 CS tear gas grenades and Ferret rounds and five M728 Combat Engineer Vehicles obtained from the U.S. Army began patrolling. The armored vehicles were used to destroy perimeter fencing and outbuildings and crush cars belonging to the Branch Davidians. Armored vehicles repeatedly drove over the grave of Branch Davidian Peter Gent despite protests by the Branch Davidians and the negotiators.
...
> Criticism was later leveled by Schneider's attorney, Jack Zimmerman, at the tactic of using sleep-and-peace-disrupting sound against the Branch Davidians: "The point was this—they were trying to have sleep disturbance and they were trying to take someone that they viewed as unstable to start with, and they were trying to drive him crazy. And then they got mad 'cos he does something that they think is irrational!"
...
> At around noon, three fires broke out almost simultaneously in different parts of the building and spread quickly; footage of the blaze was broadcast live by television crews. The government maintains the fires were deliberately started by the Branch Davidians. Some Branch Davidian survivors maintain that the fires were accidentally or deliberately started by the assault.
You may have heard the expression “drank the koolaid” to mean someone has fully embraced an outlandish ideology, or even just fully committed to a cause. At Jonestown, many cult members committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced koolaid.
Koolaid is a sugary, flavored drink powder that is mixed with water. It was a staple for many kids in the 80’s and 90’s.
Waco? Adam House (to take a non-US example)? No interest in true crime and/or cults? Both Heaven's Gate and Jonestown are extremely widely known events. All over the world.
Jonestown was significant internationally - nearly a thousand people died by suicide and murder, many of them children. It didn’t take place in the US (Jonestown is in Guyana), although the cult originated there.
Jonestown is pretty much world history by now. I was born in a South American, non-english speaking country, AFTER the fact, and by 10 years old probably have seen about two news segments or documentaries about it on TV.
Fun fact, back in 2017 when I was a junior in highschool, I would meet this friend of mine often at her house. She lived pretty far into this gated community that was right on the edge of where Rancho Santa Fe ends. I really don’t remember how the topic came up, but she told me that the mansion where the Heavens gate cult had killed themselves was literally a 5 min walk. I knew about the cult, but I never knew it all took place in San Diego lol when I went home, I looked up the distance of her house to the address of the mansion (it took a little bit because I failed to notice they changed the address, which is 18241 Paseo Victoria) it was shocking to see that it really was like 5 min away.
My mind went immediately in a satirical direction. I often ignore that actually being there, in the physical space where something that intense happened could be psychologically difficult to handle. The internet gives us enough distance to make things so much more abstract.
I spent 30 years in San Diego before moving to Denver in 2020… and Denver is far worse. There seems to be some masa shooting making national headlines every few months.
A building located vis a vis the post-Prussian farm I grew up on was destroyed when Soviets' 3rd/13th/33rd divisions were conquering the remains of the third Reich, Feb 1945.
This is the secondary theme of 1984, that gets lost because of the cultural relevance of the primary theme (govt surveillance, authoritarianism etc).
O'Brien, Winston Smith's foil, is presented as charismatic, rebellious seeming and importantly both smarter and better educated than the protagonist. The lesson I drew from this as a high schooler, was that someone can be all those things and still wrong, malicious, nefarious. That our values can be better guides than what seems like incontrovertible logic. And that following rationality blindly without empathy or heuristics (common sense), can lead to utter horror (the Stalinist purges that Orwell was explicitly referencing, and of course Nazism).
An interesting detail is on the bottom of the webpage (https://www.heavensgate.com/) they have this hidden text (perhaps an old SEO hack?):
>Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels end end times times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times Key Words: (for search engines) 144,000, Abductees, Agnostic, Alien, Allah, Alternative, Angels, Antichrist, Apocalypse, Armageddon, Ascension, Atheist, Awakening, Away Team, Beyond Human, Blasphemy, Boddhisattva, Book of Revelation, Buddha, Channeling, Children of God, Christ, Christ's Teachings, Consciousness, Contactees, Corruption, Creation, Death, Discarnate, Discarnates, Disciple, Disciples, Disinformation, Dying, Ecumenical, End of the Age, End of the World, Eternal Life, Eunuch, Evolution, Evolutionary, Extraterrestrial, Freedom, Fulfilling Prophecy, Genderless, Glorified Body, God, God's Children, God's Chosen, God's Heaven, God's Laws, God's Son, Guru, Harvest Time, He's Back, Heaven, Heaven's Gate, Heavenly Kingdom, Higher Consciousness, His Church, Human Metamorphosis, Human Spirit, Implant, Incarnation, Interfaith, Jesus, Jesus' Return, Jesus' Teaching, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Krishna Consciousness, Lamb of God, Last Days, Level Above Human, Life After Death, Luciferian, Luciferians, Meditation, Members of the Next Level, Messiah, Metamorphosis, Metaphysical, Millennium, Misinformation, Mothership, Mystic, Next Level, Non Perishable, Non Temporal, Older Member, Our Lords Return, Out of Body Experience, Overcomers, Overcoming, Past Lives, Prophecy, Prophecy Fulfillment, Rapture, Reactive Mind, Recycling the Planet, Reincarnation, Religion, Resurrection, Revelations, Saved, Second Coming, Soul, Space Alien, Spacecraft, Spirit, Spirit Filled, Spirit Guide, Spiritual, Spiritual Awakening, Star People, Super Natural, Telepathy, The Remnant, The Two, Theosophy, Ti and Do, Truth, Two Witnesses, UFO, Virginity, Walk-ins, Yahweh, Yeshua, Yoda, Yoga,
The Heaven’s Gate cultists have been spreading dangerous misinformation for 20 years? They MUST be deplatformed! Why on earth do Google, Facebook, Hacker News, their web hosting and DNS providers allow their dangerous messages to be spread? /s
The US constitution guarantees special protection for purely irrational beliefs. Once a belief starts to vaguely makes sense or to make an honest attempt to make sense, it loses its protection.
Well we’re in luck because, as has been pointed out many times in recent years, the private organizations I mentioned are not bound by the first amendment!
On a non-sarcastic note, it could well be that this and similar cults are banned on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, which is perfectly fine. They still have their own website.
Even at the time it's not a super convincing statement. They talk like the 'Next Level' is coming soon and say at the end: "The true meaning of 'suicide' is to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered."
Subject matter aside, the author of the article uses the term URL a few times but doesn't seem to know what it means. Curious for an "internet historian".
> the author of the article uses the term URL a few times
Just once, in reference to the domain name, which does in turn link to a URL.
> Curious for an "internet historian".
Where do the authors claim to be internet historians?
More striking for me was the idea that the webpage was in any way advanced for its time. That's certainly not the case. Their Higher Source home page had a much stronger design aesthetic, albeit now incredible dated looking, but even then I can think of far more sophisticated examples from that period.
135 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadI was in LA at the time. Buffy billboards everywhere. And then bam - mass suicide.
Ever since I’ve always connnected the two.
They are described as intensely private, and remain profoundly influenced by their previous association.
Efforts to unveil their identities began in 2011 on Redit, but they were finally unmasked in 2017 when they released an interview on The Daily Mirror.
They were extremely polite if reserved.
tbf sort of sums up most of the internet where I hang out.
HBO's series, Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults, is highly recommended. It is a fascinating, tragic, and ultimately humanizing look at the cult, through the eyes of observers and several ex-members.
...although Japan has had several really wacky cults that also could have inspired the story.
Also, now I want to watch that documentary
I think I edited the HTML once since 1999 to add a Google Analytics tag because I was curious if anyone ever visited it.
It's wild that that number is wedged so deeply into my brain, like a lot of things that were on my mind as a teenager. Makes me want to make sure my kids are doing something worthwhile when they're that age (which I know is futile of course).
Does "handle these venomous snakes, God will protect you" count?
On the other hand, the Heaven's Gate cult made many references to Star Trek in their material as well, and the franchise enjoyed major popularity in Germany, I would wager beyond other non-English language spheres. This may also have increased the size of the potential receptive/interested audience.
In the back of my mind I have a maybe-never project brewing that would entail finding Wikipedia pages that only exist in one language. English would of course have many unique pages. I wonder how many non-English page translations would be rejected on notability grounds, just due to sheer cultural differences.
This makes sense, because if one wiki has, say, 60% of the content (and depth) of some other wiki, it will break it down into pages differently.
Being able to speak both languages, I often find it instructive to browse the pages on a subject on both English and German Wikipedia, as the structure and depth of the material will often vary either way. It's sometimes unfortunate, but other times also possibly warranted that these wikis cover subjects to a different degree.
For example: "for starters" is translated as "für Starter" which does not make any sense.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...
It weirds me out that some people are so amenable to this kind of thing, enough to kill themselves.
I can still reach my cousin-in-law on an AOL email named after the comet mixed with his last name. Yes, it was cathartic to type this out and hit post.
Great! And good for you trying to stay informed despite a different definition of what constitutes a fulfilling life. Some of us enjoyed following news more closely, even during our teenage years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
I learned once I got to college on the East Coast in the late 90s that the rest of the country automatically thought “cult compound siege and fire” instead of “Baylor,” when they heard the name of the nearest big city to where I grew up, so took to describing my hometown as being “about an hour north of Austin” instead of “30 minutes south of Waco”.
Austin was always far, far cooler than Waco, but that always felt a bit pretentious, as my hometown is a lot more like Waco than it is Austin… which is probably why I ended up running off to the East Coast for college.
> Increasingly aggressive techniques were used to try to force the Branch Davidians out. For instance, sleep deprivation of the inhabitants through all-night broadcasts of recordings of jet planes, pop music, chanting, and the screams of rabbits being slaughtered. Outside the compound, nine Bradley Fighting Vehicles carrying M651 CS tear gas grenades and Ferret rounds and five M728 Combat Engineer Vehicles obtained from the U.S. Army began patrolling. The armored vehicles were used to destroy perimeter fencing and outbuildings and crush cars belonging to the Branch Davidians. Armored vehicles repeatedly drove over the grave of Branch Davidian Peter Gent despite protests by the Branch Davidians and the negotiators.
...
> Criticism was later leveled by Schneider's attorney, Jack Zimmerman, at the tactic of using sleep-and-peace-disrupting sound against the Branch Davidians: "The point was this—they were trying to have sleep disturbance and they were trying to take someone that they viewed as unstable to start with, and they were trying to drive him crazy. And then they got mad 'cos he does something that they think is irrational!"
...
> At around noon, three fires broke out almost simultaneously in different parts of the building and spread quickly; footage of the blaze was broadcast live by television crews. The government maintains the fires were deliberately started by the Branch Davidians. Some Branch Davidian survivors maintain that the fires were accidentally or deliberately started by the assault.
Koolaid is a sugary, flavored drink powder that is mixed with water. It was a staple for many kids in the 80’s and 90’s.
I chose to leave the state, and now the worst I see is a dead deer 3 times a year.
Chances are something unsettling has happened within 500' of you, some time in history.
Don't let that weigh you down, in thoughts or body.
Meanwhile in Europe…
Better?
I'm sure sociology and anthropology and psychology all can reconcile that.
"REALITY DISTORTION FIELDS & the HUMILITY OF ACCEPTING YOU'RE BEING INFLUENCED" https://twitter.com/CurziRose/status/1477788648812662784
O'Brien, Winston Smith's foil, is presented as charismatic, rebellious seeming and importantly both smarter and better educated than the protagonist. The lesson I drew from this as a high schooler, was that someone can be all those things and still wrong, malicious, nefarious. That our values can be better guides than what seems like incontrovertible logic. And that following rationality blindly without empathy or heuristics (common sense), can lead to utter horror (the Stalinist purges that Orwell was explicitly referencing, and of course Nazism).
>Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels end end times times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times Key Words: (for search engines) 144,000, Abductees, Agnostic, Alien, Allah, Alternative, Angels, Antichrist, Apocalypse, Armageddon, Ascension, Atheist, Awakening, Away Team, Beyond Human, Blasphemy, Boddhisattva, Book of Revelation, Buddha, Channeling, Children of God, Christ, Christ's Teachings, Consciousness, Contactees, Corruption, Creation, Death, Discarnate, Discarnates, Disciple, Disciples, Disinformation, Dying, Ecumenical, End of the Age, End of the World, Eternal Life, Eunuch, Evolution, Evolutionary, Extraterrestrial, Freedom, Fulfilling Prophecy, Genderless, Glorified Body, God, God's Children, God's Chosen, God's Heaven, God's Laws, God's Son, Guru, Harvest Time, He's Back, Heaven, Heaven's Gate, Heavenly Kingdom, Higher Consciousness, His Church, Human Metamorphosis, Human Spirit, Implant, Incarnation, Interfaith, Jesus, Jesus' Return, Jesus' Teaching, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Krishna Consciousness, Lamb of God, Last Days, Level Above Human, Life After Death, Luciferian, Luciferians, Meditation, Members of the Next Level, Messiah, Metamorphosis, Metaphysical, Millennium, Misinformation, Mothership, Mystic, Next Level, Non Perishable, Non Temporal, Older Member, Our Lords Return, Out of Body Experience, Overcomers, Overcoming, Past Lives, Prophecy, Prophecy Fulfillment, Rapture, Reactive Mind, Recycling the Planet, Reincarnation, Religion, Resurrection, Revelations, Saved, Second Coming, Soul, Space Alien, Spacecraft, Spirit, Spirit Filled, Spirit Guide, Spiritual, Spiritual Awakening, Star People, Super Natural, Telepathy, The Remnant, The Two, Theosophy, Ti and Do, Truth, Two Witnesses, UFO, Virginity, Walk-ins, Yahweh, Yeshua, Yoda, Yoga,
https://www.heavensgate.com/misc/letter.htm
> also repeatedly states the events of 1997 happened 35 years ago.
You misread. The article says 25 years, except this:
There are images from the news that stick out in the minds of people over 35 who watched the story unfold in real time.
which refers to people aged around 10 or above 25 years ago.
Just once, in reference to the domain name, which does in turn link to a URL.
> Curious for an "internet historian".
Where do the authors claim to be internet historians?
More striking for me was the idea that the webpage was in any way advanced for its time. That's certainly not the case. Their Higher Source home page had a much stronger design aesthetic, albeit now incredible dated looking, but even then I can think of far more sophisticated examples from that period.
So I guess now I need to find an ancient SCSI card and unearth that archive.