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Date: Thu, 27 Mar 97 10:19:19 EST
From: wbainbri@nsf.gov
Subject: Heaven's Gate

    Early media reports of the ritual suicide of 39 members of
Heaven's Gate in California have given the mistaken impression that
this group is somehow a creation of Internet and the World Wide Web.
It is true that this group exploited the Web effectively, but it dates
back to 1975, was always highly isolated socially, and has always been
oriented toward leaving this world.

     If you receive any requests from the media for information or
opinions on what Heaven's Gate says about the social implications of
the Web, the following information may be useful to you.

     Early this morning I was able to download a number of files from
the Heaven's Gate website before the server stopped responding:

     http://www.heavensgate.com

     The home page announced: "RED ALERT - HALE BOPP Brings Closure to
Heaven's Gate... If you study the material on this website you will
hopefully understand our joy and what our purpose here on Earth has
been.  You may even find your 'boarding pass' to leave with us during
this brief 'window.'"

     Thus, the group was using the Web to advocate mass suicide, timed
to allow spiritually advanced people to fly away on comet Hale-Bopp.
The page referred to the leadership as "Ti and Do (The UFO Two)," and
to any sociologist of new religious movements this immediately
identifies them as a group that fortuitously was studied intensively
in its early years.

     In 1975, a musician named Herff Applewhite and a nurse named
Bonnie Nettles launched a flying saucer cult, calling themselves The
Two, and named Bo and Peep in the early research studies by
sociologists Robert W. Balch and David Taylor.  The eleventh chapter
of Revelation proclaimed, "And I shall give power unto my two
witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and
threescore days, clothed in sackcloth."  These two will have great
power, even the force to shut heaven, but when they have completed
their testimony, the beast shall ascend out of the bottomless pit and
slay them.  Their bodies will lie unburied for three and a half days,
until God enters into them and reanimates them.  "And they heard a
great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither.  And they
ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them."  At
that moment, a great earthquake will destroy many of the people
remaining behind on earth.  The Two claimed to be the fulfillment of
this prophecy, except that the cloud that would carry them to heaven
would be a spaceship, and they would be permitted to take a small
number of faithful followers with them.
     Swiftly, somewhat fewer than two hundred people sold their homes
and began driving around the country in spiritual preparation for the 
great departure.  Bo and Peep told them that "doing the process" or 
undergoing "Human Individual Metamorphosis" would transform them into 
immortal, androgynous, superbeings, much as a caterpillar becomes a 
butterfly after transformation in a cocoon.  Then The Two disappeared, 
presumably off being slain by the beast from the bottomless pit and 
resurrected by God.  As the weeks worn on with no reappearance, many 
followers drifted away and others finally accepted the theory of the 
news media that Bo and Peep had concocted the whole thing as a fraud 
to grab their followers' money.  But after four months The Two 
reappeared, now claiming they had direct contact with the unidentified 
flying objects, and they set up various simulated spaceships for their 
followers in campgrounds and two houses in Texas.  For some years they 
called themselves Ti and Do, and these are the names on the Heaven's 
Gate website.
     Below are some of the scientific citations concerning this group.
The 1985 essay by Balch analyzes closely how The Two controlled their 
followers and separated them psychologically from influences outside 
the group.  For two decades, long before the existence of the Web, 
they have prepared themselves to depart this world.


Balch, Robert W.
     1980  "Looking Behind the Scenes in a Religious Cult:
          Implications for the Study of Conversion.  Sociological 
          Analysis 41:137-143.
     1982  "Bo and Peep: A Case Study of the Origins of Messianic
          Leadership.  Charisma and the Millennium, edited by Roy 
          Wallis. Belfast: The Queen's University Press.
     1985  "When the Light Goes Out, Darkness Comes."  Pp. 11-63 in
          Religious Movements, edited by Rodney Stark.  New York: 
          Paragon House.

Balch, Robert W., and David Taylor
     1977  "Seekers and Saucers: The Role of the Cultic Milieu in 
     Joining a UFO Cult," American Behavioral Scientist 20:839-859.

======================================================= 
William Sims Bainbridge, NSF Sociology Program 
703-306-1756

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