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photograph by Jana Birchum |
alt.alien.visitors
At 3am I had already been pouring over the alt.alien.visitors newsgroup for an hour or two, looking for a text to analyze for a graduate class in American Studies. What I found instead was apocalypse, American style — a Texan quietly preparing to commit suicide. Among the talk of galactic time shifts, anti-matter, and swamp gas was this plea for help: “Got lost in Texas,” a man named Dymody said, “something happened; was overcome! I want to get back, but I can’t find my craft. I am sick of these mammalian humans. They make me nauseous. If anyone knows about Ti and Do, please tell me. All information will be held in strictist [sic] confidence.”
“Dear Dymody,” I replied, ” it must be difficult to be stranded on a foreign planet. I can sympathize. I’m stuck in Texas, and I don’t even have a car.” Dymody responded to my e-mail and welcomed me as a fellow Texan. We corresponded a few times. Eventually he sent me a manifesto written by his “Heavenly Father,” a man known over the last 20 years as Bo, The Him, the Son of God, Do, and more prosaically, Marshall Herff Applewhite.
“Stefan: My heavenly father sent this message out. This information may be what you are looking for — you decide…. If I can be of any help let me know — I will be departing from my present location within the next few days.” “LOOK UP! — dymody,” was how he signed what turned out to be his last message, then still a year before the suicides.
The Manifesto: Recruiting for the Next World
Dymody and I had a lot more in common than being far from home. We were each members of groups which required that we part with friends, family, jobs, and money in exchange for training mixed with something which passed for truth. Both of our groups spent a lot of time at the computer — my group called themselves grad students, Dymody’s was called Total Overcomers Anonymous, or Heaven’s Gate. The attachment Dymody sent me in his final message was a 10-page manifesto titled (UNDERCOVER JESUS SURFACES). It was a recruitment essay written by Jesus, or Do — aka Applewhite — the co-founder of the star-crossed clan. The tract explains how in the early Seventies Do was “incarnated” into the body of a human male in his forties — the body previously occupied by Applewhite, who was, at the time of incarnation, a 43-year-old native of Spur, Texas and a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Applewhite had been hospitalized after suffering a mental breakdown as a result of being fired from his job as professor of music at Stephen F. Austin college near Houston. The school had accused him of having a sexual relationship with a male student.
“The M.O. for many of us this time,” the tract explains, “was to arrive on earth in staged `UFO’ crashes.” Then Do gets to the part we all want to hear. He tells how to overcome this mammalian civilization and reach the Next Level Above Human — the Kingdom of God — a physical place somewhere in the “Heavens or space.” To enter, you have to train. And during training, Do explains, the trainee would be “offered the opportunity to bond with [him] and [his] Father — as a bride would bond with her husband, though.”
This did not appeal to me.
More disturbing was the section where Do reveals his position on guns: “If you do recognize me and choose to look to me for guidance, I would recommend that you purchase firearms; get comfortable using them… ” So in effect, a member would need to bond with Smith and Wesson as well as with Do. To get to the Level Above Human, a devotee might have to battle the Luciferian police and ATF agents who “see us as a radical sect (much as they did 2,000 years ago).” One would also need to be prepared to lay down his/her body: “None of this `laying down of bodies’ will play out as ‘natural death,’ but will be an individual, willful loss of body… ” In other words, the gun could have more than one use.
Following the surrender of the physical container, entering the Next Level Above Human would be straightforward. A cloud of light, or spaceship, would come to pick us up and we would finally get to meet our friendly space kin. Life in outer space would be unlike life at the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe: “We will not… have families and watch television and eat scrambled eggs,” says Do in his farewell video.
A year ago Do warned me: “When I am gone — I’m sorry, but — that’s it — this is the `last bus’ out of this civilization. This is the way my Father has designed it!” I had no idea the bus would be leaving the station so soon.
Phenobarbital, Vodka, and Millennialism
In the late 20th century in the West of America, a group who called themselves Human Individual Metamorphosis, one of several previous incarnations of Heaven’s Gate, looked at their TV screens and like the rest of America, saw the omens of millennium, the signs and portents of the coming apocalypse. There was Da Nang, Watts, Watergate, and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation — not to mention a whole lot of LSD. For 22 years the Heaven’s Gate group said that the planet earth was a garden where “the weeds had taken over,” and prophesied that the planet would soon be “recycled” and “spaded under.” In 1996 the Hale-Bopp comet appeared unexpectedly and a man known on the net as Klaatu, a science-fiction writer, inadvertantly started the rumor of a gigantic UFO hiding behind the comet. On the alt.alien.visitors newsgroup Klaatu posted a satirical article supposedly written by a “scientist” who was leaking information about the companion UFO. It was just the prophetic sign which Dymody and his friends had been anticipating. Now it was time to ascend to outer space, to escape to the “Next Level Above Human.” How? Simply by ending one’s own life.
It may seem paradoxical that Dymody’s group believed that suicide could lead to a better life, but this paradox of salvation through suffering is what makes apocalyptic thought so appealing.
The main page of the Heaven’s Gate website (see sidebar) which Time Magazine has dubbed the world’s most elaborate suicide note, reads: “Hale-Bopp’s approach is the `marker’ we’ve been waiting for. [….] Our 22 years of classroom here on the planet Earth is finally coming to a conclusion [….] We are happily prepared to leave `this world’ and go with Ti’s crew.” Ti refers to Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles who died of cancer in 1985. In 1975, along with “Do,” she co-founded the Heaven’s Gate community.
As the comet reached perihelion in late March 1997, the 39 Texans, Californians, and Floridians drank a deadly cocktail of Phenobarbital, vodka, and American millennialism.
“No way was this their choice,” says John Knapp of Trancenet, a “cult awareness” website, “This was murder.” But there is little possibility that the members were literally murdered. The Heaven’s Gate website refers to the “laying down” of bodies, and the willful shedding of “containers,” and the members made “exit statements” on video. There is, however, evidence that Do manipulated and coerced his followers. They were cut off from all contact with family and friends, and were encouraged to report on each other’s failures “to overcome mammalian human ways.” They lived according to an almost monastic regimen which emphasized sexual abstinence, strict economy in toothpaste use, and total obedience in matters spiritual and earthly. Do controlled all information about the group. Did the members act willfully, or were they manipulated into believing that suicide would be their ticket to ride on a flying saucer, to escape this weed-ridden planet Earth? It’s one of the many mysteries the group left behind. “I am not na�ve,” writes Do. “I am quite aware that what I am saying here will to many, if not most, sound like I should be locked up as a mental case at the least.” His uniquely destructive alien beliefs were probably the result of some psychopathology, but like most alien contactees, Do was not gifted or original. Paranoid visions of apocalypse and doom at the hands of bad aliens or bad government are common. Look at the the Jonestown Massacre, Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Solar Temple deaths, and recently, the Republic of Texas conflict. Even extraterrestrials living incarnate in the bodies of paunchy, middle-aged Americans, and direct communications with aliens named Sananda and the like all have a long and rich history in American culture.
Technology and Anxiety: From the Spiritual Telegraph to the Internet
Jeff Meikle, Director of the American Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a student of occultism in America, once nearly met the leaders of Heaven’s Gate. In 1975, while teaching a course on the occult, Meikle, then a graduate student, happened to see a poster on the Drag which announced that Bo and Peep, as the Heaven’s Gate founders were then known, would be appearing at Carson’s Diner in San Marcos. “I thought about taking some students there to hear whatever they had to say,” says Meikle, “but something else came up that day — so I missed my chance.” Meikle pauses for a moment, then smiles and adds dryly: “We could have been out there with them right now.”
It did not surprise Meikle that Ti was a member of the Houston Theosophical Society: “There is a direct line from Spiritualism in this country in the 1850s, to Theosophy at the turn of the century, and finally to the contemporary phenomenon of channeling — being in touch with the spirits of aliens.”
Like religions, technologies change and adapt, but the anxiety which new technology brings remains. Instead of the “spiritual telegraph” through which spirits communicated with mediums in the mid-19th century, Do’s aliens communicated via the Internet. “It has to do with new technologies which are imperfectly understood,” says Meikle. “If the telegraph could enable you to communicate instantaneously between New York and Philadelphia, why couldn’t it allow you to communicate with spirits of the dead who were in the same room with you?” The magic of new technology can lead people to believe that new technologies offer hope of utopian harmony. But with this hope comes real anxiety. How many times have you read that the Internet is “threatening to engulf” our society? “The Spiritualists, the Theosophical movement, and today’s New Age cultists who have interests in technology and beings from other planets with higher knowledge,” says Meikle, “all these groups are essentially anxious about technological developments.” Change brings anxiety. So how do we relieve our anxiousness? We invent techno-gods in our own image who can reassure us. “These higher beings come along draped in the trappings of high technology, who basically tell the cultists: `It’s all okay, there’s no need to be anxious about the future, or about science which seems to be stripping away our traditional religious beliefs, because we are here to tell you: There are higher spiritual truths and it’s technology that will bring them to you.'”
Blind Belief, Dumb Reason, or High Unemployment?
In a recent New Yorker piece, journalist Timothy Ferris suggests that it’s not so unusual to see the lack of skepticism and reason which led members to return a $3,000 computerized telescope because it did not allow them to see Hale-Bopp’s companion UFO. Ferris claims that while science is stronger today than in Galileo’s time, it “remains a minority habit of mind, and its future is very much in doubt.” Meikle disagrees that blind belief is winning over the dark universe: “Even though cultists may rail against rationalists, by incorporating science they are using science’s rationalism to prove whatever irrational things they believe.” Perhaps the question is not whether science or faith will rule the universe, but what mutant hybrid of science and faith will dominate. Part of what makes Heaven’s Gate so intriguing is that the followers were seemingly educated, mostly middle- and upper-class individuals. When one thinks of people given over to millennialist thought, one usually thinks of the dispossessed and injured, not the bourgeois sons and daughters of CEOs who went to Yale. These folks took chemistry in high school, and went to college, so why did they fall for Do and his evil Reptoid aliens? One theory is that people, whether rich or poor, who join groups like Heaven’s Gate often do so because they find their status in society threatened. They feel that their accomplishments and attainments are not recognized by society. It’s easy to imagine how a profound feeling of displacement and disappointment, amplified by isolation, could lead to the sense that one was not of this earth at all. This theory seems to apply to many of the members. Many were divorced, bereaved, or unemployed shortly before joining Ti and Do. One woman, who prior to joining 22 years ago had lost her lover to another woman, said in her exit statement: “Maybe [Ti and Do] are crazy for all I know, but I don’t have any choice but to go for it because I’ve been on this earth for 31 years and there is nothing here for me.” Do himself alludes to this status anxiety as a “marker” or “tag” of belonging in his garden: “[Seedlings]… can likely be identified at this time as some of those who are rapidly losing respect for this world or its `system.’ They are, from the establishment’s point of view, being irresponsible or anti-social — and will be seen by the world as duped, crazy, a cult member, a drifter, a loner, a drop-out, a separatist, etc.” His belief system, like all alien belief systems, is based on the presumption that the “system” or the “authorities” suppress the truth. And many of us in mainstream society tend to agree with this.
My own personal run-in with a roofer who hit my parked car and then claimed no responsibility whatsover may not be enough to inject the word Luciferian into my current vernacular, but after the police officer told him it would be thrown out of court due to the lack of witnesses, I might be inclined to conclude that the conventional man, his concept of family, the police, and the government are indeed corrupt and need to be spaded under. But Do goes even further. His faulty syllogism goes like this: The government suppresses the truth; there is no evidence of extraterrestrial visitation; therefore there must be alien life on earth. In retrospect, it all makes sense.
Spiritual Escape to Space
In the early 1950s, a Midwestern flying saucer club predicted the end of the world would take place on December 12, 1954. Only the enlightened would survive through being rescued by a flying saucer which would land in Detroit, said Marian Keech, the woman who was in contact with Sananda, one of the space aliens she called “The Guardians.” Like Ti of Heaven’s Gate, Keech was a student of Theosophy. Keech’s flying saucer club was one of hundreds existing from the 1950s through 1970s.
As the hour of the end approached, reporters and the curious gathered around Keech’s middle-class home. The faithful stood in the backyard, eyes upturned, waiting for the saucer to descend. The hour came and passed. Nothing happened. The kitchen clock must be fast, they said to each other. Finally, long after the reporters had returned to the city desk, the word came from Sananda: This was a test of their faith, and the cataclysm had been postponed for a little while.
In an academic study of this group of flying saucer believers, titled When Prophecy Fails, the authors, three social scientists, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Rieckenn and Stanley Schachter, showed that when prophecy fails in the face of firm and incontrovertible evidence, often the faithful do not discard their beliefs as would be expected, but instead actually increase their faith and proselytizing activities. True and committed believers who are in the company of each other find it less painful to accept cognitive dissonance than to discard the belief system that led to the dissonance. For the members of Heaven’s Gate, it was less painful to kill themselves than it was to say: Maybe Do is crazy. This is because the group had already castrated themselves, literally and figuratively, for Do’s beliefs.
Despite obvious Spiritualist influences on UFO believers such as Marian Keech and Ti and Do, there are fundamental differences between Spiritualism and the UFO tradition. Whereas Spiritualism limited its paranoia to the spirit realm, the flying saucer myth has at its core conspiracy theories, nihilism, and a paranoid distrust of the U.S. government. Do’s self-made comparisons to Waco and to Ruby Ridge suggest he believed he was escaping the government as much as the Reptoid aliens he hated. These differences between Spiritualism and UFO belief reveal much about the changes in the culture that created both.
Apocalypse or Salvation?
As Nietzsche predicted, Christendom is dead. But its spirit lives on in the guise of the flying saucer and in other anti-rational phenomena that are inspired with the spirit of Christianity. As we approach the new millennium, we can expect that more and more anti-rational apocalyptic groups like Heaven’s Gate will fly into our skies, seemingly from out of nowhere.
The will to myth is something which anti-myth history and science can’t seem to stifle — it comes involuntarily. Many of those who believe in flying saucers claim to do so against their will. They were not looking for a saucer, it just appeared. They didn’t want to believe, but now they do. “Myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him,” writes Claude Levi-Strauss. Faith in science gradually did away with angels, incubi, succubi, witches, demons, fairies, and the like, but the human tendency to mythologize hides out in places deep inside of us — in our conceptions of outer space and lately in the virtual outer space of the Internet. Flying saucer mythology persists because it yokes together apocalypse and salvation, science, and religion. With Do’s and Dymody’s death, some peculiarly American gods have donned silvery spacesuits, boarded high-tech craft, and have invaded our world and our minds. Do’s alien gods of good and evil are as old as Zoroaster. The good gods are space brothers bringing messages of peace, cosmic harmony, and life eternal, and the bad are Reptoid monsters who threaten to destroy the planet. In the years to come, the Dymodys of America will still be getting lost in Texas. They will still be looking for a way to escape this mammalian civilization where the center does not hold. Flying saucers and other omens of millennium will appear in the skies as long as we still fear “the terror that comes in the night,” because the saucers do for us what we can’t do for ourselves — they offer life eternal.
Many would like to believe that the 39 who died were “armed wackos” and “suicide cultists.” Maybe they were, but Dymody and his crew were just like us. The Heaven’s Gaters ate Starbucks Java Chip ice cream, watched The X-Files, Millennium, and Deep Space 9 on their 72-inch television, one of six in the mansion. They visited a Wild Animal Park where they spent $80 at the petting zoo. They even went to Las Vegas. They knew how to have fun. Dymody and his crew were drinking a cocktail made from paranoia, body-loathing, millennialism, apocalyptic prophecy, techno-anxiety, and The X-Files. It’s an American cocktail, one we all drink.
Stefan Smagula is a graduate student in American Studies. The first book he ever bought was about flying saucers. His father still wants to know if he believes in UFOs.
This article appears in May 16 • 1997 and May 16 • 1997 (Cover).