Every month, the bills get paid on time. The emails get answered, and any orders filled. Which, for HeavensGate.com, is absolutely extraordinary. Because as far as the attainable is aware, every endure affiliate of the suicide band died 17 years ago from a cocktail of arsenic and angel sauce. A few backward behind, though. Anyone had to keep the homepage going.
Today, at aboriginal glance, the absolutely functional, 17-year-old website seems like just one added of the abounding GeoCities-era charcoal that clutter the internet. Visitor counts, aflame text, Chat Art gradients; the accomplished gang's actuality and afresh some. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll acquisition that about every hotlink adds yet accession band to a berserk all-encompassing dogma, absolutely ardent in its interweaving of aerial amplitude aliens, Jesus, abstruse UFOs, prophets to whom aliens speak, comets advancing to save us, and the suicide it takes to get there.
It's not just argument (though there is plenty of that); Heaven's Gate's internet charcoal also cover hours aloft hours of video recorded some time amid 1993 and 97, the year the majority of the accumulation committed suicide in apprehension of sublimating to the aircraft that trailed comet Hale-Bopp.
Those recorded statements from "students" afore their deaths (as able-bodied as their leaders' own testimony) acquire not alone as videos on the site, but as transcripts. These were advised to last. And they have, acknowledgment to the guardians of HeavensGate.com.
Today, alone a few Heaven's Gate believers remain. Two of them sit on the added end of the website's sole acquaintance email address, and will promptly acknowledge to your inquiries. Which seems odd for a accumulation whose associates are all broadly believed to be dead.
The humans who acknowledge to HeavensGate.com queries accredit to themselves artlessly as "Telah" and "we." They'll acknowledgment questions if you ask—that's allotment of the gig—but they've exhausted of the rubberneckers that acquire anesthetized through anytime aback their adolescent alive associates committed suicide in 1997. Which is conceivably to be accepted if you're the alone official acquaintance point for one of the largest, a lot of camp accumulation suicides in animal history.
In fact, what's a lot of hasty about the Heaven's Gate website is that for all the hundreds of pages of sermons and prophecies and transcripts captivated aural the website and its advertised wares, the bizarre, generally breathless argument absolutely doesn't acquaint you all that much.
And what it does acquaint you isn't bisected as absorbing as the humans who are doling it out.
In 1972, Marshall Applewhite had a affection attack. In some camp about-face of the Florence Nightingale effect, he afresh came to the ability that he and his nurse, Bonnie Nettles, were actual acceptable the two assemblage prophesied in Revelation. Bonnie agreed. The absurd apocalyptic brace afflicted their names to Bo and Peep (a accustomed fit for two long-awaited shepherds) afore ultimately adopting the monikers Ti (Bonnie) and Do (Marshall). You know, like the addendum of a scale.
The two spent the next several years overextension their bulletin and accepting followers through in-person evangelizing, traveling about the country to accord their prophetic talks. But as Robert Balch, a folklore assistant at the University of Montana who infiltrated the accumulation during the 70s, explained in his book Waiting for the Ships, "Even during attainable meetings, associates cloistral themselves from outsiders."
Ti and Do in the backward 70s during one of their abounding attainable presentations at academy campuses. Image via Robert Balch.
Contrary to our accepted assumptions surrounding cults and apprenticeship tactics, Ti and Do weren't searching to accumulate humans in the accumulation adjoin their will. They alone capital to accessory with humans who actively, adamantly capital to be there. Balch goes on to explain:
Bo and Peep were acceptable salesmen, but humans arcade for new cars commonly appointment abundant added accountability and manipulation. Humans abutting the UFO band with about no accountability to convert, and they agilely adopted accumulation norms even afore the socialization action began.
Part of this was to ensure that alone accurate believers backward with the group, but it was aswell a able aegis tactic. At atomic in Balch's eyes, Ti and Do capital to apprehend agitation as abundant as possible, decidedly in the anatomy of a accumulation of ancestors associates of cultists who affiliated calm to try to save their admired ones. As he explained to us over the phone:
They were cool batty about outsiders, and there was a arrangement of the group's alfresco ancestors that formed in 1980. And even admitting the woman that started that was about as affectionate as anybody could acquire been, I anticipate Ti and Do absolutely feared the worst. They capital anybody who larboard the accumulation to leave on acceptable terms.
And their accidental (as far as cults go at least) attitude appear defectors seems to acquire worked; there has never been a accidental of affronted aloft Heaven's Gate members. Unlike those few actual associates of the analogously abominable Peoples Temple in Jonestown, no ex-Heaven's Gaters acquire annihilation decidedly abhorrent to say about their time spent in the group. A lot of acceptable because Ti and Do were added than blessed to let unbelievers leave, and because already you fabricated that abysmal of a commitment, it was about absurd to barb your way out.
To acquire Ti and Do's teachings, you had to accept a lot. Religious abandonment was abundant allotment of the group's culture, sure, but it was alloyed with an odd coaction of technology and science—space travel, in particular. Do even referred to the classroom area he proselytized afore his alleged acceptance (many of whom were several ancestors younger) as "God's astronaut program." This wasn't mysticism. It was evolution.
Heaven's Gate's own delineation of what you can apprehend from the Next Level.
The Heaven's Gate commodity in its absoluteness is camp and, unsurprisingly, not all that consistent, but actuality are the basics: Earth was about to be recycled (read: wiped clean, Apocalypse-style), and those who capital to reside on bare to ability something alleged "The Evolutionary Akin Aloft Human," which consisted of a genderless, bodiless, airy actuality aboard a spaceship. Several of these already-evolved creatures were advancing to save those on Earth who had auspiciously afford accessories to their animal "vessel" (i.e. body) abundant to amuse the Next Level's tastes. These beings had visited Earth alone already before, admitting that time they took a animal form. You ability apperceive him as Jesus Christ.
Ti and Do were, of course, the alone ones able to antipodal anon with the Next Level, so the Heaven's Gate associates had to yield it on acceptance if they were told that, as the Hale-Bopp comet approached, a UFO was ambuscade just out of website abaft the comet's tail, attainable to snatch them up. And the alone way to get aboard this believers-only spaceship? Abrogation your barge behind. In this case, that meant donning analogous uniforms all the way down to their Nikes, block phenobarbital-flavored angel booze with vodka, and lying down to anticipate their cosmic, evolutionary reward.
It's simple to attending aback and blush Heaven's Gate's determinative years with what we apperceive now. But for a lot of of the cult's existence, the affair of suicide was rarely even broached, abundant beneath actively advised an option. Ti and Do would attainable the accumulation for the spaceships advancing to yield them away, alone to change the anecdotal if the time to avenue Earth came and went afterwards fanfare. If Ti died of blight in 1985, it anchored the angle in Do's apperception and the minds of his followers that afterlife was the alone way to forward oneself to the next level.
In the years afterwards Ti's death, the accumulation became progressively added reclusive. Do amped up the breach from avant-garde society, which seems absolutely a accomplishment because that, by this point, the actual associates had already chopped off their hair, donned matching, androgynous uniforms, and, in a few cases, subjected themselves to castration. Their anatomical forms were minimized to the complete essentials and fabricated as compatible as possible. Afterwards all, if they capital to adapt for the approaching Next Level, they were traveling to charge to asphyxiate their animal urges as abundant as possible. There was no privacy, no sex, no abandon from routine. Essentially, there was no individuality whatsoever. The associates lived calm with the ultimate ambition of acceptable a singular, active hive, abreast for access into the abundant beyond. Whenever that ability come.
Until then, though, they bare to accomplish money. Alluvial argosy crave aliment and shelter. So several Heaven's Gate cultists looked to what they knew best to sustain themselves: web design.
Of course, the accumulation aswell comprised cooks, mechanics, waiters, and added blueprint jobs. That several of them were web-savvy was incidental. But they did acquaint Do to the internet's potential, and aggregate that could beggarly for disseminating his message.
The archived home page for the Higher Source web architecture firm.
They alleged their business Higher Source, advertising themselves as able to not alone body sites that would "enhance your company's image" but to aswell "make your alteration into the 'world of cyberspace' an simple and alluring experience."
As far as aboriginal 90s web architecture firms go, Higher Source did it all. And searching aback at the archived website for the group's anatomic architecture firm, while they never anon acknowledgment their amalgamation with the Heaven's Gate cult, attenuate references to the company's origins abound. With Higher Source, you were accepting "a crew-minded effort" from humans who acquire formed "closely" calm for 20 years. Of course, abutting in this case meant accurate bunkmates.
"The Higher Source Difference."
You were accepting a lot added than that, though. UFO and suicide band connotations of hindsight aside, this is one of the a lot of aboriginal testaments to aboriginal internet web architecture around. Not alone could Higher Source program in Java, C++, and Visual Basic as able-bodied as use Shockwave, QuickTime, and AVI, they could acclivity the hell out of your chat art, too.
One of many sample graphics attainable on the Higher Source website.
In added words, they seemed like any added active adolescent web architecture aggregation of the day. According to a Seattle Times commodity that came out just weeks afterwards the accumulation suicide took place, one of their aloft audience "noticed that Higher Source staffers were 'strict in diet and dress.' But they showed 'a acceptable faculty of humor, and they were awfully smart.'" They aswell had their business argot down pat, acceptable absorbed parties that "whether application banal or custom photography, cutting-edge computer graphics, or apparent HTML text, Higher Source can go from 'cool' to 'corporate' like a chameleon."
The sample cartoon on the Higher Source web page included absolutely a bit of space imagery.
The matching, sexless apparel and compatible haircuts were Heaven's Gates way of paying as little absorption to their alluvial bodies as possible. The internet provided that aforementioned anonymity as a amount of course.
Plus, Higher Source was just the ancillary project. The group's absolute lasting, basic appulse is the website they congenital for themselves.
Despite growing up in a altered era than a lot of of his followers, Do acquire to acquire had at atomic an clue of what the internet would ultimately become. As Balch suggested, it seems that Do saw HeavensGate.com as the group's abiding banner and his own claimed Ozymandias. For anyone who'd allegedly done abroad with base, bitter urges, he absolutely had a ability for the dramatic.
The current Heaven's Gate homepage.
In the group's aboriginal days, Ti and Do were determined that they would eventually accomplish the apocalypse in Revelation 11:3 by aboriginal getting assassinated and, eventually, resurrected. The UFO would come, their afterlife advertisement to the world, and Ti and Do would be chargeless to yield their abode next to Christ in an updated, UFO-centric pantheon. But if their martyr's afterlife never came admitting several decades of befalling (and afterwards Ti died of cancer), Do did what any self-chose additional advancing would: Cover a acclamation in chat art, stick it on the internet, and SEO the bits out of it.
That is not a amount of speech; Heaven's Gate was all about search-engine optimization. Scroll to the basal of the homepage, highlight, and see for yourself.
Though a charge for acceptance absolutely played a allotment in Do's accommodation to accompany the ancient anatomy of internet fame, he did still actual abundant acquire in what he was doing. Balch contends that, in accession to advancing a legacy, Do may acquire aswell just capital to ensure that some anatomy of his accuracy was attainable to anyone who ability charge it.
In Do's mind, if you or I aboveboard accustomed the advice as getting accurate but didn't avenue with the group, our souls would about be put on ice until the next befalling for a autumn on Earth. So that could be a acumen why they larboard it up—just for anybody who was still actuality and able to admit the "truth."
As far as lasting, potentially extensive food of advice go, the internet is as safe a bet as any. At least, it is for as continued as you can accumulate somebody can stick about to pay the web hosting bills. Somebody who, ideally, was absolutely committed to the cause, but aswell accommodating to abandon the adventure to the next evolutionary level. Those people, for Heaven's Gate, were Mark and Sarah King.
After the band had afford its beyond numbers in favor of a leaner, added adherent afterward in the backward 80s and aboriginal 90s, the added genderless associates spent their canicule paying absent absorption to Ti and Do in a ambience they alleged "the classroom." It was actuality that they abstruse how to best challenge the aerial beings of the next level. How to leave their worldly, blowhard apropos abaft in favor of an ever-elusive, greater understanding. In added words, they were acquirements how to abandon every aptitude and affect they had anytime known.
This came easier for some than it did for others. If we asked the humans abaft the Heaven's Gate email abode (listed on the site) why they left, the acknowledgment was metered and, unsurprisingly, vague:
We larboard the Accumulation in September, 1987 because we were traveling to yield affliction of some added things in our lives... Chargeless will and best are the cornerstone of what anyone does, abnormally in the Next Level. Individuals in the Accumulation could appear and go as those chose to do, and abounding did just that over the years. We had an accessible aperture policy, and it swung both ways. Humans came and went all the time.
However, accession ex-Heaven's Gate member—one of the few ex-members larboard (the alone added we could acquisition traces of was anyone alleged Juan in Venzuela)—named Sawyer was a bit added accessible in why the Kings left and who they were. Apparently, Mark and Sarah weren't absolutely attainable for aggregate the Next Akin entailed. Speaking to us over YouTube messages, Sawyer elaborated:
I was there if they were instructed to leave the classroom because one of them did not wish to try to acquire by the "lesson step" that was alleged "I could be wrong," a footfall appear accomplishing what Jesus alleged "deny yourself." In added word,s giving your will to your Older Members... The added of these two artlessly absitively to ancillary with the other. Do and the aggregation approved to advice the one with this but he wasn't accepting the advice so Do instructed them to both yield a car and some money and leave the group.
When these two were instructed to leave, they were told they could appear aback whenever they capital to acquire by the "I could be wrong". The way the assignment was accustomed was to alpha what we say that is a account of judgement with "I could be wrong". It would be an acute to say, for instance, "I could be amiss but it's cloudburst alfresco if it was."
Even admitting the Kings—who affiliated afterwards abrogation the group—were no best absolute associates of Heaven's Gate, they still played acute roles. Under the guise of the TELAH Foundation (a name they still go by, and an acronym for the ever-aspired-to "The Evolutionary Akin Aloft Human"), Mark and Sarah allegedly acted as a "communication and allowance house" for the group's assorted attainable appearances and interactions, which became added added arresting appear the end of their time on Earth. In 1993, for instance, they placed a full-page ad in USA Today costing upwards of $30,000.
A archetype of the "ad" Heaven's Gate took out in USA Today.
When Do absitively that a spaceship ambuscade abaft the Hale-Bopp comet was the group's key to extensive the Next Level, he began advancing Mark and Sarah for the end—or at least, Do's end. As far as Mark and Sarah were concerned, this was training for the blow of their accustomed lives. As they explained to us over email:
They accomplished us on how they capital emails to be taken affliction of, how to chronicle to the public, and how to advertise their information. In March, 1997 our assignment amount added as they delivered us all their physical, legal, bookish and claimed acreage over several canicule as they departed.
Their words were "here is your mission, if you chose to acquire it" and we did and acquire for over 17 years. What the Telah Foundation (it's acknowledged article name) does is provides a arrangement to secure, protect, annal and advance the Foundation's (Group's) bookish acreage and their elements of understanding. What we do anniversary day is acknowledgment emails, advertise information, accommodate their book and tapes and handle the diplomacy of the Group.
The bookish acreage in catechism consists of tapes, still attainable for a reasonable $3 through the website (which accommodate anniversary member's "goodbye" statement), and the absoluteness of Ti and Do's abounding writings.
Copies of the video tapes and book of calm commodity attainable for acquirement on HeavensGate.com (cash mail orders only).
Today, Mark and Sarah King are the guardians of Heaven's Gate's legacy, tasked with the accountability of all that that entails. Afterwards all, the alone role they played in the website's conception was putting the affair online—and of course, befitting it there. Which, they added, is easier said than done:
The website was created by the Accumulation in the abatement of 1996. It has had some issues of abolition in March 1997 due to getting overwhelmed. It has aswell had to be confused due to host servers traveling out of business.
The advice on the website is still the aforementioned advice that gave us in 3.5 deejay architecture on March 25, 1997. We loaded in their abandonment updates afresh and it has remained with the aforementioned advice anytime since. If we had to move it a few years ago due to accession ISP failure, we acclimated the aforementioned 3.5 diskettes to amount the advice in.
The aboriginal discs acclimated to upload the website in 1997. Image via Mark and Sarah King.
And should they anytime acquire to change hosts again, they will await on those actual aforementioned billowing discs accustomed to them aback in 1997 to backpack on their promise.
It's not at all hasty why Mark and Sarah were alleged as to run the website. They'll acknowledgment your questions, but will never action any advice that hasn't been anon prompted. They're wary—and they acquire every acumen to be. And that quiet catch is what allows the website—not its keepers—to yield centermost stage. You wouldn't even apperceive anyone was abaft the scenes unless you knew area to look.
But why accumulate HeavensGate.com running? As far as Mark and Sarah are concerned, it seems to be added about befitting a affiance than annihilation else. And if they do apperceive what Do absolutely had in mind, at atomic for now, they're befitting their mouths shut. But as Balch says:
[Do] was aswell actual absorbed on traveling out with a splash, as one of the ex-members told me. Way aback in the actual beginning, they believed that they were traveling to accomplish apocalypse by getting assassinated and resurrected. Afresh the UFO would come, the amplitude ship, and they alleged it a affirmation because this was traveling to be affidavit to the apple of who they were. Added than that, they believed it was traveling to be witnessed by bags and advertisement about the world, So if they committed suicide, I anticipate even admitting they didn't use the appellation demonstration, it was the aforementioned thing. Traveling out with a splash—and they absolutely did. So the website absolutely could be the bequest of that.
The added possibility, of course, is that it artlessly exists as a ablaze post. A alarm of advice to adviser approaching absent souls appear the evolutionary akin aloft human. That's not to say there's traveling to be a additional group; the Kings were abundantly determined that their ambition wasn't to recruit for and charm Heaven's Gate anew.
Rather, the website artlessly exists to accumulate any inquiring minds informed. Or in our case, to act as a admonition of a bizarre, horrible, and affecting act, always preserved in the amber of internet infamy. As continued as someone's there to accumulate the lights on.
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