Seekers of Exotic Escape: My Classmate’s Close Encounter with Comet Hale-Bopp aboard a UFO

Her eyes peered down pensively at me from atop the cliff. My friend and I were swimming at Slippery Rock west of Eugene in Oregon’s Coast Range. It was a warm, leisurely summer day in July, 1975.

“Jump,” I yelled, treading water in the pool below. Two dozen feet of empty space gave freedom to her fall, ending next to me with a splash.

Soon after that innocent summer idyll, my friend the jumper, Susan Francis Strom, disappeared for 22 pensive years apart from disavowed family and friends. During that long self-expulsion, she sought a similar passage through empty space, outer space, this time in a flying saucer to a literal space in the heavens. Her chance came when the Hale-Bopp comet appeared at its nearest and brightest point on its trip around the Sun in March of 1997. The freedom of her fall would end with a different kind of splash though, death by suffocation, along with 38 others in the largest mass suicide in American history.

I’m hoping this story gives closure to long-simmering grief for my friend as I attempt to explain what led to her participation in the lethal ritual that she and the rest of a fringe group, called Heaven’s Gate, celebrated in Rancho Santa Fe, California that fateful March. My explanation requires blazing a trail through what Campbell calls a “cultic milieu” filled with an interesting, eclectic, and sometimes rather odd assortment of metaphysical musings, made rife, perhaps, by the quickening approach of the end of the second millennium.

Revitalization Movements

The period 1960 to 1990, according to McLaughlin, comprised the “Fourth Great Awakening” in the history of American religion. Socially induced forces, especially materialism and economic determinism, were causing “cultural distortion” (Wallace) in the collective unconscious (Jung) of Americans, leading to a break down in the consensus of agreement with the ways of the established order. Many of the disaffected, including a large portion of the baby boom generation, intellectually exhausted by the tumultuous sixties, sought resolution for a deepening sense of alienation through “consciousness-raising” experiments with alternative religions. These seekers became potential waves of amber harvest into the barns of, especially, auto-licensed doomsday cult “de sac” builders at the dead ends in the mushrooming “farm housing developments” of the new religions.

One disaffected, disenfranchised entrepreneur was former music professor Marshall Herff Applewhite, age 42, along with his partner, former nurse Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles, age 47. In September of 1975 they instructed subordinates to tack up flyers around Corvallis, Oregon that advertised a meeting on Sunday the 14th in a convention room, rented under a fictitious name, at the Bayshore Inn in Waldport, 16 mi. south of Newport on the coast.

The text of the flyer continues, as follows. “Two individuals say they were sent from the level above human, and will return to that level in a space ship (UFO) within the next few months. This man and woman will discuss how the transition from the human level to the next level is accomplished, and when this may be done... This is not a religious or philosophical organization recruiting membership. However, the information has already prompted a number of individuals to devote their total energy to the transitional process. If you have ever entertained the idea that there might be a real physical level in space beyond the Earth’s confines, you will want to attend this meeting.”

My friend Susie was intrigued.

Changing Her Major

I had met fellow Botany Major Susan Strom while we were both enrolled in Structure of Seed Plants at Oregon State University the previous winter. I remember taking a real liking to her after a long talk in the Commons. Her dark eyes, set wide apart in a pleasant face, held a soft sadness that made me want to just hug her.

Cordley Hall, Department of Botany/Plant Pathology Oregon State University

She told me of her camp counseling experiences, and I told her of my camping and backpacking in the Sierra, beginning as a boy scout at age 13. I said to her that my starting out in forestry was based on a love for trees. I’d emigrated all the way from Virginia for the chance.

“My tree-hugging disaffection with the tree-chopping utilitarianism of forestry led to the purity of plant science,” I continued, feeling a bit chagrined. Susie mostly nodded in agreement without saying much.

She had come out from Omaha. I could feel that her sense of dislocation was of a vaguer sort. I remember a confused look in the deepest brown eyes I’d ever seen up till then. It was a retiring look of longing and sadness for peace and tranquility somewhere on the lovely green earth, but she couldn’t tell me exactly what she wanted.

I remember our consensus that, unlike classes in plant ecology and primitive plant morphology, labs in the course we took together didn’t involve live plants, just dead slices of parenchyma tissue fixed on slides. We were supposed to explain how cells had differentiated at the behest of unseen indole-3-acetic acid and gibberellin growth hormones before permanent immobilization on the little strips of glass.

We both got a “C” in the course. We shared a desire for a more dynamic organic vitality.

Susie had a degree to finish, but read the flyer and saw opportunity to learn something new, along with a kind of academic ne’er-do-well acquaintance in our crowd named Dave Van Sinderen. I had found out that summer that she had shacked up with him at a town commune cohabitated by mutual friends on 32^nd Street. Three years older, he drifted between interests, spending time, for instance, at the National Outdoor Leadership School of Lander, Wyoming, learning how to lead wilderness trips. Camping gear was their furniture, with sleeping bags on the floor. I was jealous and didn’t want to go to the meeting.

Reeling in the Catch

I try to imagine the experience through Susan’s eyes, beginning with that recruitment meeting in Waldport. Applewhite’s and Nettles’s aliases would change over the years, yet “Bo and Peep,” respectively at the time, exhibited the power to intrigue.

Susie must have thought the humorous titles (rounding up their sheep) that poked fun at themselves rather disarming. (Don’t take yourself too seriously.) Bo had a giddy, child-like demeanor, the charisma. He was the spokesman with the resonate voice of a former opera singer. Peep was the quiet, more serious leader who took a back seat.

What did Susie hear? Evacuate Earth, ascend to the next level, because the kingdom of heaven was at hand. A space ship, a UFO, would be the mode of escape. “How interesting!” she must have thought. This was not your typical millennial message heard in the Bible belt surrounding Omaha. It had Star Trek, with aliens thrown in.

Susie and Dave were given a chance to ask questions. I’m sure the organic language for how the Earth was one of many space “gardens,” and how humans were “plants,” put on it by alien forces, as were other beings elsewhere in the universe, appealed to Susie’s botanic sensibility. She and Dave were like “caterpillars” waiting to be metamorphosised by the Two’s divine agency into “butterflies.” This too, I’m sure, appealed to their Earth Day-bred environmentalism.

The recruitment method Bo and Peep used was clever and different. They kept the message brief to keep the curious guessing, though there had been a lengthy question and answer session, with rigidly scripted answers offered at the end. Their ability to answer curtly, forthrightly, and without embellishment meant to give the message a sense of plausibility. And the speakers stuck to the message. There was no talk of life style or living expenses.

Then the screening process began. Since Susie and Dave wanted to inquire further, they gave their phone number and were called a day later and told of the follow up meeting at a park near Eugene. The intent was to slough off the gawkers and hostile hecklers. When Dave and Susie declared a serious interest in trying out as novitiates, they were again told they must leave everything they own, and were given a week to decide. Then they would be called collect about the next step. ''It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,'' Dave told friends. When the call came, they said they were ready. They were given directions to a campground in the mountains just west of Livermore, CO. Dave and Susie packed up Dave’s VW microbus and left town.

The Anointing

He from Corpus Christi, the son of an itinerant Presbyterian minister, and she from Houston, raised Baptist and born again at age 11, Applewhite and Nettles were seeped in the Christian gospel of the Deep South. Bo had taught music at St. Thomas Catholic College in Houston, home of NASA. So he and Nettles must have been familiar with alleged UFO sightings and visitations from outer space, kept under wraps by the government. He read the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. He decided objects people thought were angels were, rather, UFO’s.

Skyline, Houston, Texas

Applewhite, a divorced father of two after 16 years of marriage, was fired from St. Thomas, perhaps for a homosexual affair with a student from the Montrose section of Houston. What do you do when a deep Southern upbringing has taught you to despise your malfunctioning sexuality that predisposes you to ridicule, ostracism, and denial of salvation? Applewhite checked into a sanitarium seeking exorcism of his sexual preference. There he met nurse Peep, divorced mother of four who dabbled in astrology. They hit it off immediately, platonic, clairvoyant love at first sight.

It was a marriage made in outer space.

Applewhite’s vision of self-loathing became a convenient source for a new and powerful kind of redemption. Bolstered by a rejection of their dissatisfying pasts, both decided they were no longer who they once were. They began to wander by stolen car for three years exploring new identities. Neither he nor Nettles were immune to protean inter-changeability. Their self-stylized divinity would evolve throughout their “careers.” but, for now, they decided they were the Two of Chapter 11 in the book of Revelation. Fire from their mouths would devour their enemies (including bosses who fire you for being gay?). They would smite the earth with every plague. After their prophesying, they would be killed, and everyone would rejoice because the prophets had tormented those who dwell on the earth. Three days later God would raise them and call them up into heaven. Not the typical career objective unless this is a delusion of grandeur with a noticeable absence of any type of sexuality in the list of job qualifications.

Wandering in the Wilderness

Soon after her departure, Susan was admonished to write home on a handout postmarked in Livermore. She wrote her parents in Omaha, saying, ''The only way I reconciled leaving you is that I can help you from the Next Level, God's Kingdom.'' A mimeographed statement on the back suggested that even if she were to be killed, her body would be resurrected and would continue on into the next level. If this was alarming, it was because of where and when and under what conditions would she be in "the Next Level." Best hoped for was a spiritual place of repose and security from which to dispense some sort of benevolence. Worst feared for was that she was going to die soon at the hands of a kidnapping cult of death.

Despite the extreme situation of her present status, she and others were tapping into a universal sentiment going back to Plato. According to Angus, Plato, under the influence of oriental mystery religions and their attempt to respond to a yearning for immortality, wrote that man is a "heavenly plant and not of earth." He is the "spectator of all time and all existence" with an "innate knowledge of the heavenly patterns, who in self-examination can adorn his soul, which is by nature immortal." Properly situated, the soul can face the future, for "fair is the prize, and the hope great, and the venture glorious," not in a "sensuous continuity of existence," but in increasing "god-likeness in a differentiated eternity," a status that can be achieved by boarding a UFO. Susan was embarking on an adventure. Her stance as an "exhausted seeker," however, meant suspending her training in scientific thinking and declaring intellectual surrender.

Bo and Peep kept quiet watch over the nomadic group. Talks around campfires with new recruits under the stars came natural to Dave, the wilderness environmentalist, and Susie, the camp counselor. It must have been exciting, a radical departure from previous norms, yet non- threatening. And the fervent but low key exhortations of the Two fit the protean style of seekers, many who flitted like flies in and out of the new religions. Serial experiences that “taught something new,” according to Lifton, was an adaptation to the “flooding of imagery” wrought by mass communication and rapid change in modern society. I remember my own “strong ideological hunger” and shifting allegiances in those days as a Religious Studies major.

There was no hard sell. Anyone was free to leave, often given a bus ticket home. They weren’t being smothered in love either. There was no forced fusion into a collective identity dictated by their new elders. The present community wasn’t important. The future “shedding of their containers” on an individual basis, and thus the effectual eradication of community and the need for it, was everything. What bonded them together was simply the wait. Sometimes silence prevailed around the slowly stoked campfires, each listening to the wind and watching the shooting stars. Up there somewhere was their immediate destiny.

Nomadic wandering took the Two and their new initiates through a series of scruffy campgrounds. Susan and the rest were made moving targets during this initial period of indoctrination, a cosmological disappearing act, in order to evade family members or hostile vigilantes looking to rescue recruits who had earlier disappeared without a trace. They stayed in places such as Medicine Bow National Forest, WY and Bonny Reservoir, CO. Sometimes over the years they would settle for a time in towns where they earned money working as waitresses or store clerks. Recruitment was spotty and attrition high.

Rules of Order

Except for Jesus, who came "eating and drinking," every great teacher from Plato to John the Baptist, from Paul to Plotinus, decreed that a lifestyle of asceticism was a necessary qualification for religious life. Many questioning young Americans had been raised in affluence and its covert offering of sexual freedom, but Bo and Peep were seasoned critics of materialism and sexuality and its renunciation for their nascent religious purposes, ones that declared that the spiritual and the natural were mutually antagonistic and ultimately irreconcilable. The body is a tomb of the soul. Saving the soul required escaping the body. These body snatchers were body deniers.

In accordance with austere ascetic practices that were in reaction to the corrupting influences of sexuality and materialism, and also with the need to discipline, regiment, and subordinate new members, the Two exhorted Dave, Susan, and the rest of their prospective flock to give up sex, drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. I have always wondered how they took the no sex message. What made this easier, I’m sure, was their being paired in rotating partnerships. Each would monitor the other’s self correction regarding base human behaviors unbefitting the divine sparks of goodness that aliens had implanted within their corruptible “containers.” Such “catalytic conflict” between the new recruits would promote the “overcoming” process and maintain party line equilibrium. The Two would thus control through this reciprocal feedback between partners.

A sign that building community was unimportant, which made this group stand out compared to other new religions, talk with older, more experienced members was discouraged. More importantly, the Two needed absolute control over the fluidly evolving party line. Recruits were treated to low key sermons by the Two from folding chairs in camp. When hitting a sticky point, they would excuse themselves to go confer privately. They also circulated handouts amongst campers.

Sacred Tablets

I am fascinated by how Bo and Peep kept up with these scripted revisions on the road in the days before laptops. I picture a portable, manual typewriter much like an old fashioned war correspondent’s with which to make and mimeograph evolving doctrine.

A pair of vigilantes who doggedly followed the Two’s convoluted trail, finally intercepting them at Rock Cut State Park NE of Rockford, IL, was able to listen to some of their sermons and examine handmade scripture on October 6, only 22 days after the Waldport, OR recruitment event.

Historical perspective makes for a chilling effect what one of the student leaders told them in those earliest days of the cult. “No one would need to die in order to go to the ‘next level,” he said. This prompted one of the eyewitnesses to respond, “Our fear of a mass suicide (my emphasis) resulting from hypnosis abated.” *

The eyewitness, after watching a sermon the Two gave to campers seated on a semi-circle of picnic tables, reported, “I had been trained as an actor and director myself, and had taught theater arts. As I watched this couple, the man especially revealed he was acting. He used every device he had for portraying himself as that which he needed to be. His eyes were tools, his hands were tools, his gestures, his voice, his silence, his choice of metaphor, his dress- all tools. He used them in a too-conscious fashion, revealing the kind of overplaying I had seen often when a student tries too hard to be convincing to an audience, or to himself. His overacting was not wild and obvious, but very evident to me.” *

The eyewitnesses pieced together the following heretical imperatives the Two preached to proselytes and handed them on pamphlets.

“After being born in the usual way of others come from the kingdom of God, it was revealed that we are the incarnate Two of Revelation. The kingdom of Jesus, Elijah, and Moses is a physical place. Souls are planted in all vehicles by God. Our task is to reveal to you, who are now ripe souls cultivated on garden Earth, how to enter the kingdom.

“If reading just the quotations of Jesus, nothing else, it’s the same process, which is called Human Individual Metamorphosis. You must deny all ties to earthly existence and suffer rejection by unripe and unresponsive souls. Aided by the powers of Fathers now nearby, a chemical change will transform your body into a celestial vehicle suitable for the kingdom. A spaceship will take you there. Souls onboard the ship will be the first ever to enter the kingdom.

“Souls of vehicles who die apart from this exclusive process will recycle into other humans through birth. Up to this point all have died and their souls have recycled. God’s originally implanted souls, which have been reincarnating over centuries, have been migrating toward the western United States. Ascended souls will become Fathers themselves and will control the destinies of other vehicles and their souls planted in gardens all over the universe. Meanwhile Earth’s garden will be hoed under, replanted, left alone, or destroyed.

“We (the Two) are not Jesus. Jesus did not teach love of others, how to get along with others. He taught this overcoming process.

“Anything that puts doubts in your mind is the work of disincarnates, powerful earth-bound souls who have died and think they are in heaven. Demons, they have power to keep you here by pretending to love you through friends and families, which is not loving. It is clinging. They especially use the prayers of your loved ones to keep you here. You must avoid all this at all cost.

“Your body doesn’t die from Human Individual Metamorphosis. The space ship that is coming soon will carry you live to heaven.

“Spending all your time and energy telling yourself that this message is true is imperative. Thoughts about all else must be discarded.

“Once the prophecy about us (the Two of Revelation) is enacted and we are at the next level, a second space ship will come for you, once your process of preparation is complete.” *

This ingeniously devised recruitment method for gathering followers with a whacky but not necessarily insane promise that they would not die but still go to heaven "could be envied by any salesperson who ever tried to close a deal by first getting a commitment." *

*Tom Robinson Northwest Magazine 1975

Gnostic Astronauts

Bo’s and Peep’s plaint was an offbeat fusion of Gnostic Christian heresy and science fiction. Souls, “divine sparks” that had always existed, would recognize their transcendent potentiality and return to Evolutionary Level Above Human, which had been their original and only true home. What they needed was the secret knowledge or gnosis (γνώσεις) required for it to work. Bo and Peep possessed the secret, boarding passes for a literal ride aboard a modern spaceship. Carnival hucksters operating rides at the county fair couldn’t have made the ancient heresy sound more appealing.

At the heart of Gnostic heresy is dualism, traceable to Persian Zoroastrian influence, which meant that the world of fallen matter ruled by “Lucy” (Lucifer and the lesser “luciferans”) is pitted against those with the divinely planted spark who must escape to heaven.

Susan may have recognized a familiar millennial narrative with a newly adopted and rather novel space age pedigree. The time for the fallen world of matter, ruled by Lucifer’s minions, to be “spaded under” was at hand. It is interesting to note that all the categories of this narrative were encapsulated in a physical body. A physical space ship would take her prepared physical body, which would not have to die first, to a physical heaven. Physical embodiment of divine categories is not unusual. It actually occurs in the writing of the Apostle Paul, such as the “body” (σάρκ) of sin (Rom. 6.6) and the “body” of death (Rom. 7.24), both which must be redeemed through a saving event that would “further clothe” one’s “tent” with one’s “heavenly habitation.” Having more clothes, not less, would enable “life” to “swallow” the “mortal.” And God gave the “spirit” as a first “installment” (Rom. 5.1-5). The narrative just needed updating with some cool technology.

Adapting dualistic categories to new age thinking in regard to the problem of HOW this would manifest physically necessitated revision over the course of the group’s history. At first, one’s ascetically prepared body, later “container-vehicle,” would transport its spark via space technology. Ultimately, the old container must be left behind and the spark must transcend to a new and different kind of container. The seed of suicide as a means to hasten the process eventually took root and germinated in the mind of Bo the Gnostic astronaut.

The Saved Remnant

In his book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes the following. “To plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented, yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader, or some new technique, they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. And they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their undertaking.”

Though useful, aspects of Hoffer’s model don’t apply. Susan, I’m sure, felt “discontent.” I had sensed that. But she was not “destitute.” There would be lean times, for sure, some of it deliberate, such as her Spartan diet at Rancho Santa Fe that consisted of pasta for breakfast, and fruit and lemonade parceled out till bedtime. And there were good times. Members sometimes managed to save enough from wages and money that new members brought in to afford several expensive campers for their travels. Dave bought the New Mexico property they lived in just prior to Rancho Santa Fe with interest from an earlier trust fund, a possession that, interestingly, the Two had not urged that he abandon according to ascetic discipline. Lee Ann Fenton, who did much of the bookkeeping, says $300,000 to $400,000 had been a reasonable estimate of its worth. And, at $7,000 a month rent for the mansion they died in, their web design business was lucrative enough.

Per Hoffer’s “potent doctrine,” an apocalyptic narrative of escape, each participant’s ego was initially spared. The individual, not the collective, was the subject of transformation, initially called Human INDIVIDUAL Metamorphosis. This principal is traceable to Christianity prior to Augustine, elucidated by St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c. 130-c. 202 C.E.). In Irenaeus’ view, the whole history of human existence is one of progress from immaturity towards perfection. Each human is adapted by nature for the acquisition of virtue by means of moral development and growth and finally brought to the perfection intended by God. Hints of this are in scriptures, such as, “Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling” (Philippians 2.12). Bo took this and cloaked it in Gnostic heresy, stated again simply, that each one is a prisoner within alien territory ruled over by an inferior deity from which one must be liberated and taken back to one’s true home.

Susan was told she was a “student” in a “class.” She thus had class projects and homework. The “works” or drills Susan performed with her check partner were designed to diminish the fallible “human” characteristics peculiar to her, since they detracted from the character of her “divine spark.” Drills were tailored to each partner’s peculiar peccadilloes. She may have been amongst those who were made to listen to the incessant hum of a tuning fork knocked over the head. The objective of this do-it-yourself initiative was to more effectively “tune in” to her divine spark’s connection to the Level Above Human. But, in general, the drills were designed to diminish trust in one's own judgment, inappropriate curiosity, deceit, sensuality, taking initiative without one’s check partner, and desire for attention.

“Shame and fear were the impetuses to keep you under control, to keep you from thinking for yourself,” former member Michael Conyers said. ''You were trying to define yourself as a pure vessel in Bo’s mind. Your punishment was him denying you his approval.'' I cringe at how acrid, conditional love in a relationship of utter dependence maintained Susan’s sense of belonging and security.

Group members were permitted to occupy their spare time with ''approved'' games, like Yahtzee, Clue and croquet. They read mysteries. They watched TV powered by a generator. Bo would point out the all- too- human frailties of contestants on ''The Price is Right.''

The leaders initially were open-minded and flexible as doctrine developed. They were quick to humorously declare their “fallibility,” for instance, with an “Aw, shucks” whenever the predicted flying saucer failed to appear. Like all movements, there eventually had to be, according to Weber, a routinization of charisma and solidification of identities and roles. They experimented with his being the reincarnation of Jesus to her incarnation of Jesus’ Father. (See In His Own Words Parts 1-10) Bo had sensed from the beginning that Peep was the more mature Older Member, and when she passed away from liver cancer in 1985 under the false name Shelly West in Parkland Hospital in Dallas, he was devastated. She remained with him, communicating to him from the Level Above Human. In the living room surrounded by bedrooms filled with 39 dead bodies, two chairs from Target sat perched on a folding table. One was for Peep. He successfully adjusted to her absence aided by such gestures, which helped to reinforce the group’s “extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future” (Hoffer) for 12 years more after her death.

Bo’s “irresistible power” (Hoffer) to keep the message plausible was originally due to his charismatic manner, which also described the product of the social relationship between Bo and his followers, but also due to his quiet leadership that, after her death, grew more rigid in its authority with each passing year. He slowly changed into Hoffer’s concept of the “infallible leader.”

Deprivation theory supports the thesis that constant isolation and reinforcement of the sacred narrative, a carefully cultivated sense of election, docile dependency to dictatorial leadership, and a habituated regimen, maintained a numbing mind control over Bo’s subjects. It was more than simply Bo’s need to dominate, to wield power. According to Berger, we confirm ourselves when we externalize our identity through conversation with others. An affirming audience powerfully reinforces that projected identity (Faurbach), which is appropriated as objective fact (reified, Nietzsche) in the mind of the adherent. In a closed community, the effect is reciprocal. An immediate space ship ride to a place without the troublesome aspects of sex, a place in which “they neither marry, nor are they given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30) would be a simple and effective solution to Bo’s repressed homosexuality, his “thorn in the flesh.” Manufacturing and maintaining multiple sexless followers like himself by means of ascetic practice and reinforcement would powerfully reinforce this androgynous self deception meant to eliminate once and for all his protracted agony over a deviant sexuality.

From Cult to Sect

The type of religious organization Susan and the others belonged to evolved along with the doctrine. The flying saucer community gradually transformed from a cult to a sect. This is attributable to the changes in the doctrine and its practice.

Initially its eclectic grab bag of metaphysical elements drew members who had no intention of restricting their ideology or their membership to a single group. Such is the nature of a cult. For instance, one could practice transcendental meditation in order to enhance one’s experience of any religious persuasion.

But Do and Ti, as they were now called, had to address the problems of the precariousness of doctrinal boundaries and authority. They began to proclaim the uniqueness of their message and the requirement of an exclusive adherence to it. Increasingly Gnostic notions of a dualistic cosmology made the message more exclusive, cloaking it in science made it more plausible, and autocratic authority protected it from challenge. They declared that change, evolution to ever higher forms, even in heaven, was perpetual. This wrapped it in the garb of the evolutionary science of Darwin. And spaceship flights to a material heaven somewhere in the galaxy wrapped it in the garb of the astronomy of Halley. Both, ironically, protected it from the secularizing tendencies of modern science and technology, which usually tend to induce assignment of authority for running civilization and its institutions, especially those that explain the way the world works, to agencies that are not religious. So deliverance from this world aboard a ship to a better life in the next level, and the arena for even further change, were both projected onto outer space in chiliastic hopes that the Level Above Human would be reserved only for them, the saved remnant. Only Do and Ti, the exclusive authorities, knew the way.

A permanent body of loyal believers began to emerge, sequestered and maintained without walls.

Managing the Household

Heaven’s Gate, being a sect, required that it maintain strict discipline, adherence to internal authority, and segregation from the surrounding social world and its government, toward which they maintained only the minimal relations required for economic and political survival. It used strictly cash in order to sever ties to the economic infrastructure of the banks, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS. This helped conceal the borders of the theologically sequestered community from mundane oversight by the established order.

I have always wondered how they got away with that. Conning the fallen world of Lucifer had become high art, beginning early. On their epic road trips in the early ’70, the Two had often skipped out on their motel and food bills, stating that they obeyed no earthly laws. ''The Lord will be as a thief in the night.''

When the threat of breaches in security died down in the ‘80’s, members sought well paying jobs, probably because Dave’s trust fund was exhausted by 1981. Phony resumes were submitted, which required elaborate ruses. Phone numbers for out-of-state ''references'' would ring back to the house through call-forwarding. Members pretended to be past bosses and dispensed high praise.

Margaret Richter, a high school valedictorian, was a computer whiz. David Moore was a master mechanic. Susan Paup was a technical writer. They never had any trouble finding work. All who found jobs pleased their employers. Group members were punctual, impeccably groomed, and collegial but not gossipy. They ate bag lunches.

I’ve also wondered what Susie’s roles included. Members without jobs worked in the houses. Each day required intricate scheduling that dealt with endless minutiae: who would peel carrots, who would bag garbage, who would drive whom to work. The group kept the Procedures Book, as big as a phone directory. It mandated the direction for pulling a razor while shaving and the proper circumference of a pancake. The lesson here was not so much that there was a single right way to do things, but that unquestioning obedience was essential for a Next Level mind.

Avowed masters of mall shopping, the Two outfitted members via T. J. Maxx and Burlington Coat Factory. Apparel, even underwear, was shared. Permission for sole use of any article of clothing was denied.

Members felt fondness for each other while busy with the burdens of mundane housework. But expression of such was forbidden. Giving a hug soiled the bodies of the affectionate. Or else such behavior proved an addiction to be overcome. Lee Fenton was addicted to giving and receiving affection. Dick Joslyn was addicted to egotism. John Craig was addicted to stubbornness. Angela Skala was addicted to pie. What was Suzie addicted to, I wonder?

And I wonder what Susie thought about all the regimentation, down to the rudiments, such as how toothpaste and soap were arranged in the bathrooms, and how to bake a bourbon pound cake “10 inches high” with which to reward (mollify and keep quiet) those who helped at the car wash. (Body-despising ascetics, they didn’t eat such food themselves, of course.)

Susie and the others, I’m afraid, didn’t think much at all.

Heaven’s Internet House Calls

The dawn of the inexpensive Internet pc around 1994 ushered in the ultimate, and final, windfall of Heaven’s Gate’s isolated economics. Work could be done at home. Those with early training in computer science went to work as web page designers, calling themselves, with entrepreneurial flourish, Higher Source. I picture sexless monks at pc’s all over the mansion stroking away at keyboards, lemonade and fruit dishes accumulating on the desk tops. Since computers free the imagination from the everyday world, inevitable downtime in pallid closed quarters led to graphic doodling with childish whimsy. Post-rapture imaginings took many field days, I’m sure. Sci Fi pop art kitsch popped up and got printed to adorn the tack boards in cubicle-like work areas. The following is a gallery of galactic gleanings that illustrate Heaven Gate’s techno-sentiment, emotional need, and cultural fluff.

After fleeing Earth, the cultists, now higher members, construct an Earth Lab

Controlling a typhoon on Earth; moving toward Saturn’s rings

Pluto’s polar entrance for a landing ship; descending to its inner core

Older Member exits shuttle to greet Plutoans; confers with Pluto’s chief

The Rapture or “Beam Me Up”

The sect had started out 22 years earlier “wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their undertaking,” according to the Hoffer thesis. The greatest “difficulty” was the waiting. Many had left as the wait dragged on. Those who held out were those who were irrevocably mentally hooked. Susan’s tenure of 22 years was amongst the longest. When Hale-Bopp appeared, the difficulty of their undertaking suddenly became simple. Continuing in support of Hoffer’s thesis, the sect discovered “some new technique” that provided “access to a source of irresistible power.” That technique was suicide.

Hale-Bopp's approach is the "marker" we've been waiting for -- the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to "Their World" --in the literal Heavens. (Heaven’s Gate website)

The media made a field day out of the giddy anticipation sect member’s presented in the “suicide note” videotapes broadcast to the world via ex member Rio DiAngelo at the sect’s web design employer. Hale-Bopp had ushered in the moment of truth, confirmed by its greatest brightness occurring on March 23, the day of a full Moon, which was also about the time of the Spring Equinox. And it was Easter Week, the holiest liturgical celebration in the West for an event involving the death (suicide?) of one of the greatest Higher Members to have ever visited Earth. It was an occult fantasist’s dream come true.

Never mind that the sighting of a bright “space ship” in the comet’s tail proved to be just another star. Their wait was over. It finally came time to ascend from their despised earthly “vehicles” to the celestial one made real by Hale- Bopp. It would start Saturday, March 22.

The rite was orderly, antiseptic, and precise. The house was in order without a dirty dish in the sink (Well, there was one unfinished load of laundry). Nary a drop of blood was spilt. All followed procedure: a communion cocktail of Phenobarbital in fruit, washed down with vodka, so the knockout would make death painless and unobservable to the communicant, and a plastic bag over the head to induce actual death by means of suffocation.

Susie was one of two partners who were the last to die, Tuesday, March 25. Here’s where putting myself in her place becomes especially difficult. I was curious about Susie’s paired partner at the end, nurse Julie LaMontagne, 45. Raised by a foster family, she got her nursing degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, graduating cum laude in 1974. Shortly afterward she saw her best friend drown and her birth father, with whom she had remained close, die of cancer. The deaths "just made her collapse," says her brother. "We could never get her back after that." She drifted through a series of New England communes until she stumbled on Heaven's Gate in the late '70’s. She became Applewhite's personal nurse.

Susan Francis Strom at the time of her passing, age 44

The only description made by outsiders came toward the end, just before the two moved to the mansion in one of the exclusive gated communities of Rancho Santa Fe. Susie and Julie had a rummage sale at their little house. Their neighbor reported that the women were dreamy, charismatic. “You were drawn to them,” she said.

Coroners know the precise sequence of decay dead bodies undergo at specific temperatures. Death began on Saturday or early Sunday, according to the San Diego County coroner, Dr. Brian Blackbourne. Susie and Julie must have experienced the certain stench of decay, evident by Tuesday, three days later. What did they think seeing no one being whisked away, neatly packed bag in hand, each with I.D., such as a passport or a driver’s license, despite the announcement by Do on tape that each was to “become another individual,” and a $5 bill and two quarters to demonstrate that they were not vagrants?

I have to imagine that the scene, each body laid out on a bunk bed or futon with the same uniform, black pants and tunic, each sporting a shoulder patch stating, “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” Nikes bought in bulk at $10 apiece, and each under the same purple triangular shroud, just made it right. Don’t question Do, even if he’s dead and smelly. Maybe they were just following Scripture. The words of Revelation state, “And those from the peoples and tribes and tongues and nations will look at their dead bodies for three and a half days, and will not permit their dead bodies to be laid in a tomb.”

The sacred narrative had demanded a major revision when Ti died in 1985, her body remaining quite bound to this world. The faithful would each ascend in a new “vehicle,” a parallel body, acquired with Next Level knowledge, with a different molecular structure. It would lack teeth and a digestive system, and, most importantly, a reproductive system. A whimsical portrayal of its childlikeness, innocent yet wise, all brain, adorned the mantle in the mansion’s master bedroom in which Do lay, propped up with pillows. Did Susie see such bodies appear at the scene? If so, maybe the journey was too brief to require a change of clothes, and the cash was in the wrong currency.

When it was finally their turn, Susie and Julie may have felt confused that they would be unable to complete the rite of transformation to the Evolutionary Level Above Human. There would be no one to take the ugly bags off their heads, neatly put them into the dumpster out back with the others, and place the purple shrouds over them. I find it noteworthy that they did not toss a coin or something that would determine how one would help perform the entire rite for the other, leaving only one partially able to complete the process. However, conditioned over many years to partner in everything class members did together, Susie and Julie performed the ritual in a seamless, synchronized choreography. Both were found with bags over their heads and no purple shrouds.

Aftermath

One has to admire how well they pulled it off:

1. Meticulous preparation, probably scripted in the conditioned manner of all their activities (some of it written on notes)

2. A “press kit” consisting of a flamboyant, even smug, announcement of their “do-it-yourself rapture” on the title page of their clandestine website, “Hale- Bopp Brings Closure to Heaven’s Gate; As was promised, the keys to Heaven’s Gate are here again in Ti and Do (The UFO Two) as they were in Jesus and His Father 2000 years ago,” and suicide notes in the form of farewell tapes, each bidding the world goodbye with child-like happiness;

3. A “last supper” at Marie Callender’s Restaurant in Carlesbad, the burden of choice eliminated by making just one selection, consisting of iced tea, dinner salad with tomato and vinegar dressing, turkey pot pie for entre, and cheese cake topped with blueberries for dessert

4. Perfect setting, a comfortable, big enough place in a gated community in which the covenants at the top of the list were about ensuring privacy, best exemplified by the absence of street lights

5. No witnesses, no interference, that is, until ex member Rio DiAngelo got the tapes. By then it was too late for him to become a witness, and thus an accomplice, or sound the alarm to do anything about it. It could have backfired. He got the tapes Tuesday by Fed Ex, when the plan was Wednesday. Susan was still alive on Tuesday. DiAngelo put them aside until Wednesday.

Who’s at fault for this tragedy, if it can even be called one? Applewhite? Despite sectarian characteristics, with its inherent top-down authority structure, the process he utilized was a direct outgrowth of the epistemological individualism of the cultic milieu. They came with their questions, and “freely” went with his answer, a powerful one in its freedom-inspiring simplicity. His potent message about “potentialities of the future” (per Hoffer) for each member of his chosen spaceship “crew” was the one and only thing. This world and all its factors past and present were categorically to be disparaged. The world was not real. Reality was, instead, always the near-future escape in a UFO. Susie felt freedom and special recognition in this divinely appointed opportunity that inspired confidence and gave a simple and powerful meaning to her existence.

But people died. Heaven’s Gate has been judged a death cult. That’s tragic, is it not? One can argue that history is replete with stories of people dying for their beliefs. However, these deaths will always be questioned. Was it 39 suicides or 1 suicide and 38 murders? American society is grounded, in part, on the legal protection of lives. And the members of Heaven’s Gate were in the grip of voluntary enslavement to an ideology that ignored these laws of the fallen world order surrounding them. They had abdicated self control to the decisions of their leader who wrote the book of laws governing their community. I am sure there was no give-and-take about that. Do called the shots. And people died at the hands of people. When is that legal? Times of war? They would have argued that they were at war with their enemies, the “luciferians” all around them. Everyone was the enemy, down to the very bodies they occupied. He said that.

Judged strictly by a legal, constitutional standard, Susie’s last act on this earth was felony assistance in multiple suicides. What about killing the enemy who is your self? Can she be blamed for that? Enter the Kavorkian legal conflagration. How about its premeditation? Enter the issue of mind control that “made her do it,” even after the leader who came up with the idea was already dead, probably by the end of the second “wave” of 15, sometime on Monday, March 24.

Being ordered to kill is an argument that failed to protect the Manson family girls, and also convicted Manson, though he was absent from the scene when the 1969 Tate/LaBianca murders that he ordered occurred. The scenario of Applewhite’s argument, if it could be played out in the courts, that the coming of the comet Hale-Bopp made him order self- inflicted murder, would have failed, as did his defense that an older member made him steal a car in the early ‘70’s. The courts would also have condemned his argument that the suicide sect members were not taking their lives, rather, they were giving their lives, “developing” them into a more advanced state. Suicide defined in his own context, in a clever reverse psychology, meant "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered.”

Moment of grief: technician at the San Diego County Morgue

The class for overcoming humanness was now officially over. 38 volunteers, conditioned by time and reinforcement to become unwavering fans (read fanatics), were compelled to obey the command of a man with a grandiose psychosis. You will know him by his fruits that included no sermon on the mount, sacrifice for one’s neighbor, social ethics or services, or honor for mother and father. Even Mary was allowed to be with her son at his death. The only fruit grown was powerfully legitimating his self-appointed annihilation with multiple participants made docile, unwitting, and willing by means of his relentless indoctrination that, in Susan’s case, spanned 22 years. According to Do’s reckoning, the time it took to prepare the class for the Level Above Human, from its reference, was 31 minutes.

In the end there was no one to indict, no one to try or convict, no one to incarcerate or commit. Justice had become too elusive. The only things that could be done were to notify next of kin, cremate the bodies, auction off the meager property left behind by the dead members of Heaven’s Gate (sold for $33,000, including between $100 and $130 for each bunk bed the bodies lay on, proceeds to go to the families of the deceased for burial expenses), and wonder about the status of the divine “sparks,” the souls of those who Applewhite and Nettles had come to liberate. On my part, I pray for Susan’s.