Cults have always hovered out on the fringes of religion. There are always those for which established doctrines don’t answer all of the questions for us, or solve the many mysteries of the universe that taunt us. Sometimes these cults take a sharp right turn into bizarreness, embracing beliefs that many might find questionable at best, and it all gets quite a bit darker when there are deaths involved. Here we will take a look at a rather infamous UFO cult, which took things to the extreme to leave many dead and many unanswered questions behind.

The whole morass of weirdness all began with a rather unsual chance meeting. In 1972, a man by the name of Marshall Applewhite had found himself unemployed from his job as a teacher at the University of Thomas, in Houston, Texas, due to a dalliance with a male student, and was a little down on his luck, confused and aimless. One day he went to meet a sick friend at a hospital, where he met a nurse by the name of Bonnie Nettles, and whether this was a pick-up line or not, he told Nettles that he was convinced they had met in a past life. Far from put off by this, Nettles would take it even further into the weird when she said she had been told by extraterrestrials that they would meet, and that they had a divine mission together. It was basically love at first sight.

In the coming days, Applewhite would claim to have vivid dreams and visions, and Nettles took this as a sign of the prophecy that had been foretold to her by the aliens. The fact that Nettles was married at the time does not seem to have deterred her at all when she then embarked on a 6-month-long retreat with Applewhite, during which time they read extensively on theology, philosophy, and extraterrestrials, as well as praying and engaging in long bouts of intense meditation. Through their studies they became convinced that they were a higher level of humanity than others, and that they were actually the two witnesses spoken of in the Book of Revelation, who were described as prophets who died, were resurrected, and were taken up into heaven upon a cloud. Nettles and Applewhite had their own unique spin on all of this, in that they believed that the cloud spoken of in the Bible was actually an alien spaceship, and that they were destined to also die and be brought aboard to be whisked away by their extraterrestrial saviors in an event they called “The Demonstration.” In addition to this, they believed that God was in fact an advanced, super-evolved alien, that life had been seeded on Earth by these very same aliens, and that we were basically an extraterrestrial garden that would be harvested when the time was right.

Marshall Applewhite

Despite the raised eyebrows this all brought them from pretty much everyone, they were undeterred, and went about making plans to actually carry out their plan and try to contact these higher aliens. Their first step was to gather a group of followers, and they really went full stop with their bizarre claims to those who came to see them. Applewhite and Nettles told potential members that they were the spokespeople for aliens, who could take them away to a place far away in the cosmos basically associated with the Kingdom of Heaven. According to them, the Earth was set to be harvested and then basically reset, and that the only way to avoid being wiped out was to join the extraterrestrials aboard their ship and effectively be taken to “Heaven,” which they called “The Next Level,” where they would become perfected entities. Followers were told that if they embraced the group’s teachings, they would become eligible for this transport off Earth, to essentially become immortal. It seems to have been a good pitch, because they began to attract a decent following of believers, steadily accruing members, attracting a broad spectrum of ages and from different religious backgrounds and walks of life, including people in high positions such the Republican politician John Craig, who joined in 1975 as he was running for the Colorado House of Representatives.

Upon entering the group, followers were required to take on an extremely ascetic lifestyle. They gave up all earthly possessions and connections, including their money, jobs, and families, as well as eschewing their more human tendencies, such as sexuality and their very individuality. Many males, including Applewhite himself, intentionally had themselves castrated in order to escape the binds of sexuality. They believed that this was the only way to condition themselves for the arduous journey they would eventually make, and it was seen as essentially helping them to “graduate” to ever more perfected levels, with the final stage being to leave Earth entirely. Through all of this they believed that there were sinister entities on Earth that sought to deceive and mislead humans through the use of lies and advanced technology such as holograms, and that all other religions had fallen victim to these devious creatures. Over time, the group’s belief’s evolved and were refined to include several New Age concepts, such as the idea that aliens could inhabit human bodies similar to a spiritual “walk-in,” basically a type of possession, as well as astral travel and others. Applewhite and Nettles, who called each other aliases such as “Bo and Peep” and “Do and Ti,” also tweaked their own stories, later claiming that they were not merely the earthly representatives of the aliens, but actually harbored the souls of the extraterrestrials themselves, much in the same way they believed had happened to Jesus Christ. Indeed, Applewhite would begin to proclaim himself as an actual successor to Jesus.

In 1975, the group suddenly sort of vanished off the public radar, going underground, moving covertly across the country camping out and evading the media so effectively that it had seemed as if they had just vanished off the face of the earth. It was all part of their plan to reach a higher level of existence, and to more fully metamorphose into superior beings. Nettles would die in 1985, which spurred a few more changes in the doctrine they had been preaching. Up until that point they had believed that they would physically be brought up into space aboard a UFO, but when Nettles died of cancer and that obviously didn’t happen, it was changed to the idea that only the soul or consciousness was beamed aboard, leaving the empty vessel of the physical body behind. This worked well with the idea of spiritual walk-ins, and so the cult trudged on, later funding the operation partly through a website called “Higher Source,” and indeed the group was heavily involved in using computers and the Internet to spread their ideology and pull in money, leading to their reputation as a sort of “cybercult.”

In September of 1996, the group, which now called itself “Heaven’s Gate,” made its headquarters in a sprawling, 9,200 square feet (850 m2) mansion in the upscale area of Rancho Santa Fe, just outside of San Diego, California. They also began buying up “alien abduction insurance,” which not only surprisingly is a thing, but also cost them ludicrous amounts of money. It was at this time that the approaching Comet Hale–Bopp started to be seen as having some sort of deep significance for them, and was seen as a sign. They became increasingly convinced that in the trail of the comet was a spaceship that was coming to finally pick them up, and that this was the moment they had been dreaming of for over two decades. Applewhite convinced his followers that this was so, that they were being presented a chance to join the Next Level, but how were they to go ride aboard it? In Applewhite’s view it was simple, they just had to leave their corporeal forms behind and be beamed aboard as the comet passed.

Now suicide had long been against the cult’s beliefs, but Applewhite found a way to twist this around. In his mind, since their human bodies were only vessels for their alien souls, then by choosing not to join their brethren aboard the UFO was the real “suicide,” as it would be denying their best chance to evolve to the next stage. This rationale seems to have been perfectly logical and reasonable to his followers, because they then started making arrangements to go about carrying out a series of ritual suicides that would allow them to leave their physical vessels to join the comet’s spacecraft. The website would give the chilling last message:

Hale–Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate … Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion—’graduation’ from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave ‘this world’ and go with Ti’s crew.

The members then videotaped farewells to the friends and family they had long ago abandoned in their twisted faith, and in March of 1997 began their final journey. A total of 39 members of the group dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, with armbands that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” and then took a concoction of an epilepsy medication called phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce or pudding, which they then washed down with vodka. They then wrapped plastic bags around their heads for good measure, and as each one died their body was placed in a bed. The entire ritual was carried out over three days, between approximately March 22 and March 26, with three different groups, with some staying behind to tend to the bodies and send out videotaped farewells. Applewhite was among the last to die, and in the end, only a handful of the members remained to tell the tale.

On March 26, 1997, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department would find the bodies and it immediately hit the media to shock the entire nation. It was one of the worst mass suicides in history, made all the more chilling by the cheerful, hopeful demeanors of the final taped farewells, which showed that they really believed what they were preaching. Bizarrely, there would follow more suicides, including three of the cult’s remaining members and a copy cat suicide carried out by a 58-year-old man with no known connection to the cult, who left behind a note reading, “I’m going on the spaceship with Hale–Bopp to be with those who have gone before me.” The news was all so shocking and tragic, that even the co-discoverer of the comet, Alan Hale, spoke out to admonish what had happened and the belief systems and cultish techniques of isolation and indoctrination that had led to it. Despite the shockwaves of horror and revulsion the mass suicide caused, unbelievably the Heaven’s Gate website remained operational, run by two of the group’s surviving members.

The tale of the Heaven’s Gate cult is a bizarre, terrifying, and yet at times fascinating look into the belief system that cults can use to enslave the minds of their followers. That such a large group of perfectly sane individuals can be so absorbed into an aberrant belief system and truly embrace it to the point that they happily give their own lives is chilling at best. In the end 39 people are dead by their own choosing, looking to join the aliens they so desperately took as being real, and whether they really did find their ultimate goal or not, they leave a legacy of an ominous UFO cult, strangeness, and a dark peek into the human mind that will probably never be fully understood for most of us.

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Anomaly: something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.

If something is referred to as an anomaly, you already expect it to be strange and mysterious. If it’s called an anomaly by respected scientists, that complicates things … and makes it scarier. If those same scientists say this anomaly is breaking apart and forming more anomalies, that starts trending towards terrifying … and confusing. Is an anomaly an anomaly to another anomaly? That would be a predicament, which should be the subject of a different study.

“Over the last 200 years, the magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength on a global average. A large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America and is known as the South Atlantic Anomaly. From 1970 to 2020, the minimum field strength in this area has dropped from around 24 000 nanoteslas to 22 000, while at the same time the area of the anomaly has grown and moved westward at a pace of around 20 km per year. Over the past five years, a second centre of minimum intensity has emerged southwest of Africa – indicating that the South Atlantic Anomaly could split up into two separate cells.”

The South Atlantic Anomaly

The scientists in this case are from the European Space Agency and the anomaly is the South Atlantic Anomaly. We’re all interested in the health of Earth’s magnetic field because it protects us from solar wind and cosmic rays. The ESA and NASA are concerned about it because it protects astronauts and, more importantly, their moneymakers … satellites. The South Atlantic Anomaly was discovered in 1958 and, once its danger was determined, has forced satellites, spacecraft and observatories to be shielded in order to pass through safely. That hasn’t always worked – the South Atlantic Anomaly was blamed for the sudden destruction of Japan’s Hitomi space observatory in 2016. And now, the anomaly itself is breaking apart. What could possibly be worse?

“It has been speculated whether the current weakening of the field is a sign that Earth is heading for an eminent pole reversal – in which the north and south magnetic poles switch places.”

There goes your GPS … and that of planes, ships and everything else depending on the poles being in the their proper north and south locations. The North Pole has already been drifting into Siberia and scientists still aren’t sure why, so studying if the South Atlantic Anomaly is a possible influence can’t hurt. In fact, the anomaly itself has been drifting westward at a rate of 20 km (12 miles) per year as well as growing in size … and that’s the real problem here. The South Atlantic Anomaly is growing like an amoeba about to spit, with a second nucleus forming on the African side – the side which may have caused the anomaly in the first place. That’s the location of the African Large Low Shear Velocity Province, a so-called “slab graveyard” of ancient slabs or plates sliding under each other to form a gigantic solid formation.

The South Atlantic Anomaly breaking up

(credit: ESA)

What does something under the ocean have to do with the magnetic field?

Good question. The magnetic field is continually created and refreshed by the constant churning of the Earth’s molten iron core. The “slab graveyard” anomalies (there’s also one in the Pacific) may be blocking the force creating the field. The Atlantic anomaly causes more problems, which is why the mysterious breakup is cause for alarm. Will it form two equally powerful anomalies?

“The mystery of the origin of the South Atlantic Anomaly has yet to be solved. However, one thing is certain: magnetic field observations from Swarm are providing exciting new insights into the scarcely understood processes of Earth’s interior.”

The European Space Agency has no idea what’s going to happen, so it took the opportunity to end its press release with a plug for its Swarm constellation — three satellites in two different polar orbits at different altitudes studying Earth’s magnetic field. While they’ve made a number of discoveries, including the weakening of the field over the anomaly, they don’t have the answer … yet. All it takes is time.

Do we have enough left? That’s a quandary from an anomaly.

One of the most profound questions we face is that of if we are alone in the universe. In 1950, influential and notable physicist Enrico Fermi was working for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and suggested almost half jokingly that if there were space-faring civilizations were out there in the cosmos we should have probably heard from them by now. He famously asked “Where is everybody?” and we still don’t really have an answer to that. Fermi was puzzled by the fact that, if such civilizations existed, they hadn’t visited or found us yet. In his opinion, if they were out there, they would have exponentially broken their barriers and moved out into the galaxy, colonizing new worlds, and we would have surely known about them by now, and it is a good question. Where are they? There are a lot of proposed reasons for why we haven’t found anyone, which I have covered before, but recently there has been talk of yet another reason. Perhaps the answer to the question of where all of the aliens are is that they are all buried under miles of ice, far from our prying eyes and efforts to find them.

Perhaps one of the problems with finding life in the universe besides our own is that we are simply not looking in the right places. There has been much effort directed by scientists at looking for “Earth-like planets,” that is, planets that are much like our own and which we deem to be the most habitable and welcoming to us. These are the planets that sit just the right distance from their star, called the “Goldilocks Zone,” to have a habitable temperature, an atmosphere conducive to life, with plentiful oxygen and organic molecules, and most important of all liquid water. These are the basic ingredients we have proclaimed to be crucial for life as we know it, and it makes sense that we should deem planets similar to our own to be the best candidates for life and try to find them. After all, the only life we truly know of in the universe, that of our own world, developed in these conditions. But what if alien life is somewhere else, not on the surface, but beneath it?

While all of this effort is being made to find second Earths, and several have been indeed located, a far more common type of planet is thought to be frozen worlds and moons encased in rock and ice, but harboring vast liquid oceans below. In fact, it is widely believed that such watery worlds are perhaps 1,000 times more common than rocky, earth-type planets. To give an idea of just how common this type of world is, we need only look to our own solar system, which holds many examples. For instance, Jupiter’s moons Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa are all thought to have liquid oceans buried by miles of ice and rock, as are Saturn’s moons Titan, Dione, and Enceladus, Neptune’s moon Triton, and others, all with these oceans kept in their liquid state through geothermal activity and the affects of tides and gravitational forces. Not only do such worlds have liquid water in plentiful supply, but through geothermal activity they hold the chance of having habitable conditions and the necessary nutrients and ingredients for life even outside of the magic Goldilocks Zone. Indeed, even planets within our own star’s Goldilocks Zone aren’t really habitable, such as Mars and Venus, so maybe this is a key, and looking at these subsurface oceans potentially opens up the doors to further planets we can search for life on.

In addition, these types of habitats hold other advantages as well, because since they are located so far under, hazardous surface conditions wouldn’t necessarily affect them. One NASA physicist Alan Stern has said of this, “Impacts and solar flares, and nearby supernovae, and what orbit you’re in, and whether you have a magnetosphere, and whether there’s a poisonous atmosphere — none of those things matter.” Another group of scientists who think so are Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb, of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University, who have written a whole study on this called Subsurface Exolife. Lingham has said of the benefits of a subsurface existence in these alien oceans:

The conventional notion of planetary habitability is the habitable zone (HZ), namely the concept that the “planet” must be situated at the right distance from the star such that it may be capable of having liquid water on its surface. However, this definition assumes that life is: (a) surface-based, (b) on a planet orbiting a star, and (c) based on liquid water (as the solvent) and carbon compounds. In contrast, our work relaxes assumptions (a) and (b), although we still retain (c). One major advantage that icy worlds have is that the subsurface oceans are mostly sealed off from the surface. Hence, UV radiation and cosmic rays (energetic particles), which are typically detrimental to surface-based life in high doses, are unlikely to affect putative life in these subsurface oceans.

We have seen whole sophisticated ecosystems around hydrothermal vents on Earth in areas previously thought to be hostile for life, so it is a promising idea. Yet, there are still some drawbacks to the notion, as Lingham has said:

On the negative side, the absence of sunlight as a plentiful energy source could lead to a biosphere that has far less organisms (per unit volume) than Earth. In addition, most organisms in these biospheres are likely to be microbial, and the probability of complex life evolving may be low compared to Earth. Another issue is the potential availability of nutrients (e.g. phosphorus) necessary for life; we suggest that these nutrients might be available only in lower concentrations than Earth on these worlds.

Nevertheless, such icy worlds are coming to be seen as more and more promising as a potential candidate for alien life, and such biospheres are even thought to very plausibly be able to spawn highly intelligent life. Yet, if these vast oceans did produce intelligent life comparable to or beyond human intelligence, the main problem would be even knowing they are there at all. Some of these worlds have miles and miles of rock or ice between the surface and the water, meaning that communication with radio signals might not be an option. Stern has explained, “If they have technology, and let’s say they’re broadcasting, or they have city lights or whatever — we can’t see it in any part of the spectrum, except maybe very-low-frequency.” There would also be a lack of biosignatures on the surface to give a clue as to any life that might lie below, as the surface could be completely forbidding and barren. It seems that really the only way to know if they exist is if they contacted us or if we physically went and drilled down to them. Professor Loeb has said of these challenges:

It is very difficult to detect sub-surface life remotely (from a large distance) using telescopes. One could search for excess heat but that can result from natural sources, such as volcanos. The most reliable way to find sub-surface life is to land on such a planet or moon and drill through the surface ice sheet. This is the approach contemplated for a future NASA mission to Europa in the solar system.

Adding to this is that even if there are highly intelligent civilizations under the ice, living in such an environment would not be conducive to space travel, as they would have to bore through all of that surface, and water would be a very heavy and difficult medium to transport into orbit and over very long distances. It has even been suggested by scientists like Stern that they might not even be aware that there is space out there over their heads at all, with the universe perhaps all effectively ending for them with the impenetrable wall above them. There has also been speculation that intelligent life would need a mastery of fire to really develop machines and technology, which would be impossible in their watery realm. For instance, dolphins and octopuses have in recent years been speculated as being possibly of human-level intelligence, but their biome makes development of any sophisticated technology a challenge. Could that be happening here? There is no way to know.

What we do know is that these icy planets and moons do exist, along with ample water and quite probably the elements necessary for life. We also know that they are likely far more common than rocky, earth-like worlds. Is it at least possible that if there has evolved intelligent life outside of our own it had done so in one of these environments? If so, what does that mean for our efforts to search out and contact such life? Due to their extreme circumstances is it likely we will ever detect them or meet them? Whatever the case may be, it poses an interesting possibility for the Fermi Paradox, and at the very least truly expands the locales we should be looking at for life in the universe besides our own.