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This is the second of two interviews I did while researching Heaven's Gate for season three of Strange Arrivals. In the end, I did not include Heaven's Gate in the main episodes of season three for a variety of reasons, but wanted people to be able to hear these interviews. The first one dropped last week. You can listen to them in either order. This is an interview with Ben Zeller, who is a professor of religious studies at Lake Forest College in Illinois.
My name is Ben Zeller. I'm a professor of religious studies at lake Forest College outside of Chicago, Illinois.
Could you talk about apple White and Nettle's backgrounds, both, you know, religiously and otherwise.
Marshall Hurt Applewhite, who is the leader of Heaven's Gate at the end, but only one of the two co founders at the beginning, came from a pretty conventional Christian background. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and apple White was raised basically in the church, so for him, Christianity was just sort of the assumed background. He went to college. He actually considered becoming a minister himself, and he started at seminary, so he actually has some training as a
Christian minister. He left seminary because he felt drawn into music as a career. It's sometimes hypothesized he also left because he realized that he was bisexual. We don't have any hard evidence of that, but it's certainly plausible that a closeted bisexual would have not felt comfortable in a Presbyterian seminary at the time. Either way, he leaves seminary, but he sticks with it long enough to really pick
up the details of Christian theology. Even at the very very end of Heaven's Gate, he talks about questions about predestination and election, which are Christian theological terms which make sense within the particular denomination he was trained in. So you can see he sort of never left it behind and he brings that Christianity with him.
Interesting.
Bonnie lue Nettle's, by contrast, was raised a Baptist but was not particularly drawn into the tradition. A childhood friend said an interview much later that she only went because the family went, so she was sort of your typical once a week at most, maybe once a month attendant in keeping with sord of broader society. She was in Texas, so she was Southern Baptist and nothing surprising there. As an adult, she became deeply interested in alternative spiritualities. She
briefly joined the Theosophical Society. She was interested in spiritualism, interested in channeling, and she was far more religiously eclectic than her than apple White was.
How did they run into each other? How did they meet?
There are different stories for how he how apple White and Bonnie Lune Nettles met. The only commonality that we know for certain based on what they said, what their friends said, but their family said as they met in the hospital. The reasons that Nettles was in the hospital, that's pretty clear. She was working there. Why Appley was in the hospital, there's a couple of different answers. He
says he was visiting a friend. One of his family members said that he was suffering heart palpitations and was in there for treatment, And much later on after the Heaven's Gate suicide, there's the claim that he was a mental patient. We can dismiss that last one because Nettles was not a psychiatric nurse, so there's no chance they would have met in a psyche hospital.
She wasn't working in much. She was working i think in obgy in rotation at the time, so not likely that he was in for that. I've always assumed, because we have sort of the two different stories, that yes, he was in for heart palpitations, but then he went to visit a friend afterwards. That's always sort of assumed that they're both corrected. It makes sense either way. He ends up running into Nettle's in the hospital, and at this point in his life, Marshall Hurf apple White feels
like he's at a moment of transition. He's been experiencing these sort of spiritual encounters. He has these, he sort of hears these voices and feels this religious, spiritual calling. He thinks like he has some sort of fate is calling him to do something. He doesn't know what though, but he feels like he's at this sudden moment of transition. We should note where he's been recently divorced, he's been fired from his job. He's sort of at this sudden
moment of transition in his life. Nettles is also in a transition. She is also separated or in the process of separating, and when they meet, the story goes and we have only their story to go with that. She said to him, well, let me do your chart. She's an astrologer, so she does his chart and she says, actually, yeah, you do have a fate. You actually do have a destiny,
but it's tied up with mine. The two of us together are bound for a journey, and off they go, and that's the story of the origin of Heaven's Gate.
Interesting what is sort of the origin of the interest in UFOs.
Both Nettles and apple White were interested in UFOs even before they met. Nettles Is interest in UFOs was bound up with her sort of neo theosophical interest in channeling. Traditional theosophy involves sort of receiving information from the beyond, usually from humans or from spiritually advanced beings a generally human that sort of send messages. Neo theosophy sort of
twentieth century theosophy. These ascended masters they come to be called, are often considered space aliens or angelic beings or supernatural beings. Today we would call it new Age. At the time, it was sort of predates New Age, but within her alternative spiritual miliu, it made sense as a channeler that
she would receive wisdom from extraterrestrials as well. We know that she received contact or claim to receive contact from deceased humans, so from the spiritual realm, so it would have made sense she had looked at extraterrestrials as well. But she was also interested in just sort of UFOs as a phenomenon, so not just sort of the beings to communicate with her spiritually, but also the claims about sightings and crashes and things like that. Apple White was
a little more conventionally Christian in that way. He was open to Nettles's interpretation, but he came into it really trying to make sense of the Bible, and he used UFOs and space aliens to make sense of the Bible. But it was really Nettles Bndingland Nettles who brought UFOs and ufology to him.
This is something I was looking at with other people, is that there are people who kind of look at UFOs as being the sort of the spiritual almost like you know, paranormal type thing, and then there's others who are, you know, look at that thing in the sky, they landed at left marks, and then you know the people who try and sort of synthesize it or at least are willing to accept like both aspects of it as being real. I think it's kind of an interesting step that they have to take.
Both Nettles and apple White really did try to harmonize that spiritual approach to UFO's neuthology and also then the more sort of scientific approach. They certainly didn't come out
of that. So basically the same time they were starting their work as when like Moufon, like the mutual ufhone network was starting, although it was the Midwestern ufhone network at first, So there were sort of secular scientific UFO watchers and those who saw themselves as studying the evidence on the ground, literally on the ground, right the imprints
and such. They did not come from that world, but they were interested in engaging that, and they were interested in speaking to those who had a secular approach to UFOs because they really did believe that ultimately the UFOs were real and that the beings who the Bible referred to as angels and gods and things like that are just biological extraterrestrial entities and that all the miracles of
the Bibles are simply UFO technology misunderstood. So they did ultimately agree that science and technology and sort of a secular approach was the way to understand UFOs and upology and sightings and such. It's just that they were coming out out of a religious miliu, and that's what they really created as a religion. They really try to have it both ways, if that makes sense.
What sort of novel ways did they use to integrate sort of the reality of UFOs and their view into sort of the theological and you know, spiritual concerns they had coming into their partnership.
There's a couple of angles to what they tried to do. One is the sort of the Vondonic and Chariots of the Gods style approach, where they simply looked at ancient material. In this case, the Bible is evidence of ancient aliens and astronauts who had visited the Earth, and this was recorded by primitive humans or comparatively primitive humans and as religious as opposed to it actually being you know, space aliens, so that they were part of the vanguard of them.
And this is the nineteen seventies, so they were ahead of the curve in terms of that approach. I mean, now, of course that's pretty you know, pretty standard, sort of within one aspect of peupology. What they also did, though, which was really different from that, is they tried to interpret the Bible and particularly the prophetic passages of Revelation
with reference to this. So not just was it aliens visited the Earth in the past, but they're going to come back, and the Book of Revelation describes how they're going to come back, and how the end of our societies we know it is going to occur, and how those who have hopes of leaving our planet are going
to be able to do that. And in particular, they took the idea of the rapture, which is a Christian and Evangelical Christian idea about how the save the elect will be lifted up off the planet and what will go into heaven. Within the traditional Christian idea, it's Jesus meets them sort of halfway up and sort of lifts them up into heaven, and everyone else is sort of
left behind and in fact left behind. It there's a series of books called Left Behind, which were a fictional version of this right for them though, it's a UFO and Jesus is a space alien and it's a tractor being, and it's not heaven, it's the literal heavens, it's outer space, so that that's their interpretation. And they fused this with what today we would call a New Age focus on
self transformation and healing and self development. So the initial idea was that you would go on bodily form onto the UFO, and you would perfect your bodily being in your consciousness and you'd sort of elevate yourself to a new level of being and sort of raise your vibratory frequency. It was very sort of new Age language. They're really pulling from Christian biblical prophecy, new Age healing and self transformation, and the very sort of early upology and sort of
combining it all in a really fascinating way. I get.
There's two questions. One is like, who were the people who responded to this message and what about the message was compelling to them?
Most of the converts, most of the people who either attended the meeting. So they had these massive public meetings all up and down the West coast from Los Angeles up through the Bay Area up through Oregon and Washington. Most of the people who attended the meetings and most of those who actually joined, were what I would call
spiritual seekers. Those who who stayed and those who left generally had tried other spiritual pursuits, and that ranged from actual other new religious movements like scientology or transcendental meditation, two sort of quasi religious forms of living, like commune. There was one number who had gone to Israel, Joenika Buotz. There was a lot of interest in psychedelia, in drug use and drug trips, so they'd all tried different things to sort of, you know, break out of the norm.
Not all, I should say that there were a few who bucked the trend, but by and large, vast majority were spiritual seekers. Of those who attended their meetings, and they had these large meetings with fifty sixty, one hundred people, two hundred people at some of them, they usually wouldn't get any more a few, you know, a dozen at most to join. So this didn't appeal to everyone, but
for those who did feel attracted to it. What was generally new was the UFO angle, from the way in which it connected to the Biblical prophecy because most of the folks who joined were probably already aware of sort of the New Age self transformation elements of it. There were somedividuals who joined for one reason or another who don't fit that pattern. So there were some people who were very, very Christian in orientation, and what really grabbed them was that this was a new way to interpret
the Christian Bible and it made sense to them. There were also at least a few examples of people who came in really through the UFO angle. What they were interested in was making sense of UFO sightings and landings, and the religious spiritual stuff was sort of secondary. But most of the members were grabbed by sort of initially that spiritual seeking. But what kept them in, because most people who joined left, their nutrition rate was it was huge.
The people who stuck around found that combination somehow appealing, and it was never a large number of people. There were never more than fifty sixty seventy people at most, even early on, and of course it ends with with approximately forty, but even at its peak it was no more than twice that size, So this was never a
mass appeal. But for some people that combination New Age self transformation, biblical prophecy and making ends out of UFO settings and sort of broader uphology for some people that was very appealing.
Was this sort of set up beliefs. Was it fairly static over time or were there changes as they members came and when and they sort of you know, apple white nettles sort of thought things over or had revelations or whatever.
The central beliefs both were consistent and radically changing the entire time. So this is really what's quite fascinating about them. On the one hand, it's totally consistent from beginning to end. The point of the group that we come to call Heaven's Gate, and it hit other names too, was human individual metamorphosis things. From beginning to end, their goal was
to get off the planet. It was to leave Earth and ascend to a higher level of being, a higher level of existence what they come to call the next level or the evolutionary level above human on a UFO. So from beginning to end, that's consistent. The details changed over time, and the huge massive change was whether they would go on bodily form. Initially they told their followers at these sort of not even their fowers at these mass meetings they said publicly, you don't have to die.
What we're offering is a trip to get onto the UFO and to go to heaven in your bodily form. There is no death required. You're gonna transform your body like a caterpillar into a butterfly. Cataflars don't die to become butterflies, they transform, And that was the metaphor they use. The other metaphor they use was graduation. Students don't die to graduate. They graduate and it's in their bodies. So
these were their metaphors. So you will graduate like a student, or you will transform like a caterpillar and go into the next level, and you will then be a perfected extraterrestrial being. You're gonna live forever and never get sick, never need to eat. You're not going to be suffer sort of the frailties at the flesh, and you get to take care of the universe. You're gonna sail around in UFOs and manage the universe and manage planets. By the end, that transition was no longer bodily, it was
your soul. Will go on and do that. You're gonna get a new body and going to leave the frail, broken human body behind, and that that is a radical transition. There are other changes over time too, their particular biblical interpretations change things like that, but that's the big one. Everything else follows from there.
My conversation with ben Zellar will continue after the break. My sense is that Nettle's death is like a major kind of turning point in the trajectory of the group.
My interpretation is that when Nettles died, that's when that transition occurs. That's when they go from understanding and believing and assuming they're all going to go in bodily form unto the UFO two. And then she dies and her body doesn't go anywhere. UFO comes to pick it up, and she know, nothing hatches out of her. You know, there's not you know, it's not like alien right, So there's no evidence that she, in any meaningful way, in
any bodily way, is going into the next level. So they come to adapt and to adopt this idea of the soul. And they don't call it the soul, they call it the other things. But it's basically the consciousness. It's an upload process. They use computer terminology. It's an upload the consciousness. But whatever it is that that is body Lunettle's leaves her human body and returns to utter space.
And in her case it's a return because they understand her as having come from the next level, from outer space to begin with, and from there then that expands and that becomes the way eventually for all of them. There are ex members I should note who can test me on this who disagree with this argument, who say, no, this was not the moment of transition. It was much later, and there was not sort of a theological problem at the moment of her death. But I would never dispute
those who were there. I understand, you know, their particular experiences. But for my interpretation, this was the pivotal moment. And it may have taken a decade until this was publicly discussed and until they decided to embrace suicide, which as we know, that's how it ends in nineteen ninety seven. But the seeds of that were planted the moment that Bonnie ln Nettles died.
What year was that.
Bonnielin Nettles passed away in June nineteen eighty five. The rough chnology of the group is that T and do of bodylue Nettle's Marshal Herfapawhites meet in nineteen seventy two. The group itself begins in seventy four and seventy five and seventy six as they're expanding out. That huge moment of transition is when Nettles passes away, and then in nineteen eighty seven is when the group ends. So that
that's your rough chronology. You have it sort of a ten year period with her and then sort of a ten year period afterwards, roughly plus or minus a couple of years.
There was sort of an acceleration of you know, I don't know if saying that it was sort of of performative devotion, but like sort of an intensity of showing how and I'm particularly talking about castration and you know, abstinence, like extreme abstinence, I guess. And was that something that in your view is a result of Nettles passing away and Apple Whites trying to kind of deal with it and keep the group together. I was trying to get a handle on that.
In that case, I would disagree. All of those practices have their roots very early on the group founded was founded. The basic teaching was you had to move beyond your human existence. And you had to abandon your human practices that included sexuality, included drugs, and included attachments to the people around you. So you had to sort of give up all of those those human level addictions and attractions and ways of being because you were trying to give
up your human way of being. And again they use the metaphor they set up, a caterpillar can't be a butterfly if it wants to cling to its caterpillar ways, it has to embrace its new life as a butterfly. So they taught very early on you had to be abstinent, you had to give up drugs and alcohol. You had to give up attachments to loved ones, to your birth family. You couldn't get too attached to your job. All these
things go all the way back. They didn't enforce it for the first year because they were very poorly run for the first couple of years. Metals and apple Whites had all these ideas, but they took no lead in managing the group. So individuals did all sorts of stuff and then eventually t and do as they come to call themselves. Finally, Nettle's Marshall, clap boyd Bow and t Andell send people. So eventually T and Do say no, we have to follow the rules. Understandably, people leave, so
they lose a bunch of people. Everyone who stays agrees this is how they want to live their life. They want to basically be a monastic and that was again a term they used. They said were basically monastics. So they embraced the monastic lifestyle. And after that, well, there were some people who left because they couldn't handle that. The ex member Sawyer, for example, who who was very explicit about this, and he said he just he couldn't handle the abstinence. This is what wasn't him, so he
left for that reason. But there were others who left for other reasons as well, so that that wasn't the only reason people left. So that really those extreme practices we see at the end the castorrations and such, go all the way back to the beginning after Te's death. So the question is was there a sort of a hyper focus on apple White and on sort of dedication to him in the group. We do see the group
sort of focus narrow. However, I think given that there was now one leader instead of two, that simply that just follow us from if the group hadn't known that they would have dissolved.
Yeah, so it's a group dynamic that's not specific to them.
We have to remember Heaven's Kate, although it eventually died in nineteen ninety seven, that the group ended, they were successful, so that means they're going to be marked by certain social characteristics. They did things effectively to keep going. We could imagine the world in which after Nettle's died, apple White was incapable of a leadership of the group, in which case we wouldn't be having this conversation. They would
have dissolved in the nineteen eighties. It's only because apple White was able to transform the understanding of salvation, of getting to the next level and who Nettles was and who he was. Only because because he was able to transform that did the group survive ten more years. There's plenty of new religious movements UFO focused, and otherwise it's just disappear when the founder dies or loses interest or
is arrested or something like that. It's the rare one where the founder a co founder dies and they keep going. Heaven's Gate's really unique in that way. Not unique, I mean the classic nineteenth century cases the Mormons right when they kept going, but it's unlikely that a new religious movement keeps going after one of the founders dies unexpectedly.
Can you talk a little bit about sort of leading up to the suicide and what the dynamic there.
Was the suicides or in nineteen ninety seven. Build up to the suicides is really nineteen ninety four, So for the first time in nineteen ninety four, the suicide is discussed openly as an idea. And there's different stories about how this came up. But the most frequently told story I've been told by ex members who were present was that this was at a warehouse in California, and that it was nineteen ninety four, and that Doe apple White had a group meeting and said, how would you all
feel if we left our human vehicles? That was their term for their body, So if we left our human vehicles voluntarily? According to those who were present, there was at least one person who said, I'm not intered in the left, but the rest of them said they were willing, and actually we do know over the coming three years there were other people who said, I'm not understanding going to leave. So Rio D'Angelo famously he's the one who finds the bodies. He had said that. He said, no,
I'm not into this. I'm not going to I don't want to commit suicide. I feel like I have a recent to stay here. There were others as well. In that three year time period. This was three years before the actual suicides. They vacillated over whether they actually were going to do this or not. They still hoped the UFO was going to pick them up in bodily form, but it was an open possibility over whether that was going to happen and if they would have to leave
their human vehicles as they called them behind. They also for a while were wondering if they would be murdered. So this is around the same time as the Branch Davidian assault, so for those who know their sort of history of American government relations with New religions.
So this was.
The over month long siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, which ended with the fire, which it's still extremely contentious whether that fire was set by the Branch Davidians or by the government, whether it was an accident, no one
really knows, but they almost all died. The Branch Davidians so the members of Heaven's Gate thought for a while, maybe the government's going to come kill us, you know, they're going to besiege us, and we're all going to get shot or burned to death, and that's how we're conscious will be freed from our human bodies to go into the UFO. Of course, that didn't happen, so they had to sort of figure out how we going to get from point A Earth to point B outer space.
Why the hail bop comet, How did that sort of relate to the theology, if it did at all.
Members of Heaven's Gate had become quite attuned to a conspiratorial subculture. This actually was coming from the bottom up. I don't actually think apple White himself was initially into this, but there were several members of Heaven's Gate who were quite into sort of Internet culture or proto internet culture. Actually it wasn't even the Internet, it was dial up BBS's and they were part of sort of these chat groups that was into government conspiracies. And that makes sense
because they believed in UFOs. So they believe the government was conspiring to hide the presence of UFOs and the presence of extraterrestrials on Earth, and they believed that there were nefarious extraterrestrials who they called the Luciferians. For those who know sort of pop culture gothology, think sort of the reptiles. I think the Reptilian hypothesis here. So there's David Ike and such like that. So there's there're these reptilian evil space aliens who are conspiring against us, and
there's crashed UFOs and things. So there's there's conspiracies against us. So they get plugged into the conspiratorial world and they get connected to this claim that the government is hiding the presence of a UFO behind helpop comet and that all of the publicly released photos have been doctored. And then this breaks into the mainstream with the Art Bell radio show. So Art Bell Coast to Coast AM Coast to Coast. Yeah, there's conspiratorial stuff, but that was actually
pretty mainstream. Art Bell was not sort of just a nut job. Art Bell was listened to by a lot of people. So Art Bell has this very popular late night AM radio show and he gets a call in that says, yeah, I've seen it, and I have photographic
evidence that there is a UFO. Following Helpop comments, and then a couple of days later there's another call in from a distance viewer who says, yeah, I was able to project my consciousness and I was able to see it, and I was able to tour this UFO trailing help up comment. So there's claims that there's evidence that it's there, and they really bought into this. Now they head to their benefit. They said, well, even if there's not a UFO there, that doesn't matter. This is the marker we're
looking for. The commet itself is the markers. Even if there's not a UFO behind Helpop, we know the UFO is up there anyways. It maybe somewhere else, but the whole world is paying attention. This is our chance to demonstrate to the world the truth of what we've been saying for twenty plus years. And now is our chance, with the world watching for us, to show the truth of our message and to get our word out. You know, they made a website, they had a book, they made videos,
they had transcripts, they had basically a press release. They really in some ways, we're trying quite intentionally to get our attention. They'd be in some ways thrilled we're still talking about them twenty five plus years later. That was their intentions.
I think I've talked about how they regret not having been there and taken that leap what is sort of the afterlife.
There were several members, and sometimes we call them X members members. When people leave these groups, sometimes they rejoined. So there were ex members who left the group in the seventies or eighties and came back in the nineties. And there were people who left because they couldn't follow the rules, but they still believed the basic principles the
ideas of the group. And this is true across lots of you know, lots of moments, big and small, old and new, in the number of sort of Catholics who sort of you know, they go to the church, but they sort of like, you know, they still do some Catholic stuff, right. So Heaven's Gate was the same way. So there were people who had left the fold, but they were still basically accepting the premise of the group. And several of them did commit suicide or in their terminology,
they performed their exits and abandoned their vehicles. Wayne Cook, who went by the name of just Justodie within the group in May nineteen ninety seven, so that was just a few months afterwards, committed an exit and Chuck Humphrey, who was his check partner, so they always worked in groups of two, he attempted to and his attempt failed, and then later on he attempted it then and successfully committed suicide or performed an exit. There were several other
members as well who had ex members. They're all gone now, and there's there's still a few sort of true believers left who are present on the internet. You can you can find them around. So Sawyer is probably the best example of sort of a true believer who's left and still talked about his time in the group and in fact has expanded and tried to sort of explain what
the group was about. And he has a pretty active web presence, and you can find him on last I checked, he's on YouTube, he's on Twitter, he's all over the place.
What important thing, haven't I asked you about?
So many misconceptions about Heaven's Gate. So the first is sort of this idea that they were brainwashed jobs, that there was something wrong with these people. They all left or not all, and nearly all of them left either video testimony or written testimony about why they did what they did, about why they thought suicide made sense. We may disagree, and I disagree. I don't support suicide, and I'm not a believer and have it's skate, so it's not my not what I would do, and it's not
my beliefs. But then again, there's lots of religions out there. They're not what I would do, and not my beliefs and not my community. And some of them are pretty extreme. And while Heavens Get may to be more extreme because of the suicide, I don't think we can immediately assume people who do extreme things are crazy or are diluted. They had reasons for what they did and a lot of that. Actually, your listeners can can just go to their website. It's still up there. It's maintained by x members.
You can read some of their exit statements. You can see why it made sense to them, and there's there was video exits as well, and they're they're floating around. They were on Vimeo one point. You can if you search for Heaven's Gate exit videos you'll find them there. They're floating around. I find these very powerful to listen
to because it really humanizes them for me. Again, I don't agree with what they did, and I don't believe as they do, but I want to take them seriously as human beings, ironically, because they did not want to be human beings. So I always say this when I talk about that. It humanizes them for me. But I recognize they didn't want to be human. That's the last thing they wanted to be. I, as a human, see them like me. They in fact wanted nothing to do with our planet or people like you and me because
they wanted to transcend that. But again, I'm a scholar for religion, so that's okay. I'm okay disagreeing with the people I'm studying. I try to recognize the community in them, even if they don't recognize it themselves.
Strange Rivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Rima L. Kayali Jesse Funk, and Noemi Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick and
Aaron Manke, and supervising producer Josh Thain. Learn more about the show at Grimminmile dot com slash Strange Arrivals, and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah