Heaven's Gate cult doc on HBOMax

I haven't seen it, but it was a prominent story when I was in college. I got the impression that basically, it's as if Jim Jones went to a Star Trek convention.

The spoof Keds (making fun of Nike) commercial that SNL did was one of the funniest things I'd seen in a while. I don't think it can be found on the internet, though. I've tried.

People blamed Art Bell till his death over his giving credence to the Hale-Bopp comet "companion".

It's why I don't laugh off the current conspiracy theorists and fake news sites that incite people into doing stupid things.

Yeah they touch on the Art Bell thing, but the reality is- they were saying for 20+ years that they were going to eventually kill themselves. No one took them seriously.

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Close. Gay son of a Pentecostal preacher hooks up with a astrology obsessed nurse at a psych ward and together they start a new religion.

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Sure, but they were also obsessed with Star Trek and sci fi in general. They did numerous videos of themselves bidding farewell to the earth.

And again, NBC has scrubbed that fake SNL "Keds" commercial from the internet. It made fun of the fact that the dead people were all wearing the same kind of sneakers, and included actual police footage of the suicide victims. If you can find it, in its original form with the John Lennon music, you are a superstar.

Here's the cold open they did a few days after the mass suicide.

Heaven's Gate Cold Opening

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Here's the cold open they did a few days after the mass suicide.

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they showed a brief clip in the doc and the family members were pretty hurt (understandable)

eta: not sure a bit about a mass suicide would land well these days

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I say this every day about Trump and his cult

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It really is remarkable, isn’t it?

I think it said at the end, while showing some Nike shoes sticking out from under a sheet covering a dead body, “Keds: worn by level headed Christians since 1984” ... I don’t remember the year but it was essentially hilarious.

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People blamed Art Bell till his death over his giving credence to the Hale-Bopp comet "companion".

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That's incredibly naive and misleading, if anyone truly did blame Art Bell. When he hosted Coast to Coast, it was an entertaining latenight show that covered everything from movies and music to UFO's. He reported that there were some people out there who thought an unidentified object was trailing the comet. That's about it, and it was one of probably a thousand far out topics mentioned on his show that year. More often than not, Art played the role of skeptic to his guests and "independent researchers" who called in. No one sought out this obscure former music teacher to join his cult as a result of listening to a popular radio show heard by millions.

I don't know how anyone could honestly blame him unless they were desperate to lay some flimsy rationale for censorship in order to shield one's inferiors from dangerous thoughts.

I stayed up late watching some of the Geminid shower tonight, so it seems as good a time as any to look up some of the history of the Heaven's Gate cult.

A newspaper search gave me an idea of just how long Applewhite and his cohort had been building their following. Apparently, they were already getting the attention of local police and reporters by recruiting followers in the early to mid 70's. Long before he knew about Hale-Boppe, I'd wager.

This 1975 UPI wire story was really eye opening:

Original headline: "UFO Mystery Couple Identified as Texans; Record Clouded"






Early on they had demostrated that perfect combination of con-artists and true believers who aren't bound by laws and ethics of this realm. The kind of people who knew how to gather others who were desperate to belong to something that was exclusive and special, as bountyhunter put it.

This Folsom, California newspaper article from 1975 is really unsettling; Applewhite already had followers abandoning their lives and mysteriously disappearing with him to reach the next level of alien life, just a couple years into his weird journey:


I'm tempted to do an HBO Max trial just to watch this documentary.

Hayden C. Hewes, quoted at the end of the second article, wrote about UFO's for decades and died in 2017: obit

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Steiger and Hayden Hewes were the initial, primary interviewers of the Heaven’s Gate leaders

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