The Cult Next Door | Heaven's Gate

what if jesus came back and he came back as a gay man from texas i'm aidan mattis and welcome back to the lore lodge is that where this story is going yep [Music] so to preface this video i do not believe that jesus christ came back as a gay man in texas in the 1970s but there was a very small group of people who did and that is the story of heaven's gate if you're at all familiar with cults or your parents were around in the 90s which they probably were or perhaps you were around in the 90s you might remember a very small but rather media significant cult known as heaven's gate after going through a number of name changes over the years they eventually did settle on heaven's gate in relation to the hail bop comet that was supposed to pass in 1997 the year i was born so i mean 97 had good moments and bad moments but we'll we'll get to all of that and how we ended up in the place we ended up if you go to like heavensgate.com because you're going to be just absolutely confused by everything you see and to be honest our videos usually require about five to seven pages of notes there are 23 pages of notes on my remarkable right now so buckle up buttercup we're going hard founded by bonnie nettles and marshall applewhite who would eventually become known as tea and dough yes if you're thinking doremi faso latido that that's exactly where they got it so good on you you remember the sound of music a lot of videos on this subject a lot of articles on this subject just kind of start out with the cult and their beliefs but don't go deeply into how we got there so i decided that was where we would start with biographies on the two founding members and i'll begin with bonnie nettles who was t and in some ways the central figure of the cult but in other ways kind of the figurehead whereas marshall applewhite was the one really running all of the nonsense behind the scenes bonnie was born in houston texas to a baptist family in 1927. she then went on to marry a rather successful businessman who fought in world war ii and have three children now joseph himself her husband was really one hell of a man he was a very successful businessman he had been a pharmacist in the marines after joining into the navy for world war ii at the age of just 15. not only that but joseph nettles actually ended up despite being again a pharmacist ended up getting injured in the battle for new britain to liberate it from the japanese new britain of course being an island in the east indies not in the the not in britain joseph and bonnie would have a very stable marriage and a very loving relationship with their four children until bonnie began to become obsessed with contacting the dead in 1972 now this initially just put a strain on the marriage but would eventually lead to its collapse later that year and at this point it's important to transition over to marshall applewhite about whom the most is known and who is a man with a very very very tragic and checkered past marshall was born to a presbyterian minister in texas in the year 1931 and he would go on to try and follow a similar path but a number of things involving his confused sexuality and his tendency towards music would throw him a little bit off the path here and there as a young adult he received his bachelor's of arts in philosophy from austin college and then he would go on to the union presbyterian seminary to become a minister and he would go on through his studies and really try but just found that god's calling didn't seem to be for him he would marry a woman named ann pierce and have two children with her before eventually leaving the seminary to become a music teacher but he was drafted in 1954 and would go on to serve in the army for a couple of years before returning to the u.s to pursue his degree in musical theater after completing his masters in musical theater at the university of colorado he moved to new york city in order to actually pursue that career which if you're going to pursue musical theater that's probably the best place you can possibly go however his attempts at being a thespian failed and he had to go to the university of alabama to begin a teaching career which is perfectly fine if you fail at music teaching is a good backup it's solid this is not at all me telling myself that things did not really improve for marshall because shortly after getting to the university of alabama to teach he found himself embroiled in a scandalous affair with a male student keep in mind the time that this was and how that might not go over well in the press he was fired from his position and in 1968 three years after finding out about the affair and deciding to try and work through it his wife would end up divorcing him which is likely what set marshall down the spiral that led us to him thinking that an alien spaceship following a comet was going to take he and his followers to a separate planet where they could become god but even though i just kind of gave away the finale here i trust me you'll want to stick around for how we got there after being fired he went back to texas to teach at the university of st thomas and there he was actually very well liked by his students by the faculty seen as stylish wonder why and also just kind of generally beloved by everyone around he was a good teacher he was charismatic and okay the cult makes sense now however marshall's struggles with his sexuality would continue and in the year 1970 he would end up resigning from his position at the university of saint thomas and later researchers did uncover what was likely another homoerotic affair which at a place called the university of saint thomas is probably not going to go over well with the other faculty that said he was openly bisexual in his dating practices at the time which for the year 1970 was pretty progressive and you know it it seems to be more the fact that it was a relationship with a student than that it was a homosexual relationship that led to the resignation he would try to strike out of texas one more time to find his luck but it didn't really go over well he opened a deli the deli failed and then he went back to texas and that is where he met bonnie nettles this is best described as a perfect storm of delusion because these two people just constantly fed into each other's problems until it eventually unraveled both of their lives in a way that was honestly irreparable now interestingly enough if you read the biographies of these two on wikipedia they seem to blame the other for whatever happened bonnie's biography paints marshall as the antagonist and the one who caused this downward spiral whereas marshall's page will go and tell you that in fact it was bonnie's fault and her obsession with the occult that took a toll on the already emotionally vulnerable marshal either way the two first met in 1972 and the circumstances of their meeting are up for debate marshall's version of events as well as bonnie's at some points makes it into a much more impressive spiritual meeting of the minds story whereas bonnie's own daughter tells a much different story terry nettles says that a student at the theater school where marshall worked had gotten injured and needed to go to the hospital bonnie was a nurse at said hospital and that is how bonnie and marshall met now bonnie and marshall put it as though there was some immediate spiritual connection when in reality they probably had a few conversations and became friends before determining that they had that spiritual connection this series of conversations likely was sparked by the fact that marshall applewhite had recently gotten into astrology and bonnie who had already been interested in the occult and astrology offered to give him a fortune telling essentially a reading of his star chart a palm reading all of that stuff and tell him where his future was going and at this moment it appears she may have planted the seed in his head that they were supposed to be leading some sort of spiritual revolution on earth in any case they did determine that they had a spiritual connection and that they needed to leave their lives as they knew it to go off and live together for marshall applewhite who was already divorced and going through a number of changes in profession this wasn't a huge deal but bonnie was happily married with four children so when she left to go live platonically with marshall it completely broke everything her relationship where her marriage ended her kids basically disowned her and her reputation was tanked if you go and you look at joseph nettle's obituary you're gonna basically see no mention of bonnie at all it's just joseph all the great things he did with his life his children and that is it bonnie seems to have been scrubbed from the memory and understandably so after initially leaving their lives bonnie and marshall set up the christian art center which was a bookstore that honestly upon investigation had very little to do with christianity at all which is odd because both of these people had grown up christian and one of them had gone to a seminary it seems like this may have been something along the lines of what the cathars albigensians did where they would use christian terminology to lure in catholics and then introduce their much more dualist religious system also around this time they opened a creative space one might call it an educational space called no place but it was k-n-o-w as in knowledge no place knowledge and here they taught classes on theosophy which is almost a religion but it's the belief that there is an ancient order of spiritual masters who are representing themselves through modern day masters so to speak and that this is how they not necessarily control but um manage the world and they also taught classes on christian mysticism which comes out of a lot of medieval i don't want to say gnostic but medieval um church adjacent scholars both of these practices mysticism and theosophy draw on christian terminology and a lot of christian scripture but are not in and of themselves christian with both of their pseudo-christian organizations failing in texas of all places why would you set these up there they decided they were going to hit the road in february of 1973 and go on sort of a road trip journey they financed this by dining and dashing doing odd jobs collecting cash donations at times they were even so poor that they had to sell their blood and survive off of bread rolls so as much as there may have been some delusion here the dedication is honestly respectable while they were on the road they began teaching each other about their own beliefs and they discussed a lot of stories regarding saint francis of assisi who is the one of the patron saints of italy and also kind of the the first major person to try and end the stigma of leprosy in medieval europe the franciscan order of monks who followed him would actually make it their mission to do two things one they were going to eliminate both the stigma and the proliferation of leprosy in medieval europe and they were going to convert all the muslims they succeeded in one of those things and i think you know what it was also i mix up francis of assisi and bernard of clairvaux all the time so if any other medievalists do that no you're not alone i personally believe that part of the reason that francis of assisi was so important to applewhite specifically was that originally he had dreams of becoming a knight and being a knight was essentially the highest possible status outside of hereditary lordship and kingship that somebody could achieve in medieval europe at least outside of the clergy so i think that marshall saw his own intention of i'm going to become a musician i'm going to be a theater major i'm going to be famous and then turning to teaching instead i think he saw some parallels between how he viewed his story and how he viewed francis of assisi's story of going from i'm going to be a knight to i'm going to be the patron saint of italy animals and the lepers they also deeply discussed the works of helena blavatsky she was a prominent theosophist and the founder of the theosophical society so kind of they're not an organized religion so to speak but they do have kind of a central body if that makes sense they also discussed the works of artie lang who was a psychiatrist who focused his studies on psychosis something they both probably should have recognized that they had but didn't for those who don't know psychosis is a umbrella term referring to a number of different conditions that generally have to do with the inability to distinguish what is real versus what is not real so this includes things like schizophrenia and other disorders that might cause you to struggle to understand what you're actually experiencing in the physical realm versus what is all inside your head and finally they were very big on an author known as richard bach he was sort of a philosophical author he would write he was an aviator first and foremost but he would use aviation and stories about seagulls for example to discuss philosophical topics and he actually is still alive they also kept a king james bible with them and while the king james bible is probably the most widely used english language bible and renowned for its accuracy given the time at which it was written it is also very difficult to read it is written in early modern english it was first published in 1611 and the king james bible itself has actually not changed since there is the new king james bible which had i believe only just come out at the time that marshall and bonnie were going about their business but unless you're a trained theologian the kjv can be a pretty dense and difficult book to read so a lot of people prefer i don't want to say dumbed down but more colloquial versions that do not use quite as much flowery imagery the king james bible really sought to maintain the poetic nature of books like psalms before necessarily going for perfect word for word accuracy so while the translations are correct and they are beautiful they can sometimes be a little bit over flowery in their discussions about christianity they focused on christology which is the study of jesus christ himself his divinity his humanity his life story all of that as well as asceticism which is the practice of holding off on worldly pleasures and materialism and living a life of chosen poverty in order to be closer to the spiritual realm and closer to the ideal and probably most importantly they focused a lot on eschatology which is the study of the end times the study of the apocalypse and this likely is the final nail in the coffin for why things went off the rails trying to interpret the book of revelation is a monumentally difficult task and it's one that i don't suggest people do it's one that i am personally trying to do but i will not ever be teaching about it because it is just so incredibly difficult and seeking to understand that book is something that should be a personal spiritual journey not something where you go and preach about it along with their scripture applewhite was also very heavily into science fiction including the works of philip k dick whom you might recognize from books like do android's dream of electric sheep which eventually became blade runner another important milestone that happened during this kind of semi-nomadic period was that they got their first convert one of bonnie's friends from houston texas and this was kind of where they began the the actual cult activity and not just discussing their beliefs in june of 1974 bonnie and marshall published a pamphlet the pamphlet suggested that jesus christ would return as a texan man and that bonnie and marshall were the two witnesses described in revelation chapter 11. again this is why you don't try and interpret revelation is because it's going to lead you to thinking that you are the second coming of christ and that's just not good for anyone their belief here was because there are two witnesses in the book of revelation who are killed and then resurrected that they would also be killed and resurrected and then taken to a spacecraft the book of revelation does not mention any spacecraft and they claimed that this process wherein they would be killed and then resurrected and taken to the spacecraft would be known as the demonstration demonstrating i'm not particularly sure what exactly but something a wrench would be thrown into things when in august 1974 marshall applewhite was arrested for failing to return a rental car when arrested and charged his defense was that god gave him permission to use the car he was jailed for six months and it appears that prison made him considerably worse in prison he decided that he was going to abandon the occult and the spiritualism and the the religious aspect he would kind of keep it but he was going to focus on something a lot more hardcore and scientific aliens now all of the insanity aside marshall did know his audience so rather than taking this to various churches or preaching on the city streets he targeted groups that he thought would already be susceptible to this new way of thinking which included new age religious groups and college students keep in mind by the way the time period we're talking about it is the mid-1970s we are smack in the middle of hippie culture we we have not hit the however you might describe the 80s but we haven't hit that yet and for those who aren't up on the terminology here i got you new age religion refers to spiritual beliefs and practices that fall outside the norm of established and well-known religions including buddhism christianity islam and shinto you know things that have been around for a long time it's kind of a reinvention of disorganized religious beliefs nettles and applewhite determined that they were spokespeople for the aliens and told everyone that they were participating in an experiment and started referring to themselves as guinea and pig everyone was told that they would upon completing their human journey be elevated to the next level which was the extraterrestrial realm marshall applewhite also would do most of the speaking and bonnie would kind of be portrayed as the medium i do wonder somewhat if any of this took any inspiration from the warrens where lorraine warren was the psychic and ed warren was more of the spokesperson so i wouldn't be shocked given the timing but also the geography and the lack of the internet might have made it so they didn't really know about each other i'm not positive but knowing how into the occult nettles was it would not surprise me at all if she was a devotee of the warrens that is of course not to suggest that the warrens would have been okay with anything that's going on here applewhite kind of took a page out of the christian heresy playbook by using scientific terminology to discuss deeply unscientific things the same way that christian heretical sects like the gnostics would use christian terminology to describe deeply unchristian things again you have to put all of this in the light that the person we're dealing with here was originally a seminarian he was he was in seminary he was going to become a minister he had a lot of religious training that very much bled into the way that he spoke to other people applewhite also did something that was very very good sales practice in that he would not actually answer people's questions they wouldn't do q a sessions during their events instead they would take people's phone numbers you would give them your name your number and possibly your address and they would contact you that way the conversation was happening on their terms and it also kind of weeded out people who weren't going to be interested in the long run basically what they were doing was establishing qualified leads for their cult which is kind of wild remember earlier in the video when i said that they went through a number of name changes well the first name was uh the anonymous sexaholic celibate church and that quickly changed over because god why would you call something that but that quickly changed to the human individual metamorphosis which doesn't really sound like the name of an organization so much as a very unfortunate series of events if you've read kafka but you know we'll we'll let that be around this time their doctrine began to take shape as a combination of ancient astronaut theory like you might see on the ancient aliens tv show as well as christian doctrine of the elect which is not universal in christianity but it does fit into presbyterianism which makes a lot of sense as to how it made its way in here if you're if you know anything about presbyterianism a lot of this is very familiar very twisted but very familiar in 1975 they began focusing their recruitment campaigns on college campuses because who's more susceptible to than college students high school students but that's not the point and early on in 1975 they actually succeeded at recruitment pretty well considering they were going from three people to a recruitment of 70 individuals just a year in and they convinced 30 of those people to actually leave their homes and jobs to follow them they were apparently very charismatic and i don't know if becoming involved in a cult was easier in the 1970s for some reason than it would be today but apparently people were really just cool with believing whatever back then while personal choice was actually encouraged in their doctrine in practice they were very authoritarian with their followers they would pressure new converts into greater and greater devotion and seeing apple white not just as a leader but as almost a father figure and a guide and they were told that they should go to him with all of their problems not try to resolve it between each other not try to be independent not let things go that he should mediate everything and as i said they would especially target new age religious folks because this was just a change from something vaguely spiritual to something vaguely scientific so they didn't require a ton of real scripture and dogma and doctrine they could just kind of take you where you were and cause you to pivot just a little bit over to their side of things and around this time their doctrine changed from you will ascend to the next level in your present physical form to undergoing a biological transformation where you'd achieve a new anatomical form with different powers and abilities and applewhite didn't really have a scientific explanation for how the aliens were going to do this to you you just had to trust him which is where it kind of circled back around to religion in that magic is okay they hit the road again and decided to start saying in isolated campgrounds and making sure that nobody had any contact with their family and friends because if they did and they said any of this to them they would probably immediately be snapped out of it and they ordered their followers to renounce basically everything worldly this was jobs this was interests hobbies sexuality drugs alcohol fancy food they also give up media jewelry and even facial hair at first they required their adherents to take biblical names so you might meet an ezekiel or a bathsheba but they decided pretty early on that they didn't really like that either so they changed this to be the much more reasonable and easy to remember system of you pick two consonants the first one would be capitalized and the second consonant would be doubled so like j k k and then you would end your name with odie so like if i were to take all of the vowels out of my name i would be denoted and other aiden would also be denoted now by april of 1975 they began to cut contact almost entirely with followers who weren't in their presence so anybody who didn't actually follow them along on the road didn't really hear from them all that much and this led to them hemorrhaging about half their membership because those people just weren't there and while some people may look at this and say wow that's really bad practice it makes complete sense for what they were going for what they wanted was the most devoted following possible so people who weren't following them on the road and weren't interested in doing so didn't really make sense for them to continue wasting their energy on it those people just must not be part of the elect so they let them go they also became very prone to changing their doctrine whenever a prediction of theirs didn't go their way for example they had told people that the demonstration was happening it was coming they were going to die and be resurrected and then you would all see that they were right well that didn't happen so in order to convince their followers that they weren't completely wrong they argued that well the demonstration did already happen we we were killed in the media we were hit with so much negative press that it was as if we died and we've come through it therefore we died and were resurrected and somehow people bought that i i need to stress their argument was they were killed when the media attacked them and they were resurrected by not dying like the fact that the negative media attention didn't kill them meant that they died and were resurrected as well in 1976 applewhite became more and more hostile towards christianity even though he would continue using the bible as something of a historical account of human to alien contact this coincided with a pretty heavy-handed attempt to consolidate control over the group in june of 1976 they gathered their remaining followers in medicine bow national forest of course it's a national forest in wyoming to witness a ufo appearance and unlike some of their previous communications this one actually went out to everyone who had become a follower of theirs including those who weren't physically there so they had everyone gathered and as soon as everyone actually did get to medicine bow national forest and the campground bonnie told them that the aliens had just decided to cancel how much my dates go if i'm honest now coming from a sales background i just want to be very clear with you guys this was a tactic they never thought a ufo was coming they gave people a bombastic thing that was supposed to happen so that they could lure you there and give you the pitch they actually wanted to do kind of like how timeshare sales works for example if you want to see a great demonstration of how timeshare sales works there's a really funny one and it's always sunny in philadelphia but now that they had everybody where they wanted them they figured that you know what having it be a direct apple white to follower relationship was a little too difficult to maintain and it wouldn't necessarily be that bad if people were relying on each other to maintain the delusion so he grouped them all while bonnie at this point as the true highest being in the group grouped everybody into star clusters which were small groups of followers who would ostensibly support each other but in reality the goal was to use these groups to keep any rogues in check and if somebody were to start going off the beaten path they would use that to bring them back in the demands made by nettles and apple white also became increasingly controlling themselves doe and t applewhite nettles became the only source of truth they had strict obedience requirements close friendships among members were discouraged and perhaps most disturbingly they were instructed to see themselves as children or even pets of applewhite and that he was kind of the the go-to authority he was the guidance on everything no matter what it was everything that happened went through him but he did want to maintain the idea that everything here was by choice that it was voluntary so he would very clearly state his preferences and then tell people they were welcome to think whatever they wanted but in reality what he was saying was what they were supposed to think and what they were supposed to agree with and if you disagreed with him you were actually encouraged to leave in 1979 the group would actually settle they came into some money it's not really certain how but they came into enough money to collect a large suite of rooms they settled in dallas where they rented a number of houses but bonnie and marshall got their own home so i couldn't really determine whether they were cohabitating platonically or if they had their own separate homes but suffice to say everybody else had to share their living quarters whereas marshall and bonnie got their own space they also really doubled down on this whole idea of the next level and preparing to enter it and began to regiment their followers lives really like minute by minute to make sure that they were constantly training so that they could ascend in reality they were just keeping them busy so they didn't have free time to really think about what was going on around this time they also began not just encouraging people to leave if they didn't like it but rather they started to pay them they gave them money and they kind of just shooed them out the door if they questioned anything because they didn't want to allow seeds of doubt to really grow within the group if one person was wishy-washy about the whole thing it might start to rub off on other members and before you know it you've got most of the group realizing you know wait a second these two people don't actually have any control over us they don't control our lives they don't control our money we can go home whenever we want and they couldn't let that happen so they had to make sure that you were every single second of the day you were busy you didn't get free time you were never alone you were always under their influence around this time they also started giving them strange tests like telling them that a ufo would be visiting and forcing them to wait for hours days even weeks to see if the ufo would come and if people left they were deemed to be unfaithful and kind of shoot out so they would let you sit out there for three or four days waiting for the ufo to come only to come tell you themselves okay never mind it was just a test we wanted to see if you guys would actually you know wait for the ufo if you were truly devoted and you might think there's no way that's tenable but in reality by 1980 they were 80 members strong working and living in dallas and they even held jobs they were going out into the community and working usually with computers and i guess they were just making sure there was a buddy system because i would think that if you went to your office and didn't have another cult member watching you you might slip up but it doesn't seem to have happened or if it did happen they were so on the ball about catching it and getting rid of these people that it didn't spread throughout the community but it does seem that something must have happened to create tension because around 1982 they allowed people to write home for mother's day and around 1983 they actually allowed people to go and visit home for mother's day there was one stipulation however they had to tell people that they were studying computer science at a monastery so that their parents and family and friends wouldn't ask them why they were not responding to phone calls or receiving letters or anything like that and give people the enough to believe that these people were not being held against their will because in reality they didn't even realize they were being held against their will but also in 1983 nettle's health began to severely decline she had to have an eye removed due to a cancer and while she would live a few more years she would pass away and this devastated applewhite not just because she was his best friend and really his only peer but also because her dying really threw their theology into question they were supposed to ascend in their physical form they weren't supposed to die they were supposed to be taken up by the aliens and transformed so if bonnie died that made it so that death had to be part of the equation and applewhite had to significantly alter their doctrine simultaneously applewhite's mental health completely declined he became more depressed more erratic and had a lot more difficulty maintaining control simply because he couldn't really bring himself to even communicate with people and to initially heal the broken theology he said that bonnie just had too much spiritual energy like she was an overcharged battery and that she had to release her soul to reach the next level because she just couldn't wait anymore and his followers did accept that that her spirit had ascended to the next level but he was going to need to find a way to work death into the equation in order for any of this to continue working in order to do this he just became more unhinged which i kind of respect he decided to symbolically marry his followers the same followers who just a few years earlier he had instructed to see themselves as his children or pets he told him that salvation came through him alone which is just beginning to echo christianity and the fact that this man saw himself as jesus his teaching began to abandon the scientific language that he had used previously and returned to a more charismatic and faith-based approach everything regarding personal choice was essentially wiped out and he began to preach devotion more than anything it was it was now that you you had to be you know a complete adherent a disciple to him not just choosing to follow him and again you can really see all of the places where he was drawing from christianity and then warping it to fit his own beliefs his own mold his own delusion and this delusion was possibly all inspired by his own beliefs it's possible that he really did begin to believe what he was saying and not just see it as some way to maintain power and acceptance because he started to tell people that he had actually been left behind that his spiritual journey wasn't over yet and that bonnie nettles was actually still communicating with him but he also did something weird where he began to refer to bonnie using male pronouns which again just seems to be taking more and more out of christianity while also kind of rejecting it wholesale a number of theological changes also occurred now the body would die and the soul would be resurrected and brought up into the next level and given a new form your soul would be placed into a new body rather than your old body being transformed in some sort of genetic anatomical experiment while preaching about aliens and spaceships and the next level he did maintain the pseudo-christian verbiage he started talking about how heaven was actually another planet where the highly advanced life forms lived upon enlightenment people would actually become sort of project managers for god and go and oversee evolution on other planets and most importantly he went full ancient aliens and claimed that jesus christ himself was actually an extraterrestrial who came here to bring us all up to the next level but determined humanity wasn't ready yet and rather than stay around for a little while he decided to leave and he would come back every two thousand years to check in and that apparently made the 1990s the right time and if i'm being perfectly honest i don't totally disagree with him everything does seem to have gone downhill since the 90s he also began to teach that rather than being a sort of second coming and being born as the new jesus he was a walk-in which meant that he reached his adult life and a higher being entered his body and started to be him and use him as a spokesperson as well there had sort of been a caterpillar to butterfly metaphor being used for a long time here that our earthly existence was the caterpillar and then we would go into our chrysalis or our cocoon i can't remember which one is for butterflies and which one is for moths and then emerge from that in our enlightened higher state he abandoned this this was no longer the metaphor this just wasn't being used anymore it was completely different it was you are going to die and your soul will ascend the theology did bear a lot of similarities to gnosticism with a sort of good and evil duality and then it departed from it in that it did not see the material world as evil whereas for example the cathars believed that to even bring somebody to bring new life into this world was an evil act and that the material world was bad and that death was an escape into a better place meanwhile a more apocalyptic way of thinking began to take shape within the cult's theology applewhite's paranoia accelerated and he started to invoke the book of revelation quite a bit he also began to believe that the federal government planned on raiding his home and dispersing the cult themselves which while it didn't happen to him actually did happen because just a few years later in the 90s the atf and the fbi would raid the branch davidian compound in waco texas and murder over 70 women children and a few men why allegedly there were illegal weapons there believe it or not the absolute disaster that was waco where again over 70 men women and children were burned and gassed to death was actually an attempt by bill barr then the director of the fbi to patch up his reputation after the other disaster of ruby ridge where an atf agent couldn't actually find any reason to arrest somebody so he convinced him to saw off a shotgun but the shotgun wasn't actually short enough so he had him saw it off even more and then he tried to arrest him for owning an illegal weapon but ended up just killing the man's wife and shooting their son and dog so yes waco is just the atf and fbi trying to cover up for another time the atf and fbi entrapped someone and then murdered his family and yes ruby ridge did involve hundreds of fbi and atf agents staking out a cabin in the woods that was the home of three people i'm sure those 87 000 new irs agents are definitely after the billionaires and not you and before you think that this is some sort of partisan rant uh bill barr served under trump as well so do with that information what you will anyway back to this story wait wait i forgot one thing uh so while trump nominated the guy who is in charge to be one of his top advisors i biden nominated david chipman of whom there is a picture if you'll look at it right here actually of him standing in the wreckage holding basically basically gloating about the fact that he just murdered 76 men women and children with gas and fire and biden nominated him to be head of the atf the organization that did it so um the government hates you but actually back to the story now applewhite began claiming that people around the world the majority of people had actually been brainwashed by lucifer and that political correctness was satan because of course it was and you know again not totally off base in an orwellian sense this whole belief about luciferians running the world and all of that kind of began to also coincide with stories of alien abductions which he claimed the government was hiding then in 1992 applewhite began to worry that the people from the next level were planning to uh till the garden in north america which might have meant you know killing a whole bunch of people so they decided that they wanted to look for somewhere else in the world that was more friendly to colts and determined that there was nowhere else in the world more friendly to colts than the united states of america that same year they released a 12-part video series which was broadcast via satellite which feels like a weird thing to say because cable and fiber optic are the way that things are done now but back then satellite television was actually like super cool technology just you couldn't watch it during a thunderstorm meanwhile publications in 1988 and 1992 reinforced this belief in a universal mind that we were all part of again going back to some of the theosophical roots of their belief system they also once again changed their name to total overcomers anonymous in 1993. i'm gonna be honest i have absolutely no idea what total overcomers is supposed to mean or why they kept using the anonymous term as if this was a narcotics or alcoholic support group by this time membership had also dwindled to just 26 people so they went ahead and made a great financial decision to purchase a 30 000 ad in usa today this wildly expensive ad remember this is the 90s this is 30 000 30 years ago brought in 20 people so that's an roi of bad seeing that this kind of worked but really didn't work quite as well as they wanted to applewhite decided to go on a speaking tour in 1994 after which membership jumped to almost 100 people simultaneously applewhite began to release his control and give more and more freedom back to the people within the cult as well as withdrawing and speaking himself less he did everything through publications or public speaking tours and very little person-to-person communication around this time he also began to spiral into a deeper depression and decided to post his ideas online seeking validation from the internet which is just never a good idea also at this time the theology got much much darker and suicide became a very like hefty prominent point in it everyone was going to have to kill themselves to reach the next level and at this point the group began to take its final form and become what we will know as heaven's gate the group attempted to settle in new mexico but couldn't make it work so of course they moved to california which just seems to be cult central as well suppression of sexuality became more and more central to the doctrine probably due partially to applewhite's struggles with his own sexual feelings towards both men and women and a number of people in the group also underwent surgical castration which at the time was very unpopular whereas today you see people getting vasectomies left and right back then you couldn't even find a doctor to do it in the u.s it had to be like a medical reason in order to do it just voluntarily they had to go to mexico and their reasoning here or applewhite's reasoning at least was that sexuality was the final thing that tied you to your human form and he began citing matthew 22 30 which does say that in heaven we are like the angels and that what we know of as sexuality is left behind so i kind of see where he was coming from with that but i also think that he maybe was leaning a little bit too much into that interpretation he also began a practice of forced androgyny which meant that nobody could display any sex characteristics you had to have the same haircuts the same dress this was pretty easy because all of the names were unisex at this point so there really wasn't anything sexual going on so he was able to kind of gain complete control by removing all possible intimacy you weren't allowed to have close friends you weren't allowed to have sexual relationships you had to dress as you know being neither gender and a number of people as i said got castrated so there was a lot of you know weird stuff going on here in october of 1996 the heavensgate group rented a mansion in uh rancho santa fe california around this time applewhite heard about the comet hail bop which was apparently a pretty big deal in the late 20th century because i guess i don't know why i wasn't around yet but for reasons that nobody to this day understands he became convinced that trailing that comet was a spaceship and that bonnie was on board and that this was their shot when that comet passed earth they had to be ready to ascend their souls had to be separated from their human forms so that they could be collected and go to the next level in march of 1997 people began to record exit statements some of these were written some of these were filmed but the whole point was that people were explaining what they were doing and why they were doing it and these were half exaltations of applewhite and then also half condemnations of human hierarchy government religion all sorts of things anything that was kind of meant to structure society was derided it is possible that the timing with the comet was just serendipitous for applewhite and that he kind of saw this as his way out since he was telling everybody that he was he was it this had to happen during his lifetime so if it didn't then the cult was over he had essentially structured this so that he couldn't even choose a successor this religion was going to die and it was going to die with him on march 22nd 1997 38 adherents plus applewhite donned black uniforms with patches that read heaven's gate away team and over the next three days they would begin to commit a series of ritual suicides members took barbiturates which are central nervous system depressants as well as alcohol which is a mixture that will essentially cause you to fall asleep and stop breathing and then placed sacs over their heads and waited to die applewhite was one of the last to go his suicide was assisted by four people assistants who upon his death then took their own lives and every single person's body was left with a pile of cash and an id not really sure why they did that but they did and that was it everybody passed away and it wasn't until an anonymous tip was submitted a few days later that people actually discovered it when the county sheriff showed up to see what was going on the last vestige of this that is left is their website heavensgate.com which is still active to this day i don't know who is maintaining it but it looks like it was built in the 90s so i don't think it's been updated much and on there you can get their books you can get their exit statements you can watch some of the videos it's it's pretty creepy to go look at um it's not like horror creepy it's just you feel weird as you're reading through it you know and on that website are four exit statements one is the official one likely written or dictated by applewhite which is a condemnation of a humanity an exaltation of nettles and applewhite and an odd invocation of the bible there are then three exit statements from adherents one from chicoti basically just is a straight complete condemnation of government how the state sees itself as a religious body and that organized religion while well-intentioned ultimately creates some sort of fog that separates people from their ability to reach the next level he also taught that all human hierarchies were unnatural and against the way things were supposed to be that they were creations of lucifer and his distortions and that most people were irredeemable and unsavable there was nothing that could be done and that even things like terrorism were the result of the breakdown of you know the natural world and the order set forth by the extraterrestrials chicody also specifically mentions that even human monetary systems are meant to avoid systems of voluntary trading and bartering which again i can kind of see where some of this comes from and much of this entire theology and belief system seems to kind of be a warped version of anarchism looking at all hierarchies whether natural or unnatural as well unnatural and throughout his statement there is a clear through line of a distorted version of christianity another one of the exit statements from glennode addresses the importance of the difference between body and soul and then also echoes much of the same anarchist sentiment as chicody's beliefs the issue is that many of the more poignant remarks some of the some of the legitimate observations about consolidation of power and authoritarianism get lost among this very very unscientific not even really religious series of ramblings about how satan is in control of literally everyone who isn't them and in a sort of irony they they point out christians as being the most hostile towards them and they don't seem to understand that christians might be hostile towards this because it was using their terminology and condemning the ways in which they were twisting christian doctrine to be harmful and they saw that as an attack on them for being right not an attack on them for blasphemy which if you're going to go around and preach using christian terms it's going to make christians upset if what you're preaching isn't actually christianity finally sorody's statement references a number of things like operation northwoods uh the tuskegee experiments operation high jump which okay you know what northwoods is important to know about and the tuskegee experiment where the federal government the cdc actually infected several hundred african-american men in tuskegee alabama with syphilis and then allowed to go untreated just to see how it would spread through the black community because no one was going to get mad at them for it back then yeah that's a real thing that happened go look at the ski experiments it's horrible it's disgusting um you know i've mentioned this before but point being again it's them referencing horrible things that have been done by the government but then they get so wrapped up in all the other stuff that it just comes across as incoherent ramblings of mad men so what happens here oddly enough is that applewhite has an opportunity with all of this media coverage of this horrible event to actually point out some pretty important stuff for people to know about but he goes and derails the entire thing with the nonsense but in the end what the story is here as much as this is a story of a tragedy of a charismatic leader who led 38 people to their deaths for no reason whatsoever it's also a very important lesson in wariness and that if you are somebody who does question authority and who does have misgivings about the government or the church or anything along those lines you need to be careful who you fall in with because a lot of people will take your skepticism of hierarchies and prey on it and slowly but surely reel you in and start to feed you the more insane stuff whether it is you know a cult or a radical political extremist movement it doesn't really matter you've got to be careful when you are exploring groups and exploring people you think might agree with you to ensure that you're not falling into a trap of what is eventually going to become brainwashing because while it is good to question authority and it is good to be curious about the world around you you do not want to fall into something like heaven's gate where what seems innocuous at first turns into a genuinely tragic mass event that said this is a really weird time to pitch my coffee but we are at the end of the video and you know of course as always we're curious what you think let us know what you think about heaven's gate let us know what you think about their doctrine if you've ever experienced anything similar if there are any other cults that you'd like us to look into of course we're going to be adding more content to the channel so let us know about that and of course we do have all of the ways that you can support us we now have an amazon storefront which is linked in the description we have basically everything's linked in the description but we also have a target partnership we have a partnership with gaia industries they're a sustainable bamboo product brand and we have a number of other collaborations and whatnot that you can find in my link tree which again is in the description if you like what we're doing here and you want to support us directly you become a member here on youtube or you can join our patreon for one dollar a month you will get access to everything that goes up there we are working on making it a little bit more um attractive by adding in some more short stories and behind the scenes and some blooper reels things like that and of course at the higher tiers you get rewards like mugs and t-shirts and hoodies which are always fun of course you can find me at the aid mattis or the lore lodge pretty much anywhere and you can follow aidan thornbury our director and editor at director aiden on pretty much everything as well so once again thank you so much for watching i'm aiden mattis and thanks for stopping by [Music] you

Channel: The Lore Lodge

Views: 350,954

Keywords: the lore lodge, lore, folklore, history, culture, education, entertainment, social studies, humanities, anthropology, aidan mattis

Id: 95UXqXXX4rA

Length: 53min 51sec (3231 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022