Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website | Hacker News Reader

Left Alive And Unchanged: The Heaven’s Gate Website

thebodyintl.com

185 pointssyranwarner127 comments

Fun fact, back in 2017 when I was a junior in highschool, I would meet this friend of mine often at her house. She lived pretty far into this gated community that was right on the edge of where Rancho Santa Fe ends. I really don’t remember how the topic came up, but she told me that the mansion where the Heavens gate cult had killed themselves was literally a 5 min walk. I knew about the cult, but I never knew it all took place in San Diego lol when I went home, I looked up the distance of her house to the address of the mansion (it took a little bit because I failed to notice they changed the address, which is 18241 Paseo Victoria) it was shocking to see that it really was like 5 min away.

I witnessed two police and retired police shootings in California. I also knew the 16 year old that axe murdered his entire family in vista, ca.

I chose to leave the state, and now the worst I see is a dead deer 3 times a year.

Chances are something unsettling has happened within 500' of you, some time in history.

Don't let that weigh you down, in thoughts or body.

My mind went immediately in a satirical direction. I often ignore that actually being there, in the physical space where something that intense happened could be psychologically difficult to handle. The internet gives us enough distance to make things so much more abstract.

I spent 30 years in San Diego before moving to Denver in 2020… and Denver is far worse. There seems to be some masa shooting making national headlines every few months.

>Chances are something unsettling has happened within 500' of you, some time in history.

Meanwhile in Europe…

> Chances are something unsettling has happened within 150m of you, some time in history.

Better?

A building located vis a vis the post-Prussian farm I grew up on was destroyed when Soviets' 3rd/13th/33rd divisions were conquering the remains of the third Reich, Feb 1945.

Nah, it didn’t way me down or bother me like that. It was more of a “what the shit, you’re kidding?” moment.

Not all members, one specifically stayed behind to maintain the website. In an interview played on the Heavens Gate podcast (which is excellent) he expressed regret he wasn’t able to teleport to the comet with the rest of the group.

From the article, two maintainers are named, Mark and Sarah King.

They are described as intensely private, and remain profoundly influenced by their previous association.

Efforts to unveil their identities began in 2011 on Redit, but they were finally unmasked in 2017 when they released an interview on The Daily Mirror.

I corresponded with one of them for a bit about fifteen years ago, but it petered out as we ran out of things to say.

They were extremely polite if reserved.

They have a section with instructions on how to set up PGP: https://www.heavensgate.com/misc/secure.htm

Wow the site really is old then

I've read their cult was mostly tech people and they raised money developing websites.

87% Pagespeed:

https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heave...

It’s been two and half decades since 39 devotees of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate died by a mass suicide in a mansion outside San Diego and someone still keeps their website preserved as it looked in 97. This article examines who’s keeping it alive and dives into the role the internet played in the history of the cult.

I absolutely archived this site onto a 100MB Zip Disk back when this first happened.

So I guess now I need to find an ancient SCSI card and unearth that archive.

Maybe the Internet Archive still has Zip Drive readers! Send it to them! Would be interesting to see a diff

click

http://www.heavensgate.com/

Now that's a website. Love the modern styling.

How come they offer German translations (out of all languages)?

Maybe Lutherans? Or, more likely, some German heard of it and wanted to know more and translated it and sent it in. I've sent in dutch to English and German to English translations since I got a modem.

Maybe for the same reasons the German Wikipedia is so large. I'm not sure what they are, but I suspect: It's a large language sphere, speakers enjoy relative wealth and the luxury of time, there is a cultural tradition of cultivating and archiving information. All of them may make it more probable someone would submit translations. In addition, here specifically, the online community was well-developed in the late 90s for similar demographic reasons, e.g. science/engineering communities jumping on board early.

On the other hand, the Heaven's Gate cult made many references to Star Trek in their material as well, and the franchise enjoyed major popularity in Germany, I would wager beyond other non-English language spheres. This may also have increased the size of the potential receptive/interested audience.

I love that you synthesized that comment on the fly then actually took the time write and share it.

In the back of my mind I have a maybe-never project brewing that would entail finding Wikipedia pages that only exist in one language. English would of course have many unique pages. I wonder how many non-English page translations would be rejected on notability grounds, just due to sheer cultural differences.

I think you'll find that, in practice, there are many pages that fit "between" other pages in other languages. As random example, say English Wikipedia has "Matrix multiplication", "Strassen Algorithm" and "Coppersmith-Winegrad Algorithm" pages, whereas the German Wikipedia might have a "Matrix Multiplication Algorithms" page (this is not the current reality, but it could be).

This makes sense, because if one wiki has, say, 60% of the content (and depth) of some other wiki, it will break it down into pages differently.

Being able to speak both languages, I often find it instructive to browse the pages on a subject on both English and German Wikipedia, as the structure and depth of the material will often vary either way. It's sometimes unfortunate, but other times also possibly warranted that these wikis cover subjects to a different degree.

Oh that's an awesome idea! I'm fluent in Spanish so this technique will probably make my Spanish and English brains way smarter.

The German translations are pretty bad.

For example: "for starters" is translated as "für Starter" which does not make any sense.

Yeah, it reads like a very literal amateur translation by a native German speaker without much editing.

I've heard German speakers say German is a good language for philosophy.

Those suicides happened about the time Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV Show came out.

I was in LA at the time. Buffy billboards everywhere. And then bam - mass suicide.

Ever since I’ve always connnected the two.

I wrote a creepy poem about the whole affair, as I was an angsty goth-adjacent teen who didn't like poetry assignments.

Please share! I have plenty of poetry from 20 years ago that’s probably quite cringe and I can’t bring myself to look at it. But yours! I’m intrigued. And maybe it isn’t cringe maybe it’s great.

Alas, it's lost to the sands of time. Also, I could never touch Silvia Plath, but for all she spoke to me in that time... I think I just dislike poetry as an art form. Are you saying my disdain for the work could make me good at it? I somehow expect that other self-loathing poets have already trodden that path to muck. But yeah, I realize that I could reformat the above and call it a poem. Oh noem.

one thing to note is that websites in this style, some with marquee tags and all that, are still quite renderable using the parsers we have today (with a lot of specific settings and modes, but still). even the weird hacks they would use to overcome some limitations often survive. which is a testament of the dedication to backwards compatibility and to the weight of weird code in the browsers we have to continue to put up with as well

The article makes it look like the existence of this cult is an extremely widely-known fact and thus it doesn't need much introduction. But I only learned about it after clicking this link.

It weirds me out that some people are so amenable to this kind of thing, enough to kill themselves.

There are many human weaknesses, the desire for meaning in life leads some people to be susceptible to this kind of thing both causing it and falling victim to it.

The meaning of life is that which is assigned by the one living it. Liberating once you realize that no one has any answers for you. Like He-Man said, "I have the power."

If you were a teen or older when it happened, and lived in the US, it was pretty big news.

I can still reach my cousin-in-law on an AOL email named after the comet mixed with his last name. Yes, it was cathartic to type this out and hit post.

I was single-digit years old in the 90s and I live in Russia.

I was 19 and watched absolutely zero cable or network news in 1997. I have been learning of events from that time that I had no idea occurred or where on the news. I had a life, and therefore no time to watch anything. Sort of like these days. I watch PBS News Hour a few times a week to keep up. Even that's a chore.

> I had a life, and therefore no time to watch anything.

Great! And good for you trying to stay informed despite a different definition of what constitutes a fulfilling life. Some of us enjoyed following news more closely, even during our teenage years.

That's maybe like 2-3% of the worlds population.

Surely you're aware of Jonestown, which was a much larger such event?

No? Again, I'm non-US.

Also read about Waco, if you’re into this sort of thing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

Pedantic Central Texan: the cult compound and subsequent siege weren’t actually in Waco - that’s the nearest city with television stations and an airport. If you’re not Southern Baptist, feel free to make a joke about the real cult in Waco being headquartered at the Truett Seminary (Baylor). If you grew up Southern Baptist (like myself), giggle even more about the Vatican on the Brazos.

I learned once I got to college on the East Coast in the late 90s that the rest of the country automatically thought “cult compound siege and fire” instead of “Baylor,” when they heard the name of the nearest big city to where I grew up, so took to describing my hometown as being “about an hour north of Austin” instead of “30 minutes south of Waco”.

Austin was always far, far cooler than Waco, but that always felt a bit pretentious, as my hometown is a lot more like Waco than it is Austin… which is probably why I ended up running off to the East Coast for college.

We also made a joke about kids in Waco only having two options on what to do for the weekend: North or South. Dallas or Austin.

That's quite a bit more complicated than just another suicide cult. From your link:

> Increasingly aggressive techniques were used to try to force the Branch Davidians out. For instance, sleep deprivation of the inhabitants through all-night broadcasts of recordings of jet planes, pop music, chanting, and the screams of rabbits being slaughtered. Outside the compound, nine Bradley Fighting Vehicles carrying M651 CS tear gas grenades and Ferret rounds and five M728 Combat Engineer Vehicles obtained from the U.S. Army began patrolling. The armored vehicles were used to destroy perimeter fencing and outbuildings and crush cars belonging to the Branch Davidians. Armored vehicles repeatedly drove over the grave of Branch Davidian Peter Gent despite protests by the Branch Davidians and the negotiators.

...

> Criticism was later leveled by Schneider's attorney, Jack Zimmerman, at the tactic of using sleep-and-peace-disrupting sound against the Branch Davidians: "The point was this—they were trying to have sleep disturbance and they were trying to take someone that they viewed as unstable to start with, and they were trying to drive him crazy. And then they got mad 'cos he does something that they think is irrational!"

...

> At around noon, three fires broke out almost simultaneously in different parts of the building and spread quickly; footage of the blaze was broadcast live by television crews. The government maintains the fires were deliberately started by the Branch Davidians. Some Branch Davidian survivors maintain that the fires were accidentally or deliberately started by the assault.

You may have heard the expression “drank the koolaid” to mean someone has fully embraced an outlandish ideology, or even just fully committed to a cause. At Jonestown, many cult members committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced koolaid.

Koolaid is a sugary, flavored drink powder that is mixed with water. It was a staple for many kids in the 80’s and 90’s.

It apparently was flavoraid.

And how many times have you heard someone say "drank the flavoraid"?

It was Flavor-Aid. One of my supervisors in the USAF helped with the bodies when they arrived in the US.

I mean, if you’re going to go out that way you might as well go Kool-Aid brand.

Waco? Adam House (to take a non-US example)? No interest in true crime and/or cults? Both Heaven's Gate and Jonestown are extremely widely known events. All over the world.

Jonestown was significant internationally - nearly a thousand people died by suicide and murder, many of them children. It didn’t take place in the US (Jonestown is in Guyana), although the cult originated there.

Jonestown is pretty much world history by now. I was born in a South American, non-english speaking country, AFTER the fact, and by 10 years old probably have seen about two news segments or documentaries about it on TV.

FYI...we have lots of serial killers and death cults. Something is wrong.

In France/Switzerland, there is the Order of the Solar Temple, which seems to be somewhat unique among suicide cults for being repeat offenders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Solar_Temple

A cult of repeat group suicide sounds like something out of Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

...or Monty Python.

repeat offenders or repeat offendings?

I'm curious to know which 90's software was used for the graphics in https://www.heavensgate.com/

Me too. It's probably just my weird taste, but think it still looks pretty cool. I wondered what kind of look "cults" were going for these days on the "modern" web so checked out scientology.org. Way boring compared to Heaven's Gate, though the background image is fairly spacey.

I remember corel draw had a primitive 3d effect similar to that. So, I'd bet in a combination of corel draw + (corel photopaint | paint shop pro | photoshop).

You can be wrong and charismatic.

I'm sure sociology and anthropology and psychology all can reconcile that.

There's a tweet thread on someone's journey with this that you might dig. Your comment reminded me of it:

"REALITY DISTORTION FIELDS & the HUMILITY OF ACCEPTING YOU'RE BEING INFLUENCED" https://twitter.com/CurziRose/status/1477788648812662784

This is the secondary theme of 1984, that gets lost because of the cultural relevance of the primary theme (govt surveillance, authoritarianism etc).

O'Brien, Winston Smith's foil, is presented as charismatic, rebellious seeming and importantly both smarter and better educated than the protagonist. The lesson I drew from this as a high schooler, was that someone can be all those things and still wrong, malicious, nefarious. That our values can be better guides than what seems like incontrovertible logic. And that following rationality blindly without empathy or heuristics (common sense), can lead to utter horror (the Stalinist purges that Orwell was explicitly referencing, and of course Nazism).

Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of the actress Nichelle Nichols [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...

They still respond to emails. Try it. It’s wild.

Did… did you email them? Why? What did they say back?

On a semi related note, Ted Kaczynski is still alive and was responding to letters as of November. He got moved to a medical prison last month so I'm not sure how well he's doing, but it is utterly fascinating to be able to correspond with people who are both intelligent and insane.

>but it is utterly fascinating to be able to correspond with people who are both intelligent and insane

tbf sort of sums up most of the internet where I hang out.

Ted is insane?

From their website, under the section "Our Position Against Suicide"

https://www.heavensgate.com/misc/letter.htm

A more accurate title would be "Our Position Against Suicide At This Time"

Even at the time it's not a super convincing statement. They talk like the 'Next Level' is coming soon and say at the end: "The true meaning of 'suicide' is to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered."

Why did some old school hackers have heavensgate email addresses?

> That the design would have looked legitimate to internet users in the ‘90’s

This is false. It did not look “legitimate “ even in the 90s.

Amazing that they have a page on their position against suicide https://www.heavensgate.com/misc/letter.htm. Non-spoiler alert: it’s exactly what you might expect.

Surprisingly, it looks good on mobile

Same interesting website https://www.beyondweird.com/ That site was online before altavista. who is still paying for that website each year.

Do you have any articles where I can read about this?

Subject matter aside, the author of the article uses the term URL a few times but doesn't seem to know what it means. Curious for an "internet historian".

He also repeatedly states the events of 1997 happened 35 years ago. Heh.

More likely "She" (or rather "They" since there are two authors).

> also repeatedly states the events of 1997 happened 35 years ago.

You misread. The article says 25 years, except this:

There are images from the news that stick out in the minds of people over 35 who watched the story unfold in real time.

which refers to people aged around 10 or above 25 years ago.

> the author of the article uses the term URL a few times

Just once, in reference to the domain name, which does in turn link to a URL.

> Curious for an "internet historian".

Where do the authors claim to be internet historians?

More striking for me was the idea that the webpage was in any way advanced for its time. That's certainly not the case. Their Higher Source home page had a much stronger design aesthetic, albeit now incredible dated looking, but even then I can think of far more sophisticated examples from that period.

I supposed this was about the website for some movie starring Kris Kristofferson.

… until the HN hug of death

They should just put Cloudflare in front of it

The Heaven’s Gate cultists have been spreading dangerous misinformation for 20 years? They MUST be deplatformed! Why on earth do Google, Facebook, Hacker News, their web hosting and DNS providers allow their dangerous messages to be spread? /s

The US constitution guarantees special protection for purely irrational beliefs. Once a belief starts to vaguely makes sense or to make an honest attempt to make sense, it loses its protection.

Well we’re in luck because, as has been pointed out many times in recent years, the private organizations I mentioned are not bound by the first amendment!

On a non-sarcastic note, it could well be that this and similar cults are banned on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, which is perfectly fine. They still have their own website.

If heavensgate happened again today their hosting provider would definitely "shun" them.

Title should be clarified to match the article. Not everyone associated with the cult has perished. Several ex-members are alive and some remained close to the cult in a way that's hard to describe, and took on the maintenance of the website.

HBO's series, Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults, is highly recommended. It is a fascinating, tragic, and ultimately humanizing look at the cult, through the eyes of observers and several ex-members.

Right. I didn’t realize they were tech trailblazers back in the day until that documentary.

I think there's a decent chance they inspired Cowboy Bebop's episode about the tech cult SCRATCH: https://cowboybebop.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_Scratch

...although Japan has had several really wacky cults that also could have inspired the story.

Thanks for this comment. I was initially impressed that the site stated up that long with no human maintenance.

Also, now I want to watch that documentary

It wouldn't surprise me too much. My completely embarrassing website from the 90s has been running on the same host and subdomain with zero work done by me to keep it running: http://boglin.iwarp.com

I think I edited the HTML once since 1999 to add a Google Analytics tag because I was curious if anyone ever visited it.

Looking forward to your next update. And I didn’t sign the guestbook.

Best be sleeping with one eye open then

Your ICQ number is lower than mine by a little bit, jealous.

My ICQ is even lower (1508789) but I envy his old skool website.

1303789 (the wierdest flex).

It's wild that that number is wedged so deeply into my brain, like a lot of things that were on my mind as a teenager. Makes me want to make sure my kids are doing something worthwhile when they're that age (which I know is futile of course).

Isn't that more about iwarp, who are presumably still alive and running a business and paying bills?

Me too, and I wondered how long they paid the server and domain name cost in advance.

As an atheist Heaven's Gate claims are as legitimate (and outlandish) as those of Christians or Buddhists, whose to say they aren't reborn on an alien planet? So let's call it "assumed perished".

Catholicism strictly forbids suicide, I grew up being taught you could go to hell if you commit suicide. I assume it is similar for the other mainstream branches of Christianity. I'm no longer religious, and I understand where you are coming from questioning what ought to qualify as a cult versus a religion, because there are some cases where the difference isn't too clear (besides membership numbers). But any belief system that is actively encouraging suicide has clearly crossed a line.

> But any belief system that is actively encouraging suicide has clearly crossed a line.

Does "handle these venomous snakes, God will protect you" count?

"Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death". So not quite, but I see your point. Thanks for the laugh (sincerely).

I tip my fedora to you good sir.

I took a sociology class on "alternative religions" from Rob Balch in college—he's one of the recurring experts in that series. I enjoyed the HBO series, as it went more into the various individuals' stories than is really on topic for a sociology class.

An interesting detail is on the bottom of the webpage (https://www.heavensgate.com/) they have this hidden text (perhaps an old SEO hack?):

>Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second coming angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels angels end end times times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times Key Words: (for search engines) 144,000, Abductees, Agnostic, Alien, Allah, Alternative, Angels, Antichrist, Apocalypse, Armageddon, Ascension, Atheist, Awakening, Away Team, Beyond Human, Blasphemy, Boddhisattva, Book of Revelation, Buddha, Channeling, Children of God, Christ, Christ's Teachings, Consciousness, Contactees, Corruption, Creation, Death, Discarnate, Discarnates, Disciple, Disciples, Disinformation, Dying, Ecumenical, End of the Age, End of the World, Eternal Life, Eunuch, Evolution, Evolutionary, Extraterrestrial, Freedom, Fulfilling Prophecy, Genderless, Glorified Body, God, God's Children, God's Chosen, God's Heaven, God's Laws, God's Son, Guru, Harvest Time, He's Back, Heaven, Heaven's Gate, Heavenly Kingdom, Higher Consciousness, His Church, Human Metamorphosis, Human Spirit, Implant, Incarnation, Interfaith, Jesus, Jesus' Return, Jesus' Teaching, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Krishna Consciousness, Lamb of God, Last Days, Level Above Human, Life After Death, Luciferian, Luciferians, Meditation, Members of the Next Level, Messiah, Metamorphosis, Metaphysical, Millennium, Misinformation, Mothership, Mystic, Next Level, Non Perishable, Non Temporal, Older Member, Our Lords Return, Out of Body Experience, Overcomers, Overcoming, Past Lives, Prophecy, Prophecy Fulfillment, Rapture, Reactive Mind, Recycling the Planet, Reincarnation, Religion, Resurrection, Revelations, Saved, Second Coming, Soul, Space Alien, Spacecraft, Spirit, Spirit Filled, Spirit Guide, Spiritual, Spiritual Awakening, Star People, Super Natural, Telepathy, The Remnant, The Two, Theosophy, Ti and Do, Truth, Two Witnesses, UFO, Virginity, Walk-ins, Yahweh, Yeshua, Yoda, Yoga,

Now, persuading people to paste your keyword dump into the HN page discussion for your site. There’s some real SEO for ya ;)

Yes. The article discusses this exact bit of SEO.

Yes, it's an old SEO hack. It's called "keyword stuffing".

"Yoda" seems a little out of place lol

Ah the craigslist "vehicle for sale" technique

If I ever fall under the influence of a suicide cult. I hope I can convince them that I should be the one to stay behind and "maintain the website" ^_^

I’ll join the same cult and tell the others it doesn’t require that much effort. Just put it up on cloudflare free plan after renewing the domain for 30 years. Then hopefully I’ll dip out of the cult without anyone noticing.

Dont forget to use code suicidecult for an extra 20% off at checkout.

I tried it. It had been used successfully 14 times today, but it didn’t work for me.

Want to place a bet that CloudFlare is still around in 30 years? I'd gladly take the other side of that.

I suppose you could offer a contract to short Cloudflare’s stock.

Heaven's Gate wasn't that kind of cult. People were free to come and go. They didn't even do shunning/disconnection.

Living on a comet doesn't sound so bad these days

No chance of bear attack, according to a popular meme.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com