Space on Our Minds

The Heaven’s Gate UFO, Rancho Santa Fe, “Death Cult” shook the nation on March 27th. We were shocked to learn that 39 people willingly went to their deaths as they sought to hitch a ride on the Hale-Bopp Comet to a better, more heavenly life. There were the usual couple of days of complete fascination. The newspapers had banner headlines on the event and the New York

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Times even gave brief biographies on all of the cultists who were identified. The talk shows featured interviews with cultists, their families, or, when they had no one better, “the experts.” The phone rang off the hook for Forum member Ted Goertzel who had never even directly written on the subject but was designated as his university’s expert. Jokes abounded about catching a ride to heaven. But, then, rather quickly, the media dropped this issue. In my opinion all of the manic activity was designed more to ward off understanding than to really come to terms with the reality of mass suicide.

Suicide, both individual and collective, frightens us because it is a clear and present threat. Yet, no matter how much we try to avoid it, it comes back to haunt us since it is far more possible than we would like to acknowledge. It is a real danger in our society. This danger is reflected in the statistics of the county of 900,000 people where I live. A decade ago the coroner told me that there were at least ten suicides for every homicide. Yet, the news usually focuses on homicides because it feels much safer to think that somebody else is trying to kill us rather than that we may take our own lives. Of course, the greatest danger of suicide is through our collective actions as members of nation states, countries so jealous and protective of their sovereignty that we empower them to destroy the world rather than concede to common sense and compromise. (Perhaps it would be useful to think of the nation state as a type of cult with an apocalyptic vision of the world?)

In the face of death, especially self-inflicted death, many of us are at such a loss that we lose touch with our own senses to an unusual degree. A graphic example of this frightening tendency is revealed in the initial coverage by the New York Times on March 27th. The headline read: “39 Men Found at San Diego Estate in Apparent Suicide.” In fact, there were more women than men who killed themselves. The first paragraph indicated they were all young men. In fact, most were not young. The next paragraph declared them to be all white men, ages “18 to 24 years old.” In fact, blacks were included in their ranks and none identified in the first few days were as young as 24. The sheriff’s deputies were so overwhelmed by the stench of death that they literally “backed out” of the lavish compound.

For several years, I have been interested in Professor David Redles’ research on apocalypticism and cults. He began by studying the occult, wrote a doctoral dissertation on Hitler’s apocalypticism, and then turned to the examination of contemporary cults such as Heaven’s Gate. Recently, he has agreed to play a leadership role in the Forum’s Apocalypse, Cults, and Millennialism Research Group. When Heaven’s Gate occurred, I urged him to write up his ideas for this issue. His term “induced apocalypse” appears to me to be especially felicitous because it concretizes a concept which so many of us have been talking about for a decade and more. The books, The Year 2000: Essays on the End (1997) and Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (1994), both by Charles Strozier, are two good examples of the type of scholarship devoted to the complex issues of apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic hopes. Clearly, Charles Strozier, Robert Jay Lifton, and Michael Flynn of the Center on Violence and Human Survival are doing vital work on the subject as are others. Nevertheless, so much needs to be done including the education of the FBI, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), and the public. It should be remembered that the ATF and FBI played their appointed roles in David Koresh’s “induced apocalypse” in Waco. The children the authorities used as a justification for their action were all killed in the fire.

Though the mass media, ever responsive to so many of our unconscious desires, quickly put aside Heaven’s Gate, a preoccupation with space is in the air. Below are a few examples. On April 30th, speaking to my class on the Holocaust, a survivor who joined partisans in the woods refers to her beloved grandchildren as “being from Mars” because their values are so different. Time magazine focuses on the discovery of the possibility of life and seas on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Another article focuses on possible life on Mars millions of years ago. TV shows and documentaries dwell on UFOs invading our atmosphere and aliens abducting humans. In April the ashes of Timothy Leary and Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, were released into space. At the movies, for example, Mars Attacks was released last fall, there was the re-release of Star Wars in January, and literally as I write these words there is the release of The Fifth Element involving extraterrestrials and space travel. Fox television’s “The X-Files” is a show that chronicles the lives and events of two FBI

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agents whose job is to investigate UFO sightings and abductions; it continues to rank high in the Nielsen ratings week after week. Though we mostly focus on our fears of space, we also look upward for help. As a prominent television commentator said the other day, “Angels are hot.” Movies and television shows about angels abound with TV’s “Touched by an Angel” having 20 million viewers. Space and aliens are on our minds and likely will be much more within our consciousness. We are also increasingly aware of spatial relations and interactions here on earth as is reflected by Peter Petschauer’s exciting book, Human Space, which Andrew Brink reviewed for this issue.

Space seemed to me to be a mild curiosity in 1983, when I stumbled across Sir Humphry Davy’s belief that he was descended from extraterrestrials, the geniuses who advanced civilization. Fourteen years ago interest in space seemed mostly focused on the human use of it as we spent billions to keep the Russians from winning the space race. We were pursuing President Reagan’s Star Wars defense fantasy of a safe Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), even while the experts indicated it was impossible to fully defend against nuclear attack. Since there was little academic interest in space, I made only one attempt to publish my article on Davy’s childhood beliefs in aliens and space travel. Today it appears much more relevant. Writings about Isaac Asimov, who took his readers to the far reaches of space, while fearing to even fly from New York to Washington on the shuttle, also seem relevant in the light of our current fascination.

Our fears and fantasies of space will not go away. In early May a suicide and suicide attempt by two members of the Heaven’s Gate cult served as a reminder of this. By May 20 “Space Day” was proclaimed on NBC television. Our mostly unconscious hope for salvation from heavenly space or of alien enemies from it continues. That was the sentiment I expressed last year in my review of Independence Day and it seems all the more accurate today. For better and worse, I believe that space is an increasing focus of our hopes and fears.

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