Heaven's Gate: The Sequel

{mosimage}We are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell.

Rio DiAngelo has a message he wants to share with the world. It’s an important message, one that begins in space. That’s where he came from, and where he will one day return, following in the footsteps of his 39 friends. Bearers of the same message, those 39 friends received their culminating cosmic transmission 12 years ago, when amateur astronomer Alan Hale stood in his driveway one summer evening around midnight, pointed his telescope low and due south and saw something that wasn’t there before. Five hundred miles away, Thomas Bopp’s telescope revealed the same object, burning with a 10.5 magnitude near the globular cluster M70, just outside Sagittarius’ bow, near the Archer’s heart. It was a comet, 25 miles wide, a titanic piece of ice plunging through space at up to 90,000 mph. When the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams confirmed the object, C/1995 01 officially became known as Hale-Bopp. Something that big comes through our solar system only occasionally. Trailing multiple sputtering yellow and blue tails of dust, ion gases and sodium atoms 20 million miles long, Hale-Bopp would become the brightest celestial visitor to our solar system in a millennium.

Rio’s friends knew what to do. A secretive, itinerant group of self-described monks following the teachings of their leader, who was known simply as DO, they’d recently moved into a 9,000-square-foot mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, which they called “the Monastery” and “the Craft,” and was paid for by members doing Web design and other technical services. The group had many names over the years but by that time had settled on Heaven’s Gate. They’d waited patiently for a sign, and DO thought the sky was now speaking. When another amateur astronomer announced on Art Bell’s conspiracy-minded radio show that he’d taken a picture of Hale-Bopp showing an elongated fuzzy brightness lurking in the tail, word quickly spread in UFO circles that there was an alien spacecraft accompanying the comet. Remote-sensing practitioner Courtney Brown collected clairvoyant “data” that also suggested an extraterrestrial presence. DO’s followers went out and bought a telescope. They couldn’t see the ship themselves, but that wasn’t important. When Hale-Bopp passed too close to Jupiter, and the giant planet’s gravitational pull altered the comet’s orbit so that it would return every 2,000 years, DO became certain: This was their long-awaited “indicator,” perhaps even the star Wormwood described in The Revelation. The group updated its Web site. “RED ALERT” flashed across the top; below came the announcement “HALE-BOPP BRINGS CLOSURE TO HEAVEN’S GATE.”

For years, they’d been hoping to return to the Kingdom of Heaven, which they called “Evolutionary Level Above Human,” or the “Next Level.” Day in, day out, the group — which they always said was not a cult but a “classroom for growing a soul” — had learned to transcend human existence through rigorous discipline. In preparation for the final step of leaving their human bodies, or “exiting their vehicles,” the group assembled uniforms: matching black Nikes and homemade black pants and shirts, each adorned with a custom-made triangular patch that said “HEAVEN’S GATE AWAY TEAM.” Rio, an artist in his human incarnation, designed the infamous patch, which was embroidered with the constellation Orion in the triangle’s apex. This, DO explained, was their destination. Each morning, the house’s 40 inhabitants took turns with the telescope, watching the indicator, and taking glimpses at their home world, Sirius, the faithful hound at the feet of Orion the hunter, nine light-years away from San Diego. They couldn’t have been more excited about the trip some members took to Mexico to purchase enough phenobarbital to kill them all several times over.

On March 22, 1997, Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to Earth, at 122 million miles. DO and his followers meticulously cleaned the house, took out the garbage, polished the silver and packed their things. The sign was above; the time was now. Outside, the bougainvillea were in full bloom as the group began executing “The Routine,” a document they’d created that precisely choreographed how teams would help each other to wash down phenobarbital-laced helpings of applesauce and pudding with vodka, a lethal combination that did its work painlessly. “Lie back and rest quietly,” the ritual instructed, which they did, covered in purple shrouds, a $5 bill tucked in their wallets, waiting for the “elixir of life” to cause drowsiness, then a coma, and finally a circulatory-system collapse. No one knows the exact timeline, but within three days, all the members of Heaven’s Gate were dead.

Except Rio. Most people remember the bizarre unfolding of details surrounding the largest mass suicide in U.S. history, but few recall the sole survivor. Rio had been fitted with his departure uniform, and was prepared to “graduate with the rest of the class.” Then, one day in February, as the exit plans were coming together, Rio woke up and felt he had some unnamed thing yet to do here on Earth. He had followed his instincts before, when he abandoned his life to join the group, and now the directive coming into his awareness was telling him to leave the mansion. Rio was confused, and had an emotional meeting with DO, who telepathically consulted the Next Level. Word came back that Rio should stay behind; that it was all part of the plan. Rio was given a camera, a computer, $1,000 for living expenses and $12.50 for train fare back to Los Angeles.

Four weeks later, on March 27, Rio received a FedEx package at the office of InterActive Entertainment Group in Beverly Hills, where he was doing HTML work. Inside was a letter addressed to Rio, a press release, two videotapes on which were recorded DO’s and the students’ “Exit Videos,” and a map to the house indicating which door they’d left unlocked. Rio knew what he would find there. Lacking a car, he asked his boss, Nick Matzorkis, for a ride to San Diego, where Rio donned gloves, doused his shirt with cologne and used his camera to film the neatly arranged bodies, by then in various stages of decomposition.

As soon as he informed police, Rio and his footage were at the center of one of the biggest news stories of the decade. Three of his fellow followers, those who “dropped out” before graduation, killed themselves in subsequent weeks and months so as to not miss out on their one brief opportunity to pass through Heaven’s Gate. But Rio stayed with us. As tabloids offered lots of money, Rio chose few press contacts. Everyone wanted the insider’s perspective, which is what Diane Sawyer eventually got when Rio appeared on Prime Time Live and patiently explained to her that his colleagues had moved on to the Next Level. By the time Princess Diana was killed that summer, Heaven’s Gate was old news. The tale of the suicidal cult was eclipsed by the next shocking tragedy. Rio disappeared.

Until he contacted the L.A. Weekly a few weeks ago. With the 10th anniversary of the Exit coming up on March 27, Rio e-mailed our managing editor and offered to do his first interview since writing a self-published book, Beyond Human Mind: The Soul Evolution of Heaven’s Gate, an account of his experience that will “clarify the truth about the group and their amazing agenda.” A few days later, Rio dropped off an elaborate press kit at our offices, with full-color copies of previous interviews, various statements, a sample Q&A and a cover sheet marked with a personalized embossed seal that said, “Official Rio Document.” Throughout the pages appears the recurring slogan “Glad to be alive and planning to stay that way!” Among the clips was a short bio of Rio in the 1997 edition of People magazine’s 25 Most Intriguing People of the year, alongside Drew Carey and John F. Kennedy Jr. At the bottom of the cover letter, Rio left his phone number.

I called right away. I’d heard about Rio before and thought about trying to track him down. When I pointed this out to Rio the first time we met, he quickly chalked it up to cosmic significance. “It’s pretty coincidental that you contacted us,” I said. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, smiling and looking me right in the eye. “I think you’re going to find that it wasn’t very coincidental at all.”

Cosmic, coincidental or cosmically coincidental, it turns out that 13 years ago, Rio first learned about Heaven’s Gate from the L.A. Weekly. A short item in 1994 described the Total Overcomers, as they were then known, and their informational meeting, which instantly changed Rio’s life. After the suicides, Rio felt burned by the sensationalism of the media frenzy, which he felt never told the real story of Heaven’s Gate, but since the L.A. Weekly had guided him to the truth before, he returned to the publication to help him tell the story “that is so hot mainstream media won’t touch it.”

When I’d read about Rio, I’d always assumed that he’d survived because he came to his senses and realized the flaw in Heaven’s Gate’s suicide pact. In fact, Rio remains a true believer, one for whom a divine mission has crystallized. He began our first interview by asking me to be sure to include his prepared declaration, part of which reads:

We were at Rio’s apartment in Westwood, sitting at his dining-room table as he watched me read the whole thing. (See Rio’s statement.) On the wall was a plasma screen, around the room Eastern-themed art, including a reclining Buddha — all belonging to Rio’s roommate. “Since my time in the Monastery,” he explained, “I don’t keep attachments to many material things.” Rio is bald, neatly bearded, tall and thin. It is an unfair comparison, but with his strangely perfect posture, he seems like a prim and cheerful Anton LaVey — if Anton LaVey had wound up running a crystal shop in Sedona. Rio’s countenance is exactly what I expected from a Heaven’s Gate adept: calm, friendly, measured, sincere. All too sincere when it comes to the fact that he believes he has been granted a special knowledge about the makings of all life in the universe.

When I asked about the dropouts who later killed themselves, Rio was impassive. “People ask: ‘Why would they do that?’ ” he said. For him, their copycat suicides only further proved the point. “It doesn’t make sense to give up everything. Unless… you know. Unless you know what they knew. And what I know.” Which is? “That DO was the second coming of Jesus Christ. That’s what I’m here to help people understand.”

Part 2: Revelation on the Rogue River

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{LAW_PAGE_BREAK} And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy.

{mosimage}How does one come to understand their messianic blessings? For DO, that journey began in a Houston psychiatric hospital in 1972. Marshall Herff Applewhite, or Herff, as the charismatic son of an itinerant Presbyterian minister was then called by his friends, had been a talented musician, well-liked teacher, choir director, and singer with the Houston Grand Opera. But those days were over. He’d left his wife and children after a tryst with a male student led to his requested resignation from a university position. Herff was adrift, torn by his sexual desires, and shaken by voices in his head.

In the hospital, Herff met Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles, a registered nurse whose investigations into astrology and theosophy were guided by communications with a 19th-century monk named “Brother Francis.” Bonnie became instant friends with Herff, giving him a crash course in metaphysics. In the folie à deux that ensued, Bonnie and Herff decided they had known each other in previous lives, and hit the road to discover their joint purpose. They camped, ran out on motel bills, got arrested. They wrote a manuscript called “I Can’t Believe That — But You Must,” in which Bonnie framed Herff’s visions in messianic terms. Destined to illuminate humanity, they began signing their letters the “Two Lampstands” or the “Two Candlesticks.” Then, one summer, on the banks of the Rogue River in Oregon, among the wildflowers and sugar pines, Bonnie and Herff were struck by a “vibration like thunder,” a simultaneous disclosure that they were the two witnesses foretold in the Bible’s vision of Apocalypse.

This is what they told a group of 80 people assembled at Joan Culpepper’s house in Studio City in 1975. By then, they had abandoned their given names, instead calling themselves “The Two,” “Guinea and Pig” and “Bo and Peep.” After 30 minutes, they concluded by saying, “If you follow us, you must obey everything we say. That includes giving up your possessions, your family and yourself.” Culpepper, a local psychic guru, whose motto was “Weird turns me on,” thought Bo and Peep were too weird. But many of her guests were awestruck. Nearly a third of the audience — people from all walks of life — left with their new leaders shortly thereafter, traveling the highways looking for more recruits. “There are lot of advanced souls in Southern California,” Bo and Peep later remarked about their newfound flock.

There was no name for the movement then. Mostly they talked about “the Group.” Others referred to HIM, for “Human Individual Metamorphosis,” the title of the mimeograph they’d hand out at meetings. In 1975, the group made a big stir at a motel in the seaside town of Waldport, Oregon, when 20 new disciples abandoned their possessions, bid loved ones final farewells and vanished. On the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite reported: “A score of persons… have disappeared. It’s a mystery whether they’ve been taken on a so-called trip to eternity — or simply been taken.”

The group went underground. Bo and Peep rechristened themselves as DO and TI, harmonic bookends of the musical scale vibrating in the ether. Their travels were bankrolled by a $300,000 trust fund belonging to a member, but DO and TI sent out their followers in groups of two as ascetic nomads. They slept in tents, begged for food, and suffered instructional hardships to “clarify the butter,” as TI put it, separating the pure from the polluted. They covered a vast territory: Spokane, San Diego, Newport, Denver, Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Amarillo, Tulsa. They constantly uprooted themselves to avoid detection by members’ families.

“Jesus said it wouldn’t be easy,” the flock was instructed. “He asked for a total commitment, and that means walking away from everything, including your families.”

Severing all ties fit their belief system, in which DO and TI had come to see themselves as extraterrestrial representatives from the Evolutionary Level Above Human. DO, they’d decided, was the very same alien spirit that had inhabited Jesus, and TI was his Heavenly Father. Updating esoteric, early Christianity by way of science fiction, their millennial paradise could be found only by renouncing terrestrial attachments and shedding one’s “container” or “vehicle” to ascend into space and live eternally with the Chief of Chiefs, or God. Like DO and TI, the followers took new names; the choices ranged from biblical to whimsical: Peter, David, Joshua, Wink, Window, Marty, Moneybags, Fanta. In early interviews, DO refused to talk about his wife and children, referring to them as relatives of “his vehicle.” His devotees followed suit. As new spiritual entities temporarily residing in physical bodies, they were no longer the same people, unrelated in their minds to their former families.

Nancie Brown was one mother who never stopped looking for her son. David had joined at the beginning, and after the Jonestown tragedy in 1978, she got worried and started trying to track him down. She checked at DMVs and Salvation Army offices across the country, ran his Social Security number with police — nothing. Eventually she found a sociologist named Robert Balch who had spent time inside the group early on and had written some academic articles about his experience. Several other parents had made the same discovery, and Balch had their numbers. Nancie assembled names and addresses, put together a newsletter, and pieced together an information network. She became a detective, one step behind her son as he traveled with the group through dozens of places over nearly two decades. DO and TI saw her as an agent of “Luciferian forces,” also biblically predicted, and her efforts drove them deeper into hiding.

Part 3: A Sci-Fi/Action/Adventure/Comedy

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{LAW_PAGE_BREAK} If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters — yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple.

{mosimage}Nancie Brown’s son David was
one of the eight followers who walked into the office of the L.A. Weekly
unannounced in 1994. TI had died of liver cancer in 1985, and DO had led the group,
with continuing astral guidance from TI, who had now told him to gather a “second
wave” of recruits as “crew” for the craft. They resurfaced for another round of
cross-country recruitment, taking out ads in USA Today and publicizing
their free public meetings with radio, TV and newspaper interviews like the one
that got started in the Weekly’s conference room.

Dave Gardetta’s article appeared in the January 21, 1994, issue, a few days after
the Northridge earthquake shook Los Angeles. To Rio, the earthquake was both literal
and metaphorical, an omen that made perfect sense when he picked up the paper
with “Remains of the Day” on the cover and the mysterious visitors on the last
page.

“I was looking for answers,” Rio recalled at his apartment. “I was gathering information.
I had read a lot about Atlantis, UFOs and government cover-ups. When I saw this
L.A. Weekly article, I thought, ‘Well, let’s see if these people are who
they say they are.’ ”

Fifty or so people showed up that Sunday at the Marina International Hotel in
Marina del Rey. During the two-hour presentation, Rio felt a shock of recognition.
I asked him to describe it. “Something just changed,” he said, after a long pause.
“I could feel it physically,” he said, again looking me square in the eye. “My
mind started to awaken, as if I was remembering things I’d always known.”

He wanted to join instantly. Rio had been married — he and his ex-wife were both
musicians — but had divorced in 1986. They had a son, and shared visitation. After
one custodial weekend, Rio, who at that time was still called by his birth name,
Richard Ford, dropped his son off at his wife’s parents’ house, along with his
guitar, art portfolio, photo albums, books and extra clothes. There was no explanation,
no warning. And then Richard Ford was gone.

When questioned about his family, Rio told me, “They’re not important to this
story.” I’d read and watched several interviews Rio did in the immediate aftermath
of the suicides, and noticed that he used the Heaven’s Gate language to refer
to himself in the third person, describing his son, for example, as “the child
of my vehicle.” When I met him, that usage had mostly abated, but I did find it
surprising when Rio told me that after the suicides, he didn’t contact his mother
for a year, even when she could see that he was alive from watching him on TV
with Diane Sawyer in 1997. He didn’t reconnect with his son for another four years
after that.

I asked Rio if I could talk to his family; he said no. The media had hounded them,
he explained, and he wants to protect them. Fair enough. But another reason Rio
didn’t want to talk about his family was his extreme sensitivity to the many (false,
in his view) Freudian analyses of his motivations that peppered stories about
him 10 years ago, which went something like: missing father + abusive, pious mother
+ unhappy marriage = fertile mind for cult indoctrination.

I’d also like to resist pop psychology as much as possible, but Rio’s own book
begins with his father disappearing when Rio was 3 years old and his “unhappy,
angry and abusive” mother constantly in and out of work, marriages and new towns.
Rio’s closest attachment was to his grandmother, and when she died in 1988, according
to Rio’s ex-wife, he was “emotionally devastated.” I had to take notice when Rio
cried while describing how his first meeting with DO at a campground in Arizona
was “like finally meeting my father.” His voice broke at the very thought of it,
years later. This was the first of many tearful moments when Rio talked about
his “new family.”

He changed the subject to his book. “That’s what we need to get out there,” he
said. “We need to talk about what happens after the Second Coming.”

Rio’s a very nice guy. He digs healthful food, does odd jobs in art and design,
and doesn’t like Bush, making him not that different from anyone else in West
L.A. — except for his celestial predestination to reveal secret knowledge to the
world. When he finds out I don’t believe that the Grays — the big-headed, almond-eyed
aliens — are abducting humans for genetic sampling to save their species, he looks
surprised, as if such knowledge is axiomatic, and says, “Well, you’ll get there
eventually.”

Among the suggested interview topics in Rio’s cover letter to the L.A. Weekly
are “Truth and Clarification.” One of the fundamental truths Rio hopes to get
across, I learned, is that the Heaven’s Gate crew did not actually commit suicide,
a semantic argument made by redefining suicide from “disengaging from the body
or vehicle” to failing to learn the teachings of DO (in which case one must note
that nearly everyone on the planet besides Rio is suicidal). And clarification
is difficult to come by when the subjects for clarification are (1) the Earth
as a heavenly garden for “growing souls”; (2) the special “pocket” in the body
in which aliens deposit said souls; (3) how our galaxy is designed in a platterlike
shape for ease of soul harvesting; and (4) the 2,000-year spirit-reincarnation
cycle in which Moses, Jesus, and DO and TI came as extraterrestrial garden tenders
— none of which, according to Rio, is religion or theology, but rather a series
of teachings meant as a tool for receiving what DO called Next Level Mind.

This was a very frustrating conversation. I wanted to do justice to Rio’s ideas,
because he really means them. It was difficult, though, when I realized he was
literally suggesting that alien craft insert intangible essences in select human
beings. So I asked a lot of detailed questions, which was equally frustrating
for Rio, since many of them amounted to a challenge. “I don’t expect you to believe
me,” Rio said at one point. “I wouldn’t believe me. But this works.”

“What works?”

“This system for growing a soul that DO brought back to Earth.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know. I can feel it. It’s something I experienced.”

It’s hard to argue with fundamental subjectivity. I’m guessing that Rio has not
followed much of the 20th-century debate about epistemology, since the proof for
Rio — the bedrock upon which rests the undeniable, immutable, universal truth
of DO’s teachings — is a dream he had regularly as a kid. He would find himself
in a vast, dark room, as big as an oil tanker, isolated and alone. He could never
feel the walls. When he joined the discipline of Heaven’s Gate, the dreams returned,
but the room started shrinking. Eventually, he felt the walls and could see out.
“I asked DO about it,” Rio recounted, his voice again straining with emotion.
“And he said, ‘Your soul is evolving.’ ”

When I asked Rio why he’s come out of the woodwork only now, he seemed slightly
annoyed. “Haven’t you read my book yet?” he asked. I admitted I hadn’t gotten
all the way through. “I talk about all that in there.” After I ask several more
questions he felt he’d already answered in his manuscript, we agreed to break
until I’d read the whole thing.

And that’s when he showed me his screenplay.

“This is something we started writing in the group,” he said. “We’d shown it to
some producers, who gave us notes, and did a few revisions. I just recently totally
reworked it. Got it down to a tight 96 pages. Maybe you should read this too.”
The title was SIRUS FROM SIRIUS, a SCI/FI-ACTION-ADVENTURE-COMEDY. I flipped the
script open at random and saw:

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{LAW_PAGE_BREAK} There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for
the kingdom of heaven’s sake — Happy they!

{mosimage}Beyond Human Mind is
a fairly plodding autobiographical narrative interspersed with bullet-point guides
to DO’s teachings. It is nevertheless fascinating as a window into a very strange
realm. Over several days, I took in Rio’s book, the screenplay, DO’s and the students’
Exit Videos, many hours of DO’s teachings, including a tape called “Last Chance
to Leave Earth Before It’s Recycled,” the last three of which I discovered at
the Los Angeles Public Library. The videos — a 12-tape lesson plan, along with
the entire collection of the Heaven’s Gate suicide videography — which Rio believes
were censored by the media, can in fact be checked out from the social-science
stacks downtown. When I asked the reference librarian how these materials got
on the shelves, he looked them up in the computer and said, “Someone from the
public ordered them. You would be surprised the requests we get.” Later, I walked
by another librarian as he got a call from someone looking for reference materials
on comparative alien digestive tracts. “We don’t have information like that,”
he explained with admirable composure. “No one on Earth does.”

The Exit Videos are so important to Rio that he includes full transcripts in his
book. The videos are short; each of the 38 statements (one member chose to say
nothing) is less than five minutes long. I watched them all. Instantly noticeable
was how similar everyone looks. In preparation for their future lives as immortal,
androgynous beings in space, the men and women of Heaven’s Gate were all required
to wear matching bowl cuts and baggy, unflattering jump suits.

Equally striking is their uniform serenity. Seated outside, with San Diego’s pleasant
spring dawning in the background, every single member calmly explained their enthusiasm
for the wondrous existence awaiting them: “I’ve been looking forward to this for
so long”; “I couldn’t have made a better choice”; “Thirty-nine to beam up!” Thomas
Nichols, who had been a member since 1976 (and was the brother of Nichelle Nichols,
who played Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek), said: “I’m the happiest person
in the world.”

There is none of the malevolence seen in the martyrdom videos of suicide bombers;
these people were not political pawns and would never have hurt anyone. The only
crime they ever committed was against themselves, and that’s not how they saw
it. To a person, they seem remarkably ordinary. Everyone who ever dealt with them
said they were smart, capable and caring. Days before dying, they do not seem
afraid, coerced or disturbed. Even DO, whose delusional rambling goes on at some
length, is not the same raving sociopath one sees in Jim Jones. And, in general,
Heaven’s Gate was not Jonestown, where armed guards enforced suicide drills. Anyone
could leave Heaven’s Gate at any time, and many did. But it is a testament to
the reach of DO’s psychological grip that those who left the group were often
conflicted, not doubting DO but feeling they had somehow failed to learn “The
Process.”

That was the system for “becoming nonhuman” in order to “learn the ways of space”
and nurture Next Level Mind. Rio’s book describes how the Process was conceived
as a physical transformation that made one eligible to leave Earth. All psychological
ties that bind you to this planet must be cut. In light of this, the “away” in
the AWAY TEAM patch they wore on their Exit uniforms referred not to Orion but
to Earth, and they were simply returning home.

More than anything else, sex held back the Process. It was prohibited, along with
anything having the potential for arousal. That included jeans, jewelry, dresses,
Little House on the Prairie. No hugging was tolerated: It tricked the vehicle
into unwelcome sensuality. Members would provide updates on their progress by
writing notes to DO, which were called CSRs, or Control Status Reports. I saw
one of Rio’s CSRs, in which he said he was successfully quieting the sensual yearnings
of his vehicle, to which DO had responded in red ink, “You make me very happy.
Yous a good kiddlie.”

Many people remember from the news reports in 1997 that several male members of
Heaven’s Gate were surgically castrated. These unfortunates, according to Rio’s
book, “had trouble controlling the vehicle’s sensuality and chose neutering as
a solution.” Afterward, they were “extremely happy and even more silly.” Contrary
to news reports, the book claims it was not DO who suggested castration, but some
of the students, although DO later tried it himself to make sure it fit The Process.
(Rio himself was not castrated.)

The Heaven’s Gate regimen extended beyond sexuality. A thick Procedures Book,
spiral-bound and handwritten, regulated every facet of life. Bathing lasted six
minutes and used 1 gallon of water. The Procedures Book designated what television
shows could be watched, what books could be read and where the students could
sit, and laid out detailed schedules with precise times, such as vitamin intake
at 7:22 p.m. It specified the circumference of pancakes. DO constantly consulted
TI, who micromanaged the group’s daily existence from the Next Level, even providing
guidance for planning meals. And the recipes for those meals were exactly measured.
When members prepared coffee, not to drink, but for their enemas, it too was precisely
rationed.

What wasn’t prescribed in the Procedures Book was recorded in the Ledger. There,
every transaction made by the group was meticulously documented with receipts.
A bus trip to Oregon showed the fare, a stop at Burger King, the tip for the driver
and a $2 gift to a homeless man. Before the Exit, the group made a last-hurrah
trip to Las Vegas, where they stayed at Treasure Island, saw Cirque du Soleil’s
Mystere ($2,661), won on the slots ($58.91), took some rides on the Big
Shot and the High Roller ($123), and found some change ($2.28). On Friday, March
21, the night before Hale-Bopp’s closest approach, the Ledger showed that the
group all went to the Marie Callender’s in Carlsbad for a final meal, ordering
39 chicken potpies, 39 salads and 39 pieces of cheesecake.

Rio and the others submitted to this intense routine to prepare for the accuracy
required of a crew on a spacecraft. That’s how they thought of their house, or
“craft.” There were special names for everything, in fact, an entirely new vocabulary
created by DO and reproduced in part in Rio’s book:

Last time I heard dessert called “snack” was in Montessori preschool, but Beyond
Human Mind explains that this kind of terminology was vital to achieving nonhuman
consciousness. As were the members’ assumed names. Rio DiAngelo — “river of angels”
— was actually the out-of-craft alias for his Next Level self, which was called
NEODY. Everyone had names like this: OLLODY, JWNODY, RKKODY — multi-letter designations
followed by -ODY, a suffix shorthand for DOTI that forever imprinted the spiritual
leaders’ presence onto their followers’ identities.

Weird, yes, but how much weirder than other things we’ve come to accept? Like,
say, partaking in the body and blood of Christ every Sunday? We all know that
Jesus, one of many schismatic religious peddlers in biblical Judea, was scorned
for his beliefs. When dealing with extreme behavior like collective suicide, it’s
a natural response to look for an easy explanation, such as “These people are
nut jobs.” Some cult watchers point out that DO was so megalomaniacal that he
essentially used his followers to clone himself, to such an extent that even in
death they had no individual identity. An interesting point, but one should also
acknowledge the psychological bargain the group offered in exchange. I talked
to one former member who counts his 13 years with DO as a tragic mistake but still
pointed out that there was something comforting about being inside. “We didn’t
have to worry about family, taxes, bills,” he said. “We were protected. We didn’t
like the rules of the world, so we created our own. It was a utopia.” DO had always
likened it to a cocoon. They were all caterpillars, and they needed the safe haven
of the chrysalis to become butterflies. In a way, this is a very beautiful image.

That they killed themselves for it seems bizarre only because it happened in San
Diego, with five Jamba Juices and a Green Burrito nearby. At the turn of the previous
millennium, Christian Europe was full of apocalyptic sects prepared for blood.
And many medieval Christian monks castrated themselves for the sake of purity.
In Diane Sawyer’s interview, she is shocked by how many children DO’s followers
left behind, but our monotheistic religious tradition began when Abraham prepared
to kill his own son. When you get down to it, just how much of human history is
filled with willing martyrs for heaven or some other abstract cause? Two hundred
thousand Englishmen were slaughtered for queen and country at the Somme. Does
that make any more sense than what happened in Rancho Santa Fe?

The answer may be that this is the wrong question, because none of it makes sense.
Dying for the patrie is just as arbitrary as dying for duty or glory or
Marshall Herff Applewhite.

Part 5: X-Files Meets Touched by an Angel