Thursday, March 27, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Mass-suicides by cults espousing a "spiritual" vision may come out of the darker skies of the news like an awful, unexpected comet.
The 39 suicides in San Diego by what experts are calling a "UFO cult" may be one grisly outcome of a growing subculture of gnostic and millennial cults worldwide.
Experts point to several forces driving the trend, including a sense of alienation among many of today's youths, a need for belonging, and a search for meaning. It often all coalesces around one powerful charismatic leader who espouses a "vision."
Some of these groups may increasingly "act out" their visions as 2000 approaches. "As we approach the millennium, we are going to see more and more groups whose interpretation of the apocalypse is either confrontational or suicidal," says Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates in Cambridge, Mass.
The final actions taken by the San Diego group, in fact, may be tied to comet Hale-Bopp - with cult members believing their deaths would transport them to a starship trailing the comet, which has been visible in the night skies since January.
The San Diego suicides, as with the recent Solar Temple cult and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, are another public study in the power of suggestion among humans in groups, say experts. These incidents illustrate the lengths to which people will go to sacrifice in the service of an idea they feel is religious or spiritual.
"It is a lesson again to all of us in how strongly the power of what we believe can be enforced by those around us," says Allen Stone, an expert on law and psychiatry at Harvard University, who studied the Branch Davidians. "It shows how our ability to separate truth from the beliefs of the group are often fragile."
While there are some 5,000 estimated cults in the US, many more than during the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide of 900 people, the San Diego group, whose computer Web page is known as www.Higher Source, is part of a growing New Age cultic strain tied to belief in higher beings that are living and traveling in space and making contact with humans on Earth.
Since the 1950s, an increasing number of people have come to believe that UFOs are real and that aliens are in regular contact with humans, even conducting experiments on them, or helping to guide them into more enlightened states of being, says Richard Lucas, editor of Nova Religio, a journal in Deland, Fla., on alternative religious movements.
Enormously popular new TV shows such as the "X Files," "Millennium," and "Dark Skies" - many with their own quasi-cultic following - show the power of new narratives in American culture that highlight struggles on Earth between celestial forces of light and dark, and visions of aliens or higher beings among humans.
"It's very much something drawn from a generation fed by 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars,' " says David Reed, professor of pastoral theology at the University of Toronto, who has studied the cults. "The people in these cults have had their world view altered. They have reconstructed a spiritual world that draws from popular culture."
UFO or celestial cult believers often move in and out of fringe Christian groups or radical political, technological, and militia movements. Some are tied to a strong belief in an apocalyptic "end time."
From the time members, who are often intelligent and competent, enter a cult, they achieve a special status as part of a spiritual family which has access to hidden or revealed "wisdom" that is unavailable to other members of the human race. Higher Source, for example, referred to its members as "brothers" and "sisters."
Cut off from normal daily contact outside the cult, adherents are heavily influenced by peer pressure. The organizations are often very highly structured. Members "dress the same, talk the same, act the same - do the same things," says the Rev. Robert Watts Thornberg, dean of the chapel at Boston University. In Higher Source, the men and women dressed in black, wore their hair in buzz cuts, and lived in an antiseptic mansion.
"Most Americans don't realize how many people there are out there who believe ardently in such visions," adds Dr. Lucas. "The material world is a place of corruption, and it is perfectly rationale to try and leave the body or escape the 'prison of the soul,' as they would call it, to leave the earthly family for the heavenly family."
The Solar Temple cult - whose members committed mass suicide in 1994 in Switzerland and Canada, and last week in Montreal - felt they had only a limited mission on Earth, according to Lucas.
History shows that a suicide event in a cult is often tied to some force outside the cult - one that is pushing the it ever deeper into a psychological position of defense. The cult leader may begin to lose power, or the calculations of the leader on the basis of reality begin to lessen. To maintain power and control, the leader creates new stories and psychological narratives.
The colony of the Rev. Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978 for example, had been investigated by a congressman who flew down to South America, and was then hijacked and killed on the runway by members of the Jones cult as he was leaving Guyana with about a dozen cult members.
In the case of the Branch Davidians or the Solar Temple, the leaders had even gathered members from around the world to be on hand. In the Higher Source suicide, trucks with New Mexico license plates were at the mansion.
In the 17th century, one of the most famous of these gatherings occurred when the Jewish "false Messiah" Sabbatai Sevi called thousands of European Jews to travel to Palestine to be at the Temple for the end of the world. The Jews were captured and forced to convert to Islam.
Mark Clayton in Toronto and Faye Bowers in Boston were contributors.
MASS SUICIDES
March 22, 1997: In St. Casimir, Quebec, five members of the Order of the Solar Temple die in a fiery mass suicide. Devotees believe suicide transports them to a new life on a planet called Sirius.
Dec. 23, 1995: Sixteen members of the Order of the Solar Temple are found dead in a burned house outside Grenoble, in the French Alps. Most of the bodies are arranged in a star shape on the floor.
Oct. 5, 1994: Swiss authorities find the bodies of 48 people linked to the Order of the Solar Temple in a farmhouse and three chalets, all consumed by fire. Five more bodies are found the same year in Morin Heights, north of Montreal.
April 19, 1993: Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and 80 followers - including 18 children - die by fire or gunfire six hours after the FBI starts filling their compound near Waco, Texas, with tear gas. The government calls the deaths a mass suicide in fires set by cult members after a 51-day armed standoff.
Dec. 13, 1990: In Tijuana, Mexico, 12 people die in a religious ritual, apparently after drinking poisoned liquid. It is never established if this is a suicide and authorities speculate that the deaths might have been accidental. They said some kind of industrial alcohol, perhaps rubbing alcohol, was poured into a fruit punch the participants shared in the ceremony.
Nov. 18, 1978: In Jonestown, Guyana, more than 900 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones die after he orders them to drink cyanide-laced grape punch. Jones, who is found dead with a bullet wound in the head, led the Peoples Temple in San Francisco and moved it to Guyana.
Source: Associated Press
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