The Call of the Weird (20 page)

Posted on the Heaven’s Gate website was a list of offenses: “Trusting my own judgment—or using my own mind,” “Staying in my own head, having private thoughts,” “Having likes or dislikes.”

In 1985, Ti died of liver cancer. She’d been expecting to be picked up by a spaceship, physically, and taken to Heaven. When that didn’t happen Do adapted the theology. Now, instead of needing an actual spaceship to land, their souls could migrate over a distance. Thus the groundwork for their suicidal exit eleven years later was laid.

One academic article gave this account of their final years: “The group’s efforts to get its message out were hitting a dead end. Among the few who clicked on to the Heaven’s Gate website, the main response was ridicule . . . Hardly anyone joined . . . A dropout claimed that members ‘resented the fact that the world wrote them off as another kooky cult.’” I thought guiltily of my own contact with the group and their faith in my good intentions. In late 1996, speculation appeared on the Internet that there was a spaceship in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp. The comet would
be closest to Earth on the first day of spring 1997. Do had predicted UFO landings many times in the group’s twenty-one-year history, but this time there would be no landing. They were going out to meet the craft a hundred million miles from Earth.

Having made money designing websites, the group splurged in its last few months on outings to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and Sea World and a UFO conference in Laughlin, Nevada. They kept itemized ledgers of all their expenditures. They traveled to Las Vegas, saw Cirque du Soleil ($2,661), gambled (winning $58.91), and ascended the Stratosphere, the second-tallest structure west of the Mississippi. Among their last acts, three days before the suicides began, was a group outing to see the Mike Leigh film
Secrets and Lies.

One night in May 2004, I climbed the Stratosphere. 1,149 feet high, it looks, from the outside, a little like a flying saucer on stilts, ungainly but beautiful. The observation deck has raked windows so you can look down as well as out, down onto the lights of Las Vegas and out onto the ring of dark mountains that holds the city in its arms. It feels the way being lifted slowly into space on a flying saucer might feel. Outside Las Vegas the landscape is lifeless. The city is like a moonbase; it is easy to imagine there is no other life on earth.

At my motel, I watched the videotape in which the Heaven’s Gate members deliver their “exit statements.” On camera, they are shy and gentle, all of them aware of how they are likely to be perceived— as brainwashed dupes, weirdos, cultists—and doing what they can to forestall that impression.

They sit outside, two women with a sunny garden stretching out behind them. “I’m so happy.” “We’re looking forward to being in our next-level bodies.” Modest, humble, nervous, with their hands
folded, in baggy shirts with their top buttons all done up. “This vehicle isn’t much of a communicator and especially it’s not comfortable in front of a camera.” One starts crying.

A middle-aged black man, Thomas Nichols, the brother of Nichelle Nichols who played Lieutenant Uhura in
Star Trek,
says: “I’m the happiest person in the world.” One younger member ends her statement by slapping her chest in the style of Captain Picard in
Star Trek
and saying: “Thirty-nine to beam up!” Laughter in the background.

Two women, sitting erect, in their thirties and fifties respectively, say: “Hideousness has become the norm.”

A young guy wearing glasses says: “When we leave, I know the media will treat this as a sort of weird bizarre cult, whatever you want to call it. But look deeper . . . look for what we’ve taught people and the message we’ve left behind. We know that it’s difficult to understand but the next level requires a commitment, a kind of final ingredient of leaving the body and giving it up until you can actually graduate.”

A skinny woman with sticking-out ears says: “I know y’all can get the impression that there’s some kind of charismatic people that may have had a strong influence on a lot of weak-minded people. Well, there are a lot of people that we’ve worked with over the years that might be able to push through that impression.” She refers to Do as Jesus; starts weeping; talks about “demons.” Demons meaning—unwanted desires? Sexual urges? The impulse to quit the cult and reunite with her friends and family in the outside world?

I’m struck watching it by how many of them there are. I start to think this must be the last, then another comes on, then two more . . .

A man, fiftyish, short hair: “We know that the spin doctors, the people that make a profession of debunking everybody, putting
down everybody, are going to attack what we’re doing, just like they attacked the Solar Temple, Waco, what have you. They’ll say these people are crazy. They were mesmerized, whatever. We know it isn’t true, but how can you know that?” Then a man in his forties: “We know the media will do a hatchet job on us.”

In his video, Do looks a kindly man. He speaks slowly. He has the air of the music teacher he once was. I imagine myself among them, a fellow member of the cult. It would be very peaceful and gentle, and probably quite boring. Several newspaper accounts commented how tidy the house was, how neatly they all died.

It is hard as a nonbeliever to know what value to attach to the suicides. What does it mean? Their awareness of how they are perceived makes it difficult to view them as brainwashed. Only when they speak about the hatefulness of the world am I brought up short. Only then do they seem disconnected. I find a lot to feel sad about in their deaths, and also a little to admire. Whatever else you say about the suicides, they were done out of a kind of love. They wanted to do it. Or thought they wanted to. If there’s a difference . . .

I’d asked Rio when I met him if he knew what became of Oscody. “He’s in Phoenix,” he said. “So are Mark and Sarah.” But Rio was wrong. Oscody had “exited” back in July of 2001, without fanfare, unknown to the world at large, bringing the Heaven’s Gate suicides to a grand total of forty-two. I found this out when I spoke to Mark on the phone.

“It’s kind of difficult, an awkward thing to talk to people about,” Mark said. “Rio didn’t know about it, because we hadn’t really talked much in the last year or so.”

I met up with Mark and Sarah in the suburbs of Phoenix at a New Orleans theme restaurant called Lafitte’s, inside an Embassy Suites
hotel. We were the only customers. Instead of rings, the napkins were bound with strings of shiny beads of the kind they wear in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Dixieland jazz played incongruously.

Sarah had long dark hair, earrings, and a pendant; she looked vaguely Persian. Mark was red-haired, geeky, in black trousers and gray polo shirt. They were intelligent and friendly. Sarah was, once again, a little wary.

I bought them lunch, and they seemed pleased to have a chance to relive their days in the community, as the waiter eavesdropped on our conversation. They were in the group for twelve years, from 1975 to 1987. Like Rio, they regarded their time in Heaven’s Gate as the greatest of their lives. “If you could find an apostle who would say what it was like being in the presence of Jesus,” Sarah said, “it was just fabulous.”

“It was hard,” Mark said. “But there’s nothing in the human experience that matches it. Nothing.” It was like “unconditional love” between all the members, Mark said.

“So why did you leave?” I asked.

“Good question,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, good question,” Mark said.

“Still wrestle with that today,” Sarah said.

The answer, I suspected, was because they loved each other. Their love trumped the love of the group. Now, in addition to their workaday jobs, they run the Heaven’s Gate website and distribute videos and books to anyone who’s curious. Mark answers emails. Once a week, he’ll get an inquiry about whether it’s too late to join the rest of the class in space by committing suicide. “We tell them! We say the class is over . . . The best thing to be is good for the rest of your life and always strive to be closer to God.”

I was impressed with how thoughtful and considerate Mark and Sarah were. Mark spoke eloquently about how hard it was to
weather the onslaught of media coverage: “That very rough oneto- two-week period when the public was saying ‘Please! Explain this to us! Make them less so that we can go on with our lives!’ You know? ‘Ridicule them! Do something with them!’”

Later, reading over a transcript of my conversation with them, I was struck by a passage where Mark talked about Oscody’s “exit” and how it was to break the news to Rio:

M: Rio and I for some reason hadn’t talked for a long time and it never came up, and he went kind of like real sad: “Really?” I said, “I thought I told you.” . . . And he understood the context. He understood what it meant.

L: Why was he sad?

M: No, he wasn’t sad.

L: Oh, I thought you just said he was sad.

M: No, he wasn’t sad.

L: What did you say?

M: He was like surprised. Like: [brightly] “Really? I didn’t know that.” And so I explained the context and the circumstances. And he said, it was a very noble thing [voice breaking].

L
ooking
around the crowd that was gathering outside the conference room at the Golden Nugget hotel casino, it was hard to believe they were all there to see Marshall Sylver.

He’d endured a high-profile trial for fraud, numerous lawsuits, a scalding magazine exposé—enough disgrace, you would think, to derail the career of a supposed success coach. But still they came: young, old, all races, maybe two hundred or more, hoping to learn the secrets of Passion, Profit, and Power, at the knee of the master.

I’d made a documentary about him five years earlier. Now I was back, intending to catch him unawares at his seminar, the guest of
one Gene Puffer. As a repeat student, in theory Gene could get himself and a friend in for free. It had crossed my mind to pay for the seminar, but Dena, the friendly woman on the phone at Sylver HQ, had told me it cost $1,495.

Right now, Gene was downstairs getting a coffee. He said he might get thrown out if he were spotted by anyone on Marshall’s staff. Gene had been among several ex-Sylverites who had testified against Marshall and there was bad blood. Dena had asked me to confirm his name when I’d called, to make sure he qualified as a “reattend.” “I’ll call back,” I said. There was a chance that if his name were entered into Dena’s computer, sirens would sound and flashing red lights would go off throughout the building.

The idea of seeing Marshall again had been making me anxious for a month, even infiltrating my subconscious. A few weeks earlier, having arrived back in Vegas, and realizing a surprise visit to his seminar was my only hope of contact, I’d had a dream in which he physically threw me out of his class, dragging me along by the arm as I fired questions. He looked different in my imagination. Instead of slicked-back hair and suit, he had a blazer-cut leather jacket and his hair was fashionably tousled.

I was surprised by the strength of my animus against Marshall, but the truth is I’d never really warmed to him. In 2000, I’d attended a couple of his events, and even then I’d been troubled by the high-pressure sales practices. In the years since, the Millionaire Mentorship Program had attracted so many complaints that the State of Nevada ended up prosecuting him for fraud. Among the details that came out: The so-called “elite course” available only to “qualified pre-interviewed students” had signed up a mentally handicapped man, offered money-back guarantees that it refused to honor under any circumstances, and employed a near-destitute “millionaire mentor” who moved in with one of his “students,” then made off with his car and $10,000.

Two months before the seminar, in July, I’d spent several days at the county clerk’s office in downtown Las Vegas, reading the transcripts of case C19/451, the
State of Nevada v. M. Sylwestrzak
. Among the details were the names of two witnesses who testified against Marshall: Art Eagle and Gene Puffer. Both were graduates of the Millionaire Mentorship Program, a ten-week get-rich-quick scheme. Three and a half days learning “wealth creation,” followed by ten weeks of daily calls from one of Marshall’s elite cadre of “millionaire mentors.” If you didn’t double your money, you got a full refund. It sounded too good to be true, and it was.

I met up with Gene and Art at a gourmet coffee chain. Gene was tall, with a moustache, and a chunky technical watch. An outof- work airline pilot, he was doing substitute teaching to pay the bills. Art was a struggling entrepreneur, paunchy, with thinning hair. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and tie and a dainty, thin watch. He was the picture of a downtrodden salesman. He told me his story.

He’d been an actual millionaire at one time, he said, with $5,000,000 in his bank account. He was vague about where the money had come from. For a while, he’d had it in a bank account in Grenada, where he was getting insane rates of return—40, 50 percent. He convinced his mother and his sister to put their money in the same bank. But there were problems with the withdrawals. Then the head of the bank fled to Uganda. Art and his family lost everything.

He heard Marshall’s commercial on Christian radio. Learn the skills necessary to become a millionaire. It mentioned a “mixer,” a social event where you could learn more, taking place at Marshall’s “mansion.” Art was intrigued.

The mansion turned out be a conference room at a hotel, but Art liked what he heard. His only concern was that he might not
have what it took to make it in the Program. “I need to believe that I can help you,” Marshall said in his leaflet. Art was a slow reader and writer since suffering a brain injury as a teenager.

He approached Marshall. “I told him a little about my personal situation. I have a couple of hindrances that sometimes put me behind other people a little bit. He said don’t worry about it, you’re going to do fine, and that’s why we have this guarantee.” Reassured, he signed up. He put the course on his credit card. A total of $6,600.

The classes in “wealth creation” came first. They role-played, pretending to speak and act like millionaires. They were told to pick an “income vehicle.” They could sign up under Marshall as part of a “network marketing company”—something like a pyramid scheme—or they could come up with their own idea. Art was so impressed he decided he wanted to work for Marshall himself.

Marshall told Art he’d need to sign up for another course. Art plunked down another $5,000 for a place at “Mentorship University.” Marshall told Art he’d need to see a résumé, too. Art took him at his word. If he wanted a résumé, he’d get one, but not any old résumé. He’d get the
à la recherche du temps perdu
of résumés, an obsessive, painstaking work of art, a love letter of sorts. He began spending up to six hours a day on his computer polishing it, adding subsections, logos, fonts. When finished, it ran to 133 pages, complete with a table of contents, an introduction, and a conclusion. Meanwhile, he was volunteering his time to Marshall’s company, doing odd jobs like helping to clear away chairs after seminars.

In the time left over, Art did his assignments for the Millionaire Mentorship Program. But he was struggling with some of the definitions in his workbook for the Program. He kept a journal of his progress which, in its confused good faith, reads like satire: “Week 4: VISION TRAINING. Subjects such as ‘Focus on Focus’ and ‘Potentializing’ are mentioned in the Week 4 section, but for the most
part I don’t know what they exactly mean . . . I tried to figure out what ‘Future Pacing’ was and do some Vision Training for that.”

Art needed help from his “millionaire mentor,” Mark Connolly. Mark had claimed to be a millionaire. But he was elusive. He was late with his calls. “I found out later it was because he had no phone and no car,” Art said. Halfway through his mentorship, having invested about $12,000 in Marshall’s seminars, Art became desperate for money. He was still holding out for a job with Marshall. Mark Connolly was fired as a mentor. A man called Michael Yee took over. “And that’s when Michael Yee told me, ‘No, you’re not going to work with Marshall or anything.’” Art discovered that, according to the small print of a personal release for an outwardbound self-esteem-building event for the Mentorship University, he’d also waived any guarantee of being hired.

“Michael Yee’s advice was essentially, Well, go get a minimumwage job! Just get some work! And I thought, I don’t need to pay $6,000 for someone to tell me to get a minimum-wage job.” So Art pursued his dream of running his own business seminars, called

“Biz-Masters.”

Toward the end of the Program, Art got a call from Mark Connolly. “He said, ‘We’re working on these ideas together, Art, do you mind if I come over and stay at your place, and that’ll give us some close proximity while we work?’ So he moved in with me and began sleeping on the floor. I didn’t know at that time that he didn’t have a vehicle, and I had a Mercedes-Benz that I was letting him use.

“Even though he was only going to stay a couple of weeks, he ended up staying a couple of months. I was carrying his food and rent and everything, so it was draining me pretty heavily. I didn’t realize he’d worked as a male prostitute, and one of his old tricks, a lady, had come into town and wanted to meet up, and he said, ‘Can I borrow your car?’ I thought it was a regular date, and he
just never came back.” In addition to the car, Mark made off with $10,000 Art had raised on his credit card.

“And this was supposed to be his mentor!” Gene said.

Shortly after completing the Millionaire Mentorship Program, Art lost his apartment and had his other car (the one that hadn’t been stolen by his former mentor) repossessed. His credit by now was ruined, too. Until he made some of his money back, he said he felt he couldn’t go back to Texas and see his family. “I’d like to be at least somewhere on the rebound.”

He’d brought his 133-page résumé in a white ring binder. It had a logo on the front and it said: “You need The Eagle now!” He was still out of work.

My own experience of Marshall began in 1995. I was up late channel-surfing, in Hawaii for my dad’s wedding. “If you’re watching this infomercial you’re probably not where you want to be,” Marshall said.There was something not quite human about his delivery. Every gesture and inflection seemed practiced. He explained that the mind is like a tape recorder, and that by using the power of hypnosis you can change your mental cassette, become a new person. It wasn’t so implausible when Marshall himself seemed half machine. He was selling a set of tapes to help people take control of their lives. His technique was called “subconscious reprogramming.”

In 2000, curious about this reprogrammer of human beings, I traveled to Las Vegas to make a documentary. I arrived at an auditorium where he was due to give a presentation. There was no sign of Marshall, so I spoke to one of his employees as he helped set up. The employee was Michael Yee, the young man who would later become Art’s mentor.

As we talked, I saw Marshall walk past. He strode purposefully. His hair was combed back, and he was powerfully built. I expected
him to come up and say hello; he knew who we were; we were there at his invitation. But he kept walking.

I asked Michael to speak to Marshall backstage and see if I could introduce myself. Michael went off still wearing his microphone, and without meaning to, my sound recordist picked up the conversation through his headphones.

“The BBC was wondering if they could have a minute.”

“No,” Marshall said. “And do me a favor. It’s very bad to step in on another guy’s gig. I heard you talking about your other businesses. ‘I work for Marshall. That’s what I do.’ Because you just made us both look like idiots. You look like you’re trying to worm in on my territory.”

Michael reemerged looking subdued. “Unfortunately, Marshall is in his trance session,” he said.

For the presentation, Marshall came out on stage wearing a microphone headset. “Stand up! Make yourself feel good! If you want more money, stand up, say ‘Oh yeah!’ If you’re still seated, you’re not going to get it! I got a question for ya! Who wants to be a millionaire? What if I told you exactly how to become a millionaire? How many of you would be willing to do it? Okay, I got ninetyfive percent of you are liars . . .

“ninetyfive percent of the population is led around by their noses by the other five percent. ninetyfive percent of the money on this planet is controlled by five percent. Half of all the money on the planet is controlled by one percent of the population. Pretty scary, huh?”

As weird and controlling as he appeared behind the scenes, Marshall was masterful in front of an audience. He showed video clips of his beautiful mansion and his appearances on David Letterman. All this success could be ours, if we only did what Marshall told us to. The hallmark of the Sylver style was a mildly contradictory message: You need to do this to change your life, but you probably
won’t do it because you lack faith. He was both gung-ho and discouraging. The paradoxical nature of this combination was surprisingly compelling. We were like kittens being teased with string. It goes without saying that not everyone can be part of the 5 percent; someone has to be in the 95 percent. In fact, 95 percent of the people do. But there we all were secretly thinking: I’m a 5 percenter! Not those others, but me! It was in exaggerated form the regnant myth of the American Dream.

“How many of you would like to program your mind to automatically go to the gym? Put your hands up. How many of you believe that if someone else believes in you it’s almost easier to believe in yourself?”

Marshall brought a woman on stage. He hypnotized her into thinking she was “as rigid as a steel bar”; laid her, face up, between two struts; then stood on her like a plank. If he could hypnotize someone into being a plank, the thinking went, then why shouldn’t he be able to hypnotize me into stopping smoking, being “permanently slender,” acquiring the habits of a multimillionaire? “How many of you would be willing to trust me to see if together we can’t make your life better and get rid of that bondage that’s been holding you back?”

The atmosphere was like a church revival, but instead of rebirth through Christ, the climax of Marshall’s presentation was the moment when, for a limited time, he offered discounts on his two major courses. Geed up from the presentation and the image of a woman hypnotized into being a plank, we scurried into the lobby, where sales staff were standing by with credit-card machines. My fellow attendees looked for the most part to be struggling business people. They handed me their business cards, which had the names of network marketing companies. “Prepaid Legal” was one, a subscription legal service that cost twenty dollars a month. Another,

“Renaissance,” taught people how to incorporate themselves as companies and save money on taxes.