Escaping to Other Worlds

They believed an alien spaceship was coming to pick them up. On the face of it, to most Americans that places the Heaven’s Gate adherents safely on the lunatic fringe.

And yet, perhaps more than many would like to admit, they were also part of an increasingly popular culture in which the search for meaning has turned to a fuzzy fusion of science and science fiction.

As the millennium approaches, more ordinary Americans are reaching for what television’s “The X-Files” calls “extreme possibilities” to explain a world spinning out of control.

The show’s mantra: “I Want to Believe,” seems to serve as a rallying cry for conspiracy theorists, cultists and the average TV viewer alike.

The Heaven’s Gate members “were influenced by the same things that are influencing millions of others,” said Stephen O’Leary, a USC professor and author of “Arguing the Apocalypse.” “Millions of people believe in aliens. They don’t all kill themselves but the belief is deep rooted and it’s not only a fringe phenomenon. It is characteristic of this millennial time.”

The popularity of sci-fi television shows, the boom in “millennial” Internet sites and the surge of interest in the search for extraterrestrials reflect the growing appeal of far-out explanations for the mysteries of life. It’s a trend driven by some of the most fundamental forces of modern society.

Science marches forward at a once-unimaginable pace, undercutting traditional religious beliefs. Some of its most impassioned followers seek transcendence through technology such as artificial intelligence. And yet for many people, the technologies created to tame and control the world instead seem to make it inscrutable and unmanageable.

Collectively we know more than ever before, and yet distrust of authority and the official versions of the truth only seem to grow. The Internet computer network embodies many of these paradoxes: it is simultaneously a product of technological power, and a medium that enables anyone to challenge established sources of that power.

For a growing number of Americans, cultural critics say, believing in aliens is more satisfying than believing in traditional gods. Whether conceived as friend or foe, aliens’ strength derives largely from their technological superiority, fulfilling a need for a belief system that doesn’t wholly contradict the dogmas of scientific rationality.

Or maybe they really exist.

It is certainly not hard to find people--well-educated, independent-minded people--who believe that we have been visited by UFOs. Nearly half of Americans believe that the government is hiding proof of UFOs from the public, according to a recent poll by Newsweek magazine.

Larry Lemke, a NASA engineer, investigates UFO sightings in his spare time. A few years back he and a small team took pictures and videotape of unidentified light sources near Clearlake in Northern California.

“They were fairly large, about a hundred feet in diameter, and emitting a lot of light, more than a megawatt,” he said.

Accustomed to being ridiculed by many of his colleagues, Lemke says he has noticed a marked change in recent years, as the media and the public begin to take his ideas more seriously.

Michael Connolly, creator of the Internet site “Millennium Matters”--featuring articles such as “Mass Landings and the Arrival of the Photon Belt”--said he’s seen UFOs. He said there may well have been a spaceship traveling in the wake of Comet Hale-Bopp, as the Heaven’s Gate members believed--although he disagreed with the group’s decision to commit suicide.

“A lot of their ideas are ideas that I’ve explored,” said Connolly, who works as a technical consultant at a health care facility in Seattle. “But they cut out before class was out.”

UFOs in Popular Culture

Among those who want to believe are some of America’s most successful technology entrepreneurs. Dropped from NASA’s budget in 1993, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., (SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is now privately funded by Hewlett-Packard co-founder William Hewlett, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, among others.

“This is the first generation that actually has the ability to establish the existence of extraterrestrials,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at SETI. “The public is aware of that. And it’s reinforced by science fiction.”

Still, Shostak is none-too-enthusiastic about the rise of UFOs in popular culture.

“In one sense, it’s positive in that it stimulates interest in what we’re doing, but the sort of uncritical view of science that people have in this country, taken from ‘Star Trek,’ or wherever, is a problem that will have consequences in a society where science is very important,” Shostak said. “We believe in extraterrestrials, but we don’t believe they’re buzzing the countryside.”

Perhaps even more than “Star Trek,” which counted members of Heaven’s Gate among its hard-core fans, it is “The X-Files”--a show in which FBI agents investigate paranormal phenomena--that reflects and reinforces populist beliefs about aliens and government conspiracies. As one of the show’s slogans says, “The truth is out there”--but it’s maddeningly elusive, at least under the laws of the physical world.

At the head of a pack of other sci-fi shows that now includes “Babylon 5,” “Dark Skies,” and “Millennium,” “The X-Files” attracts 18 million viewers each week. Its tenaciously devoted fan base congregates largely on the Internet, the computer network having helped it to achieve its popularity.

“It’s exactly the kind of program for a very intense and very creative fan culture to develop around,” said John Fiske, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of “Television Culture.” “What it’s saying is that the imagination and knowledge of people like you, the fans, is much more powerful, can get at a much more resonant truth than official forms of knowledge.”

The reaction on the main “X-Files” e-mail list to the Heaven’s Gate suicides was perhaps predictable: “These people were an X-File waiting to happen,” wrote one fan, referring to the name the show uses for investigations of paranormal phenomena. Others were quick to note that “The X-Files” had already had an episode about a cult that commits mass suicide.

Julie Jekel, 20, an “X-Files” fan and college student from La Mesa, Calif. said she saw parallels between the show’s portrayal of a search for the truth and the cultists’ rhetoric.

“People just want to believe in something,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in things like UFOs. And I’ve been pretty cynical about the government for a while now.”

For Jekel, who is starting an Internet prayer group for Christian “X-File” followers, less traditional beliefs do not interfere with her belief in God.

Indeed, the search for otherworldly truths is for many closely bound with earthly technological development. For if the aliens don’t come, the millennialist dream of bodily transcendence may best be achieved by joining some kind of cybernetic “unamind,” or downloading the human brain onto a chip.

For many, the Internet has a unique ability to lift people out of what Heaven’s Gate members called their “human containers.” Longtime Internet activist John Perry Barlow, in his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, called it the new “home of the mind,” with the implied ability to shed the flesh.

The Internet’s electronic idealists become poetic about forming virtual communities not subject to mundane things like laws and borders and face-to-face conversations.

“It’s a millennialist theology,” said Phil Agre, a professor of communication at UC San Diego. “Everything will be reconstructed in the image of the order of digital data. Space and the body will be rendered irrelevant, all the powers of the earth will be decimated.”

Downloading the Brain

Scientists like Hans Moravec, head of the mobile robotics laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University and author of “Mind Children: the Future of Robot and Human Intelligence” takes the techno-evolutionary vision even further. He believes that it will soon be possible to download the information stored in the human brain and transfer it to a computer.

Or better yet, humans may get “beyond human” via machine evolution, which he says will take place at a mind-blowing rate within a few decades.

“We will be their past,” Moravec said of these future machines. “When they casually think about us, we’ll be re-created in their minds, and we’ll essentially exist again. So that’s a kind of transcendent existence, where we’re resurrected in the minds of our super intelligent descendants, and it doesn’t require us to be changed.”

Sounds like an “X-File” waiting to happen. But others say the view of technology as salvation is a religion in itself and can be as dangerous to mortal life as other kinds of millennial religious beliefs.

“There is a disdain for mortal needs in the pursuit of this technological transcendence that is really quite menacing,” said David Noble, a historian of science and technology at York University in Toronto.

It certainly had a menacing effect for Heaven’s Gate, whose literature was littered with science fiction references.

“It is really quite interesting to see how the context of fiction can often open the mind to advanced possibilities which are, in reality, quite close to fact,” the group said in a Web site mission statement laced with imagery from “Star Trek.”

“To help you understand who we are, we have taken the liberty to express a brief synopsis in the vernacular of a popular ‘science fiction’ entertainment series. Most readers in the late 20th century will certainly recognize the intended parallels.”