Heavens Gate - Marshall Appelwhite - UFO Cults And Groups

June 15, 2024 - Heavens Gate - Marshall Appelwhite

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UFO Cults And Groups

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	The approaching millennium has fanned the flames of a curious phenomenon, UFO cults.
	A synthesis of mainstream religion and cutting-edge science fiction.
	The belief in these technological angels comes from a long history of mankind's faith in a divine plan for the universe.
	The emergence of these UFO-obsessed groups became news around the world when 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California in 1997.
	Survivors of Heaven's Gate provide true stories, which read like sci-fi novels.
	A cult leader's daughter tells of her mother's search for UFOs.
	A mother of a suicide victim describes her son's alien transformation.
	Members of another group, the Unarius Academy, just down the road from Rancho Santa Fe, drive to a secret UFO landing site where they claim 33 spaceships will arrive in the year 2001.
	How can we interpret this mania to seek contact with an alien race?
	Is it simply the human need to believe in the unexplained?
	A moment ago when I said that the big surprise could come, that spacecrafts could come in by the thousands, maybe come in shifts.
	In March 1997, Marshall Applewhite, the leader of Heaven's Gate, told his followers there was a UFO in the tail of the Hailbop Comet, which orbits the Earth once every 2,000 years.
	He convinced them that this was their signal to board the flying saucer, which would take them into eternity.
	In order to catch this ride, the 39 cult members committed suicide by a combination of phenobarbital, alcohol, and suffocation.
	For reasons that still remain unanswered, they wore Nike running shoes, sported buzz haircuts, and carried $5 of quarters in their pockets.
	This tragedy was the culmination of 22 years of behavior modification under Marshall Applewhite's spell.
	What once started out as a grassroots Christian sect evolved into a dark millennial cult with beliefs in aliens and Armageddon.
	So when they presented the picture of being able to literally leave in a craft, so to speak, which they were saying was similar to what Jesus did.
	He actually left in a physical body.
	When they overlaid that with modern-day technological information, like that cloud of light was a UFO, it all lined up for me.
	Early on, Marshall Applewhite and his co-leader Bonnie Nettles had convinced themselves and their followers that they were God's emissaries, here to lead humanity out of a corrupt world.
	Applewhite said he and Nettles had come from outer space, taking on human bodies as camouflage.
	They offered salvation to members who could overcome their attachment to human desires such as sex, money, and drugs.
	Where did this desperate and bizarre mixture of sci-fi and millennial madness begin?
	Before Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles became so-called alien agents, they were living separate lives of quiet desperation.
	Their twisted partnership began some 25 years earlier in Houston.
	Bonnie's daughter Terry Nettles recalls when she was 14 years old, she and her mother would stand in their backyard, searching the skies for UFOs, hoping they would be transported.
	It would be really neat if one would come pick us up and take us away, because neither one of us really felt like we were part of this world that we were always on the outside looking in.
	And we used to dream about that a lot.
	We wanted something different.
	At the same time, in nearby Corpus Christi, Marshall Applewhite's perfect life began to unravel.
	His 16-year marriage dissolved and his career as a college music professor ended when he was accused of a sexual relationship with a male student.
	Then Applewhite met Bonnie Lou Nettles just as her 23-year marriage was ending as well.
	They met in 72 at the theater I used to work at.
	He was teaching music and drama.
	It started out with my mom doing astrology charts for the mothers.
	And I remember her telling me, we were in the living room, that there was something about his chart, something there that was a lot different than somebody else's.
	From the start, her relationship with Marshall Applewhite was based on a spiritual connection that shunned sex.
	They turned their new age and Christian ideologies into a business and went searching for followers.
	While Nettles recited the Bible inside and out, Applewhite, also known as Herf, was the charming frontman.
	On New Year's Day, 1973, Applewhite and Nettles set out on what they called a spiritual road trip.
	Though Bonnie Nettles left her daughter and son behind with her ex-husband, she wrote to Terry regularly.
	After a year on the road, their unorthodox gospel began to take shape.
	July 26, 1973.
	Dearest Terry, we have finally come out of the wilderness to know what our mission is.
	It is definitely a big one.
	In fact, we have been sent to fulfill the scriptures the same as Jesus and others came to do.
	This has been revealed in John's Revelations.
	I am not kidding, baby.
	This is for real.
	I knew it was something very important from the very beginning.
	Along the way, they had financial difficulties, and Applewhite was arrested in Kansas for stealing a rental car.
	During his six-month jail sentence, he fine-tuned his doctrine.
	Upon Applewhite's release, he and Nettles contacted UFO researcher Hayden Hughes in hope of spreading their message.
	Perf Applewhite said, Hayden, you could do our mission a tremendous service by whatever means you have available to you by simply stating that they are two individuals here to show that death can be overcome like Jesus did 2,000 years ago.
	And they compared it much like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, that their life here would go through a metamorphos into a level above humans.
	They called their group Human Individual Metamorphosis.
	By the fall of 1975, Applewhite and Nettles gave themselves names like Bo and Peep, Guinea and Pig, or Doe and T, notes in the musical scale.
	They also referred to themselves as the two based on the two witnesses in the book of Revelations who were slain and then ascended into heaven.
	At their recruitment meetings all across the country, they were extremely persuasive with their sci-fi pitch to potential members.
	That was so intriguing to me as what was it?
	What combination came together that compelled people literally to, you know, as in the apostolic age, you know, this was Peter and James and John and Matthew suddenly leaving their work and following the teacher.
	We had the same situation here.
	They simply said, come with us, and they did.
	Applewhite even convinced people he could communicate telepathically through secret codes of thought.
	He said, Mr. Hughes, if you ever need to get a hold of me, gave me a secret code which was mentally praying to Bonnie and Herf with the Lord's Prayer.
	And then about 14, 15 months later, there was widespread publicity about some people that disappeared in Oregon after attending a UFO lecture.
	So I decided to use the code.
	Then the next morning received a telephone call.
	And when he said, you have now asked, I thought, well, maybe these people are, you know, who they say they are.
	Human individual metamorphosis attracted a number of veterans of the fading hippie counterculture.
	Most of the members had been involved in other religious endeavors.
	EST, Transcendental Meditation, Tarot cards, astrology.
	They were religious seekers for the most part.
	In order to keep the business going, members sold blood at blood banks and asked for contributions from Christian bookstores.
	Some wealthy members gave their trust funds to the group.
	One of the early recruits was 19-year-old David Moore, to the utter amazement of his mother, Nancy Brown.
	When David came to say goodbye, I was observing him very closely to see if he showed any signs of being a little off balance or being kind of wild-eyed or not making sense.
	But he seemed very calm, and he told me that this was something that spoke to him in a way that nothing that he had come across before had.
	Applewhite and Nettles hated the attention of reporters, whom they believed asked annoying questions about Applewhite's past and the cult's financial situation.
	In 1976, the group went underground, living on campgrounds in so-called good energy states like Colorado, California, and Arizona.
	So we isolated ourselves in this small group of 60 or 70 people and we didn't have contact with our families.
	We were isolated into a circumstance where we could then focus on our change and there was a continual emphasis on the urgency that we make our changeover quickly because we wanted to be ready when they came.
	One woman said to us that she, when she bought toothpaste, she'd always buy a small tube because she'd expect to be leaving shortly.
	But then she said wistfully once, well, I'm always buying another tube.
	As they anxiously awaited their exit, the group struggled to be like angels, denying their sexuality as well as their individuality.
	Marshall Applewhite was promiscuous in his early life, and he saw sexuality as bad, giving him hard times.
	So he had to find a way to reckon with this.
	Applewhite tried to exert strict control over the members of the group.
	At the same time, Nancy Brown began to publish a newsletter, creating a network for the shunned families.
	One of the group members visited his mother, who was in the network, and saw this newsletter and either took this newsletter with him or at least told T and Doe and the group about it.
	Well, apparently, they were really startled and not pleasantly pleased.
	They looked at her as kind of like a meddler, somebody that was just making trouble.
	And the way Marshall Applewhite thought was she was an agent of the lower forces.
	And it's kind of humorous looking back at it now, but at the time it was like a very serious thing Because there was this feeling that we'd get from Marshall Applewhite that somebody was out to get us.
	Somebody was going to take us down, take us off track, not allow us to complete our mission.
	Sensing the newsletter might encourage parents to come after their children, Applewhite and Nettles reluctantly allowed members to contact their families.
	It was carefully controlled.
	Nancy Brown heard from her son David Moore through messages left on her answering machine.
	Hello, this is your son David.
	If you want to know how you can help these parents who want to hear from someone on the trip, if you would print in your newsletter the names of those parents who will promise not to kidnap their family members or keep them from doing what they want to do, I'll promise you that most of these parents will hear from their loved ones pretty quickly.
	And I don't want you to worry about me because there's really nothing to worry about.
	By the early 80s, cracks were beginning to appear in the walls of the cult, which was now called Heaven's Gate.
	Many longtime members felt confused and quit.
	Terry Nettles started to sense her mother's doubts in her letters.
	The letter in 82 that I got from my mom gave me the impression that I felt like she wanted out.
	Or that she no longer believed it.
	Something to the effect of, you know, be sure and conform to society, follow all the rules.
	And I thought, why is she saying these things?
	This isn't what she would have said to me a few years ago.
	In 1984, Bonnie Lou Nettles was diagnosed with brain cancer.
	Admitted into a hospital under an assumed name, she died alone in her native state of Texas.
	Applewhite never informed Bonnie's children of her illness or death until several months later.
	She was only a few hours away from me, so nobody even bothered to call me to tell me that my mom was dying so that I could be there with her.
	Nothing.
	My entire insides feel like you've been ripped out.
	And I spent many nights waking up the next day with my pillows soaking wet because I would just cry through the night.
	Though Marshall Applewhite carried on without his beloved Bonnie Nettles, Doe, as he was called, was shaken by T's death.
	It put not just Doe to the test, but it put all of us to the test of our commitment to the next level.
	Do we think this is real or do we think this was just a con game?
	How could a messenger of God die and her body remain on Earth?
	Marshall Applewhite had to quickly revise his doctrine.
	He or they needed to kind of account for what happened to her.
	They contemplated the idea that one could achieve this spiritual transcendence through some other means than just physically going there in UFOs, that suicide was an option.
	At her work, because it's not the one that she, that the old influences or the old vehicles impulses would respond to.
	So frequently, this is what we do.
	To maintain his role as the supreme and all-knowing leader, Applewhite enforced strict regulations that would further squelch free choice.
	Regimentation, daily life, measuring of food, rigid rules when they went out to the external world to work, not to interact with people.
	It was all to become more and more focused as if they were on a spacecraft leaving.
	And if you were out in the outer world, you were out of craft.
	If you were in the house doing routines, that was in craft.
	Applewhite began to question the obedience of his members.
	In the past, he had distanced himself from other men in the group to avoid his homosexual urges.
	Now, he asked the men to join him in castration.
	Marshall Applewhite was talking about how far would you go in order to attain your mission.
	And so he evidently was entertaining, castrating himself, getting rid of the human need to reproduce, or that hormonal impulse to be attracted to the opposite sex, or to be attracted to any sex.
	I started going, whoa, I don't know.
	I can't really go for this.
	Michael Conyers did not undergo the procedure, but Applewhite and six other men in the cult flew to Mexico City and were surgically castrated.
	In the early 90s, Marshall Applewhite used the internet to spread his gospel to the outside world.
	He began designing personal websites, calling the company a higher source.
	Eventually, they were earning nearly $400,000 a year.
	With this income, they recruited new members by placing a full-page ad in USA Today and other newspapers.
	Doe got instruction to relate to the world again and go out and collect any of the so-called second wave or anyone who was ready for this transition that didn't come aboard the first time around.
	Now, everything was interpreted as a warning signal from above.
	At a campground in California, the cult thought the sky offered a message of impending doom.
	The forest fires in the area had created this kind of blood-red sky, and the sunset and the sun was bright red.
	So they interpreted that through a biblical passage that said the end times are near.
	In March of 1997, the comet Hailbop was nearing Earth's orbit for its first visit in 2,000 years.
	Applewhite prophesied a UFO was following in the tail of the comet.
	He said, it's the marker we've been waiting for, the spacecraft from the level above human to take us home to the literal heavens.
	I know that Doe and the class felt like that the comet itself was significant, that this was a Next Level's way of saying, okay, let's wrap it up here.
	The higher source website posted a cryptic red alert message on the internet.
	The cult had sent letters and videotaped messages via FedEx to several old friends.
	Let me say that our mission here at this time is about to come to a close in the next few days.
	We came from distant space and even what some might call somewhat of another dimension.
	And we're about to return from whence we came.
	On March 26th, 39 bodies were found in Rancho Santa Fe, California.
	You can follow us, but you cannot stay here and follow us.
	You would have to follow quickly by also leaving this world before the conclusion of our leaving this atmosphere in preparation for its recycling.
	They had exited their vehicles in much the same way that they had entered them.
	I was so happy to hear that they were finally off this planet, that they finally got out of those vehicles.
	And I just wish that I was with them at that moment.
	A friend of mine called me at work and told me, you know, I said, just another cult.
	She says, no, you got to understand.
	She says, there's this guy named Father Doe, and there's a spaceship on that Hillbop comet.
	And I totally lost it.
	This has been part of your life.
	You know, and Herf has died with all the answers to the questions you've had.
	When my phone rang, up till that point, I had left open every hope that David was involved because the media still didn't have the factual information that would confirm it.
	But as soon as I heard that first sentence, I knew all was lost.
	Six weeks later, Heavensgate member Chuck Humphrey tried to take his life, but police managed to save him.
	I wished that I was with them.
	It's not really a regret in the sense that, gee, I lost my chance at a million-dollar lotto because I lost the ticket or I didn't play today.
	It's more of a kicking myself for not having done enough of my own homework.
	As long as I'm still here, I can't do anything but share what I know about the next level and about Heaven's Gate.
	What is it about human nature that causes some people to literally put their lives in the hands of another?
	13-year member Michael Conyers recalls the first time he met Applewhite.
	The energy that I felt from him put me into a state of almost fear and awe because when somebody says and starts owning that he may be or kind of is a representative of the kingdom of heaven, there's kind of an energy that's exchanged between the two people.
	It's like there's a charge that goes on.
	California, welcome to today.
	Hank Hanigraff of the Christian Research Institute consults cult members and their families.
	He sees Heaven's Gate as the latest example of spiritual conmen at work.
	So often they follow a leader who is presenting them the skin of the truth stuffed with a deadly lie.
	I don't think that there's a more classic current case of that than Herf Applewhite.
	And when he told them that they had been impregnated with an alien spirit and that's why his message resonated with them, they were immediately willing to follow the seductive siren call of the cult leader and in this case follow it right to their deaths.
	The lure of Heaven's Gate was not just the security of belonging to a group.
	It was the promise of a UFO taking that group to a better world.
	For people that have a particularly strong case of alienation, this can become a very powerful segment of your life.
	There is a vision of another kind of world in which we could live a lot better and maybe the UFO can take us there.
	Applewhite had led his followers here and there, changing their course as his own personal demons dictated.
	Finally, time ran out on him.
	In the case of Heaven's Gate, originally the shift was to a waiting mode.
	We are waiting and during this time of waiting, we will prepare ourselves.
	We'll purify ourselves.
	We'll cleanse ourselves.
	We'll make ourselves beings fit for the spaceship when it finally arrives.
	That's a dangerous mode because eventually you have to give up the waiting.
	For Marshall Applewhite, the exotic comet gave him an opportunity to take his life.
	For his deluded and estranged followers, it was the end of their journey.
	A few miles from Rancho Santa Fe and the Heavens Gate Mansion, the students of the Unarius Academy attend classes in past life therapy, interdimensional physics, and the psychology of consciousness.
	In 1954, Ernest and Ruth Norman founded Unarius in Glendale, California.
	Ruth prophesied that so-called space brothers were coming to Earth in the year 2001 to build a university where solutions to world problems would be discovered.
	After Ernest died, Ruth claimed that he told her to purchase land in nearby Hamul, California, which would be the UFO landing site.
	They are coming to Earth and will land here about this acreage for that purpose.
	In 1994, when Ruth Norman died, 25-year member Charles Spiegel became director of the Unarius Academy.
	Back in 1949, he had a vision in a post office in Los Angeles that would change the course of his life.
	I was walking through a dim-lit corridor to pick up some mail.
	Right in front of me, a picture appeared out of the so-called blue, just like a TV picture opened up, and it was a life-size picture of a woman smiling down at me.
	This experience prompted Spiegel to study metaphysics and Eastern philosophy.
	His research led him to a book written by Unarius Academy co-founder Ernest Norman.
	Norman wrote about past lives, psychic travel to other dimensions, and UFOs.
	Charles Spiegel contacted the Normans and asked for a meeting.
	When the doorbell rang and the door opened, Ruth Norman stood there at the threshold, and she was the exact likeness of the vision that I had in the U.S. Post Office in 1949.
	The Normans used their supposed clairvoyant powers to receive readings about Spiegel's past lives.
	Information they said came from the Space Brothers.
	They told him he had been Pontius' pilot, and they reenacted his life as the governor of Rome who had condemned Jesus of Nazareth to be crucified.
	That was my first introduction to the reality of learning about one's other self or the existence in previous lifetimes.
	It's the same person.
	What one has done before still is a part of your persona.
	Spiegel says over 20,000 members purchase books, visit the website, or the Southern California Center itself.
	One of his students, Marion Kimis, claims to have had her own vision before she came to Unarius.
	We were out looking at the stars, just enjoying the night.
	And suddenly, we looked behind us, and there, hovering on the ground next to us, was a UFO.
	It was the most incredible light show.
	It had all the colors of the rainbow.
	And they went around the perimeter of the craft, and they were all just like scintillating or dancing, just like vibrating.
	It's just incredible.
	It just hovered there and it was completely silent.
	And they've been coming around for a long time.
	I'm just lucky I've got to see them.
	Marion Kimas interpreted the UFO sighting as a visit from friendly space brothers, the same ones from whom Ernest and Ruth Norman claimed to be receiving transmissions.
	Marion believes that Ernest Norman once mentally traveled to Mars and brought back important information about the red planet.
	He psychically visited the planet Mars underground where the civilization of the Martians reside.
	A supernova came and they had warning of that.
	It was going to come and burn the top of their planet, totally burn them.
	I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of Mars where you've seen kind of canals.
	Those are the underground huge tubes where the Martians are living.
	The 19th century notion that there are so-called canals on the surface of Mars has been thoroughly and definitively debunked.
	But Unarians remain convinced.
	Like many UFO believers, the Unarians claim to have information which has been revealed to them alone.
	Through messages from the Space Brothers, Marion Kimis claims to have discovered information about a dark past which still haunts her.
	In my last lifetime, I lived during World War II, and I was a French prostitute that had taken up with a German officer just to protect my butt.
	The French resistance found out about me, and they threw me and all my belongings out in the street.
	And the mob that mobbed me and shaved my head there is the reason why I was so afraid of crowds now.
	Another student, William Proctor, also experienced visions connecting him to World War II.
	When I came into this life, I had leg problems.
	My mom would take me to the doctor over and over and over again.
	The doctor could never figure out why my legs hurt.
	But the picture that dropped into my consciousness, I had been shot down.
	I was an officer, a colonel, in the Lufwaffle Air Force.
	And I survived, but my legs were crushed in this crash.
	That's what was causing the pain.
	Proctor found himself attracted to the UFO philosophy of Unarius.
	I've always had an interest in UFOs.
	That isn't what brought me to Unarius.
	But I've always had the interest that there were life on other worlds.
	And as far as the Unarius Academy of Science, that opened the door for me.
	These, what we call Space Brothers, are human beings, and they're like us, except they're more advanced.
	And in the year 2001, we're going to meet these people.
	Because of its UFO beliefs, the Unarius Academy received a great deal of publicity following the Heaven's Gate suicides in March 1997.
	Would Charles Spiegel, the director of Unarius, eventually lead his cult on a doomsday suicide mission?
	That goes against the basic principles of physics, the physics of energy, you see.
	That's not what Unarius teaches, and that is to be responsible for yourself and for your actions.
	We are normal.
	I mean, we go out, we live everyday lives, we work, we have good jobs, we don't cut ourselves off from our family and friends.
	Taking one's life is a negative experience.
	Why would these people commit suicide over a so-called UFO following a comet?
	The only thing that was following that comet was those people's past, and it caught up with them.
	Spiegel claims the Heaven's Gate suicides were a feudal act that goes against all of the Unarius teachings.
	When I was asked by the media at the time, what do you think of Marshall Applewhite and the Heavensgate?
	My remark was, they got off at the wrong exit, and they had a head-on collision.
	The Unarians' main focus is on the year 2001.
	Co-founder Ruth Norman prophesied that the first spacecraft will land in the Bermuda Triangle, followed by 32 others in Hamul, California, on 68 acres of land high above the Unarius Academy of Science.
	One of the brothers actually spoke to Ruth Norman, and he described that there will be 33 spacecraft of varying sizes that had been specially built that would land one on top of each other and lock in.
	Tonk
	Welcome, welcome to the future landing site.
	These advanced teachers, 1,000 teachers per ship, have technology from their worlds that they want to share with us problems such as economical pollution, the ozone problem.
	They have the problems that we have on this planet.
	They have gone through every one of these problems, and they have advanced knowledge that will help us in resolving problems here that will be the future, positive future for the Earth world.
	sad music
	Hamul is also the site of an annual Unarius psychodrama called the Conclave of Light.
	In the performance, Unarians work through their supposed past life experiences.
	Many Unarians fear that this secluded location may become a battleground if hostile government troops attack the peaceful brothers from another world.
	You know, are we, as in the past and in movies, going to get out all the armed forces and train our guns on them, chase them down?
	Or have we advanced a little bit farther and are open to the fact that there is more intelligent life in the universe than ourselves?
	There's going to be a tremendous, instantaneous global change.
	Now, I don't mean people are going to throw away all their material goods and want to climb on board.
	What I mean is they're going to have a totally different way of looking at life from then on because the unanswered question: is there life out there?
	Is there intelligent life out there?
	Are we alone?
	Will finally be answered.
	And that's why it is very important that this information starts to get out now.
	That man can prepare himself for a landing that is really our future.
	Though the students appear certain of the Space Brothers' arrival, Charles Spiegel has prepared a response if the prediction doesn't come to pass.
	His answer is a convenient one.
	The world is simply not ready.
	If the spaceships don't land, I'm not going to have any great anxiety and go in a dither.
	There'll be a reason for it.
	You see, everything comes down to it.
	There's logic and reason in life.
	There's great organization in the cosmos.
	Because we're disorganized and have, you might say, gotten off the highway, that doesn't mean that the highway doesn't exist.
	You didn't pay attention to the traffic signals.
	Research suggests that 20% of Americans believe in UFOs.
	Is this why some of these people are joining UFO cults instead of mainstream religions?
	People are looking for God in all the wrong places.
	People are spiritually hungry and they feel like Christianity has failed them.
	So we've replaced God's enduring word with a UFO or an extraterrestrial that's going to tell us what a new paradigm of truth is.
	And if you look, for example, at the Unarius Academy, what is the new construct of truth?
	You'll find whole civilizations they have mastered their life.
	All too many people have uncritically bought into the story, not because the evidence is there, but they want to believe it's true.
	Some experts do see differences between the Unarians and other UFO cults.
	When you first look at Unarius, you wonder why would people stay?
	It's just a little UFO thing.
	But there's a very substantial theology that basically draws from traditional occult and Eastern theology that really holds people.
	All of this is trying to recover a sense of cosmic connectedness rather than of alienation, the idea that we humans are some kind of oddball that's stuck here in the midst of an inert cosmos.
	We're going to have an apocalyptic event.
	We're going to have a convergence of spacecraft from various galaxies around the universe and they're going to bring us some new esoteric revelation and through that we're going to have a utopian society where everything is pristine and perfect.
	And of course, as P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute.
	People have always had a fascination with the heavens.
	UFO groups celebrate this connection to the stars.
	Mainstream religion rarely, if ever, recognizes biblical passages as describing extraterrestrial sightings.
	In the mountains of Sedona, Arizona, Milton Notderft, an 85-year-old retired Methodist pastor, embraces traditional Christian beliefs, as well as ideas shared by many UFO cults.
	Reverend Not Derf's awakening came when he saw what he believed were UFOs in the skies just outside New York City.
	We saw a UFO, well, it looked like a radio tower or something, so I paid no attention, drove right on by.
	About three, four miles down the road, there was another one.
	There were finally four of them, blinking green and orange and red and white.
	And I thought, well, they must be putting on a show for me.
	So that was my introduction physically.
	Though Reverend Note Derft believes in UFOs, he found mainstream clergy and churchgoers don't share his views.
	He discovered this when he talked about his UFO experiences with his congregation.
	I don't talk about him in sermons.
	I did once, and that was a mistake, because I thought this was going to change the world in a week or two.
	It didn't, no matter how interesting or frightening they may be, things change slowly.
	After the UFO sighting, Reverend Note Derft began a spiritual search for clues that might acknowledge the existence of what he witnessed.
	He believes the Bible has many passages which document extraterrestrial life.
	Note Derft cites the star of Bethlehem, which led the wise men to Jesus of Nazareth.
	And the Bible tells us that the star that they had seen went before them until it came and stood over the place where the young child was.
	Comets don't act like that.
	Planets don't act like that.
	Asteroids don't act like that.
	It has to be something else.
	Milton Note Derft is also a believer in reincarnation.
	This age-old belief is shared by some Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans, and many UFO cults.
	Note Derft claims reincarnation explains many of life's mysteries.
	That was not a part of my Christian belief at all.
	People say, I don't want to go through this life again.
	I've had enough of it.
	That isn't the point.
	It isn't this life you're going through again.
	It's a new one that is going to teach you some different things than the last one did.
	Note Derft predicts that a shift in planets will bring changes with the new millennium.
	The acceptance of UFOs would mean a new way of life on Earth.
	The first thing that will be affected is economics.
	If we can get free energy for all time to come, what will happen to your electric stock?
	Secondly, is religion.
	And if you think religion hasn't separated us, just think of the thousands of denominations and cults that there are in the world.
	So obviously something's wrong with our ideas of religion.
	Has mainstream religion ever acknowledged the possibility of UFOs?
	So I would say from a Christian standpoint that the Bible doesn't preclude the possibility of UFOs.
	Science doesn't preclude the possibility of UFOs.
	I would just say that there's no real tangible evidence for them.
	So I think that many people believe what they believe because they want to believe it.
	UFOs reflect a deep human need to connect with the heavens, a spiritual quest expressed in ancient text, Greek mythology, and now in modern science fiction.
	I think that one can understand UFOs religiously in the term that Carl Jung, the great psychologist, used, that they function as technological angels in a technological society.
	So what this is saying is that the same kind of entities that we might once have thought of as like angels, gods, and so on coming down from heaven in a supernatural way now come in spaceships.
	Throughout history, man has looked to space and the stars for answers.
	Could it be that the heavens offer an order and harmony that our unstable world lacks?
	We associate that which is in the heavens with ultimate meanings in life or powers over us and this sort of thing.
	So something like a bright comet like Comet Halebach, it just seems to be human nature that we try to make it more than a 25 mile across rock that's throwing out a 15 million mile tale that's very beautiful and gorgeous in itself, but we want to try to make more than that.
	All of us, we look up at the stars at night.
	The very building blocks of who we are came from the stars.
	We may have this nostalgia for the stars on one level of consciousness because we know we did literally come from the stars.
	And all cultures through all time have looked at the stars and felt that either the stars were benevolent beings or they were angels.
	It is part of the human transcendental experience to look up at the sky and to feel that oneness with the universe.
	And most of the groups, in my opinion, the UFO groups, are doing exactly that.
	They are experiencing a sense of oneness with the cosmos.
	As UFO cults look to the stars for a spiritual connection with the cosmos, the question remains, is there life out there?
	And will we ever make contact?

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