Heaven's Gate (religious Group) - Media Coverage Prior To Suicide

Media Coverage Prior To Suicide

Known to the mainstream media (though largely ignored through the 1980s and 1990s), Heaven's Gate was better known in UFO circles as well as a series of academic studies by sociologist Robert Balch. They also received coverage in Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception, in which Vallée described an unusual public meeting organized by the group. Vallée frequently expressed concerns within the book about contactee groups' authoritarian political and religious outlooks, and Heaven's Gate did not escape criticism.

In January 1994, the LA Weekly ran an article on the group, then known as The Total Overcomers. Through this article Rio DiAngelo, a surviving member of the group, discovered the group and eventually joined them. DiAngelo was the subject of LA Weekly's 2007 cover story on the group.

Louis Theroux contacted the Heaven's Gate group while making a program for his BBC Two documentary series, Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, in early March 1997. In response to his e-mail, Theroux was told that Heaven's Gate could not take part in the documentary as "at the present time a project like this would be an interference with what we must focus on."

The 1982 film, The Mysterious Two, was loosely based on reports of the cult's activities during the 1970s, which had received extensive media coverage at the time. Applewhite and his co-founder would go on to occasionally use the name "The Mysterious Two" in their web site's materials. The 1980 film Heaven's Gate has no relationship whatsoever to the Heaven's Gate group.