Original subtitles

[music]

I'm Do...

Some called our partnership

Ti and Do.

That's not my name, but that's how I'm referred to

on Planet Earth, at this time.

I've been talking to my students

that are sitting in front of me.

Jmmody, would you want to stand up and--

so that we can take a look at your uniform.

Okay.

And maybe we can back up a little bit

and get a little wider picture of the uniform.

Okay, now, maybe we can zoom in on the patch

that... great.

See, it says "Heaven's Gate Away Team."

We've been away, and now we're going back.

Okay, thanks, Jmmody.

Now let's go to Dvvody.

Dvvody. [chuckling]

They're all camera shy.

We-- okay, come on over, to Stlody.

We... came from distant space,

what your religious literature

would call the Kingdom of Heaven.

And we're about to return.

[music]

JWNODY: We might see you all again,

and then we might not.

That's-- we hope that you remember us as we were

and not how other people are going to try

and tell you that we are.

And one last thing we'd like to say is,

39 to beam up. Thank you.

[music]

MAN: There is confirmed 39 deceased.

All of the individuals were similarly clothed.

It appeared as if there were almost a uniform.

2nd MAN: This was a voluntary situation.

They may or may not have been influenced,

but we'll never know that.

But, at this point, this is considered

a mass suicide investigation.

[music]

MAN: This wasn't just something that--

oh, there's a spacecraft, let's kill ourselves.

These people spent 22 years

preparing for what they did,

and I wish people would examine that 22-year period

instead of just examining their method of leaving.

A score of persons

from a small Oregon town have disappeared.

It's a mystery whether they've been taken

on a so-called trip to eternity

or simply been taken.

Terry Drinkwater takes a look at that story.

TERRY: Here along the cloud-covered coast

near Newport, Oregon,

a mysterious couple appeared three weeks ago,

circulating a flyer proclaiming

a UFO would soon be ready

to take whomever would follow them

to another life, another world.

They held meetings, one at this motel,

to recruit voyagers.

Francine Furst attended but was unconvinced.

Those people who choose to go along will be

picked up by a UFO,

and they will be leaving this Earth forever.

TERRY: Why didn't you decide to go?

I'm too human and too normal.

- [chuckling] - I love to travel,

but I also like to know where I'm going.

There were 34 people that actually...

ended up joining because of the Waldport meeting.

All different kinds of numbers were reported,

and I was among them.

SAWYER: I was living in Waldport, Oregon.

I came out of a band practice,

like an all-nighter party kind of thing,

and I saw that poster.

What piqued my interest about the poster

that I remember making a comment about to my partner is,

"I wonder what these people look like," you know,

they were talking about them being from outer space.

"If you ever entertained the idea

"of a physical level above the human level,

you will want to attend this meeting."

Back then, I had a girlfriend,

Erika, and we had

been together for three years.

We were gonna take a vacation to Oregon

to visit my cousin.

I was excited.

But at that point...

SAWYER: The place was packed.

I would estimate there were, like,

close to 200 people in this room.

And Ti and Do came out onto the stage,

and they just sat there for maybe a minute or two,

which seemed like a long time to me.

TERRY: These are "The Two."

The two who promise to take their followers

literally out of this world in a spaceship.

SAWYER: They said that they had come to teach

the process of becoming

a member of the Next Level.

DO: When a human has overcome

all of his human level activities,

a chemical change takes place,

and he goes through a metamorphosis

just exactly as a caterpillar does

when he quits being a caterpillar.

And he goes off into a chrysalis,

and he becomes a butterfly.

They said, if you followed their approach,

that your body would chemically and biologically transform

into a perfected space alien.

And you would go physically on board a UFO

and sail physically into Heaven.

What they would call

"The Next Level."

LESLIE LIGHT: I was impressed

with listening to the man.

He was kind of mesmerizing.

I kept looking at his eyes.

These kind of eyes

that you would look through,

and I just remember

feeling like,

could this, like-- I was trying

to pick up on his energy, like,

if it was really true.

SAWYER: There was this haze floating around them,

like a shimmering light.

It wasn't like a smoke haze.

It was more electrical-looking.

And I turned to my left,

and above the crowd, the people,

there was that same kind of haze,

but it was less distinguishable

as electrical.

And so I recognized that that might've been,

like, the Holy Spirit.

I was pretty young, I was 24,

so I didn't maybe have a lot of concrete beliefs,

but I believed everything he was saying.

I felt euphoric.

Higher than a kite in this meeting.

Erika had felt the same thing.

Same euphoric feeling.

I felt like I sat in front of the equivalent of Jesus.

By the end of the meeting, I looked at my partner,

and she looked at me, and it was like

we knew that we wanted to do this.

All they wanted you to do was to make the choice to go,

and then leave your possessions.

Leave everything that was connected to your humanness

and to go with them to begin to repair.

People have disappeared, yes, we have roughly

fifteen to twenty people that are no longer in the area.

[music]

LESLIE: You had to say goodbye to everybody

in your life and leave.

Nobody else wanted to go with me.

They thought it was crazy. I just went.

SAWYER: They told us to bring

any camping gear with us.

Then we were given instructions to go

to a campground at Boulder Canyon,

where they would split us up into groups.

I definitely was seeking something more than I had.

But I didn't know what that was.

[jingling]

I'm allowed to do this now.

But not federally.

These guys.

My children. It's mild.

I don't like any intense stuff, you know?

I wanna be able to function.

I was in high school when I was experimenting

with drugs and LSD and stuff like that.

I started to get into spirituality.

[Indian rhythm]

I was experimenting with different spiritual groups.

You know, meditations.

I would dance with the Sufis

and relate to the Hare Krishna people.

I read the book "Paramahansa Yogananda,"

you know, "Autobiography of a Yogi."

And I remember thinking,

gosh, I wanna be enlightened like that.

Like, I wanted that.

I wanted to have that specialness.

BENJAMIN: Heaven's Gate was never exactly mainstream,

but it wasn't as alternative as we think about it today.

So, you have to imagine what it was like in the '70s.

So, this is the time when hippies and beatniks

and-- and folks like that are

looking outside of established religions.

Many people who were drawn to Heaven's Gate

had tried all sorts of religious options.

I was struggling

with what I wanted to do with my life.

I was a young beautiful girl.

A child model in Hollywood.

I went out to Moran and became a hippie.

So, when the two came along, it just resonated

with my own spiritual dilemma

of being attached and being of this world

and what role it played in my own, you know, struggle.

We have this simple truth,

though the most potent truth,

and it is the identical truth

that Jesus brought to human beings

two thousand years ago.

Heaven's Gate is effectively, from my reading,

a Christian offshoot.

Now, this is important because it's also a time

when many Christians looked around at the world

and thought the world was about to end.

REZA ASLAN: Groups like Heaven's Gate are

what scholars refer to as millenarian.

And they have an understanding

of time as coming to an end.

Planet Earth is about to be recycled.

Your only chance to survive

is to leave with us.

These kinds of millenarian groups

tend to arise in times of societal stress.

[explosion booming]

PROTESTORS: Out now! Out now! Out now!

It's later than most people think.

Whether it's five minutes to midnight,

or whether it's ten minutes to midnight is debatable.

BENJAMIN: And for Heaven's Gate, also, this is really

the first generation of belief in flying saucers

and things like that.

What do we know of outer space?

Is there anyone out there?

And are they headed our way?

BENJAMIN: One of the best-selling books

at the time was "Chariots of the Gods"

by Erich von Daniken,

who claimed he had evidence

that the world's ancient religions were

actually founded by extraterrestrial visitors.

I was interested in UFOs.

Curious.

Never saw one.

BENJAMIN: That's why, in the '70s,

when people encountered Heaven's Gate,

people didn't say, "Whoa, this is weird."

They said, "This is what I've been looking for."

And so all these people, for one reason or another,

accept this message that "The Two"

are actually who they say they are,

space aliens, effectively,

who offer them a way to get to Heaven.

DO: In 1975,

there were two individuals

who came public,

held some meetings around the country,

and said that they were from the Kingdom of Heaven.

And those two individuals were Ti and Do.

BENJAMIN: They go by a variety of names,

but they also just call themselves "The Two."

And they went to Bo and Peep after that.

[whir, ding]

SAWYER: They said, I guess, "Our names are Bo and Peep,

because we now have sheep.

And then Bo and Peep became Do and Ti,

in that order, relative to the names.

I didn't know at the time why they chose those names,

but I learned not too long after that

that it came from that musical

"The Sound of Music."

♪ When you read, you begin with ♪

♪ A B C ♪

♪ When you sing, you begin with ♪

♪ Do re mi ♪

ALL: ♪ Do re mi ♪

♪ Do re mi fa so la ti ♪

Oh, let's see if I can make it easier.

Ti and Do were both fans of musical theater.

Do's first love was music-- before he got into religion

and spirituality, was music.

[gentle major key melody]

NEELY BRUCE: It's very disorienting

when you call him Marshall.

Nobody called him Marshall. Everyone called him Herff.

So, um, when Herff Applewhite

came to the University of Alabama,

he didn't look at all like a professor.

He was very casual, very laid back.

There was no hint that all this catastrophe

was looming in his future.

He had a fantastic voice.

He had a lot of charisma.

He was such a natural performer.

He would have the audience in the palm of his hand.

But it was widely rumored that he was having an affair

with-- with one of the male graduate students.

And his father was a very, very hard-nosed

Presbyterian minister who did not like the fact

that he had a gay son.

I'm sure, in Jesus' eyes,

his relationship to his father

was... goodness,

when will I ever grow to be like my father?

I'm so ignorant!

I do things so poor.

I can't get them right.

And yet...

his ability to recognize his father...

and want to be like his father

and realize that he is nothing but a child.

His wife divorced him. I remember her very well.

Very nice family. Then, that seems to put him--

put him in a bit of a tailspin.

And so he left Alabama for Houston.

I got a call

telling me that-- that this notorious couple

in the news was actually, you know,

Herff Applewhite and his former nurse.

This is the story that I heard.

He was gonna attempt a career on the opera stage

at Houston Grand Opera.

He was going to do his biggest role there,

which was the role of Olin Blitch.

He's a traveling preacher who seduces Susannah

in the opera "Susannah."

The Lord, he spoke to me this afternoon.

And he said, "Blitch,

"there's gonna be a lot of lost souls

"at that meeting tonight!

"Don't take no text.

I'll put the words in your mouth."

NEELY: He was in rehearsal, and he had

some sort of a psychotic episode

and was actually hospitalized.

DO: We met... just perchance...

while I was visiting a sick friend in a hospital.

Where Ti was a nurse.

JANJA LALICH: I think most people don't think of Ti

as the real leader of the group,

but she met Do when he was

obviously at a vulnerable point.

She convinced him that--

that he was her soulmate.

Ti had more experience

and was older than me.

I could see Ti's control was better than mine.

Ti really recruited Do, and-- and Do was her follower.

Nettle says, "Well, I'm an astrologer.

Uh, and I can do your chart."

And she deduces that they're fated

to work together on some grand project.

They are destined to be spiritual partners.

JANJA: After that, they became very close.

He eventually went to live with her.

They were never romantic.

But she was very much the force behind the group,

the founding of the group,

and the way the group functioned.

- You're a sweetie, yeah. - [meowing]

This is Mom.

The others are similar, but...

she looks-- for some reason, she looks sad in those pictures.

My mom was a-- was an RN.

Her passion was working with babies.

So, she ended up being a baby nurse

at a hospital in Houston.

I always wanted to be with her.

She was my best friend. We did everything together.

Actually, I was a candy striper

at the hospital where she worked,

and so we'd hang out at work.

And she'd take me to dance classes

and acting classes and music classes,

and all this stuff, and-- and I'd--

we'd talk about everything under the sun.

We spent a lot of time talking about

spiritualism and mediums and astrology.

Things like that.

Even before she met, uh, Marshall Applewhite,

she was someone who was already very entrenched

in New Age thinking.

JANJA: You know, all of this kind of stuff,

crystals and ascended beings

and channeling dead people and seances.

I have come.

And I am going to work with many of you today.

And part of that interest was in UFOs.

TERRIE: We used to dream about a UFO picking us up

and taking us away from this world.

We didn't feel like we belonged here.

I don't remember if I saw it first

or she saw it first...

we saw this light in the sky

that appeared to move in different directions.

We would talk about how neat it would be

if... it were a UFO and it would come down

and pick us up and take us away.

And we would speculate about what it would be like

in... going to different planets...

'cause both of us wanted to leave this earth.

DO: We were going through an awakening period.

It's common for the person who is awakening.

For his life to begin to fall apart

or her life to begin to fall apart.

It got kind of tense at home, you know,

because now there's another man involved.

And eventually my parents

got a divorce when I was 19.

My mom said that we need to find out

what we're supposed to do.

And as soon as they discovered

what they were supposed to be doing,

she'd be back.

But that... it didn't turn out that way.

[soft string music]

♪ There's a highway ♪

♪ Telling me to go where I can now ♪

BENJAMIN: They travel around the country

on this journey of self-exploration.

And they visit other New Age-ers.

Various gurus, alternative health centers.

They stop and stay in churches.

They have no money, so they take odd jobs.

Their car's always breaking down,

and they're digging ditches to try and make money.

TERRIE: Shortly after my mom and Herff left,

and my mom sent me this picture.

It's Herff and my mom in Vegas.

And on the back of the card, it said,

"Herff cut my hair. How do you like it?

Love you, Mom."

♪ Gonna be all right now, gonna be all right... ♪

In July of 1973,

Bonnie Lou and Herff had been on the road

for over a year at this point.

And they end up on the Oregon coast.

And it occurs to them

that they finally figured out the answer.

Herff and Bonnie Lou discover

that they are the two witnesses

who are foretold in the Book of Revelation.

They are destined to be martyred.

And then to rise from the dead.

Revelation...

Ti and Do believe that they...

will then lead all those who accept their message

into outer space to the Kingdom of God.

The Next Level.

And they refer to this as The Demonstration.

Initiating the end of the world.

They say when the Book of Revelation talks about,

"ascending up to Heaven in a cloud,"

well, they say, well, first-century,

second-century people wouldn't've understood a UFO.

So they say a cloud, but in fact that cloud

is a flying saucer.

BENJAMIN: They saw themselves not ultimately as offering

religious or spiritual guidance

but scientific, technological message.

Because they taught that,

with a powerful enough telescope,

you can see God.

I think they took acid.

[laughing]

There was a short period of time when, in isolation,

we went through an extreme awakening period.

This is...

unimportant information-- the only thing that's important

is, can you shed human-ness?

And then hang on to your hat,

because, from that point until the time you leave,

will be one major growth after another

that will change you from a human

into a member of that Next Level.

When they started, you know, the--

the leaving was imminent.

The spaceship was gonna come and get them,

and it was gonna happen tomorrow,

and there was really the sense of immediacy.

Which, if you were one of the early followers,

you know, you really bought into that.

Dick Joslyn was a young man

in Los Angeles.

He wanted to be an actor.

And he was one of the first followers.

A matter of some months ago,

uh, those of us who are up here

were sitting in a meeting similar to this,

where you are...

and listening to two individuals--

a man and a woman--

share some information with us.

It's important to understand that you cannot die

and achieve the level we're talking about.

You cannot die and get to Heaven.

Uh... this level that we're speaking of

is obtained only while you're alive

and physically healthy.

In a way that you've never been alive before.

We're not here to convince you of anything.

But we know that there are a lot of people,

at least some people,

who are waiting for this information,

and they will recognize it when they hear it.

ROBERT: My name is Robert W. Balch.

I am a sociology professor,

now retired, at the University of Montana.

My connection with Heaven's Gate

began in 1975

when the story broke

about 20 people who had disappeared

on the Oregon coast

after attending a meeting about UFOs.

Initially, 1975,

I had gone to Sedona, Arizona

to do research

on what was then

this emerging New Age community.

And so I'm walking down the sidewalk

and saw this poster on the wall.

It says, "Humans, do you really know

"what Christ came to tell us?

"Do you believe in flying saucers?

"Are you ready to take your physical body

to the next evolutionary kingdom?"

I looked at it and I thought,

boy, I wonder if these are the people

that I've been reading about in the newspapers.

The people from Waldport, Oregon.

I just thought, this is so weird.

I wanna go and see what they have to say.

We're now in the process

of... overcoming the world

and converting all of our energies

to becoming Next Level individuals.

ROBERT: Members of the group were presenting the message.

The leaders, the two, they were not there.

Nine people decided that day to join the group.

And so I am thinking, this is very bizarre.

I've never seen anything like this before.

And it was at that point I thought, ahh,

maybe I should just go undercover.

And so that night,

I went home, and I called my friend David Taylor.

I said, would you like to do this with me?

He called me, and he said, "Do you think you could join me

for a couple weeks in California?"

ROBERT: David was at the time this kind of

hippie-trippy graduate student here in our department.

And he was the only person I knew who would drop everything

spur of the moment to do something like this.

And, sure enough, he did.

At that point, we knew that

the members were all on their way

to be reunited with The Two,

who they hadn't seen for a few weeks at this point.

I told them I wanted to join the group.

And so, how are we gonna rendezvous with you?

And they-- "Well, we don't know where we're gonna be yet.

"So, here's what we'll do.

"Go to the town of Varinda,

"which is outside of Oakland.

"Find the post office,

"and we will leave you an address

on page 100 of the zip code book."

DAVID: Rob said this group is very secretive,

not just about publicity

but scrutiny from the media and the police.

We get to the post office

and find the zip code book.

There's no address.

They just say, "Meet us at the top of Mt. Diablo."

We had to hitch a ride

to get to the top of this damn mountain,

and there's nobody else there.

And I look through the garbage can, and,

sure enough, I find some of the group's literature.

And so I know that they have been there,

and I think, oh, my God, we've come all this way,

and we just freakin' missed 'em.

And just then, two cars pull up

full of members of the group.

They're like, "Hop in!" And off we go.

It was really important for me to be able to keep a record

of everything that I saw.

Everything that I heard going on.

And, of course, that had to be done secretly,

because I was an infiltrator in this situation.

Initially, I was writing on just scraps of paper.

This I found somewhere,

and so I was recording all of my notes.

One of the interesting things that I discovered

was that there was

no authority structure whatsoever.

The name of their process was

Human Individual Metamorphosis.

Because this was such an individual process,

nobody felt like they had any authority over anybody else.

You need to be focused on your own overcoming.

The Kingdom of Heaven can't be entered

as long as I still have

attachments and addictions

to the human kingdom.

Whether it be people, things,

careers.

WOMAN: Is there some special place

that you have people go

to learn about... how to do this?

Camps or something like that?

You mean, here on... here on this planet?

WOMAN: There was something about going to Colorado.

Uh... there...

we have no training camp. [chuckling]

BENJAMIN: Ti and Do didn't give a lot of formal instruction.

So, the group lives a nomadic existence

but also one characterized by what I would call

social chaos.

For a while, there are several hundred people

traveling around the country, going to campgrounds.

Thinking that their leaders are gonna teach them

the way off planet Earth.

Sometimes, we're together in groups of ten or 20,

Sometimes we're together in...

just two or three of us.

We would have meetings

twice a day, morning and evening.

Most of those meeting times were spent

tuning in to The Next Level.

They gave us tuning forks

for each group-- had a tuning fork.

[tuning fork rings]

The note A, 440 hz.

They said that we should tune our mind to that frequency.

[tuning fork rings]

So, you take it and hit it and stick it on your head.

And then, kind of like, hum it to yourself.

You know, they didn't give us instructions

on how to do any of that.

And we were living on donations at that point,

that we asked the churches for.

So, you'd have to go knock on doors

and-- and spread the message,

and then you-- maybe if you needed money for gas,

do something for them.

The things that we need to literally live

on this human planet until we get off

are provided by situations that come up.

Help will come in the strangest ways.

[soft music]

In early days, there was a lot of this...

"we've got this message that we may be picked up,"

and they would go out in the desert and wait.

We'd look up at the sky a lot. Were the UFOs coming for us?

SAWYER: We had an assigned task.

Somebody would get up and watch the heavens for an hour

and then go back to sleep.

And we burned the fire the whole time too.

That's where I got the name Sawyer.

I was the woodcutter.

Do you regret at all

giving up what you had to give up?

No regrets, it's been such an accelerated

growth experience that...

no matter what happens, I could never regret

taking this move.

It's difficult for our friends and our relatives who really

do love us to understand it's us who really want to do this.

And they might think that it's...

better for us not to do this endeavor.

So, I get asked this question all the time about,

you know, is there a certain personality type

who gets into a cult? And the answer is "no."

People who join cults

are typically well-educated.

Often from very good families.

They don't have prior psychological problems.

Because, in reality, cults don't want

lonely, strange, weird people, you know,

cults want highly-functioning individuals who can help

run the cult.

Right now, Joyce is going through the process

of leaving.

Uhh, I did have to decide what to do with my job.

I was in a job that I was very satisfied with.

But I think the biggest thing was

working with my children and talking to them.

Uhh, one of-- I do have twin girls that are 13.

- They will go with their father. - Mm-hmm.

If an individual finds themselves

with children...

and they know...

that it is time for them to move up

into the kingdom of God,

they must weigh where their responsibility is.

To their heavenly Father? Or to those children?

This is a rare photo.

It's my mom, me, and my dad.

Looks about three-ish. Two- or three-ish, yeah.

My mom had a real affinity with nature.

Definitely really into astrology.

She looked a lot like me.

My dad was an inventor.

Here's one of my father's inventions.

It's an ergonomic workstation.

They both were very, very, very smart.

That was probably one of the biggest challenges.

They weren't very simple

in how they thought about anything.

Well, I attended a... a meeting

at La... La Cañada College

in... which is north of San Francisco,

uh, in late August of 1975.

And, uh, recognized at that time

that it was the... the truth,

that-- it was what I'd been looking for.

They both sat me down

and... said that they were going to...

go with this cult.

I remember trying to discourage my mother about it.

"Oh, it's nonsense, UFOs, come on."

I don't know how they ever believed that.

Really don't, you know.

I mean, me, a ten-year-old, I didn't believe that.

How did they... it just never made any sense, you know?

They really explained it

as though they may not even be here much longer

than a month or two.

I mean, it was really an immediate state of mind

that everything was gonna change.

The UFOs are coming to pick us up any day now.

I went to live with my mother's parents,

my grandparents.

It was very hard. Very hard.

It's easier for those who are left in the world

to go ahead and move on with their lives.

So in a way, I think, well,

that's been the pattern for most of us.

To, uh, let that-- the past go--

you know, the... the people that have been our past

to go on with their lives.

KELLY: It was trying to talk sense,

like, to your parents.

How...

them telling you that...

the likelihood that they were gonna go off in UFOs

and I would never, ever, ever speak to them again, never.

Even-- Even if they didn't--

as soon as they were gone, I was just--

it was absolutely no contact with me ever again.

And...

I just couldn't imagine what...

it was like trying to compete with God.

That's really what it felt like.

And...

made me feel rather meaningless, to be honest.

I mean, I felt bad on a personal level that

my parents were freaked out.

And some of my relatives thought how horribly mean it was

for me to be so, like, they thought I was

a spoiled person who just did reckless and didn't care.

But that was not the case.

You have to realize that, when Jesus met his disciples,

he said, "You have to leave your family behind

if you want to... surrender to a higher principle."

You can't have it both ways.

If you do adhere to that belief.

So, the point is-- is even though

it seems extreme and drastic,

I was put in a position

if I wanted to be 100% faithful to this belief,

that I still love my mother,

but I needed to follow

this higher... calling.

ROBERT: The whole time that I was with the group,

you're not supposed to be forming

human-level relationships.

So, all I had to do was keep my mouth shut

and just go through the motions and play the role.

[cawing]

At this point, it's been three months

since I've joined the group,

and I had no idea what had become of David.

We had separated, and it was like,

well, I'll see you back in Montana.

It's also in December now,

and my deadline for having to leave the group

was before Christmas.

I've gotta be home for Christmas

with my family.

DAVID: So, the decision was

to write a series of academic papers

beginning with Psychology Today.

ROBERT: We were the only people

who had been behind the scenes, really,

in that group, and Psychology Today

jumped at the opportunity.

And so we ended up being the cover story.

There we are. Me and David.

One of the big issues then was,

why are people joining,

and what happens to them after they join?

Are they being manipulated? Are they being coerced?

Is there brainwashing going on? What does that really mean?

DAVID: What we concluded was, this group was really unique.

The two leaders didn't assert their authority

near as much as your typical New Age leader.

We found no evidence of manipulation.

No evidence of coercion.

No evidence of brainwashing.

Everything about it just was all about free choice.

Now, it'd still be another 20-some years

before this mass suicide was gonna happen,

and I don't think I grasped in my own mind

the gravity of the situation here.

Recently, we had the story of a small town in Oregon that

was visited by a man and a woman who said

they were millions of years old, from outer space.

Nobody knows if they are earthly hoaxers

or Pied Pipers from outer space,

but apparently some people believe their story.

DO: Unfortunately, very little of the human element

across the globe is even interested in this information.

You would not believe what we go through

to even try to get it... to people,

and the harassment that we go through.

How difficult it is to find anyone

who even cares to hear.

SAWYER: Ti and Do felt like

the demonstration of dying and resurrecting,

like the two witnesses were depicted as doing,

was Ti and Do being shot down by the press.

They say, "Well, actually, the media has killed us.

It's a metaphoric martyrdom and resurrection."

No one knows how many others are following the couple,

known up to now only as "he and she" or "The Two."

Well, that mystery at least appears to be solved.

BENJAMIN: Most of the treatments were not serious.

Most people looked at the group

and thought it sounded ridiculous.

There's lots of rumors that there's a connection

with the Charles Manson family, that these people are

gonna commit suicide by starving themselves to death.

They're being connected with cattle mutilations.

This is the biggest cult story in the country.

SAWYER: The meetings at that point were

very poorly-attended.

And Ti stood up and said, "The harvest is closed."

And that was the end of the meeting.

They told the remaining students,

"You made the first cut."

That's the way they put it. That's the way Ti said it.

DO: The fact that Ti and I expressed

that caused us to retreat and take our little classroom

and go hide with them

is because the last thing we could stand was

to have people say, "Blasphemy.

"You say you're from the Kingdom of God.

"Who do you think you are? Jesus?

Who do you think you are? God?"

Because they didn't understand.

So, our hope and our prayer for your sake

is...

you will start warding off

all the bombardment that you will begin to hear.

They say, "Boy, is this guy crazy!"

"Is this a cult if I ever heard one?"

Yes, it is! It's the cult. I mean, it's the cult of cults.

It's the cult of truth!

And I see that we're down to five seconds.

We'll see you in our next session.

♪ When I die and they lay me to rest ♪

♪ Gonna go to the place that's the best ♪

♪ When I lay me down to die ♪

♪ Goin' up to the spirit in the sky ♪

[instrumental continues]