[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]