Cult News

On the evening of Monday, April 5, 2021 I had the opportunity of being able to interview, at length, a man called Sawyer. Sawyer is an original member of the notorious group that eventually came to be known as “Heaven’s Gate”.

Heaven’s Gate, led by Marshall Applewhite is remembered due to an Applewhite inspired mass suicide, which occurred in March of 1997. Thirty-nine members of the group, including its founder Applewhite, killed themselves in a supposed attempt to to ascend to a new state of being Applewhite called “The Next Level”.

The interview with Sawyer was over four and a half hours in length. Not much was discussed, that was not generally known to the public before. Sawyer remains a deeply committed follower, despite the group’s demise.

Sawyer

But there is one thing about which Sawyer spoke, that as far as I know, has never been revealed to anyone before. That is, Sawyer describes certain minors, teenagers who he claims were knowingly allowed to camp with the group and according to him, were allowed “special contact” with their caregivers that remained outside of the group, in order to reassure those caregivers that their minor loved ones were safe.

Sawyer mentions one minor, that he says left foster care at the age of 16 to join the group. She left the group as an adult some years later.

Everyone else of legal age, other than the minor children, Sawyer says, was cut off from their families of origin, except for these minor children.

These children, who joined the group in the late 1970s were allowed to contact their families.

Sawyer also described how the group’s camps in the early years of its history, before they occupied a fixed residence, were designed to avoid detection and discourage surveillance. It seems that either from land or through aerial reconnaissance the group was effectively camouflaged to obscure recognition.

Marshall Applewhite

I contacted another Heaven’s Gate survivor, Frank Lyford, to corroborate Sawyer’s account of minor children in Heaven’s Gate. Lyford neither confirmed nor denied what Sawyer had told me; Lyford did not reply to my message at all.

If what Sawyer said is true concerning the children, it certainly casts a new light on Applewhite and his followers. And it’s an even darker more sinister image of the group than ever before. It seems that recruiting and hiding kids, teenagers, was not a problem for Marshall Applewhite.

It seems that this part of the group’s dark history has never been exposed and revealed to the public before today.

The possibility that a doomsday suicide cult once recruited minor children is deeply disturbing.