Heaven's Gate and the Web
by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the May 1997 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter
The news is full of detailed reports of the suicide deaths of 39 people who built web pages for a living, but who decided that by dying they would somehow be able to board a flying saucer they believed was following the Hale Bopp Comet. Because they had a web page with their twisted beliefs, and because they built web pages for a living, the media is hyping the fact that cult groups like this communicate via the Internet, and I heard one story which indicated a big investigation was to be launched to determine how many web pages on the Net were linked to the http://www.heavensgate.com page.
Knowing how hard it is to get a federal investigation of this sort launched, I decided to spend a few minutes to get the answer for them. If one goes to the Alta Vista search engine
(http://www.altavista.digital.com) and enters a URL, you get back a list of all web sites they surveyed that point to that URL. Early on Mar 28 I found there were 149 links, where we had only about 100 links to the Tulsa Computer Society web page, however I noticed that a number of them were from sub pages on www.heavensgate.com itself. Later that day I decided to write this article, and went on again and redid the search, and this time there were 165 pages that linked to it. The breakdown was as follows:
134 links from sub pages in www.heavensgate.com
1 link for what is probably a related domain, www.heavensgatetoo.com, which no longer is in the DNS list
20 links from pages established since the suicide (2 on 3/27, 17 on 3/28, and 1 on 3/29) capitalizing on it, including one where you can buy a Space Cult T-Shirt
5 links from various pages on the spiritweb.com domain
5 other links (www.quest-research.com, excite.com (a review on the web page from this other search engine), www.telemark.net,
www.socalink.com, and a spam cancel message from
spam.ohww.norman.ok.us/spam_notices/junjul96.htm cancelling a spam message posted by the group in 67 UseNet News Groups)
If the media continues to harp on how dangerous the web is, because of this pathetic web page, you might want to refer them to the above statistics. It is unfortunate that these 39 people decided they needed to die, and it is particularly unfortunate that their deaths occurred just before the time when we should be recalling one man whose death about 2,000 years ago could truly be considered Heaven's Gate. It is also unfortunate that the media will take this situation and try to turn public attention away from the wonderful service that the Internet makes available, in an effort, doomed to failure, to prevent incidents like this in the future.
Incidently I checked out the hundred or so links to
http://www.tcs.org, and if you ignore the 35 links from sub pages on our web site which link back to the main page, and the 35 links from one of our corporate sponsors, who includes a link to our page in the footer of each of his web pages, we are still left with almost 40 distinct web sites that truly link to us.
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Tulsa Computer Society 03/29/97
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Don Singleton, President
tcs@galstar.com