The belief that aliens from space stand ready to bring a new era to humanity is more common than people realize, experts say.
The 39 members of the Heaven's Gate group that committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe last week incorporated extraterrestrials into their religion. Across the country, small groups of people also look to extraterrestrials for answers to their earthly questions."It's been very common since the '50s," said Richard Ball, a professor of sociology at West Virginia University who specializes in social psychology. Many believe "there will be some kind of intervention from outer space to save humanity," he said.
The 39 Heaven's Gate members believed that through death, they would be taken to a spaceship that would "graduate" them to the next evolutionary level of heaven.
It all sounds reasonable to local resident Lloyd Cotter, a World War II veteran and retired psychiatrist who said he has had conversations with several alien races, spirits of dead humans and even whales and dolphins.
"Their self-destruction may have been for a very good purpose," said Cotter, who has tried unsuccessfully to start a support group for victims of alien abductions. "I think they're on a spaceship right now."
At first Cotter said he thought of the suicides as a tragedy, but "then I listened to the discussion of what had gone on," he said. "I started not being so horror-struck by it."
Across the country, dozens of such groups quietly go about their business, believing in a sort of religion that incorporates a mix of New-Age spirituality, Christianity and extraterrestrials, experts say.
For thousands of years, people have relied on their religious or spiritual beliefs to help explain mysterious phenomenon, Ball said. Heaven's Gate took the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet as a sign that it was time for them to leave their bodies and rendezvous with an alien spaceship hiding behind the comet.
In a September 1996 Gallup poll, 48 percent of respondents said they believed that UFOs were real, and 45 percent believed that UFOs had visited Earth in some form, said Stuart Vyse, an associate professor of psychology at Connecticut College who specializes in UFOs and conspiracy thinking.