San Diego History

Heaven's Gate Cult Spoof Site

People on the Net are NOT Gullible
By Mark S. Burgess
Posted on Mar 19 2007
Last updated Mar 24 2007

from ryan-finnie.org:

The mother of all spoofs. So, you remember those Heaven's Gate freaks? The 39 guys who put on Nike shoes and purple shrouds, then killed themselves? Yeah, those freaks. They also happened to run a (quite horribly done) web design business. The media latched onto this and basically associated any webmaster with a cultist. We obviously weren't going to take this.

The opportunity presented itself when CNN said their business web site as "ww.highersource.org" (only two w's, and it was supposed to be .com, not .org). Well, Varak was working at Internic at the time, and was able to register highersource.org. With about a dozen people and 10 hours of work, we had the parody site up. And boy did it get popular. Millions upon millions of hits. The poor little box it was hosted on nearly melted. And the media picked up on it too. Kinda ironic since those were the people we were blasting. For example, I was quoted in Newsweek. Others in the group got actual interviews for major publications! To this day, when I tell our story, occasionally I'll get "oh yeah, I remember that!"

Sadly, all good things must come to an end. Binky, the web server that hosted highersource.org, died a spectacular death. No backups of the site were made. It wasn't until archive.org made their historical web archive public was I able to get a copy of the site. Payment on the domain itself lapsed, and was picked up by a domain squatter. But the legacy lives on.

Connect to The Spoof Site

(The CEO of sandiego.com, Inc. was the "Bandwidth Master" in the credits.)

From USA Today - Cults on the Web -- Oh, my!

An international group of webmasters and site developers believes part of the solution is to employ some humor. Which is what they did with a site called highersource.org, a parody of the cult's home page.

The site's opening page features a wild-eyed, monkish-looking fellow and the motto, "We kill ourselves working for you."

Rather than trying to poke fun at the cult, the site is intended to be a "spoof of the press coverage" of the mass suicide, says Tera Mugrage. She and other Web professionals who developed the parody site have long been frustrated by the media's negative spin on the Internet. Things like "kids running away from home and it being Internet-related, wives leaving their husbands and it being Internet-related," she says. The Heaven's Gate coverage was "very much the last straw."

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Comments

Posted by webmaster	June 15, 2006
thanks for posting that - what a shocking time that was, and the media at the time really did make it seem like anyone involved in the web was weird and somewhat dangerous. Great spoof, I have forwarded it on to other webm's I know!

Posted by L	July 16, 2006
I am sorry that people like this feel the need to go this far to get to themselves much less outhers out there !!!!

(1)sandiego.com, Inc. invites comments in which readers can respond freely and anonymously if they wish. Comments submitted by readers will be rejected that are deemed by the editors to be damaging to the future of this web site.
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