Studying apocalyptic doomsday cults is like watching a slow-motion train wreck. Despite our best efforts it can be tough to turn away.
David Koresh, Charles Manson, Shoko Asahara, and Adolf Hitler are the archetypes. Their bizarre capacity to work a crowd ultimately resulted in the deaths of countless devoted followers. To the rational mind, however, such stuff can seem almost comically bizarre.
Heaven’s Gate
Heaven’s Gate was a mob of American UFO acolytes that arose near San Diego, California, in 1974. They believed there was a spacecraft following the comet Hale-Bop. Through ritualized mass suicide cult members thought they might physically transport themselves to the passing starship.
When they were unable to visualize the expected spacecraft their telescope was clearly defective, so they returned the device for a refund. The group purchased alien abduction insurance guaranteeing a $1 million benefit in the event of an abduction, impregnation, or death by aliens.
All 39 Heaven’s Gate cult members wore identical gender-neutral black shirts and sweatpants as well as matching Nike Decades athletic shoes. At the time of their deaths each had a $5 bill and three quarters in their pockets and wore matching “Heaven’s Gate Away Team” arm patches (one of several odd Star Trek references).
One cult member was Thomas Nichols, the brother of Nichelle Nichols who played LT Uhura on the original Star Trek. These 39 otherwise educated, professional people washed down a lethal dose of phenobarbital with vodka before affixing plastic bags over their heads. One can’t help but find such extraordinary behavior darkly fascinating.
Crazy on a Whole New Scale
James Warren Jones was born in May of 1931 in rural Indiana. Like most stark raving lunatics, young Jim’s childhood was chaotic. His father was a WW1 veteran and a member of the Ku Klux Klan whose family shack had no plumbing. Those who knew him described the younger Jones as a “really weird kid” with obsessions concerning both religion and death.
Jones employed a warped theology to manipulate people. However, he was himself either an agnostic or an atheist depending upon his particular mood. Regardless, he frequently wore a white clerical collar. Jones wielded spirituality as a form of mind control, but his real gods were Marx and Lenin.
Jim Jones championed racial integration at a time when racial integration was not terribly mainstream. His willingness to bridge racial divides bought him his first acolytes. By the early 1970’s Jones’ Peoples Temple had satellite offices in cities across the United States. For a time Jones and his buddies actually sold monkeys door to door to raise money for the group.
Jones’ communist sympathies earned him some interesting friends. President Jimmy Carter’s wife Rosalyn met with Jones on multiple occasions. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Walther Mondale publicly praised Jones and his organization. Leftist California Governor Jerry Brown gushed that Jones was a symbiotic melding of Martin Luther King Jr, Albert Einstein, Angela Davis, and Mao Tse-Tung. LGBT activist Harvey Milk was also himself enraptured.
By the summer of 1977, Jones’ group started attracting attention. Sensible minds began investigating Jones’ charlatanical faith healing as well as persistent rumors of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. In response Jones took his motley mob on the road, securing land for a church compound in the South American nation of Guyana.
The Workers’ Paradise
Jones and his followers intended to form yet another communal utopia. They titled their agrarian enterprise the “Peoples Temple Agricultural Project” or more simply “Jonestown.”
They intended to pool their resources and live comfortably off of the bounty of the land. There would be no class distinction, and resources would be equally shared by all. Oddly behind every single one of these delusional mobs there resides some alpha lunatic who believes himself divinely inspired to do most of the thinking.
Most megalomaniacal nutjobs also fold a sexual component into their particular depraved fiefdoms, and Jones was no exception. He banged anything he could catch, regardless of gender. In 1973 Jones was arrested for lewd conduct in a movie theater restroom. I tried to catalog the guy’s kids and stopped counting at nine.
The Deviancy Amplification Spiral
In the fall of 1978, a Democratic US Congressman from California named Leo Ryan flew down to Jonestown with a few straphangers on a fact-finding mission. Some of Ryan’s constituents had approached the Congressman about relatives they felt were being held in Jonestown against their will.
There followed a carefully choreographed dog and pony show designed to allay the Congressman’s concerns. All went well until a few terrified cult members surreptitiously slipped notes to the visitors begging to be freed. One deranged cult member then attacked Ryan with a knife, and the group felt it was time to leave.
The visiting delegation made its way back to the airfield in a dump truck. Once there they began boarding a pair of civilian aircraft, a Twin Otter and a six-seat Cessna. A Peoples Temple true believer named Larry Layton boarded the smaller plane and produced a handgun. His original mission was to kill the pilot in flight. However, he only succeeded in wounding two passengers before being disarmed.
Meanwhile the cult’s security detail, colorfully titled the Red Brigade, approached the Twin Otter in a trailer pulled behind an agricultural tractor. Once within about 30 feet of the plane they opened fire with rifles, shotguns, and handguns. The resulting bloodbath precipitated Something Truly Horrible.
The Guns
I recall news reports at the time saying that the cult had murdered the Congressman’s delegation with fully automatic AK47 rifles. It appears an uninformed media might have gotten the details wrong. All of the weapons catalogued from the Jonestown site were civilian firearms procured in the United States and smuggled into Guyana underneath false bottoms within shipping crates. In 1978 airport security was not really a thing.
At the behest of the State Department, the BATF traced as many of the recovered firearms as they could. There were rumors of as many as 176 guns at the compound, yet only 31 were ever documented. The handguns included a Walther PPK, three S&W .38-caliber revolvers, a Ruger .357 Magnum revolver, two inexpensive .22 wheelguns, a Ruger .22-caliber semiautomatic, and a Colt .25ACP pocket pistol.
The long guns included a GI M1 Carbine, a Ruger 10/22, a Browning slide-action .30-06, a Winchester .243 bolt-action rifle, a Sears Model 54 .30-30, a Remington 742 .308, a Winchester Model 88 .308, a Remington 700 in .308, a Remington 788 in .308, and a Winchester .30-30 lever-action saddle gun.
These guns represented a fairly typical cross-section of civilian-owned firearms drawn from 1970’s America. In each case, they were purchased legally by cult members and then smuggled into the compound in Guyana illicitly. What became of the other weapons rumored to have been there is anybody’s guess if they were ever there at all.
The Rest of the Story
The nine-man Red Brigade hit squad was nothing if not efficient. Congressman Ryan was shot more than twenty times. When word of the murders got back to the compound Jones, called on his followers to partake of a lethal concoction of Valium, chloral hydrate, cyanide, and Phenergan mixed in with Flavor Aid drink powder. Jones referred to this lethal brew as “the medication.”
While the colloquial term “Drink the Kool-Aide” has come to mean any circumstance wherein someone voluntarily partakes of something unlikely or stupid, in this case most of the victims were just flat-out murdered. Security personnel armed with guns and crossbows ensured that the poisoning proceeded in a fairly orderly fashion.
Jim Jones made a 44-minute cassette tape recording of his appellations to his followers to kill themselves in real time. The audio is available on Wikipedia and is absolutely surreal. Jones’ reassuring monotone stands in stark contrast to the obvious terror of the moment. He does at one point refer to a machinegun in his unhinged discourse, but I could find no evidence of such weapons in my research.
918 people died, some 304 of whom were children. Most of those succumbed to the poisoned Flavor Aid that was either ingested or forcibly injected via syringe. Jones himself went down with a bullet to the head, either self-inflicted or otherwise, at age 47.
Larry Layton, the man who fired the handgun in the Cessna, was the only survivor prosecuted as a result of the carnage. He was ultimately paroled in 2002. The group attempted to leave their accumulated assets, more than $7 million, to the Communist Party of the USSR. On the death tape, cult members are still asking about an airplane that they hoped might arrive to “take them off to Russia.”
This loss of life was the single worst case of mass death in American history prior to 911. The Jonestown tragedy serves as an extraordinary example of what results when true darkness is unfettered within the hearts of men.
I hate it when even small details are missing or wrong in a “news” story. It makes me believe there are many errors that maybe I did not see or have knowledge about. It reminds me of the media when they talk about buckshot and rifles.
The children were not “injected” with the deadly concoction. Anyone with children knows that you administer medicine through a syringe IN THE MOUTH…no needle…to make sure that they take the “medicine”. No one was injected. Flavor-Aid without the cyanide would probably kill you if you injected it into a vein.
Please pay better attention Mr. Editor. Credibility is a BIG deal…
About 400 of them are in Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, Ca. A lot of people still say nice things about ol’ Jones. Gave to the poor, bridge builder kinda crap.
https://jonestownmemorial.com
I remember when Jonestown happened. For some odd reason my unit went into EDRE. Then stand down was called.Nothing more came of it. I remember the sick jokes going around the bars and even the NCO club. Some I laughed at. These nutjob cult leaders dont shock me. What does is that some people are so lost that they actually follow these goobers. Now Shoko was the real deal. He really could levitate himself. On a fart column of gas. Just look at his face.
Thank you for writing this. There were facts I did not know before, and additionally the world needs to be reminded of this.
I’m not surprised to see jim jones friends with so many demorats. Demorats have always been communists.
I think the article points out there are dangerous people everywhere – it’s not about political party. Some folks seem friendly but are evil at heart – so be prepared and careful. Your enemy could be sitting next to you.
Again , Mr. Dabbs , an excellent article !
I do recall the events of Jonestown , being thirteen at the time . As
you clearly pointed out , these situations do happen from time to time
in our blessed Nation . Freedom seems to be a double – edged sword .
One has the clear right to be stupid . It is unfortunate that others are
caught up in such madness , costing them their lives .
Why is this referred to as the largest mass murder in American History? It happened in Guyana. Maybe South American history.
Dr. Dabbs makes careful note that some prominent Democrats of the era interacted with Jim Jones. Kind of a cheap shot, in that Jones was not yet known as a mass murdering lunatic when he was making the cocktail party rounds.
It’d be like busting on Trump for throwing a lavish party for Jeffrey Epstein where they were the only two men who attended and where they discussed in great detail the physical qualities of the paid bimbos comprising the rest of the guest list. Epstein was not yet known as a serial rapist and abuser, so why criticize Trump for organizing a bimbo party for him, right? It was just a totally normal bimbo party two dudes had one time.
Oh well. At least Dr. Dabbs did note that Representative Ryan, the guy who came down to investigate Jonestown and got murdered, was a Democrat. Hard to imagine Louie Gohmert putting his ass on the line like that…
Man, are you going to wake up Wed. morning to another four years of derangement syndrome and misery or what?
How funny.
The mirror comes out and you blame the other guy.
Jones associated with democrats as they accepted the Marxist rhetoric so easily. His groups line was pure Marxist silliness, and democrats accept that as being OK.
Will another outstanding and very interesting piece! I look forward to your writings.
I find this article to be very dated, as well as misleading! Congressman murdered!! Like it was ACTUAL NEWS!! Sure..it WAS news..decades ago!!
I myself felt totally insulted by comparing the loss of life of these scumbag morons to the people murdered by terrorists on 9-11, it’s sick to make such a stupid comparison!
Those people didn’t follow some power drunk idiot into a jungle, allowing people to have sex with their children, then drink the kool Ade! They were murdered for NO reason at all, other than the price of oil. They were killed by a government, not some stoned whack job!!
They were hard working people that went to their place of employment to make a living, to pay taxes for our worthless politicians, and to feed their families!! To even mention them in the same breath is the most insulting thing I have read on this stupid site in a very long time!!
Chill out dude before you have a stroke
So what you’re saying is that you take things too literally, and obviously too far?
The comparison was loss of life, was that too far a stretch for you?
And your reach for a Govt/Big oil conspiracy theory concerning 9/11B.S. found amid that jumble of poorly worded nonsense wasn’t easy, but there it is.
Must be lonely in that small of a mind.
Oh, lighten up.
Apparently reading isn’t one of your strengths, Gary. Of course it’s dated: it’s a history lesson…
Nothing in the title was misleading. It didn’t list a timeframe such as “Congressman Murdered Yesterday” – again, this is an article about an historical event.
Also, Dr. Dabbs didn’t compare what happened at Jonestown and on 9/11 by stating similarities between the events, he simply said that the body count of Jonestown was unmatched until 9/11.
Try reading again. Maybe you’ll understand it better the second time around.
…..”the most insulting thing (you) have read on this stupid site in a long time.” Why exactly have you been visiting and reading things on a “stupid” website in the first place ? Much less for a long time. TRY to learn how to read as well as the concept of “context” jackass.
Killed almost as many as Andrew Cuomo.
I was in my junior year in college when this story broke. Remember it well. We were all confused and horrified that one nut job preacher could could be so convincing as to have 1000 people commit suicide. A couple years later, when I went on USAF active duty flying cargo aircraft, one of our loadmasters told us the story of the body recovery when he was assigned to the unit that was involved. He said no matter how many times they cleaned that cargo compartment, the smell of death always lingered.
“Oddly behind every single one of these delusional mobs there resides some alpha lunatic who believes himself divinely inspired to do most of the thinking.”
A very cogent and ideology-neutral statement when removed from its context. The definition of any mob could be a group of sheep led by a sheep that thinks it’s a lion.