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In the spring of 1997, after the dozens of dead "containers"—or people, as they are more commonly called—were discovered inside the Heaven's Gate mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, the nation was once again all abuzz about fringe movements. "Where do these strange movements and their strange ideas come from?" "How can they attract so many members?"

An article by Erica Goode in US News & World Report (April 7, 1997) took the common position that strange ideas come from strange and remote origins, and that because of the universal "cravings, yearnings, wishes, and hopes" we all have, ordinary people are liable to say yes to just about any far-fetched idea that comes along. Maybe, she suggests, the UFO-based creed of the Heaven's Gate sect, with its references to New Age spirituality, derives from second-century gnosticism and, like gnosticism, is linked "more closely with Eastern metaphysical systems and paganism than with mainstream Christianity".

But people typically will found new ways of living on ways already familiar to them. In other words, they will derive strange from familiar rather than strange from strange. (By strange I simply mean unfamiliar.) So even if you want to think of people living their lives on cravings and yearnings—a description that sounds to me more like chimpanzees than humans—it is unlikely they will try to satisfy their needs by means of something they can't recognize, that doesn't make a gut-level connection for them. I don't think that the Midwestern farmers, who were the original staples of alien visitation, connected at the gut level "more closely with Eastern metaphysical systems and paganism than with mainstream Christianity".

Perhaps a better explanation of the origins of the Heaven’s Gate sect, and America's twentieth-century UFO movement generally, is that it comes from, well, twentieth-century, predominantly Protestant America. The UFO movement, then, can be described as a religious social movement deriving from mystical Christianity. And not from some sort of archaic second-century mysticism, but from the forms of mysticism which have flourished within the culture of modern American capitalism, the forms of mysticism with which Americans of all ethnic backgrounds and all walks of life are already, directly or indirectly, acquainted—Evangelical Christianity and, more recently, messianic New Age spiritualism.

The UFO movement is filled with pleas for humanity to heed the message of hope and truth sent by the highly evolved space-faring aliens who have come from the heavens on a mission—yes, as missionaries—to contact us. The movement's utopianism reveals a zealous belief in a perfect world beyond—in space, in the sky, in the heavens—a place that can teach us not merely useful things, but absolute truths about how to save our world and ourselves. This sense of an absolute truth, of indisputable right and wrong, of a perfect world beyond, is something the UFO-believers share in common with every evangelical Protestant, conservative Catholic, orthodox Jew, fundamentalist Muslim, New Age spiritualist, and PostModernist activist in America.

Like any religious movement, as the UFO movement grows, it becomes more than just a source of spiritual hope. It becomes a source for social and political organization: a community of shared worldview, shared questions and answers, shared problems and solutions, shared villains and saviors, shared fears and hopes, perhaps even shared cravings and yearnings. And it becomes a source for economic organization: a definable market for the production and consumption of books, lectures, tours, and accessories, a solid foundation on which commerce will be transacted and careers will be built. When everyone stops believing in UFOs, somebody is going out of business.

When we recognize the continuity of the strange with the familiar, it becomes harder to distance ourselves from the strange, but easier to make sense of the strange and the familiar alike. The value of the term "fringe" then becomes questionable because of its connotation of remoteness. There is nothing fringe about exploring shared questions and answers. Nothing fringe about making friends and enemies. Nothing fringe about making a living. If being fringe means being strange or remote, then the UFO faith is not a fringe movement. Too bad.

© 1997, 2007 John Clay