Welcome to Heaven's Gate.

Previously on Heaven's Gate.

Everything in the cult was controlled.

All of our emotions were under the watchful eye of our self-policing, following procedure

every second of the day.

Doe is wondering whether his students would be as committed as those students were at the

David Kress.

He respected the students staying with it, even with the threat of death.

I don't have been in the group maybe two, three weeks with everyone in the room.

He just asked each of us individually if we'd be willing to devoluntarily end our life in this world.

These were the days when there were other cults and other families would kidnap their relative, their family member from whatever group they were with and put them through deprogramming without their consent.

I don't want to say that Heaven's Gate members were brainwashed.

I don't want to say that they were mind-controlled, but I think we do have to admit that like any group, there was peer pressure.

What is the biggest lesson of Heaven's Gate?

That wonderful, idealistic, talented, educated people from very nice families can be deceptively recruited and subjected to powerful mind-control techniques that make them into a new identity that's dependent on obedient.

Did the followers of Heaven's Gate choose their fate? Or were they brainwashed?

This man, Stephen Hassan, he sure it's a latter, and as you'll hear, Hassan has spent more time around cult members than any of us are ever likely to.

He's helped a lot of people leave their cults, but there's a problem with this word we're using, brainwashing.

Because brainwashing is very hard to define, and it might just be something we've come up with, like dark matter and physics, to answer questions that we can't grapple with otherwise.

On today's show, one family struggles to understand why their brilliant daughter left them.

We pass the inspection we're allowed into California, we have no fruit, no plants, and no animals on board.

And they hope they can bring her home.

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