ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the apocalyptic expectations of UFO and alien-based religions, with a focus on Heaven's Gate, and argues that suicide, the willful destruction of the body and abandonment of human life, is generally understood as positive, undertaken to enable the transition to the 'Next Level'. Heaven's Gate was opposed to suicide per se, but redefined it as turning 'against the Next Level when it is being offered', claiming that human bodies were mere 'vessels' and 'vehicles', so that the destruction of these containers was an action of little importance. Viewed from this theological worldview, suicide births the human individual into the 'Next Level', just as eschatological destruction of the Earth, is understood as a positive transformation that births a new world, the 'new Heaven and new Earth' of the New Testament's Revelation. Thus individual destruction of the body and the eschatological destruction of the world are functionally identical phenomena connected in a microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship.
