The Fiftieth Anniversary Gathering of the Heaven’s Gate Waldport Meeting (Field Notes)

ABSTRACT: The new religious movement that would come to be called Heaven’s Gate had its first public success in Waldport, Oregon on 14 September 1975. Fifty years to the date, ex-members who had joined the group at the original meeting gathered to commemorate the anniversary of that event. These Field Notes describe the meeting and the content presented by the ex-members. While there was little new material, their presentations helped contextualize the original Waldport meeting as a regional one, and their trajectories into and out of the group illuminate the movement’s social (dis)organization and teachings.