BRAINWASHING NOT EVIDENT, EXPERTS SAY : PREY ON IGNORANCE.

Byline: Karen Rafinski Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

The members of the Heaven's Gate cult who committed suicide were not the troubled teens taken in by a charismatic cult leader as characterized in popular mythology and TV movies.

They were middle-aged men and women with enough education and sophistication to run a successful Internet computer business. Yet these adults believed they were aliens briefly leasing human bodies and that they would soon join the mother ship trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet. They believed so fervently that they were willing to take their own lives to escape a planet they thought would soon be recycled by aliens.

If it all sounds like an ``X-Files'' plot, that's perhaps a sign that a popular culture besotted with ``Star Wars'' and tabloid tales of UFOs has made such outrageous stories seem plausible to many, experts say.

``I'm not saying anybody who has Internet access and an interest in `Star Trek' is going to end up in a group that commits suicide,'' said Ronald Enroth, a sociologist at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, who has studied cults for years. ``But in a certain sense, our culture has predisposed some individuals in the direction of these more extreme things.''

Enroth had a brief encounter with the Heaven's Gate cult in the late 1970s, and he noted that their members were generally well-educated and fairly affluent. Even then, the group was urging members to sever ties with their families and give up all their worldly goods to prepare for ``the great astral trip.''

He doesn't find it all that surprising that cult members could have believed such strange cosmology. That's partly because many Americans have a poor grasp of the hard sciences, making them susceptible to bogus theories disguised as real evidence, he said. Cults tend to prey on this ignorance, cloaking their philosophies in science - or the Bible - to make them more palatable.

Many groups also prey on people in transition, perhaps between jobs or marriages or vulnerable in some other way. Many cult members are simply lonely, coming from fractured or otherwise damaged families.

``These groups have an uncanny ability to `love bomb' them, to surround them with a surrogate family,'' Enroth said.

But it's a myth that such groups brainwash people or use mind-control, experts say. Conversion is usually a gradual and voluntary process, sometimes just a way to rebel and upset parents.

``We have a saying in the literature that conversion is just coming to agree with your best friend,'' said James Richardson, a sociologist at the University of Nevada in Reno. ``After hanging around for a month or two, their ideas don't seem so out there anymore.''

As time goes on and initiates get more involved they are usually urged to sever contacts with their families and outside friends. They move into closed communities where information is tightly controlled. They often give up all their worldly goods - in a ritual designed to bind them to the group, Enroth said.

While joining a cult may well be a voluntary process, once they're in, members can become victims of bizarre group dynamics. So it's not that surprising that - with all their information filtered by cult leaders and little contact with the outside world - members of the Heaven's Gate cult came to believe that suicide would transport them to alien planets.

``I don't think they were crazy,'' Richardson said. ``I don't think they were brainwashed. I think they were convinced of a set of beliefs that we can't wrap our minds around.''

Most groups harmless

A few years ago there was a lot of talk of deprogramming, but that has since fallen out of favor. Many groups that used to kidnap cult victims were guilty of the same tactics they accused the cults of - sleep deprivation, starvation and other attempts at mind control. Some were prosecuted when grown children simply rejected the efforts of their parents, returned to the cult and pressed charges. Today, those groups provide exit counseling to those who leave the groups on their own, but most have dropped the deprogramming.

Instead, experts advise people not to panic when someone they care about becomes involved with a cult. Most of these groups are harmless. They also have a high attrition rate, so the odds are the member will drift away of his or her own accord. Keep talking, calmly, to the cult member, pointing out the inconsistencies in the group's logic. Eventually, the cult member will probably see the light.

``I get calls from parents all the time, and I tell them it's probably just a phase their children are going through,'' Richardson said. ``They're going to live through it. Just keep the lines of communication open and make them feel welcome to come home.''