DATELINE–Rancho Santa Fe

The videotape doesn’t lie. All of the 39, mostly-white Heaven’s Gate cultists were wearing black Nike sneakers.

All of them. Black. Why?

Nike, you may recall, was the winged Greek Goddess of Victory. But a victory for whom?

Follow us down the darkest alleys of the online underworld as we unravel a conspiracy bigger than anything the mainstream press is willing to divulge. Before this story ends, you’ll find yourself face to face with the sixth richest man in America, an inner-city economic development agency, a ten-year-old police cover-up in the City of Brotherly Love, and the most exciting technology to hit the Web since the browser. Brace yourselves, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

How did the Heaven’s Gate organization support 39 baby boomers in a $7,000 per month luxury mansion by “putting up Web pages"? Their astonishingly successful revenue model has thus far eluded thousands of corporations with considerably less overhead costs. Even Wired Ventures, the very bastion of straightlaced cyber-corporatism, cannot answer this seemingly innocent question.

Perhaps, they cannot. Perhaps, they can. Perhaps, the answer is buried deeper than the surface of your monitor. Consider the black sneakers. Let the public record show that each and every one of them was an identical model of Nike brand footwear.

According to Wired News (again), “Nike brushes aside reports that it’s interested in buying a cable channel or - failing that - using the Internet in place of television.” What would a shoe company want with a dedicated cable channel, let alone an electronic hearth? Do they really need that much mass media power just to sell a pair of rubber slippers?

Maybe. Maybe not. Do we really believe that’s all they’re selling? The British charity Christian Aid quotes a Nike representative who explains: “We’re not just selling a sneaker, we’re a lifestyle.” Note the omission of a verb in the latter part of his pronouncement. Nike doesn’t sell a lifestyle, Nike is a lifestyle.

Nike, a lifestyle? Just what are the contours of a sneaker-based life? Without a Nike channel in our midst, we turned to their Web site for answers. The following may shock you.

Vivid, the “architect” of the forthcoming Nike Web site, describes its staff as “vividians", a name all-too reminiscent of Waco’s own Branch Davidians. Their Web site even makes explicit references to their cult ties: Here at vivid we’re not ready to shed our containers just yet - but we are sending our Fearless Leader to Jupiter Communications’ upcoming @Travel ‘97 Conference in Chicago. (http://www.vivid.com/news) And deeper within their site: Who are we? How did we get here? Not a day goes by that we don’t ask ourselves the same thing, truthfully. Near as we can tell, we were all drawn together by a mysterious force, more powerful than our meager human brains could comprehend. In the meantime, we’ve formed this spiffy company to keep ourselves busy until we receive further instructions. (http://www.vivid.com/vividians) But instructions from whom? Aliens riding on the crest of a comet? And why would a multimedia production company be in the business of recruitment literature (as in their widely-published “Careers in Multimedia” guidebook)? What is really going on behind this thin veneer of “a lifetime in multimedia and Web design"?

Consider the comet. To many, a comet is not unlike the “swoosh” logo known worldwide as the Nike seal. Nike’s vice-chairman, Richard Donahue, describes his company’s identity as follows: “The commitment is to be a global company - one management, one theme, one value, one ethic around the world.’

One ethic, one value, one theme, and, lastly, one “management” around the world. But who, or what, will be the manager?

Unearthing the planned Nike administration takes us around the world, visiting a host of new “NikeTowns". According to LEAP New Media, the NikeTown expansion has been wrought by an advanced technological pitch with fantastical nuances: The [LEAP] laptop presentation was developed as an innovative sell-in tool for Nike’s upper management to take on the road to visually explain the NIKETOWN concept. The audience would be dignitaries, government officials, etc. in foreign markets where Nike would like to expand its NIKETOWN operations. (http://www.leapnet.com/port/media_new/) Dignitaries? Government officials? Why would they be talking to American shoe salesmen? As it turns out, foreign states are not the only powers engaged in clandestine negotiations with the forces of Nike. More on that later.

When a company wields the power to create and destroy Worlds, you can bet every bureaucrat from here to Timbuktu is going to want to “make nice” with the boys in the power suits. But what awesome technological force does Nike possess – what is their nuclear football?

According to Wired (yet again), that cataclysmic device is named PUSH: “PUSH! Kiss your Web browser goodbye…” A standard that will eliminate all Web browsers, vaporizing them in the blink of an eye, is soon to be unleashed upon the World. Nike, thanks to their “vividian” patsies, will no doubt be at the forefront of the new, post-PUSH world order.

Yes. But the story doesn’t end here. It is a well-known fact that Black Americans are both disproportionally poor and prone to wear Nike emblems on their persons. Yet, it is not as well known that a prominent African-American leader by the name of the Reverend Jesse Jackson founded an organization also named PUSH (People United To Save Humanity) more than 24 years ago – a full three years before the Heaven’s Gate began their quest. One of PUSH’s agents, Eddie Harris of Detroit, describes the pro-Humanity organization’s goals thusly: “The scope of everything we do is economic development for African Americans.”

Economic development, says Harris, but what then of the Nike emblem? Why would so many disadvantaged African Americans fork over more than a hundred US dollars a pop for a pair of Nike “shoes"? Could it be that they wish to emulate the stellar success of basketball legend Michael Jordan (the recent star of “Space Jam")?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps they are simply trying to get some place that’s better than where they are now. Perhaps the People United to Save Humanity have called Nike’s bluff, insisting that humanity itself is at risk. For what other destination lies before these disenchanted minority youths than the intergalactic trajectory of a comet?

Swoosh. LEAP. PUSH. Where is this headed? Surely there is a history to all of this – a secret power struggle of which we are still unaware.

Perhaps, you recall “MOVE"?

Investigators seeking the truth behind the Nike emblem marking Heaven’s Gate need only look back in time to Philadelphia circa 1985. As MOVE, a group of African-American naturists (neo-luddites), stockpiled arms and supplies in their urban compound, local authorities smelled something foul in the air. That smell was smoke. The Associated Press tells it this way: The attack followed a daylong siege May 13, 1985. Police had gone to the compound to serve search warrants and arrest members of the radical back-to-nature group…

The [police] bombing of the group’s rowhouse headquarters in a Philadelphia neighborhood triggered a fire that engulfed a city block and destroyed more than 60 homes. Eleven people, including five children, died in the blaze. A mistake? A flare-up? Or a coolly planned act of genocide? Did former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor know the awful truth that burned down with the MOVE HQ? Did he know what Phil Knight, supposed CEO of Nike and the 6th richest man in America, is obviously hiding – the horrifying testament revealed in the Heaven’s Gate mass-suicide?

Why Black Nikes? Why did the Internet trail lead us to PUSH? Why is it that Black teenagers are killed for their Nikes – for their “Air” Jordans, no less? Are the NikeTowns sprouting up around the world the real Gates of Heaven, the actual recruitment centers? Are Blacks being recruited by means of a carefully-contrived mass-delusion of otherwordly power and new life? Is Phil Knight the true Do, as in the now global mantra “Just Do It"?

No. Because, simply, Blacks are the only real aliens in this April Fool’s story.