Jones first insisted that mothers squirt poison into the mouths of their children using syringes. Some discussion ensued - an alternate plan put forth by Temple member Christine Miller involved flying Temple members to the USSR - but Jones prevailed, after repeatedly telling his followers that Congressman Ryan was dead, and that would bring the authorities soon (an audiotape of this meeting exists, and is just as creepy as you'd think). Jones urged Temple members to commit suicide in order to make a political point. We'll get back to that last one in a moment. Flavor Aid - a grape-flavored beverage similar to Kool-Aid. He was killing them all.Īfter the airstrip murders outside Jonestown, Jim Jones ordered Temple members to create a fruity mix containing a cocktail of chemicals including cyanide, diazepam (aka Valium - an anti-anxiety medication), promethazine (aka Phenergan - a sedative), chloral hydrate (a sedative/hypnotic sometimes called "knockout drops"), and most interestingly. On the final White Night, Jones was not testing his Temple followers. And, by the way, he had been stockpiling cyanide for years (not to mention piles of other drugs). After a while, Jones revealed that the liquid didn't contain poison - but that one day it would. On previous occasions when Temple members mock-voted for suicide, Jones tested them: Temple members were given small cups of liquid purportedly containing poison, and were asked to drink it. Faced with this hypothetical invasion scenario, Jones offered Temple members these choices: stay and fight the imaginary invaders, head for the USSR, head for the Guyana jungle, or commit "revolutionary suicide" (in other words, mass suicide as an act of political protest). intelligence agencies would soon attack Jonestown he had even staged fake attackers around Jonestown to add an air of pseudo-realism to the proceedings (though it's hard to imagine that such a small community wouldn't recognize their own people pretending to threaten the Temple). On various occasions prior to the murders, Jones had hosted White Night meetings in which he suggested that U.S. When the murderers returned to Jonestown and reported their actions, Jones promptly started up what he called a "White Night" meeting, inviting all Temple members. But Jim Jones had sent armed Temple members (his creepily-named "Red Brigade") with the group, and the Red Brigade opened fire, killing Ryan, one Temple defector, and three members of the media - and injuring eleven others.
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Eventually the entire Ryan party plus the group of Jonestown defectors drove to a nearby airstrip and boarded planes, hoping to leave. While processing paperwork to help Temple members return to the U.S., Ryan was attacked by knife-wielding Temple member Don Sly, but the would-be assassin was restrained before he could injure Ryan. Jones himself lived in a small shared house with few luxuries. It didn't hurt that he had amassed a multi-million-dollar fortune prior to arriving in Jonestown, though he did not share (or even use) the wealth. Jones figured his people could farm the land in this new utopia. It occupied nearly 4,000 acres, had poor soil and limited fresh water, was dramatically overcrowded, and Temple members were forced to work long hours. He named it "Jonestown," and it was not a nice place. So in 1977, Jones again moved the Temple and its peoples, this time to a settlement he had been building since 1974 in the South American nation of Guyana. Jones said: "Those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment - socialism." Oh, and Jones was a drug addict, preferring literal opiates to metaphorical ones.Īs media scrutiny increased and his political profile became more complicated, Jones became concerned that the Peoples Temple's tax-exempt religious status in the U.S. In the following years, Jones abandoned all pretenses of Christianity and revealed himself to be an atheist who had simply used religion as a tool to legitimize his views. And where would that new Eden be? Jones selected the remote town of Redwood Valley, California, and moved the Peoples Temple there prior to the deadline.Īs you know, that end-of-the-world deadline came and went with no nuclear holocaust. He even specified a date (July 15, 1967), and suggested that after the apocalypse, a socialist paradise would exist on Earth. Little-Known Punctuation Marks We Should Be UsingĪs the Peoples Temple grew throughout the 1960s, Jones lost the plot on the whole Marxism thing and began to preach about an impending nuclear apocalypse.The Craziest Myths the Mythbusters Busted.Space Madness: The Psychosis That Never Happened.
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