The son of a
Presbyterian minister and a former soldier,
Marshall Applewhite began his foray into
Biblical prophecy in the early 1970s. In March 1972, he met
Bonnie Nettles, a 44-year-old married nurse with an interest in
Theosophy and Biblical prophecy. The circumstances of their meeting are unclear. According to Applewhite's writings, the two met in a hospital where she worked as a nurse while he was visiting a sick friend. Applewhite had recently been dismissed from his role as music director at the
University of St. Thomas in
Houston, Texas, over an alleged relationship with one of his male students, and his wife had previously left him due to his multiple homosexual relationships. These personal and professional setbacks left him feeling depressed.
James Lewis suggests that Applewhite was a patient in the facility. Applewhite claimed, however, that he was only visiting the hospital where Nettles worked as a nurse, not receiving treatment himself. Nettles wrote an astrology column for a Houston newspaper, drawing on insights from "Brother Francis," a 19th-century Franciscan friar she believed she was channeling. She was also involved with the Theosophical Society and participated in weekly séances with her local group in Houston. At the time she met Applewhite, her own marriage was falling apart.. Applewhite later recalled that he felt that he had known Nettles for a long time and concluded that they had met in a past life. She told him their meeting had been foretold to her by
extraterrestrials, persuading him that he had a divine assignment. Applewhite and Nettles pondered the life of
St. Francis of Assisi and read works by
Helena Blavatsky,
R. D. Laing, and
Richard Bach. They kept a
King James Bible and studied passages from the
New Testament focusing on
Christology,
asceticism, and
eschatology. Applewhite also read
science fiction, including works by
Robert A. Heinlein and
Arthur C. Clarke. By June 19, Applewhite and Nettles's beliefs had solidified. They concluded that they had been chosen to fulfill biblical prophecies and been given higher-level minds than other people. They wrote a pamphlet that described
Jesus'
reincarnation as a Texan, a veiled reference to Applewhite. Furthermore, they concluded that they were the
two witnesses described in the
Book of Revelation, and occasionally visited churches and spiritual groups to speak of their identities, often referring to themselves as "The Two", or "The UFO Two". They believed they would be killed and then resurrected and, in view of others, transported onto a spaceship. This event, which they referred to as "the Demonstration", was to prove their claims. These ideas were poorly received by other religious groups. Eventually, Applewhite and Nettles resolved to contact extraterrestrials and seek like-minded followers. They published advertisements for meetings, where they recruited disciples, called "the crew". At the events, they purported to represent beings from another planet, the Next Level, who sought participants for an experiment. They said those who agreed to participate in the experiment would be brought to a higher evolutionary level. In April 1975, during a meeting with a group of 80 people in
Studio City, Los Angeles, they shared their "simultaneous" revelation that they were the two witnesses in the Bible's story of the
end time. According to
Benjamin Zeller, while accounts of the meeting differ, all describe it as momentous and agree that Applewhite and Nettles presented themselves as charismatic leaders with an important spiritual message. About 25 individuals joined the group. In September 1975, Applewhite and Nettles preached at a motel hall in
Waldport, Oregon. After selling all "
worldly" possessions and saying farewell to loved ones, around 20 people vanished from the public eye and joined the group. Later that year, on
CBS Evening News,
Walter Cronkite reported on the disappearances in one of the first national reports on the developing religious group: "A score of persons from a small Oregon town have disappeared. It's a mystery whether they've been taken on a so-called trip to eternity – or simply been taken." Applewhite and Nettles used a variety of
aliases over the years, notably "
Bo and Peep" and "
Do and Ti". The group also had several names prior to the adoption of the name Heaven's Gate. At the time
Jacques Vallée studied the group, it was known as Human Individual Metamorphosis (HIM). The group re-invented and renamed itself several times. Applewhite believed he was directly related to Jesus, meaning he was an "Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human". His writings, which combined aspects of
Millennialism,
Gnosticism, and science fiction, suggest he believed himself to be Jesus' successor and the "Present Representative" of Christ on Earth. Identifying itself by the business name "Higher Source", the group used its website to proselytize and recruit followers beginning in the early 1990s. Rumors started spreading among the group in the following years that the upcoming
Comet Hale–Bopp housed the secret to their ultimate salvation and ascent into the kingdom of heaven. Known to the media (though largely ignored), Heaven's Gate was better known in
UFO circles, and through a series of academic studies by sociologist
Robert Balch. In January 1994,
LA Weekly ran an article on the group, then known as "The Total Overcomers". Richard Ford, who would play a key role in the 1997 group suicide, discovered Heaven's Gate through this article and eventually joined them, renaming himself Rio DiAngelo.
Louis Theroux contacted Heaven's Gate for his
BBC2 documentary series, ''
Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends'', in early March 1997, weeks before their mass suicide. In response to his e-mail, Theroux was told that Heaven's Gate could not participate in the documentary: "at the present time a project like this would be an interference with what we must focus on."
Mass suicide In October 1996, the group rented a large house which they called "The Monastery", a mansion located near 18341 Colina Norte (later renamed to Paseo Victoria) in
Rancho Santa Fe, California. They paid the $7,000 per month rent in cash (). The same month, the group purchased alien abduction insurance that would cover up to fifty members and would pay out $1million per person (the policy covered abduction, impregnation, or death by aliens). In June 1995, they had purchased land near
Manzano, New Mexico, and began creating a compound out of rubber tires and concrete, but had left abruptly in April 1996. On March 13, 1997, media reported on a mass sighting of
unidentified lights over Phoenix. During March 1920, Marshall Applewhite taped himself in a video titled ''Do's Final Exit'', speaking of mass suicide and "the only way to evacuate this Earth". After asserting that
Comet Hale–Bopp was the sign that the group had been looking for, as well as the speculation that an
unidentified flying object (UFO) was trailing the comet, Applewhite and his 38 followers prepared for ritual suicide, coinciding with the closest approach of the comet, ostensibly so their souls could reach the Next Level before the closure of "Heaven's Gate". Members believed that after their deaths a UFO would take their souls to another "level of existence above human", which was described as being both physical and spiritual. Their preparations included most members videotaping a farewell message. The 39 adherents — 21 women and 18 men between the ages of 26 and 72 — are believed to have died in three groups over three successive days, with the remaining participants cleaning up after the prior group's deaths. The suicides began on March 22–23 in three waves. Members took lethal doses of the sedative drug
phenobarbital mixed into
apple sauce or pudding. They also consumed
vodka, which can cause fatal overdose when combined with barbiturates. Afterwards, they secured plastic bags around their heads to induce
asphyxiation. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweatpants, brand-new black-and-white
Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team" (one of many instances of the group's use of
Star Trek terms). Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets. According to former members, this was standard for members leaving the home for jobs and "a humorous way to tell us they all had left the planet permanently"; the five-dollar bill was for covering the cost of
vagrancy laws and the quarters were for calling home from pay phones. Another former member stated that it was a reference to a
Mark Twain story, which said $5.75 was "the cost to ride the tail of a comet to heaven." No such passage from the writings of Twain is known to exist. After a member died, a living member would arrange the body by removing the plastic bag from the person's head, followed by posing the body so that it lay neatly in its own bed, with faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth, for privacy. In a 2020 interview with Harry Robinson, two members who were not in Rancho Santa Fe when the suicides happened said that the identical clothing was a uniform representing unity for the mass suicide, while the Nike Decades were chosen because the group "got a good deal on the shoes". Applewhite was also a fan of Nikes "and therefore everyone was expected to wear and like Nikes" within the group. Heaven's Gate had a saying, "Just Do it", echoing Nike's slogan, but pronouncing "Do" as "Doe", to reflect Applewhite's nickname. Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of the actress
Nichelle Nichols, best known for her role as
Uhura in the original television series of
Star Trek. Applewhite was the third to last member to die; two people remained after him, and were the only ones found with bags over their heads and not having purple cloths covering their top halves. Before the last of the suicides, similar sets of packages were sent to numerous Heaven's Gate affiliated (or formerly affiliated) individuals. contained — like other packages that were sent out DiAngelo informed his boss of the contents of the packages, and received a ride from him from Los Angeles to the Heaven's Gate home so he could verify the letter. DiAngelo found a back door intentionally left unlocked, Days after the suicides, the caller was revealed to be DiAngelo. When the news broke of its relation to Comet Hale–Bopp, the co-discoverer of the comet,
Alan Hale, was drawn into the story. Hale's phone "never stopped ringing the entire day". He chose not to respond until the next day at a press conference after researching the details of the incident. Speaking at the Second World Skeptics Congress in
Heidelberg, Germany on July 24, 1998: Hale said that well before Heaven's Gate, he had told a colleague: News of the mass suicide motivated the copycat suicide of a 58-year-old man living near
Marysville, California. The man left a note dated March 27, which said, "I'm going on the spaceship with Hale–Bopp to be with those who have gone before me," and imitated some of the details of the Heaven's Gate suicides as they had then been reported. The man was found dead by a friend on March 31 and had no known connection with Heaven's Gate. At least three former members of Heaven's Gate died by suicide in the months following the mass suicide. On May 6, 1997, Wayne Cooke and Chuck Humphrey (known as "Rkkody" within the group) attempted suicide in a hotel in a manner similar to that used by the group. Cooke died, but Humphrey survived and was saved by authorities. Another former member, James Pirkey Jr., died by suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound on May 11. In February 1998, Humphrey killed himself in Arizona. His body was found carrying a five-dollar bill and four quarters in his pocket; next to him was a note that read: "[d]o not revive." On March 22, the same day as the Heaven's Gate suicide, five members of the
Order of the Solar Temple group also
died in a mass suicide. The Solar Temple happened to be a group with similar beliefs, in both cases believing that suicide would allow their souls to be transported into space. This led to initial suspicions of a connection, though police investigating the Heaven's Gate deaths refused to acknowledge these speculations. The Solar Temple suicides had been timed for the
vernal equinox on March 20, not the comet, but owing to several failed attempts it happened only on the 22nd. There was no apparent connection between the two groups. UCLA psychiatrist
Louis J. West described the dead members as "victims of a hoax[...] There was villainy here." Two former members, Marc and Sarah King of
Phoenix, Arizona, operating as the TELAH Foundation, are believed to maintain the group's website. The house at which the mass suicide took place carried a stigma throughout the neighborhood. Local residents opted to rename the street on which it was located to "Paseo Victoria". The property itself ended up being purchased by a local developer in 1999 for $668,000 during a foreclosure sale, well below half its assessed value of $1.4 million. It was subsequently purchased by neighbors who razed the building, built a new house in its place, and changed the address to 18239. == Belief system ==