Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate is the popular name given to a small UFO contactee group that gained international notoriety in March of 1997 when 39 of its members committed suicide in an effort to ascend to a higher level of consciousness. The group had been in the news in the 1970s when the founders, Marshall Herff Applewhite (1931-1997) and Bonnie Lu Truesdale Nettles (1924-1985), had made a widely reported tour across the United States in their initial recruitment drive to gather people in the expectation that they would soon be taken from Earth in a flying saucer. However, they had dropped out of sight for several years and their continued existence through the mid-1990s remained known to a relative few.

Heaven's Gate appears to have been born on the minds of Applewhite and Nettles in the years following their meeting in March of 1972. They operated a metaphysical center called the Know Place in Houston, Texas, for a while during which time Nettles, who was quite knowledgeable of occult lore, introduced Applewhite to theosophy. They closed the center at the end of the year and left Houston for the West Coast in January of 1973. As they began to speculate on their role in life, they concluded that they were the Two Witnesses mentioned in the biblical Book of Revelation, chapter 11, who would appear at the endtime and be murdered and then resurrected. This self-understanding would be the source of the names by which they would be popularly known, "The Two" and " Bo and Peep. " They believed that the Earth was about to undergo a renovation and that their job would be to locate a select few who would be taken off the Earth to The Level Above the Human (T.E.L.A.H.) in a flying saucer.

In 1975 and 1976, the group recruited more than one hundred people, mostly young adults, but ceased to recruit more as of April 21, 1976. During this period Applewhite and Nettles were the subject of intense media coverage and one book. They then turned inward and began to train the members of the group in the disciplines that would prepare them to transcend their earthly situation. They were quite mobile for several years but then settled in Texas where they remained through the 1980s. The group's number slowly dwindled, and Nettles died of cancer in 1985.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the group began new efforts at recruitment by producing a video that was shown on community access television. Then in 1993 it ran an ad in USA Today with a "Final Offer." In 1994, Applewhite introduced the idea that transcending the earthly situation might come by way of suicide. The group was on the move again, this time making its way westward. Members finally settled in Rancho Santa Fe, a suburb of San Diego, California. By now their numbers had dwindled to fewer than 50 people.

During the time in Rancho Santa Fe, the group searched for a new home, in a land that would be more hospitable to their monastic lifestyle. They had developed an ordered life that resembled that of a monastic group with its disciplines of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. Some of the men had been castrated as a means of quelling their sexual urges.

The beginning of the end came early in 1997 when a new comet was spotted and rumors were circulated that something was following it as it approached. The group began to think that the spaceship, piloted by Nettles, was on the way. As the Hale-Bopp Comet reached the point in its orbit closest to Earth, which happened to coincide with the spring equinox, the 39 remaining members of the group, including Apple-white, committed suicide. Their bodies were found on March 26, 1997. The group was dressed in black shirts and pants and Nike sneakers. Each member was lying in a bunk bed with a purple cloth over him/her. They had died over a three-day period.

Fifteen died the first day, 15 the second, and the last nine on the third. Of these, eight had been relatively new recruits who had joined in the early 1990s. A month later one additional member, Wayne Cooke, committed suicide. Another member, Chuck Humphrey, spent a year trying to make sure that accurate information about the group was made available and archived, and then in February of 1998, he joined his colleagues in death. He set up a website that is still available (as of June 2000) in several mirror sites on the Internet. It contains the major book published by the group, How and When "Heaven's Gate" May Be Entered.

Of several groups that have experienced multiple violent deaths among its members, Heaven's Gate is unique in that all who died appeared to have been consenting adults who had thought out their act of suicide. Since its end, the group has become an important topic of study for those interested in new religions and violence.

Sources:

Heaven's Gate. http://www5.zdnet.com/yil/higher/heavensgate/index.html. June 14, 2000.

Hewes, Hayden, and Brad Steiger. UFO Missionaries Extraordinary. New York: Pocket Books, 1976. Rev. ed. as: Inside Heaven's Gate; The UFO Cult Leaders Tell Their Story in Their Own Words. New York Signet, 1997.

Wessinger, Catherine. How the Millennium Comes Violently. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2000.