Heaven's Gate (religious group)

• 1. Introduction

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  In March 1997, the website of an American religious group called Heaven's Gate carried a final announcement. It declared that "Hale-Bopp brings closure to Heaven's Gate" and spoke of "22 years of classroom here on planet Earth." It described a coming "graduation" from the Human Evolutionary Level. The members, it said, were "happily prepared to leave 'this world' and go with Ti's crew." The words were posted just before dozens of the group's members died together in a coordinated act. To an outsider, the message reads like a riddle. Who was Ti, and who made up the crew? What kind of classroom runs for 22 years, and what does it mean to graduate from it? Why would a comet signal the end of a lesson? The answers begin long before the comet, with two people whose first meeting nobody can fully reconstruct.

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• 2. Two Strangers

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  In March 1972, Marshall Applewhite, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a former soldier, met a 44-year-old married nurse named Bonnie Nettles. Nobody can say for certain how the meeting happened. Applewhite wrote that he was visiting a sick friend at the hospital where she worked. The scholar James Lewis suggests that Applewhite was a patient there. Applewhite insisted he was not receiving treatment.

  Applewhite arrived at that meeting after a bad run in Houston, Texas. The University of St. Thomas had dismissed him as music director over an alleged relationship with one of his male students. His wife had earlier left him because of his multiple relationships with men. The setbacks left him depressed.

  Nettles lived a very different inner life. She wrote an astrology column for a Houston newspaper, drawing on a 19th-century Franciscan friar she called "Brother Francis," whom she believed she was channeling. She belonged to the Theosophical Society and joined weekly séances with her local group. Her own marriage was falling apart. Applewhite later recalled feeling he had known her for a long time and decided they had met in a past life. She told him that extraterrestrials had foretold their meeting. This persuaded him that he had a divine assignment.

  The two pondered the life of St. Francis of Assisi and read Helena Blavatsky, R. D. Laing and Richard Bach. They kept a King James Bible and studied passages about Christology, asceticism and eschatology. Applewhite also read science fiction by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.

  A pamphlet from this period described Jesus' reincarnation as a Texan, a veiled reference to Applewhite. The pair concluded that they had been chosen to fulfill biblical prophecy and had higher-level minds than other people. They also decided they were the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation. They called themselves "The Two" or "The UFO Two" and visited churches and spiritual groups to announce this. They expected to be killed, then resurrected and carried onto a spaceship in view of onlookers. They called that event "the Demonstration." Other religious groups received these ideas poorly.

  Their first follower arrived in May 1974. Sharon Morgan abandoned her children to join them, then left a month later and went back to her family. Nettles and Applewhite were arrested for credit card fraud after using Morgan's cards, although she had agreed to it. The charges were dropped. A routine check then revealed that Applewhite had kept a stolen rental car from St. Louis for nine months. He spent six months in jail, mostly in Missouri. Released in early 1975, he rejoined Nettles, and the two went looking for an audience.

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• 3. The Crew on the Road

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  In April 1975, about 80 people gathered for a meeting in Studio City, Los Angeles. At meetings like this one, the pair presented themselves as representatives of beings from another planet, the Next Level, who wanted volunteers for an experiment. Those who joined, they promised, would be lifted to a higher evolutionary level. In Studio City they shared what they called a "simultaneous" revelation that they were the two witnesses of the end time. According to Benjamin Zeller, accounts of the evening differ, but all call it momentous. About 25 people joined, and the converts were called "the crew."

  In September 1975, Applewhite and Nettles preached at a motel hall in Waldport, Oregon. After selling their worldly possessions and saying farewell to loved ones, around 20 people vanished from public view. Walter Cronkite covered it on CBS Evening News, one of the first national reports on the group. He said: "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." In reality, the two leaders had arranged for the group to go underground.

  Calling themselves "Do" and "Ti," pronounced "doe" and "tee," the pair now led nearly one hundred members across the country. The crew slept in tents and sleeping bags and begged in the streets. Staying hidden from authorities and the media let them concentrate on the leaders' doctrine of reaching a "higher evolutionary level" above human. Do and Ti claimed to have reached it already.

  Jacques Vallée met the group when it was called Human Individual Metamorphosis, or HIM. The movement renamed itself several times before settling on Heaven's Gate. Its leaders also used aliases, notably "Bo and Peep." Applewhite believed he was directly related to Jesus, and his writings cast him as Jesus' successor and "Present Representative" of Christ on Earth. Ti, in turn, was presented as God the Father and Do's "older member." Their writings blended Millennialism, Gnosticism and science fiction.

  In April 1976, the group stopped recruiting and became reclusive. Applewhite and Nettles imposed a rigid set of behavioral rules, including bans on sexual activity and drug use. Zeller described the change as a shift "from a loosely organized social group to a centralized religious movement comparable to a roving monastery." A core group of a few dozen members remained. The rules were strict, but they rested on a theology that scholars have struggled to classify.

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• 4. The Next Level

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  Benjamin Zeller has argued that the theology of Heaven's Gate was rooted mainly in Evangelicalism, with New Age elements added. Other scholars describe it as a mixture of Christian millenarianism, New Age thought and ufology, which is why it is usually called a UFO religion. Scholars still disagree about which strand mattered most.

  Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? had recently appeared when the group formed, and the ancient astronaut idea was widely discussed. Applewhite and Nettles adapted it. They taught that aliens had planted the seeds of humanity millions of years ago and had returned to harvest spiritually evolved people. Only a select few would be chosen. The rest would be left in a corrupt world. In this reading, the Bible recorded episodes of extraterrestrial contact, and what it calls God was a highly developed extraterrestrial.

  The heaven the group sought had a formal name: The Evolutionary Level Above Human, abbreviated TELAH. It was described as a physical place, another world in our own universe. Its residents lived in bliss and nourished themselves by absorbing pure sunlight. They did not have sex, eat or die, the very things that make humans "mammalian." To qualify, a person had to shed every attachment to the planet, including family, friends, gender, sexuality, individuality, jobs, money and possessions. Members took names made of three letters plus the suffix -ody, to mark themselves as children of the Next Level.

  The group also believed in evil aliens, whom it called Luciferians. These beings falsely presented themselves to Earthlings as God and conspired to keep humans from developing. They were technically advanced, with spacecraft, telepathy and long lives, and they used holograms to fake miracles. Heaven's Gate held that every religion on Earth had been corrupted by them.

  In 1985, Bonnie Nettles died of cancer. Recruits had originally been told they would be biologically and chemically transformed and carried alive aboard a spacecraft to heaven. Nettles had been chosen by the Next Level as a messenger, yet her body died on Earth. The doctrine was revised so that a consciousness leaving the body counted as leaving Earth in a spacecraft. The body became a "container" or "vehicle," and members routinely used the word "vehicle" when speaking of a person.

  Other details shifted too. The Two first taught that they were extraterrestrial beings. After the notion of "walk-ins" became popular in the New Age subculture, they began describing themselves as extraterrestrial walk-ins. A walk-in is an entity that occupies a body vacated by its original soul. The idea gave them clean slates, erasing their human histories as the histories of the souls who once lived in those bodies. Applewhite also taught that the walk-in in his body was the one that had inhabited Jesus 2,000 years ago. As in Nestorianism, this separated the man called Jesus from the sacred spirit that used his body.

  Animals, the group said, also had souls. A soul in an animal, such as a guide dog that sees itself as a family member, could rise to the human level and enter the Next Level.

  Heaven's Gate taught that there were four ways to "graduate." The first was a physical pickup by a TELAH spacecraft, which Zeller calls a UFO version of the Rapture. The second was natural death, accidental death or random violence. The third was death from outside persecution. After the Branch Davidians died in Waco, Texas, and after the events involving Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Applewhite feared the American government would kill the members. The fourth was a willful exit from the body. Near the end, Applewhite had a revelation that they might have to abandon their bodies as Jesus had done. The group declared itself against suicide, which it defined as "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered."

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• 5. Life in the Crew

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  Only adults over the age of 18 could join Heaven's Gate. Members gave up their possessions and lived an ascetic life without indulgences, sharing everything. Eight men, Applewhite among them, voluntarily underwent castration as an extreme way of keeping that discipline. The first attempt was carried out by a former nurse in the group and nearly killed the patient. It caused at least one member to leave. Every operation afterward took place in a hospital.

  John Craig was a respected Republican and ranch owner who had come close to winning a 1970 race for the Colorado House of Representatives. He joined in 1975, and he was not typical. Researchers describe most of the crew as "longtime truth-seekers" or spiritual hippies who had long tried to find themselves through spiritual means. Some sociologists link the group's growth to the era's appetite for individual religious experience. They point to Sheilaism, a way of merging diverse religious backgrounds into one shared, generalized faith. Followers found it appealing next to the traditional dogmas of Judaism, Catholicism and evangelical Christianity.

  Jacques Vallée's 1979 book Messengers of Deception described an unusual public meeting organized by the group. He worried about the authoritarian political and religious outlooks of contactee groups, and Heaven's Gate did not escape his criticism. The media largely ignored the group. It was better known in UFO circles and through academic studies by the sociologist Robert Balch.

  Beginning in the early 1990s, the group used a website to proselytize and recruit, under the business name Higher Source. The same name covered its source of revenue, which was professional website development. The cultural theorist Paul Virilio called the group a cybersect because it relied so heavily on computer-mediated communication. In January 1994, LA Weekly ran an article on the group, then known as "The Total Overcomers." A man named Richard Ford found Heaven's Gate through that article and joined, renaming himself Rio DiAngelo. His role in 1997 would prove pivotal.

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• 6. Comet Season

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  Comet Hale-Bopp took on a private meaning for the group in the years after its website went online. Rumors spread among members that the comet held the secret to their salvation. On several programs, beginning as early as November 1996, the radio host Art Bell discussed a "companion object" hidden in the comet's shadow. People have speculated about whether his shows influenced the group. Dan Friesen, who hosts the podcast Knowledge Fight, places more blame on Courtney Brown than on Bell.

  In June 1995, the group bought land near Manzano, New Mexico, and began building a compound out of rubber tires and concrete. It left abruptly in April 1996. In October 1996, the crew rented a 9200-square-foot mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, which it called "The Monastery." The rent was $7,000 a month, paid in cash. The same month, the group bought alien abduction insurance covering up to fifty members. The policy would pay $1 million per person for abduction, impregnation or death by aliens.

  In early March 1997, Louis Theroux contacted the group about his BBC2 series Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. The reply said that "at the present time a project like this would be an interference with what we must focus on." On the 13th of March 1997, media reported a mass sighting of unidentified lights over Phoenix.

  On the 19th and the 20th of March 1997, Applewhite recorded a video called Do's Final Exit. He spoke of mass suicide and "the only way to evacuate this Earth." He asserted that Hale-Bopp was the sign the group had been waiting for. He also pointed to speculation that an unidentified flying object was trailing the comet. Members believed a UFO would take their souls to another level of existence above human, described as both physical and spiritual. Most members also recorded a farewell message on videotape.

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• 7. The Final Days

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  The 39 adherents were 21 women and 18 men between the ages of 26 and 72. They are believed to have died in three groups over three successive days, beginning on the 22nd of March 1997. Members who were still living cleaned up after each group.

  All 39 wore identical black shirts and sweatpants, brand-new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team." The patch was one of many Star Trek terms the group used. Each person carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters. Former members said this was standard for anyone leaving the house for a job, and a humorous way of saying the dead had left the planet for good. Another former member tied it to a Mark Twain story about $5.75 being "the cost to ride the tail of a comet to heaven." No such passage by Twain is known to exist.

  In a 2020 interview with Harry Robinson, two members who were away from Rancho Santa Fe at the time explained the clothing. The matching outfits stood for unity. The shoes were Nikes because the group "got a good deal on the shoes." Applewhite was a fan of Nikes, so everyone in the group was expected to wear and like them. The group even had a saying, "Just Do it," echoing Nike's slogan but pronouncing "Do" as "Doe," like Applewhite's nickname.

  Thomas Nichols, brother of the actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura in the original Star Trek television series, was among the dead. Each body was laid neatly in its own bed, with the face and torso covered by a square purple cloth for privacy. Applewhite was the third-to-last member to die. The final two were the only ones found without the purple cloths over their upper bodies.

  Before the last of the deaths, the group mailed matching packages to current and former associates. One went to Rio DiAngelo, arriving on the evening of the 25th of March. It held two VHS tapes, one with Do's Final Exit and one with the followers' farewell messages. A letter inside said, among other things, "we have exited our vehicles just as we entered them." DiAngelo told his boss about the contents, and the boss drove him from Los Angeles to the house. DiAngelo found a back door left deliberately unlocked and recorded what he saw on a video camera. His boss, who had waited outside, then urged him to call the authorities.

  At 3:15 p.m. on the 26th of March 1997, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department received an anonymous 911 tip. The caller said: "This is regarding a mass suicide, and I can give you the address." Days later, the caller was revealed to be DiAngelo. A lone deputy entered through a side door, saw ten bodies and was nearly overcome by a "pungent odor." Two more deputies found no one alive and retreated until a search warrant could be obtained.

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• 8. Aftermath

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  Alan Hale, a co-discoverer of the comet, was pulled into the story as soon as the news linked it to Hale-Bopp. His phone "never stopped ringing the entire day," and he waited until a press conference the next day to respond. Hale later said he had told a colleague, well before the event, "We are probably going to have some suicides as a result of this comet." He recalled being sad rather than surprised. "Comets are lovely objects, but they don't have apocalyptic significance," he said. "We must use our minds, our reason." He repeated these themes on the 24th of July 1998 at the Second World Skeptics Congress in Heidelberg, Germany.

  A 58-year-old man near Marysville, California, left a note dated the 27th of March saying he was "going on the spaceship with Hale-Bopp." A friend found him dead on the 31st of March. He had no known connection to Heaven's Gate but copied details of the reports.

  At least three former members died by suicide in the following months. On the 6th of May 1997, Wayne Cooke and Chuck Humphrey, known in the group as "Rkkody," attempted suicide in a hotel. Cooke died and Humphrey survived. James Pirkey Jr. died on the 11th of May. In February 1998, Humphrey died in Arizona with a five-dollar bill and four quarters in his pocket and a note reading "do not revive."

  On the 22nd of March, the same day the first deaths began, five members of the Order of the Solar Temple also died in a mass suicide. That group held similar beliefs about souls traveling into space, so suspicion of a connection arose at first. Police investigating Heaven's Gate refused to confirm it, and there was no apparent link. The Solar Temple deaths had been planned for the vernal equinox on the 20th of March and slipped to the 22nd after several failed attempts.

  Janja Lalich, a sociologist and former cult member, called the event "murder." The UCLA psychiatrist Louis J. West called the dead "victims of a hoax" and said, "There was villainy here."

  The house in Rancho Santa Fe carried a stigma. Local residents renamed its street from Colina Norte to Paseo Victoria, and the property at 18341 sold in 1999 for $668,000 at a foreclosure sale. That was well below half its assessed value of $1.4 million. A local developer bought it, and neighbors later bought it, razed the building, built a new house and changed the address to 18239.

  Marc and Sarah King of Phoenix, Arizona, operating as the TELAH Foundation, are believed to maintain the group's website. In 2018, they threatened legal action against the rapper Lil Uzi Vert over concept art for the album Eternal Atake. The teased cover used a logo almost identical to the Heaven's Gate logo. A representative for the Kings wrote, "This is not fair use or parody." The released album instead showed three figures standing on the moon beneath a UFO.

  Gary Sherman produced a made-for-TV movie about Applewhite and Nettles, Mysterious Two, in 1979. NBC aired it in 1982. Glynn Washington produced a 10-part podcast called Heaven's Gate in 2017 for the 20th anniversary. HBO Max released the documentary miniseries Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults in 2020. A 2021 episode of Vice's Dark Side of the 90s, titled "A Tale of Two Cults," covered the group. In February 2023, a film about Applewhite and Nettles called The Leader was introduced at the Berlin Film Festival. That October, Michael C. Hall and Grace Caroline Currey were announced as cast members.

  The shoes themselves have had a strange afterlife. The Nike Decades now carry a high resale value, which people attribute to their infamy, their limited availability and their sudden discontinuation.

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