Heaven’s Gate

After surviving a near-death experience in 1972, music professor Marshall Applewhite teamed up with one of his recovery nurses, Bonnie Lu Nettles, to persuade a group of 20 followers to leave their families in Oregon and move to eastern Colorado in 1975, where the couple convinced their followers that an alien spaceship would take them to the “kingdom of heaven,” minus their earthly bodies, which they referred to as temporary containers.

Sound of Music Reference

Known to their followers “Ti” for Nettles and “Do” for Applewhite—a reference to the Von Trapp family from the Sound of Music—in 1985, after Nettles died of cancer and the extraterrestrials failed to show, their group of dupable followers began to drift away.

Enter Hale-Bopp Comet

The cult resurfaced in the early 1990s, when Applewhite began recruiting new members to his bizarre mix of monastic Christian ufology, and when the Hale-Bopp comet was discovered by astronomers in 1995, Applewhite convinced his followers that an alien spacecraft was hiding behind the comet, with orders to pick up Applewhite’s followers for their ascension into heaven—something Applewhite referred to as the “Next Level” or the “The Evolutionary Level Above Human.”

Ascension Prep Begins

In preparation for their ascension, Applewhite rented a 9,000-square-foot mansion in San Diego’s exclusive Rancho Santa Fe community, where they would await their salvation when Hale-Bopp reached its closest distance from earth on March 22nd, 1997. Insert sound bites. Following an anonymous tip, police entered the mansion on March 26th, revealing 39 victims of a wide range of ages who had ended their lives in a mass suicide—the largest ever to occur on American soil.

Death by Booze & Barbiturates

Dressed in matching dark clothing and Nike sneakers, each body was covered by a purple shroud. Investigators soon discovered that the cult members had died by drinking a lethal mix of vodka and barbiturates, at the same time discovering the group’s final post on their website that read, “Hale–Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate …our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion,” making the heaven’s gate cult, a tragic study into human gullibility.