The Story of “Heaven’s Gate”

Heaven's Gate is one of the most notorious cults of the 20th century, Twenty years after their mass suicide made headlines across the world. In March 1997, America was shook by the strange story that included mass suicide, wild public-access-style videos, an obsession with U.F.O.s and, in true late-Nineties fashion, tracksuits and matching Nikes.

They also had a new recruitment tool: the Internet. Heaven’s Gate has the distinction of being the first well-known American cult of the Internet era, using the new technology to share their beliefs with a wider audience and also to make a living.

They derived a large portion of their income from designing web pages. Formed in the Seventies, they had become reclusive by the start of the 1990s and started attempting to recruit members online using the organisational name “Higher Source” for the website. The cult’s philosophy took its roots from Applewhite’s Presbyterian upbringing – his father was a minister – and essentially grafted belief in extraterrestrials onto Christian theology. Applewhite told his acolytes that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, that God was an alien, and that they were living in the end times.

They read the Bible, especially, Revelation Chapter 11 in the New Testament, a section about two witnesses that would prophecy. At the end of their prophecy, they would have to battle demons, which Applewhite and Nettles called “the Luciferians.”

But then, in late March 1997, 39 members including Applewhite wearing black track suits and sneakers, ate apple sauce laced with barbiturates and washed it down with vodka. They then put bags over their heads, purple shrouds over their bodies, and laid down to leave their earthly vehicles behind.

They weren’t killing themselves, they thought, but freeing their souls from their so they could ascend to a spacecraft flying in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet – which at that point was passing by Earth – and were going to be taken to their new home in space. Instead, police found their bodies on March 26th, and the images of the white and black Nikes poking out from under a purple cloth would be burned into the eyes of a generation.

Do you believe?