Heaven’s Gate, a notorious American cult, was founded in 1975 by Marshall “Do” Applewhite and Bonnie “Ti” Nettles. Centered on gnostic, alien-centric beliefs, they saw the body as a flawed vessel to be abandoned for ascension aboard a spaceship. After the Hale-Bopp comet’s discovery in 1995, the cult peaked, tragically ending in the 1997 mass suicide of 39 members, who believed the comet signaled their deliverance. Members were found wearing bowl haircuts, gender-neutral outfits, and Nikes, reflecting their extreme uniformity and devotion.
Marshall Applewhite: Space-Bound Zealot
Marshall Herff Applewhite was born May 17th, 1931 to a devout Presbyterian family. He dedicated much of his early life to studying theology and philosophy, even pursuing academic degrees in these respective fields with hopes of being a minister.
However, after a change of heart that led to him pursuing rhythm over religious rigor, Applewhite became a musician for a Presbyterian church before being drafted in the mid-1950s. This early life, though exposing him to deep philosophical and theological concepts, has little to do with what prompted the formation of Heaven’s Gate. That would not come until his profound near-death experience in 1972, which Bonnie Lu Nettles used to get him to join the cult she was co-founding.
Bonnie Lu Nettles: Partner in Crime
Strangely paralleling the devout Christian upbringing of Marshall Applewhite, Bonnie Lu Nettles was born on August 27, 1972, to a deeply devout Baptist family in Texas. Known formerly as “Bonnie Trousdale,” she lived a relatively normal life before becoming a nurse and marrying her husband Joseph Segal Nettles.
Though they had a stable marriage and four children together, their relationship turned for the worse in 1972. Not so coincidentally, that same year Applewhite had his near-death experience that brought him to meet Bonnie at the hospital where she worked as a nurse caring for him. From this chance encounter and Applewhite’s newfound outlook on life following events that could have otherwise ended it, Heaven’s Gate was born.
Heaven’s Gate: Beliefs and Mysteries
Heaven’s Gate, started by Applewhite and Nettles, began around 1972. Nettle’s new-found interest in astrology, spirit guides, and communication with angelic beings made for an odd companion to Applewhite’s own hyper fixation on the New Testament text of Revelation—a book of the Bible written about the eschatological conclusion of reality according to the Christian expectations of Christ, his second coming, judgment on the earth, and the like. What happens when you combine an end-times-focused view of God, belief in the rapture of the faithful, angels, and astrology? Why Heaven’s Gate, of course!
The cult began with a simple belief: wherever the Bible talks about God, Jesus, or angelic/demonic beings, it is really talking about an advanced race of supreme aliens (notice the effect of Nettle’s astrological and angelic focus), who will return to destroy the Earth and save the believers for the next step in their spiritual evolution (Applewhite’s fixation on Revelation here is a clear influence).
This idea can be found in How and When “Heaven’s Gate” May Be Entered, written by Marshall Applewhite, and explains the significance of alien-centric thought for this very strange cult. Consider the following titles from sections on the Heaven’s Gate website:
- ‘95 Statement by an E.T. Presently Incarnate (this being a first-person retelling by Applewhite of his and Nettle’s incarnation into our world)
- UFOs — Why They Are Here; Who They Have Come For
- The 17 Steps (a set of behavioral guidelines that include the specific reflections that the individual is called to self-regulate and follow authority)
- ‘88 Update — The UFO Two and Their Crew
- The Only Way Out Of This Corrupt World
- UFOs, Space Aliens, and Their Final Fight for Earth’s Spoils
If it hasn’t already become quite clear, this cult was focused on getting out of Earth and fast. However, not nearly fast enough. Despite the efforts of Applewhite and Nettle when recruiting their original 20 members in Oregon, no spaceship arrived from 1975-1985. Over time, the cultists lost their out-of-this-world flair and decided to lose hope in their space-bound mission. With the passing of Nettle in 1985, all hope for Heaven’s Gate seemed lost… until the arrival of the Hale-Bopp Comet, that is.
Hale-Bop and Heaven’s Gate: Where Cults and Comets Collide
In the early 1990s, Applewhite began anew his search for members as the sole leader of Heaven’s Gate. Though the task would prove difficult at first, the discovery of the comet Hale-Bopp gave reinvigoration to his cultic evangelism. Applewhite, upon hearing about the discovery, a one in 4,000-year revolution around the sun that would fortuitously pass by the Earth in 1997, molded Heaven’s Gate to recontextualize the comet in terms of his own theology. Simply put, the comet was described as a disguise or distraction that the aliens would use to get near to Earth undetected; all along, the alien spaceship was hiding right behind the comet and was coming for the faithful.
With newfound support and millions of dollars in donations, he was able to rent a large home in Santa Fe for himself and his 38 followers. Excitement grew as the new followers awaited the coming of their alien saviors and with them a chance at the destruction of this world which had fallen into imperfection due to organized religion and sin. Our fixation on our human bodies and our selfishness led to the major issues of mankind—or so the members of Heaven’s Gate would say.
But through a rejection of our bodies and this Earth, the individual faithful would be picked up on Judgement Day by their alien spaceships and be granted an alien life form. These life forms were described stereotypically and in a way that portrayed a significant reliance of Heaven’s Gate on the already ubiquitous alien cinema of the 1990s: large black eyes, gray and rounded heads, and white space-age outfits.
From this comes an intriguing question: “What caused this national surge of interest in Heaven’s Gate during the 1990s, and why did so many come to join it?” With massive films like Close Encounter of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Stargate (1994), and Independence Day (1996), global culture at large and Western culture in particular was deeply fascinated with life outside of our planet. Perhaps the combination of the discovery of the Hale-Bopp Comet, its once-in-a-lifetime visible approach toward Earth, and multiple decades of alien fixation, had primed the world for a cult like Heaven’s Gate.
The Strange Legacy of Heaven’s Gate
In late March 1997, as the comet Hale-Bop reached its zenith in the sky, the Heaven’s Gate cult members had prepared their goodbyes to this plane of existence. After having concocted and drinking a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka, the 38 members of Heaven’s Gate and Marshall Applewhite rested in beds as they awaited their deaths. Since it is Heaven’s Gate that we are speaking about, it should be noted that their group was strange even by death cult standards. According to later police reports from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, the bodies were found with matching outfits consisting of bowl cuts, baggy black clothes, and Nike shoes. Each had $5.75 in their pockets, their bodies in the supine position.
Though the mass suicide came as a shock to the onlookers in the United States and elsewhere, the death of Marshall Applewhite and his followers did not spell a clear end to Heaven’s Gate. Some claimed that their cult really did get carried up on the spaceship behind the comet, the remnants of their lifeless bodies being some evidence that their bodies really were just “flesh vessels” meant to be disposed of.
The persistence of the cult’s infamy and the popularity of their website nearly 30 years later has been held by some as a sign that Applewhite—crazy or not—was tapping into something that many people desire: some deeper hidden meaning, a foundational reality, mysteries made known, and a future without suffering. The website that the cult created is filled with tons of hidden images visible only by hovering a mouse at just the right location, “meta tags” that reveal the deep and truly eclectic theology informing the beliefs (from ramblings on Allah and the Pyramids to Reincarnation and common Biblical references), secret links to strange chanting messages about the second coming, and more! Scholars have even written academic articles to try and understand the religious influences that may have been at play for the formation of Heaven’s Gate eschatology.
Mysteries upon mysteries, surprise after surprise, but one fact remains: Heaven’s Gate will be remembered in infamy as the cult that made the whole world look to the stars.
