#heavens-gate

Heaven's Gate: The UFO Cult That Died to Reach the Comet

In late March 1997, in a quiet, affluent suburb north of San Diego, thirty-nine members of a group called Heaven's Gate died together in a rented mansion, in one of the most methodical mass deaths in modern history. They were not coerced at gunpoint, and there were no children among them; they were adults, aged from their twenties to their seventies, who shared a belief so complete that they went to their deaths calmly and by their own choice. That belief, strange as it was, had an internal logic. Heaven's Gate held that the human body was merely a temporary 'vehicle' or 'container' for the soul, and that a higher extraterrestrial realm — the 'Next Level,' the 'Evolutionary Level Above Human' — awaited those who were ready to graduate to it. When the bright comet Hale-Bopp appeared in the skies of early 1997, amid rumors that a spacecraft was following hidden in its tail, the group's leader, Marshall Applewhite, concluded that the sign they had awaited for two decades had finally come: a craft had arrived to carry them home. To board it, they believed, they had to shed their earthly bodies. Over three days, in carefully organized shifts, the thirty-nine ended their lives, each dressed identically, each with a small bag packed as if for a journey. They left behind videos and a website explaining, serenely, that they were simply 'exiting their vehicles.' The deaths shocked the world and became a defining case of what a totalizing belief can lead rational people to do. This is the story of Heaven's Gate — not a mockery of the dead, but an attempt to understand how thirty-nine human beings came to believe that dying was the way home.