Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate was a small new religious movement that combined UFO (unidentified flying object) lore with metaphysical and Christian themes and advocated the ascetic rejection of all “mammalian ways,” such as sexual relationships and ties with family members outside Heaven's Gate. The founders, Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985), met in Houston in 1972 and in the years thereafter developed and taught a shifting and highly combinative theology, intermingling popular science fiction themes about extraterrestrial beings and spaceships [Page 507]with strains of New Age spirituality, theosophy, spiritualism, and end-times Christianity. Applewhite and Nettles attracted significant media attention in 1975, after a lecture they gave in Oregon spurred some 30 audience members to abandon their worldly attachments and possessions as a precondition for conversion. Soon thereafter, the group essentially went underground, ceasing most proselytization efforts until the early 1990s and living in a series of isolated campgrounds, eventually settling in a rented mansion in the Rancho Santa Fe suburb of San Diego and running a successful web design business. Heaven's Gate gained national attention on March 26, 1997, when Applewhite and 38 group members were found dead in their Rancho Santa Fe headquarters (California), having committed suicide successively in groups by drinking vodka laced with phenobarbital. Each member wore a sleeve patch reading “Heaven's Gate Away Team.”

Applewhite viewed himself as the second incarnation of Jesus Christ, come again to complete the project that Jesus left unfinished. He believed that he had been incarnated alongside his Heavenly Father in the guise of Nettles. Applewhite and Nettles believed that the Earth was on the brink of being “recycled” (refreshed through destruction), and consequently, their mission was to prepare as many people as possible to transition from the “Human Level” to the “Next Level Beyond Human.” They viewed this transition as a physical rather than a spiritual process, which would come to pass when followers completed the necessary training and boarded a flying saucer or spacecraft bound for the Next Level, where Heaven's Gate members would spend eternity assisting beings on other planets to navigate similar evolutionary stages. While at the outset Heaven's Gate was somewhat loosely organized, after 1975 it became progressively more routinized, for instance, under the rubric “The Process,” which involved a broad and changing set of practices such as working in pairs to renounce the manifold human traits and social ties anchoring members to the Human Level. The overall push toward androgyny paired with the rejection of sexuality eventually led Applewhite and several male members to undergo surgical castration. Many scholars have linked this process with Applewhite's prior struggles with his own homosexuality.

In the early years of Heaven's Gate, Applewhite and Nettles claimed to be the “two witnesses” referred to in chapter 11 of the Book of Revelation, who are said to arrive just before the end of days, counsel humanity through the use of tremendous prophetic powers, and be killed violently. Applewhite and Nettles expected to follow this trajectory and viewed their upcoming violent end as effecting a return (via spaceship) to the Kingdom of Heaven, from whence they came. However, this trajectory was interrupted by Nettles's unexpected death from cancer in 1985, which altered Heaven's Gate theology—Applewhite claimed that Nettles had “transitioned,” but that the two remained in contact. By most scholarly accounts, Nettles's death also served to accelerate existent Heaven's Gate tendencies toward insularity and world rejection. The group's eventual mass suicide, which members viewed as the natural shedding of fleshly containers en route to the Next Level Beyond Human, was inspired by the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997 and by rumors, widely reported in the media, that a spacecraft-shaped object was traveling in its wake.

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