Heaven's Gate | |
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Type | New religious movement |
Classification | UFO religion |
Orientation | Christian millenarianism, New Age, Ufology |
Scripture | Bible |
Leaders |
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Region | United States |
Headquarters |
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Founder | Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles |
Origin | 1974 |
Members |
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Other name(s) | Human Individual Metamorphosis, Total Overcomers Anonymous |
Official website | www |
Heaven's Gate was an American new religious movement known primarily for the mass suicides committed by its members in 1997. Commonly designated a cult, it was founded in 1974 and led by Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985) and Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997), known within the movement as Ti and Do. Nettles and Applewhite first met in 1972 and went on a journey of spiritual discovery, identifying themselves as the two witnesses of Revelation, attracting a following of several hundred people in the mid-1970s. In 1976, a core group of a few dozen members stopped recruiting and instituted a monastic lifestyle.
Scholars have described the theology of Heaven's Gate as a mixture of Christian millenarianism, New Age, and ufology, and has been characterized as a UFO religion. The central belief of the group was that followers could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by rejecting their human nature, and they would ascend to heaven, referred to as the "Next Level" or "The Evolutionary Level Above Human". The death of Nettles from cancer in 1985 challenged the group's views on ascension; while they originally believed that they would ascend to heaven while alive aboard a UFO, they came to believe that the body was merely a "container" or "vehicle" for the soul and that their consciousness would be transferred to "Next Level bodies" upon death.
On March 26, 1997, deputies of the San Diego County Sheriff's Office discovered the bodies of the 39 active members of the group, including Applewhite, in a house in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They had participated in a coordinated series of ritual suicides, coinciding with the closest approach of Comet Hale–Bopp. Just before the mass suicide, the group's website was updated with the message: "Hale–Bopp brings closure to Heaven's Gate ...our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion – 'graduation' from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave 'this world' and go with Ti's crew."[1]
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