The Heaven’s Gate Cult: A Sad, Strange Story of Manipulation
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On March 26, 1997, San Diego police followed up on an anonymous tip and entered a home in one of the city’s wealthy suburban neighborhoods, according to History.com. When the officers arrived, the stench of decomposing human bodies greeted them.
Inside lay the corpses of 39 people — all dressed in identical tracksuits and shoes — who died in a mass suicide, owing to the teachings of the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult.
Learn more about the largest mass suicide in U.S. history.
Heaven’s Gate members died by suicide as the Hale-Bopp comet approached planet Earth, in hopes of leaving the confines of their human lives to a ride on an alien spacecraft hiding in the comet’s wake.
On the group’s website, members explained:
“The joy is that our Older Member in the Evolutionary Level Above Human (the “Kingdom of Heaven”) has made it clear to us that Hale-Bopp’s approach is the ‘marker’ we’ve been waiting for — the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to ‘Their World’ — in the literal Heavens. 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.”
The resulting deaths horrified and confused America and the rest of the world. Reflecting on the cult two decades later, former member Rio DeAngelo told ABC News, that being a part of Heaven’s Gate affected his career.
“I tried to get a job and people would not hire me because they thought I was part of some crazy thing. And so it’s really a matter of choice for me to get along with my career, my life, just so people would not look at me,” DiAngelo said. “It’s not about me, you know?”
The group had its roots back in the ’70s when a Texas music teacher named Marshall Applewhite lost his job after having an inappropriate relationship with a male student, according to Rolling Stone. Not long afterward, he met a nurse named Bonnie Nettles. Both had an interest in biblical prophecy, and Applewhite believed the two shared a bond because they’d met in a previous life.
For her part, Nettles told Applewhite that she knew they’d meet someday … because extraterrestrials had preordained their encounter.
Together, the two blended multiple religious teachings from the New Testament with various bits of eschatology, mysticism, astrology, asceticism, reincarnation and science fiction, as well as aspects of Applewhite’s Presbyterian upbringing. All of this was a result of Nettles’ belief that a monk from the 1800s often had conversations with her, providing life guidance.
The two didn’t have a romantic relationship. Instead, they bonded in their efforts to ascend to a higher existence and ultimately reach the kingdom of heaven. Applewhite began calling himself “Do,” and Nettles became “Ti.” Sometimes they called themselves “Bo” and “Peep.”
In the mid-1970s, they persuaded a group of 20 Oregonians to leave behind their families, lives and worldly possessions for Colorado. There, they waited for an alien spaceship to arrive. It never did, so the group began dwindling.
In 1985, Nettles died from cancer, leaving Applewhite depressed. But he remained undeterred.
By the early 1990s, he’d tweaked his beliefs and started recruiting new members to the UFO religion. The group bounced from place to place, sometimes living in campgrounds around the country, occasionally panhandling and always looking to recruit new converts, reported The New York Times.
Throughout the years, hundreds of people joined and cycled in and out of the group. To improve retention rates, Applewhite gradually began to control many aspects of members’ daily habits and routines.
He was a master manipulator. As his techniques improved, more people stayed on to follow him, becoming fanatically devoted.
“Cult leaders come in many shapes and sizes with assorted facades. One mask is in the form of a teacher,” emails Rick Alan Ross, author of “Cults Inside Out.” “Marshall Applewhite was a teacher and he regarded the members of Heaven’s Gate as his ‘class’ of students. He claimed to have the keys to self-improvement, with tantalizing promises of a panacea, a magic formula for evolution to a level above human.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.yahoo.com/news/heavens-gate-cult-sad-strange-120001367.html.
