What Happened to the Heaven's Gate Alien Cult? | Unveiled

What Happened to the Heaven's Gate Alien Cult?

They were arguably the first popular cult of the modern, internet age, with their eyes set on the stars and space. Yet Marshall Applewhite and his devoted following were also determined to keep a disturbing date with destiny.

This is Unveiled, and today we're uncovering the extraordinary story of the Heaven's Gate Alien Cult.

The origins of Heaven's Gate date back to the heyday of the New Age movement of the 1970s, a time when many people were searching within themselves in order to achieve personal growth or enlightenment. This was the decade that was building upon the counterculture of the 1960s and daring to ask difficult questions about sex, happiness, mental health and religion. Yet, this was also a time when cults and communes around the world, already enjoying a burst of popularity and mainstream attention, began to make headlines for other reasons… particularly with regard to the darker sides of their membership.

For their part, many ex-members of Heaven's Gate have since highlighted how many of those in the group were seemingly well-adjusted and grounded individuals. Joan Culpepper told People Magazine in 1997, for example, how Heaven’s Gate founders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lou Nettles primarily had a message that connected with people who, in her words, "weren't losers with low self-esteem." While various other cults had been known to prey on insecurities - to lure in the desperate or maladjusted, promising them love, acceptance and a place to belong, before feeding in sex, drugs and violence as they gained more members - it seemed as though Heaven’s Gate didn’t exactly follow the stereotype.

Once you were inside, it primarily promoted abstinence and a life free from vice, searching instead for a plane of existence Applewhite and Nettles referred to as TELAH, an acronym for The Evolutionary Level Above Human, which became more simply known as; The Next Level. Heaven’s Gate members, then, seemingly started off on a simple quest for a higher experience... but their path to get there turned out to be confusing, difficult and incredibly dangerous.

Their core beliefs were tied into the idea that Planet Earth and, by extension, humans were living on borrowed time. They believed that the world would ultimately be recycled or swept away by the year 2027. For those in Heaven’s Gate, the only way to escape this fate was for our consciousness to leave Earth, bound for that “Next Level” that everyone aspired to… And the way they envisioned that happening is that they would be carted away by an alien spaceship into the afterlife.

This dedication to a science fiction narrative became central to defining Heaven's Gate. Eventually, the group went even further with the concept, dedicating themselves to the idea that God was, in fact, an extraterrestrial. As such, Heaven's Gate members believed that reaching heaven required you to eliminate your own human behaviour as much as was possible - only then could you hope to reach TELAH. In reality, this meant forsaking their families, their friends and their possessions when they became members of the cult. From these foundations, the group melded their sci-fi ideals with apocalyptic imagery from the Bible, even going so far as to believe that evil aliens, called Luciferians would battle against Heaven's Gate en route to The Next Level.

The Heaven’s Gate founder and leader Marshall Applewhite hadn’t always been obsessed with these sorts of outlandish ideas, though. He was once married with children, and had worked at the University of Alabama as an assistant professor. His family broke apart in the mid-to-late-sixties, though, when Applewhite had an affair with a male student, and moved to Texas to teach music at another university. Applewhite met Bonnie Lou Nettles in 1972, when she had been working locally as a nurse. The pair connected strongly over their shared interest in Bible studies and spirituality, and they soon became inseparable. Their bond grew over time, but it’s thought that it was never sexual itself… for Applewhite and Nettles, the hours and hours they spent traveling together in the early seventies were used up discussing their emerging philosophies about reaching The Next Level. They did have a few run-ins with law around this time - once getting arrested for credit card fraud, and Applewhite even did time in prison for failing to return a rental car while in Missouri - but they mostly kept a low profile. That would soon change, however.

Before long, Nettles and Applewhite had started to gain a following, mostly of generally like-minded folks the pair met at various meditation groups. At the time of Heaven’s Gate’s inception, a couple of alternative names were used at first - including Total Overcomers Anonymous and Human Individual Metamorphosis - before the Heaven’s Gate moniker was agreed upon. Meanwhile Marshall and Bonnie also answered to alternate names, like Bo and Peep or Do and Ti, in their newfound positions as group leaders.

The early days saw the group with twenty or thirty members, most of whom had left their spouses and children behind to wander, commune style, across the United States. They often found work in local towns, and campervans were eventually procured for travel. It’s said that Heaven's Gate tried to keep their preaching relatively low key at this early stage, however, mostly because the concerned relatives of some of those initial members were actively trying to track them down.

Around this time is where the group's many problems and contradictions begin to come into play. We’re in the mid-seventies now, and there are differing reports as to how strict Applewhite and Nettles were with their growing flock. On the one hand, it’s said the pair tried to control the lives of their members, holding on to their car keys and IDs, for example, and using physical abuse such as hitting followers on the head with tuning forks, in order to get rid of bad thoughts. Dick Joslyn was a member during the cult's mid-seventies peak, and he told People Magazine that the experience felt similar to military service… while another member, Jacqueline Leonard, was reportedly only allowed to contact her family after asking for permission. Despite the many tales of controlling behaviour, though, the fact that there are so many Heaven’s Gate stories out there shows that leaving the cult, and speaking out against it, wasn’t totally impossible. In fact, it's been widely reported that members were allowed to leave the group without any particular repercussions or punishment. Still, what we do now know about what happened paints quite an unsettling picture.

There are widespread reports that each member was systematically paired up with a buddy, with whom they would eat, sleep and work. These partners were rotated often, however, and they were intentionally selected to be polar opposites from one another, so as to discourage any temptation for sex or dating. Indeed, Applewhite was so focused on this particular aspect of the cult's teachings that he voluntarily subjected himself to surgical castration, so as to separate fully from any sort of sex drive. This then became a requirement for male members of Heaven’s Gate, and a number of devotees did follow Applewhite's lead… though some others simply focused on personal celibacy. Applewhite and Nettles also proclaimed that The Next Level was a genderless place, so this required all members to be as alike as possible - which is why they became known for their unofficial uniforms of baggy, androgynous jumpsuits. Remember, it was believed that all of these things would allow them safe passage onto an imminent alien spaceship, which would then transport them to a higher place - to the Next Level.

As for the matter of exactly how Heaven's Gate believed they would board this spaceship… no one really knew. Not even the leaders were entirely sure, and they were often accused of just jumping on any major, headline-grabbing natural disaster or event, insisting that it was The One, and then preparing their group for some kind of rapturous departure. When this repeatedly didn’t happen, when the Heaven’s Gate predictions failed to materialise time and time again, Applewhite and Nettles would often simply admit they were wrong, or they’d take long leaves of absence to imply that their leadership had failed. Whether or not this was a means of reverse psychology is difficult to say, but Dick Joslyn recalls feeling a "bonding" with the pair, as opposed to any feelings of distrust. Things truly began to change for the worse, though, in 1985, when Bonnie Lou Nettles passed away with cancer, leaving Applewhite as the sole leader of Heaven's Gate. From here, over the next twelve years, the cult took another new direction, leading to its ultimate, infamous demise.

It's here where the random fixation on natural disasters and the idea of The Next Level gained a new, sharper focus… settling on the Hale-Bopp comet, which was due to make its closest flyby of Earth in April 1997. History tells us how that flyby - one of the brightest seen in modern times - is now linked with a mass, ritual suicide of Heaven’s Gate members… but how did Applewhite and his followers reach that harrowing end?

The hubbub around the Hale-Bopp event was unlike anything before it. The comet’s trip to Earth was already big news in astronomy and space communities at the time but, as these were the early days of the internet revolution, it gradually captured the attention of millions more people around the world - with websites experiencing massive traffic from viewers wanting as much information as possible… But, for Heaven’s Gate, the comet took on an even greater meaning. The group believed that the spaceship they had always suspected would arrive - the one to take them to the Next Level - was flying behind Hale-Bopp, so that while everyone else was watching the skies, they could hitch a ride to their destiny. They believed, though, that the way to do that was to commit suicide. They saw this as a way to free their souls from the body to join together in TELAH, The Evolutionary Level Above Human.

Heaven's Gate were relatively out in the open at this point. The group had taken out ads in newspapers, for example, and broadcast videos about themselves around the world via satellite. The cult had also harnessed the early potential of the internet, with some members partially funding operations via a web design business called Higher Source. The Heaven’s Gate official website is still online today, in fact, as part history lesson and part memorial, but at the time it was a key tool in getting their message and story known.

Late March of 1997, shortly before the Hale-Bopp flyby, signified the closing of Heaven's Gate, as Marshall Applewhite and thirty-eight other members shot exit videos to loved ones and ate a last supper together at a local restaurant before spending a number of days committing ritual suicide at a California mansion. Their actions were staggered between two groups of fifteen and a final group of nine, with members drinking down a cocktail of barbiturates and vodka as Hale-Bopp was making its closest arc towards Earth. All members wore black clothing with matching Nike sneakers, the design of which was discontinued shortly after the tragedy. To coincide with the Heaven's Gate love of science fiction, armbands reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team" were also worn as a nod to the classic "Star Trek" TV series.

The fate of Heaven’s Gate today ranks as one of the most chilling and tragic cult stories in American history, preserved as a warning for what can happen when just one or two people can convince countless others to follow them. What started as a seemingly grounded group turned into one of the most disturbing examples of blind faith. And that’s what happened to the Heaven’s Gate alien cult.