congenitaldisease:

Heaven’s Gate Cult - In March 1997 in a house in California, police found 39 bodies lying nearly in their beds, their heads and torso covered by purple cloths. All wearing black shirts and trousers; in their pockets they each had a $5 note and three quarter coins; each had an armband patch reading ‘Heaven’s Gate Away Team’. They had all drunk a cocktail of vodka and phenobarbital and wrapped their heads in polythene bags.

Heaven’s Gate was one if many millennial and UFO-based cults in the USA. It was originally set up in the early 1970s by Marshall Applewhite together with Bonnie Nettles; who died in 1985. They were known as ‘Do’ and ‘Ti’ she believed themselves to be “The Two” (two ‘witnesses’ mentioned in the Book of Revelation). The cult combined various beliefs - Christian salvation and apocalypse, evolutionary advancement and travel to other worlds. Meme vets renounced family and worldly goods to live a communal life of asceticism and celibacy in a rented mansion they described as a monastery. They called each other brothers and sisters and knew that the next level of existence would be free if gender and sexual activity - some, including Applewhite, underwent castration.

Central to their faith was the idea that the earth, controlled by evil powers, was about to be ‘recycled’ and that they all must leave it immediately, to be ready for ‘replanting’ in another vehicle (body) at a higher level. A video shot just before the suicides show cult members thrilled by the prospect of joining a UFO hidden behind the Halle-Bopp comet, which they regarded as a celestial marker. They had timed their departure to coincide with the comet’s closest approach to earth.

Here is a link to the videos mentioned above.