Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate began in 1972, when Marshall Applewhite, a former music professor, met Bonnie Nettles, a nurse with an interest in Theosophy and biblical prophecy. They took the names Do and Ti and taught that the human body was a "vehicle" to be left behind for a physical Next Level above human. After a 1975 meeting in Waldport, Oregon, about 20 people walked away from their homes to follow them. The group then withdrew from public view for most of two decades.

Nettles died in 1985. The group resurfaced in the early 1990s with satellite broadcasts, a 1993 advertisement in USA Today and later a website, and it supported itself with a web-design business called Higher Source. In October 1996 it rented a large house in Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego. On March 26, 1997, after an anonymous 911 call, sheriff's deputies found 39 people dead there: 21 women and 18 men, aged 26 to 72, dressed alike in black. Investigators concluded they had died by suicide in three groups over three days.

The comet is where the theory comes in. In November 1996 an amateur astronomer told Art Bell's radio show Coast to Coast AM that his photograph showed a "Saturn-like object" trailing Hale-Bopp, and a professor who promoted remote viewing called it an alien spacecraft. Astronomers identified the object as a background star. The group's own website set the question aside: "Whether Hale-Bopp has a 'companion' or not is irrelevant from our perspective." For its members the comet itself was the signal. The website is still online.