Heaven's Gate was an American new religious movement known primarily for the mass suicides committed by its members in Commonly designated a cult , it was founded in and led by Marshall Applewhite — and Bonnie Nettles — , known within the movement as Do and Ti.
Nettles and Applewhite first met in and went on a journey of spiritual discovery, identifying themselves as the two witnesses of the Book of Revelation , attracting a following of several hundred people in the mids. In , 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 it 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 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.
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 We are happily prepared to leave 'this world' and go with Ti's crew.
