Inside the Dark World of Heaven's Gate: UFOs, Celibacy, and Mass Suicide | Vanity Fair

It’s a true story that, nearly 30 years later, is still stranger than fiction. In March 1997, members of the Heaven’s Gate cult visited a Carlsbad, California, restaurant for their last supper—identical orders of iced tea, salad, turkey pot pie, and cheesecake. Days later, everyone sitting around the table would be found dead in a home in nearby Rancho Santa Fe, a secluded, wealthy part of San Diego otherwise known for decorative citrus orchards, horse stables, and its elite country club. What remains the largest mass suicide in the US left 39 people dead. Later that year, it was parodied by Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live and referenced by Jodie Foster in the sci-fi film Contact. Now the story of the cult is fictionalized in The Leader, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, June 5.

Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga play founders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, respectively; Applewhite, a Texas music teacher, met Nettles in the early 1970s at a psychiatric institution where she worked as a nurse. They first went by the names Bo and Peep, then rebranded to using Do (pronounced “doe”) and Ti—names inspired in part by Nettles’s love for The Sound of Music.

The platonic pair began telling people they were extraterrestrial beings sent to Earth to guide humanity to the next level of existence. In September 1975, Applewhite visited a small town in Oregon to lecture its residents about how and why UFOs were visiting Earth. According to The New York Times, the cult leader was able to convince 20 of the roughly 150 people in attendance at the talk to take action and join Heaven’s Gate. (Nothing suggests the name is connected to Michael Cimino’s notorious 1980 box office flop of the same name.)

Dozens who believed the couple abandoned their lives, dropped out of polite society, and joined the cult. “A score of persons…have disappeared,” Walter Cronkite said on the October 8, 1975, episode of CBS Evening News. “It’s a mystery whether they’ve been taken on a so-called trip to eternity—or simply been taken.”

After stints in various states including New Mexico and Colorado, the group eventually settled in California. According to The Washington Post, Applewhite, the son of a Presbyterian minister, had been fired as a music professor at the University of St. Thomas in 1970 after administrators learned he was in a relationship with a male student. He and Nettles didn’t preach free love, instead advocating for total sexual abstinence among their followers, two of whom are played by Simon Rex and Jim Parsons. Seemingly to help stave off temptation, a half dozen of the 18 male cult members who died had been surgically castrated, according to The New York Times, including Applewhite.

Claims about immortality aside, Nettles died of cancer in 1985. Applewhite kept the group together, and when the internet was introduced to consumers in the early 1990s, the group utilized the new technology to spread its gospel and make money.

The bodies of 39 Heaven’s Gate members were discovered by authorities responding to an anonymous tip on March 26, 1997—two days after the ritual suicides had been completed. Everyone, including Applewhite, wore black track suits and Nike sneakers, ate applesauce or pudding laced with barbiturates, and drank vodka. They then put bags over their heads and purple shrouds over their bodies, and lay down to leave their earthly “vehicles,” or human bodies, on Earth. The followers believed they were freeing their souls in order to ascend to a spacecraft flying in the face of the Hale-Bopp comet—which at that point was passing by Earth.

At a news conference confirming discovery of the bodies, officials said there were 21 women and 18 men, ranging in age from their 20s to a 72-year-old man. All but one of the deceased appeared on a farewell videotape that the group recorded before their suicides. The footage appeared to show no hesitancy among members of the group, and participants “did not appear to be upset about what they were doing,” Alan Fulmer of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said at the time, by “making their final exit, if you will.”

Speaking from the White House shortly after the tragedy, then President Bill Clinton told reporters, “It’s heartbreaking. It’s sickening. It’s shocking.” He also emphasized the need to “get as many facts as we can about this and try to determine what, in fact, motivated those people.” Clinton also spoke about efforts to ensure “there aren’t other people thinking in that same way out there in our country. [People] that aren’t so isolated that they can create a world for themselves that may justify that kind of thing. It’s very troubling to me.”

In the event’s shocking aftermath, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the United States had long stopped logging UFO activity because the government “cannot substantiate that they exist,” nor that they a threat to humanity. Nevertheless, the Heaven’s Gate tragedy had a ripple effect, leading to at least two copycat suicides in the months that followed. As of 2022, the Rancho Santa Fe property where they perished is no longer standing and the street on which it once sat has now been renamed.

But that hasn’t stopped the world from wondering what may have led those 39 people to end their lives. Nearly three decades later, the fallout is still inspiring a feature film, as well as faux headlines over on popular satirical site The Onion, including this one published on June 3: “Heaven’s Gate Members Enjoy 29th Euphoric Year on Highest Plane of Existence,” adding, “Group Living It Up Since 1997 Departure From Earth.”

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