“Whether Hale-Bopp has a ‘companion’ or not is irrelevant from our perspective. However, its arrival is joyously very significant to us at ‘Heaven’s Gate.’ The joy is that our Older Member in the Evolutionary Level Above Human (the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’) has made it clear to us that Hale-Bopp’s approach is the ‘marker’ we’ve been waiting for — the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to ‘Their World’ — in the literal Heavens. Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion — ‘graduation’ from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave ‘this world’ and go with Ti’s crew.
These are the words that greet you when you visit the Heaven’s Gate website. Created in the 90s, the website is still the same as it was at the beginning of the internet when the group created it to advertise their religious beliefs and recruit new followers. It’s been 25 years since a group of 39 people was found dead, wearing matching Nike’s and tracksuits, bags over their heads, and covered with purple shrouds. What exactly led to this?
In the 1970s, a disgraced music teacher and a nurse he met while in a mental institution changed their names to “Bo” and “Peep.” They traveled the country and gave sermons on their unique Christian views, which were inspired by Bo’s upbringing as a Presbyterian pastor’s son, whose father had integrated aliens into his theology. By 1974, they had succeeded in forming a group, which they called “the crew.” For about twenty years, the crew lived in Southern California, with Bo keeping the group together despite Peep’s death in 1985.
The group’s unconventional belief system said that God was an alien and Bo was the second coming of Jesus. Because they believed that they were in the end times, they heavily focused on the Book of Revelation from the New Testament. They believed in multiple levels of existence, and that there was no gender in the Next Level, so, to prepare for their ascension, male members of the group were voluntarily castrated. A big part of this is actually that Bo wanted to suppress his sexual desire toward men, so he insisted on celibacy to “develop his full potential without sexual entanglements.”
Members of the group were originally told that they would not have to die in order to ascend to the Next Level, with the group telling L.A. Weekly that they would be “beamed up” into space to meet God. After Peep died of cancer, though, Bo told the group that they would actually receive new bodies in the Next Level, so it would be fine to leave their current bodies in order to ascend.
And in March of 1997, that’s exactly what they did. Part of the group’s practices was that everything should be exactly the same, so the participants of this mass suicide followed a routine to kill themselves in the exact same way. A group of 15 people would consume applesauce laced with barbiturates, drink some vodka, then put plastic bags over their heads and suffocate. An assisting group of eight people would then cover the bodies with purple shrouds. This was done over the course of three days, with Bo being one of the last to die.
The group believed they were leaving their earthly bodies behind to ascend to the spacecraft following behind the Hale-Bopp comet. Whether or not they succeeded in their mission is up to you.