Heaven's Gate. Another case of religious mass delusion.
Heaven's Gate was an American UFO religious Millenarian group based in San Diego, California, founded in the early 1970s and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985). On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group who had committed mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an alien space craft following Comet Hale–Bopp.
According to Jacques Vallée in his 1979 book Messengers of Deception, the group began in the early 1970s when Marshall Applewhite was recovering from a heart attack during which he claimed to have had a near-death experience. He came to believe that he and his nurse, Bonnie Nettles, were "the Two", that is, the two witnesses spoken of in the Book of Revelation 11:3 in the Bible. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to run an inspirational bookstore, they began traveling around the United States of America giving talks about their belief system. As with some other New Age faiths they combined Christian doctrine (particularly the ideas of salvation and apocalypse) with the concept of evolutionary advancement and elements of science fiction, particularly travel to other worlds and dimensions.
Heaven's Gate members believed the planet Earth was about to be "recycled" (wiped clean, renewed, refurbished, and rejuvenated), and the only chance to survive was to leave it immediately. While the group was formally against suicide, they defined "suicide" in their own context to mean "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered"[ and believed their "human" bodies were only vessels meant to help them on their journey. In conversation, when referring to a person or a person's body, they routinely used the word "vehicle"; when shown a picture of his son in an interview, Rio DiAngelo commented, "Look, there's the little vehicle."
The group believed in several paths for a person to leave the Earth and survive before the "recycling", one of which was intentioning love to this world strongly enough: "It is also possible that part of our test of faith is our loving of this world, even our flesh body, to the extent to be willing to leave it without any proof of the Next Level's existence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven's_Gate_(religious_group)
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