extraordinary%20encounters

248 The Two
Dallas–Fort Worth and essentially removed
themselves from the world. Press stories about
them were few, though in 1979 one member
spoke with Time and recounted the day-today
spiritual activities of the group, which
were rigidly directed. Nettles died, apparently
of cancer, in 1985.
In 1993, the group reemerged into view
with an advertisement in USA Today and followed
it with pronouncements in other publications.
Now calling themselves Total Overcomers,
members lectured in various cities.
Two years later, the group, by then called
Heaven’s Gate, moved to San Diego and set
up a successful computer business with its
own web site. In October 1996, it purchased a
mansion in San Diego’s exclusive Rancho
Santa Fe.
It was there that the mass suicide occurred,
apparently on the night of March 25–26,
1997. Alerted by an anonymous phone call
(the caller was later identified as Richard Ford,
one of the group’s followers), police found the
bodies of thirty-nine identically dressed men
and women of androgynous appearance.
Some of them, it was learned, had been surgically
castrated. All had died of poison and suffocation.
One of them was Applewhite. According
to a videotaped statement, the deaths
occurred so that members could leave their
“vehicles” (bodies) and join a giant spaceship
that they believed was following the Hale-
Bopp comet.
See Also: Contactees
Further Reading
Balch, Robert W., 1995. “Waiting for the Ships: Disillusionment
and the Revitalization of Faith in
Bo and Peep’s UFO Cult.” In James R. Lewis, ed.
The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other
Worlds, 137–166. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press.
Bruni, Frank, 1997. “Cult Leader Believed in Space
Aliens and Apocalypse.” New York Times (March
28).
“Flying Saucery in the Wilderness,” 1979. Time (August
27): 58.
Hewes, Hayden, and Brad Steiger, eds., 1976. UFO
Missionaries Extraordinary. New York: Pocket
Books.
Hoffmann, Bill, Cathy Burke, and the staff of the
New York Post, 1997. Heaven’s Gate: Cult Suicide
in San Diego. New York: Harper-Paperbacks.
Niebuhr, Gustav, 1997. “On the Furthest Fringes of
Millennialism.” New York Times (March 28).
Oliver, Evelyn Dorothy, 1997. “Graduating to the
Next Level: The Heaven’s Gate Tragedy in the
Context of New Age Ideology.” Syzygy 6,1 (Winter/Spring):
43–58.
Peters, Ted, 1977. UFOs—God’s Chariots? Flying
Saucers in Politics, Science, and Religion. Atlanta,
GA: John Knox Press.
Steiger, Brad, 1976. Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the
Transformation of Man. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.