For our first cult Wednesday, we are going to talk about what is, in my opinion, one of the craziest cult stories ever.
Heavens Gate
If you don’t know what Heaven’s Gate is, buckle up, because it’s going to get weird.
And I don’t just mean a little weird.
We’re talking about UFOs, extraterrestrial beings, a comet, an internet presence that somehow still exists decades later, and a group of people who truly believed they were preparing to leave their human bodies behind for something greater.
But before we get to how Heaven’s Gate ended, we need to understand how it began.
Because this story didn’t start with a comet.
It started with two people:
Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles.
Before Heaven’s Gate: Marshall Applewhite
To understand how Heaven’s Gate came to be, we have to start with the man who would eventually become its most recognizable leader: Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr.
And his story didn’t start with aliens or UFOs.
Applewhite was born on May 17, 1931, in Spur, Texas. He grew up in a religious household; his father was a Presbyterian minister. Religion would remain a recurring part of Applewhite’s life, but it wasn’t initially where he seemed destined to make his mark.
That was music.
Applewhite attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he studied philosophy and became involved in music. After graduating, he briefly attended Union Theological Seminary in Virginia but ultimately decided the ministry wasn’t for him.
Instead, he pursued music.
Applewhite married Anne Pearce in 1952, and the couple had two children. He served in the U.S. Army and later built a career teaching music. Eventually, he became a music professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, where he was also involved in the school’s music and theater productions.
From the outside, there was nothing about this life that screamed future leader of a UFO religious movement.
But things began to change.
Applewhite’s marriage ended in divorce, and his career at St. Thomas ended in the mid-1960s. Accounts from this period also describe Applewhite struggling with his sexuality and with the conflict between those feelings and his deeply religious upbringing.
After leaving St. Thomas, he continued working in music for a time, including a move to New York and an attempt to establish himself professionally.
But by the early 1970s, Applewhite’s life was increasingly unstable.
And then he met Bonnie Nettles.
Nettles would become one of the most important people in Applewhite’s life—and arguably one of the most important people in the entire Heaven’s Gate story.
Because Heaven’s Gate wasn’t originally Marshall Applewhite’s movement.
It was theirs.
And the beliefs that would eventually lead 39 people to a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, began taking shape when Applewhite and Nettles found each other.
Bonnie Nettles: The Other Half of the Story
Before there was Heaven’s Gate, there was Bonnie Lu Nettles.
And if Marshall Applewhite brought a strong Christian background into what would eventually become Heaven’s Gate, Bonnie brought something very different.
Nettles was born in Houston, Texas, in 1927. She married businessman Joseph Nettles, had four children, and worked as a registered nurse.
But alongside that seemingly conventional life, Bonnie had developed a deep interest in spirituality and the supernatural.
She studied astrology and was interested in ideas including reincarnation, mysticism, and communication with higher beings. These weren’t passing curiosities. By the time she met Applewhite, spiritual exploration had become an important part of the way she understood the world.
Her marriage was also falling apart.
Then, in 1972, Bonnie Nettles met Marshall Applewhite.
Exactly how the two first met gets a little messy.
One frequently repeated version of the story says Applewhite was hospitalized and Nettles was a nurse working at the hospital. Other accounts describe their meeting differently. Because the details vary depending on the source, we can’t say with certainty that the famous patient meets nurse story happened exactly that way.
What we do know is that the connection between them developed quickly.
And it wasn’t a romantic relationship.
Applewhite and Nettles began spending enormous amounts of time together, discussing religion, spirituality, biblical prophecy, astrology, extraterrestrial life, and the possibility that their meeting had happened for a reason.
For Nettles, there apparently was evidence of that reason written in the stars.
According to accounts of their early relationship, Nettles examined Applewhite’s astrological chart and believed it indicated that the two of them were destined to work together.
Applewhite began to believe it too.
Their relationship became so all-consuming that the lives they had been living before meeting one another began to fall away. Nettles separated from her family, and Applewhite and Nettles began traveling together.
And somewhere along the way, their conversations stopped being simply conversations about spirituality.
They began believing that they themselves had a role in a much larger cosmic plan.
They adopted new names.
They called themselves Bo and Peep, and later Do and Ti.
But even those weren’t the strangest names they gave themselves.
Applewhite and Nettles came to believe they were the “Two” described in the Book of Revelation—the two witnesses who would appear before the end times.
And this is where the story of two people searching for spiritual answers starts becoming the story of Heaven’s Gate.
Because Bonnie and Marshall weren’t going to keep their discovery to themselves.
They were going to find followers.
Two People Become a Movement
After meeting in 1972, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles became nearly inseparable.
The two began studying the Bible together, particularly the New Testament and the Book of Revelation, while also exploring Nettles’ interests in astrology, reincarnation, mysticism, and extraterrestrial life.
And gradually, they developed an extraordinary explanation for who they were and why they had met.
Applewhite and Nettles came to believe that human beings were capable of evolving beyond humanity into a higher level of existence—what they would eventually call the “Next Level.”
But getting there required something much bigger than simply becoming a better person.
According to their developing belief system, the human body wasn’t really you.
It was essentially a temporary container.
A vehicle.
The real goal was to overcome everything that connected a person to ordinary human existence and prepare to enter the Next Level.
That meant overcoming attachments to family, possessions, romantic relationships, sexuality, and eventually even individual identity.
But before all those rules were developed, Applewhite and Nettles had to convince others that any of it was true.
The Two
Applewhite and Nettles began interpreting the Bible through their new belief system.
One passage became especially important to them: the story of the Two Witnesses in Revelation 11.
The chapter describes two witnesses who appear on Earth, deliver their message, are killed, and then—after three and a half days—rise again and ascend to heaven.
Applewhite and Nettles came to believe that they were those two witnesses.
They began referring to themselves simply as “The Two.”
And they believed their time on Earth had a purpose.
They were here to deliver a message.
People who recognized that message and chose to follow them could prepare themselves to leave the human level behind and enter the Next Level.
There was also a very 1970s addition to this interpretation of biblical prophecy:
UFOs.
Applewhite and Nettles believed that what religions had historically described as angels, heaven, and the Kingdom of God could actually be understood in extraterrestrial terms.
The beings occupying the Next Level weren’t supernatural in the traditional sense.
They were physically evolved beings from beyond Earth.
And somewhere above Earth, according to their teachings, were their spacecraft.
For the people who successfully completed the transformation, leaving Earth wasn’t just a metaphor.
They expected to literally leave.
The Message Begins to Spread
By 1975, Applewhite and Nettles were actively presenting their message to the public.
They traveled, held meetings, distributed materials, and invited people to hear what they were teaching.
They used several names during these early years. Applewhite and Nettles were known at various points as Bo and Peep and later Do and Ti, while their growing movement became associated with names including Human Individual Metamorphosis, or HIM.
And people actually showed up.
One of the most important early meetings took place in Waldport, Oregon, in September 1975.
Applewhite and Nettles’ representatives presented the group’s message to an audience there, and the response was remarkable.
Dozens of people decided to follow them.
Some left jobs.
Some left homes.
Some left spouses, parents, children, and friends.
From the outside, that decision can be incredibly difficult to understand.
But this is something we need to remember as we tell this story:
These people didn’t believe they were joining a cult that would eventually become infamous for the deaths of its members.
They believed they had discovered something extraordinary.
They had been told that human existence wasn’t the end of the story. That there was another level of life beyond this one. That Earth was approaching a major transformation. And that they had been given an opportunity very few people would ever receive.
They just had to be willing to leave everything behind.
And many of them were.
Leaving the World Behind
As the group grew, Applewhite and Nettles began separating their followers from their previous lives.
Members traveled around the country, sometimes camping and living with very little. Contact with family and friends became limited. Possessions were abandoned. Romantic and sexual relationships were discouraged and eventually prohibited.
Individuality itself increasingly became something to overcome.
Members would eventually wear similar clothing, adopt similar hairstyles, and take new names.
The group wasn’t supposed to function like a collection of separate people pursuing their own lives.
It was a classroom.
Applewhite and Nettles were the teachers.
Their followers were students.
And Earth was essentially the place where they were being trained to become something that was no longer human.
The language they used reflected that worldview.
Bodies became vehicles.
Members were classmates.
Applewhite and Nettles became Ti and Do.
God became associated with the Next Level.
Even ordinary words were being replaced by a vocabulary that only truly made sense once you understood the world Applewhite and Nettles had constructed. Decades later, Heaven’s Gate members would still describe their bodies as vehicles and their community as a classroom.
But there was a problem hiding inside everything Ti and Do were teaching.
Their beliefs depended heavily on the idea that they were going to physically leave Earth.
They weren’t supposed to simply grow old and die like everyone else.
They were supposed to complete their transformation and enter the Next Level.
Then, in 1983, Bonnie Nettles received devastating news.
She had cancer.
And in 1985, Ti died.
Bonnie Nettles—the woman who had helped convince Marshall Applewhite that they were beings from the Next Level, the other half of “The Two,” and one of the two people who were supposedly going to leave Earth behind together—
was dead.
For Applewhite and his followers, this wasn’t simply the loss of their leader.
It presented a massive problem.
If Ti had gone to the Next Level…
Why was her body still here?
“Until next time, question the story, follow the evidence, and never stop asking why.”