Heaven's Gate

In March 1997, thirty-nine members of the Heaven's Gate group died by suicide at a mansion near San Diego, California. The group held that human bodies were merely "containers" and that a spaceship, hidden behind the comet Hale-Bopp, had come to carry the faithful to the "next level," an evolutionary step beyond human. The comet, at its brightest that spring, was the sign that the exit was open.

The group had been waiting for more than two decades. Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles began teaching in 1975, and the community spent those years in disciplined asceticism, cut off from family, running a professional web-design business that paid for the website on which the exit statements were posted. The belief fused older Christian and millenarian motifs with the UFO and New Age currents of late-twentieth-century America. The leaders, who called themselves bo and peep and later Ti and Do, taught that the earth was about to be "spaded under" and recycled, and that only those who left their bodies would advance. The members filmed goodbyes and dressed in identical uniforms, convinced they were shedding a vehicle rather than ending a life.

Heaven's Gate is the modern instance where the end-of-the-world story and suicide became the same act. Like the Millerites and the Witnesses, the group read current signs as portents and set a timetable; unlike them, the fulfillment it expected required leaving the world rather than waiting for the world to end. It is the clearest warning in the record of what a fully literal end-times expectation can demand of believers.

The movement that ended on this date is treated under Heaven's Gate, and the wider pattern of enacted expectation beside The Great Disappointment.

What distinguishes the date is that nothing failed to occur. Miller's followers woke on 23 October 1844 to a world still standing; the members of Heaven's Gate met their appointment exactly. The prophecy was self-referential, its only content the group's own departure, so no external event could disconfirm it and none needed to happen. The comet supplied not a prediction but a schedule, and the schedule was kept.