7. Heaven’s Gate
Marshall Applewhite was the son of a Presbyterian minister and displayed a fascination with Biblical prophecy. During a stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1972, he met Bonnie Nettles, a nurse there who also showed a keen interest in Biblical mysticism, with an extraterrestrial flair. She told Applewhite that aliens had said to her that they would meet and concluded that he had a divine mission to fulfill. Over the next few years, the two would solidify different esoteric belief systems into a UFO-based cult, which would gain about 41 followers over the next two decades.
The meetings that they held were centered around trying to contact aliens. In 1975, members of the group sold all of their possessions and effectively disappeared. Applewhite and Nettles toured the country under various aliases and preached a message of higher evolutionary transformation through contact with extraterrestrials. They even purchased alien abduction insurance, which would cover up to 50 people with $1 million each. On the night of March 19, 1997, convinced that the Hale-Bopp comet was passing through with a UFO that they would board and thereby achieve a higher level of consciousness, all the members of Heaven’s Gate committed mass suicide. The bodies would not be discovered for a full week.
