It was Sunday, March 26, 1997, when San Diego County Sheriff's deputies, responding to an anonymous tip, went to a large home in Rancho Santa Fe.
They discovered the bodies of 39 people, 21 women and 18 men, all members of a cult whose name was Heaven's Gate.
In an account on the History Channel website, it was described as a coordinated series of ritual suicides, coinciding with the closest approach of the Hale-Bopp Comet. Just before the mass suicide, the group's website was updated with the message: 'Hale-Bopp brings closure to Heaven's Gate ...our 22 years of classroom here on planet earth is finally coming to conclusion-'graduation' from the human evolutionary level. we are happily prepared to leave 'this world' and go with it's crew."
The cult was led by Marshall Applewhite, a music professor. The members became convinced that an alien spacecraft was on its way to earth, hidden from human detection behind the comet. Investigators say they believe they all drank a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka believing they would leave their bodily containers, enter the alien spacecraft, and pass through heaven’s gate into a higher existence.
(Photo Getty Images)
Photo: Getty Images