How Did Marshall Applewhite Die?
Marshall Applewhite is a music professor who began leading the cult, after Bonnie Lu Nettles, one of his nurses, helped him join the group. In 1975, Applewhite and Nettles convinced a group of 20 people from Oregon to leave their homes and possessions behind and move to eastern Colorado with the promise that they would…
Marshall Applewhite is a music professor who began leading the cult, after Bonnie Lu Nettles, one of his nurses, helped him join the group. In 1975, Applewhite and Nettles convinced a group of 20 people from Oregon to leave their homes and possessions behind and move to eastern Colorado with the promise that they would be transported to the “kingdom of heaven” by an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Nettles, and Applewhite explained to the people that human bodies were merely containers that could be abandoned in favor of a higher physical existence. As the spacecraft never arrived, membership in Heaven’s Gate diminished, and in 1985 Bonnie Lu Nettles, Applewhite’s “sexless partner,” died after battling with cancer.
The cult reappeared in the early 1990s as Applewhite started enlisting new members. The Heaven’s Gate members were certain that an alien spacecraft was traveling toward Earth and was concealed from human detection by the comet Hale-Bopp not long after the comet Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995. Applewhite informed the owner of the big Rancho Santa Fe mansion he was renting in October 1996 that his group consisted of Christian-based angels. In order to emulate Applewhite’s example of sexual abstinence, numerous male cult members had castration procedures.
How Did Marshall Applewhite Die?
One of the most amazing astronomical phenomena of the 20th century occurred in 1997 when the comet Hale-Bopp swept close to Earth as part of its 4,000-year cycle of the sun.
Applewhite and 38 of his followers took a lethal cocktail of phenobarbital and vodka in late March 1997, as Hale-Bopp drew nearer to Earth, and then laid down to die in the hopes of escaping their physical bodies, entering the alien spacecraft, and passing through Heaven’s Gate into a higher existence.
