Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles met in Texas in 1972 and left together in 1973, travelling and preaching. They became Bo and Peep, then Do and Ti. Their teaching was a synthesis: a Christian eschatology in which heaven is a physical place, reached by spacecraft, populated by an evolutionary Level Above Human, and reachable by those who complete a process of shedding everything human.
Nettles died of cancer in 1985. This was a serious doctrinal problem — she had taught that members would be taken up bodily — and the group resolved it by revising the doctrine: she had left her vehicle behind and gone ahead.
That word, vehicle, is the operative device in the whole case.
The human body was taught to be a container: a temporary garment worn by a soul in preparation, to be discarded when the time came. Everything followed from it. Sexuality was renounced, because the vehicle's urges were irrelevant; several male members, including Applewhite, were surgically castrated. Members wore identical clothing, cut their hair identically, used the same speech patterns, and adopted names of the same form. Personal history, family, taste and gender were all vehicle attributes and therefore discardable.
Two mechanisms are working.
Deindividuation, in Zimbardo's sense: uniformity of appearance and behavior, and submergence in a group, reduce self-awareness and personal accountability and increase adherence to group norms. The Heaven's Gate photographs are among the most striking images of it in existence — thirty-nine people rendered visually interchangeable.
And doctrine over person, taken to its endpoint. If the body is not you, then ending it is not death. Self-preservation is not overcome; it is redefined out of the frame. Members who left the mansion recordings behind speak calmly, and there is no evidence they were coerced. They believed they were catching a lift.
The group had made predictions before and they had failed, which by Festinger's account should have weakened it and instead did not. Failed dates were reinterpreted as tests, or as the class not being ready, and the revisions kept the structure intact while removing every falsifiable element from it.
Comet Hale-Bopp arrived in 1997, accompanied by an amateur claim — quickly debunked — that an object was following it. This became the final signal.
Between 22 and 24 March 1997, in shifts, thirty-nine members took phenobarbital in applesauce with vodka, and lay down with purple shrouds over them. They wore identical black clothing and new Nike trainers, and each carried a five-dollar note and some quarters.
Two former members maintained the website afterwards, and it is still online.