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Introducing Taco Bell's new Jalapeno Citrus Salsa with bright citrus, real red jalapenos, guajillo chiles. Usually you add sauce to the food, but when the sauce is this good, the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth. That rolled quesadilla. Not a rolled quesadilla anymore. Now it's a sauce shovel. Taco Bell's jalapeno citrus salsa. Get it with any item on the Cantina Chicken menu while it's here. The participating U.S. taco Bell locations for a limited time only, while supplies last contact store for availability.
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In 1997, 39 people put on brand new black sneakers. They laid down in their beds, and they took their own lives because they believed a spaceship was hiding behind a comet waiting to take them to the next level. This is the story of Heaven's Gate, the cult that blended a belief in Christianity, New Age mysticism, and, of course, aliens. They believed and practiced aggressive celibacy to the point of castration because they don't have any sexuality. In the next level. Yes, I wanted to be castrated. And these people weren't random drifters. They had spouses and children. There was a rancher who nearly won a seat in a state legislature, nurses, musicians, even the brother of a Star Trek actress. So why did hundreds of seemingly sane adults choose this life? And the question at the center of all of this, in light of the Pentagon finally declassifying UFO files, are they maybe not as crazy as we once thought? Well, let's find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world, from all time, forever. Yes, that is what I do here. This is the sports center of the conspiracy world. I deep dive into every crazy theory, mystery, and unsolved story ever to be had. And I try to figure it out. And we go through the real stuff, we go through the fake stuff, and ideally, we all walk away being like, that's pretty weird. But now I understand. All right, now, before we begin, I just want to say a few things. First. Thank you. Yeah, you, person, human being, man, woman, whatever you are. I want to say thanks for tuning in and supporting the show because every time you click on an episode comment, like any of that stuff, you help the channel grow, you help this show become even bigger, which it's already growing like crazy. And I'm so grateful for that. So thank you guys so much. It's. It's working. I'm shocked that this has gone on this long, but it's all because of you. And it's not just you. It's also my good pal, Christos Picadacados. How are you, my friend? I love the variations on the name. I'm switching it up. You know, I'm trying to have fun with it, but no time for that. Christos, you're abandoning us to go to Greece this weekend. And for that, I am dismayed and angry, and I feel bamboozled.
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I'll miss you.
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All right, Christos. No time, because we got to talk about Heaven's Gate. Now, you probably heard about this. You've probably seen, you know, maybe like, the weird VHS footage of the guy, like, talking to the camera. You know, maybe you've seen, like, you know, the infamous, like, Nike tracksuit type vibe. A little swaggy, if I may. But what did they actually believe? What was really at the core of this cult? And ultimately, why do they all choose such a tragic demise? Now to begin the cult that was Heaven's Gate. It didn't come out of nowhere. It was born from a very specific moment in American history. When the sky changed. In July of 1969, hundreds of millions of people watched a human being step onto the moon. And suddenly the question of, like, are we alone? Started to become a lot more realistic. You see, up until that point, human beings have never really gone to another celestial body. So the idea of something else existing out there was just so fetched. But all of a sudden, you see, you know, Buzz and Neil and the rest of the gang, the third guy who no one remembers, all of a sudden, America was like, well, maybe it's not so crazy. And as a result, culture went with it. I mean, flying saucers, like in newspaper tabloids and magazines, and alien abduction stories started to go mainstream. And then, of course, government conspiracy and cover up started to whisper. And then in 1968, this Swiss guy named Enrich Von Daniken, he published a book called Chariots of the Gods. It is maybe one of the most important pieces of UFO literature ever made. I mean, certainly like the OG in my opinion. And it exploded into this massive global phenomenon. And the pitch here is very simple. What if the gods of ancient mythology weren't gods at all? But what if. What if they were aliens? Extraterrestrials who visited Earth thousands of years ago. They got mistaken for being divine because, duh, that's what human beings do all the time. Right. Like Cortez and the boys come over and allegedly the Maya thought they were gods. Now, I've heard that that's actually a myth, but it works for my point, so we'll believe it today. And basically these aliens come down, they leave their fingerprints on the Bible, the pyramids, every ancient religion. Well, that idea would ultimately become the foundation of this cult, Heaven's Gate. And it came at the perfect moment when the old religious institutions were cracking. This was at the height of American counterculture, of the hippie movement, when millions of young people, for the very first time really in American history, maybe in world history, were just walking out of churches that they had known their whole lives and started to toy with these new age ideas and kind of combining elements of different faiths, combinations with, you know, a little dash of Christianity, a little skosh of Eastern mysticism, you know, a little bit of sci fi in there. And then, of course, aliens. And that's how scholars describe Heaven's Gate, as a blend of these things. You have this obsession with Christian eschatology, this end time story of revelation, and then some new age spirituality of oneness and global, you know, universal connected consciousness. And then, of course, UFOs. And then in 1972, those three ingredients were basically in every home in America, and they weren't super foreign to normal life. As Benjamin Zeller, the leading scholar of the group, put it, Heaven's Gate was almost like quintessentially American. It is like, not like an aberration, but it is a manifestation of what the American culture of the time was. It was a mirror of everything the country was already obsessed with. And it just followed it kind of to the illogical end. So that is the world that we're stepping into. Freshly conquered. The moon. Put a flag in it, you're welcome. A sky. And just like a massive celestial body that is completely open and full of possibilities and an entire generation curious enough to search in new places outside of the dusty halls of the churches that they knew. And all it needed was two people to light the match. And that is exactly what happened. Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion, Camp, History Camp, and Camp Gagnon. Now let's get back to it. So In March of 1972, we go down to Houston, Texas, and there's two very important people there that happened to meet. And to this day, no one really agrees. How so? Marshall Herf, Applewhite in his early 40s, always said that they met at a hospital where Bonnie Lou nettles, who was 44 at the time, was working as a nurse and that he was only there visiting a friend of his that was sick. But at least one scholar who studied the group, this guy, James Lewis, he suspected that Applewhite was a patient in the facility, that he wasn't visiting a friend, that he himself was the person, was the person that was being observed. And it's a small discrepancy, but there are implications here and we generally don't know the answer. But what we can say for certain is that these two people were eccentric. Applewhite was the son of a Presbyterian minister. He was raised on just good old fashioned scripture of the Bible, you know, just, you know, Jesus Christ and everything nice. And he was blessed with an amazing singing voice. And he was even a music director at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Also, his life was falling apart. He lost that job over an alleged relationship with a male student. His marriage had already ended. Over his other relationships with men, his wife took their two children. And by his own account, he was depressed and tormented, but was also a deeply religious man who was at war with this conflict within himself. Nettles was the opposite kind of lost. A registered nurse, A mother of four, raised Baptist, but by 1972, she drifted deep into more esoteric mystical occult circles. So she belonged to the Theosophical Society, which, if you don't know what that is, we did a whole episode on it. She also was running weekly seances in her home. And she even wrote a newspaper astrology column based on guidance from a 19th century monk that was named Brother Francis, whom she believed that she was channeling. She was the mystic and he was the seeker. And they were about to become inseparable. Now, when they met, Nettles told Applewhite something strange. She meets him and she goes, I've been expecting you. The spirits that she had consulted with told her that a mysterious man would come into her life. And Applewhite said that he felt like he had known her for lifetimes, multiple lifetimes, like they had met before in maybe some type of previous life. And they formed this intense, I mean, platonic bond, right? There was no romance or sex. But then they started to read together. And so they would read the apocalyptic literature found in the Bible. They would read things by Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy and the Theosophical societies, and then they would read science Fiction like Arthur C. Clarke and others. And piece by piece, a homemade theology started to basically click together for them. And by that summer, they landed on a pretty wild conclusion that they were actually not ordinary people at all, that they had been given higher minds, that they had accessed this type of gnosis, this. This elevated sense of being, and that they were sent from somewhere, from above. And in fact, they decided that they were the two witnesses from the book of Revelation. Two prophets who in the text are murdered and left dead in the street for three and a half days, then resurrected and lifted into the sky while all their enemies and their ops just kind of watch. And this is where their belief turned dangerous. Because think about the prophecy, right? It says that it ends in their death and them sort of like laying on the ground and then ascending. That wasn't something that they were afraid of at all. Like, they are reading this and they're like, this is us. And not only were they not afraid, they embraced it. They start telling everyone that they would meet, that they would soon be killed in public and rise from the dead and be carried bodily into basically onto spaceships in front of all their enemies. An event that they called the demonstration. And this was the moment that would prove everything that they've ever said. Their entire existence would all of a sudden be meaningful. Like, it was like that was the moment. And so they called themselves the Two. And then they, you know, hit the road to find more than just two. So the early days for the Heaven's Gate cults were. I mean, like most cults, they were pretty messy. They were kind of ignored by everyone around them that they knew immediately because they were like, well, this is crazy. So they wandered basically with no money and kind of insignificantly just kind of drifting around until May of 1974, when something changed. They got their first follower. This is a woman named Sharon Morgan, who basically abandoned her children to do it. And then a month later, she realized how crazy she was and just went home. And then by then, the two had been running up her credit cards. They got arrested for fraud, and then the charges fell apart because they had a hard time building the case. And, you know, Morgan had agreed at the time to let them use the card, so it was hard to actually, like, charge them. But then the arrest actually uncovered something else. Applewhite's name was attached to a rental car that he had taken in St. Louis nine months earlier, and he never gave it back. As a matter of fact, that's the car that. That they were sitting in at the very Moment. So the man who believed he was the successor to Christ and was a prophet from the Book of Revelation spent about six months behind bars for auto theft. But then Applewhite walked out of jail in early 1975. And he was different. He was, like, calcified. He hardened into someone who was ready to take their movement more seriously and was demanding a little bit more respect. And that's when they decided to leave their old identities behind. So they began to reinvent themselves. They started using names like guinea and Pig. And, you know, that one didn't stick because they were like, why do I have to be Guinea? And then they were like, all right, what about Bo and Peep? And then the other one was like, why do I have to be Peep? And so they finally found two that stuck. And they went with T for Nettles and Do for Applewhite, like, the musical notes, like Do Remi Fo Latito. And this was basically a nod to his time as a music director. And so they have their two. They have their claim to fame, and now comes recruitment. They already had one follower that came and left, so now they had to do something a little different. So they held public meetings, and they would paper towns with flyers, and they went hunting for what they called the Crew. And the pitch was pretty audacious. They claimed to be representatives from another world called the Next Level, that they were running an experiment, and that anyone who joined could be physically transformed into a higher life form and literally taken off the planet and go aboard a spacecraft. I mean, imagine what you would do if you saw that flyer just, like, around your town. You'd probably be like, well, that's crazy. And the only people that would believe this are probably a little unhinged. And the wildest part is that it worked. People followed them. And In April of 1975, in Studio City, Los Angeles, they pitched to a room of about, like, 80 people, and roughly 25 of them joined on the spot. Now, what's crazy about all this is, I think, what people think about cults. They're just like, oh, these are, you know, like, the craziest, like, hippies and spiritual drifters. And, you know, like, they're just unhinged, crazy people. And I think it's very dismissive just to call people crazy, especially people that, like, just don't believe what you believe. And this cult wasn't filled with a bunch of crazy people. Sure, there were some spiritual kind of, you know, drifter types. But one early recruit who joined in 1975 was this guy, John Craig. He was a respected rancher from Colorado and a Republican who just a few years earlier had almost won a seat in the state House of Representatives. Think about that. He walked away from a ranch, political career and six children to follow these two people. Another man was named Thomas Nichols. He was the younger brother of a famous actress, Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek. They also snagged a would be lawmaker and nurses and musicians. I mean, this group reached a lot wider of an audience than you might think on its face. But the moment that made them infamous came a few months later in September. So the two, like tea and dough, they held a meeting at a local hall in Oregon and around like 20 kind of ordinary residents basically showed up and sold everything that they owned, said goodbye to their families and joined the group. And it's at that point in the back half of 1975 that the movement was really hit its zenith. They, they hit their highest point. The group swelled to roughly 200 followers. At least that's what the numbers most historians will settle on for the peak. I mean, you'll see bigger figures kind of going around from press accounts. And a later New York Times obituary claimed that, you know, it pulled in as many as like thousands. Even tea and dough muddied the waters. So it's really difficult to know. In a 1976 interview, the two estimated their flock was somewhere between 300 and 1,000. The real number is probably closer to 200. And that was going to be as large as the crew ever got because almost as soon as they were making national news, it all started to fall apart. So Walter Cronkite, he covered them on the CBS Evening News and described a group of people who disappeared on what he called a so called trip freeternity for most of America. It was the first time that they ever heard of this group. So how do these two people, how do t and do handle their big national moment in the spotlight? I mean, if you're running a cult or a, you know, a spiritual revival where you think that you're the prophets from the end of times that are going to take everyone on a spaceship, what would you do? You'd probably milk it, right? No, they, they vanished. I mean, they pulled the entire group underground. They scattered into like small teams across the country and would camp in like fields and sleep in tents and basically beg for money on, you know, street corners. The prophets who wanted the whole world to watch suddenly didn't want to be seen. Why? Well, part of it was because of the news coverage. It didn't take them seriously at all. They were kind of like a punchline. They were. They were a joke. They were a bunch of people that believed that aliens were going to take them on a ship. But Nettles actually turned that into something brilliant. She reframed it into an actual theology. By 1976, she was telling the group that the media, by mocking them, had effectively killed them, exactly as the two witnesses are struck down in the Book of Revelation. And according to her, the ridicule in this moment, it wasn't failure. It was actually divine prophecy being fulfilled. So it actually cemented the group and made them more hardcore. But another part of it was the pressure from the outside. So, of course, the coverage of the group's growth and their belief system, it frightened a lot of people, a lot of families. And with the whole 1970s apparatus of, like, cult deprogramming, people were actively hunting down members to bring them back home. I mean, fathers and brothers and uncles trying to get them to leave the group. So a couple hundred of them all living together, if 1 or 2 or 10 or 20 start to break off, that's a liability for the health of the group, you know, so splintering into these small, kind of nameless teams that couldn't be found was a way of camouflaging in plain sight. And, I mean, another part of it, you know, the part that the group would never admit on camera, was that it was already starting to splinter on the inside. Just fundamentally, you see, in the early days, T&do had promised something that they called the demonstration. We talked about this before. I mean, following Revelation 11, they swore that they would be publicly killed, resurrected, and then lifted away by a spacecraft, which is, you know, proof of everything that they've been teaching, and it would be witnessed by the entire world and that everything that they are talking about is valid and true. But the issue is this demonstration, it never happened. They would kind of keep waiting and talking about it. It never came. So when the promises of a demonstration never arrived, the certainty that had drawn so many people into this group started to turn into doubt. And by the end of 1975, the movement was growing more insular and more disjointed, and followers started to slip away. A full scale of those early defections was never cleanly recorded. Accounts differ on exactly how many people left and who they were and when. But the fracture itself was well documented, and the broken prophecy was ultimately at the heart of it. Now, there were smaller strains, too, the kind that Kind of happen, you know, whenever there's people. So, for example, one early member had become pregnant by her partner back in Oregon, who refused to join the group. And it was a situation that the two tried to manage as quietly as they could inside the group's basically internal walls of secrecy. So going underground was never just about hiding from the outside world, is about getting control of a movement that was slipping away from them. So for them, the recruiting part at this point was finished. And now came the part that no one on the outside would witness for years. And this is the part where Tea and Do stopped gathering believers and started to build them from the inside. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break real quick. Cause I wanna tell you about a brand that I actually love. You've probably seen ads for it on Instagram and it's Ultra. It's the best. As you already know, I'm super locked in on like, fitness and sleep and fasting and all that kind of stuff. And one thing that I care about now is getting energy in focus without feeling like, jittery and cracked out and on edge, like my heart is beating out of my chest. And that's why I reached out to Ultra. Ultra pouches have zero nicotine, zero caffeine pouches that give you clean focus and smooth energy when you need to lock in. And a lot of people think pouches are helping them at the gym, but nicotine is actually a vasoconstrictor. It actually narrows your blood vessels and restricts oxygen delivery to your muscles and can actually work against the pump that you're trying to get. It also can raise your heart rate and your blood pressure, which is not exactly what you want when you're already training super hard. Ultra gives you that pouch experience. It's fun, it tastes good, but it's 100% nicotine free. And they use clinically proven nootropics and adaptogens to deliver immediate focus and smooth energy that lasts one to two hours. And if you're fasting or dieting, they actually can help you quiet the cravings and limit the food noise to help keep you locked in. And they have five flavors. Cool Mint, Wintergreen, Watermelon, Tropical Blue Razz. My favorite is Blue Blue Raspberry and it tastes amazing. I have the watermelon ones here because I already finished the Blue Raz, but these are great too. Now Ultra is the ultimate guilt free pouch, delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine or caffeine. And new customers can use the code Camp C A M. P to get 15% off. When you go to take ultra.com, that's take ultra.com for 15% off with the code camp. And after you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please tell them that Mark and Christos from the camp site sent you. Now let's get back to the show. Let's start with the most surprising detail about the group. They never actually called themselves Heaven's Gate, like, not for most of their existence anyway. To each other, they were simply the class T and do. They were the teachers and members were students. And even today, the handful of survivors will still call themselves and each other classmates. That word is the key to all of this. They didn't think that they joined a religion. They thought that they were going to an institution like a school, that they were studying for a graduation in order to ascend to the next level. And then In April of 76, the school locked stores. T&Doe stopped recruiting altogether. And they just started focusing inward into what Zeller called a roving monastery with, like, you know, it's pretty strange behavior. And, you know, the code of conduct internally was very disturbing. So, for example, sex, intercourse was completely banned. So were drugs and alcohol. But the rules were just the surface. The real goal was to basically erase every trace that the members had of being human. Because reaching the next level meant that you had to shed all of your attachments to the planet. I mean, and that means everything. Your family, your friends, your name, money, possessions, your gender, Everything about you that was unique or individualized or separate, you had to remove it and remove all attachment. And to promote their commitment to celibacy, eight of the men, including Applewhite himself, went so far as to get surgically castrated. The first attempt was done in house by a member who had been a nurse. And it went so badly that the patient nearly died, which drove at least one follower to just quit on the spot. He was like, y' all are crazy. I'm out. After everything that they had gone through, the demonstration not coming true, going underground, splintering, all that stuff, it was this moment. He was like, I'm out. Every castration after that happened to be done properly, like in a hospital. And to them, it was liberation. It was a way to switch off the body's demand and become slightly less primal, slightly less human, and be more like the angels that they were trying to become. And as a result, members started to dress alike. They cut their hair the same way, and they were deliberately made to look as identical and as androgynous as possible. They shared everything and they owned nothing. And in public, every single member carried the exact same two things in their pocket. A five dollar bill and three quarters. Remember that because that detail will be important in just a little bit. So the easy word to describe all of this is brainwashing. But it's actually more complicated than just that because a lot of scholars push back hard on that word. There's surprisingly little evidence of real coercion, I guess, in the way that you might think about it. No one was like chained up like the doors of like their houses or their commune. It was never locked. People could just walk in and walk out freely over the years. And the ones who wanted out, I mean, they were able to leave. Applewhite told members again and again that they could leave whenever they wanted. And some of them did. This sociologist Robert Balch, who studied the group up close, found the members far more clear eyed and self directed than that term brainwashing would make you think, right? They weren't doing drugs or alcohol. It wasn't like a sex cult. It was all fairly regular people on a mission trying to learn and better themselves that got warped along the way. So was it a prison? Was it a choice? Honestly, it's not a clean slice either way. What you really had was a room full of sincere, intelligent, ostensibly good people who chose over and over to hand over their autonomy to two leaders that they trusted completely. It's not like a gun pointed at him like, you better do this. But it isn't exactly freedom either, right? That wasn't like, hey, this is the actual reality and this is all absurd and it's that unbearable in between. That is exactly what made the belief system of Heaven's Gate so difficult to wrap your mind around. Which raises the question that I think is at the heart of the whole story. What kind of belief could make giving up everything worth it? I mean, everything, your body, your family, your name, your gender, like all of that. Well, what is it? Well, the answer lies in the belief that you have to truly trust what's waiting for you on the other side. That what you're sacrificing here is not even a sacrifice compared to what you were going to get in heaven, or I guess, up in a spacecraft in the sky, because remember, they were trying to graduate to be enlightened enough and to be spiritual enough to be picked up by this mothership. And this all started with an idea that they borrowed from Von Dankonen, the ancient astronaut idea. Heaven's Gate. Taught that aliens from a realm that they called the next level, or the evolutionary level above human, had planted their seeds of humanity on earth millions of years ago, like. Like gardeners, basically. And now the gardeners were coming back to harvest to collect the handful of human souls that had evolved enough on a spiritual or a consciousness level to be worth saving. Everyone else that would be left on the planet was unfortunately going to, you know, be doomed, and the whole planet would rot and be poisoned. And they believed that the next level is a real physical place, another world out there in the universe where beings lived without food or death or sex or any of the things that make us human. They pictured them nourished by pure sunlight, traveling by spacecraft, communicating through telepathy, and functionally immortal. And you couldn't just believe your way into it. You had to transform yourself into a being that could be saved. You had to grind down this, you know, the anthropic human self through a step by step process until you were finally ready to be picked up. And this is the part that really kind of starts to turn into something very dark, Because Heaven's gate theology, it did have a villain. They believed that the universe was also full of evil aliens. These beings that they called Luciferians, and these are basically renegades who quit their training to reach the true kingdom of God thousands of years ago. And these Luciferians, they taught, had been basically tricking humanity from the very beginning. They posed as God and they faked miracles, and they'd basically corrupted every single religion on earth. Name a religion. These evil aliens had infiltrated it and destroyed it. And they did this to keep human beings trapped and distracted and more easily farmable. So let's look at what this particular belief actually does. It teaches that every other faith on the planet isn't just wrong. It is a deliberate trap by evil aliens, which means the only true information left in the world comes from only two people. That's T&do. It's a perfect closed loop where any doubt, any objection from the outside all of a sudden becomes proof that the Luciferians are getting to you, or that maybe, just maybe, you yourself are a Luciferian. You might be an evil alien that is, you know, corrupting the very group that is the class. And this tactic, it's not unique to just Heaven's gate. It's basically, you know, any type of cult or society or even some religions that have bumpers like this. And the doctrine had a habit of evolving in very convenient ways. So at first, T.I. and Doe said that they were aliens born into Human bodies. But when a New Age concept called walk ins got kind of trendy, the idea that a higher soul could move into a body another soul had abandoned, Tee and Doe quietly rewrote themselves as walk ins. And that little revision did something really important. It seems subtle, but it actually really changed the perspective of the whole group. It erases their past. You see, Marshall Applewhite, the music teacher that went to prison for stealing a car, never existed and definitely doesn't exist now. And that was just the previous tenant basically, of the vehicle that did all that stuff. Do that person that is someone new, that is someone that walked into this new body in order to enlighten humanity. In fact, Applewhite came to teach that the soul inside him was the same one that had lived in the body of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago. Not Jesus himself literally, but like the same spirit, the same essence that it was back for a sequel. And so he called himself the present representative. And T, well, T ranked even higher than Do. The T was basically do's older member, the God the Father type figure. If, you know, DO is Jesus, well, T is above Jesus, kind of like the senior soul running the entire operation from above. Now, that question of who was truly in command, DO or T, will be the hinge that the entire tragedy is about to swing on. Because the hinge here is actually going to break when the head honcho, their spiritual guide, their father figure, so to speak, the literally God incarnate, walked into the fleshy body of this human being, dies of cancer. Yeah, things go off the rails. Here's what happens. For nearly a decade, the group just kind of waited. They would go from, like, you know, camp to camp and refining their doctrine and, you know, mostly just like, hanging out. They would watch the sky for, you know, the day that the next level would send a craft to lift them all away. And then in 1985, it happened. Well, not the UFO thing that Bonnie Nettles. T was dying of cancer. And this is a massive calamity for the group. T wasn't just their leader in their theology. She was the higher of the two beings, the only two people that, or two aliens, rather, that knew anything that was going on. The most senior one, the older member, the closest thing that they had to God in human form was dying. And the entire promise of the group was that they would ascend bodily, alive, onto a ship. That is in the teaching. So then how does God die of cancer in a hospital bed? How does this immortal being from the next level just die like Any other person. The entire premise of the theology hinges on this moment. This should have been the end of Heaven's gate. By any rational measure. The prophecy had just failed in the most undeniable way possible. Not only did they, you know, not die, then get taken away in a spaceship, one of the main members just kind of died of tragic death in a hospital bed. Now, instead of everyone, you know, breaking apart, we're going to see how the group survives a blow like this. A committed belief system doesn't break in a normal way. It bends. Applewhite reframed the entire thing. If T's body died but T was divine, then obviously the body was never the point. The body, how he taught, was just a vehicle. It was just a vessel. It was the car that you climb in and out of. T never died. T had just simply left this vehicle and gone ahead to the next level in order to prepare the way for the rest of us. But now this pivot creates a new problem. Because if leaving your body behind is now the same as boarding the spaceship, like if your consciousness can do it without the body. Which again, was not the original theology. It was that we are going to assume to a physical place in our actual bodies. That's why we're doing all this stuff to our bodies. But all of a sudden, the main person's body dies, the soul goes away for all of them. You actually don't need a spaceship in order to land on this new place. You don't need to be lifted away alive. You just need to exit the vehicle. Does that make sense? In one grief stricken revision, the entire theology rotated from hey, we're going to go up alive in these bodies to we're going to leave these bodies behind and we're going to escape and now go to the next level. Now, no one said the s word in 1995, the taking your own life word, it was actually the opposite. Doe had spent years preaching against this, calling it a betrayal of the next level. This was a way of throwing the gift of being able to exist in this reality back in their faces. But now the logic was shifting and it would just kind of sit there for 12 more years while Doe, suddenly alone, basically led the group by himself, constantly looking up at the sky for a sign or anything that would tell him what to do next. And then in the 1990s, the group did something that was very much ahead of its time. They went online, and under the business name Higher Source, they launched a web design company. And you're not going to believe me. They were good. In the early 90s, with the Internet barely coming to life, this crew of, like, disciplined, sober, communal, motivated workers that truly believed in this mission. They would build a clean, professional website on a deadline. And ultimately, this became the business that paid for the community. In fact, it's where they got the money to, you know, later cover $7,000 a month to rent a mansion. But they weren't only using the web to earn a living. They were using it to preach. They built the Heaven's Gate website and poured their entire doctrine to onto it for free for anyone on Earth to find. One of the first new religious movements to treat the Internet as like a church, like a pulpit to preach from. One cultural theorist actually called them a cyber sect. And that's exactly how one of the most important figures in this entire story found them. A man named Richard Ford. And he stumbled into the group through a 1994 online article, basically joined the crew and took the name Rio d'. Angelo. Now, remember that name. He comes back into the story at the very end, and he's going to be the reason that the world ends up knowing ultimately what happened to Heaven's Gate. So at this point, the group had gone deeply reclusive and is openly paranoid about the outside world and press coverage. But that paranoia wasn't coming from nowhere. I mean, they were watching the news. So cults and independent religious groups were being infiltrated and taken down left and right. They watched the standoff at Ruby Ridge. And then in 1993, they watched the FBI siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco with scores of people dead. And so from that, Doe basically drew a very chilling conclusion that someday the American government was going to come for his group, too. Now, let's connect that back to the growing theology that's kind of changing here. Doe taught that there were several approved ways that a soul could graduate to the next level. One was the spaceship physically taking them. Another was simply dying, even a violent way. And another was death by persecution. Which, notice the difference here. Like this is not dying in a car crash. This is being martyred by an outside enemy. So the news stories didn't scare Doe away from death. If anything, it actually helped him further his theology on graduation. And it also helped him illustrate to the rest of the group that dying or, you know, the government coming in and taking them all out actually might not be the worst thing. It was actually one of the ways that they could ascend. Now the group had become a closed circle of a few dozen believers cut off from the outside World making websites and waiting. And the only thing that was left to do was to wait for a sign in the sky. And in 1995, two astronomers saw it. In July of 1995, two astronomers independently spotted a new comet far, far out in the solar system. And it took both their names and it's called the Hale Bopp Comet. And it was a massive monster comet, one of the brightest of the whole century and, and visible to the naked eye for months. So by the spring of 1997, it would hang over the entire planet and it was kind of impossible to miss. So for most of the world, this was like a once in a lifetime light show. But for Heaven's Gate, it was the sign. It was a divine sign that they had been waiting 22 years for. In late 1996, the UFO and New Age underground communities were talking about something trailing behind the comet, this mysterious companion object tucked in the tail of the comet, like maybe a spacecraft. So was the companion real? Well, it's weird because according to scientific standards, no astronomers pinned it down almost immediately. It was a star smeared into a blob by an amateur's distorted photo. And that's the thing that everyone saw. And the comet's co discoverer, this guy Alan Hale, was horrified by what people were building out of his really generational discovery. He'd actually warned a colleague before any of this that comets will make people irrational and that someone might even get hurt by this discovery. Afterwards, he spoke with actual real grief, pleading that comets are just these beautiful objects in the sky with no message and no reason and really just begging people to try to use their critical thinking. And there was nothing behind the comet but empty space. That is what ultimately Alan Hale was telling everyone. But of course, that's not what Heaven's Gate believed. According to them, that companion object wasn't a little smudge star. It was t coming home. It was the next level craft finally arriving to carry all of them away to the next level. But here's the thing that's crazy. The same autumn, the group had actually bought alien abduction insurance. Like a real policy, like a million dollars ahead, covering up to 50 members against abduction, impregnation or death by aliens. Then In October of 1996, they rented their final home. This was a massive 9200 square foot mansion in the wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe. This is a little bit north of San Diego, and they called it the monastery. And just a few months later, the comet would be burning its brightest, blazing over the entire planet. Exactly the cosmic signal that Doe and T had been talking about. It was finally time to leave their vehicles behind. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about gld. This is an awesome new company that we're working with that I am actually wearing right now. I actually got this crucifix right here. And honestly, even just getting it, you know, sometimes, like when you work with some companies, you're like, all right, I really hope the product is good. This one is. I wear it all the time. This is actually like the new crucifix. I lost my last one at a bathhouse, literally, at a sauna. I lost my crucifix, which is maybe God's way of telling me something. But I got a new one from GLD and I've been rocking it non stop. My wife likes it and it's got, like a nice weight to it. The details actually look better in person. The clasp is, like, super solid. It doesn't feel like something you bought, like in Times Square from a random dude. It doesn't feel like something you order from, you know, some sketchy website on Teemu. And they got everything. Chains, pendants, bracelets, watches. Whether you want something subtle or something that's like, yo, I just, I just signed a deal, you know, I mean, if you want like the record deal chain, they got that too. Now, if I haven't convinced you yet, let me sweeten the deal a little bit. All right? For a limited time, the listeners of this program, Camp Gagnon, religion, Camp history camp, and the entire camp universe, you're getting a crazy deal. If you use the code Camp C A M P when you check out, you're going to get 40% off your entire order@gld.com. that's 40% off your whole order with the Code Camp at checkout at gld. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about gld. Tell them you heard about them from, you know, the good folks here at the campsite Mark and Christo sent you. And whenever you do that, it really helps, you know, support the show. And thank you so much to GLD and thank you to you for tuning in. Let's get back to the show. So in the third week of March, 1997, Marshall Applewhite sat down in front of a camera and just started talking. And the tape is titled Doe's Final Exit. Calm, certain, he explains exactly what they, him and the rest of the class are about to do. He says the comet is a sign the Spacecraft is here. And in his words, this is the only way to evacuate this Earth. All around him, his students film their own goodbyes. And it's strange to watch. And you should watch them, because there's no fear. They sit in pairs, laughing like, grinning, talking about how excited they are to finally ascend to the next level. They thank. Do they describe the next level like kids basically describing their summer break? Every visible sign says that these people are happy and here consensually, because they were certain that their lives were not ending, that their ascension was just beginning. They thought that they were going home. And what happened over the next three days was methodical and gentle and extremely organized. The 39 of them, 21 women and 18 men, ranging from 26 years old to 72 years old, died in waves across three days. The exact count per wave differs between sources. Some would say 15, and then another 15 and then nine. But others break it down differently, but every account agrees on the structure. They would leave in shifts, and after each shift, the ones still living cleaned everything up with meticulous care so that the next group could go in, and then the next, and they could all go with dignity. Each of them swallowed a lethal dose of the sedative phenobarbital, folded into applesauce or pudding and basically washing it down with vodka to deepen the effect. And then a plastic bag went over their head. And after a person passed, the living would gently remove the bag, lay the body straight in its own bunk in the mansion, and drape a square of purple cloth over the face and the chest. Every single one of them was dressed identically. Black shirts, black sweatpants, brand new black and white Nike sneakers. On every shoulder, a patch reading Heaven's Gate Away Team. And the group. I mean, they loved Star Trek, and they pictured themselves as basically being like an away team, beaming off the world to go back home. And in every pocket, the same thing. A $5 bill and 3/4 the same money that I mentioned before. Why do they have it? Well, that's contested. Former members say that it was just what they always carried when they left the house. 5 bucks for vagrancy laws, quarters to, you know, pay for a payphone. And that taking it to their deaths was almost like a. Like a morbid inside joke amongst the group, a way of saying, like, hey, we've all left the planet. Now we're gone. We don't even need this. But another former member insisted that the real significance actually pointed to a line from Mark Twain that $5.75 was the fare to ride the tail of a comet to heaven. Now here's the catch. Researchers went looking. Here's the weird part. There's no such passage from Mark Twain. So one of the most haunting details of the entire scene may trace back to a quote that was completely made up from the start. We may never know what those coins truly meant to them. Applewhite was the third from the last to go. The final two had no one left to tidy up after them. They were found with the bag still in place and the purple cloths were never laid over them them. In their final days they'd also mailed packages like farewell tapes and a letter to former members and a couple of media contacts. One reached this guy, Rio Deangelo, the man who had joined the group and then left but never quite let go. And he opened the letter on the night of March 25th and then left immediately to go to the mansion. And what he found was this. The back door left unlocked, probably for him. And he stepped inside and he filmed everything and then he called 91 1. And on the morning of March 26, 1997, San Diego County Sheriff's deputies arrived on what was an anonymous tip. This was Deangelo's tip, asking them to check on the welfare of the residents. The first deputy walked in, saw the bodies and was immediately driven out by the horror and the smell. It was the largest mass life taking event ever to happen on US soil. 39 people all gone. Each one of them certain to the very last moment that they had made the greatest decision of their lives. Now, despite the communal life taking measure of just about all of its members, it was far from the end of Heaven's Gate. Within days, a 58 year old man near Marysville, California, with no known link to the group at all, also took his own life, leaving a note that he was going on the spaceship with Hale Bopp. And then some of the group's own survivors, people who had left, started to follow. And In May of 1997, two former members, Wayne Cook and Chuck Humphreys, tried to exit the same exact way. Cook passed away, but Humphrey lived that time. But In February of 1998 he tried it again. And that time he didn't fail. He was found with a $5 bill and three quarters in his pocket and a note beside him that said do not revive. But then, and yes, it gets crazier. There's a whole other layer of this story that no one saw coming. On the same day the Heaven's gate exits began March 22, 1997 five members of a completely separate group called the Order of the Solar Temple also died in a mass life taking event in Quebec. And their beliefs were extremely similar to Heaven's Gate, like in almost every way. They too believed that death would free their souls to travel into space. And the press instantly smelled a connection, but investigators couldn't find one. The Solar Temple deaths had been timed to the spring equinox, not the comet itself, and only happened on the 22nd after several botched attempts. Two groups an entire continent apart, walking through the same door in the same week. And I mean, the mansion is in like a nice part of, you know, like north of San Diego. Well, the neighborhood was pissed. They renamed the entire street. They sold the house at a foreclosure auction at a fraction of its worth. And the buyers tore it to the ground, built something new, and then they even changed the address, trying as much as they could to erase everything that happened there. And that should be the end, right? It is a tragic story of 39 people, a comet and an empty patch of sky. A house wiped off the map and should be sealed in its own strange moment in time. But it's not the end. Because Heaven's Gate never went away. And the questions that it asked back then are now louder and even more prevalent today in 2026, maybe more than they ever have been in history. The website is still online. Could you go to the website? You can still go to it to this day. It's still. The servers are still on. It still has the same 90s web design. And some of the Heaven's Gate crew are still out there and the things that they stake their life on, that the government was hiding the truth about what's in the sky, that there's life out there that knows more than we do, that we're being visited by craft. Well, it doesn't sound as crazy now as it did back then. I mean, for the past 50 years, believing the government was hiding the truth about aliens or UFOs, it was pretty weird. You know, it was like in movies, but, you know, you wouldn't really know anyone that believed it. It was kind of underground, but now, I mean, it's way more mainstream. In 2017, reporting exposed a secret Pentagon program studying unexplained objects in the sky. In 2023, a former intelligence officer told Congress under oath that the United States have recovered craft of non human origin. And in 2026, the Pentagon started putting decades of classified UFO files online for anyone to read. And this is the kind of stuff that Heaven's Gate built.
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of it's theology on and unfortunately for Heaven's Gate, I don't think they were right. And it matters why. Right unidentified Just means that we don't know. It never meant that. We do know. And the answer is an alien spacecraft. It's behind a comet. And that part never had a shred of real evidence. And I think it's important to say because while it's fascinating to indulge in these theories and to learn more about this and to know the, you know, the craziness that happens within, you know, the, you know, mystery realm and to learn about all these different people's beliefs, whether they're fringe or abstract, we can never. No, I don't think on a personal level we should ever go too deep and encourage anyone to harm each other or oneself for these beliefs. I mean, for all I know, sure, maybe there's an alien spacecraft behind the comet. Probably not, but go ahead. The thing is, you can't use that as justification or a theology to encourage you and 38 other people to take their own lives. And the truth is the fact that they believe that this was the way is truly strange and morbid and compelling in its own way. Like they were willing to risk their entire lives, everything that they had ever worked for, everything they built, their families, and ultimately taking their entire essence away. And it's not because it was a gamble or because they wanted to see they were positive. And at the end of the day, the comet just kept going. And according to its rotation, we're going to see it again in another 4,000 years. And 4,000 years from now, learn from Heaven's Gate. Don't do it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an abridged history of the cult of Heaven's Gate, the class, the crew and the story of T. And do. I mean crazy? Do you have the website of Heaven's Gate? It's a. It's bizarre. It's like you really should see it because it's, it's crazy that still, it's still up now, whether, I mean, what is it? What is the texture. Whether Hale Bop has a companion or not is irrelevant from our perspective, however, its arrival is joyously very significant to us at Heaven's gate. The joy is that our older member in the evolutionary level above human, the kingdom of Heaven, has made it clear to us that the Hale Bopp's approach is the marker we've been waiting for. The time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the level above human to take us home to their world in the literal heavens. Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to a conclusion graduation from the human evolutionary level. And we are happily prepared to leave this world and go with T's crew. There it is, etched in stone, basically digital stone, but still there to this very day. The same thing that they posted and said, click, this is the end. And can you get a picture of him? Can you go to. What is it? Do's Doe's ending? It's a. The videos that come out of this are bizarre. And seeing them like saying goodbye in like this sure way. I always think back to the conversation I had with Jennings Brown. It's a great podcast we did. You should check it out. But he says something so interesting that when these failed end time prophecies happen, right, like this idea of the demonstration coming to take them or that they would die and then the spaceship would come and take them in their bodies to go to the next level. When it didn't happen, some of the group breaks off and they say, hey, I'm out. You guys said something would happen. It didn't happen. I'm leaving. What's crazy is that the people that stay actually become more solidified. They become more true believers. And that the person in charge of the cult is able just to say, hey, this is actually a test. We weren't ready enough. We weren't pure enough. So now you need to get more pure, you need to get more locked in. And that is when we're actually going to go and the rinse and repeat. The group that's left, you know, coming from 200 people down to like 39, those are the most die hard people that have been just absolutely, you know, just stewing in this type of information for 22 years. So at the very end it's like, yeah, it's actually not that unbelievable when you think about the level of, you know, solidification that happens in the forging of this community. I mean, you can see a picture of him here, Marshall Applewhite. And yeah, this is a from ABC News inside the Heaven's Gate House. And it shows the. This is from their documentary. And you can see them, like, sitting there on buses and just hanging out. Now, if you. Or anyone, you know, which. Another thing that Jennings said that's so interesting, these cults back in the day, they needed to get people in person. They needed to do these big gatherings and these conferences to get people in person. Nowadays, a lot of this stuff is online. It's just like digital cults. Like, it sounds crazy, but it's real. It happens on Facebook, it happens on Instagram, or like, you join a group, maybe it's like, you know, the example he always gives is like, let's say you join a mommy group and you have. You're a mom, you have two kids, and one of your kids has, like, eczema and they have, like, the skin rash. And you join this group that tells you to do, like, some holistic medicine or maybe to do, like this alternative treatment or to do this thing that'll help clear it up. And it works because it's actually, you know, a good, you know, medical procedure that can help with eczema. And then you get a message say, hey, congrats on curing your kid. Now we're gonna add you to the inner group. This is the most secretive group for people that are not only trying to improve and enlighten their physical bodies, but in order to improve their spiritual bodies. And then what happens? Well, they now go to the spiritual cleansing. And the spiritual cleansing is where all of a sudden you get all the crazy end time stuff. Sorry for saying crazy, but it is crazy. You get like the end time stuff that makes you like, okay, now it's time to lock in. And then they start separating you from your family. And this is the crazy part. The cults will tell you, hey, your family's not going to understand and they're not going to like this. And when you tell them that, oh, you're doing this, you know, radical diet, or when you tell them that, oh, you're wearing these new clothes or that you're cutting your hair in this way, they're not going to get it. And then inevitably, their husbands, their brothers, whatever, they go to them and they go, hey, why are you cutting your hair like this? And then they go back to the group and they go, you're right, they did exactly what you said they didn't understand. And then they get more solidified. So the advice that Jennings gives is ultimately to ask questions by trying to pull them out or to use logic or to try to, you know, extract Them using like force, it only solidifies the position. All the programming that's done on the inside actually validates that moment. So ultimately what you have to do is just to ask questions. You're super open ended. You go, hey, this group that you're in, what's that about? What do you guys believe? Oh, interesting. Okay. And what do they make you do? And, oh, you can leave at any time. Okay, that's good. And by having open discourse and asking these questions, you can actually pull people out of these ideologies. That's kind of my classification of a cult. If you can't come and go freely and if there's, you know, coercion that's happening to you on a mental level, you're probably in a cult. You know, religions don't fall under that bracket for me because you can come and go freely, you can join the religion, you could stop and no one's going to track you down. Now if they are tracking you down, be careful. Crisos. What'd you learn from this? It's kind of crazy, but that guy that left because of the botched castration, I would have been out at no sex. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can tell. You actually remind me of Marshall Applewood. How dare you. No, you just. I'm saying you kind of have like his, his. His charisma, his charm. What do you think I meant? Well, the commenters can't. No, they can tell your charm, they can tell your. Your whole pizzazz, your energy, your. Your sexual essence. They've never seen me, but they can hear you and they can feel you're in your. You're in their earballs. Me and Marshall Applewhite? Exactly. Betwixt Star Crossed. Anyway, what do you guys think? Is there anything I missed? If you guys are, you know, more well researched on this, maybe you're a member of Heaven's Gate. If there's anything I got wrong or anything that I completely overlooked, please let me know. I'm. Like I said, I'm not a historian, I'm not a cult expert. I'm just a curious comedian with a WI FI connection. So by all means, please don't hesitate to correct me. Drop a comment below. I read all of them. Even if I don't personally respond, someone will respond and the comment will certainly be helpful to someone. Now, I have great news if you are interested in historical content. Well, we have a whole channel for that history camp where we drop episodes every single Wednesday on the most interesting stuff that's ever happened ever in history. Also if you like religious content similar to, like, what we talked about today, but the more mainstream stuff, you know, talking about Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam. Well, we have religion camp. We drop those episodes every single Sunday. And if you yourself are interested in joining a secret society, not a cult, certainly not. But a secret society. Well, I want to invite you to a very secretive society. It is the bonfire. It is the campfire where we gather here at the campsite. And at that campfire, you're going to get additional episodes every single month. You're going to get merch discounts. You're going to get early access to guests that we have coming up, and you're going to get monthly zooms with me and the rest of the squad. Not a cult. You can come and go whenever you want. All right? That's our rule. But we would love it if you joined us. And that's over@patreon.com campgagnon that is patreon.com camp gagnon. And it's going to cost you about a cup of coffee every single month. Yes. $5. And you're going to be getting all that beautiful content. Oh, and every episode of this ad, free. So if the ads are annoying you, congrats. There's a way out into the next level. $5. I mean, this is kind of a morbid way to pitch that. I know it sounds. It's not great. Helps. Pay me. You help Christos out.
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All right.
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It's a Patreon. Anyway, thank you guys so much for tuning another episode of Camp. God bless you all. I appreciate you dearly, and I'll see you next time.
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Peace.
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Hey, guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at Camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows, and I choose the topics every single week. So check it out. Subscribe and start the dialogue. And in the comment section, Stitch Fix. Stop shopping. Get styled. Not today, sweatpants. Somebody's wearing jeans that fit.
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Wow.
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No photos, please. I'm just a regular dad who happens to have a stylist. I really look my best when someone else makes the decisions. Hey, we can all see you two way mirrors. Just share your size, style, and budget, and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door. Stitch Fix. Get started today@stitch fix.com. i want to hug you. I'm going to hug you. I'm coming in for a hug.