This Day in History: Thirty-nine bodies were found in the Heaven's Gate mass suicides on this day in 1997. The suicides were conducted in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale–Bopp. All 39 members were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades, and armband patches reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team."
The leaders of the Heaven's Gate group, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, came to their beliefs by reading books on Theosophy, and the King James Bible, Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull), the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi and the science fiction works of Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. With this they concluded that they were the two witnesses described in the Book of Revelation.
This wasn't the only religiously motivated mass suicide. The most infamous was the 1978 Peoples Temple mass suicide where almost a thousand bodies were found. From 1994 to 1997, the Order of the Solar Temple's members began a series of mass suicides, which led to roughly 74 deaths. In 2007, in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, a family of nine, all members of a the "Adam's cult", committed mass suicide by hurling themselves under a train. There was also a family in Burari, India, in 2018 where all the members hanged themselves.
On March 17, 2000, 778 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God died in Uganda were found dead. The theory that all of the members died in a mass suicide was changed to mass murder when decomposing bodies were discovered in pits with signs of strangulation while others had stab wounds.
See also 300 Books on DVD on Christian Cults & Sects (Adventism, Mormon, Amish etc)
For a list of all of my disks and digital books click here
For a list of all of my disks and digital books click here
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