Navy premium weight 100% organic cotton TSPTR long sleeve tee with water based ink print

Heaven’s Gate was the archetypal New Age Californian cult. Founded in the early 1970s by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles who met during a stay in a psychiatric institution – they renamed themselves Do and Bo and took a six-month-long road trip across the US. Around 1974, they assembled a group called “the crew.”

Later choosing the name Heaven’s Gate, the cult would advertise their meetings in the Haight Ashbury Free Press, expounding their philosophy of blended extraterrestrial UFOlogy and Christian theology. Applewhite told his acolytes that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, that God was an alien, and that they were living in the end times.

In March 1997, 39 members, including Applewhite, all wearing matching black track suits and Nike Decade sneakers, ate apple sauce laced with barbiturates and washed it down with vodka. They then put plastic bags over their heads, purple shrouds over their bodies, and laid down to leave their earthly vehicles behind. Named the ‘Away Team’ by Applewhite, they believed they were freeing their souls so they could ascend to a spacecraft flying in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet – which at that point was passing by Earth.

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