Remember these whackos?
Remember these guys? The Heaven’s Gate people had a penchant for Nikes and a pretty unhealthy obsession with the Hale-Bopp Comet. In total, 39 poor saps took their own lives, convinced that doing so would ensure their safe passage aboard a spaceship trailing the comet. After they purchased alien abduction insurance (the logic of this still baffles me) from Lloyd’s of London, they prepared a weird mixture of pudding, applesauce, arsenic and cyanide, and finally washed it all down with vodka. It took days before their bloated corpses were found. Hey, at least their insurance worked!
The cult leaders, Marshall Applewhite (above) and his partner Bonnie Nettles, had spent years feeding into each other’s delusion that they were celestial beings. But when they first started their cult, they only managed to convince one person, and it was like that for several years. I have to wonder if there was a moment, back in the mid seventies, where Bo and Bonnie started to wonder if they weren’t just nutbags, given the lukewarm response of potential followers. Was there a time of brief sanity when they might have popped out of their delusion and seen the truth? Well, judging by the video above, I’d say he had checked out from reality long ago.
Also, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be the lonely covert…sort of reminds me of a Kids in the Hall sketch: