Heaven's Gate — Hale–Bopp 'departure' of 1997

That a spacecraft trailing Comet Hale–Bopp would collect group members' souls as Earth was 'recycled'.

In March 1997 the Heaven's Gate group claimed a spacecraft was following Comet Hale–Bopp and that Earth would soon be 'recycled'. No such object existed. The episode ended in a mass suicide and is documented as one of the most harmful modern doomsday claims.

Heaven's Gate group (Marshall Applewhite) — group.

The group's own website, a shortwave radio segment on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM, and a widely-shared amateur photograph mis-identified as a 'companion object' to Hale–Bopp carried the claim far beyond the group's few dozen members.

WHY IT RESONATEDA small, tightly-controlled group combined UFO belief with millenarian Christian imagery; the comet's unusual brightness provided a public focal point that talk radio and early internet amplified.

No object was ever detected near Hale–Bopp. On 26 March 1997 police in Rancho Santa Fe, California, discovered that 39 group members had died by suicide. Coverage by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and later academic studies of new religious movements is extensive.

The 'companion object' photograph was a lens artifact, promptly refuted by astronomers. The group's teaching was closed, unfalsifiable, and had already recycled earlier failed dates.

• Encyclopædia Britannica — Heaven's GateReference work
• New York Times — Death in a Cult (1997)Independent reporting

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