Marshall Applewhite believed — and made others believe — that Earth was about to be wiped clean, and that the only escape was to shed the human body and board a spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. In March 1997, 39 members of Heaven's Gate were found dead in a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, dressed in matching black and wearing new Nike sneakers. They had packed bags for the journey. Applewhite had been refining this theology for decades, and the people who followed him were not fringe figures — they were educated, thoughtful, and completely certain. We look at the belief system, the man who built it, and the community that died by it.

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