Anecdotes

Many years before the mass suicide, the TV-movie La secte du futur (1982) was inspired by some of the beliefs and statements of the Heaven's Gate cult. The character portrayed by John Forsythe, named "He" in the film, was loosely based on Marshall Applewhite, who went by the name "Do" as the leader of Heaven's Gate.

Marshall Applewhite founded the Heaven's Gate religious cult in the 1970s, cultivating a small but devoted following over the years. Applewhite and 38 of his Heaven's Gate followers committed mass suicide on March 26, 1997. Their deaths were timed to coincide with the passage of the Hale-Bopp comet, which Applewhite believed contained a spacecraft that would carry them away.

Applewhite and Nettles were huge fans of Star Wars: Épisode IV - Un nouvel espoir (1977) and Rencontres du troisième type (1977), and they brought ideas from sci-fi to the group - resulting in theories like that Virgin Mary had been taken aboard a spaceship and impregnated with Jesus. It also led to the members that would eventually kill themselves to wear patches that said "Heaven's Gate Away Team," which you can see in the group's farewell video, a reference the specialized crew that went on missions to alien planets in _Star Trek (1980). [Rolling Stone, 2017].