The Founders and The Origins of the Cult
According to Reece, Heaven’s Gate was founded by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles in the early 1970’s after experiencing a claimed revelation, visioning that they were the two Witnesses prophesized in Revelations II., in the Bible, who had been killed in martyrdom and had been taken up by a cloud into the Kingdom of God 2000 years earlier. Applewhite interpreted the prophecy as the cloud sent by God was a symbol of an actual flying saucer.
As Jenkins puts it, such an integration of the UFO theme into religion was not a radically new approach, when seeking for an alternative to traditional supernatural Ascended Masters, the first being the Aetherius Society founded in 1956 . As he explains, Robert Heinlein’s book, Stranger in a Strange Land, about a human raised by Martians, who forms a messiatic cult on earth, influenced alternative and occultist subcultures in the 1960-70’s and also intrigued the founders of Heaven’s Gate (173).
Heinlein's novel