Heaven's Gate was an American UFO religious group based near San Diego, California. It was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. On March 26, 1997, members of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group in a house in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They had participated in a mass suicide, a coordinated series of ritual suicides, in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale–Bopp.
James Warren Jones was an American cult leader, preacher and self-professed faith healer. He launched the Peoples Temple in Indiana during the 1950s. Jones and his inner circle orchestrated a mass murder-suicide of himself and his followers in his jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978.
Heaven's Gate was an American UFO religious group based near San Diego, California. It was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. On March 26, 1997, members of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group in a house in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They had participated in a mass suicide, a coordinated series of ritual suicides, in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale–Bopp.
Roch Thériault was a Canadian cult leader who led the small religious group the Ant Hill Kids in Burnt River, Ontario, between 1977 and 1989. Thériault, a self-proclaimed prophet under the name Moïse, founded the doomsday cult in Quebec based on Seventh-day Adventist Church beliefs.
David Koresh was an American cult leader who played a central role in the Waco siege of 1993. As the head of the Branch Davidians sect, an offshoot of the Davidian Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Koresh claimed to be its final prophet.
Shoko Asahara, born Chizuo Matsumoto, was the founder and leader of the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo. He was convicted of masterminding the deadly 1995 sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and was also involved in several other crimes. Asahara was sentenced to death in 2004.
