Heaven's Gate began in 1975 when Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles persuaded a few dozen people at public meetings in the American west to leave their lives and follow them. Their teaching combined a reading of the gospels with the vocabulary of unidentified flying objects: the earth was a garden about to be recycled, a higher evolutionary level existed above the human one, and the body was a vehicle to be discarded when transport arrived. Members lived communally under a detailed discipline, gave up names, property, sex and family contact, and several of the men including Applewhite were surgically castrated to remove the difficulty.
By the 1990s the group was small, ageing and supporting itself by building websites, and it published its beliefs on one of them, which is why its own account of itself survives in its own words rather than only in other people's.
In March 1997, with the comet Hale-Bopp visible and rumours circulating of an object accompanying it, thirty nine members took barbiturates in applesauce and vodka in shifts over three days at a rented house at Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County, lay down in identical clothing and new trainers, and were covered with purple cloth. Each carried a five dollar note and some coins.
The county's religious life is otherwise unremarkable in scale but not in composition: a large border region Catholic population, Vietnamese Buddhist temples, and one of the largest Chaldean Catholic communities outside Iraq in the eastern suburbs.