ABSTRACT
Astronomers discovered the fiery Hale-Bopp comet, with its icy core twenty-five miles wide, in July 1995. On 22 March of the following year, only a day after the third group of Solar Temple members committed suicide on the spring equinox, and during the week leading up to Passover and Easter, the comet reached its closest point to Earth on its journey through the universe. At a distance of 122 million miles, it was only 29 million miles further away from Earth than the sun. That day or the next, Marshall Herff Applewhite (who called himself “Do”) and thirty-eight followers initiated their collective exit from this planet via a death meant as a departure for the Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human, conventionally called Heaven. There, they presumed to meet up again with Do’s former platonic partner-the deceased “Ti”—Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles.
