The Hale-Bopp "Companion" and the Heaven's Gate Deaths

Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp discovered Comet Hale-Bopp on 23 July 1995. As it came closer, observers photographed it, and some thought they saw something more. An image from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan was said to show an "Object moving with comet, equipped with dark funnel."

Night of 14 November 1996. Houston, Texas. Amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek took a CCD image of the comet. Beside it sat a fuzzy, slightly elongated object. A bright point with spikes. His sky-chart software could not identify it.

To Shramek it looked like Saturn, rings and all. A "Saturn-like object" trailing Hale-Bopp and keeping pace with it. He speculated it was up to four times the size of the Earth. Then he phoned Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM, broadcast from Pahrump, Nevada, on more than 300 stations. Now the object had a name. The SLO.

The next night Courtney Brown of the Farsight Institute in Atlanta, a political scientist at Emory University, came on the show. Brown said three remote viewers had examined the object. Their verdict: "a metallic object full of aliens." Brown also spoke of a "Top-10-university astronomy professor" who had photographed the craft and detected radio signals showing it was "intelligently driven." Bell said the announcement "practically blew away my disbelieving side."

15 January 1997. A new photograph, passed on by Prudence Calabrese of Farsight, appeared on the websites of Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. Online, the rumour had grown into "a huge spacecraft (3 times as large as the Earth)."

Astronomers answered. Olivier Hainaut identified Shramek's object as SAO 141894, a 9th-magnitude star. A 1954 Palomar sky survey plate showed it in the same spot. The rings were spikes from the telescope's optics. The software had missed the star because the user preferences were set incorrectly.

The January photo was exposed as altered within about 24 hours. It was a forgery of an image taken on Mauna Kea by David J. Tholen, with a star from near the edge of the frame copied beside the comet. The "Top-10" professor never came forward. Bell confronted Brown over the photograph and the unnamed source.

The members of Heaven's Gate were living in a rented mansion at 18341 Colina Norte, Rancho Santa Fe. A Usenet post said they "were aware of the Art Bell show." Their website said: "Whether Hale-Bopp has a 'companion' or not is irrelevant from our perspective." The comet was the "marker" for "the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home." In the video Do's Final Exit, their leader Marshall Applewhite described the deaths as a "final exit" to a spacecraft tailing Hale-Bopp.

26 March 1997, 3:15 p.m. After an anonymous 911 call from former member Rio DiAngelo, the bodies were found. There were 39 of them: Applewhite and 38 followers, who had died in three waves. All wore black shirts, new Nike Decades trainers and armbands reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team."

The San Diego County Sheriff's Department investigated the deaths as suicides. No government body ever examined the companion. At a press conference in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, Alan Hale said "39 people have now lost their lives as a result of this ignorance and superstition." Bell said: "I started getting a lot of messages saying, 'Art Bell, you killed 39 people'." Hale wrote about the affair for Skeptical Inquirer in "Hale-Bopp Comet Madness."