t;).
             The people who belonged to the Heaven's Gate cult weren't very aggressive, which probably added more to the surprise of their suicides. The cult members performed day to day activities and led partly normal lives. The people who actually knew of the cult were the ones caught most off-guard. You'd expect the outspoken, obnoxious "wackos" to perhaps do something like this, or at least it wouldn't come as too large a shock. But this group was different. The members of this cult weren't crazed and lonely lunatics but respectable members of our society. The members were mostly, as society would term them, upper and middle class.
             They simply had different beliefs. This group had come up with an unusual theory that the Hale-Bopp comet was really the Star of Bethlehem and that there was a UFO behind it, waiting to take them beyond mortality. Some professional astronomers speculate that if the Star of Bethlehem really did exist that it was probably a comet. Hale-Bopp has an approximately 76-year cycle. Some astronomers report that the Hale-Bopp comet has a very long cycle, from 1000 years to possibly 4000, if it is indeed a cyclical comet. The Heaven's Gate members could easily convince themselv
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