Cults come in many types and sizes. This list includes cults ranging from South Pacific islanders who perform rituals with the goal of getting planes to drop off goods, to doomsday cults that planned to take over the world after the apocalypse — and managed to gain a frightening amount of power. 1. Heaven’s Gate was a cult whose members committed mass suicide in 1997 when Comet Hale-Bopp passed near the sun. They believed their souls would reach an alien spacecraft that was following the comet. The alien craft was supposed to then take their souls to another “level of existence above human.” The group was founded in back 1974 by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles who met each other in a psychiatric hospital. To commit suicide, 39 members took phenobarbital mixed with applesauce. They washed it down with vodka, and then put plastic bags over their heads so they would suffocate. All of them were dressed in matching black shirts with armband patches that read ...