'UFO Takes Man's Wife': When the Heaven's Gate cult recruited in the Bay Area
Katie Dowd
As Robert Balch stepped into the Orinda post office in November 1975, he didn’t know what to expect. The cult members told him to search for a ZIP code book. Inside would be his next set of instructions.
He found the book and hurriedly flipped the pages. There, on page 100, he found the words: “Meet us at the top of Mount Diablo.”
Balch tells the story of his unlikely undercover operation in the new HBO Max docuseries “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults.” At the time, he was a sociology professor at the University of Montana, and he’d been looking for a cult to embed with for further study. One day, he saw an advertisement for a meeting of what would become Heaven’s Gate.