I was in Hildale, Utah, a bunch of times (to collect rock and fossil specimens) back when Warren Jeffs was controlling the entire town and all the people in it through his cult. What I saw there haunts me to this day - there were no gas stations, restaurants, etc that were open; many seemed like they'd been closed for a very long time. It seemed like few of the houses had electricity or running water; though some of them had these massively high walls around them - some topped with barbed wire. In general, there was a very eerie calm about the place that reminded me of something you'd see in a Stephen King movie. Then, I noticed there were no young males there at all - all the men were around 60+ years old; this 'patriarch' could often be found sitting on a chair on the porch of their house, and on the stairs were a bunch of barefoot young women (the average age being around 15 or so) who were wearing home-sewn dresses. Every now and then you'd see one that was pregnant... These girls looked filthy - their dresses were covered in stains, the hems of their dresses were black with grime, their feet looked like they just walked through a lot of dirt - even their faces were dirty. These people just sat there on the porch for hours; it didn't even look like they would talk to one another... They just stared at me with a hateful glare as I drove by. But I would say that anyone with even a basic awareness could figure out what was happening there, and it was all very, very, very wrong.
