Who Really Calls the Shots? Bruce Roberts and The Gemstone File

Bruce Roberts invented a technique that could create diamonds, rubies and gemstones. Unfortunately for him, the millionaire Howard Hughes stole his ideas and ruined his reputation. Bruce was pretty pissed about this so he took all the gems he had created and started trading them for top secret information. Eventually he had so many secrets that he was able to just trade these secrets for more secrets. He started writing all his secrets down and sending copies of them to random people including Mae Brussell, the host of a conspiracy theory radio show. Mae hired Stephanie Caruana, a writer from Playgirl magazine, to summarise the hundreds (or thousands) of pages of messages that Bruce had sent her. The result was The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File, a document so scandalous that it was photocopied thousands of times and sent to conspiracists all over the world.

The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File – Bruce Roberts and Stephanie Caruana

The above sounds like bullshit, and I’ve seen people online claim that Caruana fabricated the whole thing. I don’t think this is true though. It seems like a man named Bruce Roberts did actually exist and that he did compile hundreds of pages of outrageous conspiracies. I suspect that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and that Caruana went through his notes and cherry picked parts that she could fit into a somewhat cohesive narrative. For a man of his apparent genius, it is suspicious that the only mentions of him on the internet are linked to the Gemstone File.

Regardless of where it came from, the actual contents of the Gemstone File are even more implausible than the story behind it.

Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, was basically the head of the Mafia and the most powerful man in America. He kidnapped Howard Hughes, another millionaire, and forced him to become a junky. The Hughes that appeared in public after the kidnapping was an actor. Onassis was responsible for JFK becoming president, but he also had him killed when he stepped out of line. He also had Robert Kennedy killed, but he got Teddy Kennedy off the hook for killing a woman in 1969. Most important events in mid 20th century American history (Watergate, the Vietnam war…) involved Onassis in some way. Other secrets are revealed in here, including shocking details on the identity of Christ (He was an Arab, not a Jew!), and a lot of people die from sodium morphate poisoning. (Sodium Morphate is an imaginary chemical that the mafia use to assassinate people. It’s supposed to smell like apple pie.)

I’m not an expert on American history, but I’m fairly sure that most of the claims made in The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File are completely bogus. There’s nothing super crazy in here (in comparison to other conspiracy theories), and a lot of its allegations would be believable if they weren’t tied to so many different strands of the story. Reality doesn’t seem as cohesive as this. Also, it’s almost 50 years since this thing started to spread, and as far as I know, very little if any of this story has been substantiated.

While there’s no aliens, satanists or cryptids involved in this conspiracy, I did find reading about it entertaining, but I think the most fascinating element of the Gemstone File phenomena is how it spread rather than its contents. It didn’t arrive in an email or a reddit thread. People got photocopies of this thing in the mail and went on to copy it again and send it on to their friends. When I want conspiracy theories, I click a few times and take my pick of a million different sources of paranoid bullshit. Ultimately, I am glad that I have such a wealth of nonsense to wade through, but I shiver with delight just thinking about how I would feel to get a physical copy of a forbidden document of secret information in the post.

The Gemstone File – Jim Keith

I read two books about the Gemstone File. The first was The Gemstone File edited by Jim Keith. It features the text of The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone (the full 300-1000 page set of documents has never been published to my knowledge) and a bunch of essays by people who assume that it’s all a pile of shit. There’s a few others interviews and a articles in here and a short story too. It was a pretty good starting point. I feel like a lot of the stuff in Robert Anton Wilson’s article was lifted directly from his Cosmic Trigger books.

Inside the Gemstone File – Kenn Thomas and David Hatcher Childress

The next book I read was Inside the Gemstone File by Kenn Thomas and David Hatcher Childress. This is very similar in format to Keith’s book, and actually contains a lot of the same information, including the text of the Skeleton Key and the Kiwi Gemstone. There’s an essay in here claiming that Aristotle Onassis was the basis for Blofeld, James Bond’s nemesis. It was pretty convincing, and it made me really want to marathon all the James Bond movies. The rest of the articles in this book delve further into conspiracy theory lore, and Thomas does his best to link the Gemstone phenomena to the Danny Casolaro/Octopus story. (Kenn Thomas actually co-authored a book with Jim Keith on that topic, and I’m planning to read it soon. I watched that Netflix series on the Octopus recently, after reading Kenn Thomas’s book on Fred Crisman and JFK.) While I find it hard to believe that the assassination of JFK, the Maury Island UFO sightings, and the strange death of Danny Casolaro are related, there are definitely fucked up elements to all of these stories. I’ve been riding the conspiracy train a lot in the last few months, and while I remain skeptical of any accounts given, I would be shocked to find out that government agencies had not been involved in concerted efforts to obfuscate what really happened in each of these cases.

I am starting to wonder if I’m reading too many conspiracy books. I didn’t know who Aristotle Onassis was when I started this book, and when I found out he was a Greek lad who made his money in shipping, I immediately thought of James Shelby Downard’s friend from chapters 30 and 31 of his autobiography. Downard claimed to have worked on a dodgy Greek boat that was filled with illegal immigrants in the early 1930s. This would have been around the time that Onassis was involved in shipping. Either Downard was involved with Onassis, which would add another layer to the conspiracy, Downard was working for a totally different Greek (maybe Onassis’s brother-in-law) or Downard was a hoax created by a fan of conspiracies and the Greek ship is a nod to the claims of the Gemstone File.

One of the most worrying parts of reading about this stuff was realizing how much my knowledge of American history comes from episodes of The Simpsons. I’m pretty sure that’s where I first heard of Watergate and Nixon, and while I didn’t know about Teddy Kennedy’s court case after the Chappaquiddick incident until recently, I’ve long know about Freddy Quimby’s court case after beating up the French waiter. Also, I only knew who Howard Hughes was because of the Simpson’s episode where Mr. Burns becomes a germaphobic recluse.