I went a bit mad on books about Charles Manson last year. I remember seeing this book at the time, but I had had a little too much Charlie, so I put it off. Recently, I have been reading about James Shelby Downard, and any amount of research on that chap will bring you to a writer called Adam Gorightly. I was searching for a copy of Gorightly’s book about Downard, and I remembered that Gorightly had written a book about Manson.
The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control, and the Manson Family Mythos – Adam Gorightly
Creation Books – 2014
Gorightly doesn’t really push any specific theory of what happened, and in truth, there wasn’t a huge amount in here that I haven’t come across before. The Helter Skelter hypothesis is covered, but Gorightly also hints at some of the ideas that Tom O’Neill would later explore in Chaos. Mae Brussell, a name I recently became familiar with during my research on the Gemstone File, popped up a few times in here. She claimed that Manson was a CIA pawn used in an attempt to destroy 1960s counterculture. He was just another patsy like Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald. At this point I would be surprised by any book dealing in conspiracies that doesn’t somehow drag in JFK.
Gorightly is a Discordian and counterculture kinda guy, and I found the tone of the book to be quite similar to Sanders’ The Family.The Shadow was written at a much later date though, and it includes much on what happened after the trial. It gets into the Son of Sam connection and even the Hand of Death cult that Henry Lee Lucas was a part of. I’m planning to do a detailed post in the future on the Son of Sam/Manson connection. I know that connection is probably made up, but I’ve come across it in quite a few different books now.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this book was how it made me feel. It was comforting to come back to the Manson case, almost like meeting some old friends for coffee. I’ve been planning to read the revised version of Nikolas Schreck’s Manson book for a while, but now I reckon I’ll save it for the next time I have the blues. The Shadow Over Santa Susana would be pretty good for somebody who didn’t know much about the Manson story, but it was also pretty good for me as a refresher.
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
Independently photocopied – 1976ish
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.
The only known photograph of Bruce Roberts. He’s fitting Carmen Miranda with jewelry in 1952. It was 8 years later that Howard Hughes stole his rubies.
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
IllumiNet Press – 1992
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
Adventures Unlimited Press – 2001 (First published 1999)
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.
A few months ago, my friend recommended that I read the autobiography of James Shelby Downard. I didn’t recognise the name, but it turned out that this Downard guy is a mysterious figure in the conspiracy theory world. It’s not that he was into mysterious topics (although he definitely was). His life, output and reputation are shrouded in uncertainty. I mentioned him recently in my post about Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger books. The reference to him in the first of these books is quite vague, and he’s only mentioned as Mr. Downard. Wilson describes hearing a tape recording of a conversation between Downard and Jim Brandon (aka William Grimstad, a notorious white supremacist). In this conversation (some of which can be heard here) Downard and Grimstad supposedly set out a theory about how the Illuminati are preparing the world for UFO contact. More than a decade later, an essay by Downard appeared in Feral House’s Apocalypse Culture. Apocalypse Culture is an infamous collection of essays from some of the most bizarre and disgusting fringes of society. Kill King 33, Downard’s essay, is one of the strangest pieces of writing in there. It basically blames the killing of JFK on the Freemasons. It’s an abridged version of a longer piece of writing that appeared in another Feral House book a few years later. The revised version of Apocalypse Culture replaces it with another essay by Downard, and Apocalypse Culture II features yet another essay by him. It was through these appearances that the work of Downard came to attention of mainstream conspiracists.
A few years after he died, Feral House published Downard’s autobiography. It such a bizarre piece of writing that it convinced some people that James Shelby Downard was actually a hoax perpetrated by Michael A. Hoffman II (his pal and collaborator) and Adam Parfrey. This doesn’t make sense to me as Robert Anton Wilson came across him well before these two collaborated. Also, I feel that if somebody was going to make up a person, they would put more effort into making things seem believable. The writing here is far too ludicrous for me to imagine that a person wanted me to believe it. How many 5 year olds would think of circumcising themselves to get out of a pickle? A lot of this book is made up of memories that were wiped from Downard’s mind as a young man which he later recalled. The way that he got these memories back isn’t clearly outlined, and most of them are so hazy and unbelievable that I suspect they were just dreams.
Feral House – 2006
James Shelby Downard’s The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth, 1913-1935
Unfortunately, while this book does touch on aspects of conspiracy theories, it doesn’t do so in a meaningful or interesting way. The enjoyment that comes from reading this text is derived solely from the surprise that an adult man could write such bizarre nonsense. I don’t normally summarize books chapter by chapter, but I have done so here for my own future reference and to save you from having to wade through this terrible, insane piece of writing. This is long, so if you’re only mildly interested and just want the craziest parts, I suggest just reading the bits I have highlighted. (I expect that doing so will convince you to carefully reread the whole thing.)
Chapter by Chapter Summary
Chapter 1 The author, a 5 year old boy, is kidnapped by the KKK after being arrested for smuggling alcohol. Goes on to kill KKK by blowing some up with dynamite and shooting others with gun he stole from a police officer. He later kills more men with dynamite.
Chapter 2 His mom makes him dress like a girl to go meet some men in a music shop. When be gets there he shoots one with a gun he had hidden in his outfit. Next day his mom sends him away with some other men. His gun is gone, so he packs a scissors for protection. The men poison him, but he spits it out. When he is left for dead, he gets an erection, so he takes out the scissors he has stashed in his outfit and circumcises himself. His screams of pain scare the bad men away. A few months later an old man tries to turn him into a golem by writing on his forehead with lipstick.
Chapter 3 Mom runs away with a “dirty greaser” named Count Eugenio, but she takes James with her. He is taken to Jekyll Island where he sees Alexander Graham Bell getting sucked off by a gambler. He later goes to a party where a man named “Cock Robin” chokes him in front of a cheering crowd. Cock Robin is shot dead shortly after. The KKK show up again and Alexander Graham Bell uses a machine to bring Cock Robin back to life. Then he gets sucked off by a klansman. Count Eugenio then takes James to some kind of toilet museum where James pisses all over the floor and walls. James will later see somebody cut off Count Eugenio’s bollocks and shove it down his throat.
Chapter 4 The gang move on. In one place they stay, James finds himself in a warehouse full of centipedes that are part of a mind control experiment. then his mother abandons him with a paedophile hotel-keeper, but James locks the paedo in a room, fills it with gas and then lights a match and throws it in. He then lives on the street with a coyote and eats cow shit. He returns to try to kill the man he recently blew up, but the man actually sends a killer to get the boy first. The boy sets his pet rattlesnake on the killer and then beats him unconscious with a chunk of wood and steals his money. Mom comes back and says she took so long because she had been kidnapped.
Chapter 5 The KKK kidnaps the 7 year old narrator and his dad, and then they crucify the boy. Dad pulls the nails out and takes him home, but KKK kidnap him again and try to bum him, but his asshole is too small. They plan to cut his asshole to make it bigger, but their boss says no. The narrator later tricks them into shooting each other by firing a cap gun in the air. Days later, his mom tells him to go to scene of the shootout he caused to get a present. He doesn’t want to, but his mom forces him. When he gets there, another child gives him a dead cat in a box. He then attends a dinner in a Jewish family’s home, but he seems to suspect the food is poisoned so he throws it on the table, issues an anti Semitic remark and runs away.
Chapter 6 The Jewish man he insulted gets him a job at a local bar that is actually a front for a freemason’s hall. A man there takes a disliking to him so he tries to feed him to some carnivorous pigs. The kid befriends the pigs and sets them free and throws the skull of one of their victims through the bar’s window. The freemasons then conduct a trial to determine his guilt, but this is ended quickly when he takes out his willy and pees at the judge. A man then tries to shoot him, but he fills the bar with gas and blows it up. After the explosion he sticks his pocket knife up the bad guy’s nose. The freemasons are angry about this so they send a cowboy assassin to kill James, but James shoots him with a shotgun made out of a pipe and then smashes his face with a hammer and throws corpse over a bridge. This all happened when he was 8 or 9.
Chapter 7 The boy sees a snake charmer doing an act, betting people they cant lift his heavy snake. The boy gives the snake some meat and the snake is so thankful that it lifts itself onto this shoulders and makes it look like he is lifting it, much to the charmer’s chagrin. A week later his mom sends him to the shop for cleaning fluid. He also buys a water pistol which he fills with said fluid. On his way home, the snake charmer threatens him with a real gun, so James shoots him in the eyes with the cleaner and stabs him in the belly. He then feeds him to the snake and opens a sewer drain so the snake can escape. He then goes into the charmers home, kisses another of his snakes and gives his Gila dragon an orgasm. Three men jump out of a car and try to kill him on his way home, but he shoots 2 of them. He was 9 or 10 at this point.
Chapter 8 The klan and his mom plot to kill him again, but he sets them on fire. Then another man kidnaps him and tries to shoot him, but the kid shoots his eyeball out with his BB gun.
Chapter 9 He agrees to join the Order of DeMolay, a masonic youth group. His initiation ritual is held in a house owned by Count Cagliostro, and another boy tries to murder him with a ventriloquist’s dummy containing a spring loaded knife. He has a thick magazine stuffed down his shirt though, so he lives to get the dummy to stab the stabber. He then gets one of his mates to steal Cagliostro’s sword. Cagliostro, who may actually just be a man named Beppo, gets pissed so tries to kill James with a gun loaded with a needle bullet, but James shouts at Cagliostro that he is the devil and frightens him away. Then he takes the needle bullet out of the gun and stabs Cagliostro with it before killing him by smashing his head with a telephone. His mom convinces him to go to the funeral, but he is kidnapped by Beppo’s friends to be buried alive with the corpse, but he stabs one of them and jumps out of the car.
Chapter 10 His teacher takes him on school tour and tries to abandon him, but he finds a way home. He electrocutes a pig-owner who was using his family’s faucet.
Chapter 11 Sister’s boyfriend introduces him to Arthur Rochford Manby, a con artist who later had his decapitated face eaten by a dog. His mom tells him to move out after he finds his dad living in an abandoned building. She gives him 75 cents and a shotgun and an address. When he gets there, he befriends a pack of wild boar outside. When he enters some men try to get him drunk and fuck a prostitute, but he runs away and sends his pigs to kill the men. Then as he is going through their pockets, the girl they tried make him shag comes and helps. She later tries to adopt him but it doesn’t work out.
Chapter 12 Mom throws hot coffee in two burglars’ eyes. A man in a quarry tries to kill him, so he hurts the man (presumably with a gun) and chains his buddies to a fence, fills the quarry with water and walks away.
Chapter 13 James goes to see a new oil pipe being laid. A man tries to kill him by shoving him into the pipe, so he shoots the man in the head with his “nigger shooter” (a slingshot). He is immediately taken to a house where another man sticks him in a wooden trap, but he escapes and forces the man into the trap where he probably dies.
Chapter 14 The KKK try to get him to join, but when they tell him to whip a black guy, he refuses. They try to kill him, so he shoots one of them dead and the rest run away. He then goes to free the black guy he didn’t beat from slavery, but he has to shoot the black guy’s boss to set him free.
Chapter 15 He finds a treasure chest but his friends basically steal it from him.
Chapter 16 A man asks James to look at his house. Initially his price is too high, but he drops it on the condition that Downard goes into his father’s tomb and takes some stuff out of it. When Downard gets there he finds the tomb booby trapped, so he steals the stuff inside out of spite.
Chapter 17 He looks through the stuff he looted from the grave. It’s mostly books attributed to him that seem to be written in a cipher. There is also a machine that he thinks might decipher them. He contacts the American government, but they are no help, and they actually steal one of his books, so he goes to JP Morgan’s house and gets a guided tour of his library.
Chapter 18 Downard writes to Franklin D Roosevelt because the government stole one of his books. The president apologizes and sends some secret service men over to collect everything Downard took out of the grave. He then sends Downard a cheque for a million dollars, but Downard’s dad won’t let him cash it.
Chapter 19 Downard befriends millionaire Mr. Proctor of Proctor and Gamble fame. Proctor borrows his book of cryptograms and when Downard asks for it back Proctor tells him to go to a pottery shop where 2 men show him a skeleton being cremated. Proctor then tells him to meet him in graveyard but then doesn’t show up. Downard’s da then brings him back to the pottery shop/crematorium where a man with a shotgun threatens to throw him into a fiery kiln. Downard runs to the car, grabs his shotgun and scares the bad man. The man’s workers then throw the man into the fire and burn him alive. Downard never gets the book from Proctor back and deduces that it was part of an Illuminati scheme perpetrated by his own father.
Chapter 20 Downard visits another Downard’s house and claims to remember it from childhood. His mom tells him his dad has been lying to him because he resents what the klan did do him because of James. The book was written by Uncle Brad, but no further info on Brad is given.
Chapter 21 James starts a new school. One of the teachers sucks off the students. Downard exposes him at graduation ceremony.
Chapter 22 Mother and father are having trouble with some criminals who stole their house. They send Downard to a masonic lodge. The mason he meets tries to get him to hang a doll, but this makes Downard mad so he pushes the mason down the stairs and pisses in his face. He later meets a guy who tries to kill the president.
Chapter 23 Mom gets dad put into a nuthouse because he has started drinking too much. He tells Downard somebody will come to kill him, but then he hangs himself.
Chapter 24 Downard joins a military camp, but the guys in charge want to kill him so he gets discharged on purpose by deliberately getting caught sneaking out at night. As soon as he is discharged, he walks up to the Whitehouse, gives his name and the security let him in.
Chapter 25 He meets the president and both confess to being illuminati members to each other even though Downard is bluffing. The president then gets him a job at the the Bureau of Investigation but during training an Bureau of Investigation man points a gun at him so Downard shoots him.
Chapter 26 On a Bureau of Investigation mission, Downard goes to the docks to get work from mafia. They say they wont hire him because he looks weak, so he lifts a large man over his head to prove strength. He gets the job and steals some whiskey from a boat. Then he goes back to the Bureau of Investigation who send him on a secret mission to Cuba. When he gets there he buys a gun and meets an old school friend who tells him the Cuban police are going to kill him. Then he meets a man who pulls down his pants and shows him a castration scar. Several cars then drive by Downard and the men inside all try to shoot him, but he shoots each one dead. He tells a story of how when he was a kid he used to feed some alligators and walk on their backs to burp them. Once he lured a bully into their cage and they ate him. He kills some more Cuban police officers and meets another member of the secret society of benevolent castrati. He bribes a government official who puts him on a boat with an Obeah priestess who takes him to Haiti. From there he gets boat back to the USA.
Chapter 27 Downard buys a Bugatti but some men hit him in the back of head and take him to a military hospital where they wipe his memory with a mind control machine that gives him seizures and orgasms. He is allowed to escape after a while but he is then abducted again and poked with a syringe full of something. He loses his memory but somehow gets home.
He attends a few colleges but leaves because the people are weird. Has a meeting with military personnel but shortly thereafter passes out. When he comes to, he has a hiccupping fit so he goes to the doctor. The doctor vigorously fingers his asshole. No harm done. He says the doctor did this to stimulate his pudendal nerve. I don’t know why a doctor would do that to a person with the hiccups.
Chapter 28 In Memphis, Downard goes to a sex circus where he sees a woman, probably a witch, having sex with strangers. He leaves before she fucks a dog, but he is more disturbed by the fact that she “fucked and sucked a negro”. The next day he goes to another sex circus with the same girl sucking and fucking strangers, but this time he leaves when they bring a pony in to fuck her. He tries to stop these sex circuses from happening with help from his Bureau of Investigation buddies, but they wipe his memory.
Chapter 29 He trades a million dollar certificate for an old shotgun and some other crap, but people dupe him out of his prizes except for a fancy archery bow.
Chapter 30 He gets a job on a Greek ship but discovers there are illegal immigrants locked in the hold. He sets them free and they take control of the ship. Both the men working on the ship and the men in the hold are referred to as greasers. I was a bit confused. I know that Mexicans and Greeks had a greasy reputation, but one of these men is referred to as a “chink-greaser”. I guess all foreigners were greasers.
Chapter 31 He goes to watch a boxing match and visits a fencing club and a concert. The Greek calls him and asks him to work on the ship again.
Chapter 32 A famous socialist asks Downard to retrieve some books by an author with the same name as Downard, but when he gets to the place with the books, the door is booby-trapped. He turns off the electricity to the booby trap, gets books and then goes back and punches the socialist in the face. Military guys offer him a job but he gets suspicious because the interview for the job is in the woods. At the second interview for this job, he shoots somebody. He gives the books that somebody with his name wrote to the Skull and Bones society.
Chapter 33 The books by “him” are science, telepathy and prophecy books. He has another job interview, but when he gets there the interviewer attacks him with a needle. He gets the needle and injects the other lad with it. This chap dies. Then he finds the lad who sent him to that interview and punches his face for him. He joins a secret carnival society who try to kill him, but he outsmarts them, steals their chickens and gives them to a black man. He goes to a party in Florida but it turns out to be a gunfight, so he flees.
Chapter 34 He joins a new college and pranks the dean by releasing some chickens into his garden. He finds some old stuff with his name on it of which he has no memory. He would have been about 23 or 24 at this point, but the book ends here.
This book covers the first 23 years of the author’s life, but James Shelby Downard lived until he was about 83 (dates of his birth and death vary by a few years online), and I am sure he had plenty more adventures before he died. I don’t know if I could stomach reading about many more of them though. This book took a lot of effort to read. It’s entertaining to take a look into the mind of a crazy person, but this is a lengthy, dense tome, and it took me more than 2 months to get through it.
Mr. Downard
Another book of his writings recently appeared, but I don’t think that it’s a continuation of his life story. I have been making my way through some of Downard’s essays recently, and I will do a separate post on them in the near future.
Robert Anton Wilson has been a hero of mine for quite a while. His Illuminatus! Trilogy was one of the first books I read for this blog. My reviews of his The Sex Magicians and Masks of the Illuminati are probably the best pieces of writing I’ve published. I’ve read a couple more of his books since posting those, but the contents of The Book of the Breast and Quantum Psychology aren’t exactly Nocturnal Revelries material.
I’ve been reading a lot of books about conspiracies recently, and digging in this field this has led me to an absolutely bizarre individual called James Shelby Downard. There are rumours online that he’s not a real person, and that was was made up by Adam Parfrey and Michael Hoffman II for an essay published in Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture from 1987. This confused me as I had read that Robert Anton Wilson had mentioned Shelby in Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, the first part of Wilson’s “autobiography”, in 1977. There’s actually a quote on the cover of Shelby’s autobiography from Wilson that says, “the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all”. I thought it only responsible to see what Wilson had to say about Downard, so I read all three entries of the Cosmic Trigger series.
Hilaritas Press – 2019 editions
So these books aren’t really an autobiography. There’s autobiographical elements, especially in the second volume, but, as a whole, they’re more a collection of Wilson’s big ideas and how he came to adopt them.
Final Secret of the Illuminati – 1977
The first book wasn’t that great. I’ve watched enough video lectures of Wilson to know his general outlook, and none of the stuff on Timothy Leary, the Illuminati, Discordianism, Aleister Crowley, and the author’s own alien contact came as a surprise to me. One of the big things that Wilson pushes is the idea of reality tunnels and how truth, by his definition, is relative. I accept this idea, and Wilson’s linguistic philosophy is one of my favourite things about him, but the examples he provides in this book are ridiculous. One of his favourite books at the time of writing this was Robert Temple’s The Sirius Connection, one of the worst pieces of crap I’ve ever read. He also presents the psychic powers of Uri Gellar as evidence for some of his claims. I was a bit surprised that a person who I thought was intelligent had been duped by such garbage. Also, there’s a bit near the end where Wilson presents Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness in significant detail. Admittedly, I am not a cognitive neuroscientist, but this idea absolutely stank of shit to me. The book ends with Wilson’s kid dying. This was heartbreaking to read, and I wonder if it had something to do with the second half of the book being far worse than the first.
Down to Earth – 1991
Part 2 was by far the most enjoyable in the Cosmic Trigger series. Wilson tells more of his life story in this one, and he comes across as the witty, interesting guy I know he was. He had spent much of the time between writing this and the first book in Ireland, and this is apparent in his writing. Much of the book is taken up with discussions on his “Irish” upbringing, James Joyce and the modern Irish legal system. He also gets into the P2 conspiracy. Honestly, you could read and enjoy this one without picking up the other 2 entries in the series. It actually deals with the earliest parts of his life more thoroughly than the first entry in the series, so it’d be a fine starting point.
My Life after Death – 1995
I don’t know if I’d been reading too much of the one author or that this book is just worse than the others, but I didn’t hugely enjoy the last entry in the series. Wilson had already covered most of his important life experiences in the previous books, and this one came out only 4 years after the preceding entry. Does enough stuff happen between the ages of 59 and 64 to warrant a new entry in an autobiography? Apparently not. Instead of offering new, insightful ways of thinking about the world, Wilson instead fills this book with cringeworthy claims about the threat of political correctness and how society oppresses men more than women. I am quite sure that Wilson wasn’t a bad guy, but these tirades are hard to stomach in 2024. Don’t get me wrong. I accept that some of the ways that people currently expect others to use language are utterly ridiculous, but in my experience, the people who are complaining about political correctness and “wokeism” are usually assholes. Again, I’ve read enough of Wilson to know that he wasn’t anything close to a bigot, and he does make some valid points about identity politics, but the way he sets his arguments up are a little too similar to your Trump voting uncle’s facebook posts. At one point he asks why there’s no such thing as a straight pride parade. Sigh. There’s some discussion of the Priory of Sion mysteries here, and it seems that Wilson had encountered similar ideas on this topic to Tracy Twyman’s. He also discusses Orson Welles, Shakespeare and Elmyr, the art forger. This wasn’t as interesting as the other books, but it’s still worth a read.
I read these books because I’m going through a conspiracy theory phase at the moment, and Robert Anton Wilson is something of a conspiracy expert. He does discuss multiple conspiracies in these books, but he’s using conspiracies as a way to explain his worldview rather than adding a huge amount to conspiracy lore. Some of his ideas were a bit naïve and/or silly, but Wilson was always self aware enough to avoid coming across as a complete tool. He also had a lot of really good ideas, and I think his ideas on language should be more widely read. The Cosmic Trigger books were amusing overall, and they’re probably an easier starting point than the author’s fiction. I’m sure I’ll get around to more of that in the future.
When I was reading 9/11 as Mass Ritual, I noticed repeated references to a book called Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare by Michael A. Hoffman II and put it on my to-read list. Recently, I’ve been researching a particularly bizarre conspiracy-theorist named James Shelby Downard, and it turns out that his most infamous piece of writing, an essay called Kill King 33°, was co authored by Hoffman. I did a little research on this Hoffman chap, and it turned out that most of his other books are about how much he dislikes the Jews. He’s a holocaust denier and a key proponent of the Irish slavery myth. I’m not interested in reading crap like that, but this particular text is focused on more esoteric topics, and it seems pretty influential among cuckoo crazy conspiracists. Bill Cooper spent a couple of episodes of his radio show on this text. I had to read it.
Wiswell Ruffin House – 1992 (First published 1989)
Michael A. Hoffman II – Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare
The world is ruled by a shadow government. It’s not exactly clear who makes up this cryptocracy, but it’s almost definitely the Freemasons. This satanic cabal uses the media, shadow language and psychodrama to control the unthinking masses.
Hoffman claims that the cryptocracy produce traumatic events to scare the public and then wait a few years to leak information that basically admits their guilt. Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Kennedy assassination were all examples of this. It’s this idea that 9/11 as Mass Ritual is based around. I covered the Son of Sam stuff before, and I’m going to be revisiting the JFK stuff with Hoffman’s pal Downard real soon. I’m also thinking of doing a deep dive into Ripperology at some point in the future. The main thing holding me back is the sheer volume of books about Saucy Jack. I don’t know where to start.
Shadow language is method by which the cryptocracy deliberately drop hints that they have done something terrible. Remember that time when an Ozzy Osbourne song contained the name of an airport where a plane landed on 9/11? You think it’s coincidence that Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was killed is on the 33rd parrallel and that there are 33 degrees in Freemasonry? I suppose crazy people forget that there is a finite number of words in and that some words will pop up in conversations about entirely different things.
Hoffman also claims that the murder of Sharon Tate was a sacrifice to the moon goddess after the first astronauts to land on the moon desecrated her by loading 50lbs of moon rocks into their shuttle back to earth. I hadn’t heard that one before.
In general, there are two big problems with Hoffman’s writing. The first is that it’s bad. I’m a big fan of clarity. My approach to argumentative writing has always been to state things as clearly and simply as possible. Don’t beat around the bush. Say what you mean and then provide examples and clarifications. Hoffman doesn’t do this. There’s no clear central thesis to this work. It reads like a frustrated rant.
The second problem is that most of what Hoffman says is glaringly obvious. In fact, many of his claims about the manipulability of the public seem understated given the events of the last 30 years. Human beings are exactly as stupid as Hoffman portrays them, but in reality, the forces that govern them are considerably more powerful (and sinister) than the freemasons. It would be pretty easy for a stupid person to read this book and see it as prophetic. In that way, it’s similar to the Unabomber’s manifesto. It came as no surprise to see that Hoffman actually contributed an essay on the Unabomber to the second volume of Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture.
People are dumb idiots, but I cannot believe that there is a well coordinated effort by a shadow government to control them. That idea gives us too much credit. Everybody is stupid, absolutely everybody. The Illuminati, if they exist, are morons too. As mentioned above, I am currently reading more of Hoffman’s work on conspiracies. It’s leading me to a lot of bizarre texts and sketchy characters. Take care. There’s a lot of freaks out there.
I was still in school when I saw Loose Change, one of the documentaries that popularised the 9/11 truther movement. It was a formative experience for me. I was convinced that it was real for a few days, but after reading up on it, I came to realise that it was nonsense. I accept that the American government is a deceit machine that was at least partly culpable, but if they were deliberately going to do this to their own country, they wouldn’t leave as many clues and discrepancies as conspiracy theorists would have us believe.
I ignored the topic for almost 20 years, even after taking an interest in conspiracy theories. If the 9/11 attacks were staged, it could only have been political. There were no aliens or Satanic cults involved, so I wasn’t interested.
Trine Day – 2012
The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual
A few years ago, I saw this book and it caught my attention. Not only is the title unutterably stupid and potentially offensive, but it also promises a scintillating layer of black magic to the 9/11 truth movement. I knew I’d have to read it, but it seemed pretty long. The introduction was also written by Peter Levenda. I’ve read a few of his books, and my least favourite was his book on conspiracies. After recently reading and enjoying the Heck out of Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse, another lengthy book about insane conspiracy theories, I decided to dive into Bain’s work.
I’m really glad I did. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I was expecting, and I finished it in just a few days. Please don’t misunderstand. This is not a convincing book at all, but it’s easy to read, and its claims are so outrageous that I consumed it very quickly
The US government is run by Illuminati disciples of Aleister Crowley. These creeps organised the 9/11 attacks as a massive black magic ritual to usher in a new era of Satanic glory. The details that give this information away were not accidents. They were deliberately left there because the Satanic Elite are mocking us. I’ll just give a few examples.
George Bush found out that the planes had flown into the World Trade Center while he was visiting a school. Footage exists of him listening to the children reading a story called “The Pet Goat” as he is told that “America is under attack.” This is not a coincidence. The Pet Goat is a symbol of Lucifer. Even the text of the story depicts this particular goat as rebellious and violent. Also, the children in the classroom were mostly black. Seeing the pattern yet? (Bain’s insinuation, not mine!)
One of the many illustrations in this very important and serious book
The school that Bush was in was also close to the flight school where the terrorists had trained and a clown college with links to the Freemasons and the CIA. You think this is a coincidence? Guess again, idiot!
Flight 93, the plane in which the passengers overpowered the terrorists (who were armed with shanks), crashed down in a place called Shanksville. Bill Crowley (yes, CROWLEY!!!) was a Pittsburgh FBI guy who had jurisdiction in Shanksville. Flight 93 too! 93 was one of Aleister Crowley’s favourite numbers. You might brush this off and say that there’s loads of Crowleys out there and that the FBI guy’s name has nothing to do with anything, but Bill wasn’t the only Crowley involved.
Korean Airlines Flight 85 was supposed to land in Alaska on September the 11th, 2001, but because of some miscommunication, it was redirected to the airport in Whitehorse in the Yukon. The air traffic controller at that airport was one Tim Crowley. As if that wasn’t enough, please recall the lyrics to Mr. Crowley, one of the most famous songs about Aleister Crowley:
Mr. Crowley Won’t you ride my white horse? Mr. Crowley It’s symbolic, of course
Ozzy Osbourne 1980
White horse? Whitehorse! The song was written more than 30 years before the events it describes, and the songwriter was at the peak of his legendary drug use, but to me, it seems almost impossible that Ozzy didn’t foresee the Korean pilot of flight 085 misunderstanding the message from the groundstation in Alaska. He is clearly in league with the Illuminati overlords.
Ozzy isn’t the only heavy metaller involved here. Judas Priest’s Some Heads are Gonna Roll forecasts the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Arizona in 2012. Rob Halford was in on it too.
Oh, by the way, if you’re reading that last bit and you’re wondering why you don’t remember the nuclear bomb detonating in Arizona in 2012, that’s because it never happened. Half of this book deals with the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but the other half describes what was supposed to happen in 2012, the year after the book was published. None of this stuff actually happened, but that’s probably only because Bain had predicted it, and the Illuminati backed off. It’s ironic that the subtitle of this work is “The World’s Most Dangerous Book” when it actually saved millions of lives.
There’s a lot more in here that I’m not mentioning. The Skull & Bones Society, the JFK assassination and the Insane Clown Posse all play their part. Did you know that the Statue of Liberty actually depicts Lucifer? This is ridiculous stuff, and trying to refute the claims made in this book would be entirely pointless. It was an entertaining read though.
The hole in the ozone layer was made by people to let excess heat escape into space. There are colonies on the moon and mars. JFK was killed by his driver because he was going to tell the public about aliens. Whitley Strieber is an agent of the CIA. 600 aliens live with Bo Gritz in Area 51. Tobacco is purposely grown in fields covered in uranium so that more smokers will get cancer. Timothy Leary was an MK ULTRA agent. The Pope made the gas canisters used in German concentration camps.
Oh and the Illuminati run everything, AIDs was invented to kill homosexuals and black people, and the human race is just an alien experiment, but I’m assuming you knew all of that already.
Behold A Pale Horse – Milton William Cooper
Light Technology Publications – 1991
Yes, I finally got around to reading Bill Cooper’s conspiracy classic, Behold A Pale Horse, the book that served as a blueprint for the X-Files. I’ve known of its existence for a long time, but it’s over 500 pages of intense paranoia, and I didn’t want to put myself through it. What I didn’t realise was that it’s not exactly a cohesive work, and you don’t actually have to read every single part of it to get the idea. Much of it is scans of letters, newspaper clippings and bizarre documents.
To try and summarise this book would be pointless. Cooper is so paranoid that he doesn’t really commit to any specific theory. At times he seems confident that there are aliens living on Earth, but then he points out that he might only think that because that’s what the Illuminati want him to think. At one point he claims that the apparition at Fatima was a warning in which aliens showed children a hologram video of the actual crucifixion of Christ. He then ruminates on whether the aliens actually travelled back in time to record the crucifixion or if they just animated it themselves. He then goes on to point out that if they have the power to do either of those things, they may have staged the entire Jesus thing for their own purposes. Trust no-one.
Ultimately, I quite enjoyed Behold A Pale Horse. I also got the names of several other books I’ll be trying to track down in the near future. I assume that those books will also be complete rubbish, and I only hope that they are as sincere as this bizarre masterpiece. I don’t know if it’s the frenzied nature of Cooper’s writing or the knowledge of what happened to him after writing this book that makes his writing captivating.
Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America – Mark Jacobson
Blue Rider Press – 2018
Directly after finishing Behold A Pale Horse, I read Mark Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider, a book that analyzes Cooper’s life and works. Much of what it covers is contained in Behold A Pale Horse, but it’s reassuring to have somebody sane confirm that Cooper did actually mean the things that you’ve just read in his book.
Pale Horse Rider also covers Cooper’s radio show, his surprisingly powerful following in the hip-hop community, his shockingly accurate prediction of 9/11, and his unfortunate end. William Cooper spent his last months living alone on a mountaintop convinced the police were going to come and kill him. The police eventually came up the mountain and shot him in the head.
One thing that this book briefly mentions about Cooper’s life that is not included in Behold A Pale Horse is the time he spent in a mental institution after returning from Vietnam. He was crazy in the literal sense. He also seems to have been an unpleasant person to be around, an angry, paranoid mad man. I’d say I wish he was still alive, but part of him still is. Alex Jones is basically a poor man’s Bill Cooper, and a lot of the right-wing militia style conspiracists seem to have admired Cooper. Timothy McVeigh came to visit him before bombing Oklahoma. Cooper did include a photocopy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Behold A Pale Horse, and he loved the 2nd amendment, but his politics weren’t as cut-and-dry as many of his ilk today. I’d like to think of him dismissing Q-Anon and Pizzagate as Bilderberg disinformation campaigns to make truth-seekers look stupid. (I mean… that’s what they are, right?)
I recommend reading both Cooper’s own book and Jacobson’s book about Cooper, but if you are a normal person, the latter will probably suffice. It’s very entertaining.
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been really into conspiracy theories since reading Programmed to Kill and JFK and UFO recently. It’s a field I’ve been avoiding for a few years, but I’m quite enjoying it at the moment. More to come soon!
JFK & UFO: Military Industrial Conspriacy and Cover-Up from Maury Island to Dallas – Kenn Thomas
This is a book about conspiracies, but the author, probably to avoid being deemed a loony, doesn’t really outline the specific conspiracy he’s trying to push. He instead offers a bunch of sources and accounts of things that did happen (or were at least reported to have have happened) and lets the reader decide what to believe for themselves. This is more tolerable than some of the wacko bullshit I’ve read, but some of the things in here are so far removed from each other that it’s very hard to piece them together, and I think I would have preferred a bit more nudging from the author. There were a couple of points in the book where I wondered how what I was reading had anything to do with the rest of the book.
The book is called JFK & UFO. These are obviously 2 of the most popular topics for conspiracy theorists to discuss, but how are they linked? I was expecting the connection to be tenuous, but it’s actually pretty solid. It focuses around one Fred Lee Crisman, a teacher and radio talk show host from Tacoma Washington. There has been plenty written about this man, but it’s very difficult to determine what’s true and what’s bullshit. This is true of many historical figures, but it’s particularly difficult in this case as much of the disinformation about Fred’s life came directly from Fred.
In 1947, a guy named Harold Dahl, his son, dog and a couple of others saw a UFO dumping waste into the ocean near Maury Island, just off the coast of Washington. The waste was so hot it killed the dog and burned Dahl’s son. When Dahl came back to the harbour, he told his associate, Fred Chisman, what happened. (The nature of Dahl and Crisman’s relationship varies depending on the account.) Crisman went out to take a look for himself and came back with some of the stuff that the UFO had been dumping into the ocean. This part is hard to swallow. UFOs don’t generally hang around long enough for people to come back to take a second look. Apparently a Man in Black approached Dahl soon thereafter and warned him not to tell anyone about what he had seen.
All of this happened just a few days before Kenneth Arnold’s infamous UFO sighting, and Arnold, the UFO celebrity, was sent out by Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories Magazine, to interview the 2 men about their encounter. It turns out that Fred Crisman had been featured in Amazing Stories a few months prior to the sighting. He had written a letter describing a shootout with subterranean hominids in a cave in Burma. Coincidental, right?
Given Palmer and Crisman’s former association, the UFO sighting sounds like a hoax. The only thing that gives the story any believability is the fact that 2 guys from the army flew out to take samples of the waste that Crisman had collected. On the way back to their base, their plane crashed, and they both died. The UFO waste was never recovered.
Crisman went back to school after this. Then he rejoined the military to fight in the Korean war. Then he became a teacher, the director of the Western Division of the Parapsychological Society and later a “roving personnel representative” for Boeing. It has been claimed that Crisman was actually part of a top secret department of the CIA that specialised in disruption. This guy would basically integrate into a group or company and then cause as much havoc as possible. It’s not that hard to believe he was up to something odd when you consider the range of experience on Crisman’s resume.
At some point he was also a Bishop of the Universal Life Church too. This set off alarm bells in my head. I remember reading Simon’s Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon and taking an interest in its discussion of wandering bishops and the potential role they played in the Kennedy assassination. Crisman knew Clay Shaw, the man Jim Garrison accused of murdering JFK, and it may well have been through their church links. David Ferrie, one of Shaw’s alleged co-conspirators was also a “Bishop”. These churches were fronts to avoid paying taxes and maintain secrecy. Garrison believed that Ferrie and Shaw had conspired to frame Oswald. After reading this book and doing a bit of research, I think the idea is that they may have done so at the suggestion of Crisman. I’m not saying I believe that’s what happened. I just think that’s the juiciest interpretation. Crisman was the first person that Shaw called after being charged with the murder of JFK. He was also allegedly arrested and photographed at the scene of the assassination. Garrison couldn’t prove anything, and Crisman went on to become the host of a far-right talk show in Washington.
Dealey Plaza. Nov 22, 1963
Towards the end of the book, the author mentions the David Casalaro/Octopus conspiracy. For those of you who don’t know, Casalaro was journalist was found dead in a hotel apartment after going to meet mysterious contact that was going to provide him with details on a huge conspiracy about Reagan, hostages in Iran and some dodgy software. He had referred to the contact as “The Octopus”. I knew Kenn Thomas had written another book about this topic, and when I saw it popping up in here, I almost rolled my eyes. Surely this was just another conspiracy writer trying to link two completely separate things? Nope. Michael Riconosciuto, one of the central figures in that conspiracy, knew Fred Crisman well. Fred was friends with Michael’s father. This link is interesting enough, but in an interview at the end of the book, Michael drops a bombshell and claims that the UFO seen at Maury Island in 1947 was actually an experimental aircraft that Boeing was working on. He claims to have a diary from Crisman acknowledging this.
Ok, I don’t know how closely you’ve been following along, but that Boeing/UFO claim ties everything together and turns a seemingly bizarre sequence of random events into a terrifying conspiracy. That Crisman worked for Boeing at one point is certain. He was supposedly an expert in disruption. The whole Maury Island affair may have been Crisman’s plan to save Boeing from getting into trouble. Did he have something to do with blowing up the airplane to prevent the military from analyzing the evidence? Even worse, a few days before JFK was killed, his government had awarded a huge contract to General Dynamics for a new fighter plane. This contract had been expected to go to Boeing. Who would Boeing go to to get revenge for this? Kennedy wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular with the CIA either.
I’m just scratching the surface here. I’m no expert on this stuff, and I breezed through this book quickly. Writing this blog post forced me to reevaluate how convincing Kenn Thomas’s case for a conspiracy is. This guy Fred Crisman was definitely involved in something shady.
I really enjoyed reading this book and writing this post. The realm of conspiracy theories has seemed trite in recent years, but it was nice to read something that seemed mental but had enough substance to really make me think. I’ll consider reading more Kenn Thomas in the future.
There’s no such thing as serial killers. Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez and the likes were all framed by the government. None of these men committed all of the murders of which they were accused. They were all part of CIA mind control operations. Satanic ritual abuse and murderous Satanic cults exist, but they are just part of the US government’s mind control agenda.
This book starts off with a lengthy section describing different sex crimes committed against children. There really are a lot of sickos out there. The author claims that many of these crimes were committed by the US government to make their victims more susceptible to mind control. He points out that a high percentage of serial killers experienced sexual abuse as children. This was some bleak reading as proof of this. Paedophiles are truly the vilest form of life. Admittedly, I couldn’t help but giggle when a Satanic ritual abuse “victim” described how they were forced to play “poopoo baseball”
The next and longest section of the book details the crimes of America’s most notorious serial killers. McGowan includes all of the big ones with the noticeable exception of the Son of Sam. This is not because he thinks that David Berkowitz was any different to the other killers discussed but because he believes that Maury Terry said all that needed to be said about Berkowitz and his accomplices in The Ultimate Evil. This is fair; that book is exhaustive, and I’d imagine most of McGowan’s readers have probably read Terry, but the phrase “programmed to kill” actually came from one of the Son of Sam letters.
I went through a bit of a serial killer phase as a teenager, so I knew about John Wayne Gacy and Bundy, but most of my serial killer knowledge is limited to the names and lyrics of Macabre songs. I was aware that Edmund Kemper had a horrible temper and that Dahmer used to work in a chocolate factory, but although I knew that Richard Speck had done something outrageous, I didn’t know the specifics. It turns out this Speck guy killed 8 student nurses and was sentenced to life in prison. Some serial killers get murdered in prison due to their reputations, but Richard Speck managed to keep himself alive by injecting himself with estrogen and growing a pair of tits. In the late 80s, a lawyer snuck a video camera into the prison where Speck was locked up and made a video of him wearing blue satin panties, snorting cocaine and giving blowjobs to other inmates. What the heck Richard Speck?
A lot of the reasoning presented here is utterly ridiculous. The book was written in 2004, just a few years before smartphones became ubiquitous, and the writing here makes that obvious. Whenever I would read about a killer I hadn’t encountered before, I would check their wikipedia page, and in most cases that would make it very obvious how hard the author was trying to put his slant on things. I’d like to assume that a person wouldn’t get away with this kind of distortion of the truth anymore, but unfortunately it seems that more people are buying into this type of shit than ever before. This kind of thinking is a direct precursor to the Pizzagate conspiracy and that kind of nonsense. As soon as you point out how the research is flawed, believers will accuse you of having being duped by the same system that created these “satanic” killers. Some of this book is verifiable fiction too. When discussing Aleister Crowley, the author discusses the story about Crowley performing a ritual that killed his friend and drove him crazy… the one that Dennis Wheatley made up. McGowan also assumes the existence of the Hand of Death, a Satanic cult of assassins that existed only in the mind of Henry Lee Lucas (more on that in matter in a couple of weeks),
The book’s central premise is total madness anyways. The message is that serial killers are made, not born. I get the appeal of that idea. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that some men enjoy murdering children, but it wouldn’t make me feel much better if I found out that it was actually the government putting those sick desires into its citizens’ heads. Also, the notion that the American government is organised enough to do stuff like this is ridiculous.
Programmed to Kill really only covers American killers. I assume other countries do have serial killers, but I can only think of a few. It does seem a bit odd that America has so many. I read an article that claims that the amount of serial killers has been dropping in the last few decades. The CIA must be devoting their attention elsewhere.
This is a ridiculous book. It could only be convincing to a person with no way of verifying the claims made within. I mainly read it because I knew it mentioned the 4 Pi cult, but it didn’t contain anything about that mysterious group that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. It did put me onto a few other books about Satanic killers. It also forced me to spend a lot of time thinking about how horrible human beings are, and I started getting nervous leaving my house.
I read Ed Sander’s The Family a few weeks ago, and it reignited my interest in the Manson Family. Charles Manson and his followers were horrible people, and I have little sympathy for them, but there is something fascinating about how they lived and what they did. Here’s another 3 books about them.
Helter Skelter – Vincent Bugliosi
W. W. Norton & Co- 1974
I have understood the story behind Helter Skelter for most of my life. A few months ago, I read Ed Sander’s The Family, and I learned a lot about Charles Manson and the Tate-La Bianca murders. Sanders does mention the Helter Skelter stuff in there, but his book is not limited to the crimes and their motives. When I posted about The Family, a friend recommended that I read Chaos by Tom O’Neill. I put a hold on the audiobook version from my local library and waited 6 weeks. After listening to the first 20 minutes, I paused it and started reading Helter Skelter.
Chaos reveals O Neill’s findings after 20 years of researching the Manson case. The first thing it claims is point out that the “official” story as presented in Helter Skelter is based on lies and that O’Neill can prove this claim. Knowing this going in, it was a bit hard to swallow some of the stuff in Helter Skelter. Charles Manson and his followers were clearly a danger to society, and I don’t think anyone really believes that they were innocent, but the story that Bugliosi puts together to get them convicted does seem a bit sketchy. Manson was a dangerous, paranoid, psychotic criminal, but the race-war as foretold by the Beatles and subsequent escape to the Hollow Earth story actually seems a bit too cohesive for Charlie. It seems much more likely that the murders were drugs or revenge related.
As a book, I found Helter Skelter a bit tedious. I had read The Family just a few weeks before and was familiar with the story, and Helter Skelter’s focus is mostly on the court case. It’s an important book in Manson history, but it’s clearly not entirely accurate.
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties – Tom O’Neill
Back Bay Books – 2020 (First published 2019)
Chaos is a very captivating read. Its main claim is that the narrative in Helter Skelter is inaccurate. O’Neill shows that the relationship between the Family and the Polanski household was far less tenuous than Bugliosi wanted it to appear. Apparently Bugliosi told O’Neill that the cops found a video at the murder scene of Roman Polanski being cuckholded. It is suggested that the Polanskis and their friends were involved in more naughtiness than has previously been reported.
This seems perfectly believable to me. It refutes the Helter Skelter story, but it does not exonerate anyone.
O’Neill’s research takes some shocking turns, and pretty soon he is linking the Manson murders with the MK-ULTRA and the JFK assassination. That probably makes it sound crazy, but it’s terrifyingly convincing. O’Neill’s research does not reach any tidy conclusions, but the evidence he provides convinced me that there was a lot more to the Manson story than was told in Helter Skelter. I don’t want to summarize the book or O’Neill’s findings, but he convinced me that the CIA were involved in some way. I strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in the Manson family or government deception read this book. I knew that American government agencies got up to some shady stuff, but I wasn’t aware of the reach of programs like COINTELPRO and Operation Chaos. The FBI sent a letter to Martin Luther King telling him to kill himself? What the fuck?
The Manson File – Nikolas Schreck
Amok Press – 1988
The other book that was recommended to me after finishing The Family was lil’ Niky Schreck’s The Manson File. A new, almost 1000 page edition of this book was published recently, but I was only able to get my hands on the 200 page, first edition from 1988. This was quite different to the other books on Manson I have read. It’s a collection of documents by and about Charles Manson that attempt to make him out as a misunderstood, outlaw rebel and all-round cool guy.
I have to be honest here. I am biased against Mr. Schreck. Provocation is pretty cool, but this guy has been known to cross the line into edge-lord territory. He appeared on white-power talk shows in the 80s. That was a long time ago, and based on his current bandmates, I doubt he is the most racist guy in the world, but when the queen of england died last year, he posted about how much he supports the monarchy. YUCK.
The Manson File has some interesting bits, but a lot of it is Manson’s own writing. I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with Manson, and he has a tendency to get lost in his own words. This gets worse without an interviewer to reign him in. The only piece that he wrote in here that I enjoyed was his letter to Ronald Reagan in which he told the former president to end the war on drugs and to invest that money into planting more trees. I am 100% behind this line of thinking. There’s also a letter he wrote in the mid-’70s to the Hollywood Star, a tabloid newspaper, spilling some Hollywood secrets. It’s in this letter that he claims that Jane Fonda had sex with a dog. He also claims that Roman Polanski funded his Hollywood movies with “money from dog and children movies”. One might write this off as slander, but it was written before it came out that Roman Polanski actually anally raped children and made movies of his wife being raped by other men. What a fucking piece of shit. I wish the Family had killed him instead of his wife.
A lot of the book is taken up with awful art, songs and poems by Manson, and there’s a cringey essay describing the similarities and nebulous links between the Family and The Process Church of the Final Judgement. It also features a couple of essays by James N. Mason, a neo-nazi, terrorist and convicted paedophile. In a completely expected turn of events, Mason, one of the worst people in the world, idolizes Charles Manson. The only other noteworthy part of this text is a picture of the contents of a package that Charlie sent to Nick Bougas, a contributor to this book. The package contained a book and a pair of Charlie’s dirty undies. As awful as Charles Manson was, he clearly had some redeeming qualities.
Given the fact that the new edition of The Manson File is 5 times longer, I am sure it’s a very different book. I get the sense that it contains more information on the inconsistences within Helter Skelter, but I won’t be sure until I read it. At this point, I have read more than 1200 pages about Charles Manson in the last 2 weeks, and I will probably wait a while before I seek out the new edition of Schreck’s work.
I’ve definitely spent too much time on Charles Manson recently. The acts he inspired were horrendous, but it’s hard not to find him entertaining. I think part of the appeal is that Charlie was one of the biggest losers to have ever lived. He had a traumatic, loveless childhood. He had no formal education. He was insane. Just as things started looking up for him, he fucked it all up beyond everyone’s expectations, potentially because he had become a test subject for CIA mind control experiments. His life was a an absolute disaster, but he always managed to keep a smile on his face.
Nocturnal Revelries 