Ozzy did 9/11! S.K. Bain’s The Most Dangerous Book in the World

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.

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.

Milton William Cooper’s Behold A Pale Horse: A Blueprint for the X-Files

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

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

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!

Hell on Earth: Golgotha Falls by Frank De Felitta

I bought this at a thrift store a long ago, and it wasn’t until after that I saw that Valancourt Books had reissued it in 2014. That fact together with the old cover art made it seem promising. Soon after picking it up, I read Stephen King shit-talking Frank De Felitta in Danse Macabre, and I knew that this isn’t Frank’s most popular book, so I left it on the backburner for a few years. In the meantime I got a copy of Valancourt’s audiobook version, and just before Christmas I decided I needed to read a book about Satan to get me through the holidays.

This is a story about a church that has been taken over by the Devil. Whenever a priest enters the church, the Devil enters the priest and makes him do horrible things. I was quite surprised by the level of depraved blasphemy featured in here. There’s all kinds of necrophilia and bestiality. There’s even a cool bit where two gay goats come into the church and sodomise each other on the altar. It’s a bit like the artwork on war metal records.

Unfortunately, a Jesuit priest comes to exorcise the church. He allows 2 Harvard parapsychologists to monitor the exorcism. The Devil shows up and starts to fuck with them, but eventually the Pope shows up and saves the day.

Ok, technically, I have just spoiled the ending for you, but it doesn’t seem to me that anything could make that ending any worse. The fucking Pope? The only good thing about the book is the unholy depravity it contains, and de Felitta has to go and ruin that by giving it a “Catholicism saves the day” ending. This would have been such a satisfying book if the Pope had shown up at the end only to become possessed by Satan.

A lot of the novel is taken up with the boring relationship between the parapsychologists. This part sucked. Neither of them are interesting. I want satanic homogoats defiling the house of Christ, not two boring dweebs who get turned on by looking under each other’s chakras.

Overall, this book was quite bad. There’s a few entertaining passages, but it’s mostly quite boring. It took me ages to finish it.

Now, I mentioned above that I had an audiobook version of the book. Unfortunately this was one of the worst audiobook experiences I have ever had, and I had to get through most of it with the physical book. The narrator, for some reason only known to himself, chose to give the Jesuit character a “Scottish” accent despite the fact that the character is from Boston. This is weird, but it’s made excruciating by the fact that the narrator is not capable of speaking with a Scottish accent. He sounds like an Iranian pirate with a mouthful of kiwis pretending to be Shrek. Honestly, it’s shocking how poor it is. I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say half the time. There’s an Italian character in here too, and that accent was almost identical. The narrator seems to be capable of two voices: regular and foreign. Bizarrely, the Pope character doesn’t get an accent even though it is explicitly stated that he is Sicilian. The only reason I think it was a Scottish accent that this guy was putting on is that the character’s name is Eamon Malcom. I am assuming the narrator recognised Malcolm as a Scottish name from reading Macbeth in school. Eamon is an Irish name, but if I thought for one second that even a single person in the world thought that I sounded like this twat narrator, I’d kill myself.

Seriously, if you’re going to be a narrator, don’t put on accents unless you can actually do them properly. Even then, don’t do them. It’s the equivalent of a cashier at a supermarket attempting to juggle your groceries while scanning them. It probably won’t work, and even if it does, it won’t make anything better. Just do your job and read the fucking book properly.

Frank de Felitta’s most popular book is Audrey Rose. (This is made apparent by the fact that that title takes up as much space the cover of Golgotha Falls as its own title.) I won’t say I’ll never read it, but I have no desire to do so at the moment. He has another one called The Entity that sounds a bit more interesting. Maybe someday.

Hand of Death: Henry Lee Lucas’s Satanic Murder Cult

I was never particularly interested in Henry Lee Lucas until recently. I saw Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer a long time ago, and I knew that it was roughly based on him. I had no idea of how many people he had supposedly killed until I read more about him in David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill. In that book, McGowan claimed that Henry had been involved in a Satanic cult and had killed hundreds of people. His source for this information was a long out of print book called Hand of Death. I had to read it.

Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story – Max Call

Henry Lee Lucas was born to a “sadistic bitch” of a mother. She wanted a baby girl, and when Henry came out of her womb she was very disappointed. Moments after his birth, she told bystanders that she would have her newborn baby hooking by age 5. She planned to dress him in girls clothes and charge extra. The first time she fed him, she said, “suck your mommy’s tittys” and pinched his dick to make him cry. Nobody who was present for this was alive when this book was written, but it will become clear as the story progresses that Henry Lee Lucas had an excellent memory, so he definitely would have been able to remember what his mom said to him moments after he came out of her womb.

After murdering his mother and serving time, Henry got out of jail and met Ottis Toole. They became lovers. After a killing spree, a car starts following them. When they confront the man in the car, a likeable chap named Don Meteric, he asks if they want to work as hitmen for Satanic organization. When they agree they are invited to a cult camp in a Florida swamp where they murder a man, eat his flesh and drink his blood and then partake in an orgy as his corpse is set on fire.

“a good looking young man by the name of Ottis Toole”

Henry then attends a murder school at the camp, but he’s so good with knives he ends up becoming one of the teachers there. The cult is called the Hand of Death. There were thousands of members at the time that Henry was a member, but nobody else has ever admitted to being a member.

Henry’s first assignment is to kidnap kids and for satanic paedos making snuff movies. He’s taught a chant to chant while he is sacrificing children to Satan, “Ambe ishke ho asseko.” I tried putting this through google translate, but it doesn’t seem to be any known language. Then I thought it might be an anagram. I played around with the letters for a bit, but the best I came up with was, “Homo Abe seeks his AK.” I’m not sure.

After killing some kids, Henry then takes Ottis’s 12 year old cousin on a romantic road trip. She gets horny when he’s about to kill, but Henry is a decent man and won’t have sex with this child until later. This is true love after all. It’s also quite confusing. A little later, after describing her 15 year old breasts as “soft and tender”, the author says Henry started sleeping with her when she was 9, even though he previously said 12. Whether it was 9, 12 or 15, this is a child being discussed.

When his 12 year old ‘wife’ converts to Christianity and tries to get him to pray, the actual real Satan touches the back of Henry’s head and tells him to ignore her. Henry obviously ends up killing her. (In real life, he had sex with her corpse, but for some reason this tidbit is left out of the book.) After this, he continues to kill until he is caught. He occasionally snorts a line of cocaine to leave him feeling “mellow and relaxed.”

When Henry is finally arrested, he’s given a Bible in jail he sees the light of Christ and decides that the only way he can redeem himself is by confessing to all 600 of the murders he committed.

That’s the story in this book. It turns out that while Henry admitted to 600 murders, he probably only killed 3 people, including his mom. It turns out that Henry really liked attention, and the police officers working his case got him to admit to a bunch of murders for their own benefit. It made them look like big-shots, and they were able to use him to help out their buddies. In the introduction to this book, Sheriff Jim Boutwell states that Henry had recently admitted to murdering a Texas police officer. This was very convenient for the police officer’s family as his death had previously been ruled a suicide and this meant that his family couldn’t access his insurance. When the insurance company discovered it was actually a murder, they had to pay up. Admittedly, that was a pretty nice thing for Henry to do, but admitting guilt to murders you didn’t commit allows the real murderers to walk the streets. The cops getting Henry to admit these murders claim that they truly believed he was the most prolific killer of all time, but in reality, he was a smelly, one-eyed idiot who would claim to be from the moon if it made his listener happy. These cops were treating him better than he had ever been treated in his life.

There’s a Netflix documentary that does a really good job of showing how awful these police officers were at their jobs. At one point in the show, Henry claims to have driven from the USA to Japan to commit murders. He does so in the presence of the cops who are using his testimony to close murder cases. It’s mad. I found it funny that the documentary doesn’t make a single reference to the Hand of Death, the book or the cult. They didn’t have to stoop so low to prove their point.

This book is complete garbage. It’s almost pornographic in its descriptions of child abuse, and most of the narrative is clearly a complete fabrication. There was never a Don Meteric or a Hand of Death. The last third of the book, the finding Jesus stuff, makes the exploitative nature of the first part particularly perplexing. Both Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole did awful things, but both of their lives were horrifically sad. When Henry was a child, his own mother beat his head so badly that he suffered brain damage and lost an eye. Ottis Toole was raped by family members as a child. To paint these utterly tragic figures as elite satanic assassins for the sake of entertaining a bunch of repressed Christian perverts is truly despicable. Max Call was a scumbag.

2023, The Year in Review

I’ve had a pretty good 2023, but it was an odd year for this blog. In March, Google updated its algorithm and decimated the amount of traffic this site sees. This is particularly disappointing as I had more fun with this blog in 2023 than I’ve had for ages. After a few years of largely focusing on fiction, I forced myself to alternate between fiction and non-fiction on a weekly basis. This led me to some very weird books indeed. (All of the following images are links to the respective blog posts.)

I did a trilogy of posts on bizarre books about bizarre cryptids. How I wish I could ring in the New Year with Pigman, Goatman and Lizardman.

I also read a lot of true crime books this year. I don’t know why I hadn’t paid more attention to this genre earlier. Nearly all of the crime books I read had an occult/satanic/conspiracy angle to them. Some of these books were very upsetting to read, but they definitely renewed my interest in blogging. It’s terrifying how frequently texts, characters and authors I have covered here popped up in these books.

I think I read less than 15 non-fiction books during 2021 and 2022, so it was refreshing to spend so much time learning about the real world this year. I read plenty of fiction too, and most of it was of the Paperbacks from Hell variety. Some of these books were good. Others, especially Bradley Snow’s Andy, were truly awful.

My annual blog traffic. The beginning of the end?

It has been a bummer to see my traffic dropping. I blame google for this, but I have also been cutting down on social media in the last few years, and that may have made things worse too. Twitter was the only site I was still using last year, but Elon Musk is a piece of dog’s filth, so I only use twitter to link my weekly post at this point. (Even that is almost useless.) I guess we’re living in the era of the podcast now. I’d move on and try that, but I’d have nobody to do it with. I put a lot of work into this blog, and although it’s ultimately for my own enjoyment, it’s nice to get a bit of recognition now and then. Please share this website with anyone you know who would be interested, and comment or email me if you have suggestions.

Here are some more from this year:

Another thing I’ve noticed this year is an increase in requests from authors for me to read their novels. This always amuses me. Have these stupid bastards ever looked through the blog? I rarely read new books, and I trash 95% of the books I review. Keep your shitty steampunk zombie novel to yourself, you sad virgins. Also, speaking of bad amateur fiction, I don’t think many people got around to reading the short story I put out this year.

I’ll end this the same way I do every year. I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. You can also check out my index page for individual links to the 500+ books I have reviewed here so far. Also, check back soon. I have some good stuff coming up.

I sincerely wish you all a happy New Year!

Christmas Babies by Christopher Keane and William D. Black (A book so derivative, it might put you in a COMA)

Happy Christmas dear readers. I’ve had this book on my shelf for years, but I thought a tale such as this should be read in December, and I’m not very organized. Despite the title, this second rate medical thriller has nothing to do with Christmas.

Dr. Heller is worried. All of his patients are miscarrying or giving birth to weird babies with green eyes and red hair. His boozehound of a wife gets a job investigating a politician who is trying to cut government restrictions on pharmaceutical companies. While this is happening the Doctor meets a sexy computer sales rep who also has green eyes and red hair. It did not take me long to figure out exactly where this was heading.

A few weeks ago, I read Robin Cook’s Coma, the book that started the “medical thriller” craze. It gets a write-up in Paperbacks From Hell, and while I was decently entertained by Coma, I thought it was one step too far removed from horror to include here. I didn’t actually notice it until I was halfway through Christmas Babies, but the blurb on the back compares it to Cook’s writing. I’ve heard that Cook’s other books, which I have no interest in reading, are extremely formulaic, and I imagine that Christmas Babies follows that formula pretty closely. This is basically the same book as Coma expect the people in comas are replaced with ginger babies. Honestly, thinking back, it’s shocking how similar the plots are – a medical anomaly, a web of lies, an assassin, a climax in a secret research facility…

Coma is a better book, but Christmas Babies has more scabby mutants. It’s a little bit trashier too. It was not the worst book I’ve read, and the last few chapters were relatively enjoyable, but in truth, this book is a pile of Christmas shit.

Ho, ho, ho! Have a good one!

Fred Lee Crisman, The CIA’s Agent of Disruption – JFK & UFO by Kenn Thomas

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.

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.

All Serial Killers are Satanic Pawns of the CIA: David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder

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.

Ivor Watkins’ Demon

**Future – 1994 (First published 1983)**

Aside from Ken Rayner Johnson’s The Cheshire Cat, Demon is the only horror novel set in Wales that I can remember reading. Aside from that, there is nothing noteworthy about this book.

An ancient evil escapes from a Welsh mountainside after a spot of bad weather and proceeds to possess the village idiot. The moron is granted power over the weather, and he uses it to kill a local vicar and a male stripper. An English engineer who has recently moved to town has to try to defeat this evil before it kills his dog.

This is a very silly premise for a book, but it could have been entertaining if the author had made it ridiculously violent or something. He didn’t though. The writing isn’t particularly painful, but it’s nothing special either. The most interesting character, the vicar’s repulsive yet sexy sister, never reaches her potential. The male stripper was an interesting addition, but I would have liked a bit more detail. I feel like this book would have been far better if it was written by Edward Lee.

Demon was not the worst book I’ve ever read, but I can’t say anything about it was particularly good. Ivor Watkins wrote another horror novel called The Blood Snarl. It’s 100 pages longer than Demon though, and I’ve read that it’s a bit long-winded. I doubt I’ll ever read it.

The Unabomber’s Manifesto

I’ve read quite a few true crime books this year. It’s an interesting field, but I’m wary of including too much of it here. All the books I’ve discussed here have had satanism or cult connections. This week I’m going a bit further afield and looking at the Unabomber’s manifesto. The Unabomber was not a Satanist nor an occultist, and though not my usual fare, I imagine most of my readers will have at least mild interest in this extraordinarily intelligent, yet completely delusional, mass murderer.

Industrial Society and Its Future – FC (Ted Kaczynski)

For those of you who don’t know, Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard educated Math professor who left his job lecturing at the University of California, Berkeley, to live a life of seclusion in a cabin in the woods. While he was there, he decided that technology was the root of nearly all human unhappiness and that by killing a bunch of influential scientists, he would kickstart a revolution that would destroy all technology and end human suffering. In 1995, after spending almost 2 decades terrorising America, he sent a manifesto to the Washington Post and told them he’d stop bombing innocent people if they printed it. It was actually the wording in the manifesto that led to his arrest. His brother recognised familiar phrases in it and told the FBI.

The above paragraph probably makes this dude seem absolutely crazy, but a lot of his ideas are frighteningly prescient. We all know that technology is undoubtedly fucking people up. Ted came up with this stuff in the 70s, so he wasn’t even thinking of social media and smartphones, but he specifically foretold how advancing technology would gain a stronger and stronger hold on how people would think and act. We’ve gotten to a point now where technology has such a hold on every aspect of our lives that the idea of getting rid of it seems completely impossible.

I think that’s the thing that makes Ted crazy. His goals were noble but utterly ridiculous. He may have been a mathematical genius, a skillful craftsman and a philosopher, but he had no self awareness. He thought a hairy weirdo living in a bush was going to stop people from using electricity.

The other problem is that technology is also pretty useful. I’d love to see people spending less time looking at their screens, but I also think that cancer treatments for sick children are neat. Kaczynski was a “survival of the fittest” kind of a guy. I suppose that kind of belief is easier to accept if you’re a little frigid with no friends or family.

Reading this manifesto reminded me of 2 books. One of these was Kiss Maerth’s The Beginning Was the End. Like the manifesto, that book describes humanity falling from grace. For Ted the fall began with the industrial revolution. For Oscar it was when monkeys started to eat each others’ brains. The effect has been similar. Humanity’s accomplishments are unhealthily great, and both authors want a return to a more natural state. The other book this reminded me of was Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Kaczynski is more optimistic about the future of humanity as he believes in a hope for salvation, but that hope now seems so misplaced that his manifesto felt a lot like reading Ligotti’s thoughts on how humanity is cursed and doomed by its own intelligence. These would be 3 good books to read together if you wanted to have a really bad time.

The actual manifesto is pretty boring. It’s thorough, but quite repetitive. A sparksnotes version would probably be sufficient. I can’t be sure, but I feel like his ideas might have been influential on whoever wrote the Matrix.

Kaczynski killed himself a couple of years ago. I’m sure that living is prison is shit, but you can’t help but wonder if his decision to commit suicide was affected by seeing his prophecies coming to pass. It was a sad end to a sad life. He was a psychopathic murderer, but he clearly had severe mental health problems, and there’s stories that he was a victim of an evil science experiment when he was a teenager.