I’d been planning to read Jim Keith’s Black Helicopters books for a while. The black helicopters conspiracy is a little dull in some ways, but it seems integral enough to conspiracy lore that I had to take a closer look. The general idea is that right wing militia types thought that unmarked black helicopters were swarming around America trying to suppress American patriots. These helicopters were piloted by emissaries of the New World Order, nameless/faceless individuals working for some shady, secretive division of the government focused on overthrowing the government.

Oh, by the way, I’ve cracked the code
I’ve figured out these shadow organizations
And the Illuminati know
That they’re finally primed for world domination

And soon you’ve got black helicopters comin’ cross the border
Puppet masters for the New World Order
Be aware: There’s always someone that’s watching you.

– “Weird Al” Yankovic

The first book gives a timeline of black helicopter sightings. The confusing thing here is that for the first 20 or so years of these sightings, they were linked, almost exclusively, with cattle mutilations. It was only after 1993 that the helicopters became linked with the idea of political oppression. This switch seems confusing at first, but it’s easily explained away. The globalists spent 20 years having their henchmen cut up some cows to throw people off their trail. It seems kind of mad when you think about it first, but look at the wacky shit they pumped into the Kennedy assassination narrative. That the American government would push ridiculous disinformation to cover their tracks is the least unlikely part of this conspiracy theory.

Much of the rest of the books is extremely boring and unconvincing. Both discuss FEMA camps (a discredited idea about giant underground prisons covered extensively in Bill Cooper’s book). There’s also a bizarre section in the second book on the “quadrant sign code”. This is a theory that claims that the stickers placed on the back of traffic signs across America were actually placed in such a manner that they provided directions to different mystery locations to mystery employees of secret groups within the government. The person writing about this theory had not cracked the code, and hence had no actual evidence of his claims, but this didn’t stop him from waffling on for 17 pages. Overall, the second book is considerably worse. The first book isn’t hugely entertaining, but the ideas it was discussing were novel enough for me to enjoy it for a few hours. Also, the first volume covers roughly 25 years of sightings over its 150 pages. The second book covers 3 years of new information over the course of 220 pages, so it’s a bit more drawn out and dull.

I’m sure many people who read these books in the 1990s probably rolled their eyes at many of the claims herein. I probably would have too. It’s very easy to be dismissive of conspiracy theories, and there’s always people out there who are crazier than you. I’ve seen writing from Jim Keith, the author of this book, dismissing the claims of Bill Cooper and David Icke. I’m clearly skeptical of some of the claims made by Keith, but I have the benefit of hindsight and the internet. Looking back at what these guys were afraid of now is bizarre. Some of their fears were misguided, but many of them fell far short of how bad things would actually get. Keith is afraid of microchipping and government control over the lives of private citizens. Now the majority of people in America are glued to a cellphone that includes a camera, a microphone and GPS tracking. We routinely and willingly tell these phones things we wouldn’t tell another human being. Mega-corporations like google and meta know more about us than our closest friends and family members. Social media is a more efficient control of mind control than 90s conspiracy theorists could have imagined. It’s not UN soldiers who are murdering American citizens, it’s their own law enforcement agencies, and it’s not the globalists who’ve taken over, but billionaire child-molesting, bloodthirsty creeps, insidious scumbags who went out of their way to convince people like Keith’s patriotic readers that they were right while simultaneously using their fears as a playbook on how to seize control. I sincerely wish Jim Keith had been right. The New World Order sounds a whole lot better than the mess we have today.