Tag: JFK

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

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

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

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.

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

Feral House – 2011

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.