So why are Jesuits so feared among conspiracy theorists? The reasons are many and complex. The Society of Jesus was founded in the mid-16th century, just before the Counterreformation. Their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, was a Basque soldier who had a religious conversion while convalescing from wounds received in battle. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, a formal regimen of meditation on the life of Jesus, is a foundational document still used in the training of novitiates. Indeed, Ignatius’s Exercises were innovative theology for the time, and Ignatius is occasionally considered the first of the Spanish mystics, who derived knowledge of God not through the sanctioned external authorities of gospel, tradition, and Church fiat, but through revelations from internal meditation (a potentially dangerous and heretical position during the Counterreformation).

I suspect that the word “exercises” is a bit of a play on the Spanish word for army, or ejército, as the order has retained a hierarchical structure and members adhere to a vow of obedience, giving them a bit of military feel. Indeed, the head of the order is known as the Superior General, and the internal hierarchy gives missions to its members largely independent of the rest of the Catholic hierarchy—the Superior General is an appointment for life and he has full control over the order. (For this reason, he is often described by conspiracists as the “Black Pope.”) The vow of obedience became crucial in the development of the Jesuits’ reputation as missionaries, as members could be ordered to the far corners of the world to spread the gospel. And they were. The earliest Jesuits very quickly found themselves dispersed around the world, in India, China and Japan, as well as in the Americas. As part of their missionary charge, the Jesuits established schools around the world (indeed they had dozens of universities around the world by the time Ignatius died in 1556). As a result they are known as an especially erudite order (or to conspiracy theorists, “shrewd”), and they have had a long tradition of being especially friendly to the sciences.

While the educational aspect of Jesuit tradition is likely one source of the widespread suspicion of the Jesuits, as educational institutions nexuses of influence in conspiracy lore, the fact that Jesuits do not have a specific ecclesiastical garb is probably far more central to their perceived untrustworthiness. The Society’s founding documents detail that Jesuits’ clothing “should have three characteristics: first, it should be proper; second, conformed to the usage of the country of residence; and third, not contradictory to the poverty we profess.” Conspiracy theorists have taken this to mean that the Jesuits intend to “blend in” and pass unnoticed. This idea was transformed into a perceived political threat that the Jesuits were thought to pose, as exemplified in a note from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson in 1816:

I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits. [...] Shall we not have more of them here, in as many shapes and disguises as ever a king of the gypsies … assumed? In the shape of printers, editors, writers, schoolmasters, &c? … If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth and in hell, it is the Company of Loyola.

Furthermore, during the Counterreformation, the Jesuits could not avoid political entanglements and controversy in Europe, as they worked hard and largely succeeded in keeping Poland from becoming Protestant. Additionally, a handful of Jesuits were implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, lending credence to the notion that the Order was seeking to manipulate world events. Lastly, the Jesuits maintained a special and complicated relationship to the French crown; by the time of the Revolution, the King’s confessor was traditionally a Jesuit. The aristocracy viewed the Jesuits as suspicious because of their presumed influence over the monarchy and association with the Vatican; the general public, unable to criticize the king directly, turned criticism of the Jesuits became a sort of shorthand for criticism of the crown.

The Jesuits possess a number of features that one expects to see in a group of potential conspirators. They are a transnational entity, which to some puts their loyalties in question. Their profession of loyalty to the Pope raises further concerns—indeed a whole imaginary initiation rite has been attributed to the Jesuits, which reads in part:

I do further promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to do, to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honour, rank, dignity or authority of the persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agents of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Father of the Society of Jesus. In confirmation of which I hereby dedicate my life, soul, and all corporal powers, and with the dagger which I now receive I will subscribe my name written in my blood in testimony thereof; and should I prove false, or weaken in my determination, may my brethren and fellow soldiers of the militia of the Pope cut off my hands and feet and my throat from ear to ear, my belly be opened and sulphur burned therein with all the punishment that can be inflicted upon me on earth, and my soul shall be tortured by demons in eternal hell forever.

This was in fact a late seventeenth-century forgery on the scale of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was authored by Robert Ware and is a prime example of what Richard Hofstadter called anti-Catholic “pornography of the Puritan.”

In nineteenth-century America, the Jesuits were singled out as especially dangerous. In the 1830s, the same decade that saw the original publication of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures, the publication of Richard Baxter’s Jesuit Juggling. Forty Popish Frauds Detected and Disclosed. That same year, 1835, saw Samuel B. Morse’s (yes, that Samuel B. Morse) publication of Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, which posited that Jesuits were being sent to this country by Austria (?!?) to foment revolt. One book, the 1851 publication The Female Jesuit, or, The Spy in the Family, was likely inspired by a line in the Robert Ware’s fabricated oath: “[...] I will place Catholic girls in Protestant families that a weekly report may be made of the inner movements of the heretics.”

A Jesuit berates children attending public, not private school. From O.E. Murray’s The Black Pope, or the Jesuits’ Conspiracy Against American Institutions, 1892.

By the end of the nineteenth century, fears of Jesuits (and Catholics in general) centered on the role of Catholic parochial education on the youth of the nation, with special attention to which Bible should be used in public schools, the “Romanish” or Protestant Bible. The growing influence of Catholicism in public life was indicative of the demographic shift that had started with the influx of poor Catholics in the early nineteenth century which eventually led to the political mainstreaming of the Catholicism in the twentieth (though conspiracist insinuations of Rome’s potential political influence on the White House dogged Kennedy during his election campaign).

The most visible modern incarnation of anti-Jesuit conspiracy theory seems to draw heavily on Christian fundamentalist fears of the end-times and David Icke–levels of paranoia. I am talking about Eric Jon Phelps, who runs the website Vatican Assassins. Until this week, the website looked like it had been abandoned, as the “News” section hadn’t been updated in almost 400 days, but the election of a Jesuit “White Pope” seems to have brought Phelps back to the website. According to the latest, surprisingly short post: “Vatican Assassins and Eric Jon Phelps will be making a groundbreaking announcement in the coming weeks.”

Phelps has woven a narrative of the type Michael Barkun terms a “superconspiracy,” which is characterized by vast, nested hierarchies of hidden influence. In the case of Vatican Assassins, the Jesuits are actively bringing about the end-times and are the powers behind...well, almost every atrocity, including the Holocaust. (The Southern Poverty Law Center has an excellent write-up of Vatican Assassins.) I interviewed Phelps a couple of years ago at an “alternative knowledge” convention in Atlanta a few years ago. As there were a large number of UFO conspiracy theorists in attendance, I asked him what he thought of aliens, and his answer confirmed to me that I had found my calling:

There are no such things as aliens. The ‘Grays’ are creations of the Jesuits in their deep underground military bases through their genetic experimentation. All the grays are hybrids. They cannot reproduce; they live short lives; they are lesser than what a man is—that’s one of the signs of a hybrid. What I maintain is that the Jesuits have perfected their antigravity craft, and god knows what other technology, and so what they did when they crashed at Roswell, they put those little creatures in there.

Because when you inadvertently reveal one secret technology, the really clever conspirator covers it up with…another secret project. Because nobody would expect that.

First, a few things that I will cover. A frequent feature of conspiracy theory is racism. This is, of course, horrid, and the stories are often disturbing, but they need to be covered and put in context. Stories about ultra-nationalism and hate crimes also often have a conspiracist bent, so they may appear to be disproportionately represented.

Second, a few things that I won’t be reporting on (if I can avoid it). The first is sports conspiracy theories. Sometimes the ball takes a bad bounce. Get over it. New posts on tired run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories are out too, because, really, does anyone need to see another YouTube video about how the international bankers are running the world? Now, if there is a new element, like, the banksters plan to smuggle chemical weapons into a populated area via kangaroo pouches, well, I’ll consider it. I may occasionally dip into the history behind these stories, but for the most part, we’ve been there, done that. I am genuinely interested in conspiracy theories that start outside of the United States, but I often lack the background to give the context of those conspiracy theories, so you may find my collection rather skewed towards the U.S. (Don’t hesitate to help me correct that, by the way!)

Lastly, if you have tips and links to new and interesting conspiracy theories, send them to me. I want to hear them.

Let’s do this.

A new conspiracy is floating around the theory-o-sphere, according to www.MotherJones.com. Apparently Obama is unleashing deadly irony against foes opposed to his stance on gun control. By having them shot.

A summary of the principal threads of the emerging Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, as by an apparent true believer at the Guardian Express. Especially whimsical is the following web of connections related to a scene in The Dark Knight Rises, which was playing during the Aurora shooting:

“The Dark Knight Rises” map of Sandy Hook is on “Hinckley Island.” John Hinckley, Jr. tried to assassinate Pres. Reagan in 1981. The Hinckley family is friends to the Bush family. Bush = New World Order. Also on the map, the school is located where the football stadium attack occurs.

A hip-hop marketing gimmick, making references to the Illuminati, has spawned its own mythology and pseudoscholarship. I expect copious analysis of Beyonce’s halftime show in the near future. The most prolific and obsessive decoder of all things Illuminati in hip hop that I know of writes at the Vigilant Citizen website. Amazingly, everything he has ever examined on that site has confirmed to him that the Illuminati is, for some reason, reminding everyone constantly that they are secretly in control. Here’s his take on the Super Bowl.

Amy Shira Teitel has the lowdown on a conspiracy about the Apollo 1 disaster, when three astronauts died on the launchpad.

Rachael Maddow’s composite image of the President if all of the Obama conspiracy theories were accurate is pretty amusing.

Shepard Ambellas, the head poohbah at www.theintelhub.com, accidently illustrates how bunk snowballs and how misinformation and fanciful reporting by alternative media creates bogus narratives. Under the headline, “Sandy Hook: Law Enforcement Officials Now Admit Possibility of Multiple Shooters,” he leads his article with:

In a shocking twist of events lending credence to theintelhub.com’s investigation, it has now been admitted by officials that there is a potential that multiple shooters carried out the bloody massacre that took place at the Sandy Hook Elementary School the morning of December 14, 2012.

That would be a shocking twist, especially people who follow the chain of reporting back to the source! Shep links to his source, Ralph Lopez’s “Sandy Hook DA cites 'potential suspects,' fears witness safety,” wherein we find:

Sedensky said that unsealing the warrants would also:

‘identify persons cooperating with the investigation, thus possibly jeopardizing their personal safety and well-being.’

The statement by the CT prosecutor's office is the first indication from state authorities that Adam Lanza may have not acted alone.

Well, not really. This is a highly emotionally charged issue, and I should point out that probably most people who have participated in the events at Sandy Hook have come under the scrutiny of conspiracy theorists. I think of poor Gene Rosen, who, because he helped six kids whose teacher had been shot, has been harassed by conspiracy nuts. Nothing in that statement suggests anything more, and while the statement in no way limits the scope of the investigation, it does not offer positive evidence for another shooter or suspect. And I would also like to point out that the headline is also grotesquely disingenuous. The State’s Attorney’s written statement actually says:

[D]isclosure and delivery of the affidavit would seriously jeopardize the outcome and success of the investigation by divulging sensitive and confidential information known only to investigators and any potential suspect(s) and also identify persons cooperating with the investigation thus possibly jeopardizing their personal safety and well-being.

It’s not saying that there are “potential suspects,” as suggested by the headline (Lopez actually changed the wording and put it in quotes!), it’s saying if there are—it’s conditional. Further, the word “witness” doesn’t appear in the affidavit or court order, which is important because a “witness” is not the same thing as “[person] cooperating with the investigation.” Most important, I think, is the State’s Attorney’s statement in the affidavit that, “No arrests have been made and none are currently anticipated, but have not been ruled out,” which is totally missing from Shep’s write-up. From there, Ambellas’ sloppy reporting leaped to Before It’s News, and the rest is pseudohistory.

Joel Dyer gives a quick but accurate sketch of how modern conspiracist thinking came to be and an overview of its violent potential.

Our final story this week comes from France, where the famous 1830 painting, “Liberty Leading the People,” by Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix was defaced by a 9/11 Truther. The painting, which was on the 100 franc note for decades, was tagged by a twenty-eight-year old woman who scrawled “AE911” on it while it was on loan to a branch of the Louvre. She is now in custody. AE911 is short for the truther activist group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which is headed by Richard Gage. www.AE911truth.org put up a notice on the 8th, the day after the incident, which made dubious statements like, “We do not know if this act of vandalism was done in reference to our organization.” What part of the graffiti naming their group don’t they understand? They sure do seem sure about what to conclude from a whole lot of less convincing evidence!

Richard Gage, the founder of the group, made a completely self-serving statement on the occasion of his group’s newfound “popularity” in France:

“I was shocked and horrified to learn of this senseless act of vandalism. I sincerely hope that this unbalanced person is not in any way associated with our numerous volunteers in France. Our organization prides itself on the integrity of its activists, who are seeking a real, unimpeachable investigation of the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11.”

I would like to vouch for the integrity of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth’s activists. Unfortunately I can’t since I was once defamed by them in perhaps the most amusing way possible—with a chimeric LOLcat.

That’s what I have for now. A new edition will come out in a few weeks.

RJB

Conspiracy theorists are already busy on the job weaving imaginary connections and, not twenty-four hours in, had begun forcing the facts into standard pre-existing narratives for mass-shootings. The most popular so far seem to be that the shooter was brainwashed, that there were actually multiple shooters, and that the whole event was planned as a pretext for a government gun-grab.

Again.

We have been flooded with a constant barrage of information about this tragedy since it began to unfold, and not all of that information has been true. Some has been spectacularly far from the mark. In order to formulate a thoughtful response to the horrors inflicted upon us by the shooter, no matter his intention or disposition, we need to be able to understand how information comes to us and understand that we can anticipate that it will change.

This will perhaps be a basic primer for many readers of the CSI website, and I may be restating something that skeptics do instinctively, but it’s worth repeating. New media, especially YouTube, has changed the public’s relationship to news and information in a way that has made conspiracy theories not only more prevalent but also a much more participatory pursuit. For this reason, it is vital that any student of conspiracy theory attain some degree of media literacy. A good place to start is with the information cycle.

The “information cycle” is a concept that comes out of media studies and posits that newsworthy information passes through a fairly consistent sequence of media outlets as it makes its way into the history books. Knowing the stage in the information cycle at which a particular source was produced can help researchers determine what a source is best used as evidence of. For example, let’s consider the story of the Challenger disaster. When television viewers watching the launch live saw the shuttle explode, the story began its course through the information cycle. The first news reports that people encountered were in broadcast media, both on television and radio as events unfolded live. The limited amount of information that was known was reported as it was received. That information was soon augmented by eyewitness accounts and backed by the speculation and commentary of experts and pundits.

The first complete accounts the events (cause still unknown) were the stories in the newspaper the next day. Over the next weeks and months, as the story developed and the investigation into the disaster focused on the mechanical and management failures that contributed to the disaster, the story passed into weekly magazines, where the topics were explored in more depth and at some length. Finally we saw the Challenger disaster work its way into journals and books, where the event was likely to be placed within an informed and more fully fleshed-out historical context.

The information cycle, which one thinks of as “the way in which newsworthy events are experienced and understood over time,” is changing, and a lot of this is due to the possibilities of new media. A defining aspect of new media is how it has changed audience members’ relationship to information from that of passive consumers to that of active participants in the creation of content. This has come about through the widespread availability of cheap video cameras and inexpensive video editing software. The type of media that used to take a large production studio, pressroom, and distribution network to disseminate now takes minutes for a single person with an Internet connection to get out there.

Despite the conspiracy theorists’ claims that media gatekeepers are constantly withholding vital information from the public, modern media makes it easier for inaccurate initial information to spread and endure. Take, for instance, what happened when an unnamed law enforcement source leaked a name that was reportedly that of the Sandy Hook shooter, “Ryan Lanza.” This was a misidentification, but the announcement set off a cascade of events that led to the wrong image being used to identify the shooter on CNN, Fox News, CBS, and innumerable other outlets within minutes. According to Jeff Jarvis, an experienced journalist and professor who prematurely shared his observations about a twitter account that later turned out to not be the Sandy Hook shooter’s:

One of the key skills of the journalist today is not to say what we know, but to say what we don’t know. That’s been the case since 24-hour cable news came along, where everybody becomes a witness to a story as it unfolds and those of us who were reporters back in the day of pay telephones and notebooks know that oftentimes by the time our deadline came around, we learned a lot more and we were saved from many ‘instant errors’ because of the time and the structure of the press. Well, that’s gone now, both because of 24-hour cable news and now because of the Internet, and further gone because anyone can do this. So it’s not just about training journalists when that photo gets retweeted, retweeted and retweeted, it’s the same difference—it doesn’t matter if a journalist did it.

Furthermore, news, no matter its quality or accuracy, has a longer lifespan on the Internet than it did two decades ago. Footage of erroneous reporting can be captured and distributed widely, and those images retain their immediacy as they get mixed and remixed into no-budget YouTube conspiracy videos alongside better information, often making it difficult to discern what is good information and what is bad information. What comes to mind immediately is the eyewitness testimony of people who had been near the Twin Towers when they collapsed. The sound bites and interviews of stunned people covered in gray dust have been archived and live on in cyberspace. This is not a bad thing in itself, of course, but without an awareness of where those clips entered the information cycle (and the subsequent possibility that that information will turn out to be if not completely inaccurate, at least incomplete) someone viewing those clips now might be led to some rather improbable conclusions.

Forgetting that reporters, as a rule, try not to report what is known to be inaccurate information, conspiracy theorists will point to the early, more tentative reporting as evidence that something is being swept under the rug. In reality, a week into the Sandy Hook story, parallel narratives had developed in the mainstream media and in the alternative (and proud of it) media. In the mainstream media, the story is that of an investigation into the motivation of Adam Lanza, the individual who was found dead at the scene with a gun taken from the house of a relative who had been shot the same day, and the individual who reportedly was too impatient to wait for a background check when he tried to legally secure his own weapon a few weeks ago. Some would call this converging evidence leading to an increasingly certain conclusion that Adam Lanza was in fact the one who pulled the trigger.

In the alternative media, the possibilities and uncertainties are blossoming unabated, leading to increasingly baroque explanations and imaginary linkages. Conspiracy theorists have predictably seized on the earliest, most confused and jumbled reporting that came out on the morning of the shooting. Veterans Today contributor Kevin Barrett wrote on Dec 17:

Since we know that many if not most “lone nut” massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists out of business.

[...] So the first priority of all truth-seekers must be to “catapult the counter-narrative” as quickly as possible.

This is especially horrifying for those of us who value conclusions drawn from evidence over conclusion-driven cherry picking. Barrett follows up with a widely-circulated list of “inconsistencies” that in part draws on confused reporting from the first day’s events, which, though discarded from the media’s narrative of events as more evidence has accumulated, endures as the “official story” in the minds of conspiracy theorists. These include early reports that the shooter was wearing body armor (he wasn’t), that the mother of the shooter was connected to the school (she wasn’t), and the misidentification of the shooter as Ryan Lanza (the shooter was his brother, Adam).

Confusion and contradicting reports are exactly what we should expect in the earliest hours of a news story. We should expect the false reports to travel far in the media and online. We should expect news reporters who are interested in the truth to adjust their stories to conform to the evidence as new evidence becomes available. What conspiracy theorists identify as “cover-up” is actually good journalism, and it is helping audiences understand this is something that the media should emphasize. Jeff Jarvis makes the point nicely:

I think that we have a larger job and a bigger challenge which is to make sure that everyone knows that you can’t trust what you learn immediately, and that if you do choose to spread it, that you have a responsibility to say how you know what you know.

Tavis Minnear, a writer for the Ashland Times-Gazette, reported that in November 2008, a year that saw the Supreme Court uphold handgun rights in Washington, D.C., and only a week after Obama’s election, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA told members: “...that an ‘elite ruling class’ of anti-gun politicians has ‘declared war on our individual rights’ by trying to restrict Americans' ability to keep and bear arms.

“Seventy-five years ago in his first inauguration as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,' he said. Today, I would argue almost the exact reverse is true. The greatest thing we have to fear in many ways is not enough Americans are afraid, because not enough realize what grave dangers are out there to our freedoms.” (http://bit.ly/KVWVvM)

This rhetoric, whether cynically uttered or not, is a major component of a widely held belief of the paranoid right that the federal government is going to disarm the populace and then sweep in an impose tyranny, or martial law, put the “true patriots” into FEMA-run concentration camps, or whatever. Crucial to this fantasy of oppression is that there will be a high profile false-flag attack on the American people, which will of course serve as a pretense for taking away all of the guns. The past month has sadly seen a number of high-profile mass shootings that quickly became fodder for conspiracy theorists.

Predictably, as soon as word of the theater shooting in Aurora, CO broke on July 20, and as the human toll became clear (twelve dead and fifty-eight wounded), the conspiracy-theory-o-sphere was abuzz with speculation about what REALLY happened in that darkened movie theater. In the first few days after the shooting, the number of people who were “actually” responsible for the shooting swelled beyond reason; the FBI, CIA, the Illuminati, MK-Ultra, and the President all were named as being behind the shooting. It seemed that everyone except the person who pulled the trigger was responsible for the massacre. To many, the destruction of the Second Amendment seemed imminent.

To conspiracists, it was clear that the shooter was a patsy and that by definition this had been a false-flag event. As often happens, conspiracy theorists misjudged the relative usefulness of the first burst of eyewitness accounts, which suggested that there might have been an accomplice inside the theater to open the emergency exit for the shooter. In the fullness of time, the investigation found that the shooter acted alone. Of course, revelations that the suspect, James Holmes, had been a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado instantly led to the contention that he was some sort of mind-controlled hit man. Conspiracy theorists also latched onto word that the alleged gunman’s father had once worked for a company that had DARPA contracts. To them, the mind-control hypothesis seemed the natural conclusion from Holmes’s apparently disoriented and bizarre countenance at his first court appearance.

On August 5, word broke of another mass shooting, this time at the Sikh Temple outside of Milwaukee. Six people were killed and four were injured. The only suspect, Wade Michael Page, killed himself at the scene. Page had been a figure in the white supremacist “hate core” music scene and had been tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The conspiracy theories that surfaced following the Sikh shooting were of two types. The first was conventional and fit well within a rather worn conspiracy narrative. The other, not so much.

The first, an example of which I take from the execrable white supremacist site Stormfront.org, claims that a white veteran was set up/drugged and disposed of, or in the words of commenter Thor9019: “So this was likely a set up from the start and now they can go and blame it on 'white supremacists' like they always do.”¹

This is actually a long-standing self-pitying and persecutory narrative that goes back at least as far as the Oklahoma City bombing, which was of course carried out by former military, unapologetic white supremacists. And it closely parallels the plot of a peculiar and frustrating bit of what Tom Lolis (interviewed in my last article) has termed “militia fiction,” Matthew Bracken’s Enemies Foreign and Domestic (2003). I say frustrating because it represents a world where the paranoid are correct about the government’s conniving to take their guns away and impose tyranny. In the opening scene of the novel, a sniper opens fire into an arena at a sporting event, spurring a widely televised panic that results in hundreds of deaths. Killed at the scene is a disturbed but upstanding veteran who it is clear has been drugged and is being painted as a white supremacist.² This is the role that Page has been painted into by conspiracists.

A second line of conspiracy theories that has sprouted out of the Sikh killings was decidedly less expected. It began, I believe, when UFOlogist and Disclosure Project founder Steven Greer tweeted: “Sirius filmmaker Arm Kaleka's father shot at Sikh Temple. He is on scene now. Please pray for his family. Dr. Greer.”

Sirius is the title of a documentary project that Greer and filmmaker Amardeep Kaleka are working on and have been attempting to raise funds for. Kaleka’s father was the Temple President and was killed. Last year, Greer was a keynote speaker at the TruthCon in Atlanta, which I wrote about in my first CSI article. Greer was drumming up funds for his Orion Project, a scheme that would extract free energy from the expansion of the universe and deliver it to the people of the world, ending war and hunger for the bargain basement price of $5.7 million. The $5.7 million is earmarked for a secure facility where Greer can protect the scientists he’s recruited and their families from the Secret Government. It appears that the movie Sirius is intended to cover the Orion Project.

Within nanoseconds of Greer’s tweet, and even though I have seen neither Kaleka nor Greer claim that this was an attempt to silence them, UFO conspiracy theorists were raising the alarm. The blossoming of potential suspects in response to a single YouTube video about the shooting includes: JFK’s killers, Nazis, illegal black ops, private companies who put microchips in hit men’s heads, the CIA, Big Oil, bankers, and the Wall Street elite.³ Elements of the other line of conspiracy also appear in the comments, for instance, that the media are now actively pushing hate crimes laws (thought to unjustly punish whites), and that the media is being spun and distracted by the white supremacist angle. Unlike history, which jostles out untruths and favors facts to ultimately settle on a version of events that historians agree upon, conspiracy theory is ever more open and resists closure and consensus, ensuring that those who practice it will never be satisfied.

Notes

1. Another poster, the ironically named “Ballistic,” remarked:

“You know it's curious - every single one, without exception, of the racially-aware/White Nationalist-minded people I personally know are the most unremarkable, and least "extreme" people one could meet!! They are in no way distinguishable from any other White American - and in many cases, their own friends and family are probably totally unaware of their political/ideological outlook.”

Touché. From: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t905331/. ↩

2. While Bracken makes clear that the gun-owner veterans who are at being framed for hate crimes by the government are in no way racist, one of his main (and presumably meant to be sympathetic) characters says: “If they really wanted to stop terrorism, they’d go after the real threat, and they still won’t even say there’s a problem with Muslims. And now they’re trying to frame up white ‘militias’ as the next big terrorist threat.” Touché. ↩

3. One commenter disagrees: “it's the judeo masonic mafia.....it's not nazis. get real.” Touché. ↩

One of the most disturbing and popular books in white supremacist subculture is The Turner Diaries. Its author, William Pierce, who penned the thing under the name Andrew MacDonald, was a physics PhD who taught at the Oregon State University in the 1960s; Pierce became a leading American Nazi Party member (and editor of their journal) and eventually founded the National Alliance, which was for a while the most well-funded white nationalist group in the U.S. The Turner Diaries was published serially before it was released as novel in 1978. Pierce also authored Hunter, a book about a serial killer who stalks and executes mixed-race couples.

In the years since Barack Obama’s election, the number of anti-government militia groups (as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center) has exploded from 150 to over 1250. 2012 was also the first year that most of the babies born in the United States were not white. These demographic and social changes, augmented by an entrenched and politically active nativist movement that targets illegal immigrants, should encourage our awareness of the ideological fountain from which the racist subset of these militias draw, including The Turner Diaries.

To discuss The Turner Diaries, I sat down at a Mexican restaurant for a taco with Tom Lolis, my colleague and fellow Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech. Tom is a Renaissance scholar who has taught writing classes about the occult, but also takes a professional interest in conspiracy and conspiracy theories. As we sat down and ordered tacos, I pulled out my copy of The Turner Diaries and placed it on the table face down.

“You brought a copy?” Tom asked.

“When I first heard about it I downloaded pages as a PDF and printed them up on the department printer,” I said. “I ran down to the copy room to make sure that nobody intercepted it, because if someone did, it would be the end of me.”

“Yeah, it’s not the type of book that you read on the bus. If the other people on the bus knew what you were reading ...” he trailed off.

“… they’d rightly kick my ass,” I finished.

“Yeah, especially if they don’t assume that you are a college professor interested in this because it is a book of dangerous and terrible ideas.”

I showed him the promotional blurb by Timothy McVeigh on the back cover. “How did you get your copy?” I asked.

“I made the horrible mistake of ordering it online, which has probably put me on who knows how many watch lists? And it also started getting me inundated with pamphlets and catalogues from companies that I wish I didn’t know existed. I don’t recommend anyone does that.”

Tom gave a brief outline of the book’s premise. A resistance group known as “the Order” “is going to protect America from itself. The group has the aims of creating a white society, and in particular targets African-Americans and Jews. The novel suggests that Jews run the world, that Jews pull the strings, and that African-Americans are their unwitting flunkies, the unfortunate dupes who supposedly don’t know better (and of course a word like ‘African-American’ is nowhere to be found in the book).”

To Pierce, protecting America from itself means inciting a revolution, Tom said. “What seems to kick start this incendiary movement [in the novel] is an act called the ‘Cohen Act,’ which is a proposed bill to take our guns away, so it grafts that fear onto this race-hatred, and this becomes the realization for this group that they have to strike now, because once the guns are taken away, once the guns have been physically seized from your home, the Jews win.” ¹

The act that sets the revolution in motion is a truck bomb that destroys the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. “You always see in the lore of the militias that there is always going to be one act that triggers the revolution,” I said.. “All they have to do is strike against the Feds, for instance, and that’s going to spark the revolution. Even that Breivik guy, kinda thought that he was going to foment revolution. The Hutaree narrative: kill a cop, start a revolution. In The Turner Diaries, the act that is going to set things off is an attack on the FBI headquarters. This has some real world implications.”

Tom agreed. “What’s weird is what Breivik has been spouting off in Norway sounds very Turner Diary-esque, this claim that he is a part of this secret cell. [In the Turner Diaries] we have this network of terrorist cells that work together but don’t always know what the other is doing. And it’s also this quasi-theological order; there’s a lot of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism mixed in with this notion of a master race.” The major difference seems to be that Breivik substitutes the Muslims for the Jews in his conspiratorial hierarchy.

Tom suggested that the structure of the book, framing the story in the form of a revolutionary’s journals, gives the story a sense of authenticity. “It allows the reader to imagine a world where the Revolution has already happened. [...] The book sets the time of the action in the 1990s and we’re reading the journals [of martyr Earl Turner] a hundred years beyond that, when the world has completely changed (for the worse),” Tom said. “Asia has been made a desert via a nuclear strike, Africa has been ethnically cleansed—all of it. Puerto Rico has been colonized by whites, and there’s a whole list of other atrocities. In the final scene, our ‘hero,’ Mr. Turner, goes on a suicide run [in a small airplane] to nuke the Pentagon. New York is also hit with nuclear weapons because it’s seen as a sort of a Jewish capital.”

“It’s a sort a blueprint for the revolution that they are hoping will come,” I said, referring to a scene which describes in detail exactly how to prepare and bury weapons in the woods to keep them from being seized by authorities.

Tom nodded. “It’s very much, I think, a how-to manual, or at least it’s intended to be. What its efficacy could be, let’s hope we never find out, but it seems that the design is I’m going to tell an entertaining story (entertaining in huge quotes) because people are going to pass on the instructional manual. If you don’t have the wherewithal to sit through hundreds of pages of pure polemic, we’ll couch it in story.”

Tom paused. “I think one of the things that is so disturbing about the book is that the prose is actually not terrible, in the sense that had he been a gentler man, or a reasonable man, Pierce may have been able to have crafted a career as a bestselling novelist. It has that sort of page turner quality. The sentences are clean. It was one of the slowest books I ever read, though, because of the content and how hard it was to take, but I think if you looked at it purely as a prose stylist, you know, he can write. It’s not going to be high art, but there’s a story. It’s a terrible story. And I think that might account for this book’s success, that it has a sort of ‘thriller’ feel. I think that’s what makes it stand out from a lot of similarly themed fiction. And any other book I can think of that has achieved visibility, any vision of the world comparable to this, say, in science fiction, this is going to be presented as uniformly dystopian.”

“That’s the scary thing,” I chimed in. “Hitler was quite a utopian. A lot of these sorts of movements have this utopian vision and there’s no other way, you either go all the way toward the utopian world or the world is corrupt, and there’s nothing in between.”

Our tacos arrived. When we finished lunch, I mentioned that The Turner Diaries is part of a larger body of work, a collection of similarly themed novels. “I don’t think that most people would realize that there is an entire subgenre of what you have termed ‘militia fiction.’ What are some of the other books in that genre?”

“As far as books that have achieved heavy circulation,” Tom said, “you can take Unintended Consequences, which Tim McVeigh read in jail. It’s a long novel, 1,000-plus pages. It’s another one that [has] a bestseller prose style. That one is more about resistance against the ATF as opposed to killing ethnic groups. I think that’s become dominant in subsequent novels, taking the subversive tendencies of The Turner Diaries and turning them more toward political agencies than toward ethnic groups. Now in some of those works, we might find the underlying theme of ethnic groups controlling these agencies but the ATF will be front and center, or the FBI.

“I think that [The Turner Diaries] is the most prominent because it has been associated with specific crimes. Obviously you’ve got McVeigh. [A copy of the book was found in McVeigh’s car when he was arrested.] There was the case of the dragging of the African American man—I believe his name was James Byrd—in Texas. One of the assailants said that they were ‘starting The Turner Diaries early,’ so there’s clear association there. I’m not suggesting that reading a book drives you to commit violence, but those who are inclined toward that type of crime seem to gravitate toward it. [...] I don’t think that it works well as a conversion tool. I can’t see anyone picking it up and saying, ‘It changed my ideas.’

“You know, the Order, which was responsible for killing [Colorado radio host] Alan Berg [in 1984], the talk show host—the name of that group comes from The Turner Diaries. Berg was taken out because he was supposed to be a Jewish mouthpiece. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t think that’s a coincidence either.”

“We end with nuclear strikes,” Tom concluded. “When this is written [in the late 1970s], nuclear terror is at the top of the list, in terms of our cultural anxiety, so it makes sense that we end with a nuclear attack. And it’s this utopian vision, this idea that all other races are wiped off the globe. Those few who remain we recolonize all over again to create a new workforce. This is seen as a sort of ultimate moral good, within the frame of the disturbed mind of the narrator and author.”

Notes

1. It should be noted that this is a type of argument from fear that we see in recent statements by the National Rifle Association, which floats conspiracy theories about people scheming to take their guns away. Tavis Minnear, a writer for the Ashland Times-Gazette, reported that in November 2008, a year that saw the Supreme Court uphold handgun rights in Washington, D.C., and only a week after Obama’s election, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA told members:

...that an ‘elite ruling class’ of anti-gun politicians has ‘declared war on our individual rights’ by trying to restrict Americans' ability to keep and bear arms.

Seventy-five years ago in his first inauguration as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,' he said. Today, I would argue almost the exact reverse is true. The greatest thing we have to fear in many ways is not enough Americans are afraid, because not enough realize what grave dangers are out there to our freedoms. (http://bit.ly/KVWVvM)

To fans of The Turner Diaries, those unnamed “elites” are Jews, but the structure of the narrative offered the NRA is the same. A powerful group is working below the radar to take away Americans’ guns. Not everyone knows the truth, but you do. You must resist this to preserve your way of life. In every way, this is a classic conspiracy theory operating as mainstream political rhetoric. You may remember that in the days after Obama’s election, ammunition sales spiked, and LaPierre is again warning constituents about “Obama’s secret plan to destroy the 2nd Amendment by 2016” (http://bit.ly/ue0GA0). ↩

I checked the lock, just in case, and went back to my paper, but the mumbling outside continued. Finally, I was creeped out enough by the feeling that people were watching me that I went upstairs to work on the computer up there. When I sat in front of that monitor, something strange happened. The mumbling that I had heard outside now came from downstairs, again, as if the mumbler were following me but remained just outside my field of vision. I freaked out, woke up my entire family, and stalked through the house with a tennis racket, fully intending to brain whoever had come into the house. That was when I was put to bed.

What I think happened that night is that one of the symptoms of my sleep deprivation was an audio hallucination of indistinct murmuring. But because what I was feeling—that people were talking—did not line up with what I was seeing, my brain interpreted the murmurers as being just outside of my range of visual perception: outside when I was downstairs, and downstairs when I was on the second floor.

I’ve often wondered if the conspiracy theorist doesn’t have a similar experience of the world. The source of the dread, foreboding, or control that conspiracy theorists sense is often outside the range of the normal experience of everyday life, which in no way diminishes the sense of a real threat. Therefore, they locate the locus of power just beyond the normal citizen’s perceptual range: the Oval Office, the board room, the annual Bilderberg meeting, the lunchroom at the CIA (surely they have one).

Often it seems to me that the more outrageous the claim, the harder it becomes to disprove. Let’s say that during the Cold War an alien spacecraft managed to crash in New Mexico. In that case, it is not inconceivable that the government would want to assess the national security implications of the crash, including its origins and technology. They might very well decide to house the wreckage at a secure military base. (Whether or not they would be able to keep it a secret—and for how long—is another story.) Regardless, a relatively inaccessible hangar on a military base is in any case a tempting target of speculation when left unchecked by disconfirming evidence.

A less plausible conspiracy theory, in my mind, is that the aliens and humans have not only encountered each other by means of a crash, but have established diplomatic relations and have even engaged in armed conflict. An elaborate X-Files-like plot has been built up on this premise. As the story goes, the great Alien/Human war broke out underground in an installation underneath Dulce, NM, in 1979. In the version I’m familiar with, the aliens—in this case the “grays”—had entered into an agreement with the American government, which provided the aliens with the biological material that they needed for research in exchange for alien technology. The grays reneged on their deal, however, and a battle broke out on the underground military base between human security forces and the aliens. More than sixty brave Earthican patriots died protecting us from the extraterrestrial menace. The underworld has long been a popular place for locating the source of elusive, otherworldly evils. In a way, I think it makes a certain sense that someone whose innate “threat detection equipment” detected malevolent agency everywhere would locate that evil underground, which is in a sense also everywhere, only inaccessible.

The apotheosis of extraordinary conspiratorial claims is David Icke’s claims about the reptilian, shape-shifting, inter-dimensional space-alien bloodlines who control our minds from the moon, which is not only hollow but also a spaceship. Each elaboration on the story addss another layer designed to make it even more un-falsifiable (not unlike the invisible dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage). Again, it seems to make a weird sort of sense that one would need to be a deity to see through veil upon veil of lies posited by Icke—a role that Icke gladly accepted [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiyrHZCksDM].

At this point, I expect that the essayistic form demands that I summarize everything that I’ve said, but it’s hard to do. Conspiracy theories are as variable as the people who endorse them. I’ve never met two conspiracy theorists who believed precisely the same thing, even if they agreed on the broader themes of conspiracy. The problem for the conspiracy theorist, even if he doesn’t recognize this fact, is that by locating the sources of conspiracy in inaccessible places he has made his own story harder to prove and no easier for the skeptic to believe.

Oh, and for the record, I have not heard voices since that night in graduate school. None worth listening to, at least.

If you are at all familiar with modern American conspiracy theories, you will know something about the Denver International Airport (DIA). The main terminal, designed by Fentress Bradburn Architects and completed in 1995, is striking, cutting a serrated line in the sky, a visual echo of the surrounding mountains on the horizon.

Somehow, the conspiratorial world has convinced itself that, to use Richard Dreyfus’s phrase as he sculpts his mashed potatoes into a replica of the Devil’s Tower, the Denver International Airport “means something.” What exactly it means is unclear, but conspiracy theorists know its meaning is sinister. Numerous hypotheses about the facility’s real purpose have been proposed, most of them rooted in the assertion that the truth is to be found underground in the bowels of the airport. This element of the conspiracy seems to stem from a misinterpretation of events surrounding DIA’s construction. First is the extensive excavation, construction, and inexplicable (to conspiracy theorists) reburial of tunnels on the site, which now house the airport’s rail system. Second, cost overruns on the order of $2 billion raised eyebrows and left conspiracy theorists wondering where all that extra money was going.

The explanations that conspiracy theorists have offered range from the absurd to the even more absurd: DIA is the home of the global shadow government of Illuminati/Masons/New World Order; DIA is the site of a future FEMA concentration camp; it sits atop an underground city that is in turn connected to a network of other underground cities populated by aliens. One idea that seems be on the ascendance is an assertion made by governor-wrestler Jesse Ventura that DIA will be a refuge for global elites during a world-wide catastrophe, not unlike the “arks” seen in the almost unwatchable movie 2012.

According to conspiracy theorists, the key to discerning the conspiracy and understanding the real purpose of the airport is the artwork found throughout the building.¹ Two of the richest sources of clues are a pair of murals by Leo Tanguma, “The Children of World Dream of Peace” and “In Peace and Harmony with Nature,” both of which are found near the baggage claim area. These two pieces are diptychs, each consisting of a small panel and a much longer panel. While each smaller panel portrays a truly dystopian world of destruction and decay, the much larger panels display celebratory and vibrant symbolism suggestive of a utopian vision of the future.

On a recent long layover at DIA, I made a point of studying the Tanguma murals. I first came upon “The Children of the World Dream of Peace” and found it utterly enormous.

Details from “The Children of the World Dream of Peace”. Photos by Susan Gerbic

I stood back to see how people reacted to the mural. Most did not look up, but about one in 200 travelers would pause, shake his head, and move on. I approached one, a slim African American man who looked like he was in his late twenties. He agreed to an interview on the condition that I did not record his voice or give his real name. I will call him Jim.

“This is like a concentration camp,” he said, pointing to the smaller of the two panels in the diptych. And it’s true: the smaller panel looks a little like a poster for a Holocaust movie. A ghastly military figure in a gas mask dominates the scene, striking down a dove of peace with a vicious-looking scimitar. Behind him, a line of dispossessed people shuffles off endlessly into the distance. Jim pointed to the children lying on the ground near the feet of the faceless soldier. “I mean, who puts dead children in a painting? That’s sick.”

“I don’t think that they are dead, actually,” I said. “I think they are asleep.” I pointed out a little note painted into one corner of the mural, near the sleeping children. The note reads:

I was once a little child who longed for other worlds. But I am no more a child for I have known fear. I have learned to hate.... How tragic, then, is youth which lives with enemies, with gallows ropes. Yet, I still believe I only sleep today, that I’ll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and play.

The quote is attributed to a fourteen-year old who died in December of 1943 at Auschwitz. “Look,” I began. “You see these sleeping kids? They are literally dreaming of a peaceful world.” All of the important themes of the piece, the contrast of war and peace and the dream motif, are introduced in the quote, serving as a key for interpreting the mural. “It’s all about yearning for peace,” I said.

Jim was doubtful. We drifted over to the other panel, and he pointed to all the children and noted that many carry weapons. “That makes them soldiers, right?”

“But they are taking the swords and beating them into ploughshares. That’s a biblical reference. It’s not subtle!” I laughed.

Jim shook his head. “That’s what they want you to think.” He pointed to the smiling, happy children. “See that? That’s the antichrist. The antichrist is going to promise us a world of peace, but he is going to give us that,” he said, gesturing toward the gray panel.

“How do you know this?” I asked, and he gave me some quotes from Revelation. But he finished with a curious statement: “Also, nobody who works here, if you ask them, will talk about the conspiracy.”

Finally, something that we can put to the test, I thought. “Do you want to go ask someone?”

He stepped back and crossed his arms, as if it had never occurred to him that someone might actually go ask. In a moment he shook his head. “No. No.” His unease was clear, and I told him I wouldn’t delay him any longer. I went to talk to the people at the information booth.

When I reached the booth, I asked the woman behind the desk if she could tell me about the conspiracy theories, and I’ll be damned if she wouldn’t talk to me about it! Was Jim right?

Not exactly. They gave me the contact information for the media office. It was clear by the way she rolled her eyes when I mentioned the conspiracy theories that I was not the first person to ask about them.

I headed over to see the other mural, “In Peace and Harmony with Nature.”

Details from “In Peace and Harmony with Nature”. Photos by Susan Gerbic

There I met traveller Matt Brown, a new resident of Denver who was encountering the murals of DIA for the first time. I asked him why he was interested in the murals.

“I was just interested because my dad just sent me an e-mail about some of these different murals, and I said that I didn’t even notice. So on my way back I’m going check [them] out and see what the deal is.”

“So, what’s your first impression?” I asked.

“I don’t see anything wrong with this one. I mean, peace and harmony with nature. There [are a] whole bunch of different nationalities and creatures. I don’t know what that is in the middle,” he said, pointing to a psychedelic-looking plant that dominates the middle of the mural. ”But it looks like that they are all having a good time.

“This [panel] over here,” he went on, “[is] a little different. There are flames up here, there’s a dead cheetah, and then a bunch of dead people. And so I don’t really know what to make this one is trying to say, to tell you the truth, but it’s pretty harsh!” he said, laughing.

“Is there some sort of Egyptian god of death somewhere also?” Matt asked me.

“Anubis?”

“That’s what I was told.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been told all sorts of things.” It turns out that the figure of Anubis was actually not part of the art collection at DIA. The figure was only a temporary exterior marketing display promoting “The Treasures of the Pharaohs” exhibit, which was at the Denver Art Museum from July 2010 to January 2011. It was not evidence that ancient mystery cults associated with the Masons were unabashedly announcing their resurgence.

Matt asked about the other mural’s location, and I showed him where it was at the other end of the terminal. When we reached it, I introduced myself to a young couple, Lauren and Tom. I asked Lauren what she thought.

“I’ve heard about these [murals],” she said, “but ... they have never caught my eye ’cause I was always on a mission to get to a plane. But today because we were here and just casually doing a pick-up without any time constraint, [so] I wanted to take notice. They’re very strange; they are kind of confusing. They’re...odd. Mass destruction and children and weapons...It makes no sense to me.”

“This statue guy over here,” Tom jumped in, “I mean, over here he’s in charge, and over here he’s dead.”

“I’ve seen little excerpts online about this thing,” Lauren said, “and it’s very strange and I’ve just never really been able to understand it. So this is really the first time I’ve looked at it in any kind of detail.”

“What do you think of the conspiracy theories that surround these?” I asked Lauren.

“I’ve heard a lot of different conspiracies, you know, preparing for mass destruction, that kind of thing, going underground. I’ve heard about those, especially about this airport.”

“So, what do you think about those?”

She paused. “Sure, why not? We’ve got NORAD not far from here. It makes sense that...”

Tom chimed in. “We’re at a high elevation here. So there is more room to dig, if you want. What better place to come to hide someone?”

“Wouldn’t NORAD’s presence make the area a potential target or at least a little more dangerous?” I asked.

“If you go down far enough, it doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Plus this is an airport, so if you have to fly Air Force One here for protection....”

“Well,” Lauren cut in, “I’m sure that there are plenty of locations which have underground cities and things in them.”

“Do you think of it as being a refuge for the President?” I asked.

Tom: “It could be. I mean, why not?”

Lauren: “I know they shut NORAD down a few years ago from having visitors, so....There’s probably places all over the world that have underground cities.

Tom: “If you can afford it, you can come up here and live. If you can’t, you’re screwed.”

I asked them why the conspirators had put so many hints around the airport if they wanted the secret city to remain secret.

“You just stand around here and look, and people don’t even stop and notice this,” Tom replied. “It’s blatant. It’s in your face. You walk right by it.”

Lauren nodded in grim agreement. “It’s denial, I guess.”

My layover in Denver was not long enough for me to hunt down all of the art associated with the conspiracy theories, so when I returned to Atlanta I contacted Matt Chasansky, the Art Program Manager at the Denver International Airport. I interviewed Matt and Jenny Schiavone, a representative from the DIA media office, in a conference call.

In recent years, I have seen lots of large art installations in airports like San Francisco’s and Atlanta’s. Is it a trend, and if so how does DIA fit into that trend?

Matt: Well, the way we fit into that trend is that we started the trend. When they began planning for the airport in the early 1990s, they very quickly gravitated to artists in the process in a very profound way, I think. There had been public art integrated into buildings before, but the Denver Airport was the first one to do it on such a massive scale. I think we had twelve artists in the room with the design team at the very early stages of the design of the airport, and the idea was to have these projects that are equally a part of the architecture and the experience made there. And that was in the early ’90s. It was one of the last fully built out airports before 9/11, and since then there’s been [an] interesting discussion about civic spaces and what that means, and art ... has been a big part of that [discussion]. But a lot of the airports, including Denver, are city buildings, municipal buildings, so in Denver that triggers a percent for art work. On the one hand, like I said, there is a push towards art in civic spaces, and on the other hand it’s a mandatory thing to put art in airports because of how we have designed our public art program.²

How were artists or works selected for the airport?

Matt: It’s never one person selecting artwork. We form selection panels in order to have community representation and transparency and democracy in deciding how these things go. It’s really a community-wide effort and never an individual deciding what art should be, how public money should be spent on art. So, when the airport was built, a series of these community panels were assembled project by project in order to decide who are the best to work with and then once identified the airport contracted with the individual artists and began the design process.³

Are those records public?

Matt: Yeah.... All of the public records are open to scrutiny.

Jenny: I don’t know where those public records live, but since we are a government agency we are part of the [Colorado] Open Records [Act]. So it’s certainly something we could help you find.⁴

Why has Leo Tanguma’s work attracted the attention of so many conspiracy theorists?

Matt: They are striking, and Leo Tanguma is known for social and political subject matter [which he portrays] in a very up-front manner. Not the least of which [are] his choices of color and his format and the way he brings the style, the approach of the WPA murals, and the Mexican visual realists to contemporary narrative. So all that comes together. As far as not being subtle in any way, I think that’s quite intentional just because what Leo chose to do, what he proposed to be in ... his two pieces. In one mural the subject matter was overcoming war, violence, and aggression. In the other [it was] was overcoming the challenges of the environment. In both cases, he felt that you can’t pull your punches on subjects like that. You don’t talk about war with images that are anything less than powerful and emotional and striking. In order for him to complete his narrative, what he gave us was a mural, in the case of “The Children of the World Dream of Peace,” a smaller panel on one side that is that metaphor for war and is very direct because its subject matter is dealt with in a very passionate way and the solution equally so. [In] the larger panel we see the children of the world gathering ... the swords of war and destroy[ing] them in the symbolic end of violence, [which comes from] a biblical verse, beating the swords into plowshares.... On the one hand I get it; when people say that they are very unsubtle works to have in an airport, that’s very true. The reason is not because of the airport or the way they were selected. The reason is because you’re dealing with serious subject matter here. You can’t do anything short of being very serious about his approach.

What conspiracy theories have you heard about the airport?

Matt: I think it’s more “what conspiracy theories haven’t we heard about the airport?” Basically, you name it. You name a conspiracy theory and somehow we seem to be connected to it.

It’s one of the exciting parts about the story, the culture, that has built up around these; … we can fit into pretty much any story you want to tell because the assumptions and the misinterpretations have gotten wilder and wilder.... It’s a very plastic narrative that’s been created. But probably the most common is that there’s an underground city and that it is a part of a network of underground cities that the government or some sort of shadow international government or aliens are building, depending on your perspective...or Masons.... DIA just seemed to fit that story.

I met a passenger who said that if you ask an employee about the conspiracy theory, they won’t tell you anything. I asked, and she didn’t.

Matt [laughing]: I know there’s no airport policy about not talking about the conspiracy theory. I think that some people are so flabbergasted by the attention that people are paying to that that they don’t know what to say and choose not to say anything.

What are the positive and negative aspects of having conspiracy theories associated with your collection?

Matt: The positive is that everyone talks about it. It’s a culture of itself now, and there’s always more discussion, people all around the world paying attention to this art collection. And once you get past the irreconcilable conversation of “Is there or is there not going to be an end of the world in 2012 and will DIA be the capital of the new world order” ... you can actually talk about what art means and how the artist conveys the information and how artists when they create and put their whole abilities into telling a story, they hand it over to the people looking at the art. And they really do sacrifice a lot of their own personal endeavor to what people bring to these sculptures, to these pieces of artwork. So that super valuable conversation about what public art is and how we should properly spend this money and how things are selected is really good to have. And that’s the big positive.

I think the negative is [the difficulty of knowing] how to educate people because the power of a single person with a blog taking a picture of a corner of one of our murals and interpreting that—that has so much more resonance than anything official that we could do, that telling the other side of the story is a big challenge.

How have you tried to tell that story?

Jenny: ...We have tried to use social media to our benefit in that area. We have a very popular Facebook page and we do get a lot of commenters who are conspiracy theorists and people who are clearly only following us because … they want to see what the Illuminati is up to, what the aliens are up to underneath the airport, that sort of thing. It’s been fun for us to open up that dialogue between the public and the airport, where we’ll go and post a photo and a short story about a new art work, and it’s fun to see the comments roll in. You may see a few comments that are accusing us of starting another conspiracy or playing into a conspiracy theory, but then immediately following that you’ll see a conversation starting with other fans who are trying to explain what the artwork is. That really goes even beyond our art program.

Would you host a piece of artwork that addressed the conspiracy theory?

Matt: We don’t really dictate what artists should do. The artists come to our selection panels proposals based on the nature of the site.... We want things to be very site specific and serious....The approach on how to spend the public money on the art is ... a serious undertaking.

Who runs the airport operation on a daily basis? Have you been to the areas singled out by conspiracy theorists?

Jenny: We definitely have, and I would say Matt has more so than me. [W]e’re a city agency, we’re part of the city and county of Denver. And the employees who run the airport are all City and County of Denver employees. We have about 1,100 employees here who make up our operations team, our maintenance team. Matt and I, our marketing, PR, and finance divisions, those are all City employees. [There are] another 30,000+ people who work out here for the airlines, concessionaires, and other vendors who do business with the airport. But in terms of who runs the airport, it’s essentially the City and County of Denver Department of Aviation. I have been in many if not all of the places that the conspiracy theorists are fond of “calling out,” and I’ve never seen anything that was even remotely suspicious looking. There have been [people] who have asked me that [question], and I have given them that same answer. [T]hey of course think that I am brainwashed and I’m supposed to say that, but I can 100 percent honestly say that.

Matt: It’s interesting, I can’t give a tour in the airport without at least one person attaching themselves to the tour and starting to ask questions about that. [R]eally it’s fascinating that there’s nothing that you can say. There’s not [any] evidence you can provide, there are no assurances you can give that the conspiracy theory is wrong, because ... obviously it’s going to be a cover up or brainwashing or chips installed in brains.

Where do you folks plan to be in December, oh, around the 21st?

Matt: I’m going to have a stock of food in my office, but not for any particular reason.

Jenny: I think I will be on Christmas vacation, but who knows?

Notes

1. For a typical taste of DIA conspiracy theories, see the Vigilant Citizen website, which specializes in misinterpreting artwork. ↩

2. According to the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, since 1988, Denver’s Public Art Program directs that “1% of any capital improvement project over $1 million undertaken by the City be set aside for the inclusion of art in the design and construction of these projects”. ↩

3. The complete process of selecting artwork for capital improvement projects is outlined in exquisite detail in a brochure produced by the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, which can be downloaded in PDF format. For a full account of the process by which Tanguma’s murals and all the other works in the airport were selected, see pages 10–16. ↩

4. If you are in Denver and would like to examine the records relating to any of the art in the Denver International Airport, visit the Airport Public Record FAQ page. ↩

In the early days of the Republic, there was no guarantee that the American experiment would succeed, and many thought that the ballot box was especially vulnerable to undue influence. Even in the fairly egalitarian period following the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers thought that the American system of democracy was especially vulnerable to manipulation by outside interests, and Catholicism, with its hierarchical institutional structure, seemed to be a special threat. In 1816, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson: “I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits,” maintaining that they are

more numerous [in the United States] than everybody knows. Shall we not have more of them here, in as many shapes and disguises as ever a king of the gypsies … assumed? In the shape of printers, editors, writers, schoolmasters, &c? … If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth and in hell, it is the Company of Loyola. Our system, however, of religious liberty must afford them an asylum. But if they do not put the purity of our elections to a severe trial it will be a wonder. (Adams 219)

Jefferson agreed that the restoration of the Jesuits from one of their many suppressions was a “retrograde step from light” but insisted, “We shall have our follies without doubt. … But ours will be follies of enthusiasm, not bigotry, not of Jesuitism” (Jefferson 223).¹

By the 1830s, the warm, fuzzy afterglow of the American Revolution—which had brought many colonists together to fight with a common purpose—had faded, and nativist factionalism emerged as more Catholic immigrants came into the country. One of the most curious salvos in these early culture wars arrived in 1836, when an anti-Catholic New York periodical, the Protestant Vindicator, announced the upcoming publication of Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk, purportedly written by an escapee from a Montreal convent. The supposed author, Maria Monk, related a story of deception, torture, idolatry, rape, priest worship, and murder. Awful Disclosures was perhaps America’s most widely distributed book before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it was popularly republished throughout the nineteenth century. Awful Disclosures was part of a spate of similarly themed books in the period, including Rosamond (about the wife of a Cuban priest), and Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent.² Forty years later, Awful Disclosures was still being published, with the publishers’ hope that it would “inspire a wholesome and practical hatred of Popery and all that means to-day in our very midst” (iv).

In Awful Disclosures, young Maria finds herself commended into the care of the Catholics for her education due to the indifference of her widowed Protestant mother. She learns little at her convent school because the nuns are coarse and ignorant, though the nunneries manage to maintain an outwardly pious and holy appearance. Despite the neglect of the girls’ education (Maria says her studies never progressed beyond grade school), Maria decides to take vows and join the convent, believing that she will “retire from the temptations and trouble of this world into a state of holy seclusion, where, by prayer, self-mortification, and good deeds, [she will prepare] herself for heaven” (18). It’s hard to imagine how she comes to this conclusion, given the stories of abuse she hears while at Catholic school. For example, take the tale of a young squaw, La Belle Marie, who

had been seen going to confession at the house of the priest, who lived a little out of the village. La Belle Marie was afterwards missed, and her murdered body was found in the river. A knife was also found bearing the priest’s name. Great indignation was excited among the Indians, and the priest immediately absconded, and was never heard from. A note was found on his table addressed to him, telling him to fly, if he was guilty. (16)

A trope introduced early in the book that bodes poorly for every female character is “what happens in the confessional.” Of course, because the book was written in the 1830s, we don’t get descriptions of exactly what goes on there, which, of course, makes the goings-on all the more sinister because the mischief is limited only by the reader’s filthy imagination. For instance, Maria relates the testimony of a thirteen-year-old acquaintance: “She told me one day of the conduct of a priest with her at confession, at which I was astonished. It was of so criminal and shameful a nature I could hardly believe it. … She was partly persuaded by the priest to believe that he could not sin, because he was a priest, and that anything he did to her would sanctify her… ” (15). When this girl tells her mother what has happened, the mother “expressed no anger nor disapprobation; but only enjoined it upon her not to speak of it; and remarked to her, as priests were not like men, but holy, and sent to instruct and save us, whatever they did was right” (16). The corruption of the Church, Maria suggests, is known to every Catholic daughter and embraced by the faithful.

While in the convent, Maria becomes a witness to extravagant and perpetual horrors. Following her initiation ceremony, which involves a coffin and only the occasional novice’s death, she immediately becomes privy to the secrets of the Black Nunnery, including the women imprisoned in the basement and the fate of babies born in the convent (presumably conceived in the confessional): “Infants were sometimes born in the convent, but they were always baptized and immediately strangled…. ‘How happy,’ [the Superior] exclaimed, ‘are those who secure immortality to such little beings! Their souls would thank those who kill their bodies if they had it in their power’” (40). As a result, a surprisingly large number of corpses are tossed into an apparently bottomless pit in the convent’s basement.

The women are kept largely in the dark about the horrific goings-on elsewhere in the convent, but Maria learns a lot through the intervention of a nun who may or may not be crazy, Jane Ray. She is a defiant character who is largely unaffected by the discipline inflicted upon her and who seems to know a lot more than most of the other nuns. Much of the rest of the narrative is filled with stories of the bizarre abuses and punishments inflicted upon the nuns, including kissing the floor, kissing other nuns’ feet, kneeling on hard peas or walking with them in their shoes, eating meals with a rope around their necks, being fed only food that the nuns detest (like eel), drinking the water in which the Superior’s feet had been washed, brandings, whippings, mass gaggings, standing or sleeping in uncomfortable conditions for hours, and “the cap,” a leather hat that causes convulsive pain by unknown means.

Eventually, Maria learns that she is pregnant. To avoid the inevitable infanticide, she leaves this elaborate chamber of horrors by walking out quickly and fleeing to New York, where her book was presumably ultimately written. As her due date approaches, Maria fears that she may not survive the labor and feels compelled to share what she has witnessed. She openly acknowledges that the reader only has her word that any of this has happened:

If the interior of the Black Nunnery, whenever it shall be examined, is materially different from the following description, then I shall claim no confidence of my readers. If it resemble it, they will, I presume, place confidence in some of these declarations, on which I may never be corroborated by true and living witnesses.

I am sensitive that great changes may be made in the furniture of apartments; that new walls may be constructed, or old ones removed; and I have been credibly informed that masons have been employed in the nunnery since I left it. (53)

She nonetheless maintains that “ … there are some facts for which I can appeal to the knowledge of others” (130). For instance, when priests take “Holy Retreats” and disappear from the public eye for a while, they are actually recovering from venereal diseases at the Black Nunnery (131).³ This is as good as her evidence gets, unfortunately.

The publication of Monk’s memoirs was a sensation, but the account seems to have been entirely fabricated. An exchange of charges and counter-charges ensued in the press between those involved with the publication of Awful Disclosures, those familiar with Maria Monk’s personal history, representatives of the Catholic Church, and investigators who conducted inquiries into the matter. The Protestant Vindicator attempted to validate the story that Maria told by vouching for her character. It turned out, however, that the editors, especially minister J.J. Slocum, had either helped her fabricate or were otherwise intimately involved in the writing of Awful Disclosures.⁴

Six affidavits were published in the Montreal press in November 1835 that seemed to illuminate some of the background to the publication of Awful Disclosures, though in every single aspect they cast doubt on Monk’s reliability. Nonetheless, these were republished in the 1936 edition of Awful Disclosures as evidence of the veracity of Maria Monk’s testimony by virtue of “discrepancies” in the testimony. In this edition, Monk answers what she calls the three lines of attack by her critics: “1st, That I had never been in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery; 2d, That my character entitled me to no confidence; 3d that my book was copied, ‘word for word, and letter for letter,’ from an old European work, called ‘The Gates of Hell Opened’” (204). Monk’s publishers offered a $100 reward for any book resembling hers (206). Any resemblance in content, they maintained, between her account and any other exposé was due to both being factually true.⁵

In the first affidavit, justice of the peace and physician William Robertson of Montreal swore in an affidavit that three men had encountered Maria Monk by the Canal on 9 November 1834, and saw her acting in such a way that caused them to fear she was contemplating suicide. She claimed to be Robertson’s daughter, but as Mrs. Robertson turned them away when they came to his door, they took her to a watch-house, where she remained in custody. When Robertson himself went to assess the situation, “[A]s she could not give a satisfactory account of herself, I, as a Justice of the Peace, sent her to jail as a vagrant” (in Monk 213). After she was identified by her pastor and released, he heard no more about Monk for many months until he was approached to take her deposition about her experiences in the convent, but, he says, “I declined doing so, giving as reason, that, from my knowledge of her character, I considered her assertions upon oath were not entitled to more credit than her bare assertion, and that I did not believe either… ” (214). He does say that if she wants to level specific criminal charges, he would be willing to participate in the investigation. Given the seriousness of accusations, Robertson did try to ascertain where she had been during the years she claimed to be at the convent: “During the summer of 1832 she was at service in William Henry’s; the winters of 1832-3, she passed in this neighborhood, at St. Ours and St. Denis” (215).

Maria Monk’s mother, Isabella Mills, also gave sworn testimony about her daughter. In the testimony, taken down and prefaced by Robertson, she claimed that “designing men… have taken advantage of her daughter, to make scandalous accusations against the Priests and the Nuns in Montreal, and afterward to make her pass herself for a nun, who had left the Convent” (215). These men, including W.H. Hoyte of New York, with whom Maria and her child had been lodging at a local hotel, told Mills that Monk had escaped from the hotel, leaving the child behind. They claimed she had been found sick and destitute in New York and had wanted to make a confession about the Montreal Convent. Mills’s warning that they really should not trust her daughter is one for the ages:

I expected to get rid of their importunities, in relating the melancholy circumstances by which my daughter was frequently deranged in the head, and then told them, that when at the age of about seven years, she broke a slate pencil in her head; that since that time her mental faculties were deranged, and by times much more than at other times, but that she was far from being an idiot; that she could make the most ridiculous, but most plausible stories; and that as to the history that she had been in a nunnery, it was a fabrication, for she was never in a nunnery…. (217)

But Hoyte was not willing to accept that his informant was anything but absolutely trustworthy:

Next morning Mr. Hoyte returned, and was more pressing than in his former solicitations, and requested me to say that my daughter had been in the nunnery: that should I say so, it would be better than one hundred pounds to me; that I would be protected for life, and that I should leave Montreal[;] I answered, that thousands of pounds would not induce me to perjure myself; then he got saucy and abusive to the utmost; he said he came to Montreal to detect the infamy of the Priests and the Nuns; that he could not leave my daughter destitute in the wide world as I had done; afterward said, No! she is not your daughter, she is too sensible for that, and went away. (218–9)

Most of the action in Awful Disclosures happens without reference to external, historically verifiable events, with the exception of Montreal’s 1832 election riots and the arrival of cholera in the city. In every respect, her account of the convent’s behavior during the cholera epidemic fails to jibe with Montreal citizens’ accounts of the nuns’ actions. Many published accounts of the epidemic concur that the residents of the convent made their reputations as valuable members of the larger community for highly visible selfless acts during those terrible times, and it is because of this reputation that the community, including Protestants who openly reviled popery, rejected Monk’s claims.

Of course, little could be settled by vouching for the character of the nuns or author. Luckily, Monk made specific statements about the interior of the nunnery, and in the 1836 edition even provided a diagram of the interior of the convent.⁶ The Church opened the building for inspection. The most impressive investigation was carried out by Colonel W. L. Stone, the Presbyterian editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser. He visited Montreal with the most recent edition of Awful Disclosures, which included the diagram of the convent interior. The full narrative of his investigation was republished in the U.S. Gazette. He inspected every room, and the nuns opened every door and cabinet he asked to peek into. He inspected the walls and floors for evidence of recent construction. In every specific, Monk’s descriptions of the convent—some of which were very detailed, such as her escape through a gate that did not exist—were inaccurate. Based on his inspection Stone concluded, “[I]t may well be said that the girl must be an incorrigible blockhead, not to be able to remember somewhat of the interior of a house in which she pretends to have been a resident” (qtd. in Englund, 395). Most interesting, however, is what else Stone uncovered while in Montreal, hitting on the likely source of the story:

[I]t is a little remarkable that the only internal resemblance to the diagram she has given are said to be found in the recent Catholic Magdalen Asylum of Mrs. McDonnell, which was dissolved about a week before our visit, and in which the celebrated Jane Ray remained until the last. (qtd. in Englund 395)

In a deposition taken in July 1836, the matron of that institution—a reformatory for prostitutes—verified that Monk had been a resident between November 1834 and March 1835 and testified that Maria Monk had “for many years led the life of a stroller and a prostitute.”⁷ Monk seems to have been pregnant while at the asylum. I believe that it is a reasonable conclusion that during her confinement at a religious charity in New York, Monk came into contact with a group of anti-Catholics, told them what they wanted to hear, and collaborated with them on the book, inventing details from her own past experiences in Montreal.

An interesting stylistic note about Awful Disclosures is that the story shares numerous conventions with popular gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Frankenstein, and Melmoth the Wanderer.⁸ One can go through a checklist of the conventions of the gothic novel and find most of them in Awful Disclosures: Large isolated building with secret passageways and terror around every corner? Check. Imprisoned heroine? Check. Tyrannical or abusive male characters? Check. Overwrought emotion? Oh god, yes. Atmosphere of suspense? Check. Supernatural occurrences? Sort of—the nuns believe they live with a “true saint,” a holy daughter of a wealthy citizen who is restricted to one part of the convent and is said to bodily occupy heaven from time to time. Violent or macabre events? Even better—hilarious nun murder.

Let me explain.

In her fifth month as a nun, Maria witnesses the death of a young woman, who has taken the name Saint Frances, at the hands of her sisters. Maria helps carry the poor woman to the place of her “trial” though, she reports, “I had not a moment’s doubt that she considered her fate as sealed, and was already beyond the fear of death” (85). While the interrogation and evidence is being presented against the nun, the bishop seems impatient to see the sentence passed. When Saint Frances plainly states that she refuses to kill a baby, even if it means her own death, Maria reports:

“That is enough; finish her!” said the bishop.

Two nuns instantly fell upon the woman, and in obedience to directions given by the Superior, prepared to execute her sentence.

“She still maintained all the calmness and submission of a lamb. Some of those who took part in this transaction, I believe, were as unwilling as myself; but of other I can safely say, I believe they delighted in it. Their conduct certainly exhibited a most blood-thirsty spirit. But above all others present, and above all human fiends I ever saw, I think Saint Hypolite was the most diabolical; she engaged in the horrid task with all alacrity, and assumed from choice the most revolting parts to be performed. She seized a gag, forced it into the mouth of the poor nun, and when it was fixed between her extended jaws, so as to keep them open at their greatest possible distance, took hold of the straps fastened at each end of the stick, crossed them behind the helpless head of the victim, and drew them tight through the loop prepared as a fastening.

They then tie Saint Frances to a bed. “In an instant,” Maria reports

another bed [later referred to as a feather-bed] was thrown upon her. One of the priests, named Bonin, sprang like a fury first upon it, with all his force. He was speedily followed by the nuns, until there were as many upon the bed as could find room, and all did what they could, not only to smother, but to bruise her.

After about fifteen or twenty minutes of jumping on the bed, the nuns stop and have a good laugh. Later, she reports that St. Frances’ body

was taken down into the cellar and thrown unceremoniously into the hole which I have already described, covered with a great quantity of lime, and afterwards sprinkled with a liquid, of the properties and name of which I am ignorant. This liquid I have seen poured into the hoe from large bottles, after the necks were broken off; and have heard that it is used in France to prevent the effluvia rising from cemeteries. (87–90)

I bring up these gothic elements in this historical discussion of the conspiracy theory because a frequent feature of conspiracy theorists is an apparent inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, and this seems to have always been true. Awful Disclosures was marketed as a non-fictional account, but a cursory glance at the conventions reveals it to be strongly influenced by fiction. The mind-bending improbability of the story is surpassed perhaps only by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Michael Barkun identifies the tendency of conspiracy theorists to commit such fact-fiction reversals in his A Culture of Conspiracy; one should note that many modern conspiracy theories are built around transparently fictitious plots and stories. For instance, you can look to Edward Bulwer-Lytton (of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame), who wrote of subterranean beings who made use of limitless Vril energy in his 1871 The Coming Race.⁹ This story jumped into the occult literature and found its way into modern conspiracy literature in the form of free energy narratives and underground civilizations.

It is telling that Maria Monk escaped from Catholic French Canada. Nativists were quick to see Catholics menacing the United States from across both the northern and southern borders. Coordination and cooperation between the Catholics in these countries was thought to be inimical to the well-being of the nation. This strikes me as especially important to an understanding of nativist conspiracy theory—transnational entities, like international Judaism, Catholicism, Freemasonry, big oil, or Google, which do not have strictly defined geographical borders, have historically been the objects of suspicion because their members may have alternative loyalties that do not entirely or exclusively coincide with that of the nation. And the wicked Catholics were thought to especially prize Americans: “The priests and nuns used often to declare that all of all the heretics the children from the United States were the most difficult to be converted; it was thought a great triumph when one of them was brought over to the ‘true faith’” (182–3).

Monk’s story does not have a happy ending. In September 1837, a report appeared that Maria Monk had tried to enter another Catholic institution, this time an asylum in Philadelphia, under an assumed name as the basis of another abduction scheme (qtd. in Englund 418). She was discovered under the name Jane Howard. In 1849, she was arrested in New York for theft; she died, insane, in Blackwell’s Island Prison two months later.

Notes

1. It should be noted that in 1816 “enthusiasm” did not have the entirely positive connotation that it has today. ↩

2. Susan M. Griffin finds that 300,000 copies of Monk’s memoirs had been sold by 1860. “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.” PMLA 111.1 (1996): 93–107. 93. ↩

3. A fascinating discussion of how anti-Catholic authors grounded the devious character of the priest in his celibacy and rejection of “family” can be found in Marie Anne Pagliarini’s “The Pure Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture 9.1 (1999): 97–128. See also Sandra Frink’s “Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830–1860.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2 (2009), 237–264. ↩

4. On Slocum’s admission of his involvement, see Frink, 238. ↩

5. A book by this title does exist, but it appears to be a satire in verse of two rival British political publications early in the previous century. ↩

6. A great deal of collected published matter related to the Monk affair appeared in an edition of the complete works of the first bishop of Charleston, SC, John Englund, titled The Works of the Right Rev. John Englund, vol 5. 5 vols. Ed. Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds. Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1849. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations about the investigations into the convent and Monk’s “catchpenny libel” (347) come from this. ↩

7. A copy of this deposition may be found at: http://www.canadiana.org/view/50665/0002. ↩

8. It also shares a number of conventions with the escaped slave narrative, a popular form of abolitionist literature at the time. It is interesting to note that often the same people who are crusading against slavery during this period are the ones who are crusading against popery. See Griffin. ↩

9. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 31–32. ↩

References

Adams, John. 1856. “To Thomas Jefferson, 6 May 1816.” The Works of John Adams, volume 10. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 216–219.

“Maria Monk; Affidavit of Madame D.C. McDonnell, Matron of the Montreal Magdalen Asylum, Ste. Genevieve Street.” 1836. Republished on Early Canadiana Online. <http://www.canadiana.org/view/50665/0002>. 5 Feb 2012.

Barkun, Michael. 2003. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Englund, John. 1849. The Works of the Right Rev. John Englund, volume 5. Ed. Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds. Baltimore: John Murphy and Co.

Frink, Sandra. 2009. “Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830–1860.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2, 237–264.

Griffin, Susan M. 1996. “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.” PMLA 111.1: 93–107. 93.

Jefferson, Thomas. “To John Adams, 1 Aug 1816.” In Adams. 222–223.

Monk, Maria. 1836. Awful Disclosures, by Maria Monk, of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal. New York: Francis F. Ripley.

---. 1878. Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings. New York: D. M. Bennett.

Pagliarini, Marie Anne. 1999. “The Pure Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture 9.1: 97–128.

World Trade Center 7 occupies a special place in the folklore of the Truth movement. While for most of the American populace the building’s collapse is no more than a footnote to the tragedy of September 11th, an event which incurred no additional loss of human life, to a large segment of the Truth community it is exactly that marginal stature that arouses intense interest and stokes fears of a deliberate media silence.

In fact, I’m on my way to interview a man who perhaps as much as any other person has drawn public attention to what he sees as inconsistencies in the “official” story of September 11th and who has made a mission of keeping World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7), which collapsed late in the day of the attacks, in the public eye. He is architect Richard Gage, founder of the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth. He is in Atlanta at the behest of the local chapter of his organization and We Are Change Atlanta.

I am attending the “Engineering Change: A Blueprint for 9/11 Truth” event at the invitation of Camron Wiltshire, a local organizer and 9/11 activist who has put together a number of local 9/11-themed events over the last year. This one is being held at the First Iconium Baptist Church. When I enter the main congregation hall, men are leaning over the railing of the choir loft trying to nudge the lighting so that it converges at the lectern in front of the altar. An electric keyboard and an acoustic guitar, which I eye with a sense of foreboding, have been set up off to the side of the lectern.

When I meet Richard, he is enthusiastic and genial and eager to start the interview as soon as the setup for the upcoming presentations is complete. He has worked me into his schedule between the setup and a press conference. We take a seat in one of the pews. Camron has asked to film the interview, and he has sent over someone with an iPhone to record. (He later tells me that this is so that I would not take anything out of context in my article.)

Richard’s conversion to Trutherism is a sort of “Road to Damascus” story. About five years ago, he heard retired theologian and prolific Truther David Ray Griffin on his car radio. Griffin was giving a talk nearby in Oakland on the next night. According to Richard, Griffin was discussing “the explosive testimony heard and experienced by ... one hundred [first responders who] talked about sounds of explosions, hearing them being blasted around in the building before and at the onset of the destruction of the two Twin Towers.” It was the first time that he had heard any alternative theory regarding the collapses, and he seized on idea with enthusiasm. He began his own research and became convinced by what he found: that the investigation into 9/11 had been incomplete.

Richard says Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth grew out of his initial efforts to persuade his fellow workers at an architectural firm. “They kind of thought I was nuts, so I put this presentation together, this PowerPoint, and I showed them what I had learned a couple of months later. They all agreed with me. Every one of the fifteen architects that I worked for who came to the presentation agreed with me: ‘My god, you’re right! These buildings were destroyed with controlled demolition!’ Fourteen out of fifteen signed the petition. So we have the first fourteen architects and engineers for 9/11 truth—now we have 1,500. So almost everybody who looks at this information, architects and engineers and others, by a show of hands ends up agreeing with us about this evidence that they had not seen in the mainstream media.”

Richard’s group hopes to serve as a conduit for information about evidence that the media does not discuss. “Our goal, our mission,” he tells me, “is to awaken, enlighten, inform the American people, other architects and engineers about the destruction of these buildings.… We’re simply trying to inform the American people about this evidence, which is pretty indisputable, and get a new investigation.”

I ask what an unimpeachable investigation would look like. “We would want it to examine all of the evidence,” he says, “which the 9/11 commission and the NIST report did not do—the evidence we’ll be looking at today,” he says. “It would offer immunity to bring witnesses forward. It would be taken with subpoena power so that witnesses could be forced to testify, and testimony taken under oath. And using the scientific method relative to the evidence that we highlight in our DVD [9/11 Blueprint for Truth].”

I ask him about his best evidence for a controlled demolition.

He cites the apparent implosion of WTC 7 in six and a half seconds and at free-fall acceleration. While the engineers who studied the collapse and derived recommendations for enhanced building safety from their conclusions would dispute the accuracy of this statement as Richard presents it, it’s a crucial element of the modern Truth movement’s narrative. “Suddenly on the afternoon of September 11,” Richard tells me, “this building drops symmetrically, smoothly straight down into its own footprint, in the exact manner of a classic controlled demolition.… We are told that this is destruction by normal office fires, and if you look at the fires in that building in they were … small and scattered. I mean if the building is going to collapse due to fire, which has never happened to a skyscraper at all in the history of skyscrapers, it’s going to fall slowly, gradually, and over into the path of least resistance.”

And there is molten iron, he says. “These iron spheres were created during the event; they are in all of the World Trade Center dust.” In the same dust he claims there is chemical evidence of thermite/thermate in the dust as well. “We also find … nanothermite composite explosives, or pyrotechnics, found in all of the World Trade Center dust samples,” he says, referring to a paper by Niels Harrit’s team. “This is incredible evidence. There should not be high tech nanothermite composite explosives found in the World Trade Center dust, these small red-gray chips composed of nanoparticles of aluminum powder and iron oxide perfectly mixed.”

I ask about the larger Truth movement, and if there are any theories by other self-identified Truthers that he rejects out of hand?

“Oh, yeah,” he says earnestly. “There’s a whole bunch of people talking about crazy things that aren’t backed up by the scientific evidence or the scientific method that we try to apply scrupulously to the evidence that we’ve gathered. There are other theories that we don’t buy. You bet.”

“Such as?”

“Oh there’s somebody out there who’s talking about directed energy weapons; there’s somebody out there talking about mini nukes. We don’t have evidence that stands up to scrutiny for either of those theories.”

“Since you’ve been a Truth advocate, what have you gotten wrong?”

“I have made a number of mistakes that have been corrected by people who are very astute, some of which are opponents of ours promoting the official story. So we have been self-correcting all along, and at this point we’re very tightly tuned to and presenting only that which we know to be true.”

“Now, the essence of science is that you put forward a thesis that is falsifiable potentially….”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You could potentially prove something wrong, that this [thesis] is tentative until something else comes along, then I’ll have to substitute my assertion with this new one that better fits the evidence. What would it take to dissuade you of controlled demolition?”

“Someone would have to explain how a forty-seven story skyscraper with 40,000 tons of structural steel designed with a safety factor of five can lose all of its columnar support simultaneously across all eighty columns and fall at freefall losing 400 structural steel connections per second over the six and a half seconds it took to fall. Someone has to explain that. No one has. Someone would have to explain the production of several tons of molten iron. No one has. Someone would have to explain the production of small iron microspheres throughout the debris pile. Someone would have to explain the existence and documentation of in a peer reviewed paper of these nano-termite composite pyrotechnics or explosives. Someone would have to explain the near free-fall destruction of each of the Twin Towers in just a dozen seconds.”

I ask him if he would be open to the idea that the collapse of WTC 7 actually took longer than the six and a half seconds on which he is basing his hypothesis.

“We are told in the fourteen seconds prior to the overall collapse there was an internal collapse, and we don’t buy that, because if there was an internal cave-in of this building we would have seen massive deformation on the perimeter structure prior to its overall collapse which occurs in six and a half seconds.”

I point out that we did see a penthouse collapse long before the exterior collapse, which suggests that the building was collapsing internally and substantially weakened long before the exterior collapsed.

“Any … collapse, even underneath the east penthouse,” he insists, “would have caused massive deformation on the perimeter structure at that time. We didn’t see any of that.”

AE for 9/11 Truth announced that 1,500 building professionals (architects and engineers in all fields of engineering) have signed their petition for a new investigation. I point out that if these were all American engineers, they would represent collectively 9/100ths of 1 percent of the 1.6 million engineers in the country. How do you reach the other 99.91 percent of engineers?

“When we get them to sit in front of presentation like this, or a half hour presentation which we do in their offices, 90 percent of them end up agreeing with us about the evidence. So it’s simply a matter of getting them into the presentation (which takes some doing because many people don’t want to deal with this subject—there is a psychological resistance to hearing about any other alternative theory). So once we get them into a presentation most all of them end up agreeing with us.” He says he is in an architect’s or engineer’s office giving his presentation every other week in the Bay area, and they have thousands of people bringing the DVD to architecture and structural engineering firms and to the media, so this is working its way into the profession.

“We don’t have peer-reviewed journals in the architecture world that I’m aware of. We do of course have the peer-reviewed paper, the nano-thermite paper stands on its own. There are a number of papers put up on the Journal of 9/11 Studies …, which is a set of peer-reviewed papers, dozens and dozens of them.”

I ask him about the profile of him in Jonathan Kay’s Among the Truthers, which was published in the United States earlier in the week, and Richard displays object annoyance at the mention of Kay’s name. “So you have Jonathan Kay psychologically analyzing these Truthers,” he says, “but not taking a serious look at the evidence which they present. The evidence we’ve been talking about in this interview today was not presented or dealt with by him. That wasn’t his role, but that’s no excuse to call us names, like in my case, I’m having a middle-aged crisis and I’ve got nothing better to do with my time. So, yeah, it’s like he has to come up with some derogatory set of comments rather than say, ‘What are these 1,500 architects and engineers saying?’ He’s simply calling us conspiracy theorists, as if that’s going to hold any water.”

He pauses.

“We don’t have a conspiracy theory; we only have evidence that we are presenting to the American people.”

When we finish our interview, Richard prepares to host the press conference. The attending press is, as far as I can tell, entirely made up of members of the alternative media, who seem sympathetic to the speakers.

One of the characteristics of a self-sustaining conspiracy theory is an alternative set of facts that are exclusive to the conspiracist narrative. These claims of facts are repeated endlessly, and any explanation that does not accept these assertions as true is rejected out of hand. When I work my way up to a group of people talking at the front of the church, I find that I am talking to two of them, Bob Tuskin from BobTuskin.com and theintelhub.com, and Ed Sanders, from Gators 9/11 Truth out of Gainesville, Florida.¹

I ask them about what brought them so far from home? “Well, we wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Bob says. “People drive to all sorts of things—for example, for concerts, for sporting events, you know, for Disney World, whatever it may be—and we understand that people may want to [use] their free time and spend time with friends and family and recreation and whatnot, but something like this in our opinion should warrant our attention more so because right now, ten years later, almost, from 9/11/2001 we still have not received the legitimate, mainstream investigation to the largest crime in our lifetimes. In addition to that, there [are] very few people amongst us who are willing to stand up for this sort of truth because of a constant blackout by the mainstream media and a constant skewing of the facts. We are here because we know what the facts are. We know that Building Seven fell at free fall speed. We know that there is a consensus of architects and engineers as well as other likeminded individuals who are willing to hear out all of the evidence and not just look at the skewed perspective from the Zionist-controlled mainstream media.”

Ed shares a similar perspective. “It’s clear the 9/11 commission report was very incomplete and misleading bordering, and someone would make the accusation, on scientific fraud, so it’s time we bring the new investigation to the mainstream and I hope people like you are able to help us in doing so.”

I ask what a new investigation would look like.

Ed answers this question, “I think the best place to start would be with the family members. I think that they are the people who have been most affected by the tragedy. It’s obviously affecting the world as it is still ten years later with this trauma-based mind control.” Ed doesn’t think that the families themselves should do the investigations. Competent teams should be carrying out the investigation, and I would hope in a country like the United States that we’ll have people with the capacity and ability to do a proper criminal investigation, just like we watch on CSI Miami and so many other criminal programs on television. It’s just beyond me that we didn’t care to look at a shred of evidence with a critical eye. We just called the whole event on a boogy-man, Osama bin Laden, [who] is now supposedly dead, and for the most part didn’t care to actually look into what happened on that day.”

“Have you read 9/11 Commission reports and NIST reports and everything?” I ask, and Ed reports he listened to about 75 to 80 percent of the Commission Report audio book.

Ed points out that the Commission didn’t go into how the towers collapsed and he is worried that WTC 7 was not mentioned.²

Bob chimes in. “With any crime scene investigation,” Bob explains, “you start off with the crime scene. You start off with what took place. You take a look at the empirical evidence. You take a look at the data. We didn’t do that with 9/11, unfortunately. We didn’t take a look at the what before we figured out the how and the who. We have to start with the what. You’re a journalist,” he alleges, “you know there’s…” he searches for a word, “an order to things. And we didn’t start with the use of the scientific method nor did we look at what happened.”

Soon the press conference begins. The three main speakers (Richard Gage and fellow activists Manny Badillo and Luke Rudkowski) each in turn give synopses of their upcoming talks. It is at this point that we learn that Cynthia McKinney, the former member of Congress, will not be joining us, as she is en route to North Africa to investigate the conflict in Libya. The organizers thank a number of people who are involved with the conference, including First Iconium and its representatives who are attending and Amnesty International. They don’t explain in what capacity Amnesty is there, and if you did not follow up, you might easily leave with the impression that Amnesty International supports the Truth movement.

Perhaps the most effective speaker is Manny Badillo. He is outreach director of New York City Coalition for Accountability Now (NYCCan.org), which he describes as the “only family member, first responder, and survivor organization that wants the comprehensive and factual investigation that we all deserve.” Badillo’s uncle was killed in the attacks. Badillo is frustrated that his group’s petition to have a question placed on the New York ballot that asks, according to Badillo, “would you support a comprehensive and factual investigation into the event of September 11th—yes or no?” was shot down by the New York Supreme Court. He says that the court’s decision was “based on technicalities.”

In fact, in October of 2009, New York Supreme Court Justice Edward Lehner confirmed the findings of the city’s referee who had reviewed and rejected the NYCCAN petition. The referee found that the petition to create an investigative commission with subpoena power was inconsistent with the existing law with respect to financing the commission, staffing it, its jurisdiction, and compliance with New York transparency laws, the constitutional right to indictment by grand jury, and with respect to the petition’s desire to confer prosecutorial immunities upon committee members. The petition was so deeply flawed that its severability clause could not salvage any part of it. It was so badly composed that the City didn’t even pursue the original findings that NYCCAN had failed to secure enough legitimate signatures to be placed on the ballot.

“Over and over again,” Badillo says, “I see these specials they have on [TV about] 9/11 and it’s harrowing and it’s awful, because they never touch upon the facts of the case. It’s all so emotionally driven.” Of course, in almost the next breath, he denounces the City’s plans to build a memorial: “From what I understand, the vast majority of this museum-slash-memorial is going to be a museum, and how dare they further disrespect the family members? How dare that we still have to go through this?”

So much for condemning emotional appeals, I think.

Following the press conference, I lurk around the periphery of the church snapping photographs as Eva James sings her composition, “Sharing the Truth,” to her own guitar accompaniment. She dedicates it to Richard Gage. It’s a folk song in the “disaster” genre, with the refrain:

You see cascading projections of steel into dust.

It looked like demolition, but it’s never discussed.

So turn out the TV, and shut out the light

‘Cause it’s all just illusions, in front of my eyes.

Well, I’m not scared of dyin’

We’re all bound for heaven,

I’m just sharing the truth,

About nine-eleven.³

When I reach the other side of the church, I spot a pair of Alex Jones shirts and decide to interview their owners. I introduce myself to Linda Evans and her friend, Melanie. I ask Evans, who is sitting beside me, how she came to the 9/11 Truth movement: “Ever since I got into Ron Paul four years ago, I…it’s opened up a whole new world of information to me.” I have seen a lot of Ron Paul buttons and shirts at the event, so I ask her what the association is between Ron Paul and the 9/11 issue is. She replies instantly: “The truth.” When I follow up with a question about Ron Paul’s stance on 9/11 and whether he supports a new investigation, she says, “I’m not sure.” She pauses. “Yeah, I’m sure he would.”

Evans was disappointed that Cynthia McKinney was not there, but now she was really interested in Manny Badillo, even though she had never heard of him until today. I ask her if she has a theory about what happened on 9/11. She says that she does not think that it is a theory, but the truth. “I think it was [the] Israeli Mossad with a faction of our CIA and Dick Cheney in the bunker telling the Air Force to stand down. That’s what I think it is.”

I ask about her evidence for the Israeli-Mossad connection.

She considers her response for a second: “Well, there’s a lot of complications with that whole thing. I don’t even know where to start, there’s so much, and you don’t want to sound like an anti-Semite, but there is a faction of the Israelis, the Zionists, that run our country.”

“So you would say that our country is run by Zionists?”

“Yeah. Well, that and corporations.”

As I’m asking a follow-up question, the program begins and we sit back to listen.

After Gage begins, he asks a question that he asks at many of his events. How many of you believe the official story? Of the 180-ish people there, I am the only one in the entire place who raises my hand. Evans looks at me, clearly surprised. “And I was talking to you?” she asks, almost jokingly.⁴

Gage gives his talk and accompanying PowerPoint presentation, and goes deeper into many of the points we covered in our interview. The PowerPoint is quite epic, on the order of some seven hundred slides (the DVD version of the talk, Blueprint for Truth, which I picked up many months ago at a previous event, only has a six-hundred-slide version). The accompanying talk is quite polished and well delivered, and the crowd reacts well. Of the twenty-three who were on the fence about the official story of the events of 9/11, only three remain.

During a break, I head downstairs to the cafeteria, where the organizers have set up a number of tables to sell 9/11-themed shirts, DVDs, and stickers. There I see the representative of Amnesty International I had wondered about. Amnesty International has no opinion, their representative says, on the issue of 9/11. They are gathering signatures to stay an execution in Georgia, and they will take the signatures of anyone, Truthers included.

Next to the Amnesty International table is the most intriguing table, one piled high with shirts that read, “FORT SUMPTER WAS AN INSIDE JOB.” I am almost tempted to buy a t-shirt as it is clearly worth its weight in irony, but it is clear that the guy selling the shirts, Joseph Brown, does not mean it ironically. “I was at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, back in February, and we were having a good time, college students, up there, and a friend of mine was shouting this after a few beers, and I thought it was hilarious and brilliant and I had the idea for a shirt, and it’s actually kind of true, in that Lincoln maneuvered the South into firing the first shot to justify the war. Originally the reason was to save the Union, and that [meant] keeping, by force, the Southern states in the union. And so the whole thing at Fort Sumter kind of increased public opinion in the North.” Referring to a quote by Lincoln on the back of the shirt, he argues that Lincoln’s principle desire was to save the union, not free slaves.

Of course, I have to ask the big question: “Do you think that the South should have been allowed to secede?”

“Well, the U.S. was created in an act of secession. It was called the Declaration of Independence. I think that secession is a good thing.”

Back up in the assembly hall, we listen to local artist Purple Crown perform his song, “Born into War.” The song is replete with references to 9/11, vaccines and food additives.

Next we listen to a talk Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange.org. Rudkowski is described in the conference program as practicing “bold activist journalism,” and he occasionally appears on Russia Today and Alex Jones. If he’s a journalist, he seems to not break stories or land interviews. Instead, he makes his way into private events posing as a journalist and confronts people he identifies as members of the New World Order. Then he records them looking befuddled. For instance, in a video clip that he is previewing for the first time at this conference, Rudkowski confronts Henry Kissinger at some social event. Rudkowski badgers Kissinger with words of forgiveness for all his horrific crimes. Kissinger just turns his back on the kid. When Kissinger leaves, Rudkowski hops into a cab and follows Kissinger to what I take to be his residence in order to badger him some more. It is hard to see what substantive political point has been made, and Rudkowski strikes me as a sort of journalistic Crocodile Hunter, a sort of television clown jumping unsuspecting public figures and thoroughly annoying them. I feel deeply embarrassed for him.

After the talks, a large group about thirty attendees repaired to a restaurant and dance club around the corner to continue the monologue. I sit next to Daniel Bland, a veteran of the Iraq War.⁵

“Wait a second, why isn’t the burden of proof on the government?” Badillo asks.

“Yeah,” Bland agrees, “I thought [in] this country it was you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

“You’ve condemned the [government’s] engineers, haven’t you, that [they’re] in on it?”

“We’ve said that we need a new investigation,” Bland repeats. “You’re defending the people [who are responsible for] the official story, which anybody with any common sense knows cannot be true. It violates the basic, elementary laws of physics and gravity.”

“I condemn them,” Badillo puts in, “for not showing us how they came to that conclusion.”

I reply, “You know, you say, ‘The government has lied before,’ and that may be true. But the person who is saying, ‘The government is lying now,’ it’s their burden to show me that.”

“How do you induce free fall in buildings?” Badillo asks me.

“Even over and over in the talk, [Gage] said it’s not entirely free fall.”

Badillo waves his hand dismissively, scowls and then looks away.

We order beers.

“Let’s talk about the insurance fraud of 9/11 for a second,” Bland says. “The buildings were privatized six weeks before 9/11.”

“Post hoc fallacy,” I say. “Just because something happened after something else doesn’t mean that it is related.”

“You can’t cut me off. You got to hear me out, and then you respond.”

“Okay.”

“So, they were privatized, taken from public hands to private hands just six weeks before the attacks, and Larry Silverstein who owned Building 7 since the inception, but they gave him control of the towers in a ninety-nine-year lease just six weeks before. He put down $15 million of his own money. The first thing he does, he goes and doubles the insurance coverage that the Port Authority had ever carried on it. Have you ever bought a new house and then just doubled insurance?”

“I’ve done it on car insurance,” his dad says, “because my father advised me to get $100,000 instead of $50,000, which was the legal minimum.”

“Yeah, but that’s liability,” Bland says. “I’m talking about property insurance. Would you insure a property for double what it’s worth?” (Of course, this is a different claim from simply, “Silverstein doubled the amount of insurance the Port Authority took out,” but I don’t catch that at the time.) “Not only did Larry Silverstein double the insurance coverage… then he … quadruples it by suing the insurance companies by saying it was two, not one attack …. So they quadrupled it and what they do is they privatize the gain of that insurance payout to the criminals and then socialize the losses through the increased insurance premiums worldwide.” He turns to me. “It’s too easy to understand. How are you not seeing this? How can you be a professor at Georgia Tech without the common sense and rational skills to use some logic and reason? This is basic common sense.”

“I need evidence of intent.”

“Intent? … Follow the money. Who benefitted from the event?”

“That’s not how you go about doing history,” I object.

“That’s how court cases are proven,” he insists. “Motive. Opportunity.”

Our beers arrive.

Bland has a sip of his drink. “It was an inside job. I almost lost my life over these lies. What’s messed up is that I just got a job where I’m actually kind of, and I don’t know how I feel about it, I’m kind of helping the SEC with their agenda for One World Government by selling stuff to public companies to help them uniform their reporting. That’s all it is, to get everybody in the world on standardizations.”

An older gentleman comes over and asks me if I was the guy who was still not convinced at the end of Gage’s talk. I say yes, but I knew that would be the case when I decided I would attend.

“He works for SKEPTICAL INQUIRER,” Bland offers. “He writes for them and they’re known for, like, supporting the government’s stories. They act like they’re a conspiracy journal, but they always support the government.”

I have no idea if he’s read an issue. “You could convince me,” I say, “but nobody seems to take me seriously when I say it.” I outline what it would take to reconsider my opinion: convince the experts, the editors and reviewers of a single journal out of a short list of engineering journals to which my university subscribes.

“I have a lot of respect for Camron [the event organizer],” Bland says, and then he turns to his dad to explain: “Camron’s been emailing him very politely. I don’t have the patience that Camron has. I’d be a little more—I have issues with people for being so stupid. I have a low tolerance for ignorance.”

I laugh, but he has creeped me out. Camron had asked to share my emails to him with his friends, and though he had asked for it, I had not given Camron permission to share them. He clearly did it anyway, and he never told me that he had.

So we talk about squibs—little puffs of debris bursting out from the Twin Towers several floors beneath the pancaking collapse, which are shown over and over in slow motion in endless 9/11 Truther videos. These were of course due to the compression of the air in the towers as the collapse progressed. “They were focused, and all the way down,” Bland says. “Focused energy blowing out. How can you not get this? How in the world are you a college professor? I think that’s what’s wrong with America, having teachers that can’t process basic logical reasoning. They just have no common sense.”

Since we were talking about academics, I asked them why more engineering professors didn’t step forward to challenge the mainstream narrative. After all, I argued, the ones with tenure are safe to say what pretty much what they like.

“Like what happened to Steven Jones? Steven Jones had tenure.” (Jones was a physicist at BYU who was placed on paid leave when, in 2006, he took up the cause of 9/11 Truth. Before the university had a chance to review his research on Truth, Jones retired with the title of Emeritus Professor, in his words, “so that I can spend more time speaking and conducting research of my own choosing.” In fact, according to Jones, “The University’s been great. I feel like they’ve been fair with me in this settlement we’ve reached in this retirement. I feel pretty chipper.”)⁶

“[Jones] retired,” I said, “and this kind of proves my point. He was involved in one of the biggest scientific scandals of the 1980s, the ‘cold fusion’ debacle.”

“What does that have to do with 9/11?” Bland challenges me.

“Because it was such a scandal and he kept his job. It’s hard to get rid of somebody who has tenure.”

We talk about some other conspiracy theories for a while.

“So, do you think there is an Illuminati?” I ask Bland.

“Well, there’s secret societies. The New World Order is not a conspiracy theory. Do you ever listen to world leaders? Because that’s their term, not mine.”

“It was used after the Soviet Union collapsed and there was a new world order.”

“It was used back in the late 1800s, late 1900s, and it went away for a long time. And then Bush kind of brought it back in—do you know the more recent reference to Bush?”

“Bush the Elder, right.”

“Do you know anything more recent than [when Bush used the phrase] in the 1990s?” he asks me, shouting over the sound of a techno version of the X-Files theme. “Well, then [George] H.W. [Bush] used it exactly eleven years before 9/11. September 11, 1990.” He raises his eyebrows, and I understand a point has been made.

“Okay, but you’ve just lapsed into numerology.”

“Yeah,” he says flatly.

“OK,” I say, going with it.

“I mean there’s a sun cycle that equals eleven years. These people, the Illuminati were, you know, sun worshipers. The Vatican’s laid out in a sun dial, right? There’s an obelisk…”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

“You don’t know? You’ve never really seen Vatican square?”

“I’ve been there. I just didn’t know it was a sun dial.”

At this point we had been sitting there for forty minutes. I hand out my business card to the people at the table. Bland looks at it incredulously. “You got a PhD and you still can’t get this stuff? What did you get your PhD in?”

“I’m an English teacher. What did you get your PhD in?” We laugh.

“I don’t have one, but I’m smart enough to figure this one. I think you got brainwashed with all that education, obviously. You lack the ability to have common sense, logic and reason.”

“You’re smart,” Bland’s father reassures me. “I can tell you are. But there’s something wrong with you.”

“He’s writing for a skeptic magazine that always defends the government.” Bland turns to me. “You say you’re a conspiracy magazine but you try to support … the establishment story. You do. I’ve looked into you and that’s how the organization works. You are a puppy lap dog for the establishment story. That is the history and the record of what you associate yourself with, Bob.”

“So, what are my motives?” I’m dying to hear them.

“I think you’re being paid by the enemy. Your job is to be the lapdog of the official story.”

“I’m not getting paid for the story.”

“Why are you doin’ it?”

“This is what I do.”

Eddie Murphy’s 1985 “Party All the Time” comes over the speakers, and we decide to head downstairs to the dance club portion of the establishment, where more conference attendees have gone. I see Gage in a corner booth in the restaurant as we search for the steps. He waves me over and asks if there’s anything else I’d like to talk to him about. I don’t want to interrupt his conversation by yelling across his table, so we agree to talk to one another downstairs in a little bit.

Downstairs in the dance club, DJ Red is spinning tunes. Bland and I take turns buying each other beers.

Linda Evans approaches me. “So, you are coming around a little bit?” she asks.

“No, not at all.”

“Well, when you go to a FEMA camp, think about me” she laughs.

Bland disagrees with her about my fate: “No, he’s not…He writes for a magazine that has a history of supporting the establishment version. It’s called SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, giving the perception that they’re skeptical but they always support the establishment story in their writing.” Clearly I am witnessing the birth of a meme about SKEPTICAL INQUIRER.

“Most all of the magazines and publications are all owned by the Zionists,” Evans says.

(When I asked SKEPTICAL INQUIRER editor Barry Karr if the magazine is owned by Zionists, he replied, “No, but in the interest of full disclosure, we do have subscribers in Israel.”)

“You know what, I have a theory,” Evans continues, “and I read it in a couple of places, so maybe it put the buzz in my head—the Palestinians are actually the true relatives of Jesus.”

“I think so too,” Bland agrees. “The Khazars in [the country of] Georgia are not Jewish, but they took on the Jewish identity, and it’s well documented…”

Evans cuts him off. “It was Rothschild … that started all that.”

By this time, it is pretty well-known that there is a card-carrying skeptic in the house, and people are lining up to have a crack at converting me. “What brought you to the conference?” I ask a guy who introduces himself to me at the bar as Mike.

“Skepticism!” he declares.

“Skepticism of…?”

“You name it. For one, Building 7. Now, my hometown is Atlantic City. When I got out of high school that’s when the referendum allowing casinos just passed. I saw a bunch of old hotels demolished. The majority of these old hotels were brought down [with demolition charges]. The first time that I saw Building 7 collapse…” He waves his hand and shakes his head.

Mike is skeptical of 9/11 in general. “It was kind of gradual for me. When I first heard about it, I kind of thought, ‘Yeah, okay, al-Qaeda, and the hijackers, those sons-of-bitches.’ But as I started thinking about it more and more … You know, if you watch CSI or Law and Order—any crime show—the police go in there, cordon off the area, so that the photographers, the criminologists, you know, whatever, they can all go in there and do their little measurements and document the crime scene. When I learned that so much material from the 9/11 from the Twin Towers and Building 7 was just hauled off and, you know, immediately melted down, I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, I would think that any rational person would say, wait [and examine the steel].’”

Mike then elaborates on why he believes that the collapse of the towers is precluded by skyscraper building conventions, that the lighter material is found at the top. He repeats an analogy that was made at the conference of a Volkswagon Beetle being dropped on and crushing a tractor-trailer (a hideous analogy). I explain that the top fifteen floors only needed to punch through a single floor—and that the buildings were designed to handle static loads, not dynamic ones, and then the combined mass of those now sixteen collapsing floors had to punch through one floor, and that as the mass of the collapsing material increased with each floor failure, the load gathered momentum and decreased the time that each subsequent floor could offer resistance, thereby making a total, progressive, accelerating collapse inevitable.

“I don’t necessarily agree with that, because I still believe that you have lighter structures at the top and thinker stronger structures at the bottom. What you just said, I … I think it could hold some weight, perhaps, for the first … for the two Twin Towers. I’ll give you that…”

“Yay!” Over the course of the night, very little victories have become increasingly important to me.

“But for Building 7, that variable was not there, because you did not have that much trauma to Building 7. You just have a few relatively minor fires. Many tall structures have caught fire, and they did not ‘just collapse.’ And not only that they did not collapse, but they did not collapse onto themselves.”

I start explaining about how those other fires were fought, how the fire in WTC 7 was largely unchecked because the water mains had been destroyed, and that the building had a peculiar design as it was built above and around a preexisting electrical substation, but Daniel Bland comes over:

“You want a debate?”

“No, I just want to interview people.”

“We’ll turn off the music, and I’ll debate you.”

“No, thanks.”

I ask Mike what would convince him that he was wrong, and he tosses back a vicious catch-22: that because he is not an expert, he can not say what piece of evidence would convince him of the NIST conclusions.

Speaking of Catch-22, nearby, Linda Evans is in a conversation with Joe Heller, a local printer. “I have an issue with that,” Heller says, pointing at Evans’s Alex Jones Infowars t-shirt that says, “9/11 was an inside job,” which apparently set off their conversation. “To me, Alex Jones is the Rush Limbaugh of our movement because this is a dangerous statement, because he uses it so often in front of people who don’t have clue about what the facts are.” I nod in agreement, but probably for different reasons. “I’ve been involved with 9/11 Truth since about 2004 or 2003, and I believe that 9/11 was an inside job because I’ve done the research, and that’s where it points. But if you’re out in the public and you’re trying to promote the cause of truth, when you are saying 9/11 was an inside job, you’re saying, ‘We know who did this.’ That’s what you are saying.”

“Not necessarily,” says Evans.

“No, but that’s what people hear when you don’t know the facts…. What I mean is that when an outsider hears that 9/11 was an inside job, they turn you off because you’re a kook.”

A guy who identifies himself as “Mark from doulovejesus.org” (as of my writing, the ISP says the account has been suspended), introduces himself to the group. “A couple of months ago,” he says, “I guess it was back in February during the Bartow County GOP meeting, I handed out copies of a document that simply said that the government has an obligation to produce the body of evidence—that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and that we were going to be given proof. I’m calling their bluff. … The biggest problem with this document was a bottom paragraph, where sub silento [sic] is the lawful premise that a clear disclosure that does not have a rebuttal tacitly amounts to an agreement. [In fact, the legal concept of sub silentio is more complicated than that.] If you do not disclose that body of evidence within lawful delivery, by default you are admitting that you have no body of evidence, that the war on terror is being propagated against the American people and feigned enemy foreign by the enemy domestic.”

“Okay,” I say.

“This document,” he continues, “was lawfully delivered on the sixth of April and it’s been a month and a half since then. Now a day or after the document was lawfully delivered to [Congressman] Phil Gangrey’s office, one of his aides called me—we spent like fifteen minutes on the phone—and he kept saying, ‘You have the burden of proof blah blah blah blah blah.’ No. You, the federal government, have a moral and lawful obligation to answer the question the Taliban set before you: ‘Where is the proof that bin Laden did it?’”

We talk for a bit, and I turn the discussion to the recently announced death of Osama bin Laden. “Let me pretend that I’m ‘the Man,’” I say. “We have multiple lines of evidence that bin Laden was killed. Take the Saudis, they didn’t want the body….”

“They were the puppets of the Zionists,” Mark interrupts.

“The Saudis are?”

“Well,” he explains, “a number of mid-east governments. There’s only a handful of countries left that do not have a private central bank controlled by the Rothschilds. Iran and Libya are on the very short list of countries left. Iraq and Afghanistan….”

“But Libya doesn’t have an economy,” I object.

“Well, I tell ya it’s only one part of the puzzle. The fact that these people have defied the plutocracy and said that ‘We don’t want you issuing our currency and thus controlling our political system.’ So the thing I try to explain to people is that we don’t know all the details, but we do know that the official story is a lie.”

“So, like the fact that al-Qaeda condemned the killing [of bin Laden]? That’s independent confirmation, right?”

“Oh?” he says like he’s talking to a third grader, “al CIAida?”

“You’re making quite an assumption there.”

“Really?” he cocks his head.

Joe Heller jumps in. “Isn’t it true that bin Laden was financed by the CIA in the 1980s?”

“And our political alliances have shifted since the ‘80s. I mean, are we loyal to them? Would we stick with them if our interests didn’t coincide [with theirs]?”

“I would say that people who’ve worked for the CIA still work for the CIA,” Heller says.

Mark speaks back up, “Remember the line from 1984: ‘We were always at war with Eastasia.’ They lie to us with impunity and they get evasive if you sign this tax form and you are off by 53 cents, well,” his voice grows louder and angrier, “you’re going to Club Fed! But they lie to us and it’s like, ‘What’s your point? It’s business as usual!”

“I don’t know how to answer that,” I admit.

“The answer is…”

I laugh. “You don’t give me my answer, though!”

“Let me summarize morality,” he proposes. “We all need to be accountable to each other,” he says, “knowing—knowing—that we will be held accountable to the Creator himself.”

I’m working my way around the circle of people who have gathered to talk about their theories, but people jump in.

Byron Stiles, who is with We Are Change [he is thanked in the conference program], says, for a change, “I partially agree with you, that [9/11] was an outside job,” but then he completes the thought: “but I don’t believe it was who they say it was.”

“So who was it?”

“Israel.”

“What evidence do you have that it was Israel?”

Linda Evans interrupts, “Because, like I told you, it was the Israeli Mossad and our CIA.”

“Correct,” Stiles agrees.

“Cheney’s in the bunker, standing down the Air Force.”

“And Bush is reading a book about goats!” chimes in Melanie, Evans’s friend, who has joined her at the bar.

“I believe the Israeli Mossad was involved.”

“Why the Mossad?”

“Because Israelis were actually arrested that day with bombs in vans.”

“Where?”

“Outside the George Washington Bridge in a plot to actually blow that bridge up, I assume. They were arrested on terrorism charges with bombs in their vans. I don’t know if you’ve heard this before.” I say that I had heard the story. “Michael Chertoff, he’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security, is a dual citizen of Israel. He’s also an intense Zionist.”

“So is [former congressman, Obama Chief of Staff, and current Chicago Mayor] Rahm Emanuel,” Evans injects. “Henry Kissinger! Dual citizen!”

“Michael Chertoff’s mother was a founding member of the Mossad, whose motto is ‘By way of deception we will make war,’ which means they will stage false flag attacks to create a war. Same thing with Rahm Emanuel. His family was also deeply involved in the Mossad. So I believe the Mossad was involved with this.”⁷

Evans also says that the 2008 Mumbai hotel attacks were also linked to the Mossad.

Daniel Bland Sr. comes over and asks everyone if I have been converted yet. I haven’t.

It’s late, and I take my leave of the conference goers. I run into Gage on my way out. We talk briefly about seismic data gathered during the collapse, and he assures me that nanothermite pyrotechnics would not leave a seismic signature. Nonetheless, it seems to me that a major element of the anecdotal data that Truthers use to support their hypothesis is reports of explosions, which surely would have been detected by seismographs. But Gage is satisfied and I don’t raise that point. I’m exhausted.

***

On the morning of Monday, May 23rd, two days after the Truth event, I am checking my university email, where I find a message from a former student. The 9/11 Truthers are on campus. I think a visit to my place of work might make a nice coda to the story I’m writing, so I hop into a cab and catch up with them inside the Nanomaterials Building. About half dozen of the conference organizers, including Gage, Badillo, and Camron, are in the office of the building administrator, telling him, an accountant, and a student worker about nanothermite. I linger behind to talk to the office workers, who do not wish to be identified, as the party goes outside to see Gage off to the airport. The office staff are upset that people with cameras have come into their office while they are working.

I catch up with the group outside and we talk about 9/11 again. They break out the video recorders, which is par for the course, and we discuss the evidence at some length for maybe twenty minutes.

A few days later, I receive an email from a stranger alerting me to a post that Daniel Bland has placed on another stranger’s Facebook wall. Bland has said that he intends to put the video of our discussion at Georgia Tech on YouTube, which concerned me only because it was taped at my place of work and because they did not say they were filming for release (thought I know I have no expectation of privacy when I’m out and about on campus). In a private email to Bland, I ask him to refrain from posting anything, and remind him that I always made it clear that I was recording for publication. He reposted my email on this person’s wall with his response:

Bob- I told you from day one that I was not as nice and patient as Camron because I came within 15 meters of losing my own life over these evil lies. There are multiple videos of our debate and everyone agreed that we need to put it on YouTube along with text discussing your conspiracy classes at Georgia Tech and your affiliation with Skeptical Inquirer. If you wish to avoid public humiliation, you better start writing the truth about what actually happened on September 11, 2001 ASAP. We’ll give you a little time to think it over. Ignoring the obvious lies of 9/-- is no longer an option as more innocent people around the world are continuing to be murdered on a daily basis over these lies and you have clearly chosen to be a part of the continued cover-up of treason and mass murder. Unfortunately for you, you chose to get involved with the wrong 9/-- Truther!

Bland later apologized for this public attempt to blackmail me, but a few days later, he posted on my website:

Just wait until one of us publishes our video taped debate on the Georgia Tech Campus. That will be one for the History Books. I just hope that when all this is said and done that you don’t spend the rest of your life behind bars for criminal cover-up of pre-meditated mass murder. 

He also threatened to show up at the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program to “hand out info to students at Ga Tech exposing him for who he really is,” so I take his apology for all it is worth.

Notes

1. This interview was in fact filmed by Tuskin, and later released on his YouTube channel. The entire interview may be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOZNkVjnSiQ. ↑
2. Of course, 9/11 Commission Report was not a technical study, and the limitations of its mandate are mentioned up front in the document itself. ↑
3. Video of the performance can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfWs3laGSRA. ↑
4. AE for 9/11 Truth keeps a tally of this poll for many of the events at which Gage presents. It may be found at: http://www2.ae911truth.org/speakings.php#speakpast. ↑
5. Bland shared his experiences early in the program. A video of his talk can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahODXzmJjxQ. ↑
6. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/650200587/BYU-professor-in-dispute-over-911-will-retire.html ↑
7. When I Googled the supposed Mossad motto, the top hit is the white supremacist website Stormfront.org, so it is perhaps no surprise that the reference the motto makes (to Psalms 24:6) in the King James Bible actually reads: “For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war and in multitude of counsellers safety.” I found no independent confirmation of this version of the motto outside of the apparent origin of the spurious version, Victor Ostrovsky’s 1991 supposed tell-all, By Way of Deception. Michael Chertoff was born in New Jersey to a rabbi and a stewardess for El Al. I see no evidence that Chertoff is an Israeli citizen, even if his mother’s Israeli citizenship makes him eligible. I see nothing that suggests his mother was a founding member of the Mossad. The original report that a van full of explosives was retracted eight minutes later by the outfit that first reported it. Rahm Emanuel’s father was a member of the Irgun, a paramilitary group with a record of violence, not the Mossad. ↑

On a rainy Friday morning in early February, a line had already formed outside of the Center Stage Atlanta event hall a half hour before the TruthCon began. “They’re not opening until 11:00,” a large woman with a British accent told me. We pressed in close to the building to get out of the cold drizzle.

The TruthCon is the brainchild of Don Pickett, a local event promoter who usually produces music concerts. The TruthCon is a bit of a departure for Don, one that is a special labor of love. He organized the conference because he perceived a gap between the words and actions of the liberty patriots and the Truth movement. “All the time, they’re saying, ‘We need to do something, we need to do something,’” he said in an interview. “So I did this, and I put my whole heart into it.” He rented the 1100-seat venue for a two-day conference, followed on Super Bowl Sunday by a seminar off-site by David Wilcock, a researcher who argues that the fantastic powers of deities and heroes in the world’s ancient mythologies should be interpreted literally as evidence of lost alien technology.

On the first day of the conference, researcher David Wilcock lectured on the "2012 Enigma." Photo credit: Gia Film Productions/TruthCon

What makes the TruthCon especially interesting to the skeptic is the sheer variety of extraordinary claims covered at the conference. This diversity was reflected in the list of speakers, which included UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, former libertarian presidential candidate and skydiving instructor Michael Badnarik, plastic surgeon and “recognized authority on energy healing” Susan Kolb, “resonant energy” worker Edd Edwards, Steamshovel Press publisher Kenn Thomas, and Eric Jon Phelps, who promised to reveal the threat that the Jesuits continue to pose to the world as they seek to bring about the “Antichrist/Man-Beast.” Don said that he had hoped for a stronger showing from the 9/11 Truth movement, but that his contacts told him they thought appearing alongside UFOlogists would discredit the movement. “That’s ridiculous,” he laughed. “Let the speakers speak for themselves, then decide.”

2004 Libertarian Party candidate for president Michael J. Badnarik "sings the truth" about the tenets of communism Already operating in the United States. Photo credit: Gia Film Productions/TruthCon

When the doors opened, visitors entered a spacious, low-ceilinged lobby that had been converted into a display space for vendors. Display tables lined the long wall that curved around the outside of the auditorium. A full bar and refreshments were available, and throughout the conference, the lobby doubled as a social space where speakers and attendees could mingle. The crowd was fairly exclusive, the tickets being prohibitively expensive for gawkers and the casually curious. On the TruthCon website, you could either purchase tickets using traditional online payment methods, like credit cards, or pay in silver coins. I asked Don about the silver coins, since the belief that economic hardship is deliberately engineered through the manipulation of the dollar is widespread in conspiracist thought, while precious metals are perceived as being immune to market fluctuations. “Oh, I just wanted people to think about the value of the dollar, which is basically based on a Ponzi scheme,” he said. “Silver has value. Real value.” Nobody actually paid in silver, he reported.

An enthusiastic crowd arrives for the first day of TruthCon, a three-day event in Atlanta devoted to discussing "alternative knowledge." Photo credit: Gia Film Productions/TruthCon

Former libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik spoke first and at some length. For the last several years, Badnarik has toured the country delivering his eight-hour course on the U.S. Constitution, which he delivered in four-hour segments on Friday and Saturday. Many of the people who arrived at the conference early had traveled great distances specifically to see Badnarik. One woman had driven from Maryland with her boyfriend just to see Badnarik’s appearance in Atlanta. “He hasn’t been touring for a while,” she explained. “He had a heart attack and has been off the road. This is the first time he’s been back, so we had to see him.”

While the talk was ostensibly a Constitution class, it was not until about the third hour that he even referred directly to a single article of the Constitution—first he prepped the crowd with his understanding of the basis of liberty, the lens through which the class then read the Constitution. Badnarik’s argument was that government’s only duty is to preserve citizens’ life, liberty and property. He said that he could boil the Constitution down to seven words: “Don’t hurt me. Don’t take my stuff.” Much of the rest of the course was devoted to elaboration on these principles (which he believes are prior to and supersede the Constitution), and occasionally daring his hypothetical enemies to just try and take the unregistered, concealed handgun holstered under his jacket.

Badnarik’s fellow travelers surrounded him in the lobby after he completed his class on the second day. As I waited for a chance to interview the man himself, I struck up a conversation two enthusiastic supporters, Gary and Jeff. Jeff, who is a member of the Georgia Militia, gestured at the vendors and speakers: “It’s kind of unique when you have someone [Badnarik] talking about the Constitution with these other guys talking about other aspects. Because what it boils down to is the lack of truth and transparency in our government, and basically that’s what this whole thing is about.”

“I think it’s a good foundation to start with, learning your constitutional rights” Gary chimed in. “Plus a lot of the country does not know how to protect itself, and that’s part of the problem. And that can transcend into the other part of this conference, which is about our E.T. presence and getting the truth from our government.”

Both were adamant about the extraterrestrial presence. “It’s absolutely, one hundred percent real,” Jeff insisted. “I personally know people that are involved. I mean, they’re not public people—you’re not going to get them to come out in public with you—but yes, it’s absolutely true.”

“Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there,” Gary finished.

As the conference overlapped with the global 10:23 protest against homeopathy, I asked the small-government advocates about how we should safeguard ourselves from largely unregulated homeopathic products: “Get rid of the FDA,” Gary said. “If we could control the FDA, we wouldn’t have these sorts of problems. They’re trying to kill everything out there that they call ‘quack.’ I mean, why should they allow us to heal ourselves when they can make money off of healing us and telling us how they heal us?” Gary knew a thing or two about cures for cancer, including high doses of vitamin C. “You can’t go out and buy apricot kernels in this country to combat cancer,” he complained. (Apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which can break down into hydrogen cyanide. Nonetheless, in the 1970s members of the John Birch Society latched onto the FDA’s ban on amygdalin as evidence of government encroachment on personal freedoms) (“Leatrile” 1979).

By the time I neared the front of the line, the next presenter, a Georgia-based energy healer named Edd Edwards, was giving his talk in the theater. Edd and I had met a few weeks earlier at a pre-TruthCon meetup, where he told us that he could tug and push on people by manipulating gravity. When he showed us, the people around me swayed at his suggestion, and I knew exactly which audience members I would have been able to hypnotize. I had hoped to see his demonstration of a gravity wave at TruthCon, which he told me he planned to send through the audience. After he saw the theater, however, he decided that the amphitheater seating was too steep for him to demonstrate the wave safely, so he planned to invite people down to the floor to experience his powers.

When I spoke to Badnarik, I asked him what he thought about the beliefs of the other conference goers. “I don’t care,” he said. “If you’re alive and breathing, I want to teach you about liberty.” He paused. “Now, I didn’t listen to any of the other speakers. I know that a lot of people didn’t want to come because they had some people talking about UFOs, and they thought, ‘Oh, my god, that’s a little crazy.’ I mean, a lot of people think I’m crazy saying that most of what the government does is unconstitutional. So, you know, everyone’s got their own flavor of crazy.”

“Now, there’s a guy in [the theater] right now,” I prompted, “who told me that he could alter fields of gravity. As somebody who skydives, would you trust him to….” I didn’t even get to finish.

“No!” he said firmly. “To me, if it ain’t science, it ain’t.”

Back at the vendors’ tables, I chatted with UFOlogist Stanton Friedman. I asked him what he thought about the variety of speakers. “Well, I’m confused by it,” he admitted. “I don’t think they really know what they are doing because there is such a variety of stuff here. How do you promote strawberries and watermelons?” he laughs. “You don’t mix them in the same bowl.” Friedman was, however, looking forward to Michael Tellinger’s talk, “Adam’s Calendar, the 75,000-Year Old Civilization.”

I asked Friedman about remote viewing as a method of UFO research, a position advocated on Friday night by speaker Robert Dean. “Well, I have very mixed feelings about that,” he replied. “I am convinced that there are some strange areas of the world that we don’t have a good handle on. […] And I’m convinced that indeed it’s not like 2 and 2 is four always-forever-no-exceptions. The paranormal doesn’t work that way. Neither does baseball. A guy gets paid a lot of money for getting a hit a third of the time, and do you say he’s a lousy hitter because two-thirds of the time he doesn’t get a hit? You need a sense of perspective about things.”

I asked Friedman about his take on the 9/11 Truth movement, who were invited to be a part of the event but declined. “I’ve read a certain amount of stuff about 9/11, and some of it is intriguing,” he replied. “The way those buildings came down makes you think that something else was going on there, because it didn’t explode outward, but people want me to jump on their bandwagon. Look, I’ve got enough to handle with UFOs, so if I’m going to try to pretend to be an expert [on 9/11] I’ve got to spend an enormous amount of money and time […], which I don’t have, so I’m not going to express an opinion. Now, I’ve seen some papers about how no planes crashed into the Pentagon. Well, some of the points are provocative, but I don’t know how accurate they are.”

A couple of tables down from Friedman’s book stall, a large poster prominently featured images of lights in the sky (though some were clearly lens flair, chromatic aberrations and similar optical artifacts). I introduced myself to Cheryl and (another) Gary, who were stationed next to the poster, and requested an interview. They began by asking me what I thought about crop circles. I told him that they were started by two fellows in England who had been accompanied by a reporter and referred them to Jim Schnabel’s Round in Circles. Gary smiled knowingly, as if he had heard that before, but he did not correct me.

Gary and Cheryl were from Share International, a religious group waiting for the return of the enlightened Mayitreya (and some of whose members unfortunately misidentified San Francisco economist Raj Patel is its Messiah early last year) (James 2010). Gary was clearly excited about delivering a reassuring message: “All UFOs without exception are benevolent.” This information, he told me, came from Benjamin Creme, a Scottish prophet of sorts who once met George Adamski, who in turn had once met beings from Venus and Mars. “The whole thing about abductions and anal probing doesn’t even exist. In fact,” Gary continued, “[Adamski] was saying that ninety some-odd percent of the alien abductions don’t even take place in the mind of the people; they’re perpetrated by a government agency that’s used to denigrate [the aliens] as vicious, vile creatures.”

Those responsible for the crop circles have an urgent message for humanity, Gary explains. “If you watch the History Channel, they talk about how there are so many sightings around nuclear facilities. […] They’re warning us that the use of nuclear fuel is not safe. In fact we think it is safe, but in the upper levels of the physical plain, above gas, we can’t measure it, but it is causing all sorts of physical problems like leukemia. Not that leukemia wouldn’t be here anyway, or Alzheimers, but the extent of it is causing a lot of damage to our immune system. [The Space Brothers] have implosive devices that, within limits, can help clean it up a little bit. They helped clean up the Chernobyl disaster, the Manhattan Project, stuff like that.”

In 1975, according to Gary, five masters entered the world and took up residence on the outskirts of New York, London, Tokyo, Geneva, and Darjeeling. In 1977, the Mayitreya himself entered the world, Gary says. The Mayitreya “who [Creme] says […] is the Christ who worked through Jesus in Palestine two thousand years ago the same way the Buddha worked through the Prince Gautama five hundred before Jesus. The normal mode these Masters work is telepathic contact through one of their disciples. Give me a name,” he challenged me, “of somebody who significantly impacted the world—living or dead, somebody that we would probably all know about, like a household name.”

“Genghis Kahn.”

“Er, uh, well. Maybe. Give me another one.” We had a laugh.

I asked the pair what their feelings about energy healing and the other types of things that were going on at the TruthCon, and Cheryl spoke up. “Everything is energy,” she replied, “We have a thing where we do energy work, but it’s meditation. There’s all sorts of energy in the universe, and the Masters wield this energy.” A normal human being can’t receive this energy because it bounces off of them, she says. In meditation, this energy filters through the chakras and becomes able to affect the world: “You can feel it coming through your hands and your feet. The energy’s going out to the world, and this may change the world, like the coming down of the wall in Germany and also apartheid in Africa. All of this stuff is coming to an end because of the energy.” Miraculous evidence of this transformative energy (which is streaming to earth as the solar system aligns with Aquarius) is found everywhere in the world, says Gary, including Hindu statues that sip milk, weeping Christian icons, and the arrangement of seeds in fruit that seem to spell Allah: “These are all different faiths,” he points out. “That kind of proves what Mr. Creme is saying, that this is for everybody. It’s not just for one sect.” As further evidence, he points to crop circles, images of Jesus in the clouds, and hitchhikers who announce the Christ’s arrival and then disappear.

Leaving with a handful of Share International’s literature and DVDs, I approached two women sitting at another vendor table. Their display seemed to have something to do with rejuvenating skin or turning back the clock. Evelyn did most of the talking. “We are promoting our company NuSkin Pharminex,” she explained. Have you heard about the genome study?”

I assumed she was talking about the Human Genome Project and said I had.

“Well, in 2003 we found out that we have twenty-five thousand genes instead of billions of genes. Well, the genome study is LifeGen Technologies, and they partnered with our company, NuSkin. And we’re the only company in the world that has the technology to go in and reset 13,000 gene clusters.” She hands me a laminated photograph. “First they started out on the skin. This is a picture of me a year ago, and I’m fifty.” It is, in fact, a picture of her. I don’t have it in me to tell her I don’t see any difference. This is the first time I have spoken to a before-and-after model, and it’s compelling advertising; not one person in a thousand, I think, is going to tell this woman that she looks about a year older.

Evelyn then tells me about another product, Vitality, which “goes inside the body.” She hands me a pill bottle. I peek inside and see a couple dozen white gel caps. The label on the bottle informs me, “This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

Vitality, Evelyn says, “goes in and resets the mitochondria, the energy source of the cells, and it’s incredible. The mice that they’re working with [in] China are living, in human years, to 137-years old.” She recites a list of the benefits she has derived from the product, including mental clarity and sexual vitality. She also reports that she sleeps better and has sustained energy throughout the day. “It’ll help kids with ADD,” she tells me. “It’ll help kids with depression.” I wonder if she’s read the bottle.

“We’re in fifty countries,” Evelyn says, referring to Nu Skin. “We make a new millionaire every five days.” She then talks about the billions of dollars that have been paid out in commission and the even greater amounts to come, and I realize that these women appear to be at the bottom of a multilevel marketing arrangement. (A subsequent visit to Evelyn’s website, where she invites visitors to “contact me to learn more about how I can help you benefit from a closer relationship with Nu Skin Enterprises” suggests this is in fact the case.)

After my interview with the anti-agers, I returned to the main theater, where Eric Jon Phelps was preparing to give his lecture. The first thing that I noticed was that Phelps was wearing a black cassock with a hood, like a Benedictine monk’s garb, which struck me as odd since he was going to be discussing the Jesuit menace. Phelps began by telling us that he came “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the true alien, the one who came from heaven.” He then informed us that the Jesuits are at the forefront of a conspiracy bent on achieving world governance: “The Jesuits orchestrated the Kennedy assassination, as well as 9/11, as well as this present crusade into Iraq … for the purpose of the Jesuit order’s great design of rebuilding Babylon.” Phelps believes that a pope, which one we do not yet know, will be slain and rise from the dead to become the Antichrist, the man-beast of Revelation. He informs us that the Jesuits work through the Masons, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Muslims. They control the FBI, CIA and every other governmental agency of consequence. Evidence of their power is everywhere, especially in imagery such as pyramids (a throwback, presumably, to ancient Egyptian mystery religions upon which “pagan” Romanism is based), all-seeing eyes and triangles—a symbolism indistinguishable from that associated with the Masons.

Phelps was the only speaker, I thought, whom the crowd turned against, and I think it had something to do with the statement, “Just remember, you black men who are here, you have no leaders. The black leaders have betrayed you, because they are all part of high-level Freemasonry. This includes Louis Farrakhan. This includes Rev. Al Sharpton. This includes Jesse Jackson—Jesse Jackson is a 33rd degree Freemason, a member of the CFR and a bosom buddy of the Archbishop of New York.” He also shifted responsibility for the Holocaust to the Jesuits, and someone behind me gasped, “Oh, it all makes sense!” In the end received only polite, not enthusiastic, applause.

Following Phelps, the emcee of the event, an African-American baritone opera singer named Stephen Salters, came out and sang a Negro spiritual, which I thought was an appropriate and touching counterpoint to the racially tinged rant we had just heard. Then he started talking about his company, Elixirs of Love, which sells magic water. “They are a new spiritual technology,” he claimed. “I work with all sorts of beings—energetics, galactic beings, angels, archangels—to bring these waters to you to help us all shift our levels of consciousness rapidly, safely and powerfully.” I later examined his product catalog at the vendor table and saw that his perfume-bottle sized tinctures range in price from $88 to $2400 (a mix called “Holy Spirit”).

Instead of attending Michael Tellinger’s talk, I sought out Eric Jon Phelps for an interview. He was at the far end of the row of vendors, just past the psychic ghost hunters. He was taking off his cassock and talking to another conference attendee. When I asked him about how he fitted into the conference, Phelps did not see himself as being a part of the holistic medicine or New Age movements: “I was just invited here to speak on the Jesuits.” He paused. “I mean, I do believe in holistic health. I try to eat pure foods.” He praised the speakers who had spoken about the relationship between nutrition and health. “As far as the existential New Age movement, I don’t participate in that because it is a creation of the Jesuit Pierre de Chardin, who was the father of the movement.” (Paleontologist Pierre Teilhald de Chardin, S.J., it turns out, was a ‘co-discoverer’ of Piltdown Man.) (Buckeridge 2009).

I had to come clean with him—I did my postgraduate work at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit institution. I shared with him my observations about the Society of Jesus, that they were an aging order and that it was frankly difficult to see the men I knew running the world. “You have to realize,” he explained, “that there are many Jesuits who, like Masons, think that they are part of a benevolent group, like the lower level Masons.”

During his exposition of hidden Jesuit symbolism, Phelps had pointed to the sloping roof of a gate at a Nazi concentration camp, indicating that it was a symbol of the perverse satanic Trinity of the Jesuits. I asked him if a sloping roof might just be a functional design element, or for that matter if there was ever a pyramid that was just a pyramid. He said that no, that when the Jesuits set up the concentration camps at Dachau and Auschwitz, “they used their symbols to enhance their power.”

As I was getting ready to leave for Steven Greer’s talk about UFOs, I asked Phelps offhandedly what he thought about aliens, to which he replied: “There are no such things as aliens. The ‘Grays’ are creations of the Jesuits in their deep underground military bases through their genetic experimentation. All the grays are hybrids. They cannot reproduce; they live short lives; they are lesser than what a man is—that’s one of the signs of a hybrid. What I maintain is that the Jesuits have perfected their antigravity craft, and god knows what other technology, and so what they did when they crashed at Roswell, they put those little creatures in there.”

David Greer, in the last lecture of the weekend, discusses his Disclosure Project. Photo credit: Gia Film Productions/TruthCon

The final lecture on Saturday, Steven Greer’s talk, “The Disclosure Project,” drew the largest audience of all. Not only was he probably the best communicator there, but he was also willing to make claims orders of magnitude more sensational than the typical UFOlogist’s. Whereas Robert Dean told us that he had once read a top secret NATO document about extraterrestrials, Greer said that he had in his possession hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation about anti-gravity coils. Whereas Stanton Friedman asserted that the government has known about extraterrestrials for over fifty years, Greer stated unequivocally that “Since 1965, we have been placing platforms in space with very advanced scalar longitudinal weapons. These are ones that go faster than the speed of light that target extraterrestrial vehicles when they approach Earth.” He reported that former UN Secretary Generals Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan were appalled to hear this. Also, he announced that at the end of the lecture he was going to show us a photograph of an extraterrestrial.

Much of Greer’s talk was a pitch for his Orion Project, which he claimed will lead to the deployment of unlimited clean, free energy extracted from the very expansion of space-time. He said that he had “dozens of scientists” on board who were ready to sign on as soon as Greer can raise $5.7 million. Then, in six-to-eighteen months he would give us a world without pollution or poverty. He said he needs the money to build a facility to insulate scientists and their families from the retaliatory pressures of the Secret Government.

UFO disclosure advocate Steven Greer mingles with conference attendees after his lecture. Photo credit: Gia Film Productions/TruthCon

Just over a year ago, this Secret Government had made its presence known in a big way. “The Norway Spiral,” he claimed, “was a shot across the bow,” a message directed at President Obama, who was in Norway accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that week, letting him know that they could take out Air Force One at any time. “I was told a week before it happened that this was going to happen. There were only a few people on earth, on my team and a few other people who would know what that thing was.”

Greer also claimed that he could guide a UFO across infinite space using his mind, using his consciousness using coherent waves of consciousness, a mental laser of sorts. He teaches this technique at seminars around the world, and as evidence of its efficacy, he offered a poor-quality video of unidentifiable lights in the night sky that were being gasped at by a crowd. “While this was going on,” he said, “there was a group of ETs in the field with us.” (Apparently nobody thought to point the cameras at the aliens.)

“Do you all want to meet this friend of ours from the Andromeda Galaxy system?”

The crowd erupted in applause.

“About fifteen months ago, [he and people taking his seminar] were at Joshua Tree National Park, and an orb came by, and this,” he said, referring to the image that came up on his PowerPoint, “was taken with a still camera, and we looked, and there was this guy.” The image is of a campsite at night, an unlit four-second exposure. He pointed out a blurry, indistinct form apparently hovering above the scene. If you squinted, I guess, it looked sort of humanoid. “What this is is an actual E.T. being in transdimensional form,” he said. This apparently accounted for why the specter was only half-visible, as if it were stepping out of a shadow. He showed an edited version of the image in which everything except the supposed alien had been cropped. He pointed out a number of features, including the “alien’s” shoulder, chin, head, and what Greer called a “yarmulke transmission device.” He said that he knew that the alien was from the Andromeda Galaxy because of an “electromagnetometer reading,” but did not explain how a metal detector could tell him that.

Next he showed a daytime image of the campsite, which was taken from a slightly different angle, but still recognizably the same location. This was revealing, because where the alien should have been was a Joshua tree. He did not return to the original image so I could not confirm, but the image is available on the Web, and it appears that he has selected the most ‘alieny’ part of a badly lit tree. Nonetheless, he received thunderous applause from the crowd, but I shuffled out of the theater thoroughly unimpressed.

After the convention, I asked organizer Don Pickett about the variety of perspectives his convention brought together. “That was deliberate,” he said. “We wanted to bring people together and get them talking. When you have so many people talking, you’ll usually find that the truth will pop up in the mix.”

“Is there room for mainstream religions at TruthCon?”

“Sure. If you are a Jehovah’s Witness or Catholic, hey, why not?”

“Is there anyone you would not allow in?”

“Nobody who advocated violence. No anarchists. No white supremacists. No demonic or satanic beliefs. This is a positive event, not a doom and gloom convention. It’s about ascension.”

I asked him if he thought there would be room for skeptics to present. He paused. “If the angle they are coming from is objective,” he said. “You don’t want a guest telling the audience that they are all lunatics.”

Don is optimistic about the future of the TruthCon. It turns out that with only 150 attendees, the weekend’s headcount, the TruthCon was financially viable. “We’re planning to have another event here in Atlanta in six months,” he told me. “After that, we should be able to hold them in other cities. I’m really excited. I’m already talking to a guy who’s researching the UFO/Sasquatch connection.”

References

Buckeridge, J.S. 2009. “The Ongoing Evolution of Humanness: Perspectives from Darwin to de Chardin.” South African Journal of Science 105, p. 427-431.

James, Scott. 2010. “In Internet Era, an Unwilling Lord for New Age Followers.” New York Times, 5 Feb, 19A.

“Leatrile and the Law.” 1979. New Scientist, 11 January, 88.