The United States of Paranoia (51 page)

  5
. Mark Dery, “Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot,” May 24, 2010, hplusmagazine.com/2010/05/24/kraken-rising-how-cephalopod-became-our-zeitgeist-mascot.

  6
. Michael Kelly, “The Road to Paranoia,”
The New Yorker
, June 19, 1995.

  7
. Charles Fort,
The Book of the Damned
(Boni and Liveright, 1919), 163.

  8
. Charles Fort,
Wild Talents
(Claude Kendall, 1932), 240.

  9
. John A. Keel,
Disneyland of the Gods
(Amok Press, 1988), 101–2.

10
. John A. Keel,
The Mothman Prophecies
(I-Net, 1991 [1975]), 123–24.

11
. This was a man, after all, who in the 1980s spoofed the UFO buffs with a poker-faced publication that claimed “the National Zoo and the Smithsonian have been lying to the press for years in their campaign to hide the fact that unicorns really exist.” “The Great Unicorn Conspiracy,”
The Unicorn Review
, n.d.

12
. Quoted in John C. Sherwood, “Gray Barker’s Book of Bunk: Mothman, Saucers, and MIB,”
The Skeptical Inquirer
26, no. 3 (May–June 2002).

13
. Keel,
The Mothman Prophecies
, 173.

14
. Ibid., 240–41.

15
. Quoted in Sherwood, “Gray Barker’s Book of Bunk.”

16
. Quoted ibid. Moseley described several of his UFO hoaxes in James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock,
Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist
(Prometheus Books, 2002). Despite his hoaxing—and unlike Barker—Moseley did think that there might be something real to some saucer stories. Or at least he said he did; maybe he meant it, and maybe it was another gag. Once you start down that road, it’s easy to get lost: At one point, Moseley wrote, he was temporarily taken in by a story that turned out to be an echo of one of his own pranks, thus ever so briefly hoaxing himself.

17
. The letter is reprinted at johnkeel.com/?p=489.

18
. Keel,
The Mothman Prophecies
, 55–56.

19
. Some call this a prelude to the underground press. I call it a prelude to the Internet.

20
. “Tricky Dick Rides Again,”
The Realist
, Fall 1991.

21
. Quoted in Paul Krassner,
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture
, 2nd ed. (New World Digital, 2010), 150.

22
. “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,”
The Realist
, May 1967.

23
. “Why ‘The Up Your Tenth Anniversary Issue of The Realist Editorial Giggy Trip’ Will Be Two Years Late,”
The Realist
, May–June 1970.

24
. Reginald Dunsany [James Curry], “Final Solutions to the Assassination Question,”
The Realist
, March 1968.

25
. David K. Johnson,
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
(University of Chicago Press, 2004), 260. When I told Krassner a scholar had mistaken Curry’s article for an earnest exposé, he replied, “[Y]ou just made my day.”

26
. Leonard C. Lewin,
Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace
(Dial Press, 1967), 3.

27
. Ibid., 39, 41.

28
. Ibid., 84.

29
. “Report from Iron Mountain Lives On and On,” podcast, February 22, 2010, bookpod.org/report-from-iron-mountain-lives-on/.

30
. In the ensuing legal fight, which ended in 1994, the Liberty Lobby was represented by Mark Lane.

31
. David Germain, “War Never Came, So Mine’s Now Warehouse,”
The Sunday Gazette
(Schenectady), July 21, 1990.

32
. Stewart C. Best, “Conspiracy Briefing,” Best Video Production, Christian Intelligence Alert, 1997.

33
. The faith’s birth date has been variously given as 1957, 1958, and 1959.

34
. Malaclypse the Younger [Greg Hill],
Principia Discordia: How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her
(IllumiNet Press, 1991 [1969]), 7–8.

35
. Adam Gorightly,
The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture
(Paraview Press, 2003), 27.

36
. A friend of Thornley wrote that Oswald’s role in the book gave it “a sort of eerie novelty, like the appearance of Fidel Castro as an extra in a Busby Berkeley film.” Trevor Blake, “The Idle Warriors,”
Ovo
11 (September 1991).

37
. Malaclypse the Younger [Greg Hill],
The
Principia Discordia, or How the West Was Lost: Discordianism According to Malaclypse (The Younger), H.C., ande beeing the Officale Handebooke of The Discordian Societye ande A Beginning Introdyctun to the Erisian Misterees, Which Is Most Interesting
(privately published, 1965). This text overlaps with the 1969
Principia
, but it is essentially a different book.

38
. Malaclypse,
Principia Discordia: How I Found Goddess
, 54.

39
. “Robert Anton Wilson Interview,”
Conspiracy Digest
, Spring 1977.

40
. Robert Anton Wilson,
The Illuminati Papers
(Sphere Books, 1982), 2.

41
. Ibid., 47. “Vertebrate competition depends on knowing more than the opposition, monopolizing information along with territory,
hoarding
signals,” he elaborated.

42
. Robert Anton Wilson,
Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth
, 2nd ed. (New Falcon Press, 1996), 33–34.

43
. Quoted ibid., 106.

44
. Ibid., 49. Italics in the original.

45
. Ibid., 132.

46
. Many years later, Wilson and Shea satirized Rand in
Illuminatus!
as “Atlanta Hope,” the crazed right-wing author of a mammoth novel called
Telemachus Sneezed
. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson,
Illuminatus!
(Dell, 1988 [1975]).

47
. Wilson reenacted this uneasy relationship with his uncle when he discovered the work of Ezra Pound. In addition to loving Pound’s poetry, Wilson was attracted to some of the poet’s economic ideas, but he was repelled by Pound’s anti-Semitism and his sympathy for fascism. Wilson was pleased when he heard about Pound’s comment to the Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Wilson: “The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” Wilson was probably pleased as well with something Ginsberg told Pound during the same encounter: “[Y]our economics are
right
.” Quoted in J. J. Wilhelm,
Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 344.

48
. Robert Anton Wilson, “Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective,”
Critique
27 (1988).

49
. Robert Anton Wilson,
Wilhelm Reich in Hell
(Falcon Press, 1987), 25.

50
. Fredric Wertham, “Calling All Couriers,”
The New Republic
, December 2, 1946.

51
. Mildred Edie Brady, “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,”
The New Republic
, May 26, 1947. Brady also attacked Reich in an article mocking California’s anarchist bohemians. See Mildred Edie Brady, “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy,”
Harper’s
, April 1947.

52
. See Landon R. Y. Storrs,
The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left
(Princeton University Press, 2013), 79–80.

53
. Reich, in turn, could almost have passed for McCarthy himself if you snipped the right quote out of context. He referred to one psychiatrist who had written unkindly about him as “a well-used stooge of the American Red Fascist conspirators,” for example. Not that he admired McCarthy. The educator A. S. Neill, concerned that the psychiatrist saw Stalinists behind everything bad, wrote to Reich that surely
McCarthy
was an evil who “isn’t inspired by red fascism.” The psychiatrist reacted by scrawling in the margin, “
HE IS
.”
Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence of Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill
, ed. Beverley R. Placzek (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 389, 396.

54
. A. Nonymous Hack [Robert Anton Wilson], “The Anatomy of Schlock,”
The Realist
, September 1965. Wilson was identified as the article’s author in
Best of
The Realist, ed. Paul Krassner (Running Press, 1984), 166.

55
. A private alternative to the Post Office was also the subject of 1966’s most enduring conspiracy novel, Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49
. In Pynchon’s story it is never clear whether the underground post office, called Trystero, is a genuine ancient conspiracy, a practical joke, or a figment of the protagonist’s imagination—an ambiguity that admirers of the ironic style should appreciate. Wilson and Shea later gave Trystero a cameo in
Illuminatus!

56
. “Repartee,”
Innovator
, October 1967. Wilson used the pseudonym Simon Moon several times in this period. He eventually gave the name to a character in
Illuminatus!

57
. Author’s interview with Christina Pearson, February 9, 2012.

58
. Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Frauenfelder, “Boing Boing Interview: Robert Anton Wilson,”
Boing Boing
1 (1989).

59
. Robert Anton Wilson, letter to Art Kleps, Paul Krassner, Franklin Rosemont, Bernard Marszalek, Mike Aldrich, Randy Wicker, and Eric West, November 8, 1968, scribd.com/doc/95686467/The -Principia-Discordia-or-How-the-West-Was-Lost-1st-Ed.

60
. Quoted in Margot Adler,
Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today
, 2nd ed. (Penguin Compass, 1986), 331.

61
. Robert Anton Wilson,
Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati
(Falcon Press, 1986 [1977]), 63.

62
. Wilson wrote frequently for
rogerSPARK
, both under his own name and under a host of pseudonyms: Simon Moon, Mordecai Malignatus, Ronald Weston, the Reverend Brother Kevin O’Flaherty McCool. Arlen Riley Wilson and Kerry Thornley contributed to the paper as well.

63
.
rogerSPARK
, February 3, 1969.

64
. “Daley Linked with Illuminati,”
rogerSPARK
, July 1969.

65
. “The Playboy Advisor,”
Playboy
, April 1969.

66
. “We actually had a recognized student group at Cal called the Bavarian Illuminati,” reported Sharon Presley, one of the Berkeley anarchists. She added that “the by-laws were a hoot; obviously no bureaucrat actually read them.” Sharon Presley, e-mail to the author, October 20, 2012.

      Since the publication of
Illuminatus!
groups called the Illuminati have become a perennial gag, and not just on college campuses. In the 1980s, a prankster managed to get an alleged organization named the Libertarian Illuminati listed in the
Encyclopedia of Associations
. When a reporter called to ask about it, he replied by weaving an elaborate fake history for the group going back centuries.

67
. Wilson,
Cosmic Trigger
, 64. This is a good place to note a proto-Mindfuck prank in 1967, when an unknown person or persons—Doug Skinner speculates that Gray Barker was responsible—sent John Keel and other UFO researchers some mysterious mail whose letterhead identified the authors as The International Bankers. “We are a very powerful organization Mr. Keel and can make things very uncomfortable for you and your friends who try to find out too much about Phase One, Three or any thing concerning other parts of the Universe,” the alleged banking conspiracy wrote in one letter. “We are always watching Mr. Keel, we have eyes and ears that never sleep.” The entire document is reprinted at johnkeel.com/?p=1667. Barker, for the record, did periodically allude to the International Bankers in his published writing. In one book he described them as “shadowy terrorists,” rumored to be based in the Orion galaxy, who “had even dared to mail letters, written on formal, engraved stationery, threatening the cleansing of Earth.” Gray Barker,
The Silver Bridge: The Classic Mothman Tale
(Metadisc Books, 2008 [1970]), 91.

68
. Quoted in Kerry Wendell Thornley, “Wonders of the Unseen World,”
New Libertarian
, June 1985.

69
. Robert Anton Wilson, “The Illuminatus Saga Stumbles Along,”
Mystery Scene
, October 1990.

70
. On the nature and extent of the cuts, see Tom Jackson, “The ILLUMINATUS! Cuts—How Substantial?,” May 21, 2012 (rawillumination.net/2012/05/illuminatus-cuts-how-substantial.html) and the discussion in the blog post’s comment thread. Wilson claimed that five hundred pages had been removed and subsequently lost. Other sources suggest that the excisions were more modest.

71
. Alan Moore, “Robert Anton Wilson 10 : Alan Moore 2” (2007), youtube.com/watch?v=P8ah5VLztK4.

72
. “Robert Anton Wilson Interview.”

73
. Quoted in “The Other Side,”
LeFevre’s Journal
, Winter 1976.

74
. LaRouche and his followers were also known for a distinct style of over-the-top invective. This description, for example, appeared in a front-page article in a LaRouche paper: “Exhibiting the strong flavor of faggotry, the puffy-cheeked, baby-faced Moss combined the worst English pomposity with that exquisite, simpering quality that most Americans dislike about the British aristocracy.” Robert Dreyfuss, “A Close Encounter with Robert Moss of MI-6,”
New Solidarity
, May 5, 1980. The author of that passage would later leave the LaRouche orbit and become a frequent contributor to
Rolling Stone
.