Last Exit to Ponchatoula

It's beginning to look as though another demonstrable case of ritual abuse is about to be mishandled by American law.

The Hosanna Church paedophile ring will be tried upon the word of three abused children, while confessions of occult motive and corroborating evidence are being written out of the record:

What is missing from the court case as it stands are the allegations of occult activity as the motive for the sexual abuse of children and animals, he said. No physical evidence of the occult, such as pentagrams drawn on the floor and spell books were ever found, Tangipahoa Parish sheriff's Detective Mike DePhillips told the court.

"You heard today that they couldn't find any evidence of the occult, so that is a dead issue," said Assistant Public Defender Reginald McIntyre, who represents defendants Paul Fontenot and Patricia Pierson.

No pentagrams? Just last month, The New York Times reported that clear imprints of pentagrams, showing attempts at erasure, had been found on the floor of the church youth hall.

No evidence? Upon accused Nicole Bernard's April confession to the FBI, she "directed authorities to her storage unit, containing videotapes and nine bin liners full of masks and robes for use in the ceremonies. Also, she described performing oral sex on her infant daughter as part of the child's dedication."

No motive? The confessions were of crimes that had occult motive. Detectives were told by church members that "they carried out the practices for years as part of a devil-worshipping ritual involving cat blood." Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff Daniel Edwards said "This is hard to talk about and harder to believe, but some of the suspects have told us their intention in all of this was devil worshipping."

But no; that's just too much to expect a jury to accept. And so an incredible motive is erased, more effectively than the pentagrams from the floor of the youth hall. What remains are still inconceivable crimes, yet now without motive. Of course occult practice is not a crime, nor should it be. It should be irrelevent before the law whether injurious practices are conducted in the name of God, or the Devil, or neither. But eliminate the occult from this picture and the picture loses focus, because the crime has been stripped of its motive. Eliminate too much, over-fog the picture, and the prosecution loses its case. It's certainly a development, and a prospect, that seems to cheer the Public Defender.

The McMartin prosecution as well refused to pursue the allegations of ritual crimes - they were too fantastic to believe - and instead made the trials about "simple" child abuse. Given the prosecution's failure to convict, that adds an ironic gloss upon McMartin's perceived legacy as a cautionary tale of "Satanic panic."

Today's headline that reads "Occult Activity No Longer An Aspect Of Sex Abuse Case" should make some bad people feel good, but perhaps worse, it will make some good people feel better, because they will again be let off the hook of needing to investigate the shadows at their door.

And we should ask, as we always should, whether the law's looming incompetence arises from a benign though ham-fisted resistance to introducing bizarre material which seems of another space and time, or the intentional slamming shut of a lid that is not meant to be opened.

At least, not yet.

Interview with Kathleen Sullivan (Part Four)

Everything in life is a circle.
A pentagram painted on the ground.
Circles can rape.
Circles can hide.
Circles can take you for a long painful ride.
- from Circles, by "Gina," age 10

Here's the final part of my interview with Kathleen Sullivan, survivor of cult ritual abuse and mind control. (The first three parts can be read here, here and here.)

I want to thank Kathleen very much for this. The intelligence and integrity she brings to bear upon what should be inconceivable experiences contribute much to our understanding of a difficult, and urgent, subject.

You can read more from Kathleen on her website, and in her book Unshackled: A Survivor's Story of Mind Control.

In Unshackled, Kathleen mentions an elder statesman, "master hypnotist" and paedophile she calls "Lucian," who obtained ownership of several of Kathleen's alter-states while she was still a teenager.

Could you tell us something of "Lucian," and the Luciferian beliefs he shared with you?

Lucian is highly regarded within the ranks of the Illuminati, although his popularity with the public has definitely waned in the past several years. He is a former DC-level politician who, due to the circumstances of his birth, cannot become President. For that reason, and because he appears to have an extreme, life-long need to wield power and control everyone and everything around him, he has operated in the background of almost every administration since at least the 1970s. Extremely wealthy, he perversely enjoys entrapping and blackmailing politicians and using the “evidence” of their indiscretions to continue to blackmail them throughout their careers. He especially likes to entrap politicians who claim to be born-again Christians. He told me, more than once, that they are all “hypocrites” and that he is determined to prove that.

He is also not above doing more ugly things to people who get in his way or cause problems for him. The last time I saw him, shortly after Clinton became President, “Lucian” informed me that when “they” have total power over our government (whoever “they” are), he’ll have me back with him as his “pet.”

Concerning the Luciferian beliefs that Lucian taught me: as a person who did not come from a Christian family, Lucian seemed to be primarily interested in the Old Testament. He told me that he and other Luciferians consider Jesus to have been a usurper, in that Jesus stole Lucifer’s rightful position as the true son of God. In a Yin/Yang way, he stated that while Lucifer was thrown down to rule the earth, he has become known as Satan, the evil one, to most people. But Lucian and his associates know him as Lucifer, the light-bearer. This is why they prefer the word, “Illuminati.” The “illumined ones.” He and others like him have grandiose schemes to develop a one-world religion and one-world government that would originally pretend to tolerate Christianity, but would eventually have all Christians either convert to their more global religion, or face ugly consequences. But of course, Lucian – who is a flaming pedophile – is also convinced that they will be able to convince the masses that adult/child sex should be legalized.

Lucian was one of the few members of Illuminati who seemed to truly hate Christians with a passion. I don’t know how that came about.

Like the others he worshipped with, he called the sun, “Ra,” and stated that the sun’s light, when it comes into our bodies, transforms us to be more like that top God. At one location, they had a wall made of round crystals at least the size of golf balls. They believed that they could stand inside that wall and that the sunlight would somehow be concentrated by the crystals and speed their transformation. He stated that he and others like him would transform into Godlike beings that would rule the world and universe. He also mentioned something I still think is extremely odd, because I’ve not heard of it from any other source. He talked about what he called “Saint Peter’s Net.” He stated that as godlike beings, they would form a “net” and capture the energy of others who die and use their spirit-energy to become even more godlike. (In a way, this reminds me of cannibalism and ingestion of blood by some occultists in rituals, to gain the life force of their newly deceased, or dying, victims.)

Some of the Illuminati wives of politicians I was ordered to “worship” with, as a slave, included Greco-Roman religious traditions in their daytime rituals. Forced female-female and adult-child sex was often perpetrated at their rituals. At each of their rituals, at least some of the wives would also have sex with each other. They did not believe in cannibalism or drinking blood. Instead, (this is gross, sorry), they drank semen from the men, after it had been processed somehow to “purify” it. They believed it would also increase their energy. I didn’t.

Lucian, who often gave my father orders, was – like my father – since at least the 50’s, closely aligned with Nazi immigrants who were brought to the US by the OSS/CIA and U.S. Army. Like my father, Lucian was also into Gnosticism, and truly seemed to believe that by physically suffering and depriving himself of certain pleasures (excluding sex with children) he would become more spiritually godlike and elevated. That didn’t seem to keep him and Dad from tormenting and depriving their victims, however. Perhaps they failed to realize that they were also making us spiritually stronger, if their beliefs were true.

Did you first hear the name "Maitreya" from Lucian?

Yes.

Did anyone else in the network speak of Maitreya to you?

Lucian was one of extremely few persons in the Illuminati who talked with me, instead of to me. But he only did this when I was alone with him. All of the others seemed to view me as an object, a bought-and-paid-for slave who was of no importance, other than what I could do for them. So, to make a long answer shorter, I have no memory of any of the others discussing Maitreya with me. I have since learned, however, that Lucian has strong connections to Lucis Trust, and so does Maitreya.

According to Lucian, what's Maitreya's purpose?

First, more background about my experiences with Lucian. I am not claiming that anything that Lucian told me was true. He and the other people who believed they “owned” me did believe, however, that I would never be able to remember what occurred when I was in their presence – including what they said. I had what they referred to as “failsafe” programming. This means that, if all else failed, I was supposed to suicide when the memories started to emerge. Fortunately, I have had a succession of competent therapists who have kept me alive whenever suicide conditioning kicked in. (Usually, when I had to be hospitalized to keep me safe until I worked through the program, I was diagnosed as having “major depression with suicidal ideations.”)

Because I was considered “failsafe,” and because Lucian was a master hypnotist who was proficient in mind control, he seemed quite confident that I would never remember him, let alone talk about what he told me. As a pedophile and abuse survivor (I can’t go into that further), he seemed to have great difficulty socializing comfortably with other males. This may have been one of the reasons why he, unlike most of the other slave-owners, chose to “teach” me, from my teenage years on, what he believed was really going on in the world and in politics, and even in specific politicians’ lives. This included “their” plans for Maitreya.

He basically told me that Lucis Trust is really a springboard for the Illuminati’s eventual creation of a one-world religion. He stated that they were using Maitreya, who Lucian said was a master hypnotist and was already performing documented faked “miracles,” to convince the “masses” that Maitreya was the second coming of Jesus. Lucian and his associates sometimes discussed the possibility of using other smoke-and-mirror techniques, including holographs in the sky, to convince the “cattle” (he had serious disdain for anyone “lower” than himself, socially) that Jesus had returned, and that other parts of the Bible’s Book of Revelations were also occurring.

Lucian said that if “they” were successful, then those among the masses who believe in the rapture would give up everything and just sit and wait for it to occur. He said that those people would be “easy pickings.”

He also said that Maitreya was being mentioned as the possible figurehead for the new one-world religion, which they hoped to center in Rome. Again, these were things he said over a decade ago. I don’t know how much of it, if any, was true – at least to him.

Do you believe all the perpetrators are genuine occultists, or are some "agnostic," and merely using occult symbology to traumatize their victims?

I think that you have to look at each perpetrator on an individual basis.

My father, whose Welsh father was a Druid and proud of it, rebelled against his father for a while by rejecting the Druid rituals and instead looking to the writings of Aleister Crowley and the teachings of Luciferian Nazi immigrant doctors and scientists. Eventually, Dad included a few of Anton LaVey’s teachings, although he didn’t seem too impressed with LaVey. Dad also incorporated some Druid rituals and teachings.

Even though Dad did seem to believe in such teachings, he attended Christian churches regularly – Lutheran, Southern Baptist, and Methodist. He was a singer in the choirs, a lay leader, and a Sunday school teacher. (He preferred teaching youths, go figure.) So, my father was a genuine occultist who used Christianity as his cover. And yet, he was also a methodical and manipulative control addict who became quite adept at using trauma-based mind control on me and other children. And he thoroughly enjoyed using the occult trappings to terrorize and intimidate and torture us. My father basically was the whole package.

(One person who responded to a previous part of this interview fluffed me off because I wrote that when I was a child, my father was a high priest. I need to clarify that I do not give that title any importance. My father was extremely narcissistic and grandiose. He was big into control, and also craved attention. I believe this is why, instead of submitting to another local occult leader, Dad started his own little group in Reading, Pennsylvania. He demanded total obedience from the members. Those who bucked his authority sometimes paid the ultimate price, and were used as “examples” to keep the rest of us “in line.” I learned those lessons very well. In my mind, my father was both God and the worst monster on earth. I have no doubt that there may be thousands of self-identified “high priests” who operate small cults throughout the United States and Canada. Because Satanism has been so thoroughly infiltrated by fake occultists, it’s really not that big of a deal anymore to be called a “high priest”.)

I have met other sadistic perpetrators who clearly did not believe in the occult, and yet were quite adept in using occult teachings and ritual implements, stone altars, etc. to terrorize, control, and torture victims. There is a considerable network of such cell groups operating in and around Cobb County, Georgia. Another large network of cell groups reportedly operates east of Chattanooga under the cover of a specific religious denomination. Like the Aryan network in Cobb County, the Tennessee network does not reportedly take its occult practices seriously. However, the practices are used - in a mafia-like fashion - to intimidate and frighten even outsiders into silence.

I personally have gotten to the point where the occult is no longer a big issue to me. My biggest concern is that groups of sadistic adults are meeting together to terrorize, group rape, torture, and even kill precious children and other humans in the most horrific ways. Some of these groups of psychopathic adults also run lucrative underground businesses that include: manufacturing and selling illegal drugs, buying and selling children, creating and selling illegal pornography (including “kiddy porn”), forcing child slaves to “sexually service” others. (This is known as Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children.)

No child – no human – should ever have to experience one minute of the horrors that many of these victims endure (if they can) day after day, week after week, year after year, with no hope of ever being freed. My many horrific experiences with such groups – both as a child and as a dissociated adult - would make the atrocities at Abu Ghraib pale in comparison.

Since going public, have you been subjected to harassment and threats?

Of course. Here are some examples.

While I was in the early stages of recovery and was still severely dissociated, I freaked out when I left my therapist’s office and stopped at a discount store that I’d never gone to before, and was specifically paged over the intercom – I guess to let me know that I was under surveillance. Of course, when I went to where the message directed me, no one was there. Oftentimes, I would go to the post office to see if there was mail in our box, or I would go to our regular grocery store, and a cult member would be waiting there for me, to give me a verbal “message.” (“If you do ____, we will _____…”)

On one occasion, I went to a library I’d never been to before, to research a corporation that some of the perpetrators were employed by. Soon, a man sat down next to me, insisted on my telling him which company I was researching, and told me – in recognizable coded language – that if I continued that research, I’d be killed.

On another occasion, I entered our Atlanta home via our back deck and found a mini-ball – a relic from the Civil War – lying in front of the door as a message that a specific cult member from Cobb County had stopped by. (He still sells such relics.)

One time, when a self-identified deprogrammer visited our house, a military helicopter nearly landed on our roof. I walked outside, smiled big, waved, and said, “Hi!” as the men inside the copter sat stone-faced, staring at me. Our home was not in an air path, and the copter was VERY close to the top of our two-story roof.

I was also approached by perpetrators in public. Each time, they talked nicely and smiled the whole time as if we were best of friends. Each time, I froze in terror. Some would put their hand on my shoulder, which was enough to put me into a total trance state. They were always very careful to do things that seemed quite benign, so that if I complained to anyone, I would appear to have the problem, not the perpetrators. (I’ve since learned that this is a common technique used to terrorize and intimidate victims of this kind of abuse.)

The worst form of harassment during my earlier stages of recovery was when fairly young children – always a different one, a male or female – would call our home late at night, specifically ask for one of my alter-states by name, and then deliver an adult message to that alter-state in code that that alter-state could understand. The calls always came shortly before a traditional occult ritual night, in which a child would probably be killed as the group's "sacrifice." The children relayed the messages, regardless of who answered the phone. As a result, both my husband and protective teenaged child were quite angry. I repeatedly had to beg them not to fuss at the children – they were just doing what they were told. Each of those messages was spoken by the children in a very flat tone; I still have one of them on tape. Those harassing calls were hardest for me, emotionally, because I was tormented in knowing that those children were still being used by the perpetrators and there was nothing I could do to help them – especially if they were chosen for the next ritual sacrifice.

Another form of harassment and threats in the form of “concerned” individuals who claimed to have helped other survivors, and expressed their desire to help me, too. I would relax my guard after a while and believe they were genuinely concerned. They would influence me to trust them enough to regularly report to them, what was going on in my life. When they got me dependent on them for what to think and believe, and influenced me to rely on them and cut off my regular support system, then they would start giving me orders. The threats and harassment came when I realized they were bad news, and refused to obey or allow them to be a part of my life anymore. One person, who had offered to edit my book for me at no cost, was such a person. A couple who still live in our small community did the same; the wife became my counselor at school and at home; even when she acknowledged that her first husband (now deceased) was a brother of a former head of the NSA, I continued to trust her. It wasn’t until I saw a blank CIA employment application on a laptop a friend of her husband had given her, that I had enough sense to stay the hell away from both of them.

There were others, like Mark Phillips (CIA), who were also sent into my life to drain me financially, again separate me from my support systems, get me totally dependent on them, get into my head to troll for hidden information, get all of my documentation, and then – when they didn’t have any more use for me – dropped me like a hot potato, telling me that everything I told them was fabricated, that I was psychotic. I cannot tell you how dangerous those times were for me. They turned me against everyone who cared about me, leaving me no one to go to after they dumped me. Those were the times I was willingly suicidal. If not for my very patient and forgiving husband, I would not have survived.

The worst thing that was done to me, that I fully remembered starting that very night, was when I was group raped at the Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta in October, 1997 – two days after the end of a conference on mind control. It took the group of spook perps a lot of manipulating to get me into the below-ground room near one of the elevators. It was a horrific couple of hours. Unfortunately, my husband was at home in Chattanooga, and nobody was expecting me for hours. The worst part was that one of my male relatives, who became a mini-Dad from hell, was one of the rapists. He’s still too dangerous and way too connected for me to name. And again, it was one of those situations where after everyone had their jollies with me, and I found myself in a daze, wandering around the concourse, with no awareness that I’d just lost several hours – how in the world could I have proven it was done to me, when I couldn’t even remember? All I knew was that a certain part of my anatomy was burning horribly, and I found that quite odd. Fortunately, I had a therapist at the time who took emergency late-night phone calls. A bunch of alter-states that had come out, or been summoned out, at the airport room, told her – in broken sequence – what had been done to me. When I was raped and my life threatened in the room, I was told that they (a former Directorate of Operations employee and his two goons and my male relative) “had” to “do this to” me because I had named two politicians with CIA ties, in my CKLN radio interview, several weeks earlier. One of the male onlookers in the room also gave me the message that they were “not happy” about a novel, MK, that I had finished in the past month and had shared with several survivors.

Before the airport “reprogramming session” was over, the men – all hard-core spooks - left the room, and an older MKULTRA psychiatrist/programmer entered. Because I’d been thoroughly traumatized, it was easy for him to hypnotically insert two new sets of suicide commands in my mind. In other words, if one set of commands didn’t work, the other should be successful. I believe he did it to keep me from ever being able to talk about him and the terrible things he had done to me, starting when I was a young child.

Later on, when the command sequences started kicking in mentally, I was again fortunate to have help from mental health professionals who understood how to dismantle suicide programming, and obviously survived. Best of all, the old bastard died several years after the assault, reportedly of cancer.

I’m sharing this specific instance with you, even though it is still very difficult for me to write about, to help you to understand that there are levels of intimidation and threats. Usually, when a victim starts to figure things out, the perps will use seemingly innocuous techniques to intimidate us, such as whispering veiled messages in public settings or by sending in (or having us referred to) “concerned” individuals who know how to “help” us. Usually, nothing more than that ever has to be done to us, to keep us silent. But when we keep squawking, they might still pull in the big guns. Since 10/97, more people were sent in on me, one by one. I started noticing certain behavioral patterns among them (sociopaths can only fake it so far), and stopped allowing them into my life. If something odd does occur now, I don’t freak out. Instead, my reaction is, “Oh well, there’s another one. These people need to get a REAL LIFE!”

Since you've been in recovery, have you ever received words of remorse or encouragement from people within the network?

There is one retired military officer (“Poppa” in my book) who I first met with, clandestinely, in 1985. And not by choice – not at first. I didn’t trust anyone, so why should I believe he had become a better person? Over time, he became primarily responsible for helping me to gradually be extracted from the Aryan network, centered in Cobb County, that had local control over me. During our first extensive clandestine meeting in a hidden set of rooms and corridors under an Air Force base, Poppa expressed strong remorse for his earlier actions as a part of the mind-control perp system. His words seemed to be genuine. I also saw a new softness in his face that I’d never seen before. The things he told me, and admitted to me, in that and other meetings, were marvelously healing. He became a new and very positive role model for me, because – in the face of great and dangerous odds – he seems to have put his duty to his country first and has – through his own clandestine network of former military men under his command – helped me and other victims (particularly groups of children) to become free.

Because he knew I was used to memorizing certain phrases and living by them, he told me that in spite of all the technology that has been used to control the minds of victims, his people have discovered a technique that inevitably breaks the programming down, without a need for any “deprogramming” sessions. Again, his face was soft when he told me that their formula, in working with freed victims who were programmed “Delta” assassins, was: “compassion, caring, and kindness.” Whenever I met with Poppa and his people over the next few years, the effect of being in their presence was just as he had predicted: like water pouring through a cave filled with hidden nooks and crannies (symbolizing the most deeply hidden mental programs), their willingness to show me genuine concern and kindness short-circuited many of the mental programs that - herein lies the irony - had originally been installed by sociopathic people who were absolutely incapable of demonstrating certain emotions. Poppa and his people gave me what I had starved for, all my life. They resurrected my shriveled soul. Whereas I had previously drawn myself, all my life, as a tree totally gutted by heart rot, I now drew myself as a tiny seedling – still much to learn, but I was already learning what was most important. Empathy, caring, kindness, compassion. Most important for me is that I have also now developed those parts of my humanity. I no longer have a heart of icy cold stone. I care about others; I give a damn.

Is it perhaps better for the safety of survivors, that most people still refuse to accept that such things could happen?

Although it may be better for the immediate safety of some survivors, ongoing denial of the existence of these crimes causes serious problems for many more survivors. Especially since the False Memory Syndrome Foundation backlash occurred, and FMSF-assisted lawsuits were successfully brought against several mental health professionals, it’s been harder for survivors to find therapists who are willing to help them. Survivors are also more likely, partly due to managed care, to be misdiagnosed as having “bipolar disorder” (the new trend) because it’s cheaper to dope them up to level out their rage and bouts of manic energy generated by old emerging emotions and memories, than to pay for years and years of therapy. It’s a new band-aid approach.

Public denial is also a big problem for survivors who are so disabled – mentally, emotionally, and/or physically - by the horrors they have survived, that they desperately need financial help. Unfortunately, it’s now harder than ever to qualify for U.S. Social Security Disability benefits. If a survivor was never functional enough to hold a job, that survivor cannot qualify for SSD, anyway. In such a situation, the survivor can apply for SSI (Supplemental Security Income). Such benefits, however, pretty much leave such survivors in poverty. As a result, they, and other impoverished survivors who do not even have SSI, do not have sufficient resources to improve their lives and make themselves safer – basic things like deadbolt locks, emergency cell phones and the like. They also will have a harder time obtaining therapeutic mental help.

Another related problem occurs within the U.S. court systems. I have been in contact with several female survivors who married perpetrators who had enough resources – including financial support from other cult members - to gain full custody of the children away from the mothers. Some of the mothers were even advised that if they started telling the judge that the children were being ritually abused, the mothers would be viewed as mentally ill. Those mothers who were already receiving help from mental health professionals were especially vulnerable to being discredited this way. Some of the mothers are in emotional agony nearly every day, frantic in the knowledge that the bizarre behaviors they see in their precious children, when they are “allowed” to visit with them, are probably a direct result of ongoing victimization. AND THERE IS NOTHING THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT.

Several mothers, and at least one father, who tried to protect their children from further abuse by snatching their children and running with them to other countries have been caught by the FBI, brought back to the US, charged with “kidnapping” their own children, and some have been incarcerated. Unfortunately, if the protective parent is put in prison, that parent becomes much less effective in providing strength and emotional support for the child(ren).

Perhaps the most detrimental, long-term effect of the public’s ongoing denial is that children continue to be tortured, group raped, bought and sold, given for sex, and even killed. Even if we do not feel any concern for such children, we still must consider this: if the victims never get out of the underground criminal system, what can we expect from approximately half of them – based on current statistics – when they become adults? What is to stop them from doing unto others, what has been done unto them?

What’s to stop some victims-turned-perpetrators from indiscriminately inflicting their volcanic rage - generated by days or years or even decades of unbearable pain, terror, hopelessness and helplessness - on us or our children? (Remember Timothy McVeigh?) Society may suffer harsh consequences if we continue to self-protectively turn our backs and stop our ears and pretend these victims don’t exist; if we ignore their desperate, often-silent screams and prayers for help that – at least for now - never comes.


take a glass and raise it high
to those of us who won't
lay down and die
some of us beaten and abused
by those we loved
others by our government
still we won't lay
down and die

so take a glass
and drain it dry.
A Toast, by "vern."

The Firm

Somewhere Mama's weeping for her blue-eyed boy.
She's holding little white shoes and that little broken toy.
And he's following a star,
the same one three men followed from the East.
But I hear sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace. - Bob Dylan

Everywhere you look, people are talking Scientology. You'd almost think they'd never heard of Xenu before. And you know what? They probably hadn't. And to know another thing, many of them, even rank and file Scientologists, still haven't.

Certainly Scientology's creed says nothing of the meat of L Ron Hubbard's space opera. Typical of occult orders, it shows an exoteric face to the general public and lower initiates, and reserves esoteric teachings for its inner circle. Its supposed creed is nothing but mealy words of "equality" and "inalienable rights" to such things as freedom of thought and "sanity." Who could argue with that? Well, maybe L Ron Hubbard for one, who said a lot of other things, like "If you really want to enslave people, tell them that you're going to give them total freedom," and whose secret creed has driven higher inititates out of their skulls. Reportedly Tom Cruise, and reputedly only temporarily, counted among that number:

Tom Cruise became psychotic during a secret Scientology initiation in which one is told that rather than being one person, one is composed of thousands of aliens from all over the universe fighting for control of your body. After completing this initiation, known as OT III, Tom appeared sickly with black circles under his eyes and pasty skin. He said he wanted to be away from Scientology for good. He just wanted to go back to Hollywood and his home and be left alone by Scientology. This would not happen; David Miscavige ordered Cruise could not be let go. Scientology worked on Cruise day and night until he finally returned to Scientology.

Miscavige is the Black Pope of Scientology, Chairman of the Board of the "Religious Technology Center," and so heads the organization which "holds the ultimate ecclesiastical authority regarding the standard and pure application of L. Ron Hubbard’s religious technologies."

Here's Cruise snapping a crisp salute to Miscavige at a meeting of the International Association of Scientologists:



Besides suggesting just how impossibly short Miscavige must be, the photograph also demonstrates something of the church's bizarre militarism, which is on prominent display in its naval cadet-like "Sea Org" and the church's intelligence wing, the Office of Special Affairs. Bob Minton, Scientology's "Enemy Number One," describes the Sea Org as "totalitarian" and the OSA as "paramilitary organized Mafia" in possession of "rocket launchers, bazookas, countless other weapons," led by a "management that seeks "world domination."

A portion of the OSA's mandate is described in this policy letter of Hubbard's, where he set forth "the vital targets on which we must invest most of our time":

T1. Depopularizing the enemy to a point of total obliteration.

T2. Taking over the control or allegiance of the heads or proprietors of all news media.

T3. Taking over the control or allegiance of key political figures.

T4. Taking over the control or allegiance of those who monitor international finance and shifting them to a less precarious finance standard.

It's fascinating to consider that Hubbard's pastiche of science fiction and Crowleyania, which can count the berserkers of Manson's Family and the Process Church as its stepchildren, can now contend for Middle American respectability just as has Mormonism, which itself was the creature of a ceremonial magician. And as Mormons, who enjoy a disproportionate representation" in the US intelligence community, Scientologists have formed a peculiar cadre of para-military intelligence.

Curiously, there was "disproportionate representation" of Scientologists in the CIA's remote viewing program. The NSA's Major Hal Puthoff was an "Operating Thetan, Level III" when he took on the the program at Stanford Research Institute in 1972, where he remained until 1985. Puthoff's senior colleague was Ingo Swann, who himself had reached OT VII, then the highest initiatory level of Scientology. (That is, before Hubbard felt assured enough to fulfill his longtime fantasy and introduce OTVIII, the gist of which is Surprise - I'm the Antichrist!) Swann, in fact, was a founder of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles. Pat Price, "widely considered to be the best of the remote viewers," was OT IV.

Alex Constantine writes in Virtual Government:

When Swann joined SRI, he stated openly that fourteen "Clears" participated in the experiments, "more than I would suspect."... The projects at SRI were augmented by a parapsychology team at Fort Meade in Maryland under INSCOM and the NSA. Military intelligence personnel were recruited, including Major Ed Dames, the Psi-Tech founder. General Stubblebine ran the project and broadened it to include tarot and the channeling of "spirits."

Well, perhaps the representation is not so disproportionate after all. According to doctrine, a "clear" Scientologist, free of the infestation of thousands of "body thetans," is alleged to have godlike mastery of the material world, including an ability to operate free of the body. A handy talent for a remote viewer, that.

Hubbard, of course, was with Naval Intelligence at the time he was conjuring with Jack Parsons in the "Babalon Working." Scientology would have it that he was operating undercover, to bust up a black magic ring. What remains hidden in plain sight is not only Scientology's occult legacy, but that of US military intelligence.

In the summertime

"Oh yeah, in the summertime...." - Bob Dylan

You should begin noticing a change to my posting habits. I'm working on a projected book that needs the bulk of my energies over the next couple of months. It's blog-related in only the broadest sense: it's US political - and parapolitical - satire, so it needs to be funny, but I also mean it to be the bearer of some hard truths.

My agent is asking for a hundred pages by September, so I need to get to it. And to do that, I'm afraid this has to suffer some. Inevitably, my posts will become shorter and less frequent over the summer, which saddens me, but that's prioritization for ya. Hopefully, soon, there will be something good to show for it.

And I hope regular readers will understand, and bear with me, as things get irregular around here. In the meantime, this summertime, I hope you make good use of the Rigorous Intuition forum. You'll always find lots there of interest, if you find this of interest.

Dick Cheney's Acid House

You got unrighteous doctors dealing drugs that'll never cure your ills - Bob Dylan

From The Huffington Post:

Vice President Dick Cheney was taken to the cardiac unit of the Vail Valley Medical Center. Contrary to Associated Press reports that he went to see orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Steadman, for a knee injury, Vice President Cheney went directly to the cardiac unit to see Dr. Jack Eck and his team. The Vice President checked into the hospital under the name of Dr. Hoffman.

Interesting choice of alias for the Homeland's Regent. The most famous, or perhaps infamous, doctor to bear that name is Dr Albert Hoffman: the "father of LSD."

Dr Hoffman writes, in LSD: My Problem Child, that the most significant insight he had gained by his LSD experiments is that "what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous-that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego."

Were you able to read that without recalling the notorious words of the true voice of the White House, spoken to Ron Suskind last Fall? These words:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The cocaine metaphor is a common touchstone for critics of the administration. That might have been the poison of choice for the empty suit at the top, but it's not his administration, it's Cheney's, and cocaine doesn't make pharmacological sense of the bad trip he's sent us on. The White House is not a crack house, it's an acid house.

I don't know whether Cheney's choice of alias was deliberate, though with this man, I suspect everything either is, or deliberation is irrelevent. Why not "Mr Hoffman"? Let's remember, as much as we'd like to forget, that it's not too long ago that he wore a green parka and wool cap with the words "Staff 2001" to an Auschwitz memorial service.

And it must said, there is a resemblance:

The other Dr Hoffman


When was it, exactly, that we entered this altered reality? How long is it you've been shaking, sweating, and seeing things that shouldn't be there? The United States, in every tragic sense, is an altered state; an experimental subject of dark actors and mad doctors. How long before the Acid Empire, like Frank Olson before it, falls from a great height? (Coincidentally it was Cheney who, with Donald Rumsfeld, conspired in 1975 to cover-up the circumstances of Olson's state-induced, and LSD-assisted, death.)

It's been quite some time that America's been drinking the Kool Aid, but it took "Dr Hoffman" to spike it.

Bless the beasts and children

"We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight." - HP Lovecraft

For a while there, back in the 1980s, some extremely High and Outside news began intruding into mainstream consciousness: Satanic Ritual Abuse, crop circles, alien abduction and cattle mutilation became newsworthy. If permitted to continue as subjects for serious inquiry, consensus reality might have begun to groan under its contradictions, and for some there would have been Hell to pay.

It wasn't hard to spin the story - actually, spin the public - that there was nothing to see, and that those who saw something were fools or charlatans. Most people were happy to accept any explanation to not take the reports seriously. What they most wanted to hear was the reassurance that the weirdness was "debunked," and the world really was as normal as their own experience of it.

So the "False Memory Foundation" was born in 1992, declaring a "syndrome" where one didn't exist, in order to lay to rest "Satanic Panic." Nevermind that nearly half of the declassified files obtained by John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, documented CIA interest in the occult, nor that the Foundation's Board was composed of scientists whom the CIA had contracted to conduct mind control research.

And so, "Doug and Dave" appeared in 1991, claiming they had made all the crop circles in southern England since 1978, some 2,000, with planks and string. Though they were unable to recreate them for the media, or produce the anomalies associated with genuine circles, it didn't matter: To most people who had lifted their eyes for a moment out of the ordinary, they'd seen what they needed to stop paying attention: all circles had been debunked, because two pub crawlers had fessed up. Nevermind that their story was traced "to a company in Somerset that carries out research on top secret military projects."

Alien abduction, typically of UFO material, was made to disappear in plain sight by being absorbed into the Military-Entertainment Complex. It was "X-Files stuff," and so not a serious subject. Accounts were ascribed to the faulty memories of hysterics. Nevermind that not all memories were "recovered," and not all victims hysterical. And nevermind the existence of credible, independent witnesses, physical evidence and corroborating phenomenon.

Not much effort was devoted to debunking cattle mutilation. The rural setting of the crimes made it easy to convince sophisticated city-dwellers - who never see a living cow let alone one mutilated - that it was all the work of natural predators, copycat punks or disease. Nevermind that ranchers knew better, nor that it never went away.

Two weeks ago, Ray Riguidel found the mutilated carcass of a 10-year old cow in his pasture. One eye, one ear, its udder and sex organs were missing. There were no tracks or footprints. There was no blood.

"I’ve heard about it before, but it never really sunk in," Riguidel said."But it’s sunk in now. It’s real."

George Larre, who lost a cow to a similar mutilation five years before, added "If you haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t expect anyone to believe it. But if you really see one for yourself, and you understand what coyotes will do, you know it’s not predators. Some people say it’s from up above, and I don’t know. I’m not going to say it is or it isn’t. But when you see absolutely no clues and no reason, you really have to wonder."

A friend recommended that Riguidel call Fernand Belzil, a plain-speaking local rancher who has been investigating mutilations for eight years and makes modest claims for his findings. His interest in the phenomenon "snowballed" after visiting his first mutilation site, "and it’s been one hell of a deal ever since. It kind of just opened up a can of worms." Belzil doesn't presume to know what's going on. As for UFOs, he says "I guess I believe...but I’d sure like to see one first. We’re naïve to believe we’re alone in this universe, but I guess that’s just my opinion."

Fernand Belzil


Some samples of Belzil's research, drawn from his website:

June 6, 1999, near St Paul, Alberta
As you will see by the picture, half the nose area was cut out, one eye lid was removed, another one inch deep cut about an inch long just below the left eye. The penis & scrotum were removed. The oval cut on the stomach was 16 by 12 inches and it looked like a surgical cut. The flesh where it had been skinned showed no signs of teeth marks or any other abnormality.... The rectum area was cut out in a triangle shape.... There was no blood anywhere.

June 15, 2002, Veteran, Alberta
A beef Hereford cow was found mutilated in a clump of trees lying on her back with the 4 legs sticking upward. I only have 2 other cases that were found on their back. This is a very strange case. The branches of the trees above her were broken. It appears to have been dropped there. The tongue was removed, the flesh on the jaws neatly incised, ear and eye also removed, and no blood. Notice the surgical incision of the neck area.

May 15, 2003, near Derwent, Alberta
I was called out to a farm about 35 miles south of St Paul, near a town called Derwent. There I was shown a 2-day-old male lamb that had been mutilated. It was found inside a corral that had a solid board, 4 foot high fence surrounding it to keep out predators.... There was a perfectly round incision found between the hind legs in the udder area, no teeth marks and no sign that a knife had been used. There were no burn marks on the skin in that area. See Picture #1. The rectum was cut out, at the lower part of the rectum incision the tail had a neat V-shape cut (under part of the tail) that went back about 2 inches. Very odd. See Picture #2. The intestines were taken out through the rectum and piled a foot and a half behind the lamb. Seen on Picture #3. Both eyes had been removed, the lower jaw had been broken and the right side of the skull appeared smashed.

Theories, as they usually do, abound, and generally conform to investigators' other presumptions.

Linda Moulton Howe has been studying cattle mutilations for nearly a quarter century. In 1980, before it became unthinkable to do so, and after Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado declared mutilations to be "one of the greatest outrages in the history of the western cattle industry," adding "it is no longer possible to blame predators for the mutilations," CBS aired her investigative documentary Strange Harvest. Howe's belief is that bovine tissue's similarity to that of humans offer aliens a means to relatively benignly sample the effects of environmental pollutants. (Howe has the courage to examine disreputable subjects, but too often I find her conclusions distressingly credulous.)

Budd Hopkins believes cow eggs are being harvested to serve as hosts for transgenic alien-human cloning. That much more than eggs are taken, that his advanced extraterrestrials should be expected to have developed a less wasteful and attention-getting methodology, and that more than cows are mutilated (as above, in Belzil's account of a two-day old lamb), don't seem to enter into his calculations, because he's already weighted the equation to come out "extraterrestrial."

My presumption, as usual, is towards an occult explanation. (Remember the calf mutilation associated with the murder of Father Alfred Kunz, who was exposing ritualized pedophilia in Wisonsin's Catholic Church, and the canine sacrifices of the Process Church.) Which isn't to say it's always wholly human. Because the phenomenon appears to fall in a grey zone of significant convergence of both human cultic practice and UFO activity.

Perception of what's going on would undoubtedly shift if the cattle were cats, and the ranches city blocks. Sometimes they are, as in this 1995 account from Kelowna, BC, which begins with a woman looking out her kitchen window and seeing "two brilliant lit cigar shaped objects moving slowly over the apple trees, at about thirty or forty feet of height":

As they scoured the area the objects bathed the orchard in blue light and in the woman's words "seemed to be looking for something". The craft then began to slowly move from the back of the orchard and headed in the direction of the house. They now stopped directly next to the house over a garage addition and shone down white beams of light. Even stranger, the witness described the lights as broken up, "like a white line down the highway".

It is here where high strangeness enters the picture. The woman said that in retrospect a thought that passed through her mind during the sightings was her concern for the cats.

Neighbourhood cats would often congregate in the garage and this was now where the lights were "searching". The objects then "turned off" and left. The next day over a dozen cats in this area of Kelowna were missing and were never seen again.

Last fall our hotline received a call from a fellow in Burnaby who said that he witnessed, along with his brother, a dark shadowy figure run in front of them as they stood in the driveway of their home one rainy night. More disturbing, all three of his cats were gone. Oddly enough, the man said he witnessed the same dark figure as a young boy not far from the area. At that time the shadowy-shape ran into a bush.

The Kamloops area of BC was also privy to a rash of half cat mutilations as well, with a dozen or so cats mysteriously cut up. Same show, no blood, no muss, no apparent fuss and again, never a sign of struggle, no fur strewn about and no spilled blood.

Someone is doing something with our cats. Since the early nineties UFOBC has been aware of the "Half Cat" mystery on the Lower Mainland. At this time the mutilated cats first showed up in Vancouver's West Side. In these instances cats had been sliced in half with great precision and then somehow drained of their blood (exsanguination). Never a drop to be found, with no stains at all on the remaining feline carcass (in these cases, half carcasses).

In the Surrey area last fall half cats started showing up again. I talked to two woman who were unfortunately "victims of the circumstance". Living about three or four miles apart, both woman found their own cats' remains. In the first case one of the woman was off to do some banking, oddly enough she said that morning she took the long way to the bank, and to her shock found her dead cat. It was placed to appear to be coming out of a manhole cover in the middle of the road. The woman pulled over and saw that it was her own cat cut in half. Like other cases the other half was nowhere to be found . As is the way, the culprit seemed to want his work to be noticed. The other unfortunate young woman found her cat in the alley behind her house. Devoid of all blood, showing no signs of struggle and once again cut in half. Perfectly! The SPCA is sticking to their guns that these are coyote attacks. Out of ignorance or in order to quell any panic, I don't know but that's their story and they're sticking to it!

It was with great surprise when I fell upon a similar story of half cats in upstate New York in a town called Lee which is close to the Hudson Valley. However, the "coupe de grace" came when I was thumbing through an old Fate Magazine recently and discovered that the Half Cats have also surfaced in Gulf Breeze (Florida), Plano (Texas), Fall's Church (Virginia) and St Louis (Missouri). In Fall's Church twenty cases were reported alone, with slightly less than that number showing up in St Louis.

No one is suggesting aliens are experimenting on cats. In an urban environment, upon house pets, the cultic aspect of the phenomenon comes into sharper focus. Yet here, too, we have a UFO associated with the event. (And it gets worse, even for cat lovers, as there are cases of human mutilations which match the pattern. See here, though be warned, the images are graphic.)

So perhaps, instead of mutilations for a scientific purpose these are ritual killings, perhaps for the magick of the blood sacrifice or simply the induction of terror into the world. Regardless, the reason for the killing is the killing. Certainly the thought of cultists in cahoots with their bloodthirsty gods is not as comforting a hypothesis as aliens studying tissue samples to gauge environmental pollutants, but to me it's the explanation which makes best, unfortunate sense of the evidence. That it's a strange explanation is of no account, because whatever the explanation, it must be a strange one.

Jacques Vallee writes in Messengers of Deception that "the symbols attached to the UFO phenomenon are the primary images of life: blood, death, sex, time, space and sky":

What are the organs taken by the mutilators? The eyes, the ears, the tongue and the genitals: that is, the organs concerned with communication and reproduction. The culprits deserve credit not only as good surgeons, but also as good psychologists.

Should we note the common feature of cored rectums, and that according to Aleister Crowley, the anus denotes the Eye of Horus? Should we be thinking, sacrifice?

Something's hungry, and it's not a coyote.

Far Away, So Close

Stills from Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising

It can get lonely out on the edge of convention, beyond the parameters of respectable thought. And we've tended to make it lonelier than it needs to be, and also kept ourselves less informed, by failing to speak to each other respectfully across serious disciplines which are all dismissed by the misinformed as mere fantasies.

For instance, and for the most part, the 9/11 and political conspiracy crowd haven't rubbed shoulders with the mind control/ritual abuse community; few in either camp have seen the value in studying occult, paranormal and psychochemical phenomena; and virtually no one wants to be associated with UFO research.

It's perfectly understandable why this happens. Each subject is generally considered, in its own right, "fringe," and so the advocates of each, contending for a hearing and a measure of respectability, assume a phobia of cross-contamination by other disreputable subjects.

Last Spring, at Toronto's 9/11 public inquiry, I heard an elderly woman share her difficulty in persuading others of the need to critically consider the evidence that the attacks were an inside job. She said, with sadness, that a typical response would be "Oh - and what do you think of UFOs?" Exasperated sighs of recognition filled the room. And though I knew what she meant - to gain acceptance, perhaps controversial issues need to be presented piecemeal - I also thought, Good question. Because if there is any validity at all to an inquiry it cannot be pursued in isolation. Particularly huge issues with tremendous consequences. Rather, they and their implications should help explain one other, contextually, on the Big Canvas.

We know conspirators compartmentalize, and task on a need-to-do basis. Because we need to see more, we can't mistake one portion - the one that most interests us, or the one we find most persuasive, or the one to which we actually bear witness - for the whole picture.

Sight Unseen offers interesting examples of the limits of compartmentalized analysis. Author Budd Hopkins heads the "Intruders Foundation," and has been a leading researcher in the phenomenon of UFO abductions for more than 30 years. His latest book presents some fascinating case studies that merit attention, but I find his conclusions to be handicapped by both his specialization, and his fixation upon the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

Hopkins notices a "curious pattern" among abductees of "personal, cherished objects...seeming to vanish and then reappear under highly unusual circumstances." For instance, a wedding ring placed on a kitchen countertop one moment and gone the next reappeared several days later beneath the tacked-down carpet of an upstairs bedroom. Hopkins doesn't know what to make of it, though he finds the pattern repeats enough to be "intriguing" and to "deserve mention." The pattern, while mystifying to someone searching the skies for ETs, should be immediately familiar to students of the "secret commonwealth": the traditional folklore of mischevious entities who have always been with us, but inhabit another here.

Hopkins tells the story of two credible witnesses who, while driving through the wheat fields of Iowa in 1952, "came upon an eerie sight: a little old man on a bicycle, wearing lederhosen and sporting a long white beard, like something one might see rendered in wood in a Bavarian souvenir shop." About a half hour later, when they drove over a gentle rise, they encountered the same little man, "pedaling happily along in the same direction, many miles ahead of the place they had first come upon him." There were no sideroads or short cuts the cyclist could have taken, and the men had not been overtaken by a vehicle which could have given him a lift. Hopkins isn't content to let the story stand on its own strangeness. Without any justification other than his presumption of an extraterrestrial hypothesis, he posits that the figure was actually a screen memory to mask an abduction and missing time episode. After all, we can't have odd, little elfen figures bending space-time in Iowa, now can we?

Hopkins also describes a number of instances of abductees' associations, sometimes for years, with humans of extraordinary paranormal ability who appear to serve as "go-betweens," sometimes described as having a "military" bearing. Hopkins does not consider an occult explanation - to him, apparently, the paranormal is not a human functionality - nor, seemingly, that these may be genuine military figures. To him, they merely look human. They are, he concludes, most likely transgenic, alien-human hybrids.

Consider Stewart, the bizarre acquaintance of abuctee "Sally," who came in and out of her life for 25 years, usually accompanying abductions, while he never seemed to age.

One night Sally awoke, startled to find Stewart standing next to her bed. Despite the fact that her apartment was on an upper floor, the windows were locked, and the door was securely bolted from the inside, there was Stewart, next to her bed. Frightened, Sally nevertheless felt compelled to get up and go with him into the living room. There she served both Stewart and herself a drink, and the two sat together on the couch talking audibly, not telephathically, as was sometimes the case. Stewart was, as usual, interested in her daily routine and questioned her about the mundane details of her life and secretarial job.

At one point, Sally told me, she gathered her courage and decided to ask him a rather basic question: "Are you real?" she wanted to know. "Are you a human being? What are you?" Stewart smiled and ignored the question.

Sally noticed some chest hair poking out over Stewart's shirt collar, reached for it and pulled it out. "He winced and gave her an angry look, but she was pleased to realize that on some physical level he was real and not a phantasm." (Hopkins, jumping to his conclusion, writes that "chest hair [is] something never before, to my knowledge, described as an alien feature." Presumably he is discounting the many accounts of hairy, dwarfish entities, and sticking to the grays.) A few moments after Sally plucks Stewart's chest hair, "three small gray aliens approached and she was taken out the window and into a hovering UFO for a more typical abduction experience."

The next morning, Sally checked all the locks and bolts on the doors and windows and they were all in place. Stewart should not have been able to enter, let alone the "three small gray aliens," but it wasn't a dream. Their unfinished drinks were on the kitchen counter, and her roommate Hannah remembered waking up in the night to "a roaring sound in my head":

I was very scared because I didn't know what it was and then I found that I couldn't move. Something was going on. I heard voices coming from the living room. Sally was talking and there was a man's voice. It was the middle of the night and I couldn't move, and I had no idea who was out there or what was happening. I guess I just must have gone back to sleep, which doesn't make much sense when I think about it. The whole thing was very scary, because there really was a strange man in the apartment and I couldn't even move.

A few years later, in another apartment, both Sally and her new roommate Molly shared an abduction experience. Molly had never before seen or heard of Stewart, but remembered having seen a man matching his description operating inside the UFO alongside the alien entities. She drew a picture for Sally, which Sally recognized as even a better likeness of Stewart than the one she herself had once drawn for Hopkins.

Then there's the middle-aged "Mr Nelson," who walked up to a 15-year old girl named "Terry" in a pizza parlour and invited her to interview for a vaguely-described job the following day. (Her mother, in a bizarre departure from character, saw no problem with her daughter being picked up by a stranger and driven to an "undisclosed location.") En route, Nelson recounted to Terry intimate details of her life which no one, least of all a stranger, should have known. ("That was a terrible thing that your stepfather did to you," he says, and "I know all about your day yesterday. At twelve o'clock you went to Jimmy's house," and told her what her and her boyfriend did. When asked how he knew, he said only, "Oh, I just know.")

The location of the "interview" appeared like an undressed set in a virtually empty office building, and became a scene of Nelson's clumsy sexual advance. Afterwards, supposedly driving Terry home, Nelson drove into the "middle of nowhere, woods and fields everywhere." Under hypnosis, Terry remembered they "came up to a little house on the left with a dirt driveway and we pulled in":

He asked me to sit in the car... I wonder why that house was there. It 's hard to see it. It's like...field grass covers it. Higher than grass...like straw...hay.... He goes in a door. It's like an overhang over it.... I keep seeing the roof like a smooth stone roof. No peaks. And I don't look at it because I'm too scared. I don't want whoever is in the house to see me. I knew that when he went in they were probably talking about me. So I slumped down on the seat so they wouldn't see me. I feel so shaky.... I'm afraid I'm going to be killed.

When Nelson exits the house, he's accompanied by "lots of the other ones.... They're smaller. All the same. No hair.... He comes out and just stands in front of the car, but these other things come out to the side and just look at me...."

Again, Hopkins can't let the phenomena be itself. Because he can't allow bizarre, small creatures to inhabit a stone house, in another here, the house must instead be a spacecraft, and the entities extraterrestials. (Remember, the abduction of Jose Antonio de Silva by dwarfish creatures ended in a stone chamber, not an alien ship.) Because Hopkins can't conceive of someone truly human with Nelson's paranormal ability, or working in concert with non-human entities, then he must have been an alien hybrid.

To understand our own disciplines - and let's respect our studies enough to call them that, regardless of the derisive laughter from those who don't know, and those who don't want to know - we need to be interdisciplinary. We need to talk to each other in order to understand ourselves. And something which should be a great conversational aid is the latest work of Peter Levenda, author of Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement in the Occult. Now, the three-volume Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft, may become one of the most important primers for what's become of us.

Jim Hougan, in his forward to the just-released first book in the series entitled "The Nine" (the second is due in December, and the third next June), describes Sinister Forces as "parapolitics at their most bizarre and, I suspect, their most illuminating":

Like UFOs, conspiracies and assassination, serial killers, mind control and the occult, "evil" isn't something that serious people are supposed to think about. If they did, the emergency reporting system would soon be overloaded. And you know what happens when that occurs. All hell breaks loose.

You know, most of what we talk about here and on similar sites, it's not really the "fringe," or even the "edge" - it's the depth. And it truly is scary as hell down there, because what binds these subjects together is that they are all the study of evil, of one order or another. But if we want to understand where we're going, that's where we have to go first.

Don't get used to it

It's undeniable what they'd have you to think.
It's indescribable, it can drive you to drink. - Bob Dylan

Some people knew as soon as the second plane struck the towers that they were watching, at least, a US domestic co-production. I feel silly admitting this now, but I wasn't one. Even though I'd known for years about black ops, I hadn't known about black magic, and the horrification ritual of that day caught me unaware.

It wasn't until the following week that I began to shake off the spell. I met a lawyer friend for dinner, someone I had known since grade school, someone I trusted implicitly, and he began recounting in a hushed tone the story of a client named Delmart Vreeland. My friend told me about his busy summer, trying to warn US and Canadian authorities of impending and catastrophic acts of terrorism, and that he had witnessed the signing and the sealing of Vreeland's note of a remembered translation, which included the line "Let one happen, stop the rest." (Because Vreeland's foreknowledge improbably warned of Russian and Iraqi collusion - reminiscent of the premeditated frame-up of Lee Harvey Oswald as a Soviet agent, and its purposeful abandonment for the less explosive sham of a "lone gunman" - I think it likely Vreeland was fed disinformation, and joined the event's hall of mirrors. Rather than decipher 9/11, Vreeland is one of its ciphers.)

A few weeks later saw the bizarre anthrax attacks upon the media and the Democratic leadership, just as the Patriot Act was in need a push, and things started coming into focus for me. Though when the FBI allowed the destruction of the original batch of Ames Strain anthrax, which made sourcing the anthrax more difficult, I could still think, How incompetent! (Later, when the anthrax was sourced to Fort Detrick, I was not still so naive as to be surprized.)

The spell was finally broken with the fiasco of the "Battle" of Tora Bora, where intentions were laid bare as bin Laden was surrounded on every side save the one which permitted his escape. An anonymous intelligence official later said that "It was obvious from at least early November that this area was to be the base for an exodus into Pakistan. All of this was known, and frankly we were amazed that nothing was done to prepare for it." Special forces were stood down and made to watch as Pakistani helicopters choppered him and his company to safety. ("The soldier, who said he was on the ground at Tora Bora when bin Laden was located, agreed to talk about the incident on condition that his name not be used, " The Fayetteville Observer reported the following August. "'I said, "There he goes."'") Curiously, these were the special forces which suffered a rash of apparent murder-suicides at Fort Bragg, shortly after their return from Afghanistan.

The war was to go on, seemingly forever. As was the legend of bin Laden.

Yet even as I fell down the 9/11 rabbit hole I kept grabbing at roots, not wanting to fall this far. I didn't want to believe it possible. So, They were incompetent, and got lucky. Nuh uh. They knew something was coming, but looked the other way. No. They let it happen. Still not there. The roots simply couldn't support the accruing weight of evidence. I had to fall quite a while before I realized that my belief, and disbelief, had nothing to do with the depth of the hole.

And now here we are, turning hard upon the fourth anniversary of 9/11, and Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss says he has an "excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is, that the United States is making "very good progress" on his capture, but "when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play."

As with most pronoucements out of Washington, there are many incredibles to unpack in that sentence. For instance, that Porter Goss is CIA director should still make heads shake in disbelief. (And that he's been eclipsed by John Negroponte does nothing to cure our delirious tremens.)

And just think of this: nearly four years after invading Afghanistan to allegedly capture bin Laden, Goss is saying Let's not be too hasty; we need to respect a nation's sovereignty. We can't just go charging in.... But of course that's precisely what Americans believed they were signing on for in the Fall of 2001 as their blood was brought to a boil, though even then, authorities were shifting the goal lines.

In late September 2001, a deal brokered by Pakistan's two Islamic parties would have seen bin Laden extradited to Peshawar where he would be held under house arrest, and face an international tribunal which would assess the evidence for his guilt and decide whether to try him or deliver him to US custody. The US wanted no part of it. (As an offical later stated, "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr bin Laden was captured.")

Though Bush had said he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive" (though he still has not presented the long-promised evidence that 9/11 was bin Laden's handiwork), in March 2002 he said "I truly am not that concerned about him." That April, Richard Myers even admitted that "the goal has never been to get bin Laden." And because that's true, they should claim a great success.

Recently, the suggestion, based on dubious intelligence, that bin Laden had "visited" Iran, was enough to sound the drumbeats that will, someday soon, accompany the cry of "On to Tehren!" Remaining unspoken is the fact that bin Laden has spent nearly all of the past four years as the guest of America's great friend, Pakistan. A friend so close that America's current Director of Central Intelligence was breakfasting with its own director of intelligence on the morning the spell was cast.

After more than four years, we shouldn't still be astonished. But we must be. Otherwise, we'll get used to it.

Heads Up

"There are stories of coincidence and chance, of intersections and strange things told, and which is which and nobody knows; and we generally say, 'Well, if that was in a movie, I wouldn't believe it.'" - Magnolia

As mourners prepared for a funeral near Los Angeles in July, 1869, blood and flesh rained out of a clear sky for three minutes, blanketing two acres of a corn field. The flash ranged in size from small particles to eight-inch strips, and included what witnesses took to be pieces of kidneys, livers and hearts. Samples were taken to the Los Angeles News, whose editor wrote, in the August 3 edition, "That the meat fell, we cannot doubt. Even the parsons in the neighborhood are willing to vouch for that. Where it came from, we cannot even conjecture."

For an hour on an August day in 1963, an enormous amount of straw fell from clouds over Kent. "I looked up, and the sky was full of it," said a witness. A government meteorologist told Associated Press he was "mystified."

On September 23, 1973, tens of thousands of toads fell on Brignoles, France, during what was described as a "freak storm." Peculiarly, they were found to all be young toads.

Charles Fort loved this stuff. Until his death in 1932, he collected hundreds of accounts of anomalous sky falls of organic and inorganic matter. His theory, which according to Jerome Clarke's Unexplained he "cheerfully acknowledged to be preposterous," suggested that "under certain conditions of gravidic and electromagnetic strain in the solar system":

channels open through which material objects can reach the Earth from parts unknown, or can be transferred from one part of the Earth's surface to another.... Let us suppose that a channel opens between this Earth and another, where the surface is a few hundred feet, or a few thousand feet higher. Then things fall, from that Earth to this. Frogs, minding their own affairs in a pond, feel the bottom drop out....

A lot of strange things fall out of America's skies. Why some do is not so strange.

The small plane of Gary Caradori, returning to Nebraska with photographic evidence of an elite paedophile ring run out of the Franklin Credit Union.

The United Airlines jet carrying the wife of Watergate spook E Howard Hunt, as well as thousands of dollars in hush money, who had been threatening to "tell all." (Hunt immediately dropped his extortion of the White House and agreed to plead guilty.)

Paul Wellstone's King Air A100, during an election to decide control of the Senate, after having been the only Senator standing for election to challenge Cheney's war resolution, and just before his name would have been left on the ballot in the event of his death.

The company plane of Jake Horton, Vice President of Gulf Power, which exploded midair as he was en route to confront his Board over dubious accounting and illegal political payoffs. (According to Greg Palast, police received an anonymous call later that day: "You can stop investigating Gulf Power now.")

And we know many others; enough that we can speak confidently of pattern recognition. ("Keep away from small planes" has become our way of saying "Look after yourself.") And since we can describe a pattern - a pattern that repeats - we've left the Fortean realm of anomalies for that of assassination science, as James Fetzer has coined it. It's the coincidentalists who are the true heirs of Charles Fort, because they see no pattern, only anomalies. If they look up at all, they can't make sense of aircraft falling with expedience from the sky. They may as well be seeing toads or straw or meat.

I wonder what Fort would have made of this: in separate incidents last week, two helicopters fell into New York's East River.

The first helicopter, carrying sightseers, concerns us only as a precedent. (Accidents happen, but they also happen sometimes to be a template for attempted murder.) The second helicopter, however, carried "top executives of the financial services company MBNA Corp."

That's enough to merit attention most weeks. But the same week, MBNA made news when a "computer hacker" reportedly "accessed more than 40 million credit card accounts." This attack "was the latest in a series of security lapses affecting consumer information. The breach appears to be the largest yet involving financial data, said David Sobel, general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center."

And like a helicopter in the East River, it doesn't begin or end there. Recent weeks have seen a bizarre rash of "security lapses" at commercial and credit institutions, with headlines like "Personal data on millions of Citigroup clients lost in transit" and "Fed bank insurer's worker data breached".

I don't know what it means, if anything. But I think only a fool could say with confidence that it means nothing.

I'm just feeling like a frog who was minding his own business in a pond, until suddenly, the bottom dropped out.

Look out below.

Doppelganger?

"I was constantly watching myself, my secret self.... It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it." - Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer

I don't know whether this is a brand new rabbit hole, a hidden entrance to an old one, or just some stupid hole in the ground. But we should at least poke a few, strong sticks down it to see how far it goes.

On May 27, Radar Online posted court documents it had obtained showing a "George W Bush Jr" had been convicted in a Midland, Texas court of "unlawful practice of medicine," for which he was fined $2,000 and sentenced to one year's probabtion. (What precisely the practice entailed is not specified.) The charge stems from 1986, the middle of George HW Bush's second unofficial presidential term, the height of Iran/Contra, and the year during which George W Bush claims he stopped drinking. Bush is listed as 5'9" tall, 161 lbs, brown hair and blue eyes, born "12-7-45." This could describe President Bush, though according to his White House biography he was born July 6, 1946.

The lawyer for "George W Bush Jr" was Warren Burnett, legendary Texas attorney, who was also alleged to have represented the other Bush in his expunged conviction for cocaine possession. (Burnett, who would neither confirm or deny the cocaine story, died in 2002 at age 75 "with a cold beer in his hand.")



Radar Online implies that James Hatfield simply got his George W Bushes mixed up when he was researching Fortunate Son, and conflated the two, but that doesn't make sense of the evidence. And a second George W Bush is just the half of it, at best.

On June 4, 1999, with the presidential candidacy of at least one of these Midland George W Bushes in its infancy, Online Journal published a curious investigative story by Linda Starr and Bev Conover entitled "What Is George Dubya hiding?"

What prompted their question was the discovery that on March 31, 1995, the newly-elected Governor Bush had been issued a driver's license with the entirely new number of 000000005, which destroyed the records of his previous license. Laura's license was renewed the same day, but she retained her old number, which is common practice. Bush's parents have kept theirs, as have every other former governor of Texas. Starr and Conover ask whether the Governor had "something in his past to hide to cause him to purge the old record and number. This seems especially confusing since his birthday is July 6, 1946, but he obtained his new number on March 31, 1995 as a renewal."

Further, they write:

During our search for the truth about Dubya's past, we came across something very interesting indeed! Another George W. Bush, white male, blue eyes, brown hair, but born on Oct. 17, 1964! What called our attention to this person, since there are so many Bushes living in Texas, is that this person's record was deleted on Dec. 24, 1998.

Starr and Conover called the Houston number listed for the address shown on the deleted Bush's license. A woman who refused to identify herself said she had never heard of him. And a spokesperson for Bush's Presidential Exploratory Committee said she "doubted" that something had been expunged from the Governor's record, but she couldn't explain the issuance of a new license.

So what's all this about? And just how many George W Bush's are there?

We should note that the signatures of the 1986 "George W Bush Jr" and President Bush are not a match -



so it's unlikely that the person who signed the court document now occupies the White House. As unlikely as it seems, that would appear to leave pure coincidence as the most likely explanation. Except this is the Bush family we're talking about, so we should excercise caution when talking about both appearances and coincidences.

And what about the other, other George W Bush, also of brown hair and blue eyes, said to have been born on October 17, 1964, who became an unperson on December 24, 1998? Was this the whispered love child - or more accurately, graduation party child - fathered out of high school by the soon-to-be Bonesman, born to the daughter of a local evangelist? It's unlikely that a disowned son would bear his name. Coincidence? Again, probably, if it wasn't a Bush. Yet again, it is. And why was his record deleted just as the George W Bush tooled up for a presidential run?

Could legal fictions named "George W Bush" - close but no cigar to the original - have been created and entered into the system to take his rap, even post facto, vacuum up his messes, and then be made to disappear?

Incredibly, maybe. But then, how real is the original?


By the way, here's a follow up to the reopening of the Atlanta serial murder investigation (and thanks to "airdrawndagger" for the link): "Georgia Officials Fighting Effort to Release Klan File in Atlanta Child Murders Case".

And after a week of talk of Sirius, dog days, ritually slain canines and former Processeans running the "world's favorite animal shelter," what are we to think of the PETA employees, charged with cruelty to animals, who made a practice of dumping carcasses behind a shopping mall? (Thanks again to readers for the story.)

Forum update

Almost all of our data has been recovered from the ezboard crash. The process, I'm told, is ongoing, so there is still hope we will still see the remainder. Old threads may be resumed.

Until the process is complete I'll keep the temporary forum open. When it's finished, unless there's a consensus to keep them distinct, I'll consolidate the boards.

Don't worry, it's just the news

That's the lurid headline from Irish News of the World, May 26th 1996. I found it on the website of Jim Cairns, author of Disappeared off the face of the earth , which he claims is a "detailed account of the failures and the crimes of the Irish and British establishment" regarding missing persons, murders, and Satanic paedophile rings.

Cairns writes:

In the late 1970s and early 1980s people began to go missing in Ireland more frequently and in greater numbers. This was a new phenomenon not evident in previous decades, but in the early 1990s the public began to realise there was a serious problem!

I have no doubts that my information on high level paedophile groups and elitist Satanic covens is based on fact, and given the recent exposes in the Operation Ore investigations into paedophile rings at the highest levels in British political circles, which seem to implicate serving MPs in the Government, my book will help to open the minds of those detractors who label such claims as "just another conspiracy theory"!

Read my book and decide for yourself if there is indeed a conspiracy by those in power and by those with immense wealth!

I know nothing about Cairns or his claims, but his hyperbolic assertions and unrequited love for the exclamation point would have led me to presume, and not so long ago, that he was an obsessive crank who could tell me nothing I needed to know. But now I know enough that I can't do that.

Some of today's headlines from Britain:

Children trafficked into Britain for sacrifice rituals (The Guardian)

An unknown number of children are being trafficked from Africa and then used in ritualistic abuse and sacrifice offerings in the UK, according to a leaked report from the Metropolitan police.

Boys "used for human sacrifice" (BBC)

"Members of the workshop said for spells to be powerful it required a sacrifice of a male child unblemished by circumcision," the report said.

Contributors said boys were being trafficked into the UK for this purpose, but did not give details because they said they feared they would be "dead meat" if they told any more.

Child sacrifices in London (Evening Standard)

Last month Scotland Yard revealed it had traced just two out of 300 black boys aged four to seven reported missing from London schools in a three-month period. The true figure for missing boys and girls is feared to be several thousand a year.

The scale of the problem emerged through the murder inquiry following the discovery of a child's torso in the Thames in September 2001. The identity of the victim, named Adam by police, is not known but his background was traced to Nigeria. It is believed he died in a ritual sacrifice.

Children trafficked for sacrifice, says report (The Times)

Secretary Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said it was important countries worked together to tackle crimes related to people-trafficking. "But it's classically an issue, like all people-trafficking issues, where people are being moved across the whole world, essentially for money, by very substantial criminal organisations."


"Perhaps there's something terrible happening out there which we are not aware of." - John Azah, police advisor

The report may imply the problem is restricted to Britain's immigrant population, but that was merely the report's scope: its ten-month investigation, a recommendation of the Laming Inquiry into the death of eight-year old Victoria Climbié, had been limited to the African and Asian communities of just two London boroughs. "Workshops were held with the members of the public on topics such as female genital mutilation, physical chastisement, forced marriage and faith-related child abuse." It was the magnitude of the abuse in the communities under the microscope, and its ritual character, which shocked investigators.

But there's another report commissioned by the British government, released in 2000 to largely embarrassed silence, that suggests the problem of ritual abuse and child sacrifice is not just out of Africa, but one which crosses communities and is far more widespread than most could imagine. I referred to its conclusions in the post Walpurgisnacht: "satanic abuse does take place in Britain," the report found, and its victims do not suffer from "false memory syndrome":

The report, ordered by the Department of Health, focuses on the experiences of 50 "survivors". Compiled by Dr John Hale, director of the Portman Clinic in London, and psychotherapist Valerie Sinason, it will reopen the debate which started a decade ago with testimonies from children in Nottingham, Rochdale and Orkney.

Its findings contradict the claims of a report ordered by the Conservative government in 1994, which concluded that satanic abuse was a "myth". It follows the growing concern of child protection agencies, and the Government, over organised child abuse.

Last week, it emerged that police were investigating the alleged sexual and physical abuse of up to 4,000 children in care homes and council-run homes in Devon. Ms Sinason, who has treated 126 ritual abuse survivors, said yesterday that in many cases children were tortured by being held under water or made to believe they had witnessed the murder of infants as part of the satanic ritual.

"Some children are born for the purpose of abuse and are not registered on birth certificates," she added. "The abusers use trickery to convince children they have taken part in murder. This increases the power of the abuser."

A US headline today reads Many are missing, few make the news, and says the FBI maintains more than 100,000 active files on missing adults and children in the United States.

I wonder, what became of them all? And I wonder, what became of some of them?

"Hope you guess my name"

On July 13, 1970, California highway patrol picked up "two longhairs," Stanley Baker and Harry Allen Stroup, on suspicion of a hit-and-run near Big Sur. Baker not only readily admitted fleeing the scene, but added "I have a problem. I'm a cannibal ." In the pockets of both men were found human finger bones, taken from a recent victim in Montana named James Schlosser, whose mutilated remains were also missing a heart. Baker confessed to having eaten it.

Remember the times: the Tate-LaBianca murders were the summer before, and Manson and his Family members were in custody but not yet convicted. (Manson's trial didn't conclude until the following July.) A couple of murderous, hippie cannibals tripping around Southern California with bones in their pocket - why not? It was what the helter skelter mainstream mania was conditioning America's consciousness to expect from its counterculture. Baker's eager confession to crimes of which he was not a suspect suggest he may have been part of the program.

The criminal system's handling of Baker suggest it got with the program, too: though he was a convicted multiple murderer and confessed cannibal who howled at full moons and had 11 makeshift weapons conviscated in custody, "administrators still saw fit to let him travel through the prison system, teaching transactional analysis to other inmates" and proselytizing for his Satanic cult. Stroup was released in 1979 and Baker in 1986, "requesting that his present whereabouts remain confidential."

Baker claimed he had been recruited into a neo-Nazi Satanic cult while in a Wyoming college, which he identified as the "Four Pi Movement," also known as the 4P. It was a splinter of the Process Church, which itself had broken away from the Church of Scientology. The name was derived from the Processean symbol of four P's arranged in a stylized Swastika, representing Jehovah, Jesus, Lucifer and Satan. (Members "were urged to pick one that they could identify with and devote themselves to that deity.")

Four P rituals were conducted "on the basis of a stellar timetable, including the sacrifice of Doberman and German shepherd dogs":

Beginning in June 1968, authorities in San Jose, Santa Cruz, and Los Gatos began recording discovery of canines, skinned and drained of blood without apparent motive. As the director of the Santa Cruz animal shelter told [Ed] Sanders, "Whoever is doing this is a real expert with a knife. The skin is cut away without even marking the flesh. The really strange thing is that these dogs have been drained of blood." If we accept the word of isolated witnesses, the missing blood was drunk by cultists in their ceremonies. So, according to reports, was human blood, obtained from sacrificial victims murdered on a dragon-festooned altar.

Baker reported having participated in human sacrifices in the Santa Ana Mountains, and confessed to playing a part in the April 20, 1970 murder of Robert Salem, a 40-year-old lighting designer in San Francisco stabbed 27 times and nearly decapitated. Slogans were painted on the walls in Salem's blood, including "Zodiac" and "Satan Saves," which, according to Baker, "were meant to stir up panic in an atmosphere already tense from revelations in the Manson murder trial."

The killings, he said, were on the order of the group leader, known as the "Grand Chignon" (a title which was also used for Manson by some Family members who were said to have links to the group). The Grand Chignon was reputed to be a wealthy, middle-aged, Los Angeles businessman. Four P is known by other names - the "Children" in New York, the "Children of Light" in Alabama, perhaps even Henry Lee Lucas's "Hand of Death":

A faction called the "Black Cross" is said to operate as a kind of Satanic Murder Incorporated, fielding anonymous hit teams for cultists nationwide, disposing of defectors and offering pointers on the fine art of human sacrifice. If law enforcement spokesmen are correct, the cult is also deeply involved in...child pornography , and the international narcotics trade.

Four P did not die out with its hippie slavestock. Between October 1976 and October 1977 a disturbing pattern resumed, this time in New York City, when 85 German shepherds and Dobermans were found skinned and drained of blood. And then came the "Son of Sam."

David Berkowitz claimed the Sam murders had been a group action, and that he had been selected to be the fall guy for all of them. He said the group was a Satanic cult called "the Four Pi." To support his allegations, he shared unpublished facts of the ritual murder of Stanford, California student, and native of Bismark, North Dakota, Arlis Perry. A murder that remains officially unsolved.

On October 11, 1974 - the anniversary of Manson's arrest - Perry was brutally slain in Stanford's Memorial Church. She had been beaten, choked and stabbed behind the ear with an ice pick. Her body was found with a tall candle in her vagina, and another between her breasts.

Berkowitz said she had been murdered by California cultists as a favour to their associates in North Dakota, who had been offended by the Christian Perry's attempt to evangelize some of their members. Maury Terry investigated Berkowitz's claims for his book The Ultimate Evil and not only found evidence for a Satanic cult in Bismark, but that it had held midnight meetings in the woods behind Mary College - "a tiny school that neither we in New York nor the California police had ever hear of" - just as Berkowitz had said.

Terry writes:

The cult's existence in a wooded area behind the school has been confirmed by at least ten people, including police officers, area residents, nuns who taught at Mary College and other Bismark citizens who were involved in Christian activities. Importantly, the latter sources belonged to the same religious organizations as Arlis did.... A friend said "She definitely knew about it. We discussed the cult several times at our...meetings."

One nun who taught at Mary told me: "My students knew all about it. They said the cult used to kill dogs back of here." ... A married couple who lived in a trailer home near the cult meeting site at Mary told me that they saw torches and heard chanting and that three of their pet dogs were abducted in the middle of the night and later found mutilated inside a circle of stones.

The morning of Perry's Bismark funeral, a man in clad in black was seen trying to break into the church. Two weeks later, her grave marker was stolen.

Perry's pastor told Terry that before the murder, "a friend of one of my parishioners went down to Mary and hid out on the hill one night to spy on the cult. I never found out who they were, but she said there were some well-known Bismark citizens in attendance." Berkowitz had also asserted that the Bismark cult included prominent citizens.

Mandan police sergeant Lamar Kruckenberg told Terry that "In early '74 an undercover cop was brought to an indoor cult meeting in Bismark by one of his informants":

He was looking for drug activity - there was no suggestion of murder at this time, which was about seven months before Arlis' death. This cop told me the people there were wearing masks because there were supposed to be some respected Bismark people among them.

The Son of Sam case is a quarter-century old. In America, that qualifies as ancient history, yet it's neither. The received story is of one more lone nut; this one, an overweight slob who was hearing voices from his neighbour Sam's dog. Less well known is that the actual sons of Sam Carr, John and Michael, were likely Berkowitz's fellow cultists. Before he could answer Berkowitz's allegations, John was found shot to death in February 1978, "SSNYC" scrawled next to his body, which seems to suggest "Son of Sam, New York City." The following October, Michael died in a mysterious car accident.

The case of cannibal-at-large Stanley Baker, and the ritual slaying of Arlis Perry? They aren't even considered important enough now to explain with creative fictions.

All those dead dogs, skinned and drained of blood? We'll pretend they're sleeping, and let them lie.

And the respected figures behind the masks, and their black magick, national network of ritual murder, child pornography and drug trafficking? Well, let's just say that can't possibly be true.