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Passport to Paranoia
When I started systematically reading the literature on this subject, both fiction and non-fiction, I found several consistent patterns in it. The most obvious was what people in the Sixties Movement called "paranoia."
This is not the mental disease described in psychology texts, which involves uncontrollable emotions of fear over imaginary dangers, but the intellectual conclusion that something you dislike is about to happen, even though you can't actually prove it.
Most "paranoia" of this type in the Sixties Movement was focused on harassment of the counterculture by the government or private individuals; the "paranoid" ideas discussed in this chapter focus mostly on the concept that unknown forces are manipulating the course of human history in directions that seem sinister and frightening.
Starting with Book of the Damned in 1918, he was the first to publish many of the simplest and most obvious explanations for a number of strange occurrences. For example, he proposed that the inhabitants of other worlds might be visiting the Earth in space ships long before the terms "flying saucer" and "UFO" were invented, and he also speculated that we might be receiving visitations from the future or from other dimensions.
I assumed he was talking about the Invisible College and the Eighteenth-century Freemasons and Rosicrucians, but his mentions of this subject are all quite vague.
He is widely quoted as saying,
I found the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote at about the same time as Fort, to be both more interesting and more disturbing.
His horror tales make utterly grotesque monsters seem entirely real to the reader, as if the author himself believed what he was writing. The basic theme of most of Lovecraft's stories is the persecution of his characters by evil, superhuman beings called the "Great Old Ones."
Sometimes they are described as physical beings with octopus-like bodies, but in other stories they seem to be non-corporeal. Lovecraft frequently describes them with phrases such as "Dead Cthulhu lies dreaming."
Once released, Cthulhu and his cohorts often devour both the body and the soul of the unfortunate magician; and if they remain on Earth very long, they cause children in the area to be born as deformed monsters.
In terms of the plots of the stories themselves, nothing. However, anyone with sufficient conscious mediumistic powers to receive messages from the spirit-world with any regularity finds certain details in Lovecraft's horror tales disturbingly familiar.
Some of the "evil spirits" commonly contacted on the astral plane express many of the same thoughts as Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, and numerous "Lost Souls" - spirits at a low level of development who seem to be having trouble adjusting to life after death - sound just like the hapless victims in the stories. My conclusion from this was simply that Lovecraft, like Shaver, channeled a lot of the details in his stories from the spirit-world.
I couldn't find real answers from the details in Lovecraft's stories any more than I could from Shaver's, because I had no theoretical frame of reference to fit the information into. Nothing theorized by Fort, Shaver, Lovecraft, or anyone else was helpful in interpreting this kind of data.
Even though Burroughs' name is synonymous in the public mind with chaotic avant-garde writing and with "the author as junkie and madman," his work is easier to read and contains more useful knowledge about the spiritual conspiracies I was looking for than that of Lovecraft or Shaver. One of the major themes that run through his books is that mysterious "agents" are working to manipulate the course of human history.
Burroughs assumes that not all agents are on the same side, though he never clearly reveals how many different factions are involved or what their ideologies are. He does hint from time to time that some of the agents are extraterrestrials, or perhaps beings from other dimensions.
In most of his books, Burroughs describes this as being done on a strictly physical level: through violence, intimidation, bribery, or just plain "hard sell" persuasion. Both psychedelics like LSD and hard drugs like heroin are also widely used by the agents to alter people's consciousness in connection with other means of manipulation.
There is frequent mention of telepathy and other psychic powers, but they are usually described in vague terms.
For example, take a low-level CIA agent whose immediate superior and control is a double agent. Now, the second agent's role is complex enough; he's playing both sides, and perhaps actually favoring one of them over the other. But the first agent's role is in a totally different category: he or she is functioning as a double agent without knowing it.
A lie-detector test would affirm this agent's loyalty to the CIA, yet the person's actual work could all be against the interests of that organization.
The reader is given reason to doubt that the organization the agent is working for is actually what it purports to be.
This, in turn, means that conspiracies have to make at least rough sense in terms of motivation and self-interest. A
nd I hadn't found out much during all my years of
looking for negative conspiracies that furthered the interests of
the people in them.
I will begin with one from his first published book, Naked Lunch (1959):
Next, here are some excerpts from one of his latest books, The Place of Dead Roads (1983):
Ghostwritten by William Hall, punch-drunk fighter, a shadowy figure to win in the answer, Master of Assassins, Death for his credentials, Lord of "Quien Es?"
John Keel is another writer whose theories seem quite paranoid on the surface but proved very helpful to me in making the breakthrough.
He is the Ufologist who claimed back in the Sixties that mysterious "Men in Black" often pose as government agents and harass people who have seen UFOs to keep them from talking about their experiences. A major theme in all of his books is that the U.S. Government, and other governments all over the world, deliberately interfere with independent UFO investigations and make a major effort to cover up the truth about UFOs.
What has all this expensive bureaucratic investigation learned about UFOs?
I suspect that the government files contain roughly the same type of information, as do the private UFO investigators' files, except that there's more of it and it's written in different jargon.
However, I do believe that government investigators are able to find enough information to keep them convinced that there is something real and important behind the phenomenon. So the investigations continue, and the government covers up their magnitude to prevent public criticism for spending so much tax money without discovering any real answers to the UFO mystery.
Keel's Superspectrum seems to be based loosely on Jung's concept that the human race possesses a "collective unconscious," but he carries the idea much further than Jung did. Jung had conceived of the collective unconscious only as a body of information stored in the subconscious minds of many different individuals that causes all of them to think or behave in similar ways.
However, he doesn't conclude that the Superspectrum is a being or group of beings, as the occultists usually do with their concepts of gods, demons, and spirits. Instead, it is simply a kind of natural phenomenon with a "computer-like intelligence."
The next writer I discuss has researched this same line of reasoning even further.
When Vallee started his investigations in the Sixties, his working hypothesis assumed that UFOs were a physical phenomenon: either extraterrestrial spaceships or advanced flying machines built on Earth.
However, in 1969 Vallee published Passport to Magonia, in which he reluctantly admits that many accounts of UFO sightings and "close encounters" with their occupants resemble religious and mystical experiences more than they do observations of physical events. He obviously didn't want to do this, but he really had no choice if he wanted to remain truly scientific and empirical in his methods, because that's where the information he was gathering led him.
Vallee also learned that contactees all over the world, regardless of their background knowledge of the subject or their personality type, received similar information from the "space people" and underwent similar personality changes afterwards. This lead him to believe that "close encounters" with UFOs are not a purely subjective psychological phenomenon, but have an objective cause.
Instead, much of the evidence concerning UFO-encounters resembled descriptions of psychic and spiritual phenomena in occult literature.
This introduced a further complication; Jacques Vallee is one of the world's best-known computer experts, and he did not want to jeopardize his reputation with the scientific establishment by using terms drawn from occultism or religion to describe the phenomena he was studying. So instead of talking openly about telepathy, spirits, etc., he invented a jargon of his own to describe the same concepts.
In 1975, he published The Invisible College, in which he recounts further cases of mental reprogramming through UFO encounters and cites evidence that similar encounters with "mysterious visitors" have been occurring for hundreds of years.
He mentions that secret conspiracies may have
influenced the development of modern science and political theory
while working through the Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. The name of the book is derived from the use of the term "Invisible College" to describe some of these secret societies, but Vallee doesn't emphasize that most writers who've used it were occultists and have assumed that the Invisible College indoctrinated people using psychic powers and occult rituals. Instead, he postulates that the Invisible College employed methods similar to those used by modern behavioral psychologists, based entirely on operant conditioning by physical means.
For example, the majority crone away from their experience believing that a higher power had chosen them to play a special role in advancing human civilization.
They seemed filled with hope, optimism, and creative energy, expressing the belief that contactees are going to help the "Space Brothers" lead the human race into a New Age in which Earth will take its place among the advanced civilizations of the universe.
They also talked about the general concept that the Sixties counterculture called "consciousness expansion," especially forms of it achieved without using psychedelic drugs, but they usually expressed it in terms that wouldn't directly identify them with the controversy over drugs and hippies.
It was immediately obvious to me that this was just another form of the "Aquarian Age Message," phrased in terms of space-traveling aliens and galactic civilizations instead of the terminology of the counterculture.
Vallee had become extremely disillusioned with the whole concept of mysterious conspiracies that meddled in earthly affairs and tried to change the course of history by reprogramming the minds of individuals. He was more convinced than ever that such conspiracies existed, but had gone from considering them beneficial to condemning them as evil.
Some leaders of contact cults were saying "democracy is obsolete," and becoming despots over their groups. A few had taken reactionary stands on social and political issues that resembled the views traditionally held by Fundamentalist churches.
Others reminded him of the Nazis by saying that contactees are a "master race" with extraterrestrial blood in their veins. Above all, he was disturbed to see contact-cult members running their lives according to messages passed to the leaders from "space people" instead of thinking for themselves.
Vallee isn't certain who these people are, only that they don't seem to be physical extraterrestrials or supermen.
He speculates they might be government intelligence agents, especially of the CIA and KGB, or perhaps members of extra-governmental conspiracies like the hypothetical "Illuminati." Whoever they may be, he doesn't like them.
The main reason for this
change is apparently that he has started working with
Robert Anton
Wilson, who has held the "good guys and bad guys" view of the whole
thing for years, as I describe in the next chapter.
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