“The Manson Family preached peace and love and went around killing people. We don’t preach peace and love. And, we haven’t killed anybody—yet.” -Jim Kweskin

It was July 25, 1965, the Newport Folk Festival, the fabled night that Bob Dylan went electric. Many have opined, mostly boomers, on this moment’s significance in American folk music history—the musico-political implications of acoustic to electric transition, ethnomusicologies of betrayal, and so on. Playing an electric Fender guitar and backed by Paul Butterfield’s amplified blues-rock band, Dylan’s unanticipated sonic force was met with now mythical audience outcry, shock, dismay, and has been dramatically rendered for contemporary reconsumption in biopics and other nostalgia forums. These popular tableaus remain incomplete, however, for they often neglect to disclose that the night did not end with Electric Dylan. Indeed, a counterforce, percolating for years, sprang forth oppositional in the “mournful and lonesome harmonica” stylings of Mel Lyman: a man who would come to be known as the “East Coast Charles Manson” and the “Howard Hughes of the underground.”1

It was Mel Lyman’s harmonica rendition of Rock of Ages that so soothed and transfixed the Dylan-frenzied Newport crowd that they neatly filed home that night as if in hypnotic trance, their mutinous energy harmonically transposed, alchemized, into subdued and tranquil acceptance of the great sonic bifurcation now upon them. Who was Mel Lyman, this shadow figure behind Dylan, whose fingerprints and breath may be found indelibly imprinted upon some of the most important and influential folk records ever recorded in this country, but whose life remains to this day so enigmatic and occulted?

It’s been said by Dylan’s and Lyman’s contemporaries that at this moment in 1965, two roads within the counterculture diverged.2 To be sure, many followed Dylan into the 70s, despite whatever initial resistance they might have expressed, into what the die-hard folk aficionados referred to as aesthetic vandalism and capitulation to the commercial engine of the record industry—the road to rock and roll. But some took the road less traveled by, following Mel Lyman toward communes, UFO cults, and LSD—into the dark heart of the folkie dream.

Mel Lyman was born under a sun in Aries on March 24, 1938 in Eureka, California to Jessie Mae, a waitress, and James Lyman, a World War II and Korean war veteran and supervisor of the civil engineering department at Hamilton Air Force Base.34 By 17, Mel had earned a diploma from San Francisco’s Mission Adult Night School where he studied IBM programming, or as Mel put it, “shot dope and ran IBM machines.”5 Somewhere along the line, between working as a computer technician in 1955 and ultimately leaving the field behind altogether in 1961, Mel had developed a calling for folk music which required, naturally, that he abandon his family in California and hit the road as half of a folk duo gathering “signatures to a petition asking President Kennedy to redouble efforts to reach an international agreement banning nuclear bomb tests and outlawing the bombs.”6 Spotlighted by The Oregon Daily Journal in April of 1961 in an article titled “Duo Beats Tom-Tom to Ban Bomb-Bomb,” the pair set forth their peacetime credo and sang watered-down Tom Lehrer-type tunes:

Dear senator, come home,

Before they bomb D.C.

And we’ll have an old-fashioned barbecue

And a hydrogen fricassee.7

Mel had just shown up one day on the Brandeis College campus in Waltham, Massachusetts in the spring of 1963—he was living there with his girlfriend, Brandeis student Judy Silver, and orbiting the Boston area as the fulcrum of a “hearty band of experimenting dealers and dopers.”8 Mel presented himself in this scene as “a simple kind of person,” “kind of Appalachian, very casual,” which belied his relatively sophisticated background in engineering and computing.9 Of course, Mel was still married to his first teenage bride, Sophie, but didn’t let this entanglement prevent him from establishing a new life with (and impregnating) Judy Silver in Massachusetts.

Mel quickly became a fixture at Timothy Leary’s Newton Centre mansion and part of the quasi-religious International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), along with Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), Aldous Huxley, Bruce Conner, Allen Ginsberg and others, and having apparently seen a write up in the Anthropological Review on the preparation and consumption of ipomoea purpurea seeds, had taken to grinding up handfuls in Leary’s coffee grinder from a “500-pound bag” of seeds kept in the Newton Centre home’s kitchen.10 Mel had the distinguished honor of having been part of Leary’s and Alpert’s first experiments with psychedelics at Harvard and later attributed the abrupt dissolution of his relationship with Judy Silver to a psychological breakdown Silver suffered after Leary made her an unwitting subject of one of his psychedelic experiments: “[t]hose fucking bastards over at IFIF gave her acid,” fulminated Mel, “I told her not to take it. I knew her head couldn’t take it.”11 Drs. Alpert and Leary would soon be dismissed from Harvard for, inter alia, violating certain standards of rigor and ethics like administering LSD and psilocybin to undergraduate students such as Judy Silver.

In his Essay on the New Age, Mel recalls during the IFIF days that “Tim Leary used to say, ‘if you don’t like what you’re doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.” Said Mel, “I used to be fool enough to believe him, until I ran out of records.”12 It was Leary & Co. who, while Mel was “frantically trying to hold [his] peace of mind together, when [he] was clinging to all the things that had been [him],” helped Mel come to the understanding that he was indeed “infinite and eternal” and that life “had all been a silly game”—with a little assistance from Sandoz’s finest.13

Mel traveled the country as a hobo in pursuit of musical authenticity: he “strapped a pack of harmonicas to [his] back, slung [his] banjo over [his] shoulder, and set out from Portland, Oregon on a freight train to find all the folk musicians in this country that [he] admired,” to learn and to live the kind of music he saw played by others, but not yet by himself. “Brother Percy Randolph in New Orleans taught me how to play the blues on a mouth harp,” said Mel. “He didn’t teach me how to FEEL them, I’d been lonely all my life, but he taught me how to make the instrument REFLECT how I felt.” J.C. Burris, Sonny Terry’s nephew, taught Mel “more [about harmonica playing] in the basement of a tenement house in Harlem” and Reverend Gary Davis “took [Mel] around with him for a while and told [Mel] wonderful stories.” But it was Woody Guthrie from whom Mel learned “real songs,” and Obray Ramsey who “took [Mel] in as his son for two years” and taught him the “mysteries of the banjo” in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia.1415 It was through this process of absorption that Acolyte Mel synthesized these disparate fragments of folk, blues, and old-time country and became a musician himself, or as Mel describes his musical instruction, a “long process of control and release, dams, irrigation, flood control, navigation.”16

In 1963, Mel was busted on dope in Florida, faced a Tallahasse trial and a brief imprisonment; he’d been growing a pot crop out there, dealing drugs, taking in a steady stream of Dexedrine, and associating with a conman at that time who was “scheming to steal cars in El Paso.”17 Mel contemplated the reality of prison in a letter to a friend in May of 1963, indicating a preoccupation with ideas of opposites: “Monday I leave for Florida to stand trial for something or other. The law of opposites is inherent in the physical life of man & these two contradictory forces are responsible for all earthly action… heaven & hell… freedom vs. slavery… society & all it’s (sic) precautions & lies, hence jail.”

Mel’s professional musical career began in earnest when he was hired onto the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, a Boston group influenced by black vaudeville and medicine show acts of the 20s and 30s in the urban south—a fusion of ragtime, jazz, and Memphis blues before the blues even received its name. It was music for entertainment, often using found objects refashioned into instruments (Gus Cannon of Cannon’s Jug Stompers is famously said to have learned to play the banjo as a child on an instrument he fashioned out of a racoon skin stretched over a frying pan). To satisfy the terms of his probation, Mel needed a steady job—something more stationary and official than the peripatetic troubadour role he was used to playing—Kweskin provided just that.18

During this probationary period, Mel was housed by Jim and Marilyn Kweskin in their tiny attic room: “[h]e brought his cat Theodore, a record player, a dresser, an old cat scratcher, a Tiffany lamp, a school-type desk and chair, a double bed, his old radio, a legless chair, cushions, hot plate, pictures, utensils and an old Mexican fertility rug which he hung on the door.”19 According to Jim Kweskin, “[d]ownstairs it was a constant party, beer, music and all the dope freaks who came to hang out… People slept everywhere, anywhere, the big attic room across from Mel’s was always full… But Mel never came down and joined the party.” Instead, Mel stayed up in the attic listening exclusively to Ray Charles records. Kweskin “asked him once why he never listened to any other kind of music. He said, ‘Ray Charles contains all music.’”20

Here’s a quick genealogy of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Kweskin had been playing at Club 47 in Cambridge, ground zero for the 60s folk revival, “with a ragtag group of musicians,” and Maynard Solomon, cofounder of Vanguard Records, happened to be in the audience one night. “Afterward, Solomon asked Kweskin if he’d like to make a record with that band, to which Kweskin replied, ‘Well, that’s not a band, but I’d love to make a record.’”21 So Kweskin got to pulling together a crew: Fritz Richmond (washtub bass, jug), Bob Siggins (banjo) who was soon replaced by Bill Keith (banjo, guitar), Bruno Wolfe (harmonica, vocals), Geoff and Maria Muldaur (vocals, percussion, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, washboard, and kazoo), and Richard Greene (fiddle). Mel Lyman was soon added on harmonica. Things get tricky here, because the Jug Band Family Tree is not what it might appear on its face.

The story often told by Jim Kweskin and others is that Mel got his spot in the Jug Band when Bruno Wolfe, due to a drug problem, required replacement.22 Trouble was, Mel didn’t exactly replace Bruno—they played together on the Jug Band’s second album (Greatest Hits!: “Morning Blues” [Wolfe’s vocals], “Ukelele Lady” [Wolfe’s vocals], “I’m a woman” [Mel blowing Harmonica—Maria Muldaur cries “c’mon Mel” to bridge a harmonica solo]) and gigged together as well (also, have you ever heard of a small jug band with two different harmonica players?). And, having been the protege of Timothy Leary, marinating in acid and other psychedelics for some years now and on probation for a dope charge in Florida, Mel wasn’t exactly the ideal replacement for Bruno if drug use was a concern. Plus, Kweskin himself was alleged to have been a “pretty heavy dealer” of “top quality ‘A’ reefer.”23

Oh, and Bruno Wolfe wasn’t Bruno’s real name—nor were George T. Bouquet, Joe Flanken, Hugh Bialy, or Rex Rakish—nor any other of the many pseudonyms used by David Simons, Bruno’s real name, who also happened to be a Scientologist. Simons, an old pot-smoking buddy of Kweskin’s, allegedly arrived in Cambridge after following Kweskin and his wife Marilyn from Berkeley.24 Simons apparently divined through numerology that he “could never achieve greatness as David Simon (sic), so he changed his name frequently.” Simons’ mouth harp style is said to be unusual and exuberant, his singing of a “delightfully offhanded, innocent manner.” Though Simons had difficulty fitting himself into the rest of the jug band, “his playing was just out of step,” “there were many times he made a musical connection that was so spectacular that if it had been an electrical connection, he could have illuminated a city the size of Ahlington.”25

Simons’ devotion to cacophony was his sonic specialty: he “played the harmonica, the kazoo, the exit light, trash can lids, or anything noisy.”26 Per Geoff Muldaur on an online forum, “[h]e (Simons) was trouble, but I loved his singing style.” Joe Boyd, Elektra Records producer, former roommate of Geoff Muldaur, and proprietor of London’s psychedelic UFO Club, also the man responsible for the Electric Dylan Debacle, described Simons as “Jim Kweskin’s court jester.”27 The Jester, after allegedly being kicked out of the Kweskin band, became somewhat of an operative of musical destruction. Boyd ascribed the ruination of The Incredible String Band (ISB), a whimsical acid folk outfit with a strong Celtic flavor originally comprised of Robin Williamson, Clive Palmer, and Mike Heron (and influence on The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Neil Tennant and others), to Simons’ indoctrination of the members into Scientology. Per Boyd, the ISB’s fey charm, since going clear, had been eroded: the group’s “new compositions began to lose their wild melodic beauty. In the studio, there were fewer moments of surprise and inspiration.”28 Soon, with the band’s increasing devotion to Scientology, the ISB was no more.

Simons popped up in the Greenwich Village folk scene aiming to set up a band called “Wolfgang and the Wolf Gang,”29 later is alleged to have run a macrobiotic dim sum truck in New York City, and seems to have played a role in the creation of the Erewhon grocery store as a disciple of the Kushi Family’s macrobiotic commune. Ever the cipher, Simons also did a stint in Norman Greenbaum’s Dr. West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band as a bass player, his departure from Greenbaum’s group coinciding with the demise of that band as well.30

Bob Siggins helped start the Jim Kweskin Jug Band off on banjo, at the request of Kweskin himself, and stayed only long enough to make the first record.31 Siggins was a founding member of the Charles River Valley Boys, but left a promising professional music career to study at Harvard and pursue molecular neurophysiology. After obtaining his doctorate, Siggins began working at the Scripps Clinic as “part of a research team exploring the workings of the human mind and the effects of various drugs on the nerve cells of the brain.”32

“Some call Siggins a research psychopharmacologist, others an electrophysiologist. Whatever, he’s a member of the division of preclinical neuroscience and endocrinology.” Siggins’ division at Scripps was lead by Floyd Bloom who recruited Siggins after the two men had worked well together, studying schizophrenia, in the Laboratory of Neuropharmacology with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC.33

Beyond his intellect and expert bluegrass fingerpicking, Siggins brought another boon to the Jug Band by way of proximity: “[h]is upstairs neighbor was on the Board of Directors for the Club 47. His name was Paul Rothchild.” (The Charles River Valley Boys were one of the most over-qualified bluegrass bands of all time: all founding members were Harvard students, and beyond Siggins, guitarist and mandolinist Ethan Signer became a well-known professor of biology at MIT and John Byrne Cooke, guitarist and vocalist, was the son of British-born journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke and the great-grandnephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson).

Then there was Fritz Richmond, a master of both the jug and the washtub bass, who after a stint in the Army began playing with the Charles River Valley Boys. “Drawing on his expertise as an Army helicopter mechanic, he strung the washtub bass with a steel cable, turning it into a usable instrument. To play it, he developed his own steel-and-rawhide gloves.”34 Fritz was the originator of the colored lens “granny glasses” so often associated with John Lennon and other acts of the time35—a cobalt shield for pot-bleary or jug-crossed eyes. Paul Rothchild, who produced The Doors, taught Fritz “how to listen to music” and about the production end of things, and it was Rothchild who introduced Fritz to John Sebastian, Tom Rush, and The Doors for whom Fritz later worked as an audio engineer. Fritz, known around that time as “[t]he undisputed king and reigning world champion of the jug and washtub bass” and “the world’s greatest living jug and washtub bass player,” would leave his mark on albums by Warren Zevon, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, The Grateful Dead, and Richard and Mimi Fariña. Fritz died in 2005, but his washtub base sits now in the Smithsonian.

With Bob Siggins out of the picture, Bill Keith, an Exeter graduate and Harvard man, who had started off with the Bluegrass Boys, stepped in on five-string banjo, which he played in his own signature way with the fifth string unhooked. Keith’s lasting influence on bluegrass banjo is said to be “second only to that of the original bluegrass banjoist, Earl Scruggs” with Keith’s development of a kind of melodic frailing method eponymously termed “Keith Style.” Indeed, it was Bill Keith’s banjo picking that inspired Jerry Garcia to pick up the same melodic style and the two banjoists even overlapped briefly in a bluegrass band called Muleskinner.

Geoff Muldaur, Elektra producer Joe Boyd’s former roommate and a founding member of Paul Butterfield’s Better Days group, contributed slow blues vocals as a foil to Kweskin’s ragtime approach. In recruiting Geoff to the Jug Band, Kweskin “went over to his apartment, stoned as usual, and found Geoffrey to be straight, uptight and surly” when Geoff made clear he “wasn’t into reefer” and wanted to make sure Kweskin wasn’t ‘holding’ in his apartment.”36 For Kweskin, Geoff’s addition to the band was a cinch, even if “he might be hard to get along with.” “I’d just light up a joint and say ‘fuck it,’” said Kweskin.37 Geoff’s “definitive recording of ‘Brazil’ provided the seed for—and was featured in—Terry Gilliam’s film of the same title” and Laurel Canyon operator, Van Dyke Parks, famously noted that “Bob Dylan didn’t want to be Woody Guthrie. He wanted to be Geoff Muldaur.” Maria Muldaur (née D’Amato), then a singer in the Even Dozen Jug Band out of New York, accompanied John Sebastian to watch the Kweskin Jug Band play at the Bitter End on the recommendation of Paul Rothchild. Enamored, “[i]t wasn’t two weeks later that she moved up to Cambridge and in with Geoff.”38 Though the relationship was not to last, nor was the Jug Band, Maria Muldaur went on to record the 1973 hit “Midnight at the Oasis” and became a frequent collaborator with The Grateful Dead, opening shows for the band in the early to mid 70s and even contributing backup vocals to the Jerry Garcia Band in the latter part of the decade.

To round out the Jug Band was Richard Greene, “one of the most innovative and influential fiddle players of all time,” and a compatriot of Bill Keith’s in the Bluegrass Boys. Greene, the “Paganini of rock,” was the first musician to ever use an electric violin to accompany a rock band and revolutionized fiddle playing with his invention of “the chunky chop,” a “method of creating percussive energy through dropping the bow onto the strings, then playing the note.”39 Since the Kweskin Jug Band, Greene has served as a founding member of the Marin County based Seatrain (with Beatles producer George Martin) and played in The Great American Music Band and Old & In the Way (what became of Muleskinner) with Jerry Garcia, and has played with Linda Ronstadt, the Greenbriar Boys, Bill Monroe, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson, and many others.

And of course, there was Mel. “It has taken Mel Lyman many years to get from Eureka, California to Boston,” wrote The Broadside of Boston in 1963. “The journey has been a long slow haul, but if one can hear him play his banjo and sing the songs that he has learned on his travels, he will think that the trip has been well worthwhile. From Canada to the Mexican border and from coast to coast, Mel has worked, hitched, sung and played in railroad freight yard, bars and southern cane fields.”40 As the Broadside notes, Mel was particularly influenced by and was a disciple of Woody Guthrie and “a purist, in the tradition of the true folk singer, [who] will not be influenced by the demands of commercialism.”41 Indeed, Mel, like Bob Dylan, frequently visited Guthrie’s bedside as the folk singer lay in Huntington’s torpor in the Brooklyn State Hospital (now Kingsboro Psychiatric Center). In a 1961 letter, Mel solemnly noted: “I hardly ever let myself think of Woody anymore and never play his records and seldom sing his songs or look at his book and this is really the wrong approach but dammit I can’t hardly stand thinking about him dying a helpless twitching pile of nerves in a locked room in some sanitarium in New York.”42 By the mid 1960s, Guthrie had “lost the ability to play his beloved guitar, type, or hold a pen” and was eventually relegated to simply blinking his eyes in order to communicate. Mel fantasized of delivering Guthrie from his hospital bed, how he would take Guthrie’s hand and say “‘Woody, I love you’ and put him on a freight train and sing to him and cry for him and get him drunk and see him die in HIS world and bury him in a little dust pile in Oklahoma.”43

Contrary to many of the other bands organized around this time, the members of the Kweskin Jug Band were not Jim Morrison I Only Picked Up a Guitar Yesterday types, or in need of a Wrecking Crew, they were some of the most technically skilled musicians of the 60s—virtuosic talents who often operated as session musicians themselves. With this kind of lineup, it’s no wonder the band’s cult success and no mystery its influence on many of the more well-known jug, folk, and bluegrass bands to follow. The Kweskin Jug Band was signed to Maynard Solomon’s Vanguard label as promised and the group recorded their first formal record together in New York City. Vanguard had signed Paul Robeson and the Weavers in the 1950s and seized upon the 60s folk revival by expanding its roster to include Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Mimi and Richard Fariña, Country Joe and the Fish, Linda Ronstadt, and even Phil Ochs’ Newport Folk Festival performances before Ochs went Elektra.

Many of those early Vanguard albums were actually recorded in the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, an intrigue likely not lost on Mel Lyman, who was at this time an eager student of the “occult sciences.” With its polychrome terracotta and volute-topped columns of the ionic variety, the Temple was modeled on King Solomon’s and “boasted a thirty-five-foot ceiling and wooden walls and floors.” In accordance with the Maynard brothers’ recording fetish, a single microphone was dangled from the ceiling of the cavernous masonic chamber, precisely thirty feet above the stage, and “positioned for optimal balance.” Listen to the early output of the Sir Charles Thompson Trio, the Ellis Larkins and Ruby Braff duets, or even Ian and Sylvia’s first couple Vanguard LPs and you’ll notice the textural richness, the diffused warmth, the all-around sumptuous sound of these mono-mike recordings, imbued perhaps with esoteric significance, thanks to the acoustic atmosphere of the Masonic Temple. The Pythian Temple in Manhattan, now an 88-unit luxury condominium, also played host to some Vanguard recording sessions. (Sammy Davis, Jr. and Billie Holliday famously recorded at the Pythian as well). And so, these temples of secret orders “became the shrines of the age of high fidelity, worshiped for their generous space, curved interiors and wooden walls, all offering a warm, natural reverb. In those hallowed halls, great musical performances were transubstantiated into timeless recordings.”44

For the record, the first album featuring Mel Lyman’s harmonica playing is not the Kweskin Jug Band’s, but Eric Von Schmidt’s Eric Sings Von Schmidt, with Geoff Muldaur on guitar and liner notes courtesy of Richard Fariña. An early review of the album from Cori Randle remarks upon the “perfect harmony between Mr. Eric and his ‘sidemen’… a type of harmony that can only exist between fast friends—friends aware of the others’ musical tastes, strong points and weaknesses—friends who are comfortable in their friendship. Each compliments the other.” Randle cooed over Lyman’s harmonica playing, interjecting, “I’d like to say a few words about Mel Lyman’s harp, too. Tony (Little Son) Glover, a pretty mean ole harp man ‘is own self, has called Mel ‘the best around.’ One listen to this record shows the reason why. Mel Lyman is subtle and tasteful. He complements Von Schmidt rather than overpowers him.”

Mel and Von Schmidt also shared an enthusiasm for psychedelics; reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception while in the Army germinated in Von Schmidt a particular fascination with mescaline. Von Schmidt recalled procuring his mescaline from Moore’s Orchid Farm in Laredo Texas, and that the package the cactus buttons came in “had some kind of government agricultural stamp right on the box.” He “found out years later that the CIA was getting it from the same place.”45

Mel became acquainted with Eric Von Schmidt through Geoff Muldaur, and the two began jamming at Club 47 with Joan Baez, Richard Fariña, and Bob Dylan.46 It was during a party at Fariña’s apartment that the Kweskin Jug Band got hooked up with Albert Grossman who began the “process of extricating them from their Vanguard contract and negotiating a new deal with Reprise.”47 Reprise, founded by Frank Sinatra in 1960 and headed by Mo Ostin, was a Warner Brothers imprint that included on its roster the early Joni Mitchell and Frank Zappa and the Mothers recordings, Fleetwood Mac, the Beach Boys, and Neil Young—more of a Hollywood joint than Vanguard. Grossman supplied the Jug Band with a manager, Jon Tapplin, and fixed them up on the full Hollywood course: “a full concert and club schedule; and television appearances on the Roger Miller Show, the Al Hirt Show, and others.”48 Naturally, during this pilgrimage west, the Jug Band played three weeks at the Troubadour, and nestled themselves in the maw of the Los Angeles music scene: at the top of Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon.49

Fritz Richmond once described Mel’s music as being of that rare “High and Lonesome sound.”50 Per Richmond, Mel “plunked quietly and sang sometimes with harmonica. He didn’t command instant attention, for he played his music for one or two or three people sitting around a small fire in the world somewhere, or in a kitchen in Cambridge. Whatever he sang of, he gave the hint of having been there or done it before. The effect could be chilling, or very comforting.” But for Mel, the pace of the Jug Band and its performative nature worked a spiritual vexation: “Mel could become totally involved with his instrument and be drained dry emotionally at the end of a tune… it was hard for him to then jump into a fast one like ‘Borneo’ or ‘Beedle-Um-Bum.’”51

On the road, Mel was in his element. He’d tote around a “hundred pound sack” of brown rice in accordance with his macrobiotic diet and resigned himself easily to the life of a travelling musician.52 Afterall, he’d done it before clad in not much more than a navy cap, “a simple army jacket with a lot of pockets for his harps,” and his banjo case at his side.53 Mel was “into astrology and the macrobiotic diet and championed them as ways to understand other people better and for self-improvement.”54 While travelling, Mel’s bandmates picked up on some ESP vibes Mel was putting down. Per Fritz Richmond:

He showed us some unexplainable events. We were in between gigs one day in Cambridge, and Mel said he had gotten a flash. His wife and four children were in Eureka, California, three thousand miles away and were in danger. Mel knew they needed to leave Eureka, so he borrowed a van, and he and Geoffrey went to get them… Seven thousand miles later, Sophie and the kids were safe in Cambridge reading about the tsunami from an Alaskan earthquake that had turned Eureka into U-Wreck-A. We thought about that. Another time, another year, another van, Geoffrey and Mel on a snowy night, tearing along the dotted line in Utah someplace: Mel said, ‘Something fantastic is about to happen.’ They hadn’t gone another tankful when they came to a hitchhiker with his frigid digit displayed way away miles from town… who should it be but Mel’s old hanging-out partner Eben Given, who hadn’t seen Mel in years. We thought about that, too.”55

The Cambridge folk scene, many of its members graduates of ivy league universities with prominent parents, bore many similarities to the Laurel Canyon milieu, indeed, Dave McGowan in his seminal book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, regards Cambridge and Club 47 as “necessary precursors to the Laurel Canyon scene, which was essentially created by taking the music of that earlier scene, particularly the work of Dylan and Seeger, and mixing it with the instrumentation being utilized across the pond by a band known as the Beatles.”56 Just as Laurel Canyon’s folk sound was a modified export of the Cambridge format, military and CIA-funded experiments with psychedelics, particularly LSD, first took root in Boston under the yoke of Dr. Max Rinkel, a Viennese neuropsychiatrist, lecturer at the Macy conferences, and refugee from Hitler’s Germany. These Cambridge experiments in mind control, later contained under the MKUltra umbrella, would, like the music and the acid, be transmitted west as if by Turnerian edict; a Psychic Frontier. Per John Marks in his 1979 exposé The Search for the Manchurian Candidate:

“[I]n 1949, a famous Viennese doctor named Otto Kaunders traveled to the United States in search of research funds. He gave a conference at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a pioneering mental-health institution affiliated with Harvard Medical School, and he spoke about a new experimental drug called d-lysergic acid diethylamide.”57

Intrigued by Kaunders’ lecture and LSD’s psychomimetic qualities, Rinkel hastily arranged for a transatlantic shipment of the drug from Sandoz to Boston: the first importation of LSD to American soil.58 Rinkel’s first experimental LSD subject, and the “first acid trip in the Western hemisphere,” was his colleague “Robert Hyde, a Vermont-born psychiatrist who was Boston Psychopathic’s number-two man.”5960

The enterprising Drs. Rinkel and Hyde initiated a self-organized study on the effects of LSD at Boston Psychopathic, and only three years later found a generous benefactor for their work in the CIA. The two men became the “[t]he Agency’s LSD pathfinders,” alongside “Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York, Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School, Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, and Harold Hodge’s group at the University of Rochester.”61 The funds were routed through two conduits in those early days: the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. For Drs. Rinkel and Hyde at Boston Psychopathic, knowledge of the CIA’s largesse was kept carefully compartmentalized with “various levels of concealment.”62 Boston Psychopathic hospital officials “told the volunteer subjects something about the nature of the experiments but nothing about their origins or purpose. None of the subjects had any idea that the CIA was paying for the probing of their minds and would use the results for its own purposes.”63

Dr. Hyde so enjoyed clandestine work that “[u]nbeknownst to his fellow researchers… he also advised the CIA on using LSD in covert operations.”64 Hyde was paid handsomely for his time as a consultant, and “officials eventually set aside a special MKUltra subproject as Hyde’s private funding mechanism. Hyde received funds from yet another MKULTRA subproject… created for him in 1954, so he could serve as a cutout for Agency purchases of rare chemicals.”65 Author H.P. Albarelli notes that after the death of Frank Olson at the Statler Hotel, a rogue’s gallery of scientists and agents—including George Hunter White, Dr. Edward Pelikan, and Dr. Harold Abramson—convened to discuss the future of CIA-funded LSD experiments post-Olson; Dr. Max Rinkel was in attendance.66 According to Albarelli, Rinkel “would often hand-carry LSD to New York for [George Hunter] White, as well as for Drs. Paul Hoch and Harold Abramson.”67

Dr. Robert Hyde who “recruited Harvard University students, possibly including notorious Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, for a series of CIA-funded LSD experiments that spanned at least two years,” continued his human experiments at Vermont State Hospital where he subjected vulnerable patients to innumerable tortures and indignities.68 (Karen Wetmore, a former patient of Dr. Hyde’s, recalls being “involuntarily administered massive doses” of medications to which she was allergic, thereby endangering her life, and suffering long periods of confinement during which she was “kept almost constantly in seclusion, often bound with wristlets behind her back, and left to lie unattended and unrelieved, naked on a tile floor”).69

What kismet that Timothy Leary, lured to Mexico to consume psychedelic mushrooms by R. Gordon Wasson’s Life article “about an expedition that was partially funded by the CIA” would land a professorship at Harvard, that great old imperial institution, where “students and professors had for years served as subjects for CIA-and military-funded LSD experiments”70; and what synchronicity that the Cambridge folk revival and nascent Boston counterculture would emerge concurrently within this context. Through Leary, “LSD would escape from the closed world of scholar and spy,” (categories which seem to have little distinction here and ought to be collapsed) and the psychedelic counterculture was born with Mel Lyman as its herald.71

Dave Van Ronk in his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street described this milieu best:

The Cambridge drug scene was actually a lot like the Cambridge folk scene, in that everything was overintellectualized. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert had created this enormous theoretical structure based on ‘expanding your mind,’ and it was all a crock of pseudomystical horseshit and petit bourgeois rationalization to justify getting stoned. The people I hung out with were drinkers who also smoked, and a better bunch of fucked-up boyos you never did meet. The people on the self-awareness trip were silly and boring. They would sit around going, ‘Boy, am I stoned. Boy! Am I stoned…’ And the next day it was like the old Jewish joke: ‘Boy, was I stoned...’72

A little mise-en-scène with regard to 1960s Boston is in order. Dave McGowan observes in Weird Scenes that the zenith of the Cambridge folk revival coincided with a rash of slayings of women (many of whom had connections to the music and medical fields) and that “as with Laurel Canyon, the Cambridge scene came complete with its own resident psycho killer”: the Boston Strangler (Albert DeSalvo).73 Quoting author Susan Kelly, McGowan writes that one of the Strangler’s alleged victims, Beverly Samans, was murdered “just across the street” from where “a very young and not yet famous Joan Baez and an equally youthful and unknown Bob Dylan were playing to reverently hushed audiences at the Club 47.”74 Baez’s and Dylan’s frequent companion in these serenades was one Mel Lyman, who may be seen below as a shadow figure—lurking behind Bob Dylan, Eric Von Schmidt, and Joan Baez—distinguishable only by a byline on a photo taken at Club 47 by Dick Waterman and Mel’s signature navy cap caught aglint by Club 47 stage lights.75

The attribution of all of the Boston Strangler murders to Albert DeSalvo is shaky at best; Project ARTICHOKE, MKUltra hypnotist, and sex pervert William Joseph Bryan (who had earlier worked on Sirhan Sirhan) famously coaxed the confession from DeSalvo. The aforementioned Dr. Max Rinkel was part of a panel of Boston psychiatrists convened to construct a psychological profile of the Boston Strangler before DeSalvo was apprehended and Rinkel even evaluated a purported psychic eyewitness to several of the crimes, Paul Gordon, who claimed to have intuited unpublished details of the Strangler’s crimes through ESP.76

The building in which Beverly Samans was killed was the historic Craigie Arms apartment building in Harvard Square, which served as unofficial off-campus housing for university students and nexus point for the artistic-esoteric demimonde of Cambridge.77 The Craigie Arms complex gained a reputation as the “Murder Building” for being not only the site of Strangler victim Beverly Samans’ demise, but also for being the location of Harvard anthropology student Jane Britton’s bizarre ritual murder: Britton was found “laid out in the ritual manner of the Amazon.” The apartment complex also housed the degenerate Warhol Superstar Ed Hood who had starred in Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966), My Hustler (1966), and Bike Boy (1967).78 Hood was an on-again-off-again Harvard graduate student (rumors of expulsion swirled), described by friends as a “remittance man” who grew up on a luxurious Alabama plantation. Per a Cambridge friend of Hood’s, “Ed’s visits at Thanksgiving and Christmas [with his mother, a postbellum debutante] were too often abbreviated by the intervention of the Alabama State Police in Ed’s endless combinations of automobiles with alcohol and teenage boys.” Hood found greater tolerance for his activities in the comparatively liberal Cambridge, “but Ed’s monthly remittance, no matter how generous, was always quickly spent on the quantities of booze, pot and cocaine needed to entertain his boyfriends.”

Warhol’s Superstar was, to be sure, a pedophile and serial child molester; Hood’s art world friends (Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground frequently came to stay at his salon) either turned a blind eye to Hood’s perversions, or alternatively found his exploits idiosyncratic—even amusing.79 Susan Kelly in her book The Boston Stranglers notes that the atmosphere of the “Murder Building” was seedy, and often violent. Before the murder of Samans, “a young woman occupant of the building had been pistol-whipped” and violent fights often arose out of raucous parties thrown by Hood (whom Kelly refers to vaguely as an “especially notorious resident”).80 According to Kelly, at the time of the Boston Strangler murders, Hood was running a sexual blackmail operation out of his apartment: he would “get his underaged guests drunk, photograph them in compromising positions, and then use the pictures for blackmail.”81 Hood died before he could complete his thesis on the themes of love in Shakespeare. The Harvard Crimson reported that Hood, “a sensitive and gallant man,” asphyxiated on his own vomit while in the throes of an epileptic fit.82 Peter Wolf, Hood’s close friend and lead vocalist of Boston’s The J. Geils Band, indicated that the seizure occurred after Hood was “kicked unconscious by a young man he had picked up who committed suicide the next day”; Susan Kelly, more bluntly, writes that Hood was “murdered by one of the adolescents he picked up and seduced.”83

Mel Lyman was entangled with Warhol’s factory scene and even dated, if you can call it that, “Warhol lovely” Vivian Kurz (and Superstar Ronna Page would later join the Boston contingent of Mel’s cult).8485 Mel lived for a time in the Bowery with avant garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas and frequented Max’s Kansas City (where mingled Warhol, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edie Sedgwick, Midnight Cowboy party scene extras, Roy Lichtenstein, and others).86 Mel and Mekas were first introduced by Warhol Superstar Ronna Page at New York City’s first macrobiotic eatery, The Paradox, where Yoko Ono waitressed and, according to Paul Krassner, would perform a strange type of conceptual climbing-into-a-bag art act whereupon she would “fuck, or not fuck” her then husband and future Church of the Living Word/Jesus People USA cult member Anthony Cox.87

Mekas was Mel’s first real patron and funded the publication of Mel’s initial book, Autobiography of a World Savior, “a rambling, abstract, 80-page riddle… based loosely on the Superman-Krypton plot (‘Long long ago in another dimension on another planet I volunteered for an assignment the nature of which I knew little …’).”88 Mel wrote Autobiography of a World Savior as a “tongue-in-cheek joke… for some scientologist friends of his.”89 Mel, in his own words, had in NYC “been through occult science and gone a whole lot further” than his Scientologist friends, but found the “occult science” language a bit too “limiting.”90 Autobiography then was an attempt to convey his messianic message to this band of east coast Scientologists in a language that they could understand: “to devour that language, to exhaust that language and take ‘em into a greater reality, by using that language itself, by exhausting the language itself…” The language was so exhausting in fact, that according to Mel, Bob Dylan could only get about halfway through.91 In Autobiography, Mel describes in Mansonian fashion being selected by a cabal of unnamed “superiors” to fulfill their esoteric mission on Earth as a “stranger in a strange land.”92 Below, Mel may be seen featured in one of Mekas’ films as “God Making Coffee,” and later strumming his banjo hypnotically on a Bowery rooftop.

Mekas himself was financed by blue blood Jerome Hill, the Yale educated heir to the Great Northern Railway fortune and former Air Force Intelligence officer, whose foundation supplied the funds for New York’s and Minnesota’s independent filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and others. Mekas’ elegant Report From Millbrook can be viewed below, which he filmed “on a weekend visit to Tim Leary’s place,” which was of course Billy Mellon Hitchcock’s Millbrook estate. “It was a light summer outing. No LSD,” said Mekas. “Tim took me for a walk, though, and we talked about LSD. I told him that the chemicals that motivate and drive artists are more powerful and mysterious than LSD or any drug. On that note we turned back and ended our walk. There was nothing more to say.”

Before World Savior Mel Lyman came to town, the Cambridge folkies had an original guru named Rolf Cahn—a German Jew—who fled Hitler and with his parents emigrated to the United States, landing “in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Detroit” where Cahn “quite logically learned to box and soon could beat the shit out of anybody on the block.”93

“Rolf doesn’t talk about it much,” intoned Eric Von Schmidt, “but he was in some heavy shit in WWII. Parachuting behind the German lines, setting up roadblocks and machine gun positions—the works. And he spoke of the tremendous high of it, pulling the trigger… But at a certain point he realized killing people wasn’t the answer. He learned everything there was to know about the martial arts…”94 According to Cahn’s son, before seeing any action in the European Theater, “the OSS sent Cahn to study the Chinese language in Berkeley” where his “studies in Mandarin led him to an old Kung Fu master, from whom he absorbed valuable insights.” When asked about his wartime service in 1982, Cahn said simply: “I killed people. No matter what euphemism you want to use, I just killed people.”

After leaving the OSS, Cahn enrolled in the Communist Party of America and began offering flamenco, folk, and blues guitar lessons in Cambridge where he tutored Bill Keith, Jim Kweskin, and many others. Cahn, a “dispenser of Talmudic truth,” became a “prestidigitator to the folk folks,” occupying a sort of mystical “visiting rabbi” role in Cambridge where he tutored the many of emerging folk revival elect. Per Von Schmidt, Cahn’s “influence had gone far beyond teaching. He was a force in San Francisco and by the time he reached Berkeley he was an eminence.” In 1962, Cahn founded with Debbie Green, Howard Zeem, and Chandler A. Laughlin III club Cabale which served as one of the Kweskin Jug Band’s first venues under Al Grossman’s direction.95

In 1965, Vanguard released a record of Newport Folk Festival performances, recorded live, from the year previous featuring, among others, Pete Seeger, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Phil Ochs, and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Liner notes for the album, penned by Stacey Williams, emphasized the inscrutable appeal of the Kweskin ensemble:

In the spring of 1963, from the banks of the Charles River, which runs between Boston and Cambridge, came an exciting new sound. Using such old instruments as the jug, the washtub bass, the comb, kazoo, washboard and anything else lying around, the jugband made a curiously compelling rhythmic sound. One of the best, if not the best, of the revival jugbands is the one led by Jim Kweskin… the jugband rattles and rolls through three songs that fuse the beat of ragtime, the flavor of the blues and the undefinable good-time sound of the jugband…

Mel was bandied about by critics of the 60s as the “Grand Old Man of the ‘blues’ harmonica,” despite being only in his early twenties himself, and is said to have “started many a young man on a promising ‘blues’ career.” At some point along the way, the harmonica had become an integral part of the American blues sound, and later of course, the American folk revival. But where does the harmonica come from exactly and to what may we attribute its ubiquity in American folk recordings of the 60s and 70s?

The precise origin of the harmonica is shrouded in mystery, but it’s widely held to have derived from East Asian free-reed instruments such as the Chinese Sheng, by way of a meddling Jesuit operative during the Qing Dynasty named Jean Joseph Marie Amiot who is often credited with the transmission of free-reed technology to Europe. From there, the transfiguration of the Sheng into what we now call a harmonica (a composite of a comb, reed plates, and cover plates) is even more obscure.

Mainstream accounts credit Christian Fredrich Ludwig Buschmann as the inventor of the predecessor of the harmonica, an organ he called the aura, which Buschmann purportedly developed as a tuning aid rather than an instrument. As preeminent harmonica historian Pat Missin notes, this origin story is complicated by the fact that “most of what we are told about Buschmann comes from a book written about him by one of his descendants, Heinrich Buschmann.” Scribed in 1938, Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, der Erfinder der Mund—und der Handharmonika may be an unreliable piece of nationalistic pomp, for “British reference books proudly identify Sir Charles Wheatstone as the inventor of the harmonica and older American texts often used to credit Benjamin Franklin—this is doubly erroneous as he was associated with the glass harmonica, an entirely different type of instrument and far from inventing it, he merely added some improvements to it.” According to Missin, the date Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, der Erfinder der Mund—und der Handharmonika specifies as the date of Buschmann’s invention of the harmonica is 1821, “a date repeated in almost every history of the harmonica written since then, describing the aura as being four inches long and having 15 steel reeds mounted side by side…” Missin notes that “independent confirmation of this date is lacking” and that a letter dated in 1828 from Christian Buschmann to his father “mentions a harmonica-like instrument that Buschmann Junior had only recently invented. It is described as being four inches high and four inches in diameter (suggesting a circular shape, although some have speculated that the instrument may have been shaped like a cube), with 21 reeds capable of playing in six part harmony.” All told, there is a dearth of documentary evidence as to Buschmann’s purported invention: no “surviving examples of these instruments or even pictures of them,” nor “any details about Buschmann’s alleged patent.”

Rogue schools of harmonica thought reject not only the Buschmann supposition, but also the Sheng Ancestry Orthodoxy. Winslow Yerxa, a heterodox harmonica historian, insists that the purported Sheng-Harmonica ancestral relationship is entirely unfounded. According to Yerxa, “[b]eating reed organs—with a reed larger than the slot so that it beats against it—were in use for several centuries before they were adapted to create the European free-reed. Henry VIII had multiple portable reed organs (regals) in the inventory of his possessions, and Michael Praetorius lists no fewer than 24 types in his 1614 Syntagma Musicum, a compendium of all known European instruments, and some exotic ones.” Mechanically speaking, the European free-reed is of entirely different configuration than the East Asian variety: “[t]he Asian free reed used in the Sheng is a tongue cut from a surrounding surface and is part of that surface and level with it. It will not sound unless it is coupled to a tuned pipe. You could not build a harmonica or accordion with this type of reed without attaching multiple pipes to it” whereas the “European beating free reed are mounted above the air aperture that lies underneath the reed… This allows it to sound without needing to be coupled to a tuned pipe. Hence the regal, which often folded up to the size of a book for easy portability, and the later development of highly portable harmonicas, concertinas, and accordions.”

Just so, the genealogy of the harmonica is rather enigmatic and so too is its metamorphosis from tuning aid to instrument. As Pat Missin observes, “every schoolboy knows, the harmonica was a simple all-blow instrument until a gentleman named Richter came along, added draw reeds to it and devised the tuning that bears his name to this day.” (Post-Richter, two distinct notes can be played through one hole on a harmonica: one note by drawing breath, and the other by blowing). But who was Herr Richter? That, again, is a matter of speculation. Per Missin, “[t]he earliest published reference to the invention of the Richter harmonica… is from the Zeitschrift für Instrumentenbau (Journal of Instrument Making) Vol. 3, No. 21, published in April 1883. The author of this article gives no first name for Richter, describing him as a Bohemian.” Harmonica history books and articles often attribute the invention of the Richter harmonica to a Joseph Richter, but none offer documentary evidence for such identification. By 1855, “there were at least three harmonica-making businesses: C. A. Seydel Söhne, Christian Messner & Co., and Württ. Harmonikafabrik Ch. Weiss.”

In modernity, the story of the mouth harp is ultimately the story of a company named Hohner, and that’s a matter of German corporate historiography. The definitive treatise is a 670-page (Hohner-sympathetic) book published only in German which traces how the Hohner family’s musical instrument company played a significant role in the industrialization of Germany and thereby the worldwide proliferation of the harmonica.

Matthias Hohner, a “Black Forest clockmaker turned cutthroat businessman,” learned the secrets of harmonica manufacturing through industrial espionage he conducted at Christian Messner’s family-owned harmonica factory.96 Having abandoned clock making for the promising harmonica industry, Hohner became an early practitioner of labor division, automation, and mechanization, and a pioneer of semi-industrial modes of harmonica production: “reed-cutting machines took over the task of milling and hammering harmonica reeds and the small metal tongues could then be stamped from sheets of brass and bronze alloy.” Indeed, “[w]ith this change in production methods, ‘prices fell and quantities rose. A cheap mass consumer item emerged, one that probably had the lowest price of any musical instrument sold.’”97

By the late 19th century, Hohner “almost completely concentrated his exports and sales on the American market,” and thus the harmonica became a global consumer product through covert advertisement, engineered desire, and the exploitation of incipient mass media culture. “Starting with simple public relations events, the company also used publicity stunts to permanently mark the music environment with their name, including ‘concerts and competitions centered on its product,’ organizational frameworks such as clubs and school orchestras,’ and ‘new mass media such as motion pictures and radio.’”

Spurred by the protectionist Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 which imposed increased tariffs on musical instruments imported to the United States and an additional income tax on corporations, the Hohner firm began its move toward monopoly through the consolidation of “the entire Trossingen harmonica industry into a single company.” Having secured the harmonica monopoly by the onset of World War I, “Hohner supplied instruments to armies on both sides of the conflict through its neutral Swiss branch as well as by using cover addresses and other tactics.” By 1920, the Hohner company had swelled to 4,000 workers producing 20 million harmonicas a year and “the ‘seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century’ did not slow harmonica sales down, but rather expanded them.” By cynically marketing the instrument to soldiers of the British, American, and German armies, the harmonica became “a quintessential instrument for expressing nostalgia” during wartime. This profit dimension of war, to be sure, was appreciated by Hohner executives—Dr. Will Hohner, a third-generation member of the Hohner family, proclaimed in 1928 that “the first ruffle of [war] drums augured prosperity.” Soon, the “Hohner brand became [known as] the Ford of accordions and harmonicas” and Trossingen, once a rural hinterland in the Baar Region of southwestern Germany, saw itself transformed into a town of industry, its railroad and city hall built with the proceeds of Hohner harmonica sales.98 Hohner, fulfilling the “Ford of harmonicas” sobriquet, became a willing and eager Nazi collaborator during the rise of the Third Reich; the company released a commemorative “Brown Shirts model [harmonica] to celebrate Hitler’s accession to power in Germany in 1933” and the Hohner family schmoozed Hitler “to convince him to proclaim the harmonica ‘official instrument of the Reich.’” By 1940, Hohner’s Trossingen factories were utilized by the Wehrmacht to manufacture detonators with forced labor.

The Hohner harmonica as “‘cartelized’ instrument”99 appears in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and Pynchon’s references to the instrument may also be found in Against the Day and Vineland. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop plays a Hohner harmonica, a “jive accessory” of “brass inertia,” which in Sodium Amytal stupor, Slothrop hallucinates chasing orphically down The Roseland Ballroom’s toilet100; the Schwarzkommando plays a “thumb-harp whose soundbox is carved from a piece of German pine, whose reeds are cut from springs of a wrecked Volkswagen.”101 For Pynchon’s (and our) purposes, “Hohner harmonicas… [are] yet another piece in the IG Farben puzzle” for “the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey, deeply implicated in IG Farben’s cartel plots, also promoted trade with Germany in the 1930s by arranging various barter deals between the Nazis and the US.” One of these cartel plots and barter deals included “‘the shipment to the U.S. of enough [Hohner] harmonicas to provide two for every boy in the country.’”102

Pynchon again depicts a political dimension of the harmonica in Vineland, this time plotted against the rugged, cypress-lined Trasero coastline, at the edge of a “military reservation”:

Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beach head of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, […] finding the ears of sentries attenuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes.103

Pynchon is even more direct in Against the Day, wherein the Chums of Chance board for a period at a strangely iniquitous harmonica academy:

The institution [i.e. the Harmonica Marching Band Academy] had its origins […] in the intricacies of greed as then being practiced under global capitalism. German harmonica manufacturers, who led the world in production of the instrument, had for some years been dumping their surplus inventory on the American market, with the result that soon every community in the land had some kind of harmonica-based marching society, often numbering in the hundreds. […] It was only a matter of time before this unforeseen outcome of the Law of Supply and Demand was consecrated as the Harmonica Marching Band Academy […].104

Also attuned to the fascist history of harmonica production was Theodor Adorno, who in his Introduction to the Sociology of Music lumped the harmonica in with other “debased cultural goods” and identified the instrument as a “ready-made commercial” object, a talisman of the “folk-costume-society” and excoriated “the Harmonica players… rounded up by a strong industrial interest.”105 It was Hohner to which Adorno was referring. (It’s worth noting here, before the shrewd reader casts this Substack aside for having fallen under the wicked spell of the Frankfurt School, that Adorno’s Sociology of Music and the rest of his music-focused writings are full of foolish ideas [e.g., that the guitar, ukulele, banjo, and accordion are “infantile instruments in comparison with the piano,” bastard instruments “intended for players who cannot read the notes”—their listeners “ambivalent” and “retarded”; he also has a rather parochial obsession with German classical music, particularly Wagner, as the apotheosis of musical imagination, and even goes so far as to denigrate Edward Elgar’s violin concertos!]).

Post World War II, Hohner hired industrial designer and headmaster of the OSS “Spy School” in Cairo, Egypt John Vassos to streamline harmonica design for the American palate and Leland T. James, a “young banking executive,” who had served as an officer in Air Force Counterintelligence, was installed as vice president of the American Hohner subsidiary.106 In the 70s, Hohner expanded into developing electronic instruments (e.g., the Clavinet, the Pianet, etc.) and even manufactured computers for IBM for a short time, before reverting back to harmonica focus due to market constraints.

But past capitalist history of industrial espionage and slave labor—from blow-draw mechanisms to the transducement of mechanical vibration to the electrical realm to information technology and back again—built into the harmonica was unknown potential and availability for defiance. Beyond the binary logic of its ten-hole diatonic structure, the limitations of the Richter tuning imposed, and the visible band of breath blown and drawn, exists an invisible spectrum of pitch zones between notes and tonalities undefined—a mixolydian mode—which may be accessed through the reversal of breath itself.

Though the harmonica is formally predisposed to the playing of traditional European waltz and marching tunes, “[s]ometime between 1870 and 1920, Black American musicians realized that you can get a very different sound from the harmonica by mentally reversing the roles of the blown and drawn notes… This playing style is called ‘cross harp’ or ‘blues harp.’” Cross harp style, pioneered by Big Mama Thornton, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Sonny Terry to name just a few of the greatest, was later adopted and mimicked by white folk singers of the 60s and 70s who integrated the subversion of V7-I cadences into their own musical practices. One of these mimics was Mel Lyman, who after his Newport Festival harmonica solo, was anointed the face of the Hohner Blues Harp in an advertisement in the Newport Folk Festival’s booklet for 1966.

In his own private writings, later published in a second autobiographical book titled Mirror at the End of the Road, Mel had actually waxed psychosexual poetic about his Hohner:

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR COMMENTS ON HOHNER HARMONICAS FOR PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES

1. Playing my Hohner Harmonica is like making love

2. Playing my Hohner Harmonica is like making love

   1. to my cat?

   2. to my self?

   3. to my mother?

3. My Hohner Harmonica is only an extension

   1. of my self

   2. of

4. I don’t play my harp

   1. it plays me

   2. it sucks me

   3. I blow it

   4. I suck it

5. I don’t suck my harmonica anymore

   1. it blows me

   2. I suck

   3. I suck myself

   4. I don’t blow anymore

   5. I sucks mahself!!

6. I feel like I’m eating it

   1. when I play it

   2. when I’m blowing it

   3. when I’m sucking it

   4. when it’s sucking me107

And more romantically in How I play my Hohner Harp:

“and the hands must only be used for sheltering and caressing the fine little delicate bird of love nestled there amongst your mothering palms showering him with form and motion and love to give song to his exaltation and honour his noble servant, THOU, oh ye harmonica player!!!”108

Mel began, despite some initial psychic resistance, to understand his Newport Folk Festival harmonica solo as a “special request from God” to which he had to succumb: “like what Christ had to do before mounting the cross, he said not my will but thine be done and then there was no cross, no death…”109 Mel’s mission, post-Newport ‘65, was to redeem Bob Dylan, disentangle him from the thrall of rock, and bring him back to the side of folk: “Mel journeyed up to Woodstock hoping somehow to connect with Dylan and talk to him about the direction his music was taking,” but the meeting was not to be. Not long after this failed Dylan-Lyman reunion, Mel decided his Jug Band days were over. Recalled Geoff Muldaur, the “music wasn’t honest enough. I guess it meant that we didn’t see God every minute or some bullshit.”110

In 1966 came the tectonic shift—Mel’s friend Richard Fariña died. Former OSS operative Rolf Cahn recalled that Fariña “was afraid the English were going to avenge themselves because he’d blown up a torpedo boat in Ireland.” According to Cahn, in the months before his death, Fariña had been running paranoid and obsessively carried around a .38. “He thought the Protestants were going to bump him off. I couldn’t believe it,” said Cahn. “He was half Cuban and half Irish. I’m as paranoid as most, but there was no way anyone could pop you on Martha’s Vinyard.”111 Perhaps they couldn’t get to him on Martha’s Vineyard, but in Carmel they could, and on April 30, 1966, they did.

Thomas Pynchon wrote that Fariña had “been riding on the back of a motorcycle on Carmel Valley Road, where a prudent speed would have been thirty-five. Police estimated that they must have been doing ninety, and failed to make a curve. Fariña was thrown off, and killed.” That Fariña may have been murdered, rather than falling victim to a tragic accident, has long been a topic of discussion among paranoids. In Pynchon’s Politics: The Presence of an Absence, Charles Hollander sets forth the following:

Consider what Richard Fariña must have looked like to the ColntelPro people at the time. He had been to both Ireland and Cuba and implied he had consorted with the rebels during the upheavals there, though what he did is not clear. It is hard to believe the IRA or the Fidelistas would welcome Fariña with open arms, trust him, and give him anything sensitive to handle. More likely, he represented himself as a sympathetic Journalist who was willing to put their best face forward. He had direct access to the media, by virtue of his own writing and singing; he had access to a whole generation through the records and concerts of Bob Dylan and his sister–in–law; and he had access to “intellectuals” through Pynchon, the best man at his wedding. Fariña might have seemed l’eminence gris behind the entire anti–war movement. Except where would he have found time to write songs, articles, novels, to perform in concerts and on TV, make records, and lead a revolution? He would have to have been Seymour M. Hersh, Mick Jagger, and Che Guevara rolled into one.

Rolf Cahn insisted Fariña had been noticeably paranoid before he died, and yet there is no mention in any news report of the .38 that Fariña is alleged to have carried with him at all times being present at the scene of the crash. And the man with whom Fariña rode that fateful day was William “Willie” Hinds, a shadowy figure who often goes unnamed in reports on the crash or is relegated to a mere footnote.

Hinds is described by David Hajdu in Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña in such glowing terms I was nearly blinded. He was the friend of Mimi and Joan Baez’s older sister Pauline’s husband and worked by day as a marine biologist at the Stanford-affiliated Hopkin’s Marine Station in Pacific Grove, and by night as a bartender at biker bar called the Palace. While Fariña died, horribly mangled, Hinds survived the crash nearly unscathed. I reached out to David Hajdu for more information on Hinds, since all that I could find in newspapers was a one sentence obituary in 2003 naming no next of kin or detailing any other circumstances of Hinds’ life. “Hinds, William E., 64, Ventura,” the obituary read, “biologist, died Sunday.”112 David was exceptionally kind and helpful and provided me a partial transcript of his interview with Hinds from the 90s when David was writing Positively 4th Street. The following quotes are excerpted from David’s interview.

Hinds described to David his work at the Hopkins Marine Station: “…we were looking at a system of, in sea urchins and sea anemones, where the cells recognize foreign cells and foreign proteins. We were looking at the invertebrate precursor of mammalian immunity… It’s laboratory research. We would collect the animals out in the field, out in the ocean, and, in the inner tidal, and bring them back in the lab, and do what we were going to do with them.” Hinds lived at that time in Pacific Grove on Congress Street and enjoyed “riding with the outlaws” and hanging around with the biker gangs of the Monterey coast. “[T]his was the hippie era, and we were the, you know, the doper hippies,” explained Hinds. (Though, to my knowledge, outlaw bikers and “doper hippies” were two distinctly different counterculture subtypes, and both subtypes a strange fit for someone with Hinds’ academic qualifications). Hinds later attended graduate school at UC Santa Cruz and received a PhD in biology and in immunology. According to Hinds, he “did biomedical research for quite a long time” and in 1983 “went to work as a contractor for NASA in the life sciences program” where he worked ever since. Hinds described his work for NASA as “flying these life science pails in space on the shuttle and space lab and getting ready for the space station era.” Indeed, Hinds has co-authored papers such as: Modification of the Research Animal Holding Facility (RAHF) to Support Nursing Rats and Their Litters During Spaceflight, Choroidal readaptation to gravity in rats after spaceflight and head-down tilt, Use of the Aromascan(TM) Instrument for Nonsubjective Evaluation of Rodent Spaceflight Hardware, and Microbiological Certification Requirements for Non-Human Research on Space Station Freedom. At NASA, Hinds worked out of the Ames Research Center at Moffett Federal Airfield in the heart of Silicon Valley and participated in variety of joint Ames-Lockheed engineering contracts with regard to the effects of space flight upon animal biological processes. Beyond the bizarre contrast between Hinds’ sophisticated background in biology/chemistry and his predilection for riding with outlaw biker gangs and tending bar by night (at a joint that would later be investigated as hub for cocaine and firearms trafficking)113, the story Hinds told David as to how he came into possession of the motorcycle that killed Fariña is even stranger.

The motorcycle was purchased by the wife or (“soon-to-be-wife”) of one of William’s friends, who was “an heiress living in Carmel.” When the heiress turned 18, she “got a big chunk of money” and apparently gifted the motorcycle to William outright, “bought it off the showroom floor,” based upon a dream she’d had of him riding it. The heiress in question, who so generously bought the top-of-the-line motorcycle for Hinds, was named Annie Holt. Holt was a scion of the Holt family in California who were responsible for inventing the Caterpillar tractor. In fact, the Holt family’s company was a military contractor and secured a lucrative deal with the US government at the outbreak of WWI to provide the Army with armor-paneled tractors used “to pull artillery pieces and wagonloads of supplies.” Again, during WWII, “most of the company’s production capacity was devoted to military products to meet the government’s needs”; the Holt company also teamed up with Standard Oil, the American arm of the IG Farben cartel, to develop the first detergent oils. In the early 1990s, Holt subsidiary Energy Industries, Inc. was acquired for nearly $91 million by Zapata Corp., the intelligence-connected oil corporation brainchild (and cover for clandestine activities) of George H. W. Bush; Peter Holt was appointed to the Zapata board.114 Fariña, keeping company with representatives of the oil and aerospace cartels, was perhaps not nearly paranoid enough. With these facts in mind, does his death really amount to simple accident? (At the very least, Hinds grossly negligently caused Fariña’s death. Mimi never sued, though Hinds was advised by an attorney not to speak about what happened). Or did Fariña push up against some invisible but very real force, some unspoken but implied limitation on acts of resistance, the punishment for which is death?

Be it accident or murder, Fariña’s death affected Mel profoundly. When Mel heard the news, he sat alone all-night crying, mourning his “incredible loss” and an anguished letter from Mel to Fariña occupies the final pages of Mel’s second book Mirror at the End of the Road.115116

Dylan crashed only a few months later yet survived under peculiar circumstances, but Fariña was gone, so was Club 47, and with it most of the Cambridge folkies in mass exodus to California.117 Of the select few who remained in Boston were Mel and his acolytes, who in a final attempt at some form of acoustic politics, beat a retreat, and making for spiritual secession, arrived at the William Pynchon founded Roxbury section of Boston. There began, with Mel and those magnetized to him, the Lyman Family cult and in their dark brand of hippie escapism festered mind control, brutality, and possibly even murder. With the groundwork laid, the next installments focus the long rays of Boston’s clandestine quest for mind control through a Lyman Family lens, so that with magnifying clarity, the dim facets of this communard netherworld may stand more clearly revealed.

4

James c. lyman. (1973, January 17). The Press Democrat.

6

Reed, W. (1961, April 20). Duo beats tom-tom to ban bomb-bomb. The Oregon Daily Journal.

112

Hinds, william e. (2003, October 16). Ventura County Star.

113

Cocaine trial. (1988, June 22). Gonzales Tribune.

Keith Milton Rhinehart was born in Nunn, Colorado on April Fool’s Day in 1936.1 Rhinehart demonstrated an early interest in the occult, favoring the American and British Societies for Psychical Research and avidly reading the work of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement.2 This preoccupation with the occult was likely due, in large part, to Keith’s mother, Valena Kincaid’s, own immersion in the spiritualist movement and involvement in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Spiritualist Church.3 It was the founder and “trance medium” of Golden Gate, Rev. Florence Harwood Becker, who prophesized to Valena Kincaid that young Keith “would become a world famous medium.”4

In his adolescence, Keith studied under the tutelage of Cheyenne, Wyoming spiritualist minister and practicing medium Rev. Hazel Warlaumont who engaged him in seances, trance meetings, and “development classes.” Soon, Keith “was invited to the West Coast of the USA to demonstrate his mediumship in test Seances before the Board of the Spiritualist Association of Washington.”5 After earning high marks before the Board, Keith embarked upon a series of performances and demonstrations of his psychic abilities and “served Churches throughout the Northwest, Midwest and B.C. Canada.”6 At 16, while spending his summer at a “spiritualist camp near Tacoma, Washington,” Keith was groomed by a pedophile teacher thereat “who took him on a tour of homosexual hangouts in Seattle.”7 Two years later in 1954, Keith and a friend were jailed for fraud in relation to their joint business venture which offered “guided tours of the spirit world.”8 Keith and his business partner “were charged with obtaining money under false pretenses and practicing clairvoyance in the elaborately rigged apartment” which included a seance room “remodeled so the youths could reach it by the secret stairway located on the floor above.” Indeed, “Rhinehart had costumes for 45 ‘spirits’ he could portray.” When his partner called forth a spirit entity, Keith would materialize from the secret stairway, clad in “appropriate costume.”9 By 1955, Keith was travelling the Masonic circuit and billing himself as a “Boy Wonder of America,” performing demonstrations of psychic phenomena, mental telepathy, and blindfold billet readings.10

The same year, Keith founded the Aquarian Foundation based on the urging of “spirit forces” and “World Masters” who desired a church that would teach “Spritualism, Christian, Science, Theosophy Unity, [and] Metaphysics.”11 The Aquarian Foundation of Seattle was incorporated on October 20, 1955, with the help of the “Real Ascended Masters,” and Keith began ministering the Aquarian Message to “doctors, lawyers, scientists, policemen, educators, [and] laymen.”12 Keith opened a branch of the Aquarian Foundation in Honolulu, where once again he was arrested—this time for gross cheat—for holding false seances in the home of David “Daddy” Bray, “Hawaii’s No. 1 Kahuna.”13

As membership in the Aquarian Foundation swelled, so did Keith’s eccentricities. He took to throwing “wild parties,” living an outwardly opulent lifestyle driving Cadillac convertibles, collecting voluminous donations and extravagant membership dues, and even keeping a de-fanged and de-clawed lion named Tammy in his home which he shared with a “half dozen other young men.”1415 When Tammy mauled a ten-year-old boy, the Humane Society became involved, and Keith was compelled to give Tammy up.16

In 1965, Keith once more found himself at odds with the law when he was sentenced to a “maximum of 10 years in the state penitentiary for a morals offense involving a 16-year-old boy.”17 Keith was charged with sodomy after a boy named James Miller told police that Keith had asked Miller “if he would like to earn some money and go to his (Keith’s) place” (adorned with “wood carvings,” a “round bed,” and plenty of pornography), and that Keith had made “indecent propositions” to which the boy agreed in exchange for compensation.18 Keith “admitted meeting with Miller on the night in question, and stated he though he recognized him as a member of his church; but denied that anything happened… He stated that, as a minister of the Aquarian Foundation, a social reform group, he had studied all forms of sexual deviancy and on the night in question was trying to aid Miller, as an errant boy…”19 (Keith would later confess to the crime). A jury found Keith guilty under the provisions of the statute RCW 9.79.100 which, darkly humorously, provided:

Every person who shall carnally know in any manner any animal or bird; or who shall carnally know any male or female person by the anus or with the mouth or tongue; or who shall voluntarily submit to such carnal knowledge; or who shall attempt sexual intercourse with a dead body, shall be guilty of sodomy....20

Though Keith was charged under a homophobic (now repealed) statute which in essence criminalized homosexuality, the regressive nature of the statute itself does not negate the fact that Keith had solicited and molested a boy below the age of consent in Washington, which was at that time 18. Curiously, Keith’s associates relay that “[i]t was rumored that Keith had the goods on (Seattle) civil employees, the chief of police, and the mayor”; this blackmail material supposedly derived from Keith’s “psychic channels.”21 Keith’s conduct is further complicated by the fact that at this time he also ran a kid’s division of the Aquarian Foundation: a Sunday School for children ages three through fifteen.22

Lauded by Lois Cooper, Ernestine Pymm, Marian Huff, and Gretchen Smith of the Psychic Observer for taking “one more step… toward the goal of all new age movements in that man will be led out of darkness into Light,” the aforementioned authors describe Keith’s “New-Age Children” as being inducted into Keith’s Mystery School in the “most sacred of all meetings, the trumpet and direct voice communication between the spirit world and our earth plane.”23

Keith’s conviction and concomitant time in prison had little bearing upon the success of the Aquarian Foundation—additional outposts for the cult opened throughout the United States and Keith continued to advertise himself as the “world’s most scientifically tested physical phenomena medium” for having participated in several studies commissioned by the Japanese Society for Parapsychology.2425

According to a leading Reverend of the Honolulu branch of the Aquarian Foundation, the Japanese “[s]cientists photographed his (Keith’s) demonstration of producing ectoplasm through his facial orifices and solar plexus with infra-red film. Several of the scientists’ loved ones communicated through the ectoplasm as the scientists watched with amazement.”26 Per the Foundation, the image below purportedly depicts a “silver cord flowing from the medium Rev. Keith Milton Rhinehart to the fully formed materialization… The form then slowly dematerialized into a pool of ectoplasm on the floor.”27 This dramatic act of alleged dematerialization has never actually been depicted, despite having supposedly been captured on both “regular and infra-red films.”

Another of Keith’s claimed parapsychological abilities was apportment: the paranormal transference of an article from one place to another. Keith’s signature apport was, disturbingly, disgorging gemstones and other objects from his bodily orifices. Keith recalled to a Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter “the story of how when he was performing in Caxton Hall in London some years ago, holes appeared in his chest and blood and gems poured out of the holes. He said he reached in his mouth and pulled out an old Victorian brooch that had been buried in the casket of the dead mother of one of the people in the audience.”28

To the paranoid, Keith’s proximity to a variety of military and police officials, prominent occultists, and Stargate-adjacent German ex-pat doctors should come as no surprise. Despite the clearly fraudulent nature of Keith’s “demonstrations” and his trail of legal troubles, some of Keith’s prominent supporters included:

• Margaret Mead, anthropologist and wife of Gregory Bateson, who Keith interviewed and counted as friend

• Dr. Helmut Schmidt, a German-born theoretical physicist turned parapsychologist, who began his career in the United States as a senior research physicist working with plasma at the Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories in Seattle. Rhinehart claimed that Schmidt had studied Rhinehart’s abilities as a part of a “secret project for Boeing.”29 Post Boeing, Schmidt would go on to lead Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory, and spent the rest of his career at the San Antonio-based Mind Science Foundation—a key Stargate Project contractor set up by the aptly-named oil heir Tom Slick

• Dr. Moshe Baharav, President of Israel’s “Sodom Salt Mines” and United Israel Brotherhood Lodges of Israel; lieutenant colonel of the Israel Defense Forces; “director of African Mineral Mines Corporation, Ltd., South Africa, Nigeria, Liberia”; Ben Gurion associate; and Vice president ABO Jewish International Organization for Metaphysics and Kabbalah30

  

• Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous Huxley (Laura claimed that Keith channeled Aldous from the beyond)31

  

• South Rhodesian police officer John Dody32

• Lonnie MacIntosh, former chief of detectives in Seattle who “worked with the FBI for 38 years” and considered Keith a “personal friend”33

• Harold Levy, a “criminal investigator for the Navy in Norfolk (who… helped the FBI in Virginia to solve murder cases)”34

• Nearly the entire Seattle Police Department35

• Nearly the entire Honolulu Police Department36

• Dr. William G. Roll, a German-born parapsychologist and member of J. B. Rhine’s Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University37

  

• Major Paul Britt, “of the U.S. Army, active in the Indochina Operation of War,”38 once pictured in the State Journal in the company of Chiang Kai-Shek39

• Airforce Colonel Chris Wilcox, headquartered at the Pentagon40

• Jess Uphoff, who had “secret clearance from the government, designed classified airborne electronic console equipment, designed hydrogen gas valves, designed cryogenic seal configurations for hydrogen and oxygen used in rotating machinery dept. for use in the M-1 liquid rocket engine, was responsible for design of automatic digital read-out cable check-out equipment for Lockheed Polaris A2X, A3X missiles, and many other highly classified and sensitive equipment systems”41

• Louis Nathaniel de Rothschild, who Keith referred to as “Uncle Louis” (Keith claims to have been a “personal house guest of the Rothschild banking family in Johannesburg, South Africa”)42

All told, Keith Milton Rhinehart died in 1999, but his Aquarian Foundation cult continues on, headquartered in Seattle, to this day. I imagine that the Aquarian Foundation and Keith Milton Rhinehart himself are ripe for further investigation and research, given the aforesaid likely exploitation of children and matrix of military and government-sponsored psychic research involved, a cross-section that seems to underlie many of the similarly-styled Aquarian-type cults of the 60s and 70s. With that, I’ll leave the reader with the below.

1

Mitchell, J. (1976, May 10). Guru plagued by law. Oregon Journal.

8

Young spiritualists “spirited” away to denver lockup. (1954, August 15). The Ogden Standard-Examiner.

10

Boy wonder of america. (1955, January 31). The Oregonian.

13

Daddy mortified by seance raid. (1958, March 16). Honolulu Star-Adviser.

14

Paulson, D. (2010, April 9). Keith rhinehart, seattle’s psychic wonder. Seattle Gay News.

15

Lion locked up after nipping boy. (1962, April 15). The Register-Guard.

17

Seattle minister given sentence. (1965, December 7). The Daily Herald.

24

This sunday only! (1977, April 16). The Oregonian.

25

Rev. keith m. rhiehart. (1973, June 23). Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

26

Hunter, P. (1977, January 8). Physical phenomena build up faith in aquarian foundation’s founder. Honolulu Star-Adviser.

39

Relative commands china rest camp. (1945, June 22). Aurora News-Register.

I’ve long been interested in Sara Jane Moore, not simply because she shares many qualities with her patsy-assassin contemporaries such as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, but also because of how obscure many of the intrigues as to Moore still remain despite their apparent relevance and import to researchers of political assassinations, COINTELPRO/CHAOS, and the world of clandestine politics in general. Here, in this overview of my research into Sara Jane, Moore may be viewed as a vector passing through Californian cult ferment, mind control kaleidoscopic, and the subterranean latticework of political snitching and subversion.

Sara Jane Moore was the daughter of a former marine and DuPont Chemical Co. maintenance engineer1 and a Charleston Symphony Orchestra violinist.2 As a teenager, Sara Jane joined Charleston’s Civil Air Patrol where she flew a Cessna 310 and familiarized herself with weaponry.3 At sixteen, she disappeared for three days before returning without explanation; her family decided on amnesia as the cause.4 Shortly thereafter, Sara Jane obtained a job as a paper girl delivering the Charleston Gazette on an afternoon paper route.5 (Yes, the paranoid trifecta: paper routes, Civil Air Patrol, and hypnagogic trance states). After training as a nurse, Sara Jane entered the Women’s Army Corps in 1947 and was selected for Officers Candidate School.6 She was to train at Fort Benning, Georgia, but married Marine Staff Sergeant Wallace E. Anderson instead.7

By this time, Sara Jane had amassed a record of what the military termed “fainting spells” at the Carlile Barracks in Pennsylvania and in April of 1950 she was found unconscious on a sidewalk near the White House.8 In amnesic state, Sara Jane was spirited to Walter Reed Army Hospital by the Secret Service for treatment where Walter Reed nurses discovered, “stuffed up under the bodice of her dress,” “a small folio of photos”: all of Sara Jane.9 Curiously, according to news reports, Sara Jane had been at patient at Walter Reed, an institution with a strong military intelligence element and a long history of human experimentation, since at least early March.10

Soon after her stay at Walter Reed, Sara Jane obtained a speedy divorce from her husband Wallace Anderson, and remarried just as speedily to Air Force Captain Sydney L. Manning11, leaving Anderson to complete his “extensive training in desert ground rescue operations on the sand of the Libyan desert” as part of a crew composed of “an officer and eight airmen of the Seventh Air Rescue Squadron’s flight ‘C’ based at Wheelus Field, Tripoli, Libya.”12 (Wheelus Air Force Base at the time of Anderson’s post there was also home to the 580th Air Resupply and Communications Wing, which frequently “found its activities the center of debate in the acrimonious Army-Air Force-CIA bureaucratic struggle for ‘ownership’ of the nation’s unconventional warfare mission,” the base itself being a locus of Army Special Forces and US intelligence anti-communist guerilla warfare and psychological operations training).13

Sara Jane and her new husband Sydney Manning were “billeted to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base” in Tucson, Arizona, where their relationship quickly deteriorated due to Sara Jane’s purportedly lackluster domestic skills.14 When Manning was reassigned to Los Angeles, the couple moved to Southern California where Sara Jane “despite having to care for two toddlers… somehow managed to meet and mingle with a small circle of Hollywood actors and directors” and “attended several Hollywood parties while her husband was away on military duty.”15

By the 1950s, divorced from Sidney Manning and having abandoned her children with her aging parents, Sara Jane “presumably went to school to study accounting,” but had dropped off the map, exhibiting many of the calling cards of someone involved in intelligence work, she likely used a variety of aliases and different social security numbers: “[s]he covered her tracks well as she hid from her family, and law enforcement could do little to help locate her.”16

Working as a bookkeeper at Howard Hughes’ RKO studios in Hollywood, Sara Jane next married John O. Aalberg: “top brass” and head of the RKO sound department17 who had been “nominated for nine Academy Awards, including his sound recording for RKO’s Citizen Kane (1941) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).”18 Aalberg also “served as chief of the Army Pictorial Service in the China-Burma-India area in World War II” and operated as the “industry coordinator” for the film industry’s Signal Corps unit.19 By the mid 1960s, Sara Jane’s relationship with Aalberg disintegrated, and she left Los Angeles for San Francisco.20

In 1967, Sara Jane married her next husband, a wealthy physician at Kaiser Permanente named Dr. Willard J. Carmel, Jr., and the two maintained a home in a well-to-do housing development in Danville, California.21 While nestled in Danville, Sara Jane immersed herself in the campaign of George Murphy, the “ultra conservative former song-and-dance man” (for whom she had actually volunteered previously, back when she lived in Los Angeles).22 Her marriage once again on the outs, and pivoting away from her years long affiliation with conservatism, Sara Jane suddenly expressed a newfound interest in leftist politics: “[i]n 1973, for the first time, Sara Jane went to march in support of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers” and apparently developed an unlikely obsession with the abduction of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army.23 Putting her alleged education in business management and accounting to use, Sara Jane, presenting herself “as a member of the Southern aristocracy,”24 inserted herself into Randolph Hearst’s People-In-Need food program, vying for and obtaining a position as a bookkeeper.25

It was at PIN that Sara Jane encountered Wilbert “Popeye” Jackson, the leader of the United Prisoners Union (UPU) who had associated with Donald DeFreeze in San Quentin26 and had emphatically voiced his opposition to Vacaville’s mind-control and human experimentation hub the Maximum Psychiatric Diagnostic Unit as well as Louis Jolyon West’s proposition to Dr. J. M. Stubblebine of a state Violence Center.27

Sara Jane was more than just a bookkeeper for Hearst’s free food program: she would even carry messages between Hearst and Popeye (and claimed she had also been hired by Hearst to find his daughter.28 According to Sara Jane’s biographer, Geri Spiegler, as the PIN program began to wind down, Sara Jane was approached by FBI Agent Charles Bates who, in surveilling the comings and goings at PIN, had observed Sara Jane in Popeye’s company and propositioned her for a clandestine meeting.29

Appointed by J. Edgar Hoover in 1971 to head the FBI’s investigations in Washington,30 Bates also had the distinguished privilege of overseeing the FBI’s COINTELPRO activities in San Francisco as Special Agent in charge of the SF field office.31 Bates had also been Special Agent at the FBI’s Chicago office in 1969, when the Bureau extrajudicially assassinated Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their sleep and only a few years later supervised the inception of the Watergate investigation.32

“Bates approached Sara Jane and asked her to a meeting. He told her that he and his colleague would meet her on a particular street corner.” Sara Jane, apparently, was game. “On the appropriate day, she stood on the designated corner… A green car pulled up with Bates driving and another man in the backseat. That man, Bert Worthington, would become her control officer, the person to whom she would report.”33 Per Worthington, the Bay Area’s burgeoning radical scene were a dangerous bunch, “[m]any of them the dupes of foreign governments, of the KGB and the Red Chinese” and from there gave Sara Jane a condensed conspectus on what Sara Jane termed “Spying 101.” Sara Jane told Spiegler that “[t]hey (the FBI) wanted to get me out in the field as quickly as possible,” precluding her, apparently, from getting “the full indoctrination normally used for informants” which supposedly included “psychological profiles of the radical left, lessons on how to identify a violent personality, and pointers on how to protect oneself from indoctrination and brainwashing.”34 Bates and Worthington then “explained that Sara Jane’s primary assignment was to get to know Popeye much better and to find out everything she could about him and his friends. The FBI hoped Popeye could lead them to Patricia Hearst.”35

The FBI agents instructed Sara Jane on the finer points of infiltrating certain Bay Area radical groups: attending study groups and organizational meetings, jotting down the names of radicals from meeting sign-up sheets thereat, and ingratiating herself with dissatisfied and spurned members. Sara Jane was to liaise with the FBI in the following ways: “in writing, on tape, or in person. She would write reports to a fictitious company, naming suspicious people, and including herself on the list. Then she would sign the reports with a code name and mail them to a post office box. When she would make reports on audiotape, she would be told where to drop the tapes; the drop site would be a different place each time.”36

First incarcerated at the age of ten, Popeye Jackson survived more than nineteen years in the abject deprivation of California’s “correctional” facilities, including Vacaville, before co-founding the United Prisoners Union and becoming an influential Bay Area prison reform advocate upon his release in 1970.37 Post-PIN, Sara Jane injected herself into Popeye’s United Prisoner’s Union milieu at the UPU headquarters on Twenty-fourth Street in San Francisco, dropping by in April of 1974: “[o]stensibly… to help the UPU, but her primary goal was to keep her eyes and ears wide open on Popeye’s home turf, to learn what she could about him and those around him for her FBI reports.”38 And so, the story goes, Sara Jane’s life as an FBI operative and infiltrator of the Bay Area’s radical left began. Such clandestine activities, perhaps titillating for a housewife discontented with domiciliary duties, could only portend great peril for those organizations infiltrated by Sara Jane, and those individuals, such as Popeye, who kept her company. To be sure, Popeye would pay the ultimate price: gunned down, execution-style, in his car alongside Vallejo schoolteacher Sally Voye.

Submerging herself in the radical left milieu of the Bay, Sara Jane associated with Camilla Hall of the SLA39 and familiarized herself with many of the SLA members,40 including the SLA-associated Joyce and Paul Halverson with whom she lived in the Mission District of San Francisco.41

In early 1974, Sara Jane’s patience with Popeye began to wear thin: “she found that his poorly masked chauvinism grated on her sensitivities.”42 As to Popeye, Sara Jane hypocritically told the Berkeley Barb: “[h]e treated people like shit. He wanted money and a middle-class life. He did not give people the same respect he expected from them.” Others told it differently: “Sara Jane had been physically attracted to Popeye, but the feeling was not mutual” and that Popeye’s “lack of interest in her was a contributing factor to her cooling to him.”43 Past rumor of love to hatred turned, her machinations against Popeye potentially a dark romantic alchemy of solve et coagula, Sara Jane’s aptitude for infiltration and espionage was rewarded when the FBI granted her the opportunity to shed her acolyte “informant” garb in favor of donning the robes of the PSI (potential security informant).44 Alongside this promotion, “Sara Jane’s role as informant had spread beyond the FBI.” Other law enforcement agencies, impressed by Sara Jane’s contacts within the FBI and radical groups, “had begun to ask for her assistance. These included both the SFPD, where Inspector Jack O’Shea was her primary contact, and the weapons division of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.”45

Allegedly unable to metabolize the increasing isolation and alienation of her double life, Sara Jane confessed to one of her surveillance targets the truth as to her work as a COINTELPRO informant. Rumors swirled of her duplicity, and she claimed to her biographer, Spiegler, that she found within herself a growing seed of “commitment to radical causes.”46 When Sara Jane revealed to her control agent Bert Worthington that she had intentionally blown her cover to a mark, Worthington terminated her as an asset on the FBI’s payroll. Said Sara Jane, “[w]hen they cut you off, you’re really cut off.”47 Sara Jane’s seed of sympathy for the leftist groups she had been infiltrating must not have been too sincere, for she realized that her knowledge as to such groups was largely derived from the FBI, that her “studies had been directed by them,” and that it was from the FBI that Sara Jane learned “who was doing what on the left.”48

After her termination by Worthington, Sara Jane once more propositioned the FBI for a spot on the COINTELPRO payroll “and she was pleasantly surprised that they agreed to reinstate her as an informant. According to Sara Jane, it was the first time the Bureau had ever continued with a blown source.”49 This atypical arrangement begs the question: if an informant’s value to a law enforcement agency is contingent upon the informant’s ability to exist undetected within the targeted organization, then what value might be allocated to the inverse? Moreover, what kind of organization allows itself to be monitored and penetrated by a known informant like Sara Jane?

Sara Jane’s targets this time would be Prairie Fire (an arm of the Weather Underground), Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization (VVAW), and most importantly, Tribal Thumb: the organization behind the assassination of Popeye Jackson.50

Tribal Thumb, a now obscure “radical” group in the annals of Bay Area history, was comprised of a rotating band of cons, ex-cons, and bourgeois white students centered in Palo Alto. In what feels like a plot line out of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, Tribal Thumb was headed by the charismatic Earl Satcher: a former Long Beach Black Panther leader, “reputed black karate expert,”51 and gifted saxophonist with an 18-year rap sheet for auto theft and armed robbery. Satcher’s Tribal Thumb “espoused a political philosophy that combined the teachings of Karl Marx, Che Guevera, and Austrian sexologist Wilhelm Reich.”52 (Amusingly, this synthesis of thought is described in a California Specialized Training Institute intelligence report on the group as being “essentially Marxist-communist in nature, but is heavily influenced by the proletarian sexual politics…”).53

Like Donald DeFreeze (who rechristened himself with the Swahili name Cinque Mtume), Satcher had been incarcerated at Soledad Prison and Vacaville’s California Medical Facility (CMF)54 during the time Phoenix operative Colston Westbrook headed the Black Cultural Association at the CMF.55 Satcher likewise adopted for himself a Swahili name: Kitamba Cha Chumba (“Cloth of Iron”).56 Satcher’s prison activism at Soledad, similarly to DeFreeze’s, garnered for him a rather controversial reputation as a “possible agent provocateur,” and Satcher claimed to have been “one of a small group of Black prisoners on the prison yard at Soledad the day when three Black prisoners were shot and killed by a tower guard,” an “incident that touched off the series of events leading to the Soledad Brothers Case, the assassination of George Jackson, and the trial of the San Quentin Six.”57 Upon release from prison, Satcher joined up with the Black Panthers and later “founded Tribal Thumb in Long Beach, California in the early 1970s.”58 Satcher’s revolutionary doctrine, to destroy “oppression in all its forms,” “may have been mostly a smoke screen for a very different agenda.” Indeed, “[w]hen some (Tribal Thumb) members were arrested for parole violations… they were found to have quantities of revolutionary tracts. But one member said that the pamphlets were for show; he asserted that the organization sought money from radicals but actually is chiefly interested in nonrevolutionary crime.”59 While “Satcher insinuated that he was a friend of George Jackson and San Quentin Six member Hugo Pinell and belonged to the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF),” Satcher and the Panthers had long ago parted ways and Satcher, oddly, had only activated politically after his incarcerations at Vacaville and San Quentin.60

The Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the BGF ran contrary to the counter-revolutionary-crime-chaos-politic of Tribal Thumb. Indeed, the two groups “became bitter rivals.”61 In many ways, the Symbionese Liberation Army and Tribal Thumb, the latter sometimes referred to as an “offshoot” of the former, were enantiomers of the same synesthetic molecular compounds: their chirality temporally expressed in a shared wave of muddled, eclectic violence which seemed not to serve the liberation of the working class, but the disruption and disorder aims of the FBI and CIA.

“A Berkeley Barb article reported: ‘Although it is not clear whether Tribal Thumb was a provocative outfit deliberately set up by police agencies as part of some covert COINTELPRO-style war on the local Left, there is no question that the group’s actions benefited police red squads and the Right wing. It is suggestive that at several crucial points in Tribal Thumb’s history, the intervention of FBI agents and police officials either enabled the group to continue operating or helped it accomplish tasks which ultimately had a devastating effect on radical political organizations.’”62

One such intervention came in 1972: “federal agencies intervened in a parole revocation proceeding against Satcher, allowing him to remain out and relocate to Northern California.”63 This federal boon afforded Satcher, now staying in Berkeley, the opportunity to orchestrate a poorly executed robbery of a Bank of America:

“Doing the actual robbery were six women, with Satcher as the getaway driver. But he failed to show up in front of the bank; the robbers fled on foot and were quickly arrested. Satcher was caught with all the loot. But the FBI reported that they lost all the evidence against him, and again he was released. The five women were convicted and sent to federal prison. He set up headquarters at Honeydew ranch in Mendocino County, where he began a business of raising Arabian horses, and which the Tribal Thumb used as a retreat.”64

The Honeydew ranch, about 55 miles southwest of Eureka, also “served as a dairy-cattle ranch and vegetable-growing farm for the commune’s San Francisco restaurant”65 and was outfitted with a geodesic dome for growing squash and garlic. Less bucolically, neighbors of the compound “complained to the sheriff’s office over the sound of automatic-weapon fire” and investigating deputies “found a firing range on the property.”66 Sheriff’s office investigative reports documented that “[p]eople who have gone into the camp were met at the gate that is now kept locked by men carrying rifles and wearing bandoliers of ammunition.” It was there at the Honeydew ranch that Sara Jane Moore would stay and train for several days prior to her attempted assassination of Gerald Ford.

Revealingly, Sara Jane was not the only FBI-affiliated infiltrator of the Thumb. At the Honeydew ranch’s firing range, undercover FBI asset Walter Hansacker provided the group with weapons and marksmanship training: “including how to fire the pistol that one of them would use on June 8, 1975, to assassinate (Popeye) Jackson around the corner from Moore’s apartment.”67 Police investigating Popeye’s murder “found the barrel of the murder weapon at the scene,” and FBI asset Walter Hansacker withheld the rest of the weapon from the local police for eight months. When the FBI eventually relinquished the body of the pistol, the police “charged a Tribal Thumb member (Richard ‘Ricardo’ Alan London) with the murder.”68 Among those named by a Grand Jury as co-conspirators in the assassination of Popeye were a Gary Johnson (an FBI informant) and a woman named E.P. (likely “Elana Payne,” often referred to as the “chief theoretician” of Tribal Thumb and other Maoist-type groups) who later became the roommate of Sara Jane Moore right before Sara Jane’s attempted assassination of Ford.6970 Per David Talbot in Season of the Witch, “[i]t was Moore who later helped seal Popeye Jackson’s fate, circulating a letter among Bay Area radicals that accused him of being an informer for Randy Hearst. Rolling Stone later called it Jackson’s ‘death warrant.’”71

Popeye’s snitch-jacketing “death warrant,” supposedly authored by the New World Liberation Front, claimed that Popeye had been murdered because he was “found to be an elitist pig serving his own personal needs and misleading the people’s forces.” The NWLF letter reasonably charged the Bay with a surge of fear and paranoia; many leftist groups immediately disavowed the killing of Popeye (including SLA members Russell Little and Joe Remiro). Ironically, “a rare communiqué appeared from the SLA itself, concluding that Popeye’s execution ‘was either carried out by counterintelligence agencies (FBI, et al.) or by horribly misguided ‘revolutionaries.’”72 The SLA’s sentiments were shared by “many Bay Area leftists (who) suspected that police or government agents had assassinated Popeye and dismissed the communiqué … as part of government campaign of ‘disinformation.’” A subsequent letter from the NWLF to the Berkeley Barb relayed that the NWLF was not responsible for Popeye’s death, though it doubled down on criticisms of Popeye’s supposedly bourgeois decadence (e.g., driving a 12-year-old Cadillac, dressing cool, etc.).73 Despite the SLA’s public opposition to what would be revealed as the wet work of Tribal Thumb, the Popeye hit mirrored the SLA’s senseless assassination of Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster. To be sure, Popeye and Foster were well-respected organizers in their respective fields and both men’s murders were disavowed by other leftist organizations who perceived the slayings to be the work of agent provocateurs.

The strange chirality of Tribal Thumb and the SLA was even noted by Steven Weed, Patty Hearst’s fiancé at that time of her abduction, in his book My Search for Patty Hearst which he co-wrote with his friend Scott Swanton. While Weed had his own violent encounter with the SLA during Patty’s abduction, Swanton himself had serendipitously “walked out of a Berkeley paint store and almost into two members of a gang that had just robbed a bank” only three days after the SLA’s assassination of Marcus Foster.74 Swanton had apparently “pretty much forgotten the incident” until “he was summoned to appear as a state witness at the trial of Earl Satcher… who was suspected of masterminding the bank assault.” According to Swanton, when he mentioned the obvious similarities between the robberies of the SLA and Tribal Thumb (“a black ex-con, four white women, and two men hitting a bank”—one of Satcher’s soldier’s was Geraldine Farwell, the daughter of a former D.A. of San Luis Obispo) to the District Attorney, the D.A. showed Swanton one of Earl Satcher’s cards, reminiscent of the SLA’s seven-headed cobra: “‘The Tribal Thumb’ it read, and below it was a two-headed dragon.” To boot, “[t]he D.A. told him (Swanton) that Satcher had known DeFreeze in prison.”75

Patty Hearst even had an enantiomer self within Tribal Thumb: Hedy Sarney. Journalists at the time opined on the similarities between Sarney and Hearst—both were white, female Berkeley students76 who despite their respectable upbringings were somehow ensnared by political radicalism, abducted, kept in isolation, sexually abused, tormented, and psychologically conditioned to participate in politically-motivated bank heists. After being called into the District Attorney’s office, it was Hedy Sarney who Scott Swanton identified in a lineup as one of the bank robbers he had run into. According to Swanton, Sarney “lived on Channing Way and knew Mizmoon, Camilla Hall, and Chris Thompson” of the SLA.77

A Romanian immigrant and employee of the Berkeley Free Clinic, Hedy Sarney recalled being lured by Earl Satcher into the grasp of Tribal Thumb with “beer and poetry.”78 Satcher, Reichian magazine in hand, expounded to Hedy on the importance of open sexuality within the radical enclave: “[t]hey believed that people should always sleep together and that privacy and monogamy cause unhappiness and help to maintain an authoritarian and oppressive social system.”79 Naturally, “doors to the bathroom” were also within this framework an offensive extension of the hegemonic order. Why Hedy, an anti-communist who harped upon her father’s imprisonment in Romania for his opposition to the Communist Party and who apparently set forth to Satcher that she “knew communist dogma and didn’t think it worked,” would associate closely with members of the SLA and Tribal Thumb has not been satisfactorily explained by Hedy or by anyone else.80 Even Steven Weed, after interviewing Hedy, wondered why a seemingly intelligent young woman with Hedy’s background could have been enticed by someone like Satcher.81 Hedy was discovered by police on a raid of Tribal Thumb, crumpled and quivering on a bed next to a pile of over $16,000 in cash stolen from the Bank of America.82

On June 7, 1974, Hedy Sarney was sentenced by Judge Oliver Carter to 30 months in jail: “the same day Patricia Hearst was indicted for armed robbery of the Sunset branch of the Hibernia Bank” by the exact same judge who would preside over the Hearst matter.83 Reporters noted that the signal difference between Sarney and Hearst was Sarney’s lack of funds and the ramifications of that upon her legal defense. On appeal, Hedy was represented by attorney Charles Garry84 (who several years later would represent The People’s Temple, and who also allegedly persuaded Sara Jane to come clean about her work as an informer85). As to her time in Tribal Thumb, Hedy, mistily, echoed Patty Hearst: “[a]fter awhile I felt like I was in a dream… I wasn’t sure who I was or what I wanted anymore…”86

Acting on intelligence that Patty Hearst was being stored in a Menlo Park Apartment in 1975, Charles Bates and a coterie of FBI agents, sheriffs, and California Department of Corrections authorities lead with “battle-like plans” a “lightning-like raid” on what happened to be Tribal Thumb’s Menlo Park hideout which police found to be filled with “radical literature,” weapons, and “bomb-making equipment.”87 Though Patty was not found, police arrested Tribal Thumb members William McReynolds, a San Luis Obispo California Men’s Colony escapee, and Benjamin T. Sargis, identified in several sources as a “co-founder” of Tribal Thumb. Were it not for the diligence of San Mateo Times photographer Ray Zirkel, the freshly raided apartment would have been incinerated by a mysterious case of arson. But for the intervention of Zirkel, a “letter expressing support for the newly organized Red Guerilla Family, which has claimed credit for two recent bombings,” a letter expressing solidarity with the SLA, and unspecified Venceremos literature would have been destroyed by the blaze. Strangely, it was as if the raiding team knew that the fire control might be needed, for the Menlo Park Fire Department (MPFD) was alerted prior to the raid that their services might be required. Indeed, the MPFD received the following warning: “[w]e’re going to have a problem on the 1100 block of Sevier, and the FBI and sheriff’s agents will be involved. We will be operating on the ‘white channel’ (the secret channel used by police in highly secret operations.” The arsonist was never located.88

Police homicide inspectors Frank Falzon and Dave Toschi, who worked the Popeye case and assisted in many of the criminal investigations associated with Bay Area radicals, cryptically indicated to a San Francisco Examiner reporter that “it was the arrest of Miss Hearst and the Harrises some months later… that lead to the break in the murder case.”89 (Note that Falzon claims to have “extracted the identity” of serial killer Richard Ramirez and that Toschi had been lead investigator on the Zodiac Killer case and, promisingly, had inspired Clint Eastwood’s portrayal of Dirty Harry). Falzon and Toschi claimed to have checked the slugs and shell casings from the Popeye crime scene against the SLA’s arsenal to no avail, but caught a break in the Popeye case based on the “intelligence of an agent” associated with the Hearst matter.90

On September 21, 1975, Sara Jane Moore and Earl Satcher met at the Cafe Mediterranean, an iconic Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley coffeehouse91; the next day, on September 22, 1975, Sara Jane attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford. As in most political assassinations and assassination attempts, troubling details as to law enforcement foreknowledge and inaction abound. Per Jack O’Shea, one of Sara Jane’s SFPD handlers, Sara Jane was scheduled, the same weekend of the attempted Ford assassination, to “help the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) ‘set up’ Mark Fernwood, the leader of the John Birch Society chapter in Danville.”92 Sara Jane later claimed that she had learned from her clandestine dealings with Fernwood that that the far right wasn’t too unlike the far left in a certain, specific way: “they have a clandestine group on the right, too. They have a secret shooting range, secret firing range.”93

Moreover, it was Fernwood who “sold Sara Jane the nickel-plated .38 caliber Smith and Wesson used… in her assassination attempt on the President.”94 Fernwood also supplied Sara Jane with the “.44 caliber Charter Arms revolver which police confiscated the day before the shooting.”95 In fact, Sara Jane had contacted O’Shea on September 20th to tell him that she would be going to Stanford, where President Ford was scheduled to speak, that weekend to “test the security.” O’Shea recalled Sara Jane saying, “I’m going to ask you something that will make you recoil in horror. Can you have me arrested?” O’Shea allegedly replied: “[i]f you carry a concealed weapon to Stanford, you will be arrested”96 and immediately “called the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Firearms Unit of the Treasure Department” in alarm, alerting each agency that “[w]e may have another Squeaky Fromme on our hands.” Per O’Shea, fearing for the President’s life, he once more called the Secret Service on Monday to inquire “if the agents were gong to pick up and hold Sara Jane.” However, “[t]o O’Shea’s frustration… the Secret Service didn’t visit Sara Jane’s house to interrogate and possibly arrest her before she left her house in the morning”—giving her ample time to chat at the Cafe Mediterranean with Earl Satcher and who knows whom else.97

Frustrated by the Secret Service’s lackadaisical posture, “O’Shea himself arranged to meet Sara jane that Sunday morning, September 21, at an undisclosed location. He got her to show him the gun that she had in her purse; then she left for her morning’s appointment. As soon as she left, O’Shea immediately called Mission District police and ordered the officers to seize her weapon” prompting the San Francisco police to arrest Sara Jane later that afternoon. Found by SFPD to be in possession of a .44 (and eleven cartridges), Sara Jane was read her rights and transported to the police station with Elana Payne, her “constant companion” roommate who just so happened to be the Tribal Thumb Minister of Propaganda, to keep her company.98

“After processing Sara Jane, SFPD Lieutenant Raymond White called the Secret Service from the Mission station to see if they wanted Sara Jane held for the entire afternoon. An unidentified Secret Service officer is said to have replied, ‘You don’t need to hold her. We’ll be in touch.” All along, Elana Payne “sat quietly next to Sara Jane, unspeaking, unidentified, and unspoken to, throughout the time at the stationhouse.”99 The women were free to go. That Sunday evening, Secret Service agents Gary Yauger and Martin Haskell Jr. interviewed Sara Jane about her undercover activities, her involvement in the Patty Hearst case, her possession of an unlicensed concealed firearm, and her intentions with the weapon.100 Yauger, who “began his Washington career with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he did logistics work,” and Haskell, a “protection intelligence squad leader” in the San Francisco Secret Service field office, determined Sara Jane to not be a threat. “When questioned about this decision later on, any agency spokesman would only say that the interview showed that she ‘was not of sufficient protection interest to warrant surveillance.’”101 That Yauger and Haskell did not perceive Sara Jane to be a security threat is complicated by their very own testimony a year later before the Senate Committee on Appropriations in a Review of Secret Service Protective Measures wherein both men admit to initiating an All Points Bulletin for Sara Jane on the 21st, but neglecting to issue the same on the 22nd.102 This discrepancy prompted Senator Thomas Eagleton, himself prone to lobbing softball questions interspersed with praise for the bravery, patriotism, and heroism of the Secret Service, to ask incredulously:

“I wonder in light of all of those events which give evidence that you were concerned about this lady, interested in this lady, that all those concerns dissipated as a result of the interview. So my question to both of you, Mr. Haskell and Mr. Yauger, is how valid is the interview, if it can erase the slate, the slate of concern that you two gentlemen had evidenced for almost 2 days about Sara Morre? How does one that caused you to be that (sic) much trouble for a considerable period of time all of a sudden become less troublesome?”103

But Haskell and Yauger were masters at equivocating and managed testify to a muddled timeline of disregarded alerts, overlooked notices, inconsequential interviews, and missed calls culminating, naturally, in a general intelligence system failure to identify Sara Jane Moore as a security threat to the President. Worse, both agents denied under oath that O’Shea ever indicated to them that he believed Sara Jane to be a potential Squeaky Fromme. Instead, both claimed that O’Shea actually vouched for Sara Jane’s character and reliability as an informant. In the same Special Hearing, O’Shea affirmed, contrary to the testimony of Haskell and Yauger, that he did in fact put the Secret Service agents on notice as to Sara Jane’s inclinations and never once vouched for her.104

Conspicuously missing from the Hearing was Bert Worthington, who also played a role in the purportedly disastrous (mis)transmission of information that fateful day: he called the Secret Service command post with regard to Sara Jane, according to Haskell and Yauger, just to mention that Sara Jane had called Worthington to inform him that she had been arrested.105

Bertram Worthington himself emerges as curious character: he was one of the lead FBI men on the Patty Hearst case and his initials can be found on many of the type written investigative reports and memos as to the SLA that have been released by the FBI from FOIA requests. Sara Jane herself described Worthington as a harsh, cold operator who packed a pistol 24/7. According to Sara Jane, FBI agents like Worthington were “quite honest about killing people. They have three ways they neutralize people. One of those three ways is to kill them.” The other two methods? “They convict them or they hassle them until they burn out.”106

Certainly, the intelligence-steeped Haskell and Yauger cannot be taken at their word in their conflicting testimony, stout denials, and professional rationalizations as they perjure themselves with alacrity. And yet, the fix was in, and the Fromme-Moore affair given the Dallas Treatment. The Warren Commission itself is referenced multiple times throughout the Hearing, and our dear agents expertly opine on the wise prescriptions set forth by the Warren Report for improved Secret Service professional conduct in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. The First Session of the 94th Congress seemed satisfied to brush off the Sara Jane Moore incident as one of those unfortunate, but rare Lee Harvey Oswald-type situations that no one could have possibly seen coming. Indeed, for clever senators, such unfortunate moments reveal a ripeness to effect increased intelligence sharing between law enforcement agencies and perhaps even erect a more expansive computerized database of national security threats.107

Sara Jane was placed in the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, right across the way from the cell of Patty Hearst.108 According to the Sheriff, “the two women, in the heavy security section, could talk with each other.”109 With the coverup underway, and the inconvenient facts that multiple law enforcement agencies had objective foreknowledge that Sara Jane planned to pay Gerald Ford a visit with a revolver (and that an ATF agent had actually accompanied her to purchase the weapon) already receding into the background, stranger details began to emerge about Sara Jane’s past. Van Watson, the proprietor of a Charleston, West Virginia grocery store, revealed to the press that Sara Jane Moore and Charles Manson when they were children not only lived within blocks of each other in Charleston, but that they had frequented his shop where Manson’s mother clerked for a time. “I was very much surprised at the way those two children turned out,” said Watson. “Charles wasn’t much good at going to school-he liked to play a little bit of hooky… But I expected Sara Jane to grow up and become somebody with a good education and a responsible position in life.”110 Interlocks also exist between Manson and Tribal Thumb/Wellspring members.

By 1977, Tribal Thumb (now operating a hippie vegetarian restaurant and going mostly by Wellspring Communion) shifted its focus to the People’s Food System (PFS), an activist network of worker-owned natural food cooperatives and businesses. But wherever the Thumb went, unrest followed. In early April, “the Food System convened a system-wide All-Workers’ Conference, originally scheduled to discuss the Basis of Unity,” but “the burning issue of the moment” was the possible infiltration of the System by agent provocateurs:

“Tribal Thumb members… wanted to act as ‘observers’ during the conference, including Earl Satcher. The women doing security at the door told them they couldn’t enter, but they pushed their way inside. Satcher and the others demanded to be allowed to participate and were twice refused permission by the chair of the meeting.

Satcher insisted that he ‘had the right to stay.’ An overwhelming majority of the Food System workers present voted to expel them, but they still refused to leave. A shouting match broke out. A Food System worker began to snap pictures of the Tribal Thumb members. Satcher confronted the photographer and offered to buy the film. The man refused. Tribal Thumb members began to surround him; the photographer bolted for the door. Tribal Thumb members began punching Food System workers and struggled with the photographer over the camera, which was passed to a female worker. She ran away with it, but was tackled by ‘Red,’ who opened the camera, took out the film, and hurried to Satcher with it. The entire Tribal Thumb-Veritable Vegetable group then left immediately. The rest of the Food System meeting was spent discussing the disruption.”111

Deploying an SLA-style tactic, Wellspring “issued an ‘Open Statement’ in which it accused the Food System of ‘lynch-mob behavior’ and ‘fascism,’ and suggested that the PFS workers who opposed them were police agents.”112

“It is overwhelmingly evident,” read the statement, “that the only body that has reason to fear Earl Satcher or anyone connected with him [is] the SYSTEM, its agents and its provocateurs!” Not long after the dissemination of the communiqué, the unrest within the PFS came to head at a second meeting: “Satcher appeared at the door, accompanied by two Doberman guard dogs and another Tribal Thumb member” and was again denied entrance. As Satcher, his Dobermans, and his Tribal Thumb compatriot stoked the flames of PFS factionalism,

“a car with Willie Tate and three other people… pulled up near the warehouse door. As Tate approached the entrance, Satcher began firing a pistol at him. Tate, unarmed, fell to the ground, wounded. Answering fire came from some unidentified source. Several volleys were exchanged. In the end, Satcher lay dead and Tate critically wounded. All the Tribal Thumb members fled.”113

Tate, a member of the San Quentin Six, miraculously survived the shooting despite taking bullets to both the knee and abdomen. Joellyn Weiss, a possible witness to the shoot out and PFS/prison rights activist, was not so lucky. Weiss was found on a roadside “shot in the head eight times with a medium caliber pistol,” her murder unsolved to this day.114 And, even in death, the shadow of the SLA loomed large over Earl Satcher. One of the women in the car with Tate was Diane Dally115 who had risen to prominence two years earlier by interrupting the murder trial of SLA members Russell Little and Joseph Remiro. When Little began pummeling prosecution witness and SLA cohort Chris Thompson, Dally began to chant, “Kill! Kill!,” her right hand, clenched in a fist, hoisted into the air.116

After Satcher’s sudden death, Benjamin Sargis ostensibly became the de facto leader of Tribal Thumb/Wellspring. Sargis had previously been arrested in 1975 “when police searching for Patty Hearst raided a Menlo Park apartment and found him with a stash of pipe bombs, rifles, pistols, gas masks, infra-red night camera scopes and warfare manuals.”117 Sargis and Co., somehow out on parole despite repeated violations, were again raided by police, this time in San Jose in 1982. Found at the Wellspring “urban-guerilla lair” were: “bumper tags and material to make phony identifications for entry into military posts throughout the country, including the Oakland Army Base”; “$3,000 in cash”; “a pipe bomb, gunpowder, other bomb-building materials and 15 guns”; and narcotics. Wellspring’s plans? “[T]o carry out a major burglary at the Presidio armory” for which the group apparently possessed “detail blueprints of detection alarm systems.”118 From here on, Wellspring seemingly dropped their earlier Reichian-Marxist pretensions and began to hurtle full throttle into a vortex of frenzied violence and anarchy.

The Wellspring commune on the Honeydew ranch became an incubator of violence not dissimilar to Spahn:

• Rosanne Goustin, a defecting member of the commune, was shot in the head by commune members Betty Jean Abramson and Wendi Sue Heaton;119

• Ernest Major Kirkwood (also known as “Monster Mash”), a “mid-level cocaine dealer” who had been Earl Satcher’s “lieutenant” and an unindicted co-conspirator in the assassination of Popeye, was convicted in the late 80s for a double murder “during an alleged cocaine deal that went sour.” (After the murders, Kirkwood fled the United States and was “arrested at a London airport while awaiting a flight to West Africa”);120

• Robert Ray Bebb who had previously been incarcerated for a rash of armed robberies and beating his pregnant wife was “associated with the Wellspring Commune” and had been a cell mate of Charles Manson’s. Bebb was later convicted of the 1979 shotgun murder of a switchboard operator;121

• Lawrence Bailey (who now goes by Larry Giddings), a resident of the Wellspring ranch, who apparently was born in Rosstal, Germany where he spent most of his childhood before he moved to Maryland, was also a member of the Manson Family where, inter alia, he: participated in the murder of Donald “Shorty” Shea; was “present when Manson announced his plan to go on a murder rampage in Southern California, which resulted in the Tate murders”; participated in and been arrested for a 1971 shootout at a sporting goods store with other Manson Family members;122

• William Dunne, a “prep-school dropout” from a “well-to-do” family who at 18 was convicted of a “Loeb-Leopold thrill killing” with a friend;123

• Other members include Ricky Blanchard (a convicted child molester)124, William McReynolds (a convicted robber and rapist)125, and Ricardo London, Popeye’s killer, who in his memoir details how Tribal Thumb “disguised… criminality behind political clichés” and how he as a Tribal Thumb member “committed crimes ranging from assaults with a deadly weapon, carrying a loaded weapon while still on parole, firing a gun in a robbery, to assaulting an off-duty reserve police officer, robberies, drug deals, smuggling drugs into prison, forgery, stolen cars, illegal registrations, and identity fraud.”

Perhaps the most intriguing member of Wellspring was a close associate of both Dunne and Bailey by the name of Artie Ray Baker. Similarly to Dunne, Baker had done time in prison, California’s Deuel Vocational Institution (DVI) specifically, for a double-murder of an elderly couple that he committed at only 18. Baker apparently became adept at engineering prison escapes and the only times he would experience freedom in his adult life were those times he had escaped from prison. “A high school dropout from a working-class family, Baker’s only father figure, his lawyer said, was a gun-running mercenary who befriended him when he was 15.”126 At Baker’s trial for the assassination of customs officer Kenneth Ward, he was described by his attorney as a “‘civilian war machine’ who acted purely on impulse”; psychiatrist Dr. John Petrich testified that Baker had been “pre-conditioned to react with instant violence when he felt threatened.”127 After engineering an escape from DVI in 1977, “Artie Baker was recruited to train (Wellspring) members in weapons and later was designated as one of their hitmen.”128 Baker claimed he had been “conditioned” to use “weapons of war” and had “captained civilian commando training” at the Honeydew ranch as Tribal Thumb’s “weapons instructor.”129

After the slaying of Rosanne Goustin on the Wellspring ranch, a 24-man SWAT team raided the group’s San Francisco “fortress” which was equipped with 1/4-inch steel plated door outfitted with iron bars on its back, and a “escape tunnel” accessible through a basement trap door that led into San Fracisco’s sewer system.130 By the early 80s, police and reporters had come to refer to the Tribal Thumb/Wellspring Communion nexus as the “New Age Mafia”131 and the San Francisco Examiner in 1982 reported that “[o]ne federal source remarked that the group is no longer political, but merely a loose organization of hardened criminals.” Said the federal source, “[t]hey’ve even gone beyond terrorism… There has been no political statement or alliance I know of. They were doing it for political reasons, but now I don’t know why they’re doing it (engaging in criminal activity).”132 Additional reports from the Examiner relayed that Tribal Thumb/Wellspring Communion, The New World Liberation Front, and the August Seventh Guerilla Movement, a group that “claimed credit for shooting down an Oakland police helicopter” may not only overlap in membership, but that Tribal Thumb had “been identified by federal authorities as the psychological warfare unit of the August Seventh Guerilla movement.”133

The California Specialized Training Institute (CSTI) authored in 1978 an intelligence report on the “Tribal Thumb Community.” Founded and headed by future FEMA director and Lyndon LaRouche security consultant Louis Giuffrida, who while at the US Army War College “wrote a thesis outlining a military plan for the forcible relocation of millions of black Americans to concentration camps in the event of a national emergency involving racial strife,” the CSTI, as identified by Ken Lawrence in Covert Action, was a domestic application of the counterinsurgency strategies defined by General Frank Kitson in Low Intensity Operations drawn from Kitson’s years on the vanguard of Britain’s colonial wars in the Northern Ireland, Kenya, and all over, fused with the intelligence-backed policing articulated by Robin Evelegh in Peace-Keeping in a Democratic Society — The Lessons of Northern Ireland.

“Kitson’s recipe requires a technique he calls pseudo gangs or counter gangs, which he claims to have invented in Kenya during the British war against the Mau Mau.” Under Kitson’s rubric, any liberation movement or political opposition to colonial authority could be classified as “gang,” making its “false counterpart under police control a ‘pseudo gang.’” Per Kitson, the role of the pseudo gang is to “develop credibility so that they can effectively confuse, divide, and undermine the authentic organizations, and so that they can eventually serve as paramilitary auxiliaries to the security forces.” Indeed, Kitson even notes that “[t]here is some evidence to the effect that pseudo gangs of ultra-militant black nationalists are now operating in the United States.”

The CSTI’s raison d'être was to “provide counterinsurgency training to police forces from all across the U.S. and from many other countries,” which Lawrence describes as “[t]he application of Kitson’s strategy of repression to the United States… modified to conform to the specific requirements of capitalist rule rooted in white supremacy.” This brainchild of Giuffrida, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, and Edwin Meese (future attorney general of the United States), was designed to “carry out tasks that could not, at that time, be conducted at FBI Headquarters of the CIA-created International Police Academy, or other federal police training institutions.”

The Institute was based in San Luis Obispo and sprang forth from the “series of secret exercises in repression (called ‘civil disorder management’)” beginning in 1968 code named Cable Splicer, a clandestine operation that “brought together law enforcement officers from all over the state. In 1969 and 1970 they added generals from the Pentagon, the Sixth Army, and the National Guard; police chiefs, sheriffs, and lesser officers from many parts of the United States; Military Intelligence officers, telephone company executives, and defense contractors.”

Quoting writers Ron Ridenhour and Arthur Lubow in Bringing Home the War, Lawrence notes that:

“The Civil Emergency Management Course Manual at the San Luis Obispo school is a virtual handbook for the counterrevolution. Examining the motives behind ‘revolutionary activity,’ the manual author finds the causes legitimate, the frustration often well-justified, the ‘revolutionaries’ basically sincere. That is exactly why the threat is so dangerous. The manual and the course describe how that threat should be met. The methods? Press manipulation, computerized radical spotting, logistical support from other agencies, martial rule. Three days of preparation lead up to a day-long game… A last day is highlighted by discussions of ‘reduced lethality weapons’ and student movement infiltration.”

By 1978, Giuffrida’s Insitute had “graduated over 14,000 students from every state in the union, as well as from overseas,” and per Dep. Atty. Gen. Michael Franchetti, Giuffrida kept “in constant contact with heads of the Israeli, Italian and German secret services… those are people who are in and out of there quite often to teach classes.” Indeed, it was cadets of the CSTI and “similar programs” who “systematically slaughtered the Symbionese Liberation Army… That televised massacre occurred only six months after the November 1973 graduation of the first 40 students at the San Luis Obispo special weapons and tactics (SWAT) program.”

The second prong of “low intensity operations” is the intelligence-backed tactics espoused by Evelegh, who like Kitson came out of counterinsurgency operations in Belfast. Evelegh even articulated a useful policy for the recruitment of informants:

“What is needed is the ability within the law to induce a terrorist to defect to the Government’s side without his former colleagues knowing that he has done so, in return for indemnity for his crimes. We should consider briefly the effect on a terrorist organization of widespread publicity being given to official encouragement of defection in return for an indemnity. Any arrested terrorist will have this “easy way out” at the back of his mind if the pressures on him seem too strong.”

Likening the recruitment of informants to the “wooing of a woman,” Evelegh proposes that “[i]nside informers seldom appear of their own volition. They have to be consciously created, usually from among members of the terrorist organization who have been arrested…” To Evelegh, the recruiter is “seeking to achieve a seduction rather than a rape of rebuff” in their “[p]ersuading a terrorist to defect” for which Evelegh deduces there are five reasons for inducement:

“suspects are induced to think that it is in their own interests to inform and defect: because they are tortured, because they are induced to do so by cash, because they are blackmailed into it as the lesser of two evils, because they lose their nerve, and because they are genuinely converted from their terrorist beliefs to supporting the Government cause.”

Evelegh then “tells precisely how to use each of these five methods—torture, bribery, blackmail, induced cowardice, and conversion” successfully. Situated within this context, Tribal Thumb would appear the perfect vehicle for counterinsurgency. Earl Satcher, like Donald DeFreeze, perhaps primed by mind control experiments and psychic tortures deployed primarily on black prisoners at Vacaville, his freedom possibly brokered in a quid pro quo arrangement with law enforcement and/or intelligence agencies, led an anarchic band of criminals, indeed a pseudo gang or a “new age mafia,” its ranks composed of murderers, rapists, and darker yet: commando assassins trained by special forces gun runners to act as off-the-books mercenaries.

Beyond the strong temporal association between the SLA’s bank heist and Tribal Thumb’s, one of the male participants in the Tribal Thumb bank robbery, Joseph Monaco, is described in the CSTI memo as having “disclosed to a cell mate that the purpose of the robbery was to obtain money with which to purchase more weapons.”134 The report goes on to state that “Monaco further disclosed that he was an organizer for a revolutionary group involved in activities such as shooting down the Oakland Police Department helicopter and killing the Oakland School Superintendent.” The same intelligence report also references law enforcement interviews conducted with members of Tribal Thumb in which Satcher himself had apparently “made reference to newspaper clippings related to shooting down the Oakland Police Department helicopter and Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster, allegedly stating, ‘We’re just like them and we’re practically the same thing.’”135

To be sure, the similarities between Earl Satcher and Donald DeFreeze and Tribal Thumb and the SLA are far too numerous to list. Both organizations can even be traced back to a twin birth from the smoldering remains of the Venceremos Brigade, of which both Satcher and his wife Cheryl Ann Satcher (née Hockin), who was implicated in the Venceremos-attributed shooting death of a prison guard, were a part.136 Both Tribal Thumb and the SLA possessed inexplicable access to high-grade weaponry, an impressive record of fortuitous prison escapes, and special lax parole treatment that only quality fellas like Charles Manson usually get. Both groups exhibited the same entropic attributes of intelligence operations expanded beyond sustainable bounds—stoking factional infighting and operating as paramilitary death squads wherever they went—dissolving just as rapidly as they were organized.

According to a memorandum on the SLA’s ideology prepared by Bert Worthington, who consulted with “a long-time member of the Communist Party USA and Marxist-Leninist scholar,” the SLA’s writing contained:

“a great deal of the hippie street drug culture jargon, a call to restore human society to an earlier more romantic age and is similar to the romantic utopianism of Rousseau. However, no plan for building this new world is offered-only terrorism and destruction. Although there is much emphasis on the interracial character of this new world, there are contradictory overtones of black nationalism. Classical Marxism-Leninism would definitely characterize the SLA ideology as ‘ultra-left adventurism.’

Worthington notes in the same document that Marxist-Leninist former Venceremos members, unaffiliated with the SLA, “have constantly deplored the lack of Marxist-Leninist ideology on the part of the SLA and its failure to concretely relate its actions within the context of working-class problems… They have characterized the SLA philosophy as being hippie, street oriented akin to that of the Manson clan.” Worthington, a quoting a missive as to the SLA circulating in disbanded Venceremos circles:

“Contrary to what they, the police, and the press are saying, the SLA is not a revolutionary group. In effect, if not in intent, they are anti-working class, anti-revolutionary, anti-communist…

However, to carry out the socialist revolution, it is necessary to drive out of the working class all anti-revolutionary elements. The SLA represents just such an anti-revolutionary tendency.

The international communist movement has always condemned anarchism. V. I. Lenin, leader of the Russian Bolsheviks, pointed out that, although the members of such groups as the SLA are passionately indignant at the crimes of the ruling class, they are unable to link up the revolutionary struggle with the labor movement. For people who don’t believe that the working class can become revolutionary, Lenin says, it is very hard to ‘find some outlet for their indignation and revolutionary energy other than terror.’

Lenin goes on to say that, even though they don’t mean it to be, their terrorism is a kind of elitism- ‘Let the workers carry on their economic struggle against the employers and the government,’ the terrorists say, while they carry on the political struggle themselves. This ‘handful of terrorists engaged in single combat with the government’ doesn’t rouse the working class to action, Lenin says. Instead it merely makes a short-lived sensation. Indirectly it leads the working class to ‘apathy and passive waiting for the next bout.’…”

So too can the elitist Sara Jane’s adventurist attempt, even if conducted in earnest upon Gerald Ford’s life, be characterized for all of her doctrinal inconsistencies, and also for the possibility of mind control lurking in her psychiatric history. (Sara Jane had a history of amnesic fugue states dating back to childhood and had been committed to psychiatric institutions at least seven times throughout her life137, including institutionalization at the military-intelligence bulwark Walter Reed).

Though Sara Jane and some others assert that, in the end, she was persuaded by her associations with Bay Area radicals to the side of revolution, the idea is unavailing. Secret Service agent Yauger testified before the Committe on Appropriations that in his interview with Sara Jane, she expressed no “animosity to the Ford Administration. She did not show any animosity to the President” and that she advised the agents that “prior to Mr. Rockefeller’s appointment, that this was a lackluster Administration”138; Sara Jane declared in a Playboy interview that her personality was a divided one of three selves, all operating at once.139

Records as to Sara Jane tend to disappear. While the FBI “reported that Sara Jane had almost completed a master’s in business,” possibly at UCLA as Sara Jane claimed, “the Registrar at UCLA found no records of Sara Jane Moore (or Kahn, or Manning, or Aalberg) ever completing a degree at UCLA.”140 Likewise, per Charleston reporter Bob Brunner, Sara Jane was committed to Spencer State Hospital in the 1970s, but her records were spirited away by the FBI before the West Virginia-based Brunner could get his hands on them. Sara Jane’s Army service records were destroyed by a fire in St. Louis in 1973. (A hotbed of psychoeugenics, Spencer State was presided over by Dr. Walter Freeman—pioneer of the transorbital lobotomy, a barbaric procedure that he had famously performed on Rosemary Kennedy and Frances Farmer). Immediately after her discharge from Spencer in 1972, Sara Jane returned to Charleston, West Virginia and “was a frequent customer at a tavern in the Daniel Boone Hotel, where she said her name was Rosemary Rockefeller.” Rosemary Rockefeller “telephoned Florida and Cuba several times… and announced to customers in the bar that she was trying to get Fidel Castro to assassinate Richard Nixon.”141 (It’s curious that Sara Jane, who evidently had a years-long fascination with the Rockefeller family, would attempt an act that would have naturally resulted in Nelson Rockefeller becoming president).

When Sara Jane was arraigned before Judge Samuel Conti, “who was seeking to establish a factual basis of her guilty plea,” it was Sara Jane herself who “raised the issue of a possible accomplice.” When asked by Judge Conti whether anyone encouraged her in her attempted assassination of Ford, Sara Jane, “[a]fter a pause of about 30 seconds,” replied, “[a]s to that time, no.” When Judge Conti pressed further, asking “[w]as your intention formed alone?,” Sara Jane replied, “[o]n that particular date, yes.” Before accepting Sara Jane’s guilty plea, Judge Conti pressed once more: “What about some other day?” Sara Jane replied: “I’m not going to answer that.”142 (Sara Jane was evaluated by several psychiatrists after the attempted shooting, including Dr. Jonas Rappeport, a protégé of Dr. Manfred Guttmacher [assigned to examine Jack Ruby], who would go on to evaluate John Hinckley, Jr. as well).

She was even more direct in the aforementioned Playboy interview:

“… the stuff I gave the FBI was hard information. I never fudged with them: what I gave them was very accurate. I had done something very valuable for them in the fall of 1974… I will intrigue you a little with this: that was the point at which the seed of what finally happened on September 22, 1975, was planted. That was the one time when my political beliefs, what I wanted to have happen, coincided with something that the bureau and the Secret Service wanted.”143

As for Earl Satcher and Tribal Thumb, it’s uncertain (but likely) that the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army and Tribal Thumb were fellow travelers in the mind-control bastion that was Colston Westbrook’s Black Cultural Association. In 1974, an unknown California prison inmate was interviewed by the FBI about a redacted subject (not Donald DeFreeze) who had been a signal part of the BCA meetings at Vacaville. Redacted had been “extremely militant and… had done an immense amount of reading and seemed well versed in Guerrilla warfare and the setting up of the structure of organizations.”

Redacted possessed “organizational charts of a new organization, name unknown…” and had advised the unknown inmate that as soon as Redacted was moved to a minimum-security prison, that he planned to “escape and go underground on the outside as he had work to do.” Redacted was “only going to get himself into more trouble and that… he had to be about his business and that he was going to assume a leadership role in a new organization” and had generously supplied the unknown inmate with “literature on the Venceremos and the Tupamoros.” Once Redacted was outside the prison walls, his focus would be learning foreign languages, target practice, and mastering karate.

Whether Redacted, escaped from the CMF and gone underground, would become “reputed black karate expert” Earl Satcher may never be known, and perhaps neither may the dark forces that molded Sara Jane Moore be revealed, but the glimmer of truth that is their evident convergence, and their concomitant collapse, lingers in the air like a phantom note of a tenor sax acoustically attenuated on the mist over Vacaville.

10

Amnesia victim able to recall name to doctor. (1950, April 27). Kingsport News.

12

Brainerd soldier trains in Libyan desert. (1951, September 8). Brainerd Dispatch.

17

RKO lays off top brass; more to go. (1954, September 24). Daily News.

19

Film industry plans signal corps unit. (1948, November 29). Valley Times.

27

Hayes, B. (1974, April 6). New crisis for a “crime doesn’t pay” crusader. The San Francisco Examiner.

41

Weinstein, H. (1975, September 23). Conservative, informant moore was also a radical “groupie.” Biddeford-Saco Journal.

52

Cops find arms cache at gang’s san jose lair. (1982, July 31). Oakland Tribune.

53

(1978). (rep.). The Tribal Thumb Community. San Luis Obispo, California.

54

Court denies inmate writs. (1969, May 19). Vacaville Reporter.

76

Blackburn, M. (1976, February 6). The poor girl who casts a shadow over heiress patty. Daily Post.

78

Wood, J. (1974, September 1). The long nightmare of hedy sarney. The San Francisco Examiner.

83

Turner, W. (1975, October 6). Parallel to patty’s case in sf. Press Telegram.

94

Private collector says he sold gun to mrs. moore. (1975, September 24). Santa Barbara News-Press.

108

Sara moore moved to sm county jail. (1975, October 25). The Times.

110

Charleston store owner knew sara, manson as kids. (1975, September 25). The Daily Breeze.

114

Shooting victim and con rights. (1977, August 16). Oakland Tribune.

115

Ex-con feud and shootout. (1977a, April 28). Oakland Tribune.

117

Police nab guerilla gang leader. (1982, July 30). The Californian.

118

Raid uncovers possible presidio plot. (1982, August 11). The Sacramento Bee.

119

Capps, S. A. (1980, June 7). Police raid sf commune “fortress” in murder probe . The Sacramento Bee.

120

Popp, R. (1987, April 23). New age mafia figure pleads guilty in killings. San Francisco Chronicle.

121

Webster, J. (1982, October 27). Password slaying: judge rules defendant competent to stand trial. Spokane Chronicle.

122

Humboldt commune members linked to jail escape in seattle. (1979, October 20). The Sacramento Bee.

123

17-year-old to face adult court oct. 18. (1972, April 14). Anaheim Bulletin.

126

Pogash, C., & Jacobs, J. (1979, October 21). Jail break linked to radical s.f. commune. The San Francisco Examiner.

127

Killing instinctive? (1979, September 14). Kitsap Sun.

128

Seattle jailbreak leaves one dead, four injured. (1979, October 16). The Grand Rapids Press.

132

Boldenweek, B. (1982, July 12). A hornets nest of terrorism buzzes again. The San Francisco Examiner.

133

Yarish, A. (1975, June 22). Parole eased for ex-popeye suspect. The San Francisco Examiner.

136

Woman being held in ambush, slaying. (1972, October 13). The Patriot News.

137

Buckley, T. (1975, December 21). Fantasies... doctor thinks ford conspiracy was another of sara moore’s. The Courier-Journal.

141

Who, after all, is sara moore? (1975, September 24). The Miami Herald.

“The temple is holy because it is not for sale” -Ezra Pound

By 1971, Marshall Applewhite had absconded from Taos1, having presumably left his Sunshine Co. in the capable hands of former Army counterintelligence officer Harvey Mudd, and ended up back in Texas, whereupon an alleged kismet encounter between him and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles, a nurse and occultist who studied theosophy and astrology, sparked the initial formation of what would become the Heaven’s Gate cult.

It’s unclear exactly how Applewhite and Nettles met, and like many of the biographical aspects of the group, remains occluded by the sheer variety of stories told. Applewhite claimed that “he was visiting a hospitalized friend when Mrs. Nettles entered the room and their eyes locked in a shared recognition of esoteric secrets.”2 Terrie Nettles, Bonnie Nettles’ daughter, averred that The Two had “met at a drama school in a theater” at which Nettles’ son, Joe, was a student.3 Other sources indicate that Nettles tended to Applewhite in a psychiatric institute after a near-death experience incurred by Applewhite from either drug overdose or untreated heart condition. Applewhite’s Houston friend, Ray Hill, endorsed the near-death drug overdose hypothesis, citing Applewhite’s Leary-esque nature.4 One rather humorous account has it that Applewhite and Nettles actually met while he was hospitalized with hemorrhoids.5

Perhaps Nettles’ and Applewhite’s meeting truly was a kismet encounter and their aforesaid “shared esoteric secrets” a common descent from the First Families of Virginia. Like Applewhite, Nettles’ family served in Virginia’s House of Burgesses and similarly accumulated wealth through plantation slavery.6 Indeed, Nettles’ and Applewhite’s ancestors had likely interacted in the 17th and 18th centuries—generally as members of the governing, landholding class, and more specifically as participants in Bacon’s Rebellion on either side—Applewhite’s forebear John Sturdivant, a leading rebel7, and Nettles’ forbear Anthony Armistead, the hangman loyalist.8 Nettles descended from the distinguished Tidewater Armistead family, which counts among its members John Armistead, a sheriff, member of the governor’s Council of Virginia and House of Burgesses, and business partner of Robert Beverley910; George Armistead, commander of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812 (of Star-Spangled Banner fame)11; presidents William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison notably sprang from the Armistead line12. (Moreover, it’s through the intermingling of the Armistead family with other early Virginian settlers, that Nettles can trace her lineage back to Anchetil de Greye, one of the companions of William the Conqueror)13.

Nettles’ and Applewhite’s ancestors would again reunite in the 19th century, this time with more certainty: Nettles (née Trousdale) was of prominent Confederate stock and related to Tennessee Governor William Trousdale who supplies a direct interlock with one of Applewhite’s ancestors. Through his mother (Louise Winfield), Applewhite was a scion of the prominent Wingfield family14, and though not a direct descendent, was likely related to Edward Maria Wingfield, the first President of the Jamestown Colony. General Winfield Scott, another prominent Wingfield (having dropped the “g”)15, fought alongside William Trousdale in the Mexican-American War: Trousdale and Scott together participated in the battles of Contreras and Churubusco, and Trousdale commanded two regiments (the 14th and 11th) and an artillery battery at the Battle of Chapultepec under the direction of Scott16.

Gone transatlantic, both family lines began as slave traders, Baconian Indian slayers, and rabid frontiersmen of the great American necropolis. They would converge, as if by edict, at points of rebellion, battle, and empire expansion—a great mobility of generations of class society culminating, naturally, at the vanishing point of Houston, Texas, 1971.

Said Applewhite of Nettles in an interview with the Houston Post: “I came into contact with her by sheer accident… When I met her, I felt I had known her forever.” Nettles, concurring, proclaimed: “Now we know we have known each other in previous lives.”17 It was their mutual study of astrology and theosophy that lead them to break with the traditional roles of their “past lives” and open a spiritual institute they called the Christian Arts Center, for the purpose of “assisting man in his search for freedom from limiting restrictions,” offering classes in “theosophy, metaphysics, astrology, healing, the occult, etc.”18

“A lot of people are going to say ‘Old Applesauce finally flipped!’,” said Applewhite to the Houston Post reporter. “But our whole purpose of our being here is to assist people in becoming more aware of the spirit… Our general purpose is to assist man in his pursuit of study beyond traditional ideology.”19 (Heaven’s Gate’s theosophical roots ought not to surprise; many early UFO groups and contactees of the 1950s and 1960s were themselves outgrowths of theosophy or scientology [e.g., George Hunt Williamson, George Adamski, Guy Ballard’s I AM movement, George King, George van Tassel, Dorothy Martin, etc.], Heaven’s Gate being no exception).

After opening the Christian Arts Center with Nettles, Applewhite was terminated from his position as musical director at Houston’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church for his belief in the occult: “They asked me to say that I resigned, but I was told by Father Puckett that his church could not have staff members who ‘dabble’ in astrology or theosophy,” Applewhite said.20 The Christian Arts Center proved to be a fleeting engagement; a later and similarly evanescent endeavor was dubbed “Knowplace.”21 Though short-lived, Nettles’ and Applewhite’s metaphysical mercantilism worked an alienation: as they withdrew from the straight world, the straight world withdrew from them.

Applewhite, no longer able to work as a musical director, and Nettles, having forfeited her position as a nurse, became “The Two”: an identification with the enigmatic prophets of Revelation XI who prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sack cloth and performing miracles, before being killed by the beast and later resurrected—ascending to heaven in a cloud.

In their early days together, The Two reportedly enjoyed the work of Tavistock Clinic grantee and Gregory Bateson collaborator R.D. Laing, as well as the popular quasi new age book Jonathan Livingston Seagull22, written by Richard Bach, a former Air Force fighter pilot and subject in Russell Targ’s and Hal Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments at the Stanford Research Institute. The Two’s recruitment efforts reportedly began in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1973, then metastasized quite publicly to the Oregon coastline by July, as they drove “more than 8,000 miles in one summer month: a rudderless, zigzag between California, Utah, Montana and Idaho. They went up to Canada and down to New York” drawing forth recruits who eagerly renounced both earthly possessions and preexisting human relationships.23 An early recruitment meeting was held at the home of Texas Democratic congressman Bob Eckhardt, but the couple left abruptly, declaring the house haunted, after their rent checks to Eckhardt bounced.24 The Two spent at least a month proselytizing and pamphleteering at The Oaks at Ojai, a fairly pricy hotel/retreat a mere 2 miles from Krotona Institute of Theosophy, a proximity likely not lost upon Nettles the Theosophist.

In July 1973, The Two appeared at Hayden Hewes’ International UFO Bureau, Inc. in Oklahoma City whereupon Hewes summoned the deputy director of the Bureau (Dan Garcia, an Oklahoma City police officer), the couple were fingerprinted and recorded in a ninety-minute interview with Hewes. According to Hewes, The Two conveyed to him by telepathy a “‘thought code sequence’ that he might use if he ever needed to get in touch with them.”25 Hewes indicates that when he deployed for the first time the “thought code sequence,” “the next day, he received a telephone call and later a visit from one of the followers of The Two who said that he had been directed to contact Hewes because he had used the mental code.”26 The Two returned to Hewes’ bureau to announce that they had chosen the Bureau to “present their teachings, their creed, their extraterrestrial manifesto, to the world.”27 In January 1976, Hewes’ associate and fellow Fortean Brad Steiger attended a Bureau meeting with The Two, and that same year Hewes and Steiger co-authored a book entitled UFO Missionaries Extraordinary.

While The Two were apparently dissatisfied at the time with Hewes’ and Steiger’s rendering of their theology,28 the writers’ account of The Two was peculiarly fawning and uncritical, reading like propaganda for the cult and attributing to The Two absurd and inexplicable psychic powers. (Hewes even claims, beyond the “thought code sequence,” that as soon as The Two left his office, he observed them vanish into thin air).29 In 1976, The UFO Research Newsletter remarked upon Hewes’ and Steiger’s evident bias, reviewing UFO Missionaries as a “distort-the-facts-to-fit-the-theories, cut-and-paste job,” and critiquing Hewes and Steiger for being “‘taken in’ by these con artists extraordinary.”30

Per a 1975 Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) Bulletin, The Two also made their way to the APRO, a UFO research group and predecessor to today’s Mutual UFO Network (MUFON):

“In July of 1974 a middle-aged couple walked into APRO’s office and held a conversation with office manager Sheila Kudrie and Betty Darr. The gist of it was that they were some sort of emissaries and that within a year and a half they would be assassinated and would be taken up by a UFO, rejuvenated and returned to earth for some sort of revivalist movement.”31

The Two would return to Hewes’ home and offices on occasion. One of their visits was observed by Anthony L. Kimery, a self-described “national security journalist” who once consulted for Bill Hamilton on the INSLAW theft (and who lists on his LinkedIn “volunteer experience” as to children his membership in the Grand Lodge of Oklahoma AF&AM since 1985 and his membership in the Shriners International since 1986). According to Kimery, and contrary to Hewes, “[t]hey (The Two) didn’t particularly strike me as enlightened. When they left that night, saying they were leaving on a UFO, I watched them get into a beat-up pickup truck a few blocks away.”32 In retrospect, “after covering terrorism and extremist groups as a journalist for almost twenty years,” Kimery was unsurprised by the suicidal outcome of Heaven’s Gate, but “[w]hat does surprise me is that both state and federal law enforcement agencies weren’t keeping better track of Heaven’s Gate.” Indeed, Kimery was “certain that an aftermath of the tragedy will be an increasing pressure on law enforcement services to collect intelligence on such cults… It is very likely that both the FBI and the CIA did investigate the cult to some extent at some point, but they obviously did not unearth enough significant evidence of imminent criminal activity to necessitate the kind of surveillance that would have alerted authorities to the impending mass suicide…”33

Twenty years earlier, the CIA-convened UFO investigatory body the Robertson Panel had actually mentioned the APRO by name, concluding that “such organizations should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.” Considering the historical role that military and intelligence agencies play in the propagation and infiltration of UFO organizations, and perhaps even their very inception (NICAP, anyone?), what if any influence did such agencies play in the emergence of Heaven’s Gate? Applewhite had blipped upon the radar of the FBI before he is alleged to have even met Bonnie Nettles, and after his honorable discharge from the Signal Corps he should have been consigned to the reserves for at least eight years. However, there is no evidence Applewhite ever complied with the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951; no evidence that he ever attended reservist meetings, annual training sessions, drills, or anything else.

To be sure, UFO culture, at least in the United States, has always been a somewhat “networked” subculture in that UFO researchers, scientists, contactees, military intelligence agents, undercover law enforcement officers, and the curious coalesce under the auspices of organizations dedicated to the study of the phenomena. Though The Two and the group that became Heaven’s Gate would be regular attendees at UFO-related conferences and meetings well into the late 90s, very little is recalled by fellow UFO researchers and contactees about their interactions with the group’s members and scant information is available as to these associations.

As The Two’s UFO cult inexplicably gained traction, concerned associates of early inductees to the cult worried that their missing friends and family members “revealed a too-quick conversion to some very organized and dogmatic concepts… We are overwhelmed with a growing fear… that (they) were being brainwashed or somehow hypnotized.”34 One man, Tom Robinson, infiltrated with a partner early cult settlements in Illinois, embarking on an odyssey to retrieve his missing friends from the grip of The Two who by now came to refer to themselves as, inter alia, “Bo” and “Peep,” “Do” and “Ti,” “He” and “She,” and “Guinea” and “Pig.” Robinson tracked The Two and their crew from the Oregon coast to Colorado Springs, to Karmadzong (a hippie Buddhist retreat/commune which locals warned Robinson not to go to at night), to Rock Cut State Park in Rockford, Illinois. Reflecting on his experience of infiltration and his impression of The Two, Robinson wrote,

“I tried to see them as being from another planet… It didn’t work. I tried to see two incarnate spirits from Heaven… It didn’t work. I tried to see a couple of con artists… That didn’t quite fit either.

I saw no simple answer, no neat category into which I could fit these two people… But I did notice some important things at work during this meeting.

I became convinced that I was looking at a man and a woman, definitely human, not above confusion, nor being suspicious, nor being deceived, nor being a bit deceitful. I also realized that whatever their aim was, it called for manipulation of other people toward the same end.”35

As a trained actor, director, and teacher of theater arts, Robinson made an interesting observation as to Applewhite’s comportment, echoing Taos’ Dennis Robbins:

“As I watched this couple, the man especially revealed he was acting. He used every device he had for portraying himself as that which he needed to be. His eyes were tools, his hands were tools, his gestures, his voice, his silence, his choice of metaphor, his dress— all tools. He used his tools in a too-conscious fashion, revealing the kind of overplaying I had seen often when a student tried too hard to be convincing to an audience, or to himself. His overacting was not wild and obvious, but very evident to me.”36

As to Nettles, Robinson noted,

“The woman was not so effective. She underplayed, sticking almost entirely to organization matters which she had outlined on the clipboard she held. At one point she dove into an explanation of how confusing this would be for all of us, since we would be ‘going backwards, against the forces of nature.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, not exactly against the, but uh…’ She stopped completely. She was apparently over her head and asked the man to explain it. He managed to drop the subject while appearing to explain.”37

For Robinson, “Bit by bit the mystery surrounding these two persons dropped away. Only the mystery of what they were trying to do remained.”38

Robinson detailed The Two’s interrogation of him upon his infiltration, their lack of belief in Robinson’s earnestness (disguised as [other]worldly curiosity), which Robinson described as “an obvious duality of purpose in us and in them.” On her clipboard, Nettles kept a list of inductees. The newcomers (infiltrators), Robinson and his compatriot, were marked “hold” on Nettles’ clipboard.39

Robinson’s companion managed to track down their missing friends at a connected camp 40 miles away. The occupants of the other camp reacted to his appearance at there with “…near paranoia. They had descended upon him, shining flashlights in his eyes and demanding to know what he wanted.” Ultimately, Robinson’s friends refused to leave and remained with the cult for the time being.40

Around the country, disciples of The Two began their own recruitment endeavors. One of the early disciples in Sacramento, California was identified as “Bean” (whose given name was Jerry Paup), a former aerospace technical writer who worked on the Boeing SST.41 At the same time in Wichita, Kansas, a H.I.M meeting was led by a man who identified himself as “Bart,” an Army Reservist and former communications executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Bart’s real name was Dale Mackey, who, as director of advertising at MGM, rubbed shoulders with Rock Hudson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Peter Sellers, and other film industry elites).4243 At a Salt Lake City, Utah HIM meeting, a police officer freelancing for the night provided security, confiding in an attendee: “… my one son is acting police chief in Reno, and my other son is top man for the entire Secret Service force that guards the President of the United States.”44

Mid 1970s reports refer uniformly to Applewhite and Nettles as having “hollow” and “glazed over” eyes: the affectation of those enraptured by the theology of Human Individual Metamorphosis as that of a hypnotic stupor. Indeed, the journalism that came from The Two’s Oregonian and Californian recruitment escapades only generate more questions as to what The Two’s designs really were—and if they were the only psychic drivers in their activities.

Veteran Portland, Oregon reporter Doug Baker wrote in a column that the group associated with HIM confessed to a “prominent Waldport citizen,” who chose to remain anonymous, that The Two, echoing the directives of the Robertson Panel, were actually a hoax, concocted by a “pair of college students preparing a paper on ‘Psychological Reactions to Panic in a Small American Community.’”45 In downtown Portland, a “think factory social research firm” of psychologists convened in a nondescript former department store building to analyze the advent of H.I.M., and the missing Oregonians who had left behind family and friends to join The Two.46 Per The San Francisco Examiner, on the panel sat Ray Hyman, who assured reporters that “there is nothing really new about it (H.I.M.) at all” and that history is littered with similar cults.47 Though the “social research firm” of which Hyman was a part is never specified by the Examiner, it was possibly the progenitor of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), formed in 1976 to “promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims,” and counted among its members Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, B.F. Skinner, and Philip J. Klass. (CSICOP would later award Elizabeth Loftus, the doyenne of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, “for her research in memory and eyewitness testimony”).48 Hyman was a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and had earlier been a consultant to the Systems Coordination Division at the Naval Research Laboratory, an antecedent of the Navy’s Tactical Electronic Warfare Division.49 Shortly before HIM came to town, Hyman received a nearly $500,000 DARPA grant in 1967 to be a principal investigator in the studies of perception on “how the human nerves process information from the environment” alongside other psychologists (including a guy by the unfortunate name of “Robert F. Faggot”).50 By 1972, Hyman had been tasked by the Department of Defense with investigating purported psychic Uri Geller, and in 1994 a review of CIA remote viewing experiments.

In San Jose, radio show host Victor Boc (who now writes new age-inflected personal finance books about how once may simply “manifest” wealth into one’s life and how currency is actually a form of energy) featured a three hour interview with The Two on KOME during which Boc reportedly expressed his skepticism in The Two’s message as well as in the existence of UFOs. Boc claimed that after the radio show, two men placed a cloth, soaked in an unknown chemical, over his nose and mouth thereby incapacitating him.51 When Boc regained consciousness, he found he had been abducted, in Hearstian fashion, and “in an auto enroute to San Francisco with his abductors.” The kidnappers allegedly showed Boc a letter they intended to mail to his radio station which read: “When you next see Victor Boc, he will be a follower of our causes, and he will not be the only one.” Boc claimed that the letter also asserted “more newsmen would be taken hostage, given proof that UFOs exist, and then released” and that the note further stated, “We are an organization with access to UFOs. We have firsthand knowledge that UFOs are real. The Two are who they say they are, and alien beings are here for our benefit.” Boc claimed that the note listed several preconditions for Boc’s release: that KOME, Boc’s radio station, take a “favorable stand” toward UFOS, publicize The Two’s upcoming meeting in Oakland, and for KOME to arrange a similar H.I.M. meeting in San Jose.52 For what it’s worth, police claimed that they believed Boc’s allegations. Don Lightborn, a “self-proclaimed disciple of the H.I.M. movement” who had been part of Boc’s radio interview, claimed “Just after the radio program he (Boc) went outside the office of the radio station and said there were two guys out there saying threatening things to him… I went back into the offices and the next thing we knew Victor was gone, and we found his glasses in the hallway.”53 No arrests were ever made. The usual refrain at this time, from investigative agencies and district attorneys, was that because no obvious criminal activity on the part of the cult could be detected, there was no reason to investigate the group. However, the drugging and alleged abduction of a radio host for cosmo-political purposes certainly must rise to the level of criminal misbehavior, especially in such Hearstian times.

In or around September to October 1975, the cult passed through Grand Junction, Colorado and camped out at the Colorado National Monument. Dorothy O’Donnell, a Grand Junction resident and camper, recounted how a female H.I.M. inductee kept wandering over into Dorothy’s adjacent camp site looking “like her mind was half shot” and declaring she had given her baby away to join the cult.54 While in Grand Junction, park ranger Lavar Johnston encountered the group; Johnston recalled a wild-eyed Applewhite and members acting like “zombies” with no apparent interest in or reaction to their surroundings. According to Johnston, while most of the members camped in their cars or “makeshift campers on the back of pickup trucks” The Two dwelled in a “fancy camper.”55 1975 in Grand Junction was a curious time: the organized crime-connected disappearances and murders of Denise Oliverson, Linda Benson, and Linda Miracle were fresh (see George from CAVDEF’s research), while HIM camped out near Grand Junction the body of Tracy Freitas was discovered56, and while passing through the Portland, Oregon area the decapitated remains of Tina Michelle Migis were found.57 In Grand Junction at the time, rumors swirled that the murders were cult-related, and that HIM might be responsible.58 For some reason, the cult also managed to tread many of the same paths as Ted Bundy— from Washington to Utah to Grand Junction, Colorado to the Chicago area. The Two termed the transformation one undergoes during the Human Individual Metamorphosis, from caterpillar to butterfly, “the process”: an unsettling designation, considering another cult of the same time period, responsible for much mayhem and likely murder, bore the same name and similar neo-gnostic beliefs.

In fact, the group in multiple reports from the 1970s, is referred to interchangeably as HIM and as The Process. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times in 1976, surveying the converts of HIM, reported of a man named Levi, who “went AWOL from the Air Force four months ago to join the Process,” despite insisting “that he liked the Air Force, where he served more than two years.”59 Another member, David, “left a prospering computer business” and a mistress he was “very fond of” to “go nomading in the Process.” (According to David, his mistress, a “scientology adherent… refused to join him in the Process”).60 Another early recruit, Aaron, had spent “a long period of wandering that took him to an Israeli kibbutz, to India where he consulted a series of gurus and into hallucinatory drugs such as peyote.” Aaron told the Caller-Times reporter that “[n]one of the Indian gurus compared even remotely with the Two… When I watched them and listened to them, the vibrations were so intense and so real that they just grabbed me in the gut. I had never experienced such intensity before.”61 Though Aaron abandoned HIM when he decided “Bo and Peep misinterpret the heavenly message,” his belief in “the next level” and “the Process” never wavered. A cross-pollination existed between HIM and other esoteric sects of the day:

“There is one common denominator among almost all of the converts. Almost all are seekers who… have been ‘looking for something for a long time.’ They have spent years, in the trite phase, ‘trying to find themselves.’ Many have tried scientology, Yoga, Zen, off-beat cults, hallucinogens, hypnosis, Tarot cards and astrology.”62

For HIM, the Process “consists of ‘overcoming’ normal human attachments—to families, homes, money, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, children, sex and any kind of drugs,” the “successful completion of the Process literally changes the physical structure of the body… in their reconstituted bodies, the converts will enter a real spacecraft and go physically up to the next level” a process that Nettles and Applewhite also referred to as a “harvest.”63 Applewhite emphatically claimed that harbingers of the “harvest” would include increases in UFO sightings.64 UFOs, of course, being “space vehicles” and “simply a means of transportation that is expedient and functional in this (‘next level’) environment.” Abductions then, and “reports of persons being taken inside the aircrafts or kidnapped by the alien vehicles are merely for the purpose of ‘treatments’ so that spotters might not ‘lose their marbles.’”65

Reporters connected The Two and their crew’s passage to animal mutilations throughout the country: “‘Space People’ May Have Butchered Calves” reported Indiana’s Rushville Republican.66 The Republican relayed that “[t]wo calves found mutilated at a farm in this rural area northwest of Chicago may have been killed and butchered by would-be voyagers to another planet,” per the local Lake Villa, Illinois police:

“The calves were slaughtered about the same time the group was at the park. The first slaughtered calf was discovered Oct. 1. Only the calf’s head and internal organs remained and police said the head was so neatly severed that no blood could be found anywhere around the remains… The carcass of the second calf, found Oct. 5 about 1,000 yards from where the first was slaughtered was virtually intact. Only the calf’s left ear was missing. It had been cut off… and could not be found.”67

Echoing the commentary of the aforementioned Taos journalist Dick Behnke, Grand Junction reporters also ran with stories of gruesome cattle mutilations, speculating that the deaths were the work of a religious cult:

“Some local residents think a strange religious cult is behind the incidents… The reports hold that various organs were missing from the animals, including the udders, testicles, ears, rectum, vaginal area and tongue… the Colorado Bureau of Investigation has confirmed that the original cut on one Hereford bull calf whose genitals were missing was made with a knife.”68

A Mrs. Jim Russell, a rancher west of Kiowa, Colorado, described the strange death of one of her pregnant heifers: “the animal’s rectal area and udder had been cut out with a knife in ‘really a professional job’ and the heifer was ‘drained of blood.’” Russell speculated that “… the heifer may have been taken away and mutilated then the carcass was brought back, possibly by helicopter.”69

While HIM members categorically denied any involvement with the cattle mutilations70, no good explanation was ever proffered as to why the phenomena seemed to follow the group state to state, or how the dead, mutilated calves came to be located right outside of the HIM campsite.

The Two expressed apprehension that they would be assassinated (and then resurrected) and a convert from Dallas sent a letter to his parents attempting to reassure them of his newfound monastic path, stating matter-of-factly: “This is not an SLA or Charles Manson group and it will not do anything wrong.”71 Beyond the serendipitous co-occurrence of HIM’s emergence and some of the earliest reports of cattle mutilations in connection with UFO phenomena, one of the stranger and more persistent rumors as to HIM was that the cult was trailing then President Gerald Ford around the country. Reporters connected the movement of HIM to his campaign path and unearthed that a member of the group actually personally knew President Ford.72 An early HIM defector revealed to the press that Jackie Leonard, a Vail, Colorado-based recruit and wife of optometrist Dr. C. A. Leonard, would regale HIM members with “a lot of stories about knowing President Ford and going to parties where he is when he is in Vail.”73 The White House confirmed to The Los Angeles Times that although “Mr. Ford has not played golf with Dr. Leonard since he became president, the Vail doctor knows Mr. Ford and gave him some golf balls last year.”74 (1975 was indeed a tumultuous year for Ford, who narrowly survived two assassination attempts by both Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who themselves were connected to both Manson and the Symbionese Liberation Army).

In 1975, The Two lead a recruitment session on the cusp of Laurel Canyon for Human Individual Metamorphosis in the home of Joan Culpepper, a Studio City adwoman turned psychic to the stars.75 Clarence Klug, a “spiritual teacher” from Ojai (where The Two had once paid pilgrimage), helped supply the audience. “We were sitting there in the home of Joan Culpepper, the astrologer to movie stars and Nancy Reagan, inside this pyramid with all these whacked out, but professional people and the host introduces us to these two people from outer space,” recalled an early HIM follower.76 According to Culpepper, The Two lead this seance in unusual dress for California spiritual crowds: sweatpants and “desert boots.”77 Culpepper would later be one of the first (and certainly one of the most notorious) whistleblowers in regard to The Two’s practices. As to the Oregon encampment, Culpepper recalled that The Two wielded a cudgel of fear against their devotees, “telling us the spirit entities would kill or maim or harm our friends and loved ones if we didn’t go along with them. They also told us two people who turned against them died. But they didn’t explain how.”78 Culpepper and another HIM washout ended up running a sort of “half-way house” “re-programming” rehab for H.I.M. refugees in Topanga Canyon.79 By November 1975, newspapers had begun to wrangle the former sheep of Bo’s and Peep’s flock who, like Culpepper, had begun to bleat of mind control, abuse, and various other cultic torments. At this time, former members including Culpepper (who had for some reason been interviewed about HIM by the Secret Service, “perhaps because there are rumors that a senator’s daughter has become a follower”80) as well as rival UFO cults speculated that The Two’s teachings would culminate in suicide. Daniel Fry’s wife, Bertha “Tahahlita” Fry proclaimed that H.I.M. “could be mass murder,” and that H.I.M. was “nothing at all” like the Frys’ UFO religion.81

Ever the entrepreneur, Culpepper put her experience in running cult re-programing half-way houses to use by playing a foundational role (alongside likely CIA asset Tim Stoen and the later murdered Al and Jeannie Mills) in the creation of the Human Freedom Center (HFC) in Berkeley, an anti-cult organization and “de-programming” outpost for defectors of cults like the People’s Temple.82 Among the founders of the HFC was Maria Papapetros83, who had been a metaphysical student of Culpepper’s and claims to have participated in “Locus of Control” parapsychology studies under the supervision of CIA consultant and “Apostle of LSD” Dr. Thelma Moss at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute (then under the stewardship of Louis Jolyon West) and later acted as a “psychic consultant” on the Hillside Strangler murders.

In a Jonestown retrospective, psychologist Lowell Streiker described Culpepper as “a fast-talking, name-dropping resident of Los Angeles… Joan told me of her background in advertising and show business, as well as her following of ‘Bo and Peep’ in an obscure UFO cult.”84 Streiker encountered Culpepper, just post H.I.M. whistleblowing, as a member of the board of directors for the Human Freedom Center. Culpepper’s rhetoric of “mental kidnapping” and “mentacide” rubbed Streiker the wrong way, as he observed the apparent decrepitude of the Human Freedom Center’s Berkeley “half-way house.”85 Culpepper and Papapetros were not the only members of the HFC involved in remote-viewing, UFOs, ESP, and parapsychology. As noted in Tanner F. Boyle’s Substack Getting Spooked, the Human Freedom Center also employed SRI remote-viewer Keith Blue Harary as a Director of Counseling. (A fellow “psychic to the stars” with an interest in cult deprogramming, Harary and Culpepper and Papapetros would have had a lot in common).

The Two hosted another early recruitment session at the Bechtel International Center on the Stanford University campus, which was attended by Jacques Vallée, UFOlogist, ARPAnet developer, and SRI engineer. Vallée was turned onto the early meeting by his humble friend “Major Murphy,” a retired high-ranking U.S. counter-intelligence officer.86 “Major Murphy” had called Vallée’s attention to some esoteric-looking flyers The Two had posted around the Palo Alto area, and both men attended the H.I.M. meeting together. Vallée recalls that “Major Murphy” sat front row before The Two.87 “In this sense,” said Vallée, “the doctrine of H.I.M. is a genuine prototype for some future religion. At the same time, it is updating psychedelic themes of the previous decade, restating them for the UFO culture of the 70s and 80s.”88 Another attendee of these early Palo Alto conferences was Steven Halpern, who would later consult with the Army as to modalities for music as mind control; melody as carrier wave of consciousness.89 Halpern expressed compunction for not having joined H.I.M. on its Northern California junket: “I blew it by not going… I’m sure he (Applewhite) definitely has had direct contact with extraterrestrial beings.”90

Going forward, Vallée’s colloquy with “Major Murphy” as to Heaven’s Gate’s earlier incarnation, H.I.M., may prove instructive not only in understanding the phenomenon of UFOs from a counter-intelligence perspective, but the very phenomenon of Heaven’s Gate itself:

“Major Murphy, who retired from a U.S. Intelligence service quite a few years ago, had seen action in World War II in Italy, and also described vividly his investigations in the Caribbean, where he organized efforts to intercept submarines and German spies on their way to the United States. I met him at a gathering of UFO contactees and suggested a drink when it was over. I expressed my surprise at his interest in the event, which I had regarded as a complete waste of time. He asked me to clarify this judgment, and I said that in my opinion none of the people in attendance knew anything about science. Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really occurred to me: “What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific problem?” (my emphasis).

I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomenon it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. (my emphasis). Now, the UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings. “If it is,” added the Major, “then the study of it doesn’t being in science. It belongs in Intelligence.” Meaning counterespionage. And that, he pointed out, was his domain.

“Now, in the field of counterespionage, the rules are completely different.” He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. “You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 percent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 percent of the phenomenon. Not so in Intelligence. If I get 95 percent of the data, I know this is the ‘cheap’ part of the information. I still need the other 5 percent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it…

“Are you saying the UFO data we use to compile statistics to find patterns with computers are useless?” I asked. “Might we be spinning our magnetic tapes endlessly discovering spurious laws?”

“It all depends on how the team on the other side thinks. If they know what they’re doing, there will be so many cutouts between you and them that you won’t have the slightest chance of tracing your way to the truth. (my emphasis). Not by following up sightings and throwing them into a computer. They will keep feeding you the information they want you to process. What is the only source of data about the UFO phenomenon? It is the UFOs themselves!

… you should work entirely outside of the organized UFO groups; they are infiltrated by the same official agencies they are trying to influence, and they propagate any rumor anyone wants to have circulated. In Intelligence circles, people like that are historical necessities. When you’ve worked long enough for Uncle Sam, you know he is involved in a lot of strange things. The data these groups get are biased at the source, but they play a useful role.

“Second, you should look for the irrational, the bizarre, the elements that do not fit: that’s what I have come to observe at this meeting tonight. Have you ever felt that you were getting close to something that didn’t seem to fit any rational pattern, yet gave you a strong impression that it was significant?”91

From inception (Guinea & Pig, Bo & Peep, The Two) to terminus (Heaven’s Gate), the cult enjoyed a fundamental and salutary relationship as curiosity and spectacle with the press; at every critical juncture, media were watching and poised to report in generous fashion, often with full page spreads and spotlights in major outlets, upon the group’s alleged activities. Indeed, the group were jettisoned into the public consciousness by Mockingbird asset Walter Cronkite’s report that more than 20 Oregonians had disappeared after following an esoteric pair known as Bo and Peep. Papers of Record The New York Times and Time Magazine got exclusives. This remarkable attention was remarked upon by James D. White, a retired Associated Press reporter and JFK assassination researcher to former OSS officer, Senate investigator, U.S. State Department intelligence analyst, and fellow JFK assassination researcher Harold Weisberg:

“If you have noticed, or paid any attention to it, we would like to have your impression of something that has been going on along the West Coast and has been played big by the press here… The NY Times has used a couple of inside page stories on it. I refer to the mysterious operation of a couple called The Two…

… there are certain refinements to The Two’s operation which indicate a possibly broader purpose, such as laying the groundwork for a sort of all-purpose religious movement which could be used to exploit the enormous amount of emotion and energy the disaffected spend on such already-existing religious movements such as those of the Hare Krishna crowd, the followers of Dr. Sun Myung Moon…

The Two never appear before the press, but get lots of publicity. They want no money, which is sensationally different if you compare them with Dr. Sun, Maharaj Ji or the others. Even Billy Graham. In this light, this could be a very subtle and well-thought-out thing, and could be big stuff. Religious movements always have been used politically, but I can recall no instance of one being created for political purposes. You might keep your eye open if anything comes along…

Both have minor police records, nothing very serious but enough to make them vulnerable and a familiar target to anyone in the disinformation field who might want to use them and their peculiar appeal and contacts…

I still regard it as a Department of Disinformation operation… The increased activity along this line suggests that some fairly important revelations may be coming up, probably unavoidably, and that the country is being confused systematically in order to minimize the impact of any real information that may be forthcoming…”

It should be noted as well Heaven’s Gate’s proximity to mind control doctors: Margaret Singer, the longtime research partner of Louis Jolyon West and False Memory Syndrome Foundation board member who ran cover for the U.S. Army’s use of biological warfare in Korea, claimed she had “interviewed several Applewhite followers since the 1970s,” including a “former cult member” only a couple years before the suicides took place.9293 Withal, one of the academic tomes penned on Heaven’s Gate is Dr. Janja Lalich’s Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults. Lalich happens to be a longtime collaborator of Margaret Singer’s and several years before Lalich wrote Bounded Choice, she collaborated with Singer on a study of a cults titled Cults in Our Midst: The Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives, with a foreword by mind control doctor Dr. Robert Lifton, and "Crazy" Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work?, a repressed memories coverup. When I inquired with Dr. Lalich as to her knowledge of Margaret Singer’s and Louis Jolyon West’s interactions with members of HIM/Heaven’s Gate, Lalich replied simply: “I don’t have any information regarding either Dr. Singer's or Dr. West’s interactions with members of Heaven’s Gate.” (Which seems to me unlikely, considering that Lalich was one of Singer’s most frequent collaborators).

Curiously, though Singer, by her own word most certainly had dealings with Heaven’s Gate, and Louis Jolyon West had in his personal research files a folder on Human Individual Metamorphosis dating back to 1975, neither psychiatrist mentioned their either academic or professional connections to the group in a joint talk they held together when the subject of Heaven’s Gate arose. Instead, both relied upon the tired method of poking fun at Applewhite’s countenance: his wide-eyed, unblinking gaze, and perceived sexual dysfunction.

Post-suicide, the media attitude towards Heaven’s Gate depended upon the comical absurdity of the group’s beliefs, emphasizing the carefully cultivated aesthetics of the cult: mandarin collars, track suits, and closely-cropped haircuts. Academics fill the void of seriousness to becloud the material reality of the cult further by containing the discourse to whether or not new religious movements are actual theologies deserving of analysis, or whether they can be reduced to mind control, a topic which itself is, within this context, stripped of its political history. This parlor game is monopolized by university professors who are given special and restricted access to the surviving documents of the group and academic psychologists who have concerning connections to the established guard of military intelligence contractors who participated in Operations Artichoke and MKUltra. The public is then presented with two “legitimate” options. First, that for everyday people, Heaven’s Gate is something to gawk and laugh at, and second, for the well-heeled intellectual above crude ridicule, Heaven’s Gate is not unlike any other new religious movement (NRM): a sort of digital, UFO-tinted Skoptsyism redressed for 90s cyberculture. Death is certainly no subversion of the market and is easily subsumed (itself an exciting opportunity for commodification). The “murderabilia” market of Heaven’s Gate flourishes to this day and one of the first occasions after the group’s alleged suicide was a well-attended estate sale of the cult’s possessions. Nike Decades sneakers continue to be a morbid collector’s item.

Lalich’s evasive answer, and the earlier deceptions of Harvey Mudd and Jim Levy, were only a harbinger of increasingly strange, and sometimes outright hostile interviews to come. In speaking with those with firsthand knowledge of Heaven’s Gate, I found that people had a way of dummying up when I inquired about facts and circumstances outside the already well-plotted terrain of aesthetic commentary and turgid academic posturing. When I pushed conversation beyond these boundaries, sources would often abruptly terminate our line of communication, feign ignorance, or generally get pissed off. Some of my sources were seemingly disingenuous, others squirrely, and almost always hesitant. Perhaps this is for good reason. As the reader will come to learn in later installments, those close to and part of Heaven’s Gate end up mired in costly litigation, on the wrong side of a Treasury Department probe, imprisoned, or worse: dead. I try not to mind much when my sources lie to me, since often a strategic lie reveals much more than the bare truth, and like Heraclitus sez, “a hidden connection is stronger than an obvious one.” These forces of concealment, which threaten to blot out all the rest, are at once counteracted by the grace of others who, despite being hounded by a press more interested in salacious soundbites than truth, and who lost dear friends and sometimes family, chose generously to give me a chance with their stories. These opposing forces indeed fit no rational pattern, but impressed upon me a tense and inarticulable significance. I’m not sure if truth, long buried, may be resurrected. But I am certain that the dead do persist, albeit hieroglyphically, in memory mosaic and digital palimpsest preserved.

1

Show business. (1971, October 8). The Houston Post.

5

K, J. (1994, April 27). Of UFOs and hemorrhoids. The Santa Fe Reporter.

17

Warnken, C. (1972, August 5). Astrology plays important role at new arts center. The Houston Post.

18

Ewing, B. (1972, August 4). One more horn was needed. The Houston Chronicle.

20

Warnken, C. (1972b, August 12). Music director claims his beliefs cost him his job. The Houston Post.

24

UFO must be a gas-guzzler. (1975, October 19). The Kalamazoo Gazette.

41

Wilson, W. (1975, October 21). “The two” and HIM. The Sacramento Bee.

42

HIM meeting slated Monday. (1975, July 26). The Wichita Eagle.

43

Newton, J. (1967, December 26). Ex-Albuquerquean helps breathe new life into film production. Albuquerque Journal.

44

Kelleher, J. (1975, November 17). Galactic bible-thumpers hit SLC. The Daily Utah Chronicle.

45

This UFO business “a wonderful hoax.” (1975, October 10). The Capital Journal.

46

The UFO mystery: who’s soaring now? (1975, October 10). The San Francisco Examiner.

50

UO gets $439,233 U.S. grant. (1967, September 26). The Oregon Daily Journal.

51

Boc denies kidnapping self staged. (1975, October 23). The Olympian.

53

Kidnap host of program in San Jose. (1975, October 22). Martinez News-Gazette.

54

Were campers awaiting UFO. (1975, October 8). Albany Democrat-Herald.

55

Lofholm, N. (1997, March 30). Cultists: former ranger remembers applewhite’s “wild eyes.” The Daily Sentinel.

56

Sullivan, R. (1975, October 16). Girls death ruled accidental. The Daily Sentinel.

64

Haworth, K. (n.d.). UFO cult makes appearance in central Texas. Austin American-Statesman.

66

“Space people” may have butchered calves. (1975, October 16). Rushville Republican.

68

Some suspect religious cult responsible for cattle deaths. (1975, June 22). The Daily Sentinel.

70

McGrath, P. (1975, October 16). UFO cultists “sincere, gentle.” Lincoln Journal Star .

71

Crick, R. J. (1975, October 8). “Missing” UFO disciples “all happy”. Oregon Journal.

72

Simross, L. (1975, November 16). Bo and peep fleece followers. The Plain Dealer.

73

Simross, L. (1975, December 22). Keeping tabs on bo, peep, flock.

76

Brand, W. (1997, June 27). Psychologist met with heaven’s gate founders. Oakland Tribune.

79

“Halfway house” for UFO cult dropouts. (1976, January 21). Ukiah Daily Journal.

82

Stumbo, B. (1978, December 17). Cult conclave still incredulous. The Los Angeles Times.

90

UFO to paradise? (1975a, October 7). Albany Democrat-Herald.

93

Calif. group’s origins may be 22 years old. (1997, March 28). Press of Atlantic City.

“The rocket will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.” -Wernher von Braun

Situated just 30 miles north of San Diego and nestled among the southern Californian circuitry of defense contractors, hospitals, and military installations, Rancho Santa Fe was, and is, one of the wealthiest communities in the southwest United States. Often referred to as the “Beverly Hills of San Diego,” the community has a reputation for being the idyllic coastal playground for the rich and famous, for those more polo-inclined and less gauche than their Angelean counterparts, it being of course the oldest planned community in California.

To be sure, Heaven’s Gate’s rented Spanish-Mediterranean estate at 18241 Colina Norte, Rancho Santa Fe, was replete with an in-ground swimming pool, tennis courts, a putting green, and groves of lemons, avocados, grapefruits, and oranges; perched atop one of the highest vistas offered in a posh, gated cul-de-sac. The late journalist and gumshoe Daniel Hopsicker would reveal that the Heaven’s Gate cult rented the estate from San Diego FBI informant, SAVAK weapons merchant for the Shah of Iran, and student VISA scammer Sam Koutchesfahani, who was likely connected to Abdussattar Shaikh: “The FBI's Best Chance to Uncover September 11th Before it Happened.”

Five years before the Heaven’s Gate mass suicides, intelligence asset Ian Stuart Spiro allegedly assassinated his wife and children in their Rancho Santa Fe home, execution-style, before assassinating himself, cyanide pill-style, in the Anza-Borrego Desert. At the time of his and his family’s deaths, Spiro had been liaising with and holding INSLAW and “Octopus”-related documents for Michael Riconosciuto.1 Similarly to Heaven’s Gate, the Spiro case was swiftly wrapped up with no heed paid to the politically charged circumstances of Spiro’s final days. Indeed, the “official story” as to Spiro is that he crumbled under the pressure of debt and business deals gone awry; a counterfeit history.

Most journalists seem to attribute the advent of, or at least the ritual suicidal culmination of Heaven’s Gate, to Marshall Applewhite’s purportedly repressed bisexuality or homosexuality. Reporters leave Applewhite’s and the group’s mise-en-scène largely unexamined. While it’s possible that Applewhite’s and his followers’ alleged psychosexual dysfunctions played a role in the formation of the Heaven’s Gate theology, (famously, one of the group’s religious tenants was to abstain from any sensual or sexual activity, prompting several male members to undergo castration), psychoanalytic analyses (and even academic-theological analyses) refrain from critically addressing the historical forces at play in the development of this 1970s UFO cult, and its eventual transformation into a web-developing cyberspace outfit.

Much like UFO sightings themselves, the actual reality of the ritual suicide of 39 men and women at Collina Norte (or as it’s called now: Paseo Victoria) has entered the realm of faith, a form of reality which lingers now in its most basic unit: the pixel. A heap of broken images, links, and corrupted lines of code. In order to fully appreciate the scope of the arc of Heaven’s Gate, and to attempt to understand its trajectory and finally its terminal velocity, it pays to start at the beginning. Not just with the inception of the cult, and the people who comprised it, but also with the bad moons rising on the meridian. Shall I project a world?

Marshall Herff Applewhite, Jr. was born in Spur, Texas to Louise Winfield and Marshall Herff Applewhite Sr., a Presbyterian minister. On his father’s side, Applewhite was the scion of the Colonial settler Applewhaite family of the Isle of Wight County, Virginia— directly descended from Henry Applewhaite (Applewhite) III2, a member of the House of Burgesses who possessed the largest single grant of land in Isle of Wight County and was a Captain in the Militia3. On his mother’s side, Applewhite descended from equally illustrious Virginian stock: namely, Robert Wynne4, Speaker in the House of Burgesses, and the grandson of the mayor of Canterbury across the pond5. The family also owned large sugar cane plantations in Barbados and enslaved at least 338 people thereat6. Marshall Applewhite’s maternal uncle was State Senator Henry Logan Winfield, a prominent rancher and oilman in west Texas7. (Many of Applewhite’s relatives are buried in the Bexar County, Texas masonic gardens)8.

Applewhite attended the local Corpus Christi high school and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Austin College before entering into Presbyterian seminary school and obtaining a graduate degree from the University of Colorado. He married, had two children, worked as a professor of music at several colleges, where, as the story goes, Applewhite “had already gone astray, using drugs with the (Houston) neighborhood crowd,” according to Applewhite’s old friend Ray Hill9 (“citizen provocateur,” gay rights activist, Kinsey Institute attendee, and friend of Harvey Milk10). “We’d sit around cross-legged on bean bags with incense burning,” said Hill. “Herff would talk his spiritualist stuff. The music was strange and there was a lot of chemicals— reefer, hallucinogens.” Per Hill, Applewhite was “kind of a Tim Leary type.”11

According to Harriet Rowand, the wife of a University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa music department chairman, Applewhite was fired from the university for having an affair with a male student. Rowand also claimed that “the FBI interviewed her husband at least three times in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s about the disgraced teacher’s newly acquired interest in cult activity”12, putting Applewhite on the radar of federal law enforcement well before Heaven’s Gate was even formed.

Applewhite earned a reputation for being a gifted vocalist, and many of his students seemed to have adored him for his talent and temperament. On Facebook, a former University of St. Thomas student stated: “He was one of my professors at UST and was NOT a ‘nutcase.’ Warm, talented and compassionate with the students.” Another former student commented: “Herff Applewhite was my chorus teacher @ UST, and he was a very gifted teacher; my 19 year old psyche felt like he was a very conflicted man, always having extraterrestrial experiences to share…” Another commenter shared that Applewhite had been “the vocal director at a children's theater called ‘Studio 7’ in the early 1970s. We performed kids plays out of the old Houston Music Theater (now The Arena Theater) off the SW Freeway. He actually performed in a few plays. I remember him as a very nice guy with a big booming Opera voice! I don't think anyone would have predicted that kind of crazy from Herf....”

It was at Studio 7 that Applewhite worked with Patrick Swayze’s mother, Patsy Swayze, who recalled “many of the actors and actresses gossiping that their ‘normally well-spoken’ colleague was suddenly starting ‘to act strangely, talking about UFO's and preaching this strange religion.’”13 Applewhite had been a successful vocalist and a man about town in Houston- he was featured often in the society pages and played multiple leading roles for the Houston Grand Opera (once with Placido Domingo in Faust)14 accompanied by the Houston Symphony Orchestra with André Previn, the former husband of Mia Farrow, at the helm.

Little is known about Applewhite’s time spent in the United States Military Signal Corps. According to a résumé obtained by the New York Times from Applewhite’s sister, Applewhite had served in Austria and later in White Sands, New Mexico15. I requested Applewhite’s service record from the National Archives, but was informed that his personnel records were gone, likely destroyed by a calamitous fire suffered by The National Personnel Records Center in 1973 (just prior to the Church Committe and the House Select Committee on Assassinations). The fire “destroyed the major portion of records of Army military personnel for the period 1912 through 1959, and records of Air Force personnel with surnames Hubbard through Z for the period 1947 through 1963,” such that Applewhite’s complete record could not be produced or fully reconstructed.

The National Archives were able to provide a DD214 separation form which didn’t contain much interesting information, except that Applewhite had been a high-speed radio operator, and was honorably discharged from active service to complete eight years of service in the Army Reserves pursuant to the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951. Applewhite, as a specialist third class, served as a radio communication instructor in the United States Air Force at the Salzburg, Austria Signal Communications School16, and was fluent in German17. According to a feature on Applewhite in the Houston Post in 1965, Applewhite had been an announcer for the Armed Forces Network (the War Department’s radio broadcast service).18

Applewhite’s Signal Corps sojourn in White Sands, New Mexico would apparently be his first encounter with a state he would often revisit over the course of his peripatetic life. These New Mexico encounters seem to be the least explored by journalists and media, while biographers and academics eschew any discussion of Applewhite’s military service.

If Applewhite were stationed in White Sands, New Mexico with the Army at any time during 1955 to 1956, he was likely in proximity to the largest military installation in the United States: The White Sands Proving Ground (renamed White Sands Missile Range in 1958), the “Birthplace of America’s Missile and Space Activity.”

Since 1945, at least sixteen hundred Nazi scientists and researchers, a veritable brain trust, were brought to the United States and furnished with plum research contracts at, inter alia, universities, defense contractors, CIA fronts, and military garrisons as part of Operation Paperclip19. 100 V-2 rockets, assembled by slave labor in the underground Mittelwerk factory, were transported carefully to the White Sands Proving Ground (WSPG) as part of the Hermes Project, as well as Nazi war criminal Werner von Braun and his Peenemünde rocket group20. The very first launch of the V-2 rocket on American soil occurred at White Sands in 194621, not long after the Jornada del Muerto desert had been christened by Trinity, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon by the United States Army in 194522.

Isn’t it curious that the man who designed the motion picture cameras which recorded the Trinity test, Ivan Jerome, a White Russian inventor with top-secret contracts with the United States government, was simultaneously a prolific and unrepentant producer of sadomasochistic child sexual abuse material? The same cameras he designed for classified United States military projects, he used to record his clandestine orgies with children.

As to Herr Applewhite of the Signal Corps, it’s noteworthy that the Signal Corps only deployed to Weisse Sandwüste von Neumexiko to service the V-2’s radar. For the record, prior to the first American V-2 launch of 1946, the British enlisted some of their own German war criminals to fire two V-2s over the Baltic Sea. “The one designated to fire first developed a leak and one of the Germans crawled into the motor through the exhaust nozzle to repair the damage.”23 In a rare turn of karmic redemption, “enough of the alcoholic fumes had escaped to, as a British officer aptly put it, ‘do the blighter in.’”24 The droll British, not ones to dwell too long on the profound irony of the nazi rocketeer gassed to death within the chamber of his own suicide-rocket, launched the V-2 successfully only a few days later: the “… rocket performed in the expected manner… sans the deceased worker, of course.”25 (An inadvertent Gottfried!).

At White Sands, however, “there was some difficulty with the assembly of components which had been collected from various factories and storage sites throughout Germany.”26 The Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories (the U.S. Army’s consolidated research component on electronics, radar, and communication systems) quietly deployed a ten-man team and “two modified SCR-584 vans” to WSPG to service the first American launch, and successful tracking, of the V-2 rocket in 1946. Following the successful showing, “The Ordnance Department requested the Signal Corps to remain at the Proving Grounds for certain duties such as the provision of communication and instrumentation of ballistics.”27 If Applewhite were indeed part of a Signal Corps contingent in White Sands servicing the V-2’s progeny (the final flight of the V-2 having occurred by 1952), his fluency in German would certainly have come in handy.

“As early as 1949, (Signal Corps) personnel were permanently assigned to Ft. Bliss for signal support functions. Later, these activities were reorganized into the White Sands Signal Corps Agency in 1952. Among the duties of WSSCA was the conduct of high altitude and upper atmosphere research using the Nike Cajun rocket.”28 This certainly comports with Applewhite’s 1956 “Place of Separation” on his DD214: Ft. Bliss, Texas.

Only several years after Applewhite’s honorable discharge, the WSSCA would be “redesignated as the U.S. Army Signal Missile Support Agency (SMSA) after its size and scope of operations had doubled. SMSA was responsible for providing communication-electronic, meteorologic, and other support to WSMR as well as conducting research and development in meteorology, electronic warfare, and missile vulnerability.”29 (Applewhite’s choice of Nike Decades footwear for his group’s departure costume carries with it a twinge of the uncanny).

In Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America, Alex Constantine discusses the political-aeronautical origins of the flying foil disk. Constantine traces the “flying saucer” back to development of the “foo-fighter” overseen by Nazi General Hans Kammler, the aesthetic and technological predecessor of the American UFO, citing a 1945 report by the New York Herald Tribune and the Oslo Report (a 1939 military intelligence leak by Hans Ferdinand Mayer) which described the German development of remote-controlled projectiles, electric fuses for bombs and shells, acoustic torpedoes, and disk-shaped airfoils. Per Constantine,

“Renato Vesco, the foremost aerospace engineer in Italy in the 1960s, traced the history of the Nazi flirtation with the flying disk to the U.S. Albert Speer and the SS Technical General Staff, Vesco learned, had equipped the disks with a ‘proximate radio interference’ capability- the most widely-reported electronic effect in postwar domestic UFO abductions- to disable the sensitive electronics of American night fighters: ‘Thus a highly original flying machine was born. It was circular and armored, more or less flat and circular, whose principals of operation recalled the well-known aeolipile of Hero, which generated a great halo of luminous flames.’

The unmanned experimental disks were guided by remote television controls designed by Telefunken, in coordination with the German Institute for High Frequency Studies and Blaupunkt…”30

Of course, the remote-controlled disk technology was transplanted, alongside the V-2 and other fascist technologies, to the United States under Operations Paperclip and LUSTY. Dr. Alexander Lippisch, one of the Paperclip scientists who took up residence at White Sands31, had developed disk-shaped, wingless aircraft with vertical lift capabilities at the Gottingen Aviation Institute32. The aforementioned pedophile pornographer and defense contractor Ivan Jerome, who built the first helicopter for the U.S. Airforce in 1922, claimed to have invented a “flying saucer” himself in 1923 while at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, later another major port of call for Paperclip Nazis. Jerome’s “flying saucer” or “flying crane” consisted of “Four B-36 airplane wings… joined in the shape of a cross, with a total wingspan of 250 feet… Each wing… powered with three 3000 horsepower motors driving standard B-36 propellers.”33

It’s hardly surprising that many early UFO sightings of “flying saucers” in New Mexico from the 1940s to 1950s are in proximity to the White Sands Proving Ground. The most well-known of these incidents is perhaps Aerojet contractor Daniel Fry’s alleged contact at White Sands with an oblate spheroid which purportedly divulged to Fry certain arcane, theosophically-tinged secrets of the Earth’s prehistory which later formed the ideological basis for Fry’s new age Understanding, Inc. UFO cult. (I won’t be going much into Fry and Understanding, Inc. here, but for those interested Jenna on X has an interesting thread detailing the intersections between some Kennedy assassination operators and UFO lore.).

To be sure, Paperclip scientists’ work was not restricted to simply aerospace. Author Linda Hunt in Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip notes that “By 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, the Paperclip scientists’ primary job was to locate plants and poisons that could be turned into new hallucinogenic mind-control drugs.”34 In a 2002 article for High Times, Constanine makes the case for the abductee experience as cover for mind control experimentation:

“Short-term memory dissolution proved to be an imperfect science. Abductees often struggle through it to recall details every bit as traumatic as experimentation in the Nazi camps. The 1976 Allagash abductions, for instance, involving four men, all professional artists in their 20s, night-fishing in the wilderness of northern Maine. Two of them were twins (long a fascination of Nazi eugenicists). The UFO approached.... The Allegash Four could remember nothing of the kidnap, but before long the nightmares began. They dreamed of "alien" abductors and invasive surgical procedures. Before long, they recalled hypnotic suggestions to forget the experience, the return to their canoe. One of the men woke up one morning with a tumor on his leg. It was surgically removed and sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for an opinion. Later, the hospital could not explain why the tumor had been sent to a military lab. When the abductee requested his X-rays, the hospital refused to turn them over.

Concentration camps were once used for medical experimentation. In the absence of a Dachau, a highly sophisticated, classified escape vehicle and a fancy brain zapper will do. It was very nearly the perfect crime. There would be loose ends, of course, and the inevitable blowback ...”35

Constantine postulated that UFO “clean-up crews” were assembled to “tidy up” the inevitable blowback. “One approach to cloaking the origins and purpose of the program was the use of ‘experts’ to gaslight the public and reinforce the post-hypnotic programming of the subjects,”36 said Constantine.

“A welter of ‘experts,’ most of them with CIA, military or Nazi roots, cropped up like poison weeds to deflect attention from the black core of the Project. The most prominent was C.G. Jung, founder of analytical psychology. In his book Flying Saucer, published in 1959 by Harcourt, Jung attributed the UFOs to group hallucinations or "visual rumors" akin to visions of the Virgin Mary. Prior to WW II, Jung was the leader of a secret occult lodge that pandered anti-Semitic myths of Aryan supremacy, Thule-style, lavishly funded by Edith Rockefeller McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller and heir to the International Harvester fortune… Like Jung, proliferating CIA and military intelligence psyop teams diverted attention from classified air machines and human experimentation conducted by doctors from Dachau on Americans, all with federal sanction”37

After his discharge from the Army and reported psychiatric hospitalization, “Applewhite had undergone several mystical experiences… but seemed unable to find the words or framework for explaining them. According to one account recollected by a friend…, Applewhite had had a visionary experience and needed help processing and interpreting. ‘He said a presence had given him all the knowledge of where the human race had come from and where it was going. It made you laugh to hear it, but Herff was serious. And he didn’t seem crazy.’”38 Sociologists who had infiltrated Applewhite’s group in the 70s noted that “Applewhite had experienced ‘strange voices, and later bizarre dreams and out-of-body experiences.’”39 Did Applewhite, like Daniel Fry, experience contact with a cosmic entity at White Sands, his mind-control UFO-homiletics synthesized by the historical alchemy of Nazi aerospace technology and esotericism? During the course of his later travels, Applewhite once confided in a Charlotte, North Carolina man that he had been contacted by aliens in a national park: “… He was walking along a trail, it was cold and there was snow on the ground. All of a sudden he got so hot he took his jacket off and there was a burning bush… the spirit that made it so warm gave him a message that he should try to improve himself.”40

Many who knew Applewhite before his infamy registered an inability to reconcile the cult leader with the steady, warm, gifted man they knew. Bill McMinn, a philosophy professor at the University of Alabama, remembered Applewhite as an “exceptional person and a delight to know,” and that Applewhite “was interested in science, but also interested in astral aspects, mystical science, and kind of esoteric in his faith.”41 Fred Goossen, a former colleague of Applewhite’s at the University of Alabama, averred that Applewhite had undergone a “fundamental psychological change” after he left the University, insisting that “The person who’s been reported and the Herff Applewhite I knew are just not the same person.”

Applewhite was not the only member of his group to have served in the military, or to have engaged in defense work. Professionally, many of the members of what came to be known as Heaven’s Gate were accomplished engineers and computer scientists who likely played unsung, but salient roles in the development of the architecture of the ARPANET at Berkeley and UCLA, and later designed important programs used by many cell phones and pagers of the 90s. These individuals’ backgrounds will be explored in later installments, but to grasp the significance of their academic and professional circumstances, and ultimately the group’s digital politics, it’s a necessary undertaking to conceive of universities such as Berkeley and UCLA themselves as defense contractors, the internet as a refined weapon of military-industrial control, and how exactly it came to be this way.

Why the hallowed ground of Silicon Valley? In the popular imagination, Silicon Valley as sacred cradle of technological development took form in the 1960s and 1970s with Apple and Intel; for nerds and/or obsessives, this cluster of accumulated wealth began symbolically with the formation of the Hewlett-Packard Company in 1939; for our purposes, the “ancient forces of greed and fear” had been chiseling away at and extracting from the Valley in organized fashion since at least the Gold Rush times, for “nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.”42

It was the “cultural peculiarities of the things demanded— novel forms of mining equipment and lumbering equipment” which defined the region’s “development of new techniques and innovations in mining equipment such as hydraulic pumps, air compressors, hoisting gear, crushers, and amalgamators.”43 As labor struggle fomented, the professional-academic caste of the electrical and hydraulic power industries differentiated itself from the “out of touch” east coast by forming location-specific professional organizations and guilds such as the Pacific Coast Electric Transmission Association and technical journals such as “the weekly Mining and Scientific Press (in its 48th volume by 1884), Engineer: a Monthly Journal Devoted to the Mechanical Arts and Sciences (1876), and Journal of Electricity, Power and Gas (1898), which published the Pacific Coast Electric Transmission Association's proceedings.”44

By 1909, the first Valley electronics company, Federal Telegraph Co. (FTC) took root in Palo Alto, whereat Lee De Forest’s innovation of the Triode, a tube amplifier, marked the incipience of Vacuum Tube Valley. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, FTC provided to the US Navy radio equipment for the networking of its new imperial conquests around the world: “… the company became intertwined with both War and State Departments in an effort to wrest global communications away from British hegemony.”45 Under contract with the Navy, FTC thus connected “America’s off-shore bases in the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone.”46 At the time, “The United Kingdom controlled two-thirds of undersea cables, and London was the corporate HQ of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi,” which prompted the Navy in 1918 to prop up the wavering FTC by commandeering FTCs stations and patents in order to “keep them out of the hands of the Marconi radio empire.”47 Withal, “FTC became ‘an industrial extension of American foreign policy,’ especially in Latin America where the US moved to dominate radio in a tech updating of the Monroe Doctrine.”48

The next blow to British radio monopoly came in 1919 with the formation of The Radio Corporation of America (originally a patent trust held in part by United Fruit Company), which was termed publicly a “reorganization,” but was more like a Navy-lead coup of the American Marconi subsidiary. By the 1950s, newspapers began reporting not on the naval origins of RCA, but on its unusually chummy relationship with the US Signal Corps:

“Key patents on which RCA’s radar and television tubes are based has long been the subject of scrutiny inside the Justice Department, and at one time a criminal suit was considered against the giant TV-radio manufacturer. This was based on the signal corps contention that RCA had appropriated one of the most important secrets ever developed by the signal corps— radar.

What happened was that the signal corps, during the years 1932-1936, developed the then revolutionary ability to look into space through radar. Later, William D. Hershberger, a signal corps civilian who had worked on radar, resigned and turned up on the payroll of RCA. Following this, on Jan. 11, 1938, RCA filed for the basic patent on radar listing as inventors William D. Hershberger and I. Wolf, a laboratory man for RCA.”49

After World War II, “the Army consulted with the patent office and the Justice Department about bringing a suit against RCA. Suddenly, however, the Army cooled off. Simultaneously, the head of the signal corps, Gen. Harry Ingles, retired on March 31, 1947, later became president of RCA Communications, Inc… After that, the Army began to alibi for RCA and the criminal aspect of the suit was dropped.”50 And all along, RCA was presided over in various capacities by David Sarnoff, famed cold warrior and Reserve Brigadier General of the Signal Corps51.

The nascent digital age required a particularized economic apparatus to sustain it. Vannevar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) (which housed the Manhattan Project under its auspices) would establish extensive, de facto federal funding for domestic scientific research, and it was through this economic relationship that universities (such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, Caltech, etc.) became the consorts of the defense industry and intelligence agencies through universities’ subsidized production of weapons system research and development. Sans venture capital and public offerings, funding for emerging companies necessarily relied upon the close relationship between universities and military, intelligence agencies, and defense contractors. If the applications of technology originally produced for military purposes could be profitable on a commercial level (like radar), a system of funding and organization would be required to nurture not only the proliferation of bleeding edge technology, but also systems of evaluation and management to regulate the selection and incubation of these companies (i.e., the organization of labor itself). Thus configured, post-OSRD blossomed the first venture capital (VC) firms52, thereby outmoding the scientific patronage of wealthy philanthropists who often operated through foundations skewed toward dispersing donations to the east coast. From these arrangements were born revolutionary advents in weaponry; one of the most prolific was the internet.

Per Yasha Levine in Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet,

“America’s early warning radar system was sparse and full of holes. The process of tracking airplanes was done by hand: uniformed military men sitting in dark rooms filled with cigarette smoke, watching primitive green radar screens, barking out coordinates and jotting them down on glass boards, and then radioing commands to pilots. The system would be useless in the face of a large, targeted nuclear attack by air.”53

Digitized radar information and real-time computing across great distances were needed for such an early warning system, and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory (which incubated Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics) was put to work to develop SAGE: The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. (Fittingly, it was Wiener’s study of anti-aircraft technologies which lead to his development of cybernetics).

SAGE was the most extensive computer system ever designed, and the first computer network in history.

SAGE was controlled by two dozen ‘Direction Centers’ located strategically around the country. These giant nuclear-proof concrete bunkers housed two IBM computers that together cost $4 billion in today’s dollars, weighed six hundred tons, and took up an acre of floor space; one was always on standby in case the other failed. Each control center employed hundreds of people and was connected to land-based and coastal radar arrays, missile silos, and nearby interceptor aircraft bases. The system could track up to four hundred airplanes in real time, scramble fighter jets, launch Nike missiles, and aim antiaircraft cannons. SAGE was the eyes, ears, and brains of a massive weapon. It was also the first nationwide computerized surveillance machine—surveillance in the broader sense: a system that collected information from remote sensors, analyzed it, and allowed the military to act on the intelligence it produced.”54

The Stanford Research Institute (SRI), specifically Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC), became a major player in the newfound world of computer science and cybernetics inventing not only “hypertext links, multiuser real-time word processing, video conferencing, and, most notably, the computer mouse,” but jumpstarting “a whole range of networking projects, efforts that would lead directly to the creation of the Internet. One of these was a $1.5 million joint UCLA–UC Berkeley initiative to develop software and hardware for a network that connected multiple computers to multiple users. As a funding proposal explained, this research would be used directly to improve military networks, including the National Military Command System, which was then a new communication system linking the military to the president.”55 To be sure, SRI and ARC promulgated computer science as a field of research and study in its own right, following the directive of Vannevar Bush’s OSRD: “The long-term research contracts the ARPA Command and Control Research division handed out to research teams helped seed the creation of independent computer science departments in universities across the country and tied them closely, through funding and personnel, to the US military establishment.”56

And so, Gold Rush Valley became Vacuum Tube Valley became Silicon Valley; and American Marconi turned into RCA turned into the Signal Corps turned into General Electric; and FTC turned into the US Navy turned into Mackay turned into ITT; and the infinite shuffling of executives, mergers and acquisitions, the amalgamating interchange of patents, the churn of replacement and reincarnation of vacuum tubes to transistors to silicon chips. À la the paradox that Plutarch describes in Life of Theseus:

“The ship on which Theseus sailed… the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus.⁠ They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became a standing illustration for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.”57

The Stewart Brands, Douglas Englebarts, Electronic Fronter Foundation types, and really anyone on the Gates payroll will tell you that “information wants to be free” and that all the internet really is, is counterculture manifest as technology; that the counterculture itself is an organic phenomenon (like, the liberal progression of history wherein “things just happen”), and the internet is a completely different vessel than her military forebears. With ARPANET mapped over the existing SAGE nodes, American V-2 rockets reconstituted from nose cone to guidance system with parts built by Nazi slave labor, Nike Cajun bases repurposed as behavioral modification centers58, is there any question that this is not the same ship? This ship, though she flies a flag of convenience, also waves a banner in the spirit of in hoc signo vinces: the black sun’s jolly roger of sorts (which bears a striking resemblance to a dark reversal of a solar good luck symbol once associated with prosperity, but which now portends quite the opposite).

Conveniently, it was Stewart Brand, former Army parachutist, Merry Prankster, and proprietor of the Whole Earth Catalog, who ran cover for Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory:

At the time, the atmosphere around Stanford was charged with anti-ARPA sentiment. The university had just come off a wave of violent antiwar protests against military research and recruitment on campus. Activists from Students for a Democratic Society specifically targeted the Stanford Research Institute— a major ARPA contractor deeply involved in everything from the ARPANET to chemical weapons and counterinsurgency— and forced the university to cut official ties. To many on campus, ARPA was the enemy. Brand disagreed.59

“Spacewar, Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,”60 waxed Brand in his 1972 ARPA-evangelism for Rolling Stone. Per Levine, Brand

“… set out to convince the magazine’s young and trend setting readership that ARPA was not some big bureaucratic bummer connected to America’s war machine but instead was part of an ‘astonishingly enlightened research program’ that just happened to be run by the Pentagon. The people he was hanging with at the Stanford AI lab were not soulless computer engineers working for a military contractor. They were hippies and rebels, counterculture types with long hair and beards. They decorated their cubicles with psychedelic art posters and leaflets against the Vietnam War. They read Tolkien and smoked pot. They were ‘hackers’ and ‘computer bums… full of freedom and weirdness.… These are heads, most of them,’ wrote Brand… They might be stuck in a computer lab on a Pentagon salary, but they were not there to serve the military. They were there to bring peace to the world, not through protest or political action but through technology… ‘Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics’…”61

Levine’s Surveillance Valley adroitly navigates the history of the inception of the internet as counter-insurgency measure born out of data visualization and processing techniques first deployed in the Phoenix Program. Computer technology and the infant internet were designed to “better wage ‘limited war’ and counterinsurgency to combat the ‘multidimensional Communist challenge— in paramilitary warfare, in psychological warfare, and in the conventional and nuclear field.’”62

In 1964, the United States Army began a counterinsurgency study called Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential, code named Project Camelot, funded by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at American University. SORO was itself a creation Army's Psychological Warfare office. (In fact, it was at first called the Psychological and Guerrilla Warfare Research Office, PSYGRO). Employing a team of intellectuals and academics, Project Camelot was designed to measure and forecast “the causes of revolutions and insurgency in underdeveloped areas of the world,” to “find ways of eliminating the causes, or coping with the revolutions and insurgencies,” “to test a general systems approach to predicting and influencing instability in several Latin American countries.”63 From Levine by way of journalist Joy Rohde, Camelot’s “ultimate goal” was “to build a radar system for left-wing revolutions— a computerized early warning system that could predict and prevent political movements before they ever got off the ground.”64 This would be instrumentalized through use of “POLITICA,” a Pentagon-funded computer program “designed to reproduce the role of the military and other factions in the politics and economic dynamics of a nation by structuring the roles of major national actors and groups, placing them in conflict or cooperation in a game environment and identifying from the resulting interaction the societal and human variables relevant to the study of incipient insurgency. By sequential search of various patterns of variables under various initial conditions, the game is designed to highlight those variables decisive for the description, indication, prediction, and control of internal revolutionary conflict.”65

The project ultimately suffered from some bad PR (Latin American newspapers denounced it as coup-fomenting imperialist espionage) due in part to the heavy-handed, obfuscatory approach taken by ex-pat anthropologist Hugo Nutini toward Chilean academics, and thus the plug on the project was rather publicly pulled.66 The way it’s told is that after this snafu, the Pentagon learned its lesson about meddling with other countries’ affairs and never again tried to use computers to wargame counter-revolution and operationalize digital systems of control. (Bad for international relations, diplomacy, etc.)67. This would also be the first and last time that prominent sociologists and anthropologists would dirty their hands with unwitting participation in regime change-type antics. (It’s worth noting that many of the participating academics absolved themselves ex post facto of any responsibility for their involvement with Camelot. Indeed, many seem to have conceived of themselves as “reformers,” playing a sort of white hat role mediating and liberalizing the more hardline approach of the Army).68

Despite the public floundering of Camelot, the development of cybernetic strategies of counterinsurgency continued unabated and with more discretion. According to Levine, “In 1968, (J. C. R. Licklider’s) Cambridge Project at MIT picked up where Camelot left off.”69 Indeed,

“… computing technology had advanced to a point where it could help the military use data to fight insurgencies. The Cambridge Project included several components. It ran a common operating system and a suite of standard programs custom-tailored to the military’s “behavioral science mission” that could be accessed from any computer with an ARPANET connection. It was a kind of stripped-down 1960s version of Palantir, the powerful data mining, surveillance, and prediction software the military and intelligence planners use today. The project also funded various efforts to use these programs in ways that were beneficial to the military, including compiling various intelligence databases.”70

On October 29, 1969, the first ARPANET node blinked to life, joining Stanford and UCLA. In only two years, more than fifteen nodes would be added to the network. By the 1980s, ARPANET was handed off to the National Science Foundation, “a federal agency created by Congress in 1950 with a mission to ‘promote the progress of science’ and ‘secure the national defense,’ becoming NSFNET.71 In a strange way, Applewhite’s progression from the Signal Corps to charismatic leader of a cyber-cult only mirrored the very transmogrification of the defense industry itself.

Just as journalists and academics neglect to mention Applewhite’s military service in New Mexico, so too do they either ignore or simply gloss over his return to New Mexico, post-discharge. After the breakdown of his professorial career and the dissolution of his marriage and family life, Applewhite inexplicably resurfaced, on “sabbatical,” in Taos, New Mexico in or around 1970 where he helped build and run a restaurant called The Sunshine Company. Taos residents recalled Applewhite as being “very charming and very good-looking” and that the women of Taos were “crazy over him.”72 Dennis Robbins, who worked for Applewhite at The Sunshine Co., recalled that “He (Applewhite) had women falling all over him… He was charming people even then.”73 Applewhite hobnobbed with the artists and intelligentsia (including Taos socialite Benjamin Hazard and artists Jim Wagner and Charles Thwaites)74, attending and throwing soirées for the Taos Opera Guild75.

According to Taos resident and business owner Bill Whaley, The Sunshine Co. was an “early California-sort of vegetarian and light meals place” that Applewhite operated c. 1970 to 197176. Robbins described the restaurant as more of a “ratskeller,” (German for a tavern-like establishment, apparently) and as a very popular “upper-scale funk bar.”77 The Sunshine Co. advertised the summer of ‘71 in The Taos News the piano stylings of Virgil Dixon and his friends78; in a 2008 blog, a former Army lieutenant recalls a road trip of his in the summer of ‘71 through Taos and happening upon “a small bistro, fairly lively but not overcrowded,” called The Sunshine Company. Nursing a beer, the lieutenant sat at a table proximate to a stage on which a comedian, clad in all black, delivered a series of irreverent japes ranging from discussion of parochial school to drugs to religion. “When he got onto serious theological stuff, I nearly fell out of my chair,” said the lieutenant. “I finished my beer, and waved to the waitress to get another. When she delivered it, I asked who was the comedian. ‘That's George Carlin,’ she said. ‘He's a friend of the owner and he's doing the gig for free.’”79

The Sunshine Co. may have been a slightly seedier joint than your average hippie California-style brunch spot, or even a ratskeller, for it was also probed, less than a year after Applewhite’s tenure there, by the New Mexico State Police Narcotics Investigation Division for alleged narcotics trafficking. “Certain people who frequent it have been under investigation, believed to be involved in narcotics,” reported New Mexico State Police Sergeant Tommy Holder.80 The State Police investigation revealed the 1972 owner of The Sunshine Co. to be Harvey Mudd II, a scion of the ultra-blueblood Mudd family (which counts among its members a Dr. Samuel Mudd, one of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination; Roger Mudd, a prominent journalist for CBS who was present at the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel; and Harvey Seeley Mudd I, one of the initial investors in the Cyprus Mines Corporation and eponymous benefactor of Harvey Mudd College. Interestingly, Harvey Seeley Mudd I was a trustee of The American Heritage Foundation’s “Crusade for Freedom,” the anti-communist psywar CIA funding conduit to Radio Free Europe, masterminded by Frank Wisner and others81).

As to the narcotics probe into Mudd’s eatery, and him as an alleged heroin dealer, Mudd dismissed the New Mexico State Police’s prying as political retaliation for Mudd’s lobbying in regard to the control of certain land subdivisions. Mudd claimed that an unidentified, hostile, and possibly organized crime-connected Albuquerque business orchestrated a byzantine plot against him: “Several ‘hippy types’ were recruited (under dramatic, clandestine circumstances), to plant cocaine or heroin in the offices of the Central Clearing House,” wrote Mudd in an attempt at self-exoneration in a local Santa Fe newspaper guest column. Mudd’s own in-house investigation of the origin of the aforesaid cocaine and heroin apparently unearthed this sordid plot.82

As for The Sunshine Co.’s narcotics-associated patrons, police acted on search warrants and grand jury indictments to round up conspirators in the distribution of LSD and other psychedelics. The Taos conspirators who had frequented Applewhite’s and Mudd’s establishment were members of the local New Buffalo and Hog Farm communes.83

Harvey Mudd II grew up in Ojai, California where he attended the elite Thacher boarding school before earning a bachelor’s degree from the New School for Social Research in New York City in the 1960s84. After graduating, Mudd spent several years in Army Counterintelligence85, and upon discharge involved himself “in the peace movement in New York City and worked ‘on the periphery’ of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign for presidency,’”86 before heading on down to Taos, New Mexico where he sought to “help mediate the crisis” in regard to the “Hippie invasion of Taos”87 by funneling his vast fortune into the commercial and artistic development of Taos as a countercultural outpost for the middle-class dispossessed. Mudd also founded and directed the Central Clearing House— an influential environmental lobbying group. Where the east coast had Billy Mellon Hitchcock, the southwest had Harvey Mudd II. As Harvey Mudd immersed himself in the burgeoning bohemian artist milieu of Taos, his father, Henry T. Mudd, one of the main financial backers for Richard Nixon’s 1962 campaign for governor88 , regular Bohemian Grove attendee and member of the Council on Foreign Relations89, presided over the family’s Cyprus Mines Corporation.

The Mudd family’s Cyprus Mines played a key role in the armament of the Wehrmacht, providing imports of copper concentrates and pyrites to Nazi Germany well into the late 1930s.90 Non-ferrous metals, such as nickel and copper, “were indispensable for waging war because they were used in most of the commodities demanded by the Wehrmacht, including shells, armoured steel, and electrical equipment.”91 After years of squalid working conditions, both Greek and Turkish Cypriot workers of the Cyprus Mines went on strike in 1948 for more than three months. “Two thousand Greek and Turkish Cypriots took part in the protests, including women and children. Authorities opened fire on the miners on March 8 and arrested and imprisoned 76 men and women for up to two years.”92

Back in Taos, Harvey Mudd used his trust fund derived from quelling Cypriot labor rebellion to swell his Taos County landholdings to around 570 acres— playing landlord on the Taos Plaza and squeezing his tenants for exorbitant rents93. Though Mudd owned multiple properties in Taos County, he also resided at the New Buffalo commune94, which served as the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider. (In fact, in the early 70s, Hopper even took up residence in Taos at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House).

In his introduction to Iris Keltz’s Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie, Ed Sanders notes that the commune movement “found particular grace (as well as strong opposition) in the mountains near Taos, a town of a few thousand souls in north central New Mexico at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, and 55 miles north of Santa Fe… It is a place where people talked openly about being in ‘God’s country’— where boundaries seemed numinal rather than those recorded on deeds at the County Clerk’s office.”95 For the communards, Taos had “a kind of spiritual topography to the placing of roots… and somehow the curves of the brain flowed out and fit in with its contours, escarpments, shapes, smells, seasons, flora and fauna, drainage and heritage.”96

To be sure, Taos County at the time was home to dozens of communes (e.g., Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm, The Reality Construction Company, New Buffalo, Lama Foundation, Lorien, etc.) and was tellingly termed by poet Robert Creeley “the goyim’s Israel.”97 The bulk of the hippie settling of Taos, though the historical record is awash with communard nostalgia, was seemingly openly colonial: “Taos in particular was like the Third World back then,” said Rick Klein, co-founder of the New Buffalo commune. “Aside from a few artists, there wasn’t much Anglo influence…”98 Many of the first wave of Taos settlers, specifically the commune proprietors, were Stanford economics graduates, children of wealthy coastal families with trust funds to burn, ex-military bums, Aquarian new-age gurus— all bent on erecting themselves as the landholding-aesthete caste on the Anglo-deprived frontier. The colonio-hippification of Taos in the 60s and 70s was met with sometimes violent resistance from the local Hispanic population, a class antagonism cutely referred to by locals as the “Hippie-Chicano War” which allegedly spurred the eventual dissipation of the Taos communes. “Nearby Hispanic communities resented the communards, perceiving that they came from prosperous backgrounds yet chose to live in poverty, that they flaunted social norms, that they were unhygienic, sex-crazed dope fiends, and that they might negatively affect the economically important local tourist industry. Incidents such as dynamiting, arson, and telephone threats occurred.”99 Hippie-preferential news joints allege that “The conflict came to a head when one nearby commune member was murdered, two others beaten, and a third raped. Soon after, the pace of commune establishment slowed and cultural conflicts became less salient,” but make no reference to any actual details of the aforesaid murder. (That’s not to say these events never took place, but it’s also worth noting that a highly publicized 1975 alleged rape of an “Anglo woman” by a “Taos Pueblo Indian” resulted in the acquittal of the accused)100.

Many of the communards who weathered the Hippie-Chicano War unsurprisingly became the landlords, business owners, and tourist industry profiteers of 80s to present day Taos, having bought up choice land and historic buildings on the cheap many years ago, awaiting the town’s Aspen-ization by way of its nearby snow-capped slopes. (Case in point is Charles “Chick” Lonsdale III, son of a vice-president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and founder of the Lorien commune, who became a prominent real estate broker in New Mexico— his chapter in the Scrapbook titled “From Capitalist to Communist and Back”101). Other communards split. The crown jewel of Mudd’s Taos landholdings was the 80-acre Lobo Ranch in Arroyo Hondo which he sold to Phil DeCaro, a CIA operative who had proudly participated in the Bay of Pigs.102

While in Taos, Mudd contributed to the Fountain of Light magazine, an underground hippie tabloid which published the first iteration of Richard Alpert’s Be Here Now (Alpert had actually helped form the aforementioned Lama Foundation). Fountain of Light was established by The Family and Lorien communes:

“Seeing a need for services to the hippies who were descending on Taos in droves, The Family prevailed upon a wealthy local counterculturalist— one of the young heirs who played such vital roles in sponsoring communes— to underwrite a natural foods general store, a free medical clinic, an alternative newspaper called the Fountain of Light, and a sort of hippie switchboard, the Taos Community Information Center. The group also ran an alternative school.”103

Jim Levy, a writer and poet, took over Fountain of Light aiming to expand its musings to local news. Similarly to Harvey Mudd, Jim Levy spent his adolescence in the gilded cradle of The Thacher School in Ojai. According to his online biography, Levy married “the woman who became Pema Chödrön,” and later moved to Taos to become part of the town’s counterculture vanguard. (Levy and Mudd became fast friends, and worked in tandem on the Fountain of Light). By 1970, the paper’s benefactor, the aforementioned Charles “Chick” Lonsdale (an Aquarian new age guru, Stanford graduate in psychology and economics, Jungian therapist, and founder of the Lorien Commune) had run through his $250,000 inheritance. Fountain of light was shuttered, as were other small ventures for which Lonsdale had footed the bill.

Having run into what felt like a dead-end as to Applewhite’s time in Taos, I reached out to both Harvey Mudd and Jim Levy, hoping they might shed some light on Applewhite’s activities, associations: anything, really. Mudd never responded to my queries. Levy, on the other hand, informed me that he “never met Applewhite and know about him only from stories I've heard. And I don't know anyone here to suggest.” I thanked Levy for his response, and asked: “Any chance you might be able to share any stories about him that you’ve heard around? I know that he operated the Sunshine Co. in Taos Plaza c. 1970-1971, and that Harvey Mudd owned the Sunshine at the same time or shortly after, but I haven’t heard much else in the way of stories.” My prying met an end when Levy retorted, “Lena, I am 84 and can't remember the stories. I forwarded your emails to Harvey and he responded that he too can't remember anything. But he has your emails. If he wants to add anything he will. Otherwise I think he and I are dead ends.”

Levy’s terse response and Mudd’s outright refusal to engage with me stuck in my craw. Did they really not remember anything about Applewhite? Not even stories? Taos was a small town, and it strained credulity that Mudd wouldn’t remember such a notorious former associate of his. Since Mudd ignored my requests for an interview, I was compelled to purchase a used copy of his 2018 memoir Leaving My Self Behind (which Mudd partially dedicated to Levy) in an attempt to glean insight into his time in Taos and how he came to either rent to or buy from Marshall Applewhite The Sunshine Co. (Amusingly, the used copy of Leaving My Self Behind that I obtained had been inscribed by Mudd with a dedication to his son, who had apparently given up the book for adoption).

I soon found that the very existence of The Sunshine Co. is left out entirely of Mudd’s memoir, even when he discusses at length the narcotics probe he faced in 1972, which had to do unequivocally with The Sunshine Co. and its clientele. In fact, Mudd elides over discussion of this fact completely— an omission which struck me as odd, considering that Mudd insists in Leaving Myself that he (and later Levy, to whom Mudd delegated the operation of Mudd’s enterprises after Mudd became more immersed in environmental politics) personally ran “a gangly mini conglomerate” of businesses, which included a bar on the Taos Plaza. Mudd and Applewhite shared another subterranean connection: both were ex-Army and stationed at Fort Bliss! (Applewhite in the Signal Corps; Mudd in Intelligence, and only a few years apart).104

My initial bemusement by Levy’s reaction to my simple questions and Mudd’s avoidance gave way to wariness as I made my way through Mudd’s memoir in which he describes being trained in “various aspects of military counterintelligence”; that his assignment at Ft. Bliss was “in the area of personnel security,” assessing whether “a soldier or civilian employee of the Department of Defense might be a security risk” (i.e., rooting out reds); his mentoring by an Air Force colonel stationed at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico105. Mudd even reveals that his father was an acquaintance of former CIA Director John McCone, and that Mudd himself wondered if his father or the family’s Cyprus Mines “had any financial interest in Chilean copper or any involvement with the 1973 coup.”106 Can you really expect someone with such a pedigree and training in counterintelligence, as Mudd openly admits in his memoir, to be straight with you?

I recalled Ed Sanders’ wise comments and directive in the Scrapbook:

“The communes of New Mexico of course grew up not far from the most secret and guarded facilities of the military-industrial-surrealist-complex— the nuclear research labs at Los Alamos and Sandia, and possibly at other places we still might not know about. Military intelligence agents, on the look for Russkie spies, international trouble makers and Mossad agents, undoubtedly kept an eye on the communes of New Mexico. In addition, the communes of the Taos area grew up at a time when the FBI was putting into action its COINTELPRO program against the New Left and the underground community. It was around then that the CIA domestic CHAOS program targeted the underground press for destruction…

It’s not known what, if any, military intelligence, FBI or CIA operatives were present in the Taos communes, perhaps stirring up strife and discomfort. They were masters at strife-stir. It’s a field of investigation- now that the Cold War is over for now— that’s ripe for researchers”107

Could Mudd have been one of the military intelligence operatives helping to shape and monitor the culture of the Taos communes? A handler for Marshall Applewhite? Mudd had certainly stirred up a lot of strife in Taos during his time there, and didn’t want to talk much about it— especially when it came to Applewhite. Then there was Mudd’s and Levy’s proximity to a commune called “The Family,” (which would set off alarm bells for any paranoid), by way of Fountain of Light. Histories of the 60s Taos communes indicate that The Family and the Lorien Commune were behind the periodical, and that The Family was also involved in a free clinic for hippies, a natural food shop, and a sort of “switchboard.” I almost didn’t look further into the circumstances of The Family, but when I learned that they were involved with the operation of the Taos Free Clinic (later renamed La Clinica), which Sanders lumped in with its California parallel the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic108, my paranoia compounded, as did my curiosity.

In Scrapbook, Chick Lonsdale describes how he “bought the medical supplies to help La Clinica get started” and that it was a “cooperative venture with Drs. Kilgore and Rosen…”109 While Lonsdale states he was involved with multiple communes in Taos, he was not a member of The Family, though he remained supportive of their endeavors. According to Lonsdale, “They (The Family) provided the volunteer assistance for a variety of activities from auto repair to selling The Fountain of Light around town. They worked as receptionists at La Clinica…” Lonsdale described The Family as “quite a focused group and quite promiscuous compared to Lorien. They had what they called a group marriage. The 35 or so people who lived in that commune shared each other sexually,” adding: “It was a different moral system.”110

Little in the way of biographical information is available to read in regard to The Family’s mores, spare a memoir by a woman named Margaret Hollenbach who claims have been a part of the Taos commune in 1970. Hollenbach recounts that The Family’s leader was a man who called himself Lord Byron, an “ex-con who… may have learned his manipulative techniques while doing time for armed robbery in San Quentin prison.” For The Family, “the core group activity is ‘the Gestalt,’ wherein any member who is having ‘problems’ might be called to the hot seat and grilled by the community.”

The name of the commune, The Family, niggled at me and I could have sworn I’d encountered it before (and not just with Manson, the Children of God, or that whole Australian endeavor where those hippies were feeding LSD to kids). Indeed, Yasha Levine had actually mentioned the very same commune in Surveillance Valley:

“Formed by students from UC Berkeley in 1967, The Family quickly transformed into a rigid hierarchy, with men addressed with titles like “sir” and “Lord,” and women forced to wear skirts and assigned conservative gender-based work: cooking, child care, and washing. A founding member who called himself Lord Byron presided over the group and reserved the right to have sex with any woman in the commune.”111

Levine included The Family as an example of the cybernetic-libertarian dream run amok, one of the many communes that experienced the dramatic inversion of their “upbeat youthful experiments into repressive environment,” the “cybernetic structures that these groups imposed on themselves, rules that were supposed to flatten and equalize power relations among members and lead to a harmonious new society, produced the opposite result…”112 But was The Family really an “upbeat youthful experiment” gone wrong, or something more sinister from the start?

According to The Taos News in 1969, the cooperative venture that was the Taos Free Clinic was privately funded and subsidized by “the Taos County Health Department, a group of California physicians, the ‘Church of Macrobiotic Sciences’ and local physicians.”113 Beyond Dr. Rosen and Dr. Kilgore, newspapers named a Joseph Sage (a non-doctor) as a member of the clinic’s board of directors. Yet, in the newspaper archives, there was no mention of The Family’s involvement with the free clinic— just the Church of Macrobiotic Sciences. Were “The Family” and the “Church of Macrobiotic Sciences” one and the same?

Before joining the Manson Family on the Spahn Ranch, Linda Kasabian experimented first with commune living in Taos. After the Tate murders, Kasabian reportedly fled back to Taos where she confided the slaughter at Cielo Drive to Joe Sage, a monk at a Taos-based Zen Buddhist “macrobiotic” commune. Sage is mentioned briefly as a “colorful character” and kindly monk-type with a “reputation for helping people”114 in Vincent Bugliosi’s snow job Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders and goes unmentioned in Tom O’Neill’s Chaos. (Bugliosi also mentions that upon her return to Taos, Kasabian “found her husband living with another girl in a commune at Lorien…,”115 which was Chick Lonsdale’s joint). In The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, Ed Sanders mentions Kasabian’s intention to “establish a permanent home… at the Church of Macrobiotics located a ranch near Taos, New Mexico”116, but never mentions Sage by name— a curious fact considering Sanders wrote the introduction to Scrapbook in which Sage’s “church” and “family” are featured; Sanders also invokes by name in the introduction Sage’s free clinic.

Kasabian’s confession to Sage, allegedly the first revelation of the Manson Family’s culpability in the murders of Sharon Tate, et al., was not told in an unaltered state, but rather under a sort of meditative trance that Sage had induced in her. “When she told me about the murders, I didn’t believe her,” said Sage to Berkeley Barb reporter Kathleen Nemetz.117 “Those were the days when everybody was on acid and people told some pretty weird stories when they tripped… We put her into deep mediation… Her story was bizarre, but on hearing it the second time, we thought she might be telling the truth…” While in hypnotic stupor, Kasabian was prompted to return to the belly of the beast: “Sage said while Kasabian was still in the meditative state he gave her a suggestion to go home and tell her mother’s attorney of the murders.” Sage then “gave her $100 to return to Los Angeles,” and “called the Spahn Ranch and talked to Manson.” Even stranger, “Sage… apparently never told any authorities about her story,” claiming that his role as a priest hearing a confession prevented him from doing so.118 Further confounding Sage’s role in Kasabian’s post-murder posture, Kasabian testified at trial that not only had Sage paid for her plane fare, but that he had also paid $600 for her attorney.119

I got in touch with Ron Schulz, a former member of Sage’s macrobiotic commune in Taos. While rooting around the internet for info on Sage, I found Ron through his comments on multiple online platforms, including Tom O’Neill’s website, searching, like me, for the scoop on Sage. I immediately knew I wanted to speak with Ron, since he had speculated that Sage may have been involved in MK-ULTRA-type experiments.

Ron kindly shared with me a letter he had sent to Tom O’Neill, which neatly described his experience as party of The Family and the group’s connection to Manson:

Dear Tom O’Neill,

I very much enjoyed your book, although I was amused by your hesitancy to embrace the ‘conspiracy’ aspects of the case at first, as MKULTA and CHAOS, etc., have been well documented over the years. Planning and conspiring is the backbone of human social history, after all, so necessary to those in power or attempting to get there.

My memoir is coming out this summer, detailing my time in May 1969 with Joseph Sage, mentioned in Helter Skelter as an acquaintance of Manson. Joe was another messianic dictator and some of Charlie’s girls passed through his place, although I’m unsure of their names or if they returned to participate in any of the mayhem in California. That’s where I first heard of Manson, the Son of Man, as they called him. Soon after an intense short man emanating a dark, terrifying energy came to our door, asking for Joe who wasn’t home. He obviously tried to overawe me, asking me whether I’d had anything to do with Negroes, a strange out of the blue question. His demeanor told me he didn’t like them and something about the way I’d greeted him at the door must have roused his animosity. The interaction was brief, but it stuck in my mind.

After the murders later in the year, I was reminded of him and wondered if it could have been Manson or another male member of his tribe. I’m six-two and had to look down at the intense fellow, but cannot be sure it was Charlie, there were quite a number of ego-tripping conmen loose on the landscape.

Sage also called his group the “family,” listed as such in the book Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie and he advocated open sexuality with all of us sleeping side by side in one room. He used Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as the Bible, but macrobiotics was his principal obsession and we opened a restaurant in town.

Ours was not an unwashed bunch, we had all the modern conveniences, more so than our native and Chicano neighbors. With all attention on food, Sage was consumed by an anger that popped up promiscuously at almost anyone. His neglect of basic personal skills seemed behind the failure to keep hold of his Good Karma restaurant back in California, which he blamed on his thieving partners.

Ultimately, he scapegoated and drove me away after I simply tried to discuss the divisiveness of all the bad vibes.

I’m left to wonder at the connections Joe and Charlie had to each other and the sinister forces that may have been manipulating them, whether as agents provocateurs, mind experiments or other strategies to manipulate the counterculture.

Anything you know about Joe and the Taos scene would be of deep interest to me. Anyway, for the sake of unraveling true history, your book needs a sequel.

Very truly,

Ron Schulz

Tom O’Neill never responded. When I asked Ron which of the Manson girls visited Sage’s commune, Ron said that he couldn’t recall their names, but that there had been three. “One gave me a nice massage,” said Ron, “and chattered away about a group under a leader “Manson, son of man” that stuck in my mind…” According to Ron, “Sage vented a lot of hostility on them.” Ron was seventeen at the time, “feeling (his) way best as (he) could, bumbling into a society that attracted (him),” but was repelled by Sage’s “explosive and unreasonable temper.” Much like “Lord Byron,” Sage reveled in his command over the sexuality of the young female commune members, while simultaneously machinating the divide between others.

Like Mudd, Sage’s proximity to death cults and his participation in 60s and 70s Taos hippie counterculture becomes more dubious when one considers his background (as to which there is a relative dearth of information). According to the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1965, Sage had been in the Air Force in World War II, studied at the University of Mexico under then communist painter Pablo O’Higgins, and before opening an art gallery in Taos had operated The One-Fourth Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana.120 According to Sage’s obituary, he served in the Marine Corps from 1942 to 1962121, which means that immediately upon discharge, Sage immersed himself in the burgeoning counterculture milieu specifically in proximity to leftists and communists. Beyond publishing some crudely-crafted poems in the Marine Corps periodical The Leatherneck, Sage didn’t otherwise demonstrate any real artistic knack, so why the University of Mexico? Why an art gallery in New Orleans?

Sage’s possible role as an intelligence-affiliated “strife-stirrer,” as Sanders eloquently put it, solidified in my mind in a major way when I found Sage’s name in Jim Garrison’s files, included in one of Andrew Sciambra’s investigative memoranda as to Lee Harvey Oswald’s army buddy, co-founder of Discordianism, and likely Kennedy assassination conspirator Kerry Thornley. Sage had apparently frequented The Bourbon House and had been seen in the company of Thornley. (Others who shared the dubious distinction of being Thornley associates include Guy Bannister and David Ferrie). Curiously, the former marines Thornley and Sage would go on from New Orleans to play roles in the new age movement— both with a self-professed affinity for Zen. (Both men also shared some strange communications with Charles Manson).

After Sage flushed out of Taos, he resurfaced in Arizona where he ran for president for his very own National Reconstruction party. Sage also owned and operated the popular Haight Ashbury hippie haunt the Good Karma Cafe122 which was recommended by yippie Abbie Hoffman to readers as a suggested place to dine in the Haight.123 Sage’s role as chef at the Good Karma Cafe, which he performed in “Buddhist hair knot and Chinese-style beard,”124 allotted him access to the Haight’s multitude of budding political organizations and collectives for which questions of healthy food available to all for free had become an important issue around which to organize.

Indeed, the Good Karma Cafe served as a meeting place for various anarchist collectives of the Haight such as the Diggers125 and functioned as a “crossroads for people travelling for Hawaii to Macchu Pichu, and from Alaksa to some ashram in India.”126 Directly across the street from the cafe was a crash pad for followers of the esoteric Zen/Sufi mystic Murshid Samuel L. Lewis127 (son of the vice president of the Levi Strauss jeans manufacturing company and scion of the Rothschild of the international banking family— Lewis, like Sage, also had a role in the spiritual movement in Taos and has been interred at the Lama Foundation since 1971).

Considering Sage’s involvement with the art and theater scene in Taos (he was active in local theatrical productions128, arrived in Taos as a member of a jazz trio129, and operated an art gallery) as well as his membership to a relatively small class of hippie health food business owners in the town, it’s unlikely Sage didn’t encounter Applewhite during his time in Taos— Sage even partook in a theatrical production overseen by Applewhite’s friend Ben Hazard.130

Both Sage and Applewhite departed Taos under a cloud of ignominy, their convergence uncertain. As for Mudd, a likely Hippie-Chicano War refugee, he defected from Taos to California in 1975, “forsaking his expensive, seven-year political battle… to become a full-time poet and, finally, a prosperous businessman himself.”131 Indeed, “for 18 months he exorcised his activist demons in San Francisco” where Mudd “rediscovered jazz” and embraced being a capitalist without all the “spiritual grousing” of his younger years.132 (He would again find himself embroiled in a drug probe, this time at a winery in California for which he provided the seed capital133; the perennial Pollyanna prone to unwitting dealings with crime rings, apparently).

Tricia Hurst, a local Taos journalist who claimed to have known Applewhite, described him as having a “sort of built in radar he just naturally gravitated towards females with fat wallets… he has been described in these parts as the con artist’s con artist and when he left town a lot of pockets were empty and a lot of bills past due.” Hurst claimed that those who knew Applewhite well “… said he was a true psychopath in the guise of a Greek god. He regularly attended the Episcopal church taking communion in a pristine white suit, slept in a great antique brass bed with two white globes on either side, affected exotic plants and peacock feathers in vases all over the house and was elaborate and grandiose— drunk on his own perfume.”134

How exactly Tricia Hurst came to know the exact décor of Marshall Applewhite’s bedchamber is left unexplained in her column, but perhaps what goes unmentioned is also what gives Hurst’s writing the unusual mixture of encomium and disgruntlement only the jilted are inclined to manifest. (Also unexplained is how Applewhite was able to afford such splendorous and ornate living quarters, but perhaps the goings on at the Sunshine Co., and a possible benefactor in Harvey Mudd, accounted for his extra pocket money). Applewhite was apparently adept at courting the monied and ingratiating himself with the upper classes: “At the time, I had the gut feeling he was a scam artist…,” said Dennis Robbins. “He was real smooth. Wore the right clothes. Knew the right people. Very polished.”135

Dick Behnke, a local Taos columnist whose father had been part of Project Blue Book136, remarked:

“In all the reports I have read, except in New Mexico publications, the fact that Applewhite lived in Taos has not been reported. Both Newsweek and Time magazines made no mention of the fact that Applewhite ran a restaurant here. I know at least one correspondent for Newsweek who called me to ask about Applewhite’s sojourn in our community. I gave him a few names of people to talk to, but nothing appeared in the weekly news magazine about Taos.”137

Behnke observed that:

“In the national reports, the mysterious period of Applewhite’s life between the time he left (or was thrown out of) the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and the time he reappeared in 1971 to visit a shrink, is missing.

It is as if, by coming to Taos, Applewhite dropped off the face of the earth as a fine musician and vocalist— only to reappear about a year later as a troubled extraterrestrial navigatory to the hidden world of aliens and UFOs.”138

If the New York editors had pursued Behnke’s leads, they might have found that one of Behnke’s sources, “an Indian guy from Taos Pueblo,” had an interesting tale to tell from summer of 1970, back when Applewhite, Mudd, Kasabian, Sage, and possibly even Manson were in town:

“… my source told me that he and his brother were spotlighting deer on Indian land north of Taos near the Rio Grande Gorge when they ran across a psychedelic-painted VW bus parked along the road.

As they pulled up next to the bus, a group of about a dozen people, all totally naked or dressed in white robes (it gets fuzzy there), sprang up and raced away across the sagebrush, ducking the lights of my source’s pickup.

They disappeared without a trace. My storyteller, an accomplished tracker, even if he did occasionally hunt with a spotlight and rifle, said he and his brother looked, but they never found a trace of the group. there were no footprints, torn garments, dropped beads; nada.

After searching for these ‘ethereal beings,’ my storyteller and his brother, flinging caution to the wind, proceeded to explore the bus and its cargo.

In the back seat of the bus they found about a dozen animal hearts in plastic bags. My source told me he thought they may have come from either deer or cattle.”139

While Behnke and his source couldn’t be certain that this group had to do with Applewhite, Behnke asserts that “in those days, strange things were going on in this valley. People were espousing mystical philosophies and probably were doing large amounts of psychotropic drugs” and that this unexplored terrain of 1970s Taos could have been the incubator of Applewhite’s interest in extraterrestrials. Behnke recalled that “Taos and various communities in New Mexico were much in the news during the later 1960s and early ‘70s because of numerous UFO ‘sightings.’ It was also about this time when the first of the cattle mutilation reports began.”140 Indeed, Behnke’s source’s observation of a mysterious psychedelic cult seemingly harvesting animal organs seems consistent with the behavior detailed in the Flickinger report.

Those in Taos willing to admit that they knew Applewhite, and who weren’t suffering from the same selective dementia as Harvey Mudd and Jim Levy, insisted that they had never known him to be interested in cults, to have believed in alien resurrection, or held any of the other “bizarre beliefs” for which he would become famous. Jim Wagner, a well-known and successful Taos artist, asserted that he remembered Applewhite as being “nice and ‘very effeminate’” with “nothing but good vibes.”141 Wagner also mentioned that Applewhite, before opening the Sunshine Co., had been the bartender at the nearby historic La Fonda Hotel which boasts historical guests such as “Prince Peter of Greece, Judy Garland, Georgia O’Keefe, Tennessee Williams, Millicent Rogers, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lady Dorothy Brett, Robert DeNiro, Dennis Weaver, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Julia Roberts, Rock Hudson, and numerous others.”

Applewhite was put together enough to have successfully run “one of the first upscale restaurants in Taos,”142 which was how Applewhite came to know Bill Mingenbach, a specialist in “zomes” (polyhedral dome buildings inspired by the designs of Buckminster Fuller) and partner of Architects Taos who was hired by Harvey Mudd (and overseen by Jim Levy) to design The Sunshine Co. while Applewhite occupied the joint. “He was really intelligent and seemed normal except for a few eccentricities,” reported Mingenbach. “He never talked about cults or aliens or anything of that sort.”143 According to Tally Richards, a socialite and gallerist, “Applewhite wanted to open a gay bar in the basement of La Fonda Hotel, but Saki Karavas, who owned the hotel at the time, wanted nothing to do with it.” Richards averred that Applewhite was “an attractive, energetic fellow in his 40s with salt-and-pepper hair… He seemed very sane.”144 Applewhite’s landlord, who declined to give reporters a name, remembered Applewhite as “very bright and very articulate… He seemed above average… Things really clicked for him” and that Applewhite said he had supplied the “voice-over for the Hamms beer animated commercials.”145 (Which do indeed sound a lot like Applewhite if you’re paying attention to enunciation, pronunciation of consonants, and pre-nasal short-a distribution). Applewhite’s claim to his landlord comports with interviews Applewhite gave in Houston to reporters in which he claimed to have recorded music for commercials with The Ray Charles Singers.146

As many of Applewhite’s associates and friends revealed surprise by his turn to the occult, The Taos News incorporated by reference Tricia Hurst’s previously published article, which identified no sources, but stated that after Taos, Applewhite moved back to Dallas whereupon he joined the Hare Krishnas: “Herf got off on some religious kicks. In Dallas he was supposed to have joined those Saffron robe people.”147 Perhaps it was Applewhite’s proximity to the true machinery of war at White Sands, the V-2, or perhaps it was the unique altitude and psychedelic climate of Taos that germinated in Applewhite a taste for the occult, or it could have been the Taos Hum, that “‘time beacon’ that pumps pulses of gravity into space, an invisible lighthouse for time-travelling ETs” that Major Ed Dames, the trainer of Courtney Brown, perfidiously claims exists there. Certainly, Brown and Applewhite would become inextricably karmically linked when Brown’s purported remote-viewing of a spaceship trailing behind the passing Hale-Bopp comet on the Art Bell radio show allegedly set in motion Applewhite’s and his follower’s ritual martyrdom in Rancho Santa Fe.

D.H. Lawrence once wrote: “It has snowed, and the nearly full moon blazes wolf-like… risen like a were-wolf over the mountains. So there is a faint hoar shagginess of pine trees, away at the foot of the alfalfa field, and a grey gleam of snow in the night, on the level desert, and a ruddy point of human light, in Ranchos de Taos.”148

In the next installments, our ruddy point of human light ought to expand, like grey-gleam-light refracted through the many omnitriangulated panes of a Fullerian geodesic dome, for Marshall Applewhite returns to the mountains of New Mexico— not as a lonesome stranger in a strange land, but as a familiar face: the patriarch prophet of Heaven’s Gate.

7

Former State Senator Dies at Stockton. (1957, October 2). The Odessa American, p. 1

9

Nichols, B. (1997, March 29). Mass Suicide in Rancho Santa Fe. Corvallis Gazette-Times, p. B7.

14

“Faust” opens with a bang, some bumps. (1967, April 12). The Houston Chronicle.

16

Applewhites Back from Austria. (1955, July 21). Corpus Christi Times, p. 18.

17

For the Applewhites Assignment to Salzburg Meant Operas, Ski Jumps (1955, July 25). Corpus Christi Times, p. 12.

18

Bell, T. (1965, August 1). Herff applewhite: busy musical man for “milk and honey.” The Houston Post.

33

Wilder, P. (1953, February 22). Will today’s helicopter be tomorrow’s flying saucer? The Tampa Tribune, p. 48.

40

Couple assisted UFO pair. (1975, October 19). Daily-Times Advocate.

49

Efforts made to kill monopoly probe. (1955, January 25). The Santa Fe New Mexican, p. 4.

72

Behnke, D. (1997, March 29). Taos residents: cult chief charming. Albuquerque Journal, pp. 1–3.

74

Cooke, R. (1970, August 13). Art notes. The Taos News.

75

Gala opera guild party to be held in colorful setting at la finca. (1971, June). The Taos News.

78

(1971, July 14). The Taos News.

80

Police in probe of sunshine co. (1972, March 22). The Taos News.

81

“Crusade for Freedom” Letter from A. J. Wilde to Allen Dulles (1954)

82

Mudd, H. (1977, March 30). Crime danger exists. The Santa Fe New Mexican.

83

No Mudd case in probe. (1972, April 19). The Taos News.