ALSO BY ADAM GORIGHTLY The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control, and “The Manson Family” Mythos The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture Copyright © 2003 Adam Gorightly All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Paraview, P.O. Box 416, Old Chelsea Station, New York, NY 10113-0416, or visit our website at www.paraview.com. Book design by smythtype Author photo by Andrew Taylor of Tao-Productions.com ISBN: 1-931044-66-X Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003112931 The opinions expressed in this book are the author’s and do not represent those of the publisher. The author has sought permission for the use of all illustrations and substantial quotations known by him to be in copyright. Any omissions should be brought to the attention of the author. This book is dedicated to Jim Keith and Ron Bonds CONTENTS Foreword: The Monster in the Labyrinth by Robert Anton Wilson Introduction: Great Conspiracy Theorists Think Alike! Timeline CHAPTER 1: Free-Thinking Nerd CHAPTER 2: A Few Good Men CHAPTER 3: Idle Author CHAPTER 4: Discordian Interlude CHAPTER 5: Star Witness CHAPTER 6: Sex, Drugs, and Treason CHAPTER 7: Tales of the Jolly Green Giant CHAPTER 8: Bit Players CHAPTER 9: Framed in Red? CHAPTER 10: Lee Harvey Doppelganger CHAPTER 11: The Roselli/Thornley Connection CHAPTER 12: Operation Mindfuck and the Bavarian Illuminati CHAPTER 13: Zenarchy and Other High Adventures CHAPTER 14: Dreadlock Recollections CHAPTER 15: Is Paranoia a Higher Form of Awareness? CHAPTER 16: Stan Jamison, Brother Ray, and Good Ol’ Doc Stanley CHAPTER 17: Letters from the Edge CHAPTER 18: Black Helicopters over Tampa CHAPTER 19: Discordian Interlude #23 CHAPTER 20: Zen and the Art of Dishwashing CHAPTER 21: The Fallen Idols of Discord CHAPTER 22: Where Have All the Discordians Gone? (The Passage of Omar and Mal-2) Afterword: Synchronicities A-Plenty! Notes Sources Acknowledgments Appendix 1: A Partial List of Discordian Conspirators (In Alphabetical Disorder) Appendix 2: Images FOREWORD The Monster in the Labyrinth Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear—and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM! Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye’ve been left to fight alone. —“EPISTLE TO THE PARANOIDS,” The Gospel According to Fred BY KERRY THORNLEY Kerry Thornley wrote those words in the mid-1960s and within 10 years he had become a clinical paranoid himself, in the judgment of almost all of his friends, including Dr. Robert Newport, a psychiatrist who had known Kerry since high school. The moral of this seems to me: take great care which nut cases you dare to mock, for you may become one of them. I do not write in any spirit of smugness or superiority. I became somewhat paranoid myself, for a while there, or at least experienced acute anxiety attacks. For several months I literally could not leave my house without looking around to see if Kerry crouched behind a bush waiting to shoot me. You see, he had become convinced that I worked for the CIA and served as one of his “managers” or “brainwashers,” but I thought I worked as a freelance writer and considered myself his friend. As his letters to me grew increasingly hostile and denunciatory, I began to fear that he might have graduated from “weirded out” to “dangerous.” This now seems silly to me—an overreaction—but the violence and paranoia of the Nixon years made everybody in this country feel a bit jumpy. A Black Panther leader in my part of Chicago seemed to have gotten shot by the local police while sedated; the extreme Right and extreme Left both had wild conspiracy theories about everybody else; anti-war meetings, anti-segregation meetings, even pot-legalization meetings all had people making nervous jokes about who among us the government had infiltrated to report on our Thoughtcrimes. The government not only appeared irrational and out of control, but so did a large part of the population. I finally moved to Ireland to start a new life as an expatriate, and my worries about Kerry executing me for “brainwashing” him made up only a microscopic part of my motive. The whole country seemed a bit funny in the head and I had to hide out and lie low for a while. Silence, exile, and cunning, as Joyce had advised. Looking back, I feel amused and humbled. Like Kerry, I had satirized the paranoids before the sheer number of them frightened me into acting just like one of them. I remember my last phone conversation with Kerry, during which he announced that just a week earlier I had come to Atlanta, argued with him about my alleged CIA connections, spiked his drink with LSD, and brainwashed him again. I told him that I had not left San Francisco in months, and that if he had a bad trip the previous week then somebody else gave him the acid, not me. I insisted on this as persuasively as I could. Finally, Kerry relented—a bit. “Well, maybe you believe that,” he said. “But that means your bosses have been fucking with your head and implanting false memories in you too!” How do you argue that you haven’t had your head altered? “Look,” I said, “I’ll put my wife Arlen on. She’ll tell you I haven’t left here in months.” “That won’t prove anything,” he said with the calm certitude of a Grand Master announcing checkmate. “They probably fixed her head too.” I don’t remember the rest of the conversation. I felt lost in an Escher painting. A few weeks, or a few months, before or after that conversation, the police found a young woman raped and murdered two doors from the house where Arlen and I lived. A few days before or after that atrocity I attended a meeting of the physics/consciousness research group in which the assembled Ph.D.s seriously discussed a quantum model in which the universe contains only one electron, and everything else, including this seemingly solid Earth, our own bodies, and our “minds” (if we still think we have “minds”) results from the virtual interactions of virtual particles, or of probability waves. So Arlen and I packed up and moved to a land where the weirdest critter, a six-foot-tall white rabbit, seldom roams far from the fens and farmlands. I’m only kidding—not. —Madonna, Truth or Dare But let us, as the Chinese say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and examine