The United States of Paranoia (28 page)

We talked for about ten minutes and throughout that period “Gray” sounded like a man under duress . . . as though someone was holding a gun to his head. I tricked him several times with different meaningless references and by the time I hung up I was definitely convinced that this man was not the real Gray Barker.

An hour later my phone rang again and a young man said, “Gray
Baker
has been trying to reach you . . . he asked us to give you this number and to please call him.” He recited a number that was identical to my own except for the last digit.

There were more calls from strangers that night, and more pointless messages from Gray
Baker
.

The next day I called Gray long distance and he denied having placed the call, naturally.
14

He would, wouldn’t he?

In private Keel suspected that at least some of the stuff Barker was feeding him wasn’t true. In one letter to the prankster, he wrote: “Let’s stop all this happy horseshit.”
15
James Moseley, another ufologist with a history of hoaxing, later recalled that his pal Barker “was delighted that Keel was reporting all sorts of ‘persecutions’ and paranoia.”
16
At one point Barker wrote a letter to Moseley and sent it to Keel instead, as though he had accidentally addressed the envelope inaccurately; it was filled with mysterious comments seemingly designed to make Keel paranoid.
17

University Books, 1956

“The diehard fanatics who dominated sauceriana during the early years were a humorless lot,” Keel wrote in
Mothman
, “and Gray’s mischievous wit baffled and enraged them. At times it baffled me, too.”
18

Barker’s playful deceptions bring to mind the second wellspring of the ironic style: the pranksters—most notably, a prankster named Paul Krassner, who launched a magazine in 1958 called
The Realist
.

The Realist
’s great innovation was to refuse to label which articles were truthful and which were jokes, and sometimes to add just enough truth to a piece of fiction that readers would be left completely befuddled as to what, if anything, they should believe.
19
With time Krassner would make that a matter of policy: “
The Realist
never labels an article as either satire or journalism,” he wrote in 1991, “in order not to deprive you the pleasure of discerning for yourself whether it’s actually true or metaphorically true.”
20
But the practice didn’t begin as a deliberate attempt to confound people. Krassner had simply assumed that everyone would be able to tell the satiric from the sincere. When it turned out that many readers found that difficult, he didn’t look for ways to clear up the confusion; he looked for ways to have fun with it.

The result was one of the most infamous hoaxes of the 1960s. “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” published in 1967, posed as a series of outtakes from William Manchester’s popular account of the JFK assassination,
The Death of a President
. Krassner’s piece began with a true story: When LBJ had been competing with Kennedy for the 1960 presidential nomination, he had called his rival’s father a Nazi sympathizer. The article went on to describe the president’s infidelities, which were well known in journalistic circles but had not yet been reported, and then it grew steadily less reliable, concluding with a scene of Lyndon Baines sticking his Johnson in the president’s throat wound. It is a testament to Krassner’s literary skill—or the average reader’s gullibility, or LBJ’s unpopularity—that many people were fooled. When Krassner met Daniel Ellsberg, the famous leaker confessed that he had believed the Johnson story. “Maybe it was just because I
wanted
to believe it so badly,” he said.
21

The hoax was not, at its heart, about a conspiracy, but the penultimate paragraph had a paranoid touch. In the margins of the Manchester manuscript,
Realist
readers were informed, this handwritten note appeared: “Is this simply necrophilia or was LBJ trying to change entry wound into exit wound by enlarging?”
22

As Krassner strove to top his Kennedy piece, and as his personal interest in conspiracy theories grew, secret plots moved to the center of his hoaxes. He began to conceive of himself as an “investigative satirist,” detailing plots that didn’t exist in order to expose the deeper social truths that did.

After Robert Kennedy’s death, the magazine announced that it would reveal “the rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology hierarchy.”
23
The article hadn’t actually been written yet, but the title alone was enough to prompt the Church of Scientology to file a lawsuit against the magazine. That only encouraged Krassner to dig deeper, searching for facts that would give his tale the texture of authenticity. Soon he was assembling an elaborate story about Scientology, assassination, and intelligence agencies, with Charles Manson replacing Sirhan Sirhan at the center of the saga.

You can see the ironic style coming into focus here. When Mae Brussell blamed an anticountercultural conspiracy for the Manson murders, she created fiction with mythic resonance but she thought she was exposing hard truths. Krassner skipped the hard truths except insofar as they helped him achieve that mythic resonance. Or at least that was his plan until he encountered Brussell along the way—but we’ll save that part of the story for later.

Krassner wasn’t the only investigative satirist in
The Realist
’s stable. Writing under the pseudonym “Reginald Dunsany,” a lawyer named James Curry produced a piece claiming that Jim Garrison, the controversial New Orleans D.A. who was helming his own investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination, had uncovered “a secret international terrorist ring more deadly than the Ochrana, GPU and Gestapo combined—the Homintern.”
24
Several pages of allegations about an international homosexual conspiracy followed. Nearly four decades later, in his otherwise excellent study
The Lavender Scare
, David K. Johnson would mistake Curry’s satire for an earnest piece of paranoid gay-baiting.
25

Outside
The Realist
’s efforts, the most notorious conspiracy hoax cum spoof of the 1960s was the
Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace
. The book, published in 1967, presented itself as a leaked classified report produced by the Special Study Group, a conclave tasked with considering what Washington should do if a “general condition of peace” should break out.
26
War is a social stabilizer, the purported panel concluded. It allows planners to judiciously burn off excess economic inventory, it channels “antisocial elements” into “an acceptable role,” it establishes “the basic authority of a modern state over its people,” and it helps “preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an incentive.”
27
The whole thing was written in a scathing parody of the prose found in a report from the RAND Corporation or some similar think tank. The book’s comic peak comes when the Special Study Group ponders other ways to fulfill war’s nonmilitary functions, including the creation of “fictitious alternate enemies.”
28

The jape was inspired by a newspaper headline: “Peace Scare Drives Market Down.” When the liberal journalist Victor Navasky saw that, he said to himself, “Peace? Peace is supposed to drive the market
up
.”
29
Then he and some friends conceived the satire, which was classified as nonfiction when it entered the best-seller lists. The book’s primary author, Leonard Lewin, confessed to the hoax in 1972, but that didn’t stop people from believing the
Report
was real. The members of the Liberty Lobby printed their own edition—since they thought it was a government document, they assumed it was in the public domain—and they didn’t stop selling it until Lewin sued them.
30
In 1990, the Associated Press distributed a story about the history of Iron Mountain, the spot in New York state where the Special Study Group was supposed to have met. The article casually cited the book’s claims as a part of the place’s past. “After two years of meetings, the commission decided that permanent peace was a bad idea,” the reporter recounted, then quoted Lewin’s introduction to the book and moved on to the next stage of the location’s history.
31

People still tout the
Report
as a genuine window into the mind of the Enemy Above. Some of them don’t seem to be aware of Lewin’s confession; others know about it but just don’t believe it. “The government claimed it was a HOAX,” wrote Stewart Best, the director of the DIY documentary
Iron Mountain: Blue Print for Tyranny
. “The Eastern Establishment claimed it was a HOAX. Eventually the writer of the forward [
sic
], a Mr. Leonard Lewin, claimed it was a hoax, a political satire, written to generate interest in the problems of war and peace, disarmament, etc. The only problem with all of this is the simple fact that IT WAS PUBLISHED AS NON-FICTION, and it was claimed at the time of the release that it was AUTHENTIC by both Lewen [
sic
] and the Editor-in-Chief of Dial Press.”
32
You might get the impression that Best does not comprehend how a hoax works.

The third source of the ironic style was Discordianism, a spoof religion founded in the late 1950s by a couple of Californians named Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley.
33
If you believe the mock faith’s mock bible, the
Principia Discordia
—and just to be clear, it is unwise to take anything in the
Principia Discordia
at face value—the church was born with a blinding epiphany in a bowling alley. “This particular evening,” the
Principia
relates, “the main subject of discussion was discord.” Hill and Thornley

were complaining to each other of the personal confusion they felt in their respective lives. “Solve the problem of discord,” said one, “and all other problems will vanish.” “Indeed,” said the other, “chaos and strife are the roots of all confusion.” . . .

Suddenly the place became devoid of light. Then an utter silence enveloped them, and a great stillness was felt. Then came a blinding flash of intense light, as though their very psyches had gone nova. Then vision returned.

The two were dazed and neither moved nor spoke for several minutes. They looked around and saw that the bowlers were frozen like statues in a variety of comic positions, and that a bowling ball was steadfastly anchored to the floor only inches from the pins that it had been sent to scatter. The two looked at each other, totally unable to account for the phenomenon. The condition was one of suspension, and one noticed that the clock had stopped.

There walked into the room a chimpanzee, shaggy and grey about the muzzle, yet upright to his full five feet, and poised with natural majesty. He carried a scroll and walked to the young men.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “why does Pickering’s Moon go about in reverse orbit? Gentlemen, there are nipples on your chests; do you give milk? And what, pray tell, Gentlemen, is to be done about Heisenberg’s Law?” He paused. “SOMEBODY HAD TO PUT ALL OF THIS CONFUSION HERE!”
34

That was followed by a vision of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, who became the duo’s object of worship.

Should that story seem hard to believe, here is an alternative account. Hill and Thornley were high school pals in East Whittier, California, where they shared an affection for crackpots, a distaste for religion, and a fondness for pranks. (Once they created what Thornley’s biographer Adam Gorightly described as a “seemingly mundane radio program” interrupted periodically by reports that “Soviet planes were invading the U.S. and dropping bombs.”
35
They loaded this latter-day “War of the Worlds” into a concealed reel-to-reel tape player, set up an ordinary radio that appeared to be the source of the broadcast, and let it play during drama class, scaring the hell out of their classmates.) Discordianism was a drunken prank of a theology, a couple of smart-asses cracking jokes. It probably wouldn’t have outlasted their teen years if Hill and Thornley hadn’t found themselves corresponding in the early sixties, reviving their old high school gag in their letters.

By that time Thornley had spent some time in the marines, where he had befriended a private named Lee Harvey Oswald. When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, Thornley wrote a novel,
The Idle Warriors
, that attempted to make sense of his old friend’s decision. He finished it in 1962—surely the only book to have been written about Oswald
before
the death of John F. Kennedy. Thornley had trouble finding a publisher for the manuscript, which didn’t see print until 1991.
36
But in the wake of Kennedy’s death, in 1965, he did produce a paperback, called
Oswald
, that attempted to analyze the assassin’s mind. It included no conspiratorial speculations. At that point, Thornley believed that Oswald had been a lone gunman.