The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

by Jon E. Lewis

  Subliminal Programming. The FCC sometimes receives complaints regarding the alleged use of subliminal techniques in radio and television programming. Subliminal programming is designed to be perceived on a subconscious level only. The Commission has held that the use of subliminal perception is inconsistent with the obligations of a licensee and contrary to the public interest because, whether effective or not, such broadcasts are intended to be deceptive.

  Under this regulation, FCC-licensed TV and radio stations are banned from knowingly broadcasting programming containing subliminal messages. The FCC issued its regulation in response to a 1974 TV commercial for the toy Husker Du which repeatedly flashed the phrase “Get It”.

  End of story? Not quite. Because as the Gore case highlighted, hidden symbols can be dismissed by the accused as a mistake or as coincidence. And so everyone pretty much carried on as before.

  But all this selling commodities or denigrating political opponents is penny ante stuff, because the truly important hidden messages are the symbols of the Bavarian Illuminati and its satanic project. Take a look at CBS’s logo with its ocular image, which conspiracists insist is the All-Seeing Eye, the emblem of Freemasonry, the middle-aged white men’s front for the Illuminati. Then turn McDonald’s golden arches clockwise by ninety degrees and you get the number three – a sacred number in Freemasonry, because it symbolizes the Deity. Adidas? Run and have a look at the sports manufacturer’s logo, it is a triangle – another form of three. Texaco’s logo is a pentagram (well, almost), the sign the Illuminati use to mark their territory in much the way a dog pees on a lamppost.

  Freakiest of all subliminal messages is on US $20 bill. When folded in half there can be seen the image of the World Trade Center in flames. And so the evil Illuminati announced their intention to the world …

  Mmm.

  Further Reading

  Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 1957

  SYNARCHY

  Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre was a nineteenth-century French conservative philosophe who, looking at the world around him, believed that there was too much competition between the spheres of Economics, Politics, and Religion. Dire Anarchy was about to ensue. To avoid this dread fate, d’Alveydre prescribed a system of rule whereby the top men from all three spheres would work together in a secret circle for peace and prosperity. He lashed together the Greek “syn” (together) and “archy” (rule) to describe this system of harmonious governance by an elite. Come to think of it, he lashed bits of Plato together to make up the philosophy in the first place.

  Anyway, so far so explicable; thereafter synarchism became a term that meant almost anything to any homme.

  •

  Some theorists suggest that d’Alveydre was an occultist who telepathically communicated with “ascended masters” of the universe, whose HQ is a cave called Agarttha. For alternative historians Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince d’Alveydre’s occult synarchy is the big conspiratorial beast behind the Priory of Sion, the European Union … Umberto Eco treads similar ground in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum.;

  •

  In 1922, or thereabouts, a Mouvement Synarchtique d’Empire was reportedly formed to replace French democracy with a right-wing dictatorship. The proto-fascists of the “Movement for a Synarchist Empire” were joined in the thirties by a military clique around Admiral Darlan and businessmen who wanted collaboration with Hitler. Vichy France has been defined as synarchy in action. The fullest account of the MSE is contained in a document entitled “Pacte Synarchique”. Which may well be a hoax. A number of academic studies, including Olivier Dard’s La synarchie, le mythe du complot permanent (1998), suggest that French synarchism was non-existent hooey, although the French fascist Cagoule group did draw for “inspiration” on d’Alveydre’s ideas.

  •

  The Executive Intelligence Review of Lyndon LaRouche Jr has published copiously on synarchism, where it is defined as:

  a name adopted during the Twentieth Century for an occult freemasonic sect, known as the Martinists, based on worship of the tradition of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. During the interval from the early 1920s through 1945, it was officially classed by U.S.A. and other nations’ intelligence services under the file name of “Synarchism: Nazi/Communist,” so defined because of its deploying simultaneously both ostensibly opposing pro-communist and extreme right-wing forces for encirclement of a targeted government. Twentieth-Century and later fascist movements, like most terrorist movements, are all Synarchist creation … It is typified by the followers of the late Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève today … is found among both nominally left-wing and also extreme right-wing factions such as the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal … The underlying authority behind these cults is a contemporary network of private banks of that medieval Venetian model known as fondi.

  The neo-Conservative thinker Leo Strauss has certainly wielded influence in the twentieth century, especially in America where economist Paul Wolfowitz and historian Francis Fukuyama might both be termed “Straussians”. Disappointingly, there is little verifiable evidence of an actual synarchist cabal, which is what you would expect from a super-shadowy super-elite. Or a fantasy.

  Further Reading

  Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988

  Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, La France vraie ou la Mission des Français, 1887

  THE THIRD SECRET OF FÁTIMA

  On 13 July 1917, at around noon, a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared (allegedly) before three young shepherd girls at Fátima in Portugal. It was not the first or last time the Madonna revealed herself to the children, Lucia Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, but on this occasion She entrusted them with three secrets. Although the Roman Catholic Church generally pooh-poohs visions, the children were so convincing that their account received Vatican approval and the site where “Our Lady of Fátima” had descended became a holy shrine. Of course, authentication was helped by the fact that 50,000 people also saw the Marian visions, and the sun was said to dance in the sky.

  The Marto children both died in the great flu pandemic of 1919, but Lucia went on to become a nun, and in 1941 was prevailed upon by the Bishop of Leira, Jose da Silva, to reveal the first two prophecies to assist with the canonization of Francisco and Marta. The first secret was a vision of Hell, complete with demons and blackened human souls; the second prophecy predicted the end of World War I and the start-up of World War II (which of course was already well under way by 1941); the third secret revealed … Well, Lucia on considered reflection decided that this was a secret not to be told.

  Two years later, however, as Lucia teetered on the edge of death, da Silva persuaded her to write down the third secret so it could be known in case of her death. She did so, and the written prophecy was dispatched forthwith to the Vatican with the proviso that 1960 was the earliest year in which it could be opened for general gaze. Before then, the secret was for the pope’s eyes only.

  The year 1960 came – and the Vatican failed to release the text of the third vision. Then, 1961 passed with no release of the secret text, 1962, 1963 … Not until 2000 was the Third Secret of Fátima revealed, by which time suspicions about what it foretold had gone into overdrive. The publication of the text (see Document, p.543) did little to quell the queries. According to the official Vatican line, the text foretold the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, centring as it did on “a man clothed in white who falls to the ground apparently dead”. (John Paul II had a special affinity with Our Lady of Fátima; Mehmet Ağca tried to whack him on the 13 July, the anniversary of the Madonna granting the secrets to the girls, and the pontiff believed that Mary’s hand guided the bullets away from his vital organs.) Admittedly an attempted assassination of a pope is a Bad Thing, but Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, had once stated on the record that the third secret dealt with nothing less than “the End Times”. And why had Sister Lucia – who was still alive in 2000, having recovered from her
illness in the 1940s – been sworn to secrecy about a secret that was now no longer secret? And was a prophecy about a papal whacking really worth hiding for forty years?

  Very helpfully, the Vatican issued an image of the four pages of Lucia’s handwritten account of the Third Secret. This was petrol to the flames of controversy: Lucia herself, along with a bevy of Vatican prelates who had sighted the text, all commented that it was written down as a one-page letter. These witnesses included Father Joaquin Alonso, the official Fátima archivist for sixteen years.

  Many “Fátamists”, as those in the Catholic Church who are cynical of the Vatican’s line on the Third Secret are dubbed, believe that there are two Third Secret texts, with the first a single page containing the words of the Blessed Virgin and the other a description of the vision. All this, of course, begs the question – what is in the suppressed portion? According to arch-Fátamist Father Nicholas Gruener, the secret portion is a prophecy that the Vatican itself will be taken over by Satan and the Roman Catholic Church will suffer a crisis of faith.

  Little wonder, then, that the top men of the Vatican City have kept the important bit of the third prophecy locked tightly away in the archives.

  Further Reading

  Christopher Ferrara, The Secret Still Hidden, 2008

  Antonio Socci, Il Quatrro Segretto di Fátima, 2006

  DOCUMENT: SISTER LUCIA, THE THIRD PART OF THE SECRET REVEALED AT THE COVA DA IRIA-FÁTIMA ON 13 JULY 1917

  I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.

  After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: “Penance, Penance, Penance!” And we saw in an immense light that is God: “something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it” a Bishop dressed in White “we had the impression that it was the Holy Father”.

  Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.

  THE THULE SOCIETY

  Occult-loving Nazis piloting flying saucers? You couldn’t make it up.

  Could you?

  In 1912 veteran German occultist Rudolf von Sebottendorf set up the Thule Society, the name taken from the legendary continent in the Far North where, by repute, had lived the original Aryan civilization – who had divined the secrets of the Universe. By means of mystical rituals, Sebottendorf sought to imbibe said ancient wisdoms of Thule, which would accordingly endow Sebottendorf and his fellow initiates with superior powers.

  Sebottendorf was also a virulent anti-Semite, so rather more of the Thule Society’s energy went into denouncing Jews than communing with the spirits of the original master race. Despite damning Freemasonry as a Jewish plot, the Thule Society ironically modelled its structures and symbolisms on Freemasonry. It also adopted the swastika as its emblem.

  The connection between the Thule Society and the Nazi Party extended to rather more than a liking for the swastika. Two Thule Society members, Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer, set up the fledgling German Workers Party, soon to become the National Socialist German Workers Party – the Nazi Party. Ernst Rohm and Rudolf Hess, both key players in the early Nazi Party, were also Thule Society members.

  Under the tutelage of the Nazis, Germany made significant advances in military and aviation technology – far more so than the Allied powers who fought her between 1939 and 1945. By the end of the Second World War, the Germans had fielded the first jet fighter, the “cruise missile” V-1, the ballistic V-2, not to mention the Me163 rocket plane.

  Advancing into the ruins of Nazi Germany, the Americans were quick to notice the superiority of Nazi avionics, and promptly recruited hundreds of scientists and technicians in Project Paperclip.

  But was German military technology so far advanced because Nazi mystics were in contact with the inhabitants of the Isle of Thule? And did the Nazis even get as far as building flying saucers? Someone who believes all the above is UFO researcher Vladimir Terziski, President of the American Academy of Dissident Sciences. According to Terziski, the occult Thule Society (and the Vril Society, too) established clear lines of communication with the “Thulians” in the inter-war period, who then generously passed on their superior technical knowledge to SS Military Technical Branch E-IV. In turn SS Military Branch E-IV was not only able to build jets and rockets, but flying saucers which reached the Moon in 1942. And Mars a little later.

  A more mundane use for the saucers came in 1945, when they whisked Adolf Hitler from his Berlin bunker to a secret underground base in Antarctica. Terziski has the film footage of the base, known as “New Schwabia”.

  If all this was not extraordinary enough, it turns out that the beings from Thule were not actually humans – but aliens.

  What proto-Nazis like Rudolf von Sebottendorf would have made of the knowledge that they were descended from little green men and not white supermen can only be guessed at. What can be said with certainty is that the Luftwaffe did not need alien technology for its futuristic designs. The Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I forbade Germany to build military aircraft. So, frustrated aircraft designers turned their attention to designing extreme shapes for the new sport of gliding. The case in point were the Horten brothers, who were building delta-winged gliders in the 1930s. When Germany under Hitler re-armed, the Horton boys built “flying wing” jet planes for the Luftwaffe. Then there was Professor Heinrich Focke who patented a flying-disc design in 1939, Alexander Lippisch who helped build the delta-winged Me163 rocket plane, Arthur Sack who constructed an aircraft with a circular wing … The Germans did not need alien technology. They could do it all by themselves. Vorsprung durch Technik, as they say.

  THE TONKIN GULF INCIDENT

  By early 1964 South Vietnam seemed to be losing the war against its Communist insurgency, sponsored by Ho Chi Minh’s regime in North Vietnam. This was a major concern to the US, which feared a “domino effect” should the South fall, in which country after country in Asia would turn Red. To aid the South Vietnamese effort, President Lyndon B. Johnson provided a number of fast patrol boats; ostensibly these were for defensive purposes, but secret OPLAN-34A sanctioned them for covert attacks on North Vietnamese military targets. US warships, operating in international waters just off the North’s coast, were to direct the operations.

  On the night of 4 August, two US Navy destroyers, the C. Turner Joy and the Maddox, were patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast when they came under apparent torpedo-attack from North Vietnamese PT boats. President Johnson, after assessing North Vietnamese radio intercepts and on the advice of Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, went on national TV to denounce North Vietnam’s “open aggression on the open seas”. Within three days Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (there were just two dissensions in the Senate, see Document, p.550), which authorized the president “To take all necessary measures to repel any armed at
tack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression … [and] to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”

  Up to 7 August 1964, the US had only been “advising” in the Vietnam War. From that day forth, it was fighting it. A campaign of heavy bombing was ordered immediately, and by early 1965 thousands of US troops were arriving in theatre almost daily.

  According to the Los Angeles Times, “the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated hostilities”. The North Vietnamese started it!

  Or, perhaps, not. Even on 4 August there were doubts that the Maddox and C. Turner Joy had actually come under attack. The Maddox’s captain blamed “freak weather conditions” for affecting the radio, while Admiral Grant Sharp of the Pacific Fleet cited edgy personnel, adding in a communiqué to the White House, “A lot of these torpedo attacks were from the sonar operators!”

  The personnel on the US ships were definitely hyped up, because the Maddox had come under attack two days previously. Why did the US Government not denounce North Vietnamese aggression on that occasion? Because the Maddox had been operating illegally and provocatively inside North Vietnamese waters. The radio decrypts used to justify the official account of the Gulf of Tonkin almost definitely relate to 2 August, not 4 August.