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The Raymond Broshears Files Part 00001: Welcome to the Garrison Investigation Funhouse

'Reverend Raymond Broshears' folder from the Garrison investigation files. (National Archives)

For some time now I’d been planning a multi-part series on Reverend Raymond Broshears, one of more colorful characters (among a clown car of colorful characters) who careened headfirst into Kerry Thornley, and the Garrison investigation.

A deep dive into Rev. Broshears branches off in a number of directions, including the JFK assassination, UFOs, Discordianism, and “Wandering Bishops”—not to mention Rev. Broshears’ involvement as a gay rights activist in San Francisco in the late 1960s to the early-80s.

Reverend Ray Broshears, circa mid-1960s, lifted from Bernard Fensterwald's
Assassination of JFK by Coincidence or Conspiracy? (1977).
The reason I’d been holding off on this series was because I’d discovered, a while back, a Rev. Broshears archive located at the GLBT museum in San Francisco that would no doubt enhance this effort. Finally—in February of this year—I scheduled a visit to the Broshears’ archive, and just prior to my visit was alerted to the following Newsweek article titled “The Most Dangerous Gay Man in America Fought Violence With Violence” by Eric Markowitz, which—as synchronicity would have it—was all about Rev. Broshears! It should be noted that Broshears falls into the category of an “obscure character”—the type of subcultural figure your present author is fond of writing about, but who is so far out of the mainstream that his appearance in Newsweek was about as predictable as Donald Duck becoming President. Markowitz’s article even cites yours truly as a source, quoting Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Oswald and the Garrison Investigation. Pick up your copy today before supplies run out!

Anyway, that’s the way the stars sometimes align themselves in a weird and wonderful way when researching Discordianism, and related subcultural currents. Without further ado, let us proceed…

Born Earl Raymond Allen in Centreville Station, Illinois, in 1935, our hero later adopted the last name Broshears (taken from his stepfather)00001 and in time became known to the world as the Rev. Raymond Broshears, or in some circles simply as “Reverend Ray.”

In the mid 1950s, Broshears served as a Navy medical corpsman before being discharged for what he later described as “medical reasons” resulting from a “serious injury to the head causing what was then thought to be a minor brain dysfunction.”00002

In the late 1950s, Broshears graduated from Lee Bible College in Tennessee, and later studied under the fire and brimstone southern Baptist preacher, Billy James Hargis. George Mendenhall of the Bay Area Reporter later discovered that Hargis excommunicated Broshears when he discovered his sexual proclivities. According to Eric Markowitz:

In the early 1960s, Broshears continued traveling and preaching. At that time, in his late 20s, he got involved in the civil rights movement. He joined the Congress of Racial Equality, which fought for desegregation. That fight got him in trouble. In 1965, he participated in a sit-in in Belleville, Illinois, to protest the mistreatment of African-Americans. The details are murky—and the Belleville police department could not locate records related to the incident—but Broshears was arrested for groping a 17-year-old boy. “It wasn’t child molesting or anything like it,” Broshears told a reporter in 1972. “I was arrested for ‘groping a minor.’ He was fully dressed, there was no other physical contact involved.” That boy, however—who was not named in any reports, likely because of his age—was apparently the nephew of Belleville’s mayor…

The incident was a local scandal, and Broshears was sentenced to six months in county jail…When he was released, in December 1965, news had traveled that Broshears was a sex offender, so he bought a ticket, headed west and left everything behind. “I came to San Francisco, the gay mecca,” he would later say, “to become a faggot.”00003

Before planting permanent roots in San Francisco, Broshears spent a couple of years in Long Beach, California, operating a ministry called “The Church of God of Light” that was “involved in helping ‘skid row’ bums, improving conditions in the ghetto, and publishing an outspoken newspaper called The Light and Understanding.”00004

Reverend Ray Broshears (Berkeley Barb).

During his Long Beach sojourn, Broshears came up on the radar of JFK assassination sleuths after an appearance on an episode of Tempo, a Los Angeles TV program hosted by Stan Bohrman.

According to an October 16, 1968, internal CIA memo:

“[Broshears] appeared as a last-minute guest on the Stan BOHRMAN television show in Los Angeles in August 1968. The program is in the format of receiving questions from outside telephone callers… In answer to questions from callers, BROSHEARS admitted he was homosexual and that he was a roommate of David FERRIE for a short time in 1965. BROSHEARS stated that FERRIE admitted being involved with the assassins of President KENNEDY and to being in Houston at the time of the assassination with a plane waiting to fly the assassins on a getaway trip, first to South America, then to South Africa. According to Subject, while FERRIE was waiting in Houston, the assassins fled in a light aircraft from Dallas trying to make their escape all the way to Mexico without stopping. The assassins died in a plane crash that afternoon on the coast of Corpus Christi, Texas.

“After the program, BROSHEARS was visited by Mark LANE who urged him to visit GARRISON in New Orleans to make a deposition. Subject spent six days with GARRISON and when he returned to Los Angeles, was again on the Stan BOHRMAN TV show. On this program, Subject discussed his interview with GARRISON stating that he told GARRISON about FERRIE’s work with the CIA and Subject’s first meeting with Clay SHAW who had been identified to Subject as ‘Bert’. BROSHEARS admitted that this was the first time he had disclosed that he knew SHAW. He said he was at first reluctant to become involved in the investigation but after talking to GARRISON, he is convinced GARRISON is leading a fight for ‘JUSTICE’. He accused the CIA, FBI and Secret Service of impeding the progress of the case.

“BROSHEARS admitted to having been taken into custody by Secret Service agents two years ago for threatening the life of President JOHNSON.”

One of Garrison’s investigators, Steve Jaffe, wrote an article for the August 9, 1968, Los Angeles Free Press in which he noted that Broshears’ TV appearance represented “one of significant historical importance.” According to Jaffee:

“Broshears, who has tried to escape harassment by ‘individuals from mysterious sources’ ever since his short association with Ferrie in 1965, told of the role which Ferrie had played in the plot…Since the time of his arrest by incident of his alleged threat on President Johnson (after which he was questioned and released without conviction or sentence) he has had to be in constant touch with Federal offices of the Secret Service and F.B.I. by order of the Federal government. Agents from those organizations have warned him ‘to keep his mouth shut’ or risk being committed to a mental institution…”00005

The aforementioned CIA memo stated that Broshears had been visited by JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane, who urged him “to visit GARRISON in New Orleans to make a deposition.” Apparently Lane and Broshears had been in contact prior to the Tempo television appearance, as documented in this letter dated July 27, 1968:

Letter from Rev. Broshears to Mark Lane dated July 27, 1968.

Suspicious of Garrison’s motives, Broshears was initially reluctant to provide a deposition, but soon received incentive via subpoena that in short order turned around his way of thinking.

August 8, 1968 subpoena from the offices of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. (The Raymond Broshears Papers. Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society)

Broshears recounted his meeting with Garrison and crew in the August 1968 issue of his self-published newsletter Light and Understanding:

“…I did not wish to go, for the very word ‘Garrison’, left a bad taste in my mouth. He had (according to establishment press) persecuted many of my ‘fellow-beings’, with whom I have great empathy and ties. I feared for my life (which later proved true), for I didn’t trust Garrison or the U.S. government or Clay Shaw’s friends. [Steve] Jaffee arranged to make the trip as secret as possible, which it was. But, now, after having met Jim Garrison, I am convinced that this is one of America’s truly great and sincere people. I trust Jim Garrison with my life. I was overwhelmed at the honesty and the simplicity at the District Attorneys Office. Mr. James Alcock, the assistant D.A. is a real ‘BRAIN’, for after having spent a couple of hours with Alcock, I was convinced, in Light of what I had been told by David [Ferrie], that Garrison had the ‘goods’ on Shaw. Later I met ‘Moo’ Sciambra, a ‘French Quarter resident’ also working on the case. And I met the Chief Investigator, a good cop, Mr. Louis Ivon. Ivon and Alcock are both articulate men, as is Mr. Garrison, whom I later met at his home, he having just had an operation.

“Mr. Garrison was not the ‘bad boogy man’ he has been portrayed to be. And he does not mince words. He says what is to be said, and looks you straight in the eye while he is talking to you…

“While in New Orleans, I ran into old ‘cold flames’ who didn’t seem too pleased to see me. But the most shocking thing that I discovered while there, was the fact that the government had removed almost all trace of my ever having been in that city.  But they ‘slipped’ up, and a couple of cards were found in various agencies, and gave light to the fact I was indeed in Orleans and that I had indeed been involved in the ‘underground’ there.

“But things were different now. David had been murdered. Kerry was not in Orleans, but in Tampa, Kerry, you know, the one whos picture was on the cover of Life with Lee Oswalds head super-imposed upon it. Kerry had the little spider like hands and arms and narrow hips, not Oswald, just ask his wife…”

Page 1 of the August 1968 edition of Reverend Broshears' Light and Understanding newsletter.
Download PDF here.

In New Orleans, Garrison and his team took Broshears under their wings, and among those that helped foster the good reverend’s cooperation was none other than Barbara Reid, who was an early member of the Discordian Society, and key witness against Kerry Thornley in Garrison’s investigation. At one time, Reid even claimed she was the Goddess Eris herself! (You can’t make this shit up.)

Among other mind-gobbling allegations, Rev. Broshears informed Garrison’s investigators that David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Lee Oswald and Kerry Thornley (!) were members of a homicidal-homosexual cabal that conspired to kill Kennedy. According to Broshears, he was introduced to Thornley by Ferrie, and claimed he’d had sex with Kerry, and knew well “his slender hips.”

While it can’t be denied that Thornley indeed possessed slender hips, I’ve seen nothing to suggest he was gay or bisexual, although he was extremely open minded in regards to sexual experimentation.

Here is an excerpt from Broshears August 1968 deposition:

Q. Do you recognize this man in the picture here?

A. That is the man whom David Ferrie constantly referred to as Kerry Thornley.

Q. And this person here?

A. That is Kerry Thornley.

Q. Where did you meet him?

A. At Lafitte’s in Exile. And I don’t know what—he always maintained that he was not a homosexual… David [Ferrie] has told me numerous times that Kerry Thornley maintains he is not a homosexual. But I say he is and I say to the whole world if he is not a homosexual why was he in homosexual bars, why if he is not? And his resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald is rather frightening…

To suggest a resemblance between Oswald and Thornley as “frightening” is a stretch. Unless, of course, Broshears based his observations of this supposed Thornley/Oswald likeness on Harold Weisberg’s set of fabricated photos.

Cafe Lafitte in Exile, it so happens, was a landmark French Quarter bar owned by Tom Caplinger, the father of Grace and Lane Caplinger. Grace and Lane were friends with Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, and it was Lane—according to legend—who helped type the 1st edition of the Principia Discordia after hours at Garrison’s office when she worked there as a secretary in 1965. Her sister Grace later changed her name to Grace Zabriskie after launching an acting career in the late 1970s, and is most famously known for her wonderfully weird role of Sarah Palmer in Twin Peaks.

Grace Zabriskie with David Lynch's bullhorn in her ear.

Although Broshears claimed he encountered Thornley in New Orleans in 1965, this timeline didn’t jibe with the period Thornley actually lived there—from March 1961 until early December 1963. Newsweek reporter Eric Markowitz placed Broshears in lockup at the Belleville County Jail from July through December ‘65 which was the same time Broshears was supposedly in New Orleans hanging out with Ferrie and having sex with Thornley’s “slender hips.”

Researcher David Blackburst interviewed Broshears in the 1970s and discovered further inconsistencies in his story. Although Broshears claimed to have been Ferrie’s roommate, another Ferrie roommate stated that he’d never heard of Broshears. When Blackburst questioned Broshears about the layout of Ferrie’s apartment, he was unable to describe it accurately, and was just as confused about the layout of the streets in the French Quarter. This suggested to Blackburst that Broshears never actually lived there.00006

David Ferrie.

Broshears claimed that on the night he first met Ferrie, the two men patronized a bar catering to the homosexual community, and it was there that Ferrie introduced Broshears to “one of the wealthiest men in New Orleans” who went by the name of Bert and/or Clara. According to Broshears, Bert/Clara was actually Clay Shaw, Garrison’s chief suspect.

Ferrie allegedly informed Broshears that he had worked as a CIA contract pilot, and that they (the CIA) had blackmailed him with films of “a sixteen year old boy engaged [with Ferrie] in a homosexual act.” This was presumably among the revelations of sexual impropriety that got Ferrie fired from his pilot gig at American Airlines.

Whatever the case, I’ve seen no documentation confirming Ferrie actually worked for the CIA. The initial source for this revelation was Victor Marchetti, a special assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms. Marchetti claimed that a colleague informed him that “Ferrie had been a contract agent… in the early sixties and had been involved in some of the Cuban activities.” Marchetti told author Anthony Summers that “…he observed consternation on the part of then CIA Director Richard Helms and other senior officials when Ferrie’s name was first publicly linked with the assassination in 1967.” Marchetti’s allegations were later contradicted by internal CIA memos, so I guess it’s a case of whom you choose to believe. Trust No One.

At the very least, Ferrie was involved in paramilitary training with anti-Castro Cubans in 1961, an operation either directly or indirectly funded by the CIA and funneled through Guy Banister’s detective agency. (Banister was another supposed plotter in the JFK dust-up.) This hornet’s nest of intelligence agents or assets based in New Orleans (such as Banister) speaks to a nebulous gray area surrounding the Garrison investigation. Garrison and his investigators did indeed stumble upon information pertaining to intelligence agency capers in New Orleans, some of which apparently overlapped with Banister’s op, but to make the leap that these activities were directly related to JFK’s assassination… is indeed a leap, although certainly not out of the realm of possibility.

Jack Martin

In the same manner that Barbara Reid was the person most responsible for dragging Kerry Thornley screaming and kicking into the Garrison investigation funhouse, the same can be said of a fellow named Jack Martin (aka Edward Stewart Suggs) in his role of foisting David Ferrie into that very same fray.

Barbara Reid
Martin, like Reid, had a unique role in Garrison’s mad world; both were “witnesses” and at the same time both worked closely with Garrison’s investigators. Although Reid’s role was absent from Oliver Stone’s JFK, Martin was accorded lofty status, portrayed by Jack Lemmon as a sad sack two-bit private dick who inadvertently stirred up this aforementioned hornet’s nest inhabited by the likes of Ferrie, Banister, Shaw and other sinister and supposed spooks. Or at least that’s how it was romanticized in the film.

Martin first came to the attention of federal authorities just three days after the assassination, on November 25, 1965, when he was interviewed by the New Orleans FBI field office. At this time, Martin informed the feds that he was a private investigator, and had “…developed considerable information about FERRIE… particularly his homosexual tendencies and the fact that he formerly operated the Civil Air Patrol [squadron].”

Martin stated that Ferrie was an amateur hypnotist, and may have and “planted a post-hypnotic suggestion that [Oswald] kill the President.” Martin further alleged that he had visited Ferrie’s apartment and “saw a group of photographs of various Civil Air Patrol cadet groups and in this group he is sure he saw several years ago a photograph of LEE OSWALD as a member of one of the classes… he stated that FERRIE conducted military type drills with rifles… and he recalled that FERRIE claimed to have taught these cadets how to shoot. MARTIN stated that he observed in FERRIE’s home a number of foreign made firearms and it is his opinion that FERRIE could have taught OSWALD how to purchase a foreign made firearm or possibly have purchased the gun that was shown on television…”

In a follow-up FBI interview on 11/27/1963:

“…MARTIN further stated he considered FERRIE to be a completely degenerate person and it was his opinion that FERRIE is capable of any crime. If was for this reason that MARTIN suspected FERRIE of being involved in the killing of President KENNEDY… MARTIN advised that he considered the possibility that FERRIE had taught OSWALD to shoot a rifle and use a telescopic sight, in that he knew FERRIE taught military training to Civil Air Patrol Cadets and OSWALD was a Civil Air Patrol member…”

On November 28, 1963—the day after Martin’s FBI interview—the New Orleans field office reported that their investigation of “allegations against Ferrie stem from Jack S. Martin who was previously confined to the psychiatric ward of Charity Hospital, New Orleans, for a character disorder. Martin is well known to New Orleans office and is considered thoroughly unreliable.”00007

Martin later admitted that his allegations against Ferrie were “a figment of his imagination and that he made up the story after reading the newspapers and watching television.”00008 Martin blamed his false account on what he called “telephonitis” resulting from excessive alcohol intake followed by blabbing on the telephone.

At one time or another, Ferrie and Martin worked as private detectives for attorney G. Wray Gill, most well known for representing mob boss Carlos Marcello, who many have connected to the JFK assassination. Martin from all accounts was a hanger-on, who apparently both Gill and Ferrie considered a pest. In June 1963, at Gill’s direction, Ferrie bounced Martin out of Gill’s office in what was termed an “undiplomatic manner.” This altercation presumably started a beef between the two men which later resulted in Martin’s bout of “telephonitis.”00009

When Garrison launched his investigation in late 1966, Martin once again jumped the David Ferrie shark by trotting out his past claims including the allegation that he saw Oswald in Banister’s office “two or three times” in the company of Ferrie.

During the early stages of Garrison’s probe, Martin was a member of Big Jim’s investigative team, although Garrison and Martin later had a rift over paperwork Martin filed with the Louisiana Secretary of State entitled, “Articles of Incorporation of ‘Garrison-Intelligence-Agency.’” The intent behind these filings (according to a letter Martin sent to Garrison) was to establish an “independent intelligence force… to render and give aid to Jim Garrison, and to otherwise support him in his efforts…otherwise known as ‘Garrison’s Guerrillas’… just as we’ve talked about.”

Martin admitted in his letter that he “kited a couple of checks (cause we were broke) to get these papers filed.” In the upper right hand corner of Martin’s letter, Garrison wrote: “Spoke to J.M. [Jack Martin] 12/3/67. Must be abolished.” Reading between the lines, it can be assumed that Garrison instructed Martin to cease and desist with this Garrison’s Guerillas caper, then further distanced himself from Martin by kicking him off the JFK investigation team.00010

In On The Trail of the Assassins, Garrison described Martin “as a quick-witted and highly observant, if slightly disorganized, private detective.” However, Garrison confided to LIFE Magazine’s Richard Billings that Martin was “an undependable drunk and a totally unreliable witness.”00011

Martin’s view of himself was in a more heroic vein. He once described himself as an “Author, former newspaperman, professional soldier, adventurer, and philosopher.”

Martin, it turns out, had a long and checkered rap sheet that included the charge he was a back-alley abortionist in the early 1950s going by the name of Dr. Suggs. Martin’s criminal history is documented here by Dave Reitzes.

While the preponderance of Martin’s claims were sketchy as all get-out, his allegation that Ferrie and Oswald had been associated in 1955—to one degree or another—is one that stuck. In this regard, Ferrie and Oswald had been in contact on no less than four occasions during the period Ferrie served as Commander of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) squadron in New Orleans. How significant these meetings were, and how well the two men actually knew one another, is a matter of conjecture. A lot of assassination buffs got their panties in a perpetual twist when the photo below surfaced of Ferrie with Oswald and some other CAP cadets during training exercises in 1955.

Ferrie and Oswald at CAP training exercises in 1955.

Whether or not Ferrie was grooming Oswald to become a future assassin, he was indeed one sketchy dude involved in a number of hinky activities. One of these endeavors concerned a group of young men Ferrie organized called—of all crazy things—“Omnipotent.”

The existence of Omnipotent was revealed in a October 30, 1961, FBI memo forwarded to the U.S. Customs Service, and the U. S. Bureau of Narcotics, concerning an informant’s tip that Ferrie had organized a group of young men and had “been holding something over the heads of the boys in this group and…is keeping them doped up with narcotics, liquor and with hypnotism…”

The FBI memo went on to state that “the members of that organization [Omnipotent] had to swear allegiance and obedience to a 19-year-old or 20-year-old boy, and that the purpose of this organization was to train people concerning what they could do in the event of an all out attack against the United States…” Read the Omnipotent memo here!

It may appear I’ve gone a bit far afield with this Martin-Ferrie-Omnipotent rabbit hole, but I felt some background was necessary before launching off into our next Rev. Broshears installment that will feature, once again, Messrs Martin and Ferrie, along with a whole host of other curious characters that have been identified by author Peter Levenda as the “Wandering Bishops.”

Thanks to Carmine Savastano of the Neapolis Media Group for giving me a heads-up about David Ferrie’s Doomsday Cult!

 
Notes

00001 http://www.glbthistory.org/

00002 Eric Markowitz, “The Most Dangerous Gay Man in America”, Newsweek, February 2, 2018.

00003 Ibid.

00004 October 16, 1968 CIA memo. FOIA document 1361-500)

00005 Jaffee, Steve. “Ferrie Confessed His Involvement In John Kennedy Assassination Plot. Los Angeles Free Press. August 5, 1968.

00006 http://www.jfk-online.com/dbraybropost.html

00007 Warren Commission Report page 208.

00008 Warren Report Page 202.

00009 Lambert, Patricia; Lambert, Patricia (2000-09-26). False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (Kindle Locations 5732-5736). M. Evans & Company.

00010 Ibid (Kindle Locations 6768-6776).

00011 http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ripples.htm

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Reprogram Yourself For Freer Swinging

Michael Marinacci, author of Weird California and California Jesus sent me this short Kerry Thornley article he came across entitled “Reprogram Yourself For Freer Swinging” that appeared in EROS LIB Issue #2, a newsletter published by the San Diego Sexual Freedom League, circa 1975.

On the same page is what appears to be a short-short by Ray Faraday Nelson who is the author of “8 O’clock in the Morning” a short story later adapted into the paranoid cult classic They Live.

1975 newsletter EROS LIB Issue #2, article by Kerry Thornley.
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Erisian Herstory: The Discordian Archives Timeline

The front piece to the Paste-Up Discordia (The Sacred PUD).
Courtesy the Discordian Archives.
Here at Historia Discordia, we’ve be on a mission from Goddess to document the Origins, History & Chaos of the Discordian Society.

Hey, we even put this calling into the site’s masthead, so, you know, we’re like srsly Discordian zealots.

(DEATH TO ALL FANATICS!)

We enjoy this unique opportunity to have access to both Discordian Founders’ archives as well as other original materials. While Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley kept their stash of documents by very different methods, one Hodge and the other Podge, some clarity has been achieved regarding Discordian history.

Many New Old Truths have been discovered about the origination, growth, hilarity, and impact of Discordianism from this cache of source documents.

As such, we’ve tried to put a little sanity, Goddess forgive us!, on this library of madness:

As we glean new information and post articles about and from the Archives here, we include them into the Discordian Timeline, a linear year-by-year accounting of what was going on and when with the Early Discordians thru to current Modern Discordians.

The Discordian history is a murky maze and fraught with many Erisian contradictions, so we hope offering an understanding of its conception, history, and weirdness on a timeline will help every past, present, and future Discordian Pope better grasp these wonderful absurdities.

And yet more to come!

Check it out and come back for updates:

The Discordian Timeline

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May Eris of the Month 2018: Chasing Eris by Groucho Gandhi

May Eris of the Month 2018: Chasing Eris by Groucho Gandhi.

Got my super-duper THICK copy of the Chasing Eris book by Historia Discordia’s very own Brenton Clutterbuck!

Get yer copy of this wonderful book documenting one man’s world-wide travels to discover what’s up and what’s not with the Modern Discordian scene!

All Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!


Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.

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March Eris of the Month 2018: Dwarf Planet Eris with Moon Dysnomia

March Eris of the of the Month 2018: Dwarf Planet Eris and her moon Dysnomia.

This month’s entry for Eris of the Month is the solar system’s largest Dwarf Planet, Eris, “holding” its moon Dysnomia (daughter of Eris) as the Apple of Discord.

This amazing composite photo courtesy of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii taken during August 2006.

In space, no one can see the fnords.

Also, check out this previous post about Dwarf Planet Eris wherein Early Discordian Louise Lacy writes a letter to Eris’ discoverer, astronomer Michael E. Brown, in an attempt to lure him into Discordianism and most likely the Region of Thud.


Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.

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Emails from the Acidman

Cover of
The Adventures of Acidman
by Ian S. Garlington.
I recently received an email from a fellow named Ian Garlington, who goes by the handle of the Acidman. Ian wrote:

…I did my doctoral research at Osaka University’s American Literature department on the influence of psychedelics on American sf and comics and started reading a lot about Bob Wilson and then Thornley and then you. I write about Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Thomas Disch as well and I was strongly influenced by the temperament of all of this.

I like your version of Kerry Thornley much more than his own version. You got him from all the best angles. I keep a picture of him next to my desk and used to tell my students that I was his reincarnation.

Thank you very much for the Historia Discordia… I read every page in extreme detail and took notes. I explained about it in my American history class at Kansai Gaidai University…

I found a copy Prankster and Conspiracy on a book shelf in a witch store in Osaka but when I asked they told me that none of the books were for sale. I found a note inside that said in English “Never show or tell anyone about this book.” I don’t know why anyone would say that.

Your message in that book about how greyface got Thornley in the end, may be the warning that may save my life not too far off.

No way, fate is like iron rails, right? We can only affirm that we don’t have any clue what is about to happen next but it will happen in spite of and maybe as a result of our best efforts to escape it.

And then I had a mystical vision in which Robert Williams (comix artist) appeared to me at the same time that I felt experiential knowledge of the fourth dimension. There was a lot downloaded and I tried to record what was happening with a camera and a mic but the main message of it was, “your mission is to study Spinoza. I lost interest in all else and eventually quit lecturing and moved back to devote myself to founding Portland Weed Church, Portland Association of Deleuze Studies, Oxford Cognitives, and the Adventures of Acidman (as a household brand).

I published my dissertation as a book while in Japan but have not distributed it until now. I would like to send a copy to you if you are interested in seeing any of it…

Ian did indeed send me his book, the cover of which includes his psychedelic acrylic art. The full title is The Adventures of Acidman: Psychedelics and the Evolution of Consciousness in Science Fiction and Superhero Comics from the 1960s Onward (Amazon), including chapters like “An Anatomy of Cosmic Conspiracy: The Function of Fragmentation in the Illuminatus! Trilogy” and “Comics’ Cosmic Poetry: Pyshcedelics, Chaos and the Poetics of Comics in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles.”

When I emailed Ian back asking if I could share his emails, he replied:

Yes, of course you can share that story. I was trying to find the VICE TV documentary about erotic witches in Tokyo where there are some interviews with the guy who is most likely the owner of the books on that shelf.

I met this man in person only once in a shower room in a psychiatric clinic where both patients and the doctor’s club friends were partying all night, mingling in an uninhibited environment (I believe I was invited as a “club friend” because the patients all said that they were visiting the clinic on a weekly basis, but you never know).

The warlock was completely naked.  He asked me a few questions and then told me he thought it was my mission to balance the cosmic scales by forming a new branch of Discordianism capable of defeating the newest incarnations of Greyface (in Japanese). That is what I am doing now. I paraphrase this sometimes these days as “getting the heroic dose of psychedelics to the center of the singularity before Google Flesh Cyborg self lobotomizes.” Kind of a John Lilly level of cosmic dualistic struggle.

Sincerely,

Ian

Here’s a YouTube of the Acidman creating some of his acrylic psychedelic art:

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Ave Eris, Gratia Plena: The Pasts of Discordian Christmas

Have a Kerry Christmas!
Discordianism is well-known to tolerate the traditional holidays and holydays of other delusional systems of belief and Christmas is no exception.

To demonstrate, here are some festive reason-for-the-season articles from the Discordian Archives about the pasts of Discordian Christmas.

Bless us, Eris!

Fa La La La La, La La La fnord La!


RAW 1975 Xmas Card

1975 Christmas Card from Robert Anton Wilson, front. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.



Cinema Rio Christmas Card

Cinema Rio Christmas Card, Front.



A Christmas Story: Excerpt from Kerry Thornley’s THE IDLE WARRIORS

Marine Oswald Xmas



A Very Merry Manson Christmas To All

A Kerry Thornley Flyer: A Letter From Charles Manson. Courtesy the Discordian Archives.



Merry Xmas All!

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Love is Alive and Well: The Stan Jamison Files

Among the more prodigious correspondents of the 1970s Discordian letter writing circle was a fellow named Stan Jamison (aka Coman Ra – Lt. Colonel, Commanding 1st Intergalactic Confederacy Advance Detail—Planet Shan) who was a rather enigmatic sort in that he didn’t fit the typical mold of what some might consider a Discordian. Of course, using the term “typical” to describe a Discordian is oxymoronic, as there was nothing close to typical about any of the Early Discordians.

The Stan Jamison files. All three and a half inches.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

Many have associated the early Discordians with the hippie movement (whatever that actually was) and it can’t be denied that Greg Hill and his fellow travelers were heavily immersed in and influenced by the 1960s counterculture, and were students and practitioners of its myriad forms of expression, including alternative religions, non violent political protest, Anarcho-Libertarianism, and an irreverent sense humor that permeated their colorful network of guerilla ontologists.

Even though he was described, at times, as a semi-fascist right wing kind of guy, Jamison was into what some might consider some pretty hippy dippy type shit himself, and to some degree his interactions with Discordian Society members certainly rubbed off on him in terms of being able to see different sides of an issue and immerse himself in different reality tunnels he might not have normally ventured into or engaged in.

Jamison was a self described “naturopath,” a practitioner of natural healing and out of the box therapies who ran a mailing list dedicated to a wide range of topics such as growing organic sprouts, how to cure cancer via oxidation, and other alternative healing cures.

The Stan Jamison Files: 'Doc Jamison Speaks'

In this circa 1970 memo to Louise Lacey, Greg Hill shared his thoughts about the semi-enigmatic Doc Jamison.

Page 00001 of memo on Doc Jamison from Greg Hill to Louise Lacey, circa 1970.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Page 00002 of memo on Doc Jamison from Greg Hill to Louise Lacey, circa 1970.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

At the time, Louise was the secretary of the Earth People’s Park (EPP).

To this end, Greg Hill’s comment (re Jamison supporting EPP) was emblematic of the sort of out of the box strategic thinking he often showcased in his writings. In this case the notion that Jamison could help promote a left leaning concept like EPP to a right wing audience who under normal circumstances might view EPP as a manifestation of Socialism. In reality, EPP slid more toward the anarchic side of the political scale, i.e. less government, which was the sweet spot where mutual interests between the left and the right sides of the political spectrum could find common ground.

Like his fellow Discordian conspirators, Jamison took part in many of the prank letter writing campaigns referred to as “jakes.” Once such jake was initiated by Discordian Thomas Patrick McNamara (aka Thomas the Gnostic) to The Rag, a counterculture mag out of Austin, Texas.

April 9, 1970: Thomas the Gnostic’s Illuminati letter to The Rag.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

Others, of course, soon joined in on the fun, including Jamison with his own Illuminati letter to The Rag that included an honest to goddess pope card for The Rag’s “Illuminati Editor.”

June 10, 1970: Doc Jamison's Illuminati letter to The Rag, page 00001.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
June 10, 1970: Doc Jamison's Illuminati letter to The Rag, page 00002.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

During the late 1960s, Jamison resided in Irwin, California, or—as he called it—“The Free City of Irwin” where I guess he had his own branch of The Universal Life Church (ULC), a non-profit ministry whose headquarters were located in the nearby town of Modesto.

ULC became famous (or infamous, as the case may be) for ordaining ministers for a “free will love offering” and was a huge influence on The Discordian Society. Greg Hill, in fact, became an ordained ULC minister, and in the decades to follow thousands in the U.S. and abroad would receive their minister’s credentials through the organization.

Greg Hill's ULC Minister's card.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

One aspect of ULC that resonated with Greg Hill—and that became part of the Discordian ethos—was the idea that anyone anywhere at any given time could become a holy man or holy woman (a pope or mome.) ULC became popular during the Vietnam War era when many potential draftees from across this great land of ours obtained their very own ministerial credentials in the hopes it would help them steer clear of the war (on religious grounds), a notion that resonated deeply within the Discordian ranks and led to other like-minded correspondences/interactions, one of which was with Archbishop Gordon L. Cruikshank, an anti-gov/anti-tax advocate/militant of a certain stripe who had created his own religious organization called The Life Science Church in Rolling Meadows, Illinois.

Page 00001 of Archbishop Gordon L. Cruikshank's March 29, 1970 letter to Stan Jamison.
Page 00002 of Archbishop Gordon L. Cruikshank's March 29, 1970 letter to Stan Jamison.

Greg Hill was also a card carrying member of this outfit. (Of course there was never an alternative religion that Greg Hill met that he didn’t like.)

Greg Hill's Certificate of Ordination from Gordon L. Cruikshank's Life Science Church, Inc.

Another colorful character who came into the orbit of Hill and Jamison was W. John Weilgart, an Austrian philologist/psychoanalyst and the mastermind/madman behind “aUI,” a so-called constructed language or what Weilgart referred to as “the language of space.”

According to Brad Steiger, as a child Weilgart learned about aUI from a literal “little green spaceman” who informed him that this “space language” was used by all sentient beings throughout the cosmos, and that if adopted by humankind it could cure every one of irrational thinking patterns.

This aUI Wikipedia entry describes aUI as:

Weilgart’s motivation for inventing the language was to create a form of communication based on what he proposed to be universal, basic elements of human thought and expression, and incorporated it into his psychotherapy work.

A good summary of aUI can be found at The Anomalist.

Jamison forwarded three items to Louise Lacey that included a one page explainer on aUI; a letter about aUI and how it could be used as the official language of Earth People’s Park; and a letter from Weilgart to Jamison and Doc Iggy (aka Greg Hill) that apparently was in response to material The Discordians were circulating about nudes in San Francisco that “were soldiers in the Om United New World Nude Brigade.”

One page explainer on aUI.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Stan Jamison's July 5, 1970 letter to Louise Lacey on aUI.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
July 14, 1970 letter from John Weilgart to Stan Jamison.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

Jamison received a couple more letters from Weilgart detailing plans for a summer of 1970 West Coast visit that would be coordinated by Jamison and Hill to include speaking gigs and media appearances not to mention Weilgart trying to wrangle some nudie models for a body painting exhibit dedicated to his space language.

John Weilgart's letter to Stan Jamison. Date unknown.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
July 17, 1970 letter from John Weilgart to Stan Jamison.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

There was more back and forth correspondence, but suffice it to say I could no evidence that this Discordian-Weilgart hook-up ever actually took place, though the vision of voluptuous nudes with aUI body paint shines bright in my mind’s eye.

Doc Jamison's official Declaration of War.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

In his 1986 broadsheet Kultcha Issue #28 entitled “Coman-Ra,” Jamison’s Discordian name, Kerry Thornley wrote:

Since 1970, though, Greg Hill and I both had been receiving from him everything from advice about how to grow organic sprouts to racist newspapers published by White Christians who were armed and quite dangerous. In reply to one of my memos about Kirstein [aka Brother-in-Law] that had fallen into his hands indirectly, he wrote me to say that the tragedy in Dallas [Kennedy’s assassination] was plotted by the Secret Order of Thule in such a way as to assure that no cover-up could remain convincing forever. Motive: to make the American public paranoid about their government and mass media. For paranoia, he told me, is a big step in the direction of mental health.

People who become paranoid, Coman-Ra [Stan Jamison] wrote, will not rest until they discover every last shred of truth. Among the devices used to encourage awareness of conspiracy were the many crude Oswald impersonations that occurred just previous to the assassination. Puzzled for more than a decade about exactly that mystery, I had to admit this was the first credible hypothesis to explain it without making the assassins look like idiots. And had they been less than geniuses, there’d have been no cover-up at all.

Coman-Ra further informed me that the conspiracy was constructed in concentric circles, like Chinese boxes, with descending levels, so that only the “man at the center” understood afterwards exactly what had happened. Of course, I could not ignore the possibility that man might have been the person I call Brother-in-law.

What brought the many loose ends in the John Kennedy murder mystery together for me was this realization that it was a maximum complicity crime. Various factions must have been deliberately implicated on a blind-alliance basis, so that once the event occurred, every group of conspirators was startled at evidence of participation by someone besides themselves.

What brought the many loose ends in the John Kennedy murder mystery together for me was this realization that it was a maximum complicity crime. Various factions must have been deliberately implicated on a blind-alliance basis, so that once the event occurred, every group of conspirators was startled at evidence of participation by someone besides themselves.

Like Brother-in-law, Jamison seemed morbidly fascinated with Hitler and Nazi Germany. Both men mentioned in particular little-known aspects of the Third Reich — such as the secret pagan rituals of the SS and the occult beliefs of Hitler’s cohorts. Both repeated a rumor that Nazi rocket scientists discovered energy secrets the oil companies were repressing to this day. And whether either or both were living some kind of macabre hoax or were absolutely fanatical was impossible to decide, since neither man was without humor. For instance, [Jamison] always signed off with: “Love is Alive and Well.”

As might be anticipated, it struck me that perhaps Jamison and Gary Kirstein were the same person, so in 1977 I dropped in on Jamison unexpectedly at his address in Turlock, California. Not only was he not the same man I had conversed with in New Orleans, but it was plain that the spine-chilling ranting in his letters was just a big put-on. That isn’t to say his information about the assassination could not have been valid. A warm, intelligent human being obviously unsympathetic to Fascism, he nevertheless seemed quite versed in secret society politics.

“I come on all hairy like that in my letters,” he told me, “to scare off government agents.”

Stanton Jamison: United States Social Security Death Index
Even though he put out a lot of articles about how to cure cancer with oxidation and live forever by eating wheat germ, it appears (according to the U.S. Social Security Index) that Jamison lived only to the age of 75, dying in California on April 29, 1996, around that same time period (give or take a year or two) that so many of his Discordian brethren likewise cashed in their chips: Thornley in 1998, Camden Benares in 1999, and Greg Hill in 2000.

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Adam Gorightly Gets Letters – From Kerry Thornley: Manson and RAW and the Process Church, oh my!

Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Lee Oswald and the Garrison Investigation by Adam Gorightly
In the early 1990s, I corresponded on a couple of occasions with Kerry Thornley (long before penning The Prankster and the Conspiracy).

These letters aren’t dated—nor have I retained carbons of the originals from my end, so I don’t remember specific dates—but as I recall along with my letters I included an article I’d written for Paranoia Magazine that theorized that the Beat Movement and their subsequent Hippie/Yippie offspring—including the Manson Family—may have been part of a grand conspiracy that employed psychedelics as mind control agents (ala MK-ULTRA), all part of a plan designed to influence and undermine the 60s counterculture.

In response, Kerry shot back:

I harbor no conspiracy theories about The Beats, but did hear the rumor, several times, that Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller were behind them. Why, I don’t know. Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) was a lot like Nelson, evidently—an energetic psychopath.

I’m sorry to say I wasn’t impressed with your articles. You seem to have no conception of the effects of LSD, and your picture of Manson is fucked.

Why the CIA introduced acid, I have no idea. But I suspect they hadn’t the faintest notion of what to expect. I knew many people, including my ex-wife and one nuclear physicist, who gave up good defense industry jobs because acid turned them against war. And it certainly doesn’t turn the brain to mush, etc., etc.—quite the opposite!

Manson never held any mysterious power over anyone. That was a myth created by the girl’s attorneys to get them off with a lighter sentence. Read Manson In His Own Words by Eddowes [sic]…One of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read—a very no-bullshit account of what happened.

I suspect there may be some truth to the Oswald/FBI informant theory. I went to the FBI (five or six) times myself in the years after the assassination—exactly why, I don’t know (but suspect mind control may have been involved.) Right after Hoover’s death… I wrote some letters to Clarence Kelley, upon becoming convinced a bunch of local radicals were actually Nazis in drag. It is, however, incomprehensible to me that I would do anything so stupid, except once when I thought FBI agents were setting me up and wanted to cover my ass.

Robert Anton Wilson—whom you mention in connection with Leary (whom I hear was a munitions corporate espionage agent) was my mentor from 1967 until about 1971. I hear he was connected with a Nazi secret society known as MAAGI6 , because it infiltrated MAG-11 (Marine Air Group Eleven) to which both Oswald and I belonged at different times. But the same sources of information held him in great respect as someone who in spite of his affiliation was very independent and a sincere anarchist, etc. Wilson introduced me to the individual anarchists–Proudhon, Warren, Tucker, Spooner, Bersodi, Labadie, etc.

Later,
Kerry

1990s letter from Kerry Thornley to Adam Gorightly, Page 00001.
1990s letter from Kerry Thornley to Adam Gorightly, Page 00002.
1990s letter from Kerry Thornley to Adam Gorightly, Page 00003.

In the above letter, Kerry mentioned sending a letter to FBI director Clarence Kelley about his belief that he was being monitored by some secret society of sorts with connections to US intelligence which indeed was a sort of wild thing to do—sending a rambling letter like that to the Director of the FBI—but hey, we’re talking about Kerry here.

This missive to Kelley is in a batch of Thornley-FOIA documents I’ve collected over the years that I’ll post here at HD sometime in the near future. Kerry also states his belief (or suspicion) that Robert Anton Wilson was an intelligence agency spook or asset, aligned to some Nazi secret society. Make of that what you will!

In response to Kerry’s letter, I evidently brought up the Process Church of the Final Judgment, which—in turn—launched Kerry off on one of his classic conspiratorial screeds in this follow-up letter:

1990s letter from Kerry Thornley to Adam Gorightly on the Process Church, Page 00001.

Page 1 of Kerry’s reply letter recounts a brush he had with the Process Church in New Orleans in 1967 when he’d returned there to appear before Jim Garrison’s Grand Jury looking into the JFK assassination. Weirdly enough, the person who took Kerry by the Process Church headquarters was none other than Slim Brooks, the same shadowy character who he suspected had lured him unwittingly into a JFK assassination conspiracy.

On Page 2, Kerry connects Robert Anton Wilson with The Process, referring to an incident that occurred in 1975 at a place called the Celestial Mansion where Kerry believed that Wilson and a group of clandestine intelligence agents/secret society adepts met with him as part of some sort of debriefing regarding the JFK assassination.

1990s letter from Kerry Thornley to Adam Gorightly on the Process Church, Page 00002.

I know. It gets deep.

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Mary, Ferrie, and the Monkey Shine

One of the more controversial conspiracy yarns to spin off of Jim Garrison’s JFK assassination loom provided fodder for Edward Haslam’s 1995 Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus: The Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory (1995 First Edition, 2015 Updated Edition).

The first edition of Ed Haslam's mighty tome.

This party got started in the October 1967 Playboy featuring an interview with Jim Garrison:

GARRISON: …and he [Ruby] became the prisoner of the Dallas Police, forced over a year later to beg Earl Warren to take him back to Washington, because he wanted to tell the truth about “Why my act was committed, but it can’t be said here… my life is in danger here.” But Ruby never got to Washington, and he’s joined the long list of witnesses with vital information who have shuffled off this mortal coil.

PLAYBOY: Penn Jones, Norman Mailer and others have charged that Ruby was injected with live cancer cells in order to silence him. Do you agree?

GARRISON: I can’t agree or disagree, since I have no evidence one way or the other. But we have discovered that David Ferrie had a rather curious hobby in addition to his study of cartridge trajectories: cancer research. He filled his apartment with white mice—at one point he had almost 2000, and neighbors complained—wrote a medical treatise on the subject and worked with a number of New Orleans doctors on means of inducing cancer in mice. After the assassination, one of these physicians, Dr. Mary Sherman [an orthopedic surgeon on the staff of Ochsner Clinic at Tulane], was found hacked to death with a kitchen knife in her New Orleans apartment. Her murder is listed as unsolved. Ferrie’s experiments may have been purely theoretical and Dr. Sherman’s death completely unrelated to her association with Ferrie; but I do find it interesting that Jack Ruby died of cancer a few weeks after his conviction for murder had been overruled in appeals court and he was ordered to stand trial outside of Dallas—thus allowing him to speak freely if he so desired. I would also note that there was little hesitancy in killing Lee Harvey Oswald in order to prevent him from talking, so there is no reason to suspect that any more consideration would have been shown Jack Ruby if he had posed a threat to the architects of the conspiracy.

Garrison—as we see—was connecting heavy duty dots, intimating that David Ferrie (one of Big Jim’s key suspects) operated a Super Secret Cancer Research Lab (SSCRL) from his weirdo French Quarter compound (filled from floor to ceiling with hundreds of caged white mice) that somehow was connected to the mysterious death (in July 1964) of Dr. Mary Sherman and also connected to Jack Ruby’s death, well, because Ruby died of cancer. Elementary, dear Watson!

Dr. Mary Sherman

Mary Sherman’s murder was like a scene straight out of one of the weirder episodes of Twin Peaks. Her body (or what was left of it) was stabbed multiple times and then set on fire at her apartment in New Orleans. Sherman’s right arm was damn near completely consumed, including “a portion of the right side of her body extending to the hip,” according to the coroner’s report.

Oddly enough, Sherman’s apartment suffered minimal damage; her bed mattress had been partially destroyed and was smoldering upon discovery. While there was smoke damage to the room, all of the curtains were intact, which was another oddity given the fact that the fire was intense enough to do the number it did on her body.

Photo from the Mary Sherman crime scene.

Haslam’s father, it so happens, was an orthopedic surgeon at Tulane U. and colleague of Dr. Sherman’s. During a sort of deathbed confession, the elder Haslam hinted to his son Ed that there was some kind of nefarious monkey business behind Sherman’s death although Doc Haslam never specifically spilled the exact nature of these beans to his son. These bizarre breadcrumbs—in addition to experiences from Haslam’s youth—propelled him on his literary odyssey.

From this rich tapestry of weirdness, Haslam cobbled together a sort of conspiratorial science fiction detective novel, the components of which coalesced into something that sounds, well, possible—maybe kinda sorta—because it tied together a bunch of disparate threads that had been dangling around in the conspiracy research community over the last several decades and contained enough semi factual elements to lend the story some semblance of truthiness.

Haslam’s theory goes something like this: dastardly David Ferrie had been involved in a clandestine CIA ‘underground laboratory’ (in cahoots with Dr. Sherman), part of a caper to concoct a “cancerous cocktail” (as Haslam so eloquently terms it) that would be used to knock off Fidel Castro. The grand design, according to Haslam’s theory, was that Castro would be slipped a mickey of this cancerous cocktail by his lover and CIA mole, sultry Marita Lorenz, a plot line not entirely outside the realm of reality. As history instructs, the CIA did indeed hatch a number of harebrained schemes to take Castro out of commission; like putting powder in his beard to make it fall out and thus lose face with his followers; or dosing him with LSD right before he delivered a speech which would make it seem like he’d gone off his head—not to mention the old exploding cigar routine you might see in a old Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Sultry Marita Lorenz cozying up to Fidel Castro in the early 1960s.

CIA mad scientists even toyed with the idea of rigging up an exploding conch shell for Fidel to encounter while gamboling about the beach. Apparently our boys at The Company had a lot of spare time on their hands to cook up these capers that in the end never really panned out. However—as the story goes—the CIA (according to Haslam’s theory) later employed their cancerous cocktail to poison Jack Ruby because of course they had to stop him from running his mouth about the real reason he’d pumped Lee Harvey Oswald full of hot lead outside the Dallas County Jail.

Haslam speculated that the mastermind behind all of this monkey business was a distinguished physician named Dr Alton Ochsner, former President of the American Cancer Society and President of the Ochsner Medical Center at Tulane University.

According to Haslam’s theory (and make no bones about it, Haslam lays it out in a theoretical fashion), Ochsner directed this cookin’-up-a-cancer-cocktail-caper-to-kill-Castro from his lofty perch at Tulane U., ostensibly providing funding for the Op—or the CIA funneled the funding through him—which Ochsner then passed on to diabolical David Ferrie and his alleged cancer causing cohort, Mary Sherman. All of this gets incredibly murky, once again because it’s primarily speculation on Haslam’s part, cobbled together from different sources of varying merit who seemingly held different pieces of a larger puzzle which Haslam collected, tossed together like a conspiratorial salad, then added his own special dressing (or puzzle pieces or pet theories to keeping mixing metaphors even more) to attempt to tie it all together into a unified field theory overlapping the creation of AIDS with the JFK assassination.

When he wasn’t doing distinguished doctorly stuff, Ochsner had a history of staunch anti-communist activities and was a founding member of The Information Council of America (INCA), an anti-communist propaganda outlet that operated out of New Orleans. Among INCA’s anti-commie efforts included an LP called Self Portrait in Red (YouTube Videos: Part 1 and Part 2) that featured a radio debate pitting Lee Oswald against anti-Castro Cuban Carlos Bringuier.

Self Portrait in Red LP, Side 1
 Self Portrait in Red LP, Side 2

In subsequent years, conspiracy sleuths have come to suspect that this LP (the production of which was overseen by Alton Ochsner) was part of a grand plan to set up Oswald before the fact as a commie lone nutter with an itchy trigger finger, along the same lines as what Garrison claimed Kerry Thornley, Discordian co-founder, was up to: basically framing Oswald for the JFK assassination in advance.

During the period Ferrie and Mary were supposedly involved in this cancer cocktail caper, high tech medical gadgetry was being introduced into the cancer research field and placed at medical universities such as Tulane. This included the use of linear particle accelerators that could blast the bejesus out of cancer cells (and monkey viruses, for that matter). While Haslam was never able to produce any tangible evidence to confirm Sherman might have had one of these linear particle dohickeys at her disposal—or that one was ever housed at Tulane—this nonetheless formed the basis for one of the more science fictional aspects of his story: that Mary was monkeying around with one of these things and accidentally blew herself to smithereens.

Haslam even went so far as to speculate that the supposed linear accelerator explosion caused a mutation of the monkey virus they were messing around with and released it into the atmosphere which a decade later led to the spread of HIV and the AIDS pandemic. (That’s fucked up, dude!)

In the aftermath of this cancer cocktail catastrophe, a clean-up crew was called in to cover-up this messy mishap to keep the secret lab under wraps and the New World Order conspiracy humming along. As part of this clean-up cover up, Sherman was stabbed multiple times to make it look like murder, then transported—under cover of darkness—to her apartment where the culprits started a fire to cover their tracks.

If the creation of AIDS (by way of mutating monkey viruses) wasn’t enough conspiratorial fodder to get your head spinning, Haslam took another ponderous leap by linking his story to the polio vaccine, which also plays into current conspiracy theories suggesting that vaccines have all sorts of awful side effects such as causing autism in children.

As Haslam writes in his intro to Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus:

I also noticed that names connected to the polio vaccine were names connected to Mary Sherman and to the investigation of the JFK assassination. I began to suspect that these secrets were somehow intertwined. A web of secrecy surrounding our national health. Interlocking secrets that protected each other. Secrets which presented serious accountability problems for the people in power. I remembered the warning my father had given me. I could see how unwelcome this news would be in many circles.

Haslam’s conspiratorial-everything-in-the-kitchen-sink-theory notwithstanding, he was never able to produce a paper trail connecting David Ferrie and Mary Sherman to cancer experiments. In Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus, Haslam admits that Garrison’s Playboy interview was “the single document we currently have connecting Sherman to Ferrie’s cancer experiments.”

JFK Assassination researcher John Simkin sums up Mary, Ferrie, and the Monkey Virus quite succinctly at this link where he writes,

“As intriguing as Haslam’s theories are, he actually offers very little checkable evidence, if you read closely. In his original edition, he seemed to speculate a lot; a few pages later, the speculation would become fact; and he would then pile ‘fact’ upon ‘fact’ to create the impression of something sinister…”

In 2007, Trine Day published a revised edition of Haslam’s mighty tome retitled Dr. Mary’s Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans, and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses (Amazon) are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination, and Emerging Global Epidemics.

The revised edition of Haslam’s mighty tome.

And why a revised version, pray tell? Enter Judy Baker…

Judyth Vary Baker first entered into the JFK assassination fray in the late 1990s with claims she’d been Oswald’s girlfriend and that the two even planned to divorce their respective spouses and tie the knot… until, of course, Jack Ruby’s bullet silenced their steamy romance forever.

In 2000, Baker came to the attention of 60 Minutes who were developing a segment regarding her claims when they came to the conclusion that her story didn’t hold water. Judy afterwards claimed that the reason the episode never aired was because The Man stepped in and shut down production as part of an ongoing conspiracy to keep the truth under wraps. The nerve of ‘em!

It was around this time that Ed Haslam encountered Baker and before you know it, the two were hitched to the hip because, at last (or so it appeared), here was someone who was not only an actual witness to Mary and Ferrie’s super secret lab, but claimed she had worked there, as well! Of course, these claims came many years after the publication of Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus and most sober heads concluded that Baker had simply inserted herself into the story as a means of furthering her claims that she was Oswald’s main squeeze. It wouldn’t be the last time that Baker would insert herself into different JFK assassination scenarios.

Baker—as the story goes—or at least the one she was putting forward, was supposedly some young science student whiz kid, and while in high school was recruited by the CIA to work on this secret cancer cocktail project. In due time, Baker found herself in New Orleans where along the way she met Lee Oswald and it was love at first schtup.

Baker—in her account—portrays Oswald as a do-gooder undercover CIA guy who somehow also got involved in this cancer cocktail caper, and all that business about handing out Fair Play For Cuba pamphlets was just a cover for Oswald’s role in infiltrating communist organizations as a double agent for the good ol US of A.

Cover of Judy Baker’s Me and Lee. Caveat emptor.

In 2010, Baker’s Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald hit the shelves, which included in its cast of characters damn near everybody that Garrison ever suspected of being in on the gag, including Ferrie and other usual suspects like Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, Carlos Marcello, and on and on and on; basically anyone that Garrison even thought he caught a whiff of was included in Baker’s rogue gallery of conspirators.

What initially piqued my interest about Baker’s book were her claims asserting that she’d witnessed Thornley and Oswald together in New Orleans, but after reading those specific passages they came across like a contrived piece of fiction attempting to present itself as fact. As I dug deeper, it soon became apparent that Baker’s timeline for the Thornley/Oswald meetings were inconsistent with the public record and that Thornley had traveled back to California during the timeline Baker alleged that the meetings occurred.

In regard to the Baker’s take on the whole Mary, Ferrie, Monkey theory, she claims that Oswald volunteered to courier the cancer cocktail vials to Mexico City, and once there pass them on to an intermediary who would run them to Cuba where they would be used in the planned attempt to slip Castro a death inducing mickey. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you’re a commie loving creep), the Cuban intermediary was a no-show, and so Oswald—realizing the cancer cocktail had a short shelf life—took it upon himself to attempt to deliver the goods to Cuba, which of course first meant going to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City to get a passport. This explains (I guess) the reason for Oswald’s appearance there which has always been one of the great mysteries surrounding the JFK assassination: What in the dickens was Oswald up to in Mexico?

While Oswald was waiting to get his transit visa, Hurricane Flora blew into Cuba and beat the shit out of the island and basically foiled his plan to deliver the goods, and so that was as far as the cancer cocktail caper ever got.

After this cancerous cocktail caper went south, the evil CIA plotters who cooked up the plan decided to turn their attention on JFK and instead of using the cancer cocktail to do him in, they figured it would be just as easy to blow his head off. This is where Oswald parted ways with the evil CIA plotters and decided he would foil the plot because, like, it was his patriotic duty, dude.

On that dark day that will live in infamy (November 22, 1963), Oswald was sent to Dealey Plaza as one of the shooters but intentionally missed Kennedy, although other shooters, of course, hit the mark. And there you have it, boys and girls, a JFK assassination theory with more moving parts than Jayne Mansfield on a trampoline with a hula hoop twirling 4th of July sparklers.

More recently, Baker associated herself with the Raphael Cruz-JFK Assassination allegations first floated during the 2016 presidential campaign by “journalist” Wayne Marsden.

I wasn’t able to locate Marsden’s original Raphael Cruz-was-up-to-no-good-in-New Orleans-article, but of course Alex Jones was all over the story like a bad suit.

None of this passed the smell test because the story dropped at the same time we were knee deep in the GOP Primary featuring Ted Cruz as Trump’s main competition, and to a lesser degree Little Marco Rubio, who—curiously enough—was likewise targeted (surprise!) by Mr. Marsden in another hit piece entitled “Rubio’s coke house, gayish dance troupe, and foam parties” based on dodgy photos that may or may not have been Little Marco, but they kinda sorta looked like him frolicking at a gay Miami bathhouse (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). It was the same deal as the supposed Raphy Cruz photos that may or may not have been him but looked similar enough that they could be used in a similar manner to gin up a story. This gay angle was further reinforced through media reports that Rubio is fond of wearing fashionable Beatles-style boots, another sure sign of his diabolical homosexual and globalist tendencies!

Dirty Little Marco! (Photo from Wayne Madsen’s Pulitzer Prize winning
'Rubio's coke house, gayish dance troupe, and foam parties.')

After Marsden’s article on Cruz broke, long time political dirty trickster and Trump ally Roger Stone (during an appearance on Alex Jones’ Infowars) fanned the flames of this Raphael Cruz dumpster fire in the video below.

At the 1:22 mark, Stone starts laying it on pretty thick: “I had an email last night from Judith Vary Baker. She’s a friend. She also undisputedly was Lee Harvey Oswald’s girlfriend from 1961 to 1963. She knew Raphael Cruz well. She confirms that he was part of Lee Harvey Oswald’s crew…Also, if one will simply do a computer analysis of the facial aspects in the photo, which yes appeared in the National Enquirer, but was released by the Warren Commission with a current photo of Raphael Cruz, it’s a perfect match!”

Soon after, candidate Trump gave the Raphael Cruz-JFK assassination yarn another news dump bump when he regurgitated it to Fox and Friends in his own inimitable word salad way.

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being, you know, shot. I mean the whole thing is ridiculous, I mean, and nobody even brings it up, they don’t even talk about that. That was reported and no one even talks about it, but I think it was horrible, I think it’s absolutely horrible… I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, before the shooting? It’s horrible!”

Political propaganda for fun and profit.

Around the same time that Raphael Cruz was getting drug through the mud, Judyth Baker posted to her blog about a book of her science fiction stories soon to be released at the time by Trine Day entitled Letters to the Cyborgs that would include a never before seen science fiction story written by her fallen lover Lee Oswald! According to Baker:

“I re-typed Lee’s story so that it could be published, using pink paper for the carbon copies… I fixed many spelling errors, and a few grammar errors, but his dialogue was really good, he had read so much science fiction that he was very familiar with the lingo, and I saw that he had talent But before any thought of such a venture could go beyond that stage, Lee became immersed in infiltrating a plot to kill President John F. Kennedy. And they killed him…”

Curiously enough, when I checked the Trine Day site for further info on Letters to the Cyborgs, I couldn’t find diddly squat about Oswald having a story in the collection, which I thought would’ve been the main angle to market the book—because, really, who the hell cares about Baker’s science fiction? This led me to suspect that Trine Day thought better about repeating such a tenuous claim (that Oswald authored the Sci-Fi story) and omitted it from the book’s promotional material. (But, as usual, I digress… back to Mary, Ferrie and a barrel of monkeys.)

A 2007 review of Dr. Mary’s Monkey in New Orleans Magazine mentions the first researcher to go down this Mary-Ferrie-rabbit hole as Don Lee Keith, who wrote an article on Sherman’s murder for Gambit Magazine entitled “A Matter of Motives.” New Orleans Magazine states that “Keith reconstructed the crime scene in his mind and was the first to smell a conspiracy with a cover-up.“ However, Keith’s “papers reveal NO link between [Sherman and Ferrie], save a document from a local reporter working with Garrison, whose source was… Garrison.”

It eventually dawned on me that the document referred to above was something I might have stumbled upon several years ago when I was researching Kerry Thornley and spending endless hours scouring the National Archives online collection related to Jim Garrison.

The Mary/Ferrie document to which I refer was a (supposed) affidavit composed by a certain Mr. Robert L. Russell (also known as James Alexander II) dated September 27th, 1986. The affidavit states that Mr. Russell attended a meeting with alleged CIA agent Guy Banister and:

“…with other individuals, at which it was decided to murder Jack Ruby…that at this same meeting, Bannister and others decided to call in Dr. Louis J. West to accomplish this murder by means which were to be both undetectable and beyond suspicion of foul play… at that time…. I was known as James Alexander II, a wealthy oil man, and that I was thereby working undercover for Robert F. Kennedy to obtain information regarding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.”

Page 1 of the Russell Affidavit.

My initial reaction to this affidavit was that it had to be some kind of hoax, or a red herring intended to spread disinformation. I based this on the inclusion of Dr. Louis Jolyon West in the narrative which seemed just a little bit too good to be true—kind of like a conspiracy theorists’ wet dream—mainly because West has so often been linked to a panoply of MK-ULTRA conspiracy theories over the years like some sort of Dr. Evil super-villain in a Marvel comic book series. It’s no secret (as you can read from his wiki page) that West was indeed involved in at least one MK-ULTRA-related project when he injected an elephant with large dose of LSD and accidentally killed the poor creature. But beyond that, his legend grew somewhat ridiculously, I think, mainly because it gave street cred to different supposed MK-ULTRA mind control conspiracy theories that have circulated over the years.

The affidavit states that Russell (under the alias of Alexander) met with Dr. West in New Orleans “during 1964, 1965 and 1966, and at these meetings observed Dr. Mary Sherman” who gave:

“Dr. West several vials of a solution of live cancer cells on at least one occasion… Dr. Sherman knew that West intended to use these cancer cells and other drugs to inject Jack Ruby, then under West’s care at the Dallas County Jail. …Dr. West routinely hypnotized Ruby and gave him sodium pentothal to render him passive and to obtain information from him (Ruby) regarding what he knew of the Kennedy assassination… Dr. West visited Ruby for the last time in December 1968 and at that time gave him a final massive injection of the live cancer cells… Dr. Sherman was beaten to death in early 1967 by an unknown assailant whom she had discovered searching her apartment for papers relating to Dr. West and the cancer injections for Jack Ruby… the assailant then set Sherman’s apartment on fire in order to cover up the murder…”

As you can see, the Russell Affidavit—as I’ll refer to it henceforth—matches up with some of the key details in Haslam’s books; namely that Sherman was part of the plot that killed Ruby with a cancerous cocktail and that David Ferrie was a player in the caper. In the Russell Affidavit, Sherman was killed ostensibly to cover up Ruby’s murder as opposed to Haslam’s even more dramatic version of events suggesting she was fried with a linear particle accelerator in the lab and then secreted back to her apartment and torched. Of course, there’s no mention of Dr. West in Haslam’s account, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given the fact that West was still alive at the time of the first edition of Haslam’s book and most likely would have sued for libel if someone claimed he had orchestrated Jack Ruby’s murder.

At the time I stumbled upon the Russell Affidavit, it was admittedly a bit of a head scratcher, and like so many weird conspiratorial tidbits I’ve come across over the years, I filed it away in one of those odd corners of my mind to ponder again at some future date.

Then, while thumbing through Joan Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice a couple years back (page 364 to be exact), I came across a passage in which Mellen states:

“[Garrison] began to write fiction… he produced a brilliant spoof. Innovative in challenging the boundaries of the conventional short story, the piece is in the form of an ‘Affidavit.’ The author’s name is appended is not ‘Jim Garrison,’ but one Robert L. Russell…”

Mellen refers to the affidavit as a “brilliant spoof,” but you can read it for yourself and make up your own mind if that’s actually the case. It certainly doesn’t read like a spoof; or if it was a spoof, then Garrison evidently was spoofing himself because the only other source at the time linking Mary and Ferrie to this cancer conspiracy was Garrison’s 1967 Playboy interview.

Not only wasn’t the Russell Affidavit a spoof, it wasn’t particularly brilliant, either. The only reason I can figure why Mellen offered this puzzling explanation was because she probably didn’t know what to make of it, either—not to mention that on its face the Russell Affidavit seems somewhat problematic if, indeed, Garrison actually authored it, as it only undermines his credibility and presents the possibility that he was intentionally pushing a false narrative.

This inevitably leads us to the next question: Was Ed Haslam’s Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus inspired by Garrison’s “brilliant spoof?”

Download the Russell Affidavit here in its shocking entirety and decide for yourself!

For more on the curious (*cough* bullshit *cough*) claims of Judyth Baker, check out this classic compilation of hits courtesy of arch debunker Dave Reitzes.