Project: Blue Beam

Having just recently launched AgencyWatch, this seems a propitious time to turn attention to one of the more preposterous conspiracy theories to have emerged during the Twentieth Century: Project Blue Beam, an alleged global (indeed, supraglobal) conspiracy by the Masonic "6.6.6" group, involving their traditional puppet organizations, NATO and the UN, and amounting to nothing more nor less than a faked Rapture to bring about a New World Order. Craziness of this sort is so far-fetched, so utterly removed from anything in reality, that it naturally takes hold and develops a following in the fertile soil of the Internet - small wonder its progenitor, the late Serge Monast, published it online in 1994.

Loyal readers may have detected a certain willingness in this author to entertain perspectives that are... unorthodox. This goes with the territory when you set yourself up as a critical irrealist, but it's still important to draw the line somewhere. When an alleged multinational conspiracy has no shred of evidence for it, and moreover makes no sense intrinsically, it's worth taking a leaf from James Randi's approach and asking some sensible questions about it.

To begin with, let's look at the original thesis, and its author.

Serge Monast was a Quebecois, a journalist, a poet, and a beard-wearing loon, in no particular order. He founded the International Free Press Agency (L'Agence Internationale de Presse Libre, or AIPL), which proved more obliging in publishing his screeds than most mainstream outlets - these included such gems as Le gouvernement mondial de l'Antéchrist, The United Nations concentration camps program in America, Le Protocole de Toronto (6.6.6.), and, of course, Project Blue Beam (NASA).

As with most conspiracy theories, the Blue Beam argument is accreted around grains of truth - transnational organizations do exist that attempt to shape the global economy and establish a global currency; that operate as international police and international military organizations with supranational authority; and that seek to establish certain moral and ethical norms worldwide. The uncontroversial existence of these organizations bespeaks a globalist trend in sociopolitics, and there are certainly legitimate concerns of all kinds that can be raised against such a post-national paradigm. But Monast eschewed these relatively mundane concerns over sovereignty, self-determination, equality, and accountability, going instead for the deep-end paranoia of ascribing a specifically anti-Christian agenda to these trends. This agenda he identified with the Masonic/Satanic 6.6.6. group, which he believed had been stealthily concentrating power for decades (if the words 'Bilderberg Group' wandered through your mind there, we'll be getting round to them in a future blog). He described in some detail how 're-education camps' would be established for those Christians who clung to their beliefs and rejected the 'Luciferian' indoctrination into the New World Order. Prisoners here would be color-coded on a rainbow scheme, according to their nature and ultimate fate. Details of this, sadly, were not available when Monast published his magnum opus - it may be noted in passing that if this were all the product of a kind of demented genius, an especial genius attaches to the careful omission of readily-conjured details such as this, thereby lending a spurious air of authenticity to the revelations.

By contrast, the four-step plan of 6.6.6. to bring about Armageddon - to immanentize the Eschaton, to quote Robert Anton Wilson in his magnum opus - was very clearly elaborated by Monast. First, all archaeological evidence of existing world religions would be eradicated in a carefully-orchestrated series of earthquakes. Second, a hologrammatic 'God', mediated by satellites and black technology, would appear unto the peoples of the Earth to preach the New World Religion. In tandem with this, step three would initiate telepathic mind-control of the converted. The fourth and culminating step would be a horrorshow of "electronic and supernatural" illusions, designed to compel obedience or induce madness, or both. This "Night of the Thousand Stars" will see the Antichrist enter into his power, and fulfil sundry ancient prophecies.

Monast mentions Star Trek, directly and obliquely, at various points in this narrative, which is quite appropriate since all the elements he describes occur in various forms throughout the work of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry - himself implicated with the shadowy cryptocultic Council of Nine. Whether Monast was freely adapting science-fiction material to clothe his paranoiac fantasies, or whether he was acting as an unwitting agent of a genuine conspiracy with motives of its own, is a question debated by today's conspiracy theorists without resolution.

Serge Monast died in 1996 of a heart attack. He was 51 years old, and had spent the previous night in jail; he had complained increasingly of persecution by the authorities since the publication of Project Blue Beam. His followers conted he was killed by the kind of "psychotronic beam weapons" he describes in his literature; there is no more evidence for this than for anything else contained therein.

But then, there wouldn't be, would there?

I is for ... Illuminati

The date: May 1, 1776. The place: Ingolstadt, Bavaria. Adam Weishaupt - a professor of canon law at Ingolstadt University, a Jesuit, and a Freemason - initiates some of his fellow Masons into a new secret society. Originally, this secret-within-a-secret is to be known as "the Perfectibilists." Influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment, they pass into history as the Bavarian Illuminati.

Influential in literary, artistic, and political circles - Goethe was among the organization's alleged 2000-strong membership - the Bavarian Illuminati nonetheless operated for less than a decade before Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, banned all secret societies from his jurisdiction. Weishaupt fled; Illuminati documents were seized from the home of diplomat Xavier von Zwack and others; and the society collapsed in upon itself...

...Or did it? Persistent rumors claimed that the French Revolution had been orchestrated by the Illuminati; their shadowy influence on world affairs was denounced by no lesser a personage than George Washington, and became a favorite target of Puritan New England preachers in the early 19th century - decades after the Illuminati had supposedly ceased to be.

The Millennial fascination with secret societies, the growing anti-globalist movement, and political developments such as the PATRIOT Act have all contributed to a modern resurgence of interest in the Illuminati. Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, a bestselling book adapted into a blockbuster film, both rehashes and reimagines the swirling conspiracy theories involving the Illuminati. In so doing, it blurs truth with legend, and confuses the original Illuminati with several organizations that have adopted the name since. Not all of these have done so with a sincere adherence to Weishaupt's esoteric vision as their primary motivation; since Robert Anton Wilson, with Robert Shea, authored the Illuminatus! trilogy, that genre-bending cult classic has inspired any number of tongue-in-cheek fraternal societies on campuses all over. The Discordian Society, whose activities are somewhat unreliably recorded in Illuminati!, perpetuate and enrich the Illuminati myth even as they obscure any trail that the real Illuminati might inadvertently be leaving. This might mean that the Discordians are themselves Illuminati; of course, it's much more likely that there are no real Discordians, only people pretending to be Discordians.

That, I need hardly add, is just what the Illuminati would want you to think.

E is for ... Eight Circuit Theory

The late Dr. Timothy Leary, currently orbiting this Earth in accordance with his last wishes, was a hero of the counterculture and remains a controversial figure in academic circles. The Harvard professor of psychology is infamous for encouraging his students to partake of psychedelic drugs - including psilocybin and LSD - in order to facilitate their creativity. He was inspired on this unorthodox pedagogical approach by his own experiences using so-called "magic mushrooms," from which psilocybin is obtained; he later opined that he'd learned more about his own mind and the discipline of psychology on his first trip than in fifteen years as a psychological researcher.

At the time Leary was embracing and encouraging the counterculture - his Harvard Psilocybin Project was actively supported by the beat poet Allan Ginsberg, for example - the drugs he was peddling to his students were quite legal, although they were eyed with increasing suspicion by the authorities. Marijuana, an altogether inoffensive substance by comparison, was illegal, thanks to the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937. This legislation, which marked the opening salvo of the U.S. government's long and fruitless War on Drugs, was remarkable for several reasons. Firstly, as the name implied, the legislation actually concerns imposing a tax on vendors of cannabis sativa - principally doctors and pharmacists. The letter of the law criminalizes possession of the weed only on the basis that the taxes levied under the Act haven't been paid. These taxes were designed deliberately to be unaffordable to that class of persons commonly to be found using cannabis for recreational purposes, therefore virtually guaranteeing that anybody regularly using the drug did so in contravention of the law. This may seem a roundabout way of outlawing the drug - it was not illegal to own it, to cultivate it, to smoke it, or even to sell it, only to avoid the excise tax upon it - but it should be borne in mind that, at that time, there was considerable doubt over the constitutionality of a law that forbade citizens from partaking in a form of commerce. In those innocent times before the New Deal, the Supreme Court placed considerable weight on the Tenth Amendment deference to state legislatures, and regularly thwarted federal efforts to regulate all manner of industries. Alcohol had been prohibited by the Eighteenth Amendment, but the fact that a constitutional amendment had been required to accomplish this indicates that the path to outlawing drug use was not clear - not least because prohibition had subsequently been repealed by the same mechanism.

The regulation of a trumped-up tax provided a constitutional mechanism, but it was still necessary to sway popular opinion. To that end, Congressional hearings leading up to the Act relied heavily on sensational anecdotes from people who claimed the evil weed had driven them to acts of depraved enormity. An appropriately sensational term - "reefer madness" - found its way into tabloid headlines and thence into common parlance, even becoming the title of an unintentionally-hilarious 1936 movie (which you can actually go and watch here). Dr. William Woodward, counsel for the American Medical Association, rejected the claims of drastic personality alteration resulting from cannabis use, concluding the drug was essentially harmless and questioning the approach adopted by the committee in gathering evidence. The committee not only disregarded his objections, having very compelling - if hardly altruistic - reasons for doing so; it later reported to the house that the AMA was in full support of the bill, a blatant lie that went unchallenged. "Reefer madness" had no scientific basis whatsoever, but the Congressional imprimatur saw it cited in the defense of murderers and other violent criminals - sometimes successfully.

Leary's own "madness" in dosing his students with psychoactive drugs whose effects were still poorly understood hastened the hardening of the official line against all recreational drugs - the government did, in fairness, have a much better case to make regarding the dangers of LSD and psilocybin, and they'd done the top-secret research with Project MK-ULTRA to prove it, although that, alas, is a story for another time - but there was some method to it. That method, belatedly, harks back to the title of this post: Eight Circuit Theory.

Eight Circuit Theory is a classic piece of pseudoscience, cobbling together a lot of mystical ideas with a lot of valid observations into an overarching theory that is beguilingly untestable, and so unscientific. Despite this drawback, it has a certain appeal, which is why I'm choosing to talk about it here today. Essentially, Leary's model of cognition likens the brain to a radio - a tuned circuit, or more accurately, eight separate tuned circuits, each of which receives (and broadcasts) specific kinds of information. The eight circuits are hierarchically arranged, from the instinctive processing of the bio-survival circuit to the transcendental comprehension of the non-local circuit. Much of the theoretical scaffolding of Leary's model seems preposterous; but his assertion that, for most of us, the higher circuits are customarily closed seems reasonable enough within the terms of the model. The real controversy lies in his related belief that drugs such as LSD and psilocybin could "turn on" the circuits, and allow the user to "tune in" to information that otherwise passed them by: hence the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out." What were the participants in Leary's Psilocybin Project "dropping out" of? Robert Anton Wilson, currently percolating in the Pacific off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in accordance with his last wishes, had theories of his own about that; but they can wait.