The Eyes of Fear
The Eyes of Fear
1999
Back in the nineties sometimes someone would hand you a VHS tape or a cassette, or a CD with something written on it in black sharpie. They did this for the same reasons you send someone a link to a video, to say “Look at this shit.” Then, as now, it was done to share in the joy or the pain, like the newly converted, who want you to join them in secret knowledge.
With a little bit of all of these things, someone from Texas handed me a VHS tape back in 1999.
“Alex Jones: Black Helicopters” was what he had written on it.
He handed it to me because Black Helicopters were my thing. I was the UFO Guy.
“UFO Guy” was a whole social role in the 90s, and it was mine.
Ever since I was old enough to go to the library, I had been the UFO Guy. Aliens and UFOS were fun, they fit in with the dog-eared Asimov Science Fiction magazines in my room, and the copies of the “Mysteries of the Unknown” Time-Life books at my grandparent’s house.
My favorite was The X Files, a television show I watched more often than I went to church, a show that defined vast swathes of my teenaged personality.
As fun as it was, there was a dark side. Fire in the Sky, not Forgotten Planet. Will Smith in “Enemy of the State,” not “Men in Black.” The world of Roswell, Area 51 and the Military Industrial Complex.
Dreamland.
I wanted to hear about government conspiracies and cover ups. I got them on the X Files, and on the low end of the radio dial. There I heard a constant stream of breathless declarations that outlined the endless crimes of the Clinton family: rapes, airplanes full of cocaine, missing persons, mass murders, secret sex changes, the Clintons were capable of anything and had done everything, if the radio preachers and Rush Limbaughs of the world were to be believed.
Black Helicopters hovered over the border of Dreamland and the political. A sinister plot, but grounded in reality. They were just helicopters, after all. Just helicopters, painted black, without any identifying markings. But they maintained an otherworldly air. They were like UFOs: they were mysterious and airborne, they interfered with electricity and radio, they abducted people, they mutilated cows, they carried Men in Black and high technology.
Like a lot of things, black or unmarked helicopters first entered conspiracy lore via the pamphlets of the John Birch Society, which claimed that they were the harbingers of a communist-backed UN takeover of America. Like a lot of apocalyptic apocrypha they made a comeback in the 90s.
If I wanted to talk about The X Files or mysterious helicopters, I had the internet at home, a dial up affair, via a phone call to the America Online server in Pickens, Mississippi. In the X-Files chat rooms of AOL, most fans were concerned with the flirtations of Mulder and Scully, or fantasies about Assistant Director Skinner. But some of us were also trying to talk about “real” UFOs and conspiracies. And in those rumblings I heard of Alex Jones, the guy out there doing the Mulder thing “for real.”
So when that “Alex Jones: Black Helicopters” tape hit my hands, I was ready. I’d watched Sightings and Unsolved Mysteries, Mulder and Scully, read “Mysteries of the Unknown.” I’d visited Roswell! I was familiar with the late night rantings of Art Bell, and the daytime ravings of the men on the AM side of the dial.
This was right after I first watched The Matrix, and now I had a VHS that promised to show me who was behind EVERYTHING.
This was the year 1999. I was ready.
Hell yeah I watched it! It wasn’t neat and official like later Jones offerings. It was probably something Jones had offered up to his radio listeners, or fans of his public-access TV show. It might even have been something a fan had put together themselves, from things taped off analog TV.
It was a copy of a copy of a copy of something that had never been high quality. It was blurry, distorted and disjointed. It was about the DEA, FEMA, and the UN, flying unmarked black helicopters over the Texas/Mexico border. Parts of it were pulled from a 60 minutes episode, or maybe Nightline. “Black Helicopters” had the sort of punk authenticity only an amateur effort can have, it felt true because it was a weird project with no budget, put together in a basement or a closet.
It broke after I watched it a few times, and that could have been the end of me and Alex Jones. You could not, in those days, simply “download another one.” You could go on ebay, if you knew about it, which I did not, but that was no guarantee. “Searching the internet” meant asking people in chat rooms, and I was on my way to becoming a college kid, reinvented in a new town for the new millennium. The X Files was over, as far as I was concerned. I looked old enough to buy beer and hang out at the Dutch Bar.
2001
On 9/11 my roommate was in the hospital getting kidney stones removed and all my classes were canceled. I spent the day going from news channel to news channel before settling in for the night to write myself a letter. I put a notice on the envelope, to open it in 10 years. I forgot about it in 2011, and 2021, but in 2022 I did open it. It was full of vague warnings about crackdowns and martial law, about war, famine, death, and plague.
My paranoia deepened as I saw people from my hometown being sent to Afghanistan in order to look for Saudi terrorists who had been denounced by the Taliban.
It was an easy time to be paranoid. “Homeland Security.” Color-coded warnings about danger. A media hellbent on scaring the shit out of everyone.
I hadn’t thought about Alex Jones in 2 or 3 years, until a day in late 2002, when a friend from my philosophy class barged into my dorm room with a DVD of Waking Life.
Waking Life was a 2001 movie by Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater, a dreamscape of live performances rotoscoped over by watercolor-esque shapes. Alex Jones made an appearance, shouting messages from a car with bullhorns on top, shouting into his radio microphone, a red-faced rant against the forces of dehumanization and authority that deaden us all. It was a message against hatred and fear and the corporate state. It was impassioned, and it resonated with me in a time when hatred and fear seemed omnipresent.
Unlike my chance encounters with Alex Jones in years past, this time he had infowars dot com, and I had Google.
This was how I got into Alex Jones. This was how he stopped being a voice I had heard once or twice in the analog wilderness and became a voice I was interested in - a voice that shouted loud about what I saw looming on the night of 9/11.
At the time, Jones was focused on one thing above all others: 9/11. He and I were not alone in this. A lot was known, and none of it added up to a war in Afghanistan, let alone the war in Iraq that was already brewing. The hijackers had been from Saudi Arabia, from a group called “Al Qaeda,” led by an ex CIA asset brought on when George Bush Sr. was leader of the CIA. Bin Laden was the son of a Saudi billionaire that was quite friendly with the Bush family.
Alex Jones has always had one note above all others, and it is the one that would eventually cost him the most. The “False Flag Attack.” Before 9/11, he would claim that the Oklahoma City Bombing was a false flag, that Columbine was a false flag. To him, the goal of every false flag was for the federal government to get our guns, to get more control, to do something sinister.
I soaked it up. I was no withdrawn weirdo. Conspiracies were popular enough that I made friends, usually strange ones. I stopped being the UFO Guy. I started being the “Bush Did 9/11 Guy.”
College ended. I bounced from job to job, I worked in bars and office buildings, on roofs and in refrigerated warehouses. My coworkers liked to listen to the weird guy. I liked being the weird guy. After a few beers they would inevitably ask me “do you really believe that” and I could only answer “The world’s real goddamn weird. Why not?”
I didn’t have the internet after college. Not really. I would go back to campus, a couple of times a week, and download Infowars shows for later, putting them on a USB drive and listening to them in my apartment late at night. After my campus login expired, I started doing the same thing with the computers at the Eudora Welty library.
Other than emails I would exchange with friends and far-flung conspiracy theorists, Jones was my entire internet experience, such as it was back then.
Chief in those emails was “Mike.” Mike was always recommending Infowars stories, Prison Planet, forums about astral travel, websites that taught remote viewing. In college, we had bonded over UFOs. Unlike me, Mike didn’t have very many friends.
Mike was a David Icke fan. According to Icke, Shapeshifting lizardmen had infiltrated society. They were everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Boxcar Willie.
Mike from Memphis began to play a pretty big role in my conspiratorial mindset. I didn’t have the internet, but he did, and he spent a lot of time on it.
He would call me to give me updates on the goings-on of the reptilian royal family, or to tell me to read The Invisibles, which I did. Whatever Mike’s faults, he got me to read my favorite comic books of all time.
The beginning of the end was when Mike brought me a pirated copy of Alex Jones’ “Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove.” It’s famous now, but it’s not much. Grainy footage of owl carvings and old men in tents, a clearly paper-mache man being burned in effigy, a distorted chanting. It’s frat boy bullshit, and while I’m sure that getting the most powerful men in America together for a weekend to “immolate their cares” is in fact a terrible and toxic thing, it felt a lot less satanic than Alex Jones breathlessly narrated. All I could see was a man scaring himself shitless, a man who didn’t see what I saw, who looked at the world through the eyes of fear.
I feared this was my future . The more paranoid I became, the more fear leaked into my life. The fear colored over every detail, like it was rotoscoped.
2004
In 2004, my non-internet friends found something they thought I would like, in the theaters. They took me to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which let me sort out a lot of the swirling thoughts I’d had over the past three years. Compared to the conspiracies I was used to, Fahrenheit was tame stuff. The facts were basic, surprisingly close to what would become the “official” record of events in the 9/11 Commission Report, which came out around the same time.
Seeing the popularity of the film, which to this day is the highest grossing documentary film of all time, helped me realize that my concerns over 9/11 were real, that they were shared. They showed me that I did not need the extreme claims of Jones. The movie gave me an important outlet for the source of cognitive dissonance that was the 9/11 “truther” movement.
Yes, I had been skeptical of the way that 9/11 was understood, and furious with the wars that had started over it. That carried over into an unearned skepticism about the events themselves, but the “Truthers” were convinced of darker things yet, things that seemed to me entirely unnecessary and often self-contradictory. They held all kinds of stories at once: The towers were blown up from the inside, the airplanes were holographs, hundreds of people were taken off planes and shot, or were secret CIA agents placed ahead of time, and the planes were shot down, except the one that wasn’t, and the Pentagon wasn’t even damaged, except it was, by a bomb, or a drone. There were no clues because everything was perfectly faked, except one flicker on a security camera, and only our brave internet sleuths knew the Truth!
I developed an aversion to the truthers, but Alex Jones was one of the primary ones. I still visited infowars regularly. I got my videos from Mike. I stayed up late listening to George Noory, who’d recently taken over my beloved Coast to Coast AM. I’d call in from time to time to tell about my experiences with the Shadow People, or the Hat Men, as some called them.
I didn’t have the internet. Years passed. I was into this exactly as much as anyone else who calls Coast to Coast to talk about the Hat Men at four in the morning.
In June of 2006, Mike came to visit with his haul of weird videos and pirated media. He had big news. Tickets to see Alex Jones premiere his new movie in Austin, “TERRORSTORM.” He’d bought the tickets and was going to pay for gas.
I was in charge of everything else. Driving sixteen hours. Finding us lodging in Austin. Figuring out how to get there.
We went the next morning. This was a 550 mile, 8 hour trip in a 1998 Oldsmobile Intrigue. My friends in Austin did not know we were coming. All I had was a gas station map and a compass. Mike had not had the foresight to print out directions. I’d been to Austin a few times. The tickets had the address. I assumed this was enough.
Obviously we were late for the “Terrorstorm” premiere. We came in after the first showing was over, and found Alex Jones in the lobby, answering questions from other frazzled white guys. Mike told Alex Jones that we had driven all the way from Mississippi, and the police had made us late. This was partially true, as we had been pulled over in Palestine, Texas.
Alex Jones gave us two seats in the front. He thanked us profusely for driving so far and when he introduced the second showing, he added Mississippi to the list of states and nations people had supposedly arrived from. It gave me a good feeling. I felt like I belonged. Then “Terrorstorm” started.
“Terrorstorm” was a nightmare. Not in a “terrible movie” sense. It was better than many things I had seen on late night TV. It was a movie, with a plot and an editor and some skill behind it. It was a nightmare because every single second of the film was well designed to scare you, and convince you that everyone else in the world was wrong about everything. Everything! From the enlightenment to 9/11 to the skyline of Austin Texas, a skyline that contained a satanic owl in the Frost Bank building, which DID look a little owlish.
I worried about “Terrorstorm” for quite some time. I worried that my own growing paranoia was just like the paranoia Alex had exhibited in the Bohemian Grove, or in Terrorstorm. Was the guy who nicely gave me and Mike free tickets the same one who was shrieking about how the Enlightenment was Satanic? It reeked of fear and performance, and I didn’t want either.
But I kept on. I got the internet at my apartment in 2008. All I used it for was to visit Infowars and play World of Warcraft.
Jones enthusiastically supported the 2007 Ron Paul Revolution (the one with the EVOL in big red block letters) - and that felt genuinely different from the usual shouting voice of fear. But Ron Paul flopped, and one day I was playing World of Warcraft and listening to Infowars, my usual mid-morning ritual, when Alex Jones said that, in order to stave off the nation-obliterating socialism of Barack Obama, his listeners should vote for Mitt Romney in a Republican Primary.
Hold the fuck on, Alex Jones. I was ready to listen to your stories about how bank lobbies are designed to siphon off your willpower and funnel them to the scions of the Rothschild family, but voting for Mitt Fucking Romney?
His furor over Obama shattered my immersion in the narrative of Jones. It was on another level entirely, something more than he had felt for George Bush. This was not some political thing to me, not entirely - I had been prepared to accept any number of impossible things about the Clintons, after all. But unlike George Bush and Mitt Romney, there seemed to be nothing tying Obama to the illuminati of the world, he had no father in the CIA, no grandfather in the Wall Street Plot or ancestors founding the Mormon Church.
Jones was full in on the Birther conspiracy. As 2008 wore on endlessly, the focus of the show shifted from 9/11 to Obama. This bothered me to no end, not because I was particularly enamored of Obama, but because it was all so transparently nonsense. Alex Jones wanted me to believe that Hillary Clinton couldn’t uncover the truth of Obama to get him ejected from the primary.
Obama was the last straw, but that camel had been loaded with cognitive dissonance for years. Jones had always dealt in things that I did not believe, and the longer I listened to him, the longer that list became.
Some of it lined up with his anti-Enlightenment stance. A lot more, with his apparent belief in magic, his disdain of basic science and medicine.
I was ready to leave, but that social cache of being cool and weird and believing novel things, it held me there. I was still the Conspiracy Guy.
2009
In 2009, Alex Jones was endlessly promoting his new movie, “The Obama Deception.” I took a pilgrimage to the grave of Bill Hicks. The same late 20th century zeitgeist that had gotten me into Alex Jones had gotten me into Tool, and Tool got me into Bill Hicks. His grave is in Leakesville, Mississippi, between the Alabama border and Hattiesburg, about a two and a half hour drive. I rolled a joint and bought two loose cigarettes at the Fast Lane on State Street. The joint was for the trip there. One cigarette was to put on his grave, and another was to smoke on the way back.
I drove in silence, argued with imaginary Alex Jones fans in my head, until I got sick of them. Then I just drove, watched the scenery, followed the directions I had written down on a notepad. I stopped in Leakesville, asked directions to Magnolia Cemetery. I went in, found the Hicks plot. A half smoked cigarette was on top of his grave. I took it, and replaced it with the fresh one, said some words I don’t recall, got back in my car, and put in a Bill Hicks CD.
I drove and I listened, and at the end of one of his shows Bill Hicks said “The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”
I heard that. He was speaking to me. I had been seeing through the eyes of fear, listening to the voice selling locks and guns and isolation. I drove through the wreck of the world. Abandoned towns with busy Wal-Marts, a church every half mile, dead forests and broken roads. The world Alex Jones had been warning me about was never coming. “They” were never going to take our guns. “They” were never going to round up the preachers. “They” didn’t need to take over America. “They” were the ones who already owned it. The men in the TEA Party weren’t a break or a revolution, they were Mississippi as it was. The world Alex Jones wanted was already here, only 600 miles away from him, where Bill Hicks was buried.
My break with the world of Alex Jones seemed sudden from the outside. I took no more daily doses, I tore off my bumper stickers, I stopped the workplace discussions of the Loose Change videos.
I had a ways to go, inside, after that. Finding a new social niche was easy and far more rewarding than being “the Conspiracy Guy.” There were truths out there darker than conspiracies, and more hope than I had known since that tape hit my hand ten years ago.
I’m working on turning this into a larger piece. I realize that this is a sudden end and that there is no real answer to “why” I left the conspiratorial fold. There is an answer, but it’s long and it’s not easy. I hope you’ll read it when I write it. Until then, maybe buy a t-shirt or a poster, it helps keep the place running, because I’ll shut this site down before I put more ads on the internet.