Note: There is an abridged version of this article. You can find it here.

Back in the Nineties

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 reason 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.

So 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.

I’d spent my life earning it. My third grade class participated in the homefront of Operation Desert Storm by painting squares for a quilt. My square had stealth bombers with Little Green Men piloting them. We did not send that to Iraq. It hung in the school library for years, and people knew which square was mine. I was not a very popular kid, so I leaned into being weird. It felt good being different from people I didn’t like.

Before I could drive, I spent my afternoons in the library. I learned the entire Dewey Decimal system, but got stuck at the beginning. I read everything the Canton Public Library had about the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, Psychics, UFOs and aliens.

I loved science as well, in a way only 10 year olds can. I read Jurassic Park a dozen times before the movie came out. I knew about DNA and plasma.

My parents also had a library, it filled our tiny living room on shelves my dad made before I was born, when my parents moved to Canton from their 70s apartment behind Millsaps College.

Carl Sagan was on the shelves, a name I recognized from my UFO books. They mentioned him with disdain. But, I was drawn in by the wild Don Davis cover art. I liked science. So, I read them. What Sagan said made sense. Knowledge was provisional. Things had to be proven.

I figured some things just hadn’t been proven yet. Even Sagan himself was out there searching for aliens, trying to involve Earth in an Encyclopedia Galactica. I was convinced we’d already found them.

I read about the simple tests that psychics failed. A magician came to my elementary school gymnasium and did things just like Uri Gellar and Banachek did on cable TV. I decided psychics were making everything up.

This was my first rift with a world I didn’t even know I was getting into. Psychics were out. But aliens? Aliens were from space. Plasma and DNA were involved. Science!

I read The Dragons of Eden and the Time-Life “Mysteries of the Unknown” series. Mongolian Death Worms, ancient astronauts and time-displaced battleships were all much more exciting than what Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking told me in books or PBS specials.

Extraterrestrials fit in with the dog-eared Asimov Science Fiction magazines in my desk and the black-sharpie labeled Mystery Science Theater 3000 VHS tapes I collected. Aliens were fun, but 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, alien abductions, spies, Dreamland, and grim G-Men covering up the truth.

I could hear about government conspiracies and coverups anytime, by turning on the radio and going to the low end of the dial, or the AM stations. There, I found a constant stream of preachers, sports pundits, and breathless bloviators, shouting about mass murders by the Clinton family, telling me that everyone would have AIDS before the world ended in the year 2000, that a secret “homosexual cabal” ran everything on orders from the devil himself.

And like a lot of Americans, I watched Waco unfold on live TV.

Waco was only three weeks in 1993, but the radio kept talking about it forever. Waco, Texas, the Waco Massacre.

Waco was where Alex Jones got his start, but I didn’t know that then. The men on the radio told me that the FBI and the ATF were going to kill me and my family for having fireworks and shotguns.

They never came. A few years later, the Oklahoma City federal building got blown up, and the men on the radio sounded different, for a while.

I didn’t believe any one particular piece of what the preachers and blowhards on talk radio said. None of it fit into the picture of the world I had, not even the weird parts. But while the pieces didn’t fit, the picture they painted was the same color as the world I knew. Even as a teenager, I’d seen the government take land. I’d seen corrupt cops and hushed up “incidents.” I knew how the rich kids got treated when they fucked up.

Black Helicopters hovered over the border of Dreamland and Waco. 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. Microwaves and plasma were involved.

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 United Nations takeover of America. Like a lot of apocalyptic apocrypha they made a comeback in the 90s. Especially after Waco.

I knew a lot about Black Helicopters. I wasn’t the only one. There were books, websites, appearances on the X-Files.

The X Files intersected with almost all the paranoid themes of the era, and for 7 years I tried desperately not to miss an episode, even at the expense of Friday night football, a high cost to pay in a small Mississippi high school.

There were not many X Files fans in my hometown, but I had the internet at home, a dial up affair via a phone call to the AOL line in Pickens, Mississippi. And in the X-Files chat rooms of America Online, where many fans were concerned with the flirtations of Mulder and Scully or having untethered fantasies about Assistant Director Skinner, plenty of us were trying to talk about “real” UFOs and conspiracies. And in those rooms I heard of Alex Jones, the guy out there doing the Mulder thing “for real.”

Jones surfaced again, alongside conspiracies that the Oklahoma City Bombing was faked by the government. This dark, White Supremacist murmuring intersected with mainstream X Files fandom in a big way, after the 1998 “Fight the Future” movie opened with a federal building being bombed by government conspirators, to prevent evidence of extraterrestrials from being revealed.

So when that “Alex Jones: Black Helicopters” tape hit my hands in 1999, I was ready. I’d spent years watching Sightings and Unsolved Mysteries, hanging out in that paranormal part of the library, watching Mulder and Scully. I’d visited Roswell! I was familiar with the fun late night rantings of Art Bell, and the dark daytime ravings of the men on the AM side of the dial.

Right after I first watched The Matrix, I had a VHS that promised to show me who was behind EVERYTHING.

This was the year 1999. The world was ending, and I was ready.

Hell Yeah!

Hell yeah I watched it! It wasn’t neat or crisp, 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.

Over the next few years I’d occasionally run across Alex Jones, on a radio wave on a clear night, or on a random tape or DVD passing through my circles, but I thought that he’d gone away, that the world would never see his ilk again.

So why was I the UFO Guy, the Black Helicopter guy, really? I laid out some of the coincidences that got me there, but why did I make those choices? Surely it can’t all boil down to “I walked into a library that had Dewey Decimal shelves and the first thing that struck a 6 year old’s fancy was the part in the 090s about UFOs.”

I wish we were not all so vulnerable to the roll of the dice. Random events and cultural forces are powerful things. The world is a bit of a trash fire, so we often seek to blame someone, something, and blaming “the random nature of things” doesn’t feel good, even when it’s true.

But I was not entirely hapless and guided by chance. Learning about these things was fun. It was weird. I was a strange kid. I was different, and by dint of that difference I was a bit lonely.

There was a great appeal in things that were lost and overlooked, of beings so different that they were from another world, their motives incomprehensible, their designs only imagined, their science thwarting the most powerful governments in the world.

Knowing things about sports or movies or people was fraught. I was often wrong, or at least declared to be wrong by someone more confident. But if they didn’t know what I was talking about, there was no chance of that happening. Bringing up the Cardiff Giant or the Nazca Lines was a way to talk to people in a way that I was comfortable with: “You do not know anything about this, let me inform you.”

Thus I became the UFO Guy, the X Files Guy, the Bigfoot Guy and yeah, the Black Helicopter Guy. I could comfortably dispense wisdom about the various types of aliens and saucers and no one would argue. No one wanted to.

I accepted my role as the weird guy, but I wanted to be seen as smart. So I learned Science. I moved on from 321 Contact and Zoobooks and into Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, I talked to Michio Kaku and his fans on AOL. I read popular science books like “The Science of the X Files” and “The Science of Star Wars., all for the same reason I learned about UFOs: nobody at the Segregation Academy in Canton Mississippi could prove me wrong.

It was easy to mix science and aliens, because the broad field of “UFO Stuff” used the language of science, the appearance of the objective investigation of fact, to weave a sci-fi mythos, one that people believed and shared as much as they did the story of Noah. And again, that mythology was not one where I believed every individual fact, but one where the big picture - an infinitely weird, vast universe where strict social police covered up anything that might break through - was all too believable.

In the year 2000, right before I went off to college, I was in a pool hall and arcade where I hung out a lot, playing the Area 51 light gun arcade game when an old guy with a grey ponytail and sleeveless shirt saw me. I knew him as the guy who sold those displays of knives and shurikens that sit at gas stations. He asked me if it was my truck with the X Files and Roswell bumper stickers, and told me that Area 51 was a front. That the real underground base with aliens and secret shit was Dulce Base, in New Mexico.

He said he’d learned about Dulce by using Remote Viewing. That the government was after him for this. That he knew ways to channel his chi, that made him dangerous enough to fight Delta Force Commandos.

He said he would teach his Psychic Karate. One lesson. Twenty bucks. He’d give me back forty if he couldn’t knock me down with his chi.

He called himself. “The Coyote.”

I took him up on it. The Coyote began to charge up his “psychic attack.” He went through elaborate yoga motions, saying he was “focusing his chi,” that he was channeling his energy up to his third eye to “mind blast” me.

I watched closely. I didn’t believe in chi. I thought I was well on my way to earning twenty dollars, looking for some sign that he might actually be able to blast psychic energy out of his third eye.

Then he punched me right in the solar plexus with a sharp right jab. I went down, and my twenty dollars went out the door.

I went to college, with my brand new computer and a T1 internet connection. I had stopped watching The X Files after the end of the seventh season. It’s the best place to end the show.

I continued to look for the weird. I undertook obsessive playthroughs of Deus Ex. I listened to Art Bell on the radio, I read Philip K Dick, I listened to Tool, and wondered who that comedian was. I looked through the liner notes and got the name “Bill Hicks.” I went to the mall and they had a copy of Arizona Bay. I listened to it, I loved it, and that was it. There was nothing else I could find. In those days, there were mysteries.

In 2001, I had a way around that. My new roommate was a guy who loved Big Trouble in Little China and Eraserhead. He was an internet guy.

Sure, I had been online, played games, visited chat rooms. But I had been limited by a 56k dialup that never got to 56k. My roommate, though, had been living with high speed internet. He was a pirate. He had a computer that downloaded things 24/7. While I was playing games and talking to dubious older women he was rearranging his hard drives to hold more movies, more CDs, and he showed me everything Bill Hicks had ever put out.

So I found another paranoid voice from Austin, Texas. Bill Hicks drew a big political picture around the War on Drugs and the Military Industrial Complex, a circle big enough to take in Black Helicopters and the Grassy Knoll.

In the summer of 2001 I got the new Tool album, Lateralus. I listened to it dozens, if not hundreds, of times, and I listened to “Faaip de Oiad” every single time. "Faaip de Oiad" was the last track, the hidden track, with audio from a famous Art Bell show in September 1997.

If there is an Art Bell segment you know about, it’s probably this one, the one where a supposed Area 51 ex-employee called in to warn mankind about extradimensional aliens who infiltrated the government. As he goes on, he becomes increasingly terrified, and then Art goes off the air for 5 minutes straight.

The original call had that drawn out, dead air amateur quality that sold it better than a voice performance, but Tool remixed it into a tight time slot and engineered the sound to make it terrifying.

Extradimensional aliens were one of those rifts I had with parts of the UFO community. For some reason, aliens that travelled across countless light years posed no discernable psychic distress to me, but aliens that slipped across a multiversal boundary were simply unbelievable.

Extradimensional entities often cause rifts in the paranormal community. There is no faster way to split up a meeting of cryptid hunters than to suggest that Bigfoot can warp.

The Second Half of 2001

The second half of 2001 started with things on a nice trajectory for me. Bill Hicks, Rage Against the Machine, and political science classes had shown me that there were things more sinister than any black helicopter coverup, going on in broad daylight.

Aliens and UFOs receded, became secondary concerns. They went back to that part of my mind that wondered about magic and god.

Sometimes I would look for them, though I found nothing but platitudes and grifts.

On 9/11 my roommate was in the hospital getting kidney stones removed, and all my classes were canceled. I spent the day alone, going from news channel to news channel. I wrote myself a letter, to open in 10 years. I forgot about it until 2022. It was full of vague warnings about crackdowns and martial law, about war, famine, death, and plague. It echoed the warning from "Faaip de Oiad" or any of a thousand warnings about a dark future that I never thought would come, until that day.

Like a lot of people, I was quick to seize on the oddities surrounding 9/11. By Thanksgiving, I had arranged an unpleasant picture of events, led mostly by random internet forums and an intense paranoia that would deepen as I saw people from my hometown being sent to Afghanistan in order to look for Saudi terrorists.

It was a hell of a time to be paranoid. The development of a huge new government agency focused on “Homeland Security,” the color-coded warnings about danger, and a media hellbent on scaring the shit out of everyone. Even at the supposed liberal bastion of Millsaps University, I found almost no one who supported peace. No one opposed the war in Afghanistan.

2001 and 2002 were dark. But I was no longer living out the stereotype of a conspiracy theorist, other than being weird and white and male.

I had turned from a slightly chubby and awkward 13 year old into a stout farmboy with big arms and hands. I was a decent student, I had friends, a social circle. I was happy, other than the usual bits of youthful angst.

I dated, and I was fairly good at it. I dated off campus mostly, and without the easy conversation starter of “what’s your major” I would talk about DARPA or the CIA selling crack or the Illuminati. If you’re 21 years old and attractive, it works well enough.

One day in late 2002 I watched Waking Life, thanks to a friend in a philosophy class who was really into lucid dreaming.

Waking Life was a 2001 movie by Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater. It’s a dreamscape of live performances with floating watercolor-esque shapes rotoscoped on top. Alex Jones makes a pre-9/11 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 fear and hatred seemed omnipresent.

Unlike my chance encounters with Alex Jones in years past, this time he had infowars dot com, and I had Google.

Infowars was how I got into Alex Jones. I had dabbled, run across him here and there, but now I was on his website daily. His was a voice I was interested in - a man against the forces I had seen looming, a voice out of Rage Against the Machine and the live AOL updates about the Battle of Seattle.

After reading his editorial about 9/11, I added Hunter S. Thompson to my reading list. Thompson, Philip K Dick and Alex Jones were my dark guides to the bleak times that unfolded ahead of me.

I was against another war, now. A march to war in Iraq had begun before we even got the one in Afghanistan underway. The “Axis of Evil” was out there and like many Americans, I had nothing against any of those nations.

The inevitable feel of the War in Iraq drove a lot of people to paranoia. Unlike the war in Afghanistan, the idea of war in Iraq was unpopular. At first. But there was a churning demand for it on TV, in the op-ed pages, and in congress. It wore on us. I watched my political science classmates be seduced by it.

I joined the Green Party out of disgust with the way the Democrats wanted war, and because my new girlfriend was in it.

In 2003, my Green Party friends and I geared up and traveled to Washington DC, to protest the upcoming War in Iraq. I got tear gassed and hit in the head by a police baton. By March we all sat glumly, drinking on couches and listening to “Bombs Over Baghad” while watching CNN gleefully livecast bombs hitting the city.

On the upside, Bill Hicks made a roaring comeback. Though he’d died in 1994, his old material about the first gulf war, the one I’d drawn alien-piloted stealth bombers for, was so pertinent that it seemed prescient. My black plastic binder of pirated Bill Hicks and Rage Against the Machine CDs was suddenly cool.

The rest of the year I spent studying, making a daily visit to Infowars, and networking with the various anti-war groups I could contact. The Infowars hole drew me deeper and deeper into conspiracies that were new to me - the federal reserve, income tax denial, fluoride in the water.

Above all else, though, Jones was focused on one thing: 9/11. Even shortly after the attacks, a lot was known, and none of it added up to a war in Afghanistan, let alone a war in Iraq. The hijackers had been from Saudi Arabia, from a group called “Al Qaeda” that was led by an ex CIA asset who had been hired by the CIA when George Bush Sr. was in charge. Bin Laden was the son of a Saudi billionaire, from a family that was friendly with the Bushes.

This was bleak shit, and if you hung around me long enough you would probably hear me use that early 00s slogan “Bush did 9/11.”

A lot of people went into the 9/11 Truther movement because of the wrongdoings of the Bush family and administration. They saw these failures and connections go unpunished, in fact they saw them rewarded, with reelection, with lionization, with bigger budgets. So it was not a wild jump to assume that it must be some false flag attack. The alternative was almost as horrific.

Alex Jones has had one note above all others for his entire career, and it is the one that would eventually cost him the most: The “False Flag Attack.”

Even before 9/11, he would often claim that the Oklahoma City Bombing was a false flag, that Columbine was a false flag. In his world, the goal of every false flag was for the federal government to get our guns.

9/11 allowed many things to happen in America. Jones just said that anything that happened after 9/11 was proof that 9/11 had been engineered to cause it.

Meanwhile, in my political science classes, I was being shown a world where politicians and organizations bettered the few at the cost of the many. The difference with the Infowars world was that these groups cared nothing for secrecy. They had press releases and bullet point outlines.

At the time this galvanized me to the paranoid cause. “These are the ones we catch” I would tell myself, as if somehow Jones and his ilk had ways of investigating the wrongdoings in the world that the average journalist, corporate whistleblower, or opposition researcher did not.

I spent the summer of 2003 couch surfing and reading books about magic and rituals, with an eye towards an idea that Jones had become fixated upon. This idea is not an uncommon one in conspiracy circles, but Jones was who I learned it from. The idea is that the designs of public buildings like banks, libraries, and governmental offices, especially more ceremonial ones, are designed with Masonic Magic that funnels our life energies in arcane rituals.

What the IRS does with our life energy, I never questioned, but evil Masonic architecture is a mainstay in lots of conspiratorial plots.

Jones was afraid of Masons and their demonic allies. Being anti-Masonic and believing in demons felt too Catholic for me, but satanic Masons constituted a major part of the Jones cosmology, just as much as his obsession with owls. Owls stood for Athena, for wisdom, which was pagan, just like the Enlightenment, because Lucifer is the lightbringer and the Illuminati are illuminating us, just like Satan!

With my disdain for religion, and love for the weird contingencies of history, this take on Satan drew me in, but it came dangerously close to a belief in magic. It was all based on a sort of earthbound astrology, done by drawing lines between old churches and marble columned congressional chambers, and calling them “ley lines.”

I did not see myself as someone who believed in magic. I short-circuited this mental block with a sort of hand-waving, I decided that time and attention were basically the same as chi.

Besides, I knew that there was a difference in scene and setting. In the Hinds County Courthouse in Jackson, I had seen the theater of justice play out behind oaken thrones and gold-inlaid marble. I had also seen judges in the strip-mall aesthetics of the courtrooms in Canton. A year in prison was the same no matter who handed it down, but the ancient mesopotamian symbolism made it seem much more deserved.

I often hear people say that believers in conspiracies are intellectually inferior, that they’re somehow stupid for believing what they do.

Intelligence is no protection from paranoia. It can make it worse. I was able to rationalize contradictions that others would not have. If I had been a little less sharp, I might never have believed that the Illuminati had learned mind control from aliens. If I had been a little more sharp, I might still believe that. A smart mind can convince itself of a lot of things.

Yet, justifying any belief in magic caused cognitive dissonance. After a long summer surfing couches and reading books I may have convinced myself that magic could be real. I probably used the word “quantum” a time or two. My memories of those summers are hazy. Drugs may have been involved.

College ended, and I bounced about the real world, I worked in bars and office buildings, on roofs and in refrigerated warehouses. My coworkers liked to listen to the weird guy, and 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?”

Mike and Icke

I didn’t have the internet after college. 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.

Going through the Infowars archives, I heard a man named Jon Ronson talk about his book “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” You should read it if you have not. But Jones and Ronson were also talking about an earlier interaction they had, around the same time I watched that “Black Helicopters” video. They talked about the time Jones and Jonson “infiltrated” the Bohemian Grove.

I wanted to see Alex’s video of the Bohemian Grove, but I had never purchased anything from Infowars dot com, and I wasn’t going to. Giving my credit card number to the one man who was doubtlessly (in my mind) the center of a massive government surveillance operation seemed to be the worst possible idea.

So instead I settled on going to Books-a-Million and paying cash for Ronson’s book THEM: Adventures with Extremists, in which he recounted his own version of the story. I told my friend Mike to pirate the Bohemian Grove video and bring it to me on his next trip down from Memphis.

It’s time we talked about Mike. I haven’t talked much about Mike because this is about me, not him, but at this point, Mike from Memphis, who I met at Millsaps, had begun to play a big role in my conspiratorial mindset.

Mike was the person who introduced me to Waking Life, and he got into lucid dreaming in a big way. He recommended Prison Planet, and forums about astral travel and remote viewing, after we bonded over a mutual knowledge of Alex Jones and alien technology.

Mike’s big thing was shapeshifting lizardmen, he was a David Icke fan. He claimed he learned the art of astral projection from a man in England who had to fight psychic assassins from MI-5, after he’d used remote viewing to see Princess Diana be sacrificed to an extradimensional Moonchild in Buckingham palace.

He spent a lot of time online. He frequently called me to reveal that everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Boxcar Willie was secretly a lizardman, 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.

After I read THEM, Mike brought me a DVD copy of Alex Jones’ “Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove.” There’s grainy footage of owl carvings and old men in tents, a clearly paper-mache man being burned in effigy, a distorted chant. It was 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 a terrible and toxic thing, it felt a lot more hokey and a lot less satanic than Alex Jones breathlessly narrated.

The man was scaring himself shitless. It was a view into what I feared was happening to me, I was becoming more afraid, more paranoid, and the paranoia was leaking into my life. As useless and baseless as it all felt, I kept getting deeper into it. I felt like a character in one of the Philip K Dick books I was reading.

Mike was good enough to include a ton of pirated comic books and some lessons on Astral Self Defense on that DVD, so I filed it away as More Weirdness, instead of more accurately as More Cognitive Dissonance.

In 2004, my non-internet friends 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.

To this day it is the highest grossing documentary film of all time, and it helped me realize that my concerns over 9/11 were real, and they were shared by a lot of peoplett. 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.

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 believed 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 not Alex Jones, who was one of the primary ones. I still visited Infowars when I went to the library. I still got my videos from Mike.

One week I decided to stay up for four days in a row so that I could see The Shadow People. I didn’t think they existed, because they were extradimensional, but after 80 hours awake, they started appearing, black figures in the corners of my vision with big heads and red eyes. They stayed for years.

I usually stayed up late to listen 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. I was into all of this exactly as much as anyone else who calls Coast to Coast to talk about the Hat Men at four in the morning.

I was still involved with a handful of activists I had met in the green party and anti-war movement. They were environmentalists, anti-racists, and anarchists.They accepted my paranoia. No cell phones. No emails. They knew that people like themselves had been the first targets of the Patriot Act.

My paranoia ran deep, bothering me day in and out. I learned about Project Acoustic Kitty, and worried I might one day get so paranoid that I would dissect a cat. I shut up about the Illuminati around my new girlfriend.

In 2005, one of my activist friends got me a part time job at the Rainbow co-op, where I had been hanging out since we met up there to caravan to a war protest. If you’re from Jackson, you may not need the explainer, but Rainbow Co-op was a health food cooperative that can easily be understood if the only pieces of information you have about it are the name and phrase “health food cooperative.”

The co-op was nice, because I could talk about any weird thing I wanted, and someone would know what I was talking about, from fake moon landings to GMOs to Dulce Base. Being the Conspiracy Guy was paying off again!

I only worked a few hours a week to get the discount, until the business that had been paying me to do tech support was flooded by Hurricane Katrina.

Storms and Terror

Katrina reminded me of those FEMA conspiracies, reminded me that the department of homeland security was a nightmare born out of a single day’s trauma, and that there were a hell of a lot of people out there that George Bush didn’t care about.

My activist friends and I put a lot of miles on my Oldsmobile Intrigue. We drove back and forth to New Orleans to deliver food and water and random supplies. The Oldsmobile Intrigue was the car Mulder and Scully drove in the 1998 film The X-Files: Fight the Future. Mine had a “One Nation Under Surveillance” bumper sticker on one side and a NASA sticker on the other.

Stories about soldiers in the streets and militarized police were told in person down there, in spaces I’d once had a lot of fun in. Those spaces had become unfamiliar. There were security and police dressed like soldiers. Armored trucks and things Alex Jones had been warning me about were down there. I ignored the fact that most of the things he had been warning me about were not.

Mike from Memphis came to visit with his haul of weird videos and pirated media in June of 2006. He had big news, we had 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 free lodging in Austin. Figuring out how to get there.

We went the next morning. This is a 550 mile, 8 hour trip in a 1998 Oldsmobile Intrigue. My friends, brain drain expatriates in Austin, did not know we were coming. I had a gas station map and a compass. Mike had not had the foresight to print out directions. I’d been to and through Austin a few times and the tickets had the address printed on them. This, I assumed, was enough.

But we got pulled over by a zealous cop in Palestine, Texas who made a big deal of searching the car from Mississippi. I hadn’t brought anything illegal, Mike was too paranoid for that, but the fear that he’d find some ancient seed or stem, or just throw something in the car was palpable, especially as he searched more and more, sweating in the hot sun. The hour or so that added to the trip would have been no big deal, if I’d known where the Alamo Theater was. It was not on my map, and we didn’t have a computer for mapquest, so we had to stop at the friendly Wheatsville Co-op to ask for directions.

We were late for the “Terrorstorm” premiere, comically late, we came in after the movie was over, and found Alex Jones in the lobby, answering questions from frazzled white guys indistinguishable from me and Mike. Mike, normally the more socially reserved of us, strode right up and told Alex Jones that we had driven all the way from Mississippi, and the police had made us late.

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 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.

The day it came to theaters, I went to see Richard Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly,” which also featured an Alex Jones cameo. (He shouts something in front of a chicken restaurant before being thrown into an unmarked cop car) That wasn’t the only reason I’d seen it, the other was Philip K. Dick. The rotoscoped unreality of the film did a fine job, it portrayed a descent into a community of drugs and mutually reinforced paranoia.

Soon after “A Scanner Darkly” I finally got to read all those “The Invisibles” comic books Mike had pirated for me. The Invisibles was written in the mid 90s, and at one point the storyline hinges on a heroic resistance fighter using his remote viewing skills to check out Dulce Base.

Dulce Base is a sort of hipster version of Area 51, the cooler secret alien base nobody knows about. In conspiracy lore it’s where the Stargates run, and alien hybrids hang out, and Delta Force commandos fight grey alien invasions in tunnels underneath the New Mexico desert.

You may recall the claim of “remote viewing Dulce Base.” That’s because my psychic martial arts trainer, “The Coyote,” claimed he’d done exactly that, just as Mike’s astral projection teacher had said he’d seen Diana sacrificed to the Moonchild - which is itself a plot point in The Invisibles.

The idea that The Coyote had lied to me had crossed my mind before, but this revelation from the Invisibles felt like that punch in the pool hall, all over again. I’d been listening to Jones go through the elaborate motions of an information war, but I had dropped my defenses against the repeated jabs that were threatening my sanity.

And my sanity was under attack. Selling organic milk and natural detoxification juice in the Loose Change years was a psychic minefield.

I discovered that my more deranged coworkers often vehemently disagreed with me, not because my stances were Too Weird, but because they were not weird enough.

My refusal to entertain psychics and healing crystals put me at odds with them more so than “normal” people were put off by my stories about Bretton Woods.

The co-op also had internet access on public computers. I no longer had to make a separate stop at the library. I could find out about false flags at work, then share the stories with the people who loved them.

One of my coworkers was a huge Bill Hicks fan. He told me that Bill Hicks had been buried in a family plot, in Leakesville, Mississippi. I resolved to make a pilgrimage, but would not for years.

Loose Change and Zeitgeist started coming up, bringing new converts who wanted to be wowed by the deep and encyclopedic knowledge held by the Guy at the Co-op.

These were two extremely dubious “documentaries” that I heard about on Infowars, that eventually came to be screened at the co-op. Loose Change solidified the unease I felt about the “Truthers.” Zeitgeist revealed something else entirely, a concept that those outside the conspiracy world call “Crank Magnetism.”

Simply put, Crank Magnetism is the idea that people who believe in one sort of conspiracy or pseudoscience are more likely to believe in another one. This seems like the sort of obvious but useless statement that Amazon uses to try and sell you a second mattress when you buy one, but the clever peddlers of paranoia use it to sell you a second, related thing. Why don’t people know about aliens? Men in Black. Why not buy a fitted sheet with your mattress, after all? Zeitgeist’s attempt to tie “Jesus was a metaphor for astrology” to 9/11 and the federal reserve didn’t bother me. But the way so many of my cohorts uncritically lapped it up, did bother me.

Crank Magnetism kept pulling things to me that I did not want. I had grown out of aliens and never believed in astrology. I liked my conspiracies to be about money, assassinations, secret societies, and maybe the occasional dark ritual or high tech DARPA project.

At the co-op one topic came up constantly: Vaccines. No topic led people down the rabbit hole more, and no topic united every believer in nonsense quite like vaccines. It seemed that to be a conspiracy theorist, you had to reject them entirely.

But vaccines work. They work in a way that is huge and obvious. They work in a way that shows up as big lines on big charts.

Vaccines subverted the “big pharma” narrative. They were cheap, preventative, they worked with the body, with “natural” immunity. They were based on “ancient wisdom,” facts we’ve known for thousands of years, and techniques we’ve known for hundreds.

Even the thread of political concern about them, that the government can “force” you to get them, failed to bother me. The government could force you to do a lot of things. But if you didn’t get a vaccine, that could hurt someone other than you. “Your right to swing your fists ends at my face” has always been a rule.

The idea that global warming was a lie was also a non-starter. I could not be asked to defend Big Oil.

I Had Been Wrong About the Illuminati

The road became rocky, but I kept on. In 2008, we got the internet in our apartment. All I used it for was to visit Infowars and play World of Warcraft. I did both at the same time, in the morning, so I could get it out of the way before going to work in the afternoon, and so my girlfriend didn’t know what I was up to.

Getting Jones daily, instead of in binges, changed my outlook. I watched as Jones enthusiastically supported the Ron Paul Revolution, you know, the one with “EVOL” in big red block letters. Waiting for the next daily update, an injection of some kind of hope, felt genuinely different than hearing hours a day of the shouting voice of fear.

But Ron Paul flopped, and one very normal morning I was playing Warcraft and listening to Infowars 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 my willpower and funnel it to the scions of the Rothschild family, but voting for Mitt Fucking Romney was a bridge too far.

His furor over Obama broke my immersion in the narrative of Jones. It was on another level entirely, something more than he had for George Bush. This was not some political thing to me, not entirely. I knew nothing about Obama. Unlike George Bush, John Kerry, and Mitt Romney, there was nothing tying Obama to the Illuminati of the world, he had no father in the CIA, no grandfather in the Wall Street Plot, no millionaire family, or ancestors who had founded the Mormon Church.

Jones was fully onboard the Obama Birther conspiracy. As 2008 wore on endlessly, the focus of the show shifted from 9/11 to Obama. This strained me, not because I was particularly enamored of Obama, but because I’d heard almost 20 years of Clinton Conspiracies, and Alex Jones wanted me to believe that Hillary Clinton - the mastermind of everything from Gulf War One to Columbine to two World Trade Center bombings - hadn’t uncovered the truth of Obama to get him ejected from the primary.

Obama was the straw, but that camel had been loaded with cognitive dissonance for years. Jones dealt in things that I did not believe, and the longer I listened to him, the longer that list had become.

Some of what I rejected lined up with his anti-Enlightenment stance. Some, with his belief in magic. Being paranoid about magic and against the values of the Enlightenment is the recipe for an inquisition.

I was ready to go, but that social cache of being cool and weird and believing novel things, it held me there. I was still the Conspiracy Guy. It was an important role in my world. It was one I’d gotten good at, playing it since that first alien abduction I saw on Unsolved Mysteries thirty years ago.

While I was a child of the 90s zeitgeist, I also had that bookshelf from my parents house in me still, both of us full of books from the 70s.

I had borrowed Hunter S Thompson books from there. That bookshelf had gotten me into Philip K Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins and Carl Sagan. It had helped build that idea that the world was weird and magical. Another name was always bouncing around, Robert Anton Wilson.

He was not on my mother’s bookshelves. But one of my anarchist action buddies had an entire shelf of Wilson, she recommended that I start with a big fat book called Illuminatus!

Illuminatus! was another blow to the psychic solar plexus. I read it helplessly, with a speed I hadn’t harnessed since grade school, when I was trying to win pizzas. On each page a professional joker and storyteller laid out all the things I believed, only believable as farce.

Illuminatus! reminded me of one reason I had become the UFO Guy in the first place: It had been fun. There were little green men, flying saucers, stunned generals and abducted rednecks.

“Queen Elizabeth is a conquering alien” was fun. “The shapeshifters drink blood and also run banks” was not. Aliens saving us from our military industrial complex were fun. Obama trying to take over the world was not.

Alex Jones was not fun.

His rantings had been written down 30 years ago by a Playboy editor, who’d grafted them together from the rantings he got in the letters to the editor from perverts in the 60s.

I had wanted to believe so badly that I had stopped caring if things were true, and this old paranoid paperback showed me the truth by bombarding me with lies. It got me to watch the eye in the pyramid, then punched me in the solar plexus.

Jones was angry and afraid. Afraid of rioters and protestors. Angry at school boards, environmentalists, doctors and university professors. Daily he told me my world would come to an end, unless I bought two years worth of survival food. I’d suffer from the diseases the fallen and poisonous world created, unless I bought his vitamins.

I had been wrong about the Illuminati. There were men out there in secret lairs, hidden behind a smile and a story, men who were out to manipulate people, to show them half-truths and scare them into submission, all while making a tidy profit selling bogus cures and magic.

They had podcasts and called themselves Infowarriors. Wilson put it all on paper thirty years ago. And as I was reading it, I watched Jones scream in fear at the idea of Americans somehow electing a “socialist.”

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 people 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 for directions to Magnolia Cemetery.

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. I felt like he was speaking to me. I had been seeing through the eyes of fear, listening to the voices 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 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.

I closed the eyes of fear and turned on the lights. Illumination. It was like turning on the lights in a dark room that had once held a lurking, monstrous shape and now only held a coat on the wall.

I couldn’t fight the Illuminati. But I could fight city hall. And preachers in the street. And quacks in the co-op. I might not win, but at least I could fight.

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 Loose Change videos.

I felt hope, for the first time in a long time. I saw the world, I got back out there in it. I got engaged, married, I started up a short-lived Skeptics Society and chased a guy selling quack cancer cures out of the state. I got death threats from Holocaust Deniers, did real, non-psychic martial arts. I shouted down street preachers and started advocating for the Pearl River. I did art, stand-up comedy, photography, and started the website you’re on right now.

Paranoia has a way of framing all your actions as being adversarial, you sort everything into “for or against” the people you think cause all the problems in the world. And when your adversaries run the entire world, it’s almost impossible to do anything constructive. Why make the world a better place for the Illuminati?

Afterword

A while back, I published a shorter form of this essay. The question a lot of people had at the end was: “What got you out?” There are a lot of people out there who are awash in conspiracies and paranoia. Ours are paranoid times, and those of us who have hyperactive pattern recognition must recognize that in ourselves and guard against it.

So, what got me out? It wasn’t easy. As Carl Sagan said in “The Demon Haunted World,” “Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

I don’t recommend giving the paranoid people in your life a copy of Illuminatus!, the Invisibles trade paperbacks, some Bill Hicks albums, and a stack of Carl Sagan books before sending them out to learn Psychic Karate from a guy who sells gas station knives.

Actually, I do recommend that, if you want to give them a gift they’ll love. But it probably won’t get them out of their hole.

But first a little clarification of some terms I’ve been using loosely so far, lumping it all together under a banner of paranoia and conspiracy theory.

I encourage you not to use the popular idea of a conspiracy theory, as something that is both paranoid and wrong.

A more precise definition is “a theory that places the blame for events on a secret plot by a group or individual.”

They can be correct. If I have a theory that Ronald Reagan’s administration secretly aided the Contra Rebels in Nicaragua against the democratically elected socialist Sandanistas, this is both a conspiracy and correct, or at least supported by plenty of good evidence from multiple sources.

Things like pseudoscience and superstition have come up as well. As Crank Magnetism states, they tend to stick together. They get believed for a lot of the same reasons. And breaking with them is just as difficult. There’s a reason Carl Sagan lumped all these things together under the name “baloney,” or “bullshit,” depending on the audience.

I believed a lot of baloney. But there was baloney I did not believe, and that was important.

These rifts I had with the true believers were the guardrails that kept me from going over the edge . They ranged from astrology to extradimensional aliens to young Earth creationism, and hit a lot of points in between.

It had to be a lot of things. When I encountered one thing, I could ignore it. When there was a narrow class of things I could justify it. Fortunately, there was a lot of bullshit I had rejected at some point or another.

But to have a long list of bullshit I didn’t believe, I had to encounter a lot of bullshit.

The reason that bullshit is so powerful in the social media age is that it’s a thing you share, and it’s spread by those you trust. It’s a beast of hierarchy. You see someone successful, or someone convincing, and you let down your guard.

You get introduced by a friend, a fun TV show, a movie, a family member, a guy from your class who wants to show you something. Then the baloney salesman asks you to believe him, instead of these experts you don’t know.

They show you something. It may be made up, it may be a real fact. It can be a blurry photograph or a story from a policeman, a preacher, or a pilot. It throws you off balance. It makes you ask questions. You study that thing. Then they hit you with Psychic Karate.

Science and anarchism inoculated me against a lot of baloney. Science, capital S Science, the technique by which you learn the truths of the world if you are a scientist, asks the expert to prove themselves before you believe them.

My time in anarchist groups and cooperative structures taught me the dangers of hierarchy, of accepting an answer from someone who claimed to be an expert but offered no proof. When I would ask questions I was often sorely disappointed in the answers, which were almost always an argument from authority, and often that authority was religion.

It’s important to reach people before they are too far gone, before they end up blaming everything on “liberal elites” or “the Jews” or “globalists.” Because there are people who are too far gone, who have invested too much of themselves into that identity for too long, who have rejected too much truth.

But those young people who want to talk about alien abductions, those parents who “have questions” about vaccines, they can be reached. I only read Carl Sagan because I was reading about UFOs. There were other people debunking them, but Sagan understood that delusional people, people who have been duped, start off trying to figure something out. It may be difficult, or confusing and frightening, like childhood illnesses, or school shootings. They want the truth but they don’t have the tools to find it.

You can tell them the truth. But even if they believe it, even if you are more convincing than a professional con artist, you will have to tell them the next truth and the truth after that.

Better then, to give them the tools to find the truth. Because if you don’t, the next Alex Jones will simply tell them one thing after another. And they won’t know how to escape.