IS SECESSION REALLY BATSHIT CRAZY?

http://feralhouse.com/is-secession-really-batshit-crazy/

Just four years ago, when the George W. Bush presidency brought on two wars and endless corruption,  Feral House published Thomas H. Naylor’s book, Secession: How Vermont and All the Other States Can Save Themselves from the Empire.

Although the author and Kirkpatrick Sale, who provided the introduction, were essentially more liberal than not, the point of their book was not particularly partisan — among all Secession movements it listed pro-Confederate Dixiecrats and Alaskan state Secessionists promoted by Sarah Palin’s husband.

The Secessionist Movement outlined by Thomas Naylor ( http://vermontrepublic.org ) was to provide the means to opt out of the venal leviathan known as the U.S. of A. No more participation in the military-industrial juggernaut, and the corrupt corporate mandates nourished by The System.

Today, following President Obama’s re-election, over a million dissatisfied conservatives and racists are signing petitions to Secede. Whether or not we agree with their intentions, let us remember the leftist Secession movements during Bush’s two terms, and let us all have a good look at the Obama administration.

Do we all love Monsanto, and its intention to take over the food chain, with its lawsuits against farmers who refuse to purchase their GMO seeds? Obama has appointed many Monsanto employees and lobbyists to critical positions in the USDA and FDA.

Do we all also support Obama’s signing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which effectively endorses war without end and makes indefinite military detention without charge or trial a permanent feature of the American legal system?

You don’t have to be a racist or a total kook to dislike or fear these crucial decisions made by the President. Would the Mormon robber baron have been any better?

Perhaps the state is too damn big to allow decisions that go against military-industrial bombs or poisonous food. Let us all consider the Secession option.

FeedBack: King-Kill 33 & James Shelby Downard

Hi. Here are some corrections in regard to Shelby's publishing career:
The first edition of "Apocalypse Culture" published in 1987 by Amok Press contained Downard's "King-Kill 33°" which was edited by Michael A. Hoffman II.

The "Expanded and Revised Edition" of "Apocalypse Culture" that came out in 1991 through Feral House contained another essay by Downard, "The Call to Chaos: From Adam to Atom." Fortean writer Bill Grimstad assisted with the editing of that article.

The "Secret and Suppressed" book, first issued in 1992 with Jim Keith credited as its editor, contained a Downard article, which he kindly sent to me for that purpose.

My "Cult Rapture" book, published in 1994, contained my article about Downard when I visited him in Memphis. The photograph on your article was mine of him standing in front of his house.

In 2006 we finally got around to publishing a portion of Downard's autobiography through Feral House: "The Carnivals of Life and Death."

Robert, thanks for the post.

Adam Parfrey
FeralHouse.com

JFK & UFO

Military-Industrial Conspiracy and Cover-Up from Maury Island to Dallas
Kenn Thomas
5.5 x 8.25 · ISBN: 9781936239061 · Paperback · B&W photographs · $17.95 · Available Spring 2011
http://feralhouse.com/jfk-ufo

In 1947 six flying saucers circled above a harbor boat in Puget Sound near Tacoma, Washington, one wobbling and spewing slag. The falling junk killed a dog and burned a boy’s arm. His father, Harold Dahl, witnessed it all and brought his partner, Fred Crisman, down the next day to see yet another UFO. The Maury Island incident became the first UFO event of the modern era.

In 1968, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison subpoenaed Fred Crisman as part of his investigation into the JFK assassination, which became the subject of Oliver Stone’s 1992 JFK movie. Garrison believed that Crisman was the infamous grassy knoll shooter. And he’s the central figure in the “Mystery Tramp” photo of the Dallas rail yard hobos.

Illustrated with rare newspaper images, JFK & UFO interconnects the lingering mysteries of America’s most notorious assassination and its weird ufological subculture. It examines the denizens of the bizarre, semi-spook underground reflecting a stranger and more true history than offered by the mainstream.

This is a revised version of an earlier edition, which went out of print in 2004 and is now a collectors’ item. New research in this edition includes:

* What Kenneth Arnold came to believe about UFOs.

* Ray Palmer and the original “moon hoax.”

* The obsfucated analysis of Maury Island by Ed Ruppelt, author of “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.”

* The Nazi connection.

* Close-up on Guy Banister, an FBI agent inked to both Maury Island and JFK. Oswald worked for him as part of his “Fair Play For Cuba” cover.

* Fred Crisman: right wing radio talk show host before his time, with material from heretofore unseen newsletter from The Institute for American Democracy.

* From Danger Man to The Invaders: the changing image of the TV spy. (Crisman felt The Invaders was based on his life.)

* Gerald Heard and the missing Maury Island chapter.

Kenn Thomas works as a conspiracy investigator, university library archivist, and editor and publisher of the conspiracy magazine, Steamshovel Press. For Feral House he has written The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro, which helped expose the Inslaw scandal of the Reagan years. Thomas also co-edited (with Adam Parfrey) Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century.

It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps

http://blog.lavacocktail.com/2011/01/26/its-a-mans-world-mens-adventure-magazines-the-postwar-pulps-hardcover.aspx

It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps
book review
Jaye Beldo
1-26-11

After exploring the lurid confines of It's a Man's World ,the latest/boldest offering from Feral House on the post war adventure magazines, I immediately flashed an idea for a cover of the next issue of Ms. Gloria Steinem would appear, campily cartooned along with CIA operative Clay Felkner, the Esquire editor that brought her to feminist fame in the early 70's.

Picture it if you can: a Bowie knife wielding, Green Beret uniformed Felkner trying to liberate a skimpily dressed Steinem who is entwined to a United Nations flag pole by some giant viper with the face of Henry Kissinger (who she actually dated in the 1980's). Elizabeth Forsling Harris, a CIA-connected PR executive who, by the way, planned John Kennedy's Dallas motorcade route, looks on with smug satisfaction, bull whip in hand, wearing a moth eaten Gestapo uniform. Or maybe Rosie O' Donnell could be garishly depicted on the cover of, let's say, Misandrist Monthly , a potential pulp alternative to her now ailing 'zine, held in similar serpentine bondage by her very own CIA backed publisher,begging for sweet release. (I can't think of anyone who would want to rescue her however....maybe Andrea Dworkin dressed up like a Navy Seal.)

What I'm struggling to say, via these unlikely to be seen in the mainstream images, is that we are currently suffering from a kind of mass polarity reversal. It is now the castrating fantasies, Will to Power drives and other hormonally imbalanced Überfrau desires of today's corporate woman that are beckoning to be scrutinized in comic book fashion. However, these burgeoning fantasies are kept just beyond the margins of acceptable consensuality, veiled behind carefully crafted PC ideologies that will ensure that the heterosexual white male will forever remain the perennial scapegoat. I suggest that these estrogenated day dreams, on the verge of rising above the subconscious horizon, be as graphically and overtly rendered as the images depicted in It's a Man's World. It very well may prevent something truly horrible from happening.

The cover illustrations within It's a Man's World seem to beg for us to breathe life into them so the soldiers, hunters, cowboys, criminals and jungle adventurers can animate their way into the very crux of our psyches and conquer whatever needs to be conquered and plunder what needs to be plundered . I can confidently say that buying this book, fetishizing it, whether you are a man or a woman, will be profoundly therapeutic and even cathartic because nothing like the art depicted within It's a Man's World exists on the newstands any longer and probably never will again. The images within this garish but intriguing testament to the American male of a bygone era, some how give a kind of unadulterated power to the very things within ourselves that we try to repress and then project upon one another.

With this kind of power in mind, now is the time to try and convince the men's magazine illustrators of the 50's ,60's and 70's to come out of retirement, ignore the PC police and translate these current fantasy modes such as described above to the covers of noxious feminist tabloids, T.V. Guide, Playgirl and maybe even Newsweek. I'm confident that many of the evolution retarding, sexual/political conflicts we now distract ourselves with would instantly be resolved.

It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps
Adam Parfrey (Editor), Mort Kunstler (Contributor), Josh Alan Friedman (Contributor), David Saunders (Contributor), Bruce Jay Friedman (Contributor), Bill Devine (Contributor), Hedi El Kholti (Designer)

http://www.amazon.com/Its-Mans-World-Adventure-Magazines/dp/0922915814/thekonformist

Speed-Speed-Speedfreak

http://feralhouse.com/titles/books/speedspeedspeedfreak.php

Speed-Speed-Speedfreak
A Fast History of Amphetamine
Mick Farren
unusual capsule shape • 208 pages • illustrations • two color interior • ISBN: 978-1-932595-82-6 • $12.95
Price: $12.95

Elvis Presley, the Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, the Beatles, Judy Garland, Hank Williams, Jack Kerouac, Johnny Cash, JFK, the Manson Family and Adolf Hitler. All of the above were, at one time or another, to put it bluntly, speedfreaks.

Speed-Speed-Speedfreak traces the criminal and cultural use of amphetamine and its growing use through each new and destructive cycle. Speed is both one of the biggest social problems facing the country today, an indispensible component of the doctor’s medicine bag, and a huge and abiding influence on artists, musicians and writers.

Formatted in the shape of an amphetamine capsule, this book presents award-winning author Mick Farren’s examination of the curious history of America’s secret addiction to speed, both in its political and cultural manifestations.

• Ingenious, one-of-a-kind book that looks just like the subject it covers!

• Two-color photos, illustrations throughout.

• A unique, affordable gift for anyone affected by the highs and lows of speed culture.

Mick Farren is the former lead singer of The Deviants and the author of more than forty books.

“[Speed-Speed-Speedfreak] is cleverly formatted in the shape of an amphetamine capsule and is full of Mick Farrenisms: with reference to Hitler at his most tweaked, he’s described as “high as a swastika-decorated kite.” Farren and his publisher Feral House (legendary for their controversial tomes) have provided a sometimes fun, sometimes scary, always fascinating look at one of the most popular items in the recreational pharmacopoeia. Speed may kill, but its history teaches us a lot about human nature.” — Michael Simmons, High Times

LOVE, SEX, FEAR, DEATH: The Process Church

http://www.dangerousminds.net/index.php/site/comments/love_sex_fear_death_the_process_church_of_the_final_judgment/

LOVE, SEX, FEAR, DEATH: The Process Church of the Final Judgment
Richard Metzger
08.05.2009

Our friends at Feral House and Process Media are co-hosting this event at The Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles:

Was The Process Church truly “one of the most dangerous Satanic cults in America”? Or were they an intensely creative apocalyptic shadow side to the flower-powered ‘60s and New Age ‘70s? Scores of black-cloaked devotees swept the streets of New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, and other cities selling magazines with titles like “Sex”, “Fear”, “Love” and “Death”, and a theology proposing the reconciliation of Christ and Satan through love. Marianne Faithfull, George Clinton and Mick Jagger participated in Process publications and Funkadelic reproduced Process material in two of their albums. The inside story of this controversial group has at last emerged with Feral House’s LOVE, SEX, FEAR, DEATH by Timothy Wyllie and other former members. Feral House and Process Books present a re-creation of an actual Process Church “Sabbath Assembly” ritual. Author Wyllie (Father Micah) will follow to discuss the cult and his time within it in a multimedia presentation.

I’ll be interviewing author Timothy Wyllie on Dangerous Minds when he’s here for this event. (Some of you may recall that I interviewed Timothy once before in 1999 with Genesis P-Orridge as part of my Infinity Factory talk show).

Jodi Wille of Process Media tells me: “We’re touring this event to five more cities in October—NY, SF, Seattle, Portland and Philly, with musicians of note in each city comprising the “Sabbath Assembly” band. Should be fun!”

2009 UFO Crash Retrieval Conference

2009 UFO Crash Retrieval Conference
7th Annual
November 6th-8th, 2009

REGISTER TODAY FOR THE 2009 UFO CRASH RETRIEVAL CONFERENCE IN LAS VEGAS, NV!!!!

Registration for the UFO Conference is $189.

The price of the banquet is $69.

Last year's banquet sold out so please register early.

The first 50 people to register for both days of the UFO Conference will receive a free copy of the conference proceeding ($35 value).

It happened before Roswell. It happened before Mount Rainier. There was hard evidence obtained. And it relates to John F. Kennedy. Do you know the story of the Maury Island crash retrieval?

The Maury Island Crash Retrieval: The JFK/UFO Connection

The Maury Island incident involved the sighting of a circle of UFOs and the retrieval of material from the central craft in 1947. It preceded the Roswell event by a month and Kenneth Arnold's Mount Rainier sightings by three days. One of its principle witnesses, Fred Crisman, was subpoenaed in 1968 as part of New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison's investigation of the JFK assassination. Crisman had retained what was recovered from the Maury Island UFO ostensibly until he turned it over to Air Force investigators, who subsequently died in a plane crash attempting to return it to Hamilton Air Force base on San Francisco bay. The UFO material was never recovered from the plane crash site and investigators recommended that any future such retrievals be processed through the Army's Foreign Technologies division, where Phil Corso later said the Roswell debris had been processed.

Questions arise as to whether Crisman gave the Maury Island material to the investigators in the first place and/or whether he had a hand in sabotaging their plane. Further questions remain about whether his continued possession of the crash debris gave him an opportunity, via threat of disclosure, to operate in intelligence circles, perhaps leading up to the JFK assassination. Garrison suspected Crisman as the infamous grassy knoll assassin. Crisman's name as such a suspect came up independently in a famous samizdat document of the assassination entitled the Torbitt Document, as one of the well-known tramps arrested in the railyard at Dealey Plaza.

This talk reviews various aspects of the case, including presentation of the Zapruder film (demonstrating where Crisman may have shot from) and Garrison's appearance on the Tonight Show with the tramps photo, discussing also more surprising aspects, including Garrison's contention that Crisman worked as an assassin for elements of the aerospace industry distraught over JFK's defense contract awards. It reviews JFK's last speech, on the TFX tactical fighter, the controversy of its contracting and how it subsequently lead to secret military development in Pine gap, Australia. The talk also looks at Lee Oswald's role as an agent connected to the U2 program and Area 51. And it reviews Crisman's life as a right wing radio talk show host in Tacoma, plus his contention that the TV show The Invaders was based on his life. For this conference, the talk would emphasize the crash debris retrieval and its role in known but only dimly understood aspects of covert government operation.

Kenn Thomas is a university archivist, researcher and author of over a dozen books on various conspiracy topics, including NASA, Nazis & JFK; Maury Island UFO, about possible John F. Kennedyassassination-connected personality Fred Crisman; and The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro, about the Inslaw affair. Thomas calls his research interest "parapolitics," the study of conspiracies of all colors -- from alien abductions and the Illuminati, to the John F. Kennedy assassination and the 9/11 attacks. New Yorker called his work "on the cutting edge" of conspiracy. His work has become proverbial enough that Baseball Prospectus described conspiratorial activity in that sport as having "enough fishy behavior to keep Kenn Thomas swarming for years." Thomas latest book, co-edited with Adam Parfrey, entitled Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century, is available from the publisher, Feral House, online at feralhouse.com. Thomas' web site appears at steamshovelpress.com and he can be reached for lecture appearances at editor@steamshovelpress.com.

Did you miss last year's conference? Would you like to see it in the comfort of your own home? Visit our Online Store now to order Proceedings, DVDs, and Documentaries affiliated with all six previous conferences!

Conspiracy Convention Raises Web of Theories

http://www.metroactive.com/metro/06.03.09/alleys-0922.html

Silicon Alleys
Conspiracy Convention Raises Web of Theories in Santa Clara
By Gary Singh
06.03.09

WITH CELEBRATORY TALK about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock reverberating throughout the land, no one seems to be bringing up the darker side of that era, especially since August will also mark the 40th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders. There exist several local connections I could perhaps explore: Charles Manson spent time in San Jose on his way from the Haight-Ashbury to Los Angeles; Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sadie, spent part of her childhood in Cambrian Park and, like me, went to Leigh High School; and local Homestead alumnus-turned–conspiracy theorist Jeffrey Deane Turner claims that factions of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, to which Manson may have had connections, eventually morphed into a more secret and sinister operation with tentacles still operating here in the South Bay. Whether or not there's any such thing as an accident — and since the Conspiracy Convention 2009 just happens to hit the Santa Clara Convention Center this weekend — I think I must probe a few seemingly connected spheres of influence. I originally met Turner in order to consider his claims that '60s sexpot Tuesday Weld is a descendant in a bloodline of druidic witches who indoctrinated her into the Illuminati, with whom she secretly unleashed nearly everything we currently know about the '60s counterculture. According to Turner, the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, the Who and many more were actually Weld's secret protégés, functioning as entertainment-industry fronts in her elaborately networked battle against the both the worldwide fascist network and another secret society, the All Nations Group, puppeteered by '80s pop star Tiffany.

I was introduced to Turner by his pal Douglas Hawes, a San Jose native who had appeared with Turner on Untamed Dimensions, an Internet radio show hosted by freelance investigative journalist Adam Gorightly. Originally writing for Steamshovel Press, Gorightly had been the first to break the story of Turner's paradigm-shattering claims. The essay, "Tiffany Overtakes Tuesday Weld," later appeared in Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History Into the 21st Century (Feral House), as well as Gorightly's own compendium, The Beast of Adam Gorightly: Collected Rantings (1992–2004). Gorightly will infiltrate Silicon Valley this weekend to cover Conspiracy Con 2009 for Paranoia Magazine. He will also be hawking an updated version of his book The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control and the Manson Family Mythos, to be released Aug. 8 by Creation Books, just in time for the 40th anniversary. According to the hype, it takes "readers on a black magic carpet ride from the Hollywood 'Beautiful People' scene of the late '60s through to the vast desert landscapes of a Death Valley gone mad—;with all the love-ins and murderous creepy-crawls that happened along the way." The book contains all the time-tested free-form 666-degrees-of-separation-alia: Manson's connection to the Beach Boys, the Hollywood S&M scene in the '60s, UFOs, Sammy Davis Jr.'s involvement in the Church of Satan, the Beatles' White Album, the Second Coming of Christ, Yul Brynner, the CIA and good old-fashioned satanic hippie love. The updated version contains new information on the possible whereabouts of Steve Grogan, a.k.a. "Clem," the only Manson Family member who was actually released from prison.

And getting back to the Process Church, Feral House will soon release Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, written by former church member Timothy Wyllie. Judging by publisher Adam Parfrey's foreword, it looks to provide a more rational, thinking man's approach to the whole ball of wax, disproving the more hysterical fear-fueled sensationalism previously written on this cult.

How's that for a few meaningful coincidences? Seems like more sleuthing is in order, methinks. In the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, "I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path."

Apropos to “Colbert Is A Swinger for Marvel”

FeedBack: Apropos to “Colbert Is A Swinger for Marvel”

“Marvel has always been open to daffy gimmicks like this -- hey this is the company built by Stan Lee, after all.”

Of course, one of Stan’s daffiest tricks has been to take full credit for creating Marvel comics’ central core of characters when it fact they were primarily created by Jack Kirby. Stan reaps the benefits of a megabuck entertainment corporation built on licensing Kirby’s ideas. Instead of a percentage, Kirby got a page rate. Even the image of Colbert is taken from Kirby’s drawing of Spiderman’s first appearance.

Kenn Thomas
Secret and Suppressed II, featuring Rob Sterling on the electronic Votescam, now out from Feral House!

Secret and Suppressed II

http://feralhouse.com/titles/new_releases/secret_and_suppressed_ii.php

Secret and Suppressed II
Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century
Edited by Adam Parfrey and Kenn Thomas
277 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 • ISBN: 978-1-932595-35-2
Price: $17

Just in time for the presidential election, Secret and Suppressed II’s new revelations — Newspeak, The Illuminated, Parascience, and The Controllers — illuminate the paranoid and nightmarish post-9/11 planet.

Contributors: Robert Anton Wilson, Jim Hougan, Paul Krassner, Mae Brussell, Adam Weishaupt, Jim Marrs, Joseph P. Farrell, Mike Bara, Craig Heimbichner, Richard Sauder, Joan D’Arc, Al Hidell, Jay Weidner, Col. Fletcher Prouty, Adam Gorightly, Harry Helms, Mark Bruback, Douglas Hawes, William W. Flint, Jerry E. Smith, Robert Sterling, David Martin

TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEMONS FROM THE FAR SIDE OF TRUTH
NEWSPEAK
Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression by David Martin
The Mind of Mae Brussell by Paul Krassner
The Evil Feedback Loop: Mae Brussell Interviewed by Conspiracy Digest

THE ILLUMINATED
Who Was Adam Weishaupt? by Mark Bruback
Occult Theocrasy by Lady Queenborough
Weishaupt Meets Wilson by Robert Anton Wilson
From Diogenes’ Lamp by Adam Weishaupt
The Idiots Guide to the Cryptocracy by Craig Heimbichner
Brotherhood of the Gun by Craig Heimbichner
Holy War, Ground Zero by Adam Parfrey
Occult Nashville by Jim Marrs
Tiffany Overtakes Tuesday Weld by Adam Gorightly and Douglas Hawes

PARASCIENCE
Are Aliens and the Technology Underground and Undersea? by Richard Sauder
The Secret History of NASA by Mike Bara
The Darwin Wars by Joan D’Arc
Wilhelm Reich, Eisenhower and the Aliens by Kenn Thomas
Secret Weather Wars by Jerry E. Smith
The Bussard Fusion Reactor and its Detractors by William W. Flint

THE CONTROLLERS
The Next Vietnam by Colonel Fletcher L. Prouty
Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by Jim Hougan
Exposing the Nazi International: An Analysis by Joseph P. Farrell
Lingering Questions About 9/11 by Harry Helms

Paranotes by Al Hidell
Ohio Vote-Rigging Convictions
The Green Scare
Thought-Crime and Punishment
This Apple Isn’t Green
The Big iPod is Tracking You
Tougher Nuke Plant Security Standards Nixed
Bloggers Behind Bars
Cell Phone Genocide
Timothy McVeigh: Lost and Found
Lobbying “Reform” Sham
The Real U.S. Attorney Scandal
TB-Infected Lawyer Evaded Homeland Security
Homeland InSecurity
Brits Caught Up in “Shadowy War”
Wal-Mart Paid me to be Paranoid
Global Pedophile Ring Broken
Washington Pedophile Ring Intact
The Price of Loyalty
The “Gay Bomb”
Subprime Scapegoats
Fuzzy Math
More Fuzzy Math
Dollar Collapse Danger
Chinese Embrace Conspiracy
Subliminal Science
Air Force Official Found Dead
A Billion Here, a Billion There
Microchip Health Hazard
“Welcome to Islamberg”
McCain and Hillary’s Occult Connections
Obama’s Cousin Accused of Ethnic Cleansing
The Next Bubble
The Doomsday Seed Vault
“Smiley-Face” Serial Killings
Tens of Thousands Covered Up
Iraq Commander Details Bush Rant

Electronic Votescam by Robert Sterling
The Culling by Jay Weidner

About the Authors

Excerpts

Photo Insert (8 pages)
http://konformist.com/2008/secretandsuppressed2.pdf

Demons From The Far Side of Truth
http://konformist.com/2008/secretandsuppressed2-excerpt.pdf

Stalking the Octopus

http://www.stlmag.com/media/St-Louis-Magazine/August-2008/Stalking-the-Octopus/

Stalking the Octopus
For 20 years Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press has been tracking the oily tentacles of world conspiracy — and shaking readers out of their reality tunnels
By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Demond Meek

In 1991, when journalist Danny Casolaro was found floating in a blood-filled bathtub with a shoelace wrapped around his throat, the coroner ruled it a suicide. But people who knew Casolaro and knew why he was at the Sheraton Inn in Martinsburg, Va., where his body was found, never believed it was anything but murder.

Casolaro had traveled to Martinsburg to meet with one last source—the one, he said, who would help him cinch up the book he'd been working on for more than a year. He called it The Octopus, the same term he used to describe the cabal of spies, spooks, crooks and politicians he'd uncovered in his research—a group whose ties he had traced to, among other things, Iran-Contra, the Bay of Pigs, the October Surprise and even Area 51. But whomever it was that Casolaro was to meet in Martinsburg on August 9 never showed up. And on August 10, when two housekeepers found Casolaro's body in the tub, his fat accordion file of notes (which friends say he took with him everywhere) was conspicuously missing, along with his briefcase.

A few months after his brother's death, Tony Casolaro collected what was left of Danny's notes and clippings (the accordion file never resurfaced, and neither did the briefcase), turning them over to ABC News in hopes that the network would follow up on some of the leads his brother had uncovered. When ABC did nothing with the information, Tony took it to a friend at Investigative Reporters and Editors at the University of Missouri–Columbia's journalism school. The files were placed in IRE's archives. And that's where conspiracy researcher Kenn Thomas stumbled on them in 1993.

As it turns out, Danny Casolaro was correct when he guessed that The Octopus would rescue him from obscurity—he just didn't count on the subtitle of the book being Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Penned by Thomas and his late writing partner Jim Keith in 1996, The Octopus is one of the most popular and accessible titles in the conspiracy genre; when the first edition went out of print, it became a collector's item and was priced for as much as $100 on Amazon.com. Thomas and Keith used the thin remains of Casolaro's research as a starting point (the 2004 second edition even includes an appendix listing the contents of Casolaro's news clippings file) but also pulled on "affidavits filed by arms merchants and convicted felons; mainstream and non-mainstream political sources, including some that publish messages received from channeled aliens, others notorious for their far-right connections, lite-left leanings and radical chic pose; unattributed sources on the Internet; anonymous samizdat; participants in Casolaro's investigation; peripheral players; researchers who knew Casolaro; and researchers whose work expanded on the Octopus thesis." Rather than apologizing for this motley—and not always academic—tangle of sources, the pair simply directed their readers to the copious footnotes, encouraging them to "track these sources and make their own judgments concerning credibility."

Welcome to the world of conspiracy research, where Christian Libertarians who see the Illuminati's nefarious influence in everything from world politics to the design of gum wrappers fraternize with '60s hedonists who never abandoned their mission to fight The Man; add to the mix former military and intelligence personnel, professors, journalists, New Agers, geeks, hipsters, whistle-blowers, snake-oil salesmen, housewives, physicists and, of course, genuine paranoid wing nuts. In the conspiracy world, the red state–blue state rift never occurred. "We may all be nuts," Thomas told The New York Times in 1995, "but we're not all the same nuts." Thomas claims the left wing–right wing division is itself part of the conspiracy—as he told The Riverfront Times that same year, "the real division is the top and the bottom."

Thomas was born and raised in St. Louis and at first seems an unlikely conspiracy researcher. When he's not in a suit, he's at least in a dress shirt, with a neatly trimmed beard and a sort of ease that could not coexist with true raging paranoia. He reminds you of those cool sociology professors you had in college who looked buttoned up from the outside but taught units on the Yippies, included Jack Kerouac and H.L. Mencken on the reading list and screened 200 Motels in class. Thomas, who works as an archivist for the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri–St. Louis' Thomas Jefferson Library, has been a key figure in the conspiracy underground for years; his magazine, Steamshovel Press, has deeply influenced the underground conspiracy movement and also surfaced in mainstream popular culture, from The New Yorker to The X-Files to Baseball Prospectus, which opined that Major League Baseball boasted "enough fishy behavior to keep Kenn Thomas swarming for years." Thomas even wonders out loud if he and fellow conspiracy newsletter publishers Greg Bishop, editor of the now-defunct Excluded Middle, and Jim Martin of Flatland were perhaps the inspiration for The X-Files' Lone Gunmen; in fact, he saw smatterings of Steamshovel in Mel Gibson's Conspiracy Theory, too.

"Everything in there, everything this cab driver guy spots, is right out of Steamshovel Press," Thomas says. "There are two anthologies, basically back issues of Steamshovel. Brian Helgeland, the screenwriter, bought both of those books [Popular Alienation and Popular Paranoia] from Jim Martin at Flatland Press." Thomas says he's also seen material from the Steamshovel website show up on TV: "There was a show called Dark Skies on the SciFi channel that mixed in real historical figures with this whole alien story. I did some research one week on Dorothy Kilgallen; the next week, Dorothy Kilgallen was a character on the show. So I write a column about Carl Sagan—in the '60s Sagan presented a paper to all these rocket scientists on aliens—and the next week, Carl Sagan was a character on the show. So they're cribbing off the website." Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. "I've been told many times that I need to go to Hollywood and exploit this," Thomas laughs. "The thing about living in St. Louis is, for $200 you can go to any city in this country, and L.A.-centered stuff, New York–centered stuff—that's part of the conspiracy. It's part of the homogenizing of the world. I don't want to be part of that. I want a bigger picture. And you have to work harder to live in L.A. I think I've stumbled upon the perfect place."

That perfect place is somewhere up in North County, where Thomas bought a really lovely house—"the Everly Brothers' family owned it, it's this 100-year-old Victorian Folk house, and it's got a huge yard"—but doesn't want to go into more detail than that. Years ago, he took out a P.O. box and prefers to keep his address on the down-low. Though the first few issues of Steamshovel didn't attract a lot of attention (the inaugural issue was a stapled-and-photocopied affair, containing a Q&A with Ram Dass [formerly Richard Alpert, who had worked alongside Timothy Leary in Harvard's LSD experiments] that'd been orphaned after a local newspaper reneged on its agreement to publish it), Thomas says he continued to publish in order to get free review books from publishers, and when he switched to conspiracy topics, he immediately regretted printing his home address on the back cover. Weird people started showing up on his doorstep.

"One of them was an old guy who was just driving across the country and living out of his car," Thomas says, shaking his head. "The other guy's actually become a friend of mine and takes me out to the gun range, tries to teach me to shoot. He used to shoot with Burroughs—he went to school in Lawrence. That was another weird little coincidence. It was easy for him to track me down, but this other guy was from Texas …"

Ah, that's the other thing: co­incidences. And Burroughs. Thomas studied literature at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs (he spoke at the ceremony when Burroughs' star was added to the Loop's Walk of Fame). The second issue of Steamshovel was dedicated to the theories of Wilhelm Reich, the scientist who developed a kind of chi accumulator he called an orgone box. Thomas (who quips that Burroughs became his neighbor … after he died and was buried in Bellefontaine) says he's noticed that "the grass is lighter around Burroughs' grave, and I tried to make the case that this is because Burroughs sat in the orgone box every day of his life. He was a Reichian. He had more life energy." (It could be true; junkies don't often live to be octogenarians.) Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, were also friends. So Thomas' approach to conspiracy is a decidedly literary one; the third issue of Steamshovel featured poet Amiri Baraka, though even then it seems that conspiracy sneaked in somehow: Baraka talked about being the only member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York; Lee Harvey Oswald was the only member in New Orleans. (Relating this fact makes Thomas roar with laughter.) Much later, Baraka would be jettisoned from his post as poet laureate of New Jersey after delivering an angry, conspiracy-heavy poem about what happened on 9/11.

"But before that third issue, Mae Brussell died," Thomas says. (Brussell was a Jewish housewife in California who put forth her own sort of Octopus theory based on a transcript of the Warren Commission hearings and thousands upon thousands of newspaper clippings.) "Also," Thomas continues, "there was another magazine called Critique, which was a conspiracy magazine—but that guy joined a cult and changed the magazine to Sacred Fire, and the magazine was dedicated to the homilies of his guru. It was like breakin' my heart, because I was putting out this free newsletter to hustle some books and I was into poetry, but it looked like the whole conspiracy world was falling apart—what the heck is going to happen? So I did a call for papers—'People who are interested in conspiracy, send me your stuff.' And then, that must have been '92, and to this day—I just came from the post office—to this day I get things like this …"

He pulls out a newsletter from The Worldwide Conspiracy of Einsteinian Relativity. The return address is San Quentin Prison. "I haven't totally read it yet," Thomas says. "He's even sent me a photo of himself. Still, the people in prison, I want to say, 'If you're so damn smart, what are you doing in prison?'"

It's actually been a light day at the post office. Lately, Thomas has been keeping a low profile; he has been planting lilies in his yard and swears that now that he has a house, "I just want to be landed gentry for a while." He has two kids, a daughter in college and a son who's just on the cusp of high school. It was during a trip to the airport to pick up his daughter that he realized that he didn't miss his life during the '90s and early noughts, especially after 9/11—where he regularly showed up on shows like Kevin Nealon's The Conspiracy Zone or stepped off airplanes only to be greeted by a constellation of flashing camera bulbs. "I remember one time flying into London, and I was received like I was one of the Beatles," he laughs. "There were flash cameras going off, guys with microphones saying, 'Can you talk about this, Mr. Thomas …?' I was blown away. But then there were other times when I used to do the Reich talk—it's very difficult to talk about, he was a very complicated guy who used his own language and created his own technology, so the talk can sound a little academic. I remember one time going to a conference, doing a little workshop on Reich, where like only six people signed up."

He doesn't, he says, miss the rock-star life. He'd rather be planting hostas. After his distributor, Fine Print, went belly-up around 2000, Steamshovel—like many small presses—had a tough time getting distributed, and Thomas didn't actually print Steamshovel Press No. 23; it's a PDF. Everything was, rather logically, rolling to a nice, clean stop.

But somehow, this spring Thomas once again found himself getting ready to embark on another rock-star tour: the first stop being RetroCon, a UFO conference held at the Integratron, a stylized, flying-saucer–shaped building constructed in the Mojave Desert in the '50s by a UFO contactee, George Van Tassell, who swore it channeled positive energy from the universe. Thomas delivered two lectures, one on a UFO sighting at Maury Island in Washington State and one on "Jack Kirby, Conspiracy Theorist." (Kirby was the co-creator of a number of Marvel Comics heroes, including the X-Men, Captain America, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four.) Then it was off to the Beyond Knowledge Conference in Liverpool, where he delivered another Maury Island lecture and one on Reich. And this doesn't even take into account a possible book tour in the fall, when Feral House, the publisher of The Octopus, releases Secret and Suppressed II, Thomas' follow-up to Jim Keith's 1993 book, which, among other things, introduced the term "men in black" to the mainstream—and contained the essay that eventually became The Octopus.

Now, before we proceed any further, it's important to know that the term "conspiracy theorist" is considered pejorative by guys like Thomas. The term "conspiracy researcher" is OK; "parapolitical researcher" is infinitely better: "Politics, of course, is going out and voting for people," Thomas says. "The 'para-' is everything that goes on behind the scenes in that process." And the popular perception of the conspiracy theorist "is a cartoon picture created by the media to keep people from taking these kinds of issues seriously," Thomas says, with a touch of crankiness in his voice, relating the term to a phenomenon he calls "the laughter curtain." Area 51 is the classic example: Disseminate enough dopey misinformation about little green men, and no one will pay attention to the trillions of dollars being funneled into the military-industrial complex via Area 51's black budget.

Of course, a cursory look through any of Thomas' dozen books, or an issue of Steamshovel, will clue you in to why the term irritates him so. As an archivist, his research is naturally both sweeping and impeccable. He's filed thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests. (Tip: File multiple times for the same material, and one day you'll get a clueless clerk—that's how Thomas ended up with all of Wilhelm Reich's prison correspondence.) He's made multiple trips to the National Archives for material related to the JFK assassination, which is more difficult than it sounds. You have to know what document to request before the archives will hand it over to you, so doing research there requires a lot of preresearch. He's a Jedi with LexisNexis and other research tools; he knows how to dig for information that other people don't know how to dig for, and then he publishes it. Nothing sexier than that. No tinfoil hats, no special Google-fu, no channeling. Just enormous stacks of documents.

"You have to create a triangulation of research, the bulletin-board model of research where you take the bits of data that come in and every one of them has a bias, you have to find out where the bias is, pin it up on a bulletin board," Thomas explains, sounding every bit the archivist. "When you find a certain kind of information clustered somewhere, you realize you're onto something. That's the whole metaphor of Steamshovel Press—your desk gets piled up with bits of information, and you need to create a metaphor for pushing it out of the way. It actually comes from a Dylan song: 'takes a steam shovel to clear out my head.'"

In an attempt to correct the semantics a little, Thomas created the motto "All conspiracy. No theory," which you'll see at the top of his site, steamshovelpress.com, and above the magazine's logo. Though bypassing the theory part sometimes gets him in trouble (he's pissed off some people by documenting, for instance, that it was indeed a plane that hit the Pentagon, not a missile, as some 9/11 conspiracists allege), his only-publish-what-you-can-document approach has earned him the respect of those who normally dismiss conspiracists, and he's absolutely spooked out the true believers; Bob Girard of Arcturus Books said Steamshovel would "feed that dark feeling in the pit of your gut." But Thomas' good friend Greg Bishop says that's not the point.

"It's informed by history and creativity and radicalism and basic mistrust of people in power," he says. "Kenn's about eight or nine years older than me, but I also admire William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and Leary and Ginsberg and all those people. I include a lot of UFO writers and paranormal writers and psychedelic researchers in my universe of what's going on. Kenn does not quite as much, but we still have that same spirit of being suspicious of people that don't have most of the population's interest in mind."

That lack of magnanimousness seems to especially extend to segments of the population that like to go poking around in the Octopus' business. Casolaro was warned several times, sometimes by his sources, that the information he was compiling could be dangerous to his health. And Thomas' friend and co-author Jim Keith, who wrote for Steamshovel, also died under mysterious circumstances; after suffering a knee injury at Burning Man in 1999, he was taken to Washoe Medical Center in Reno. Before being taken into surgery, Keith told his nephew, "I have the feeling that if they put me under, I am not coming back." He was correct. Though the hospital ruled that Keith's death resulted from a blood clot that moved from the site of the injury to his lung, Thomas theorizes that it possibly resulted from tissue contaminated with clostridium bacteria, incidentally one of the superbugs being bred in government laboratories for warfare purposes, which Keith had discussed in his last book, Biowarfare in America (anthrax is another popular germ in weapons labs). Two years later, Ron Bonds, publisher of IllumiNet Press, which had issued Biowarfare, died of clostridium poisoning after eating in a Mexican restaurant—right around the corner from the tissue bank that had been the source of clostridium-infected tendons that had resulted in the deaths of several people undergoing knee surgery. Of course, one is tempted to ask Thomas: Does he ever get nervous about these things?

"Well, you know, Jim Keith and I used to have this discussion: 'How come they don't come after us?' It's not a conversation I can have with Jim Keith anymore," Thomas says. Though he'll josh about black helicopters and aliens, this is not a subject he can approach with levity, not yet. "I have no proof, but Jim Keith, it's a horrible burden to try and communicate what kind of guy he was, because he was funnier and more charming than I will ever be. In Casolaro's case, he thought what would protect him would be to turn this into a fictional novel. It doesn't matter—if you start doing a real investigation and start talking to people, they don't care if you're going to write a novel or a story for The New York Times. They just know that you're poking around where you don't need to be. And that could've been what happened to Keith."

And who are "they"? Thomas laughs. "'They' are different people at different times. This whole question of why haven't they killed me—why did they let Abbie Hoffman go for so long? He's part of the Octopus story. He was delivering his write-up of the Iran-Contra affair when he was forced off the road by a truck. So why don't they just form an army and go out and shoot every dissident in the country?"—he's again laughing now—"But they don't. Sometimes they kill people, sometimes they have the laughter curtain. They make us look like crazy people. That's the thing about great journalists—they know what not to ask! In some cases, it's just to maintain access to power, sometimes just to stay alive." And besides: "My mentor into the world of the weird was Timothy Leary. And Timothy Leary would never accept negative energy. Never. He was in prison, I remember seeing footage of him in 1970 where he was talking about 'Whoa, how cool is this? I can slow down. I can just sit here and write and read and learn.' He did that, and then he escaped! He went over the wall. For a while, he was in a cell right next to Charles Manson. He taught me that there's nothing to be afraid of. There's no reason to let it get you down. Soak it up. Fight back. And do dharma combat with it."

Perhaps it's naive to say this, but it seems that things have changed a bit since the early 1990s, when Danny Casolaro was intrepidly chasing the Octopus like a cross between Columbo and Jacques Cousteau. Whether it's the transparency brought about by the Web or the brazenness of the current administration in consolidating power in the executive branch or even the conspiracy underground's success in mainstreaming concepts like black helicopters and MIBs (men in black), it seems to have a slightly less opaque ink cloud to hide behind. Oddly enough, Thomas is finding this phenomenon a little irritating, at least as far as finishing the manuscript for Secret and Suppressed II goes. "We came up with the idea, believe it or not, of trying to—and this must've been in January—of trying to expose what a wacky church Barack Obama belonged to. That was obscure at that point!" Thomas laughs. Though the book's being released to coincide with the 2008 elections, Adam Parfrey, Thomas' editor at Feral House (which published both editions of The Octopus), says that's why they're concentrating on the bigger-picture stuff, like the larger implications of Diebold's electronic voting machines—and the Freemasons. "We have definitely discussed investigating Freemasonic influence—there's a lot of interest in that with The Da Vinci Code," Parfrey says. "Though we're trying not to have these bizarre intimations about the Vatican, but address Freemasonry as really a large issue in the military as well as the government—with actual, supportable evidence."

And though the lilies behind Thomas' house are no doubt flourishing (the Everly Brothers would be happy to know), his spring tour has him wondering how to knacker Steamshovel's distribution problems; Nexus magazine, he notices, is still on the stands, so there must be some way to do it. "I consider myself a permanent fixture," he says. "What I may do is stop the magazine at that and create a smaller, comic-book–sized zine, hold onto the name and put that at the top, so it'd be Steamshovel Press presents, say, Popular Alienation or Popular Paranoia and make it smaller and less expensive enough that it can come out more frequently."

And why abandon the life of the landed gentry? Same reason he always has. "It's just like when I first started Steamshovel—it was basically out of paranoia that because Mae Brussell had died and the other magazine that did conspiracy stuff had disappeared, I had to make sure it was there for me to consume," he says. "But even more so, now that the country's changing again … we have to stimulate and encourage a variety of points of view, eccentricities, the creative life.

"I try to get that across to the people who take this stuff too seriously," he says. "It's hard to do, because they're locked into reality tunnels—that was Leary's concept. You're locked into these certain reality tunnels, and you can't see the bigger picture and can't sympathize enough with another tunnel to see that there's something else."

Visit Kenn Thomas on the web at steamshovelpress.com; Secret and Supressed II will be released in October and will be available at Barnes & Noble, Borders, local bookstores, Amazon.com and feralhouse.com.