Lilith, The Phantom Maiden (An Apocryphal Catechism)

In William Peter Blatty’s 1971 religious horror novel, The Exorcist, as well as the classic 1973 film based on the book, a demon named Pazuzu possesses a young girl and must be cast out by a stoic and dutiful Catholic priest. In the beginning of both the book and the film, the titular exorcist is present at an archaeological dig in Iraq, at which is uncovered a statue of Pazuzu, ancient Mesopotamian King of the lilu, or wind demons. This demon appears to be a chimera, with wings, bulging eyes on a canine face, feet like the talons of a bird of prey, and a serpent wound around his phallus and leg. A surface reading of the book or viewing of the film might cause one to think that the exorcist himself was ironically responsible for somehow freeing the demon by digging up the statue, but what was intended seems more like a portent of the imminent confrontation the exorcist will have with Pazuzu, whom he has struggled with before. However, it would seem that, maybe, Blatty chose poorly or researched only shallowly when deciding what Assyrian demon should be his antagonist. Pazuzu, in one aspect, was a domestic spirit of the home, and even in its more fearsome aspect, as depicted in the statue, was considered a protector. The lilu wind demons were considered evil spirits, it’s true, and Pazuzu chief among them, in that they were related to destructive winds and locusts that brought famine. But they weren’t associated with danger to youth. Quite the opposite. Pazuzu was called upon to drive off other demons. His statue was used as an apotropaic, an amulet, especially to protect the young from one particular demoness, Lamashtu. This she-demon, sometimes viewed as an evil goddess, was depicted much the same as Pazuzu, with talon feet and sometimes holding a snake, but hairier, without wings, and with the head of a lioness. According to Mesopotamian lore, she brought disease and nightmares, harmed women giving birth, abducted and slayed children, drank their blood, and chewed on their bones. Now there’s a villain Blatty might have made the torturer of a possessed child. But the lore of ancient Mesopotamian demons is all confused now. It has been combined and recombined with other folklore, evolving as the basis for new superstitions, incorporated into religion after religion, as the lines between what must have once seemed real figures have been syncretistically blurred. Here we see the protector become the ravager, but so too we see the evolution of Lamashtu, who eventually became identified with the lilu, her nature rewritten through the ages, reinvented by medieval Kabbalists who gave birth to an apocryphal legend.

As with my previous post on superstitions, this topic occurred to me rather organically while researching my Halloween series on vampire lore. Claims that lore about vampires extends all the way back to ancient myth are common. I looked into the assertions about links to Greek myth and the so-called “vampire bible,” the Delphi Scriptures, and found it utterly unconvincing and lacking support. I mentioned that at the end of my series. However, there are other prevalent claims that the lore and superstitions about vampires can be traced back to the figure of Lilith, and before her, Lamashtu. Unlike the supposed myth of Ambrogio, there is a lot of real history and folklore to unpack here, tangled up in syncretistic iterations, and I was not prepared to discuss its impact on vampire lore then. I am now. The connection seems clear enough. It is said that Lamashtu drank the blood of children. However, we know that the original vampire lore, deriving from claims about revenants, often had little to do with blood drinking. Also, to claim that Lilith was the prototypical vampire really doesn’t work, since she was known more for strangling that drinking blood, as we’ll see. Moreover, vampires are and always were the risen dead, humans transformed because of the circumstances of their death and burial, or due to the influence of the Devil. Their nature can be attributed to the various aspects of a decomposing corpse dug up by those who suspected its posthumous activity. In no way does this correspond to these spirits and deities, who were never human and appear as animal hybrids. Yes, I’ll get to the claims about Lilith’s human origin, but that’s irrelevant here, since according to her origin, as you’ll see, she was not a human, or undead. Moreover, revenants were never known to attack only children. The entire claim seems predicated on the detail about Lamashtu’s blood drinking, like someone went looking for the first ever thing thought to drink blood and then made the unsupportable assertion that there was some direct line of folkloric descent from that legend to vampires. A more logical but equally insupportable claim would be that the blood drinking aspect of vampires derived from other parasites known to suck blood, like leeches, or mosquitoes, which also spread disease like malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever, though we didn’t know it back then. But on another level, there are some clear parallels between folklore and superstitions about vampires and those about Lamashtu and Lilith. As with revenants, Lamashtu was a scapegoat, blamed for the spreading of disease, likely blamed for sleep paralysis since she was thought to bring nightmares, and held responsible for any number of illnesses that might result in a child’s death or the death of a mother during childbirth. Lamashtu was even said to kill the unborn, so she appears to have been the scapegoat for stillbirth as well. It is clear that the figure of Lilith descended in some ways from the demoness Lamashtu, and it is clear that she too served as a scapegoat for a number of misfortunes, some similar and some quite different, but her myth took on ever more strange aspects, and she developed amazing importance in more than one religious tradition. So let’s begin with a look at the first real appearance of Lilith, not as a creature but a woman, the so-called “phantom maiden.”

A Pazuzu statue like the one shown in The Exorcist. Image credit: Lamiot (CC BY-SA 3.0)

I have spoken at some length, in my series on giants and my series on Flood Myths and Noah’s Ark, about the Epic of Gilgamesh. In case this is your first episode or you missed those others, the Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem that may have served as the source material for numerous biblical traditions. I spoke about the Flood Myth of Utnapishtim serving as the basis of the story of Noah, but additionally, there appear to be parallels and connections to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in Eden. For example, the eating of the forbidden fruit appears to correspond to the Sumerian god Enki eating forbidden flowers and being cursed by his goddess wife, Ninḫursag, and dying. Each part of his body died, and when Ninḫursag relented in her curse, giving birth to goddesses who would each heal a part of Enki’s body, especial focus is given to his rib, and the goddess Nin-ti, or lady of the rib. Indeed, the Sumerian word for rib, ti, apparently also meant “to make live,” so Nin-ti meant both “the lady of the rib” and “the lady who makes live.” Some scholars believe that this ancient pun may be the origin for the part of the story of Genesis in which God makes a woman live from the rib of Adam. This aspect of the Genesis narrative will be very relevant to our discussion of Lilith later, but right now, what is more relevant, is the story of the Huluppu Tree, which some see as a parallel of or perhaps the origin of the story of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in which dwelled the Serpent. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess Inanna finds a primeval tree growing on the Euphrates River. In its roots, a snake or dragon nested, and in its uppermost branches, a massive, fire-breathing bird. Inanna wants to make a throne and bed of the tree, but these creatures stood in her way, and worse than they, in the trunk of the tree, so the poem states, Lilith, the phantom maiden, made her home. The word translated as Lilith here is Lillake, meaning ghost or phantom. In the Sumerian King List, an ancient chronicle kept to legitimize and delegitimize the reigns of various rulers, it is said that Gilgamesh, the basis of the poem who likely was a real king, was himself the son of a lilu demon. There is a strong sense among scholars that gradually, the monstrous she-demon Lamashtu and the evil lilu wind demons like Pazuzu, who were called lilitu in the feminine form, gradually came to be viewed as similar or the same. Such that the Lillake described in the Huluppu Tree was described as a ghostly young woman, a phantom maiden. Here is an inflection point in the development of the myth of Lillith. Gilgamesh drives the serpent from the tree roots, the great bird from its branches, and the phantom maiden from its trunk, and it is said that she flees from there into the wilderness or desert. It is there where we next find her.

Only once in all of the Bible is Lilith mentioned, and even then, the mention is dubious and demonstrates the nature of the figure as well as how she changed through the ages. In the book of Isaiah, chapter 34, verses 13 and 14, as the 8th century Israelite prophet, speaking of God’s judgment on nations and listing the many misfortunes that will befall a nation being divinely judged, talks of wild beasts and other creatures overrunning it: “Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. It shall be the haunt of jackals, an abode for ostriches. Wildcats shall meet with hyenas; goat-demons shall call to each other; there also Lilith shall repose and find a place to rest.” There is some debate about the historical context of the book of Isaiah, as well as its authorship, owing to changes in style and anachronisms that suggest everything after chapter 39 or 40 may have been written by a different, later author, but this chapter that makes mention of Lilith, quoted here in the New Revised Standard translation, is believed to represent the words of Proto-Isaiah, the prophet himself, who lived in the 8th century BCE in the Kingdom of Judah. A closer look at the original Hebrew and a comparison of the various translations may help us better understand this reference. The word lilit, taken in some translations as a proper name, is in other versions translated as night-spirit, night-monster, night-demon, night hag, night animals (plural), night bird, and screech owl.  Some versions even change the name entirely to Lamia, an analogous child-eating female spirit from Greek myth who seems to be yet another iteration of the original Lilith figure, likely itself derived from the ancient Lamashtu. But this is a leap, for the Hebrew word being translated is lilit. I find the New Living Translation’s choice to refer to a plural, night creatures, as apt, since otherwise the verses in question are referring to plural beasts taking residence in the desolate nation. Remember that the original basis for the name Lilith seems to have been the plural word for Mesopotamian wind demons, lilu in the masculine, and lili or lilitu in the feminine. Thus the verse may not be referring to a singular figure, as many have believed, but rather a class of demons. Many translations view the previous creatures mentioned as goat demons, sometimes translated as satyrs; therefore, the verse would be describing both wild creatures and demons making the judged nation their abode. Other translations have it, however, that these verses are only describing wild creatures, specifically wild goats, and they translate lilit as a kind of bird, or specifically a screech owl. This seems questionable to me, since a few verses earlier, in verse 11, an entirely different word is widely translated as screech owl. However, the mythical Lilith, or particular female examples of the class of demons called lilitu, had long been associated with owls. One terracotta relief out of Babylon, the Burney Relief, has been discovered depicting her as a beautiful nude woman with wings and the feathered talon feet of an owl. And this image of her as a chimeric hybrid appears contemporaneous with the account in Isaiah, as on a 7th-century BCE tablet out of Syria, the Arslan Tash amulet, she is depicted as a kind of winged sphinx creature. Thus she may have been viewed as both a demoness and a wild creature, as she had previously been portrayed nesting in a tree in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Strange then that she would later be viewed as so human, less beastly and more beautiful.

The Burney Relief, depicting a monstrous Lilith. Image credit: Aiwok (CC BY-SA 3.0)

To make a clear and striking juxtaposition, Lilith today is viewed as a dark and beautiful woman with long hair. When we aren’t hearing about her as the progenitrix of vampires, she is thought to be the mother of all demons. Rather than originating as an offspring of a god, as did Pazuzu and Lamashtu, making her a kind of demigoddess, as were the demons from which her lore derives, she instead is claimed to have originated in Paradise, when the Judeo-Christian God created man and woman. She in fact is said to have been the first wife of Adam, formed from the dust just like him and therefore equal to him, not formed from a part of him like Adam’s second wife, Eve, and thus not subservient to him. Because of this aspect of her myth, she has become something of a feminist icon, representing an empowered and coequal gender, whom Adam rejects for not acquiescing to his domination. Thus Lilith, spurned but also defiant, sprouts wings and flies to freedom. In some depictions of her, like Pazuzu before her, she is associated with a serpent that winds itself around her, and as her myth developed, she became associated with the the figure of Satan. Some tellings have it that she returned to Eden to tempt Eve, whom she resented, with the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Thus we see again Lilith nesting in the tree in paradise, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Other versions focus on her insatiable sexual appetite and after her fall make of her more of a succubus demon who returns to Adam to have intercourse with him, and from her unholy unions with Adam as well as with other men, she conceives and gives birth to other demons, an entire race of succubi and incubi, called lilin, and so once again we return in a roundabout fashion to the notion that Lilith is not unique but rather one of an entire race of demons with similar attributes and behavior. But how did we get from the notion of Lilith as the later version of Lamashtu, a wild, animalistic demoness, part bird, who devours children, to the notion that she was one of God first creations, made in his image in Paradise? The answer is that it was invented, whole cloth, during the Middle Ages in an apocryphal work of Aramaic and Hebrew proverbs.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira is believed to have been composed anonymously between 700 and 1000 CE. The work was clearly inspired by a Hebrew collection of ethical lessons written in Jerusalem in the 2nd century BCE by one Ben Sira, but scholars believe the medieval work to be more of a satire. The author likes to address topics such as sexual intercourse, masturbation, urination, and flatulence. In fact, fair warning, any discussion of this composition, as well as certain aspects of Lilith, will get a bit bawdy and weird. It has been suggested that the Alphabet of Ben Sira may have actually been written by a Jew as a kind of burlesque comedy poking fun at his own traditions, or by a non-Jew as a kind of mockery of Judaism. One example of the parodic nature of the work is that its protagonist, Ben Sira, is said to be the grandson of the prophet Jeremiah, whom God had commanded not to marry or have children. Well, according to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, Jeremiah did have a partner, and had a daughter with her, but in an effort to obey God’s command, would apparently practice Onanism, or coitus interruptus—which, at the risk of being crude, is basically pulling out to spill one’s seed. According to the author, the prophet Jeremiah did this once in bathwater that his daughter afterward bathed in, resulting in his impregnating his own daughter, making Ben Sira both the grandson and son of the prophet Jeremiah. One can see why this work is apocryphal and rejected even back in the Middle Ages by Jewish philosophers and rabbis. The passage in which the author invents the modern legend of Lilith occurs when King Nebuchadnezzar asks Ben Sira to heal his son, and Ben Sira blames Lilith for the boy’s illness and makes an amulet for his protection. He then explains who Lilith is to Nebuchadnezzar, saying God created her for Adam so that Adam wouldn’t be alone and made her out of earth just as He had made Adam. However, they began to argue over sexual positions, with Lilith refusing to be on the bottom, and Adam insisting that he was superior and therefore must be on top. Lilith protests that they are, in fact, equal, being made from the same stuff, and when Adam denies it, she abandons him, sprouting wings and flying away to the sea. Adam, of course, complains to God that his woman has run off, so God sends angels to bring her back. Lilith, however, refuses to return and claims she “was created only to cause sickness to infants.” The story concludes with Ben Sira explaining that, because of the deal she struck with the angels sent after her, the amulet he had made would be effective at driving her off. The story further indicates that she is the mother of demons, many of whom are doomed to perish every day. The tale given in the Alphabet of Ben Sira is the first known suggestion of her creation in Eden as Adam’s wife, but the notion of her as a bringer of misfortune to children, which is also present, was likely inherited from her forerunner, Lamashtu. How she came to be known as the mother of demons is not especially clear, but it would come to define her persona.

Adam clutches a child in the presence of the child-snatcher Lilith.

The next development of the Lilith myth came in another medieval Jewish text, the Zohar. This work was said to have been composed actually long before the Alphabet of Ben Sira, in the 2nd century CE, supposedly by the famed sage Rashbi, or Shimon ben Yochai, but this claim appears to only have been made by the man who first promoted the text, Moshe ben Shemtov, or Moses de León, a Spanish rabbi and Kabbalist, a kind of traditional mystic. The problem is that Moses de León was known to compose pseudepigraphal Kabbalistic tracts, meaning he falsely attributed his writings to other, typically ancient and more authoritative sources, which increased their value. In other words, he was a forger. Indeed, de León’s widow, according to one report, explicitly revealed the Moses de León wrote the Zohar himself in the 13th century and attached Rashbi’s name to it in order to make it more valuable. Nevetheless, within fifty years, it was considered a core sacred text among many Spanish Kabbalists. Regardless of the authorship controversy, the book purports to be a collection of the teachings of the sage Rashbi, as well as commentaries on the Torah and allegorical narratives. In it, Lilith is discussed some sixty times, and in other Kabbalistic writings, her myth is further expanded. The notion that she was created of dust the same as Adam is reinforced, but in some Kabbalistic works, it is claimed that, for some unclear reason, when God made Lilith he formed her not of good, clean dust or soil, but rather of unclean filth. The idea that she fled Paradise after a quarrel with Adam remains. However, in the Zohar, we learn that Adam actually impregnated Lilith before she fled, and that when she bears his children, they are demons or spirits, thus clarifying Lilith’s role as a mother of demons. A further aspect clarified is her perpetual yearning for male companionship, such that when she fled from Paradise, at one point she found herself near God’s throne, which was surrounded by Cherubim, and since cherubs looked like little boys, she attached herself to them. But it was Adam she longed for, and Kabbalist tradition tells us she returned to the garden, but finding Eve with him, she schemed to be rid of her by tempting her, thereby contributing to Adam’s Fall as well. But Kabbalist tradition is far more intricate than this. Kabbalist mystics actually rewrote much of the origin story of Lilith, suggesting that rather than a creation of God she was a spontaneously generated divine creature, a kind of manifested aspect of God, an emanation from beneath his throne, which kind of sounds like a fart to me. By this alternative version, she was only part of an androgynous, dual entity, Lilith being the female half and Samael, a rebel angel and adversary to God identified with Satan, was her male counterpart. Thus, Lilith and the Devil were one and the same, so she was the Serpent in the Garden just as much as he was. Despite this development of Kabbalistic lore that has Lilith being more of a demoness from the start, she is always depicted as longing for Adam and for the company of all men. After the Fall, she copulates with Cain, bearing many demons. And Adam, upon finding out that their expulsion from Paradise and the murder of his son may have had to do with his connubial relationship to Lilith, decides to be celibate and not even lie with Eve for a whopping 130 years. However, during these many years, it’s said that Lilith comes to Adam in his sleep, stealing his seed, and begetting many demons, an entire demonic race, in fact: the Lilin, a plague upon mankind that are said to lurk in dark places, such as doorways and wells and in pits used as latrines. Thus, in the Middle ages, a tale that likely began as satire was expanded upon by forgers and mystics into the full-fledged myth of a separately created woman, a nymphomaniac spirit who caused the fall of man and became a succubus that mothered an army of demons.

A simple explanation for the popularity of this growing and changing myth is that, much like her folkloric precursor, Lamashtu, Lilith served as a useful scapegoat and superstitious explanation for a variety of misfortunes and embarrassing or baffling experiences. While the philosophers and mystics spoke of her origin and nature, the everyday people only feared her and blamed her for things. Her nature as a succubus who stole the seed of men to give birth to demons meant that Lilith was commonly believed to be the cause of nocturnal emissions. Whenever a male had a wet dream, it was said that Lilith had come to him in his dreams and succeeded in arousing him to the point of impregnating her. Perhaps the men or boys who had these nocturnal emissions and were embarrassed by them or confused were consoled by this superstition. Men also likely claimed to their wives that they had better engage in frequent intercourse with them or it would be their fault when Lilith came to them, and it was thought that when Lilith succeeded in seducing a man, she gained some rights of cohabitation in the household. Thus later artifacts that bear the name of Lilith, like incantation bowls and other charms, are inscribed as literal writs of divorce, declaring that Lilith had no rights there. The danger was even thought to exist when a man slept with his wife, whether he spilled his seed outside of her on purpose, if you’ll excuse the frankness of my remarks, or even if some of his semen was lost accidentally. Lilith was thought to lurk in the bedsheets, waiting to steal it, and rather comically, men would shout out at the moment of orgasm, “Release, release! Neither come nor go! The seed is not yours!” Nor were men alone the supposed victims of Lilith or her other succubi children, for some of her demon offspring were male incubi and were said to visit women in their sleep and impregnate them. Of course, one can easily imagine this scapegoat being quite handy if a woman needed to explain a seemingly inexplicable pregnancy. And it must also have been used as a defense by rapists, who could easily blame a woman’s violation on some incubus. But this idea of the incubus seducing or assaulting women in dreams returns us to the notion of sleep paralysis and the “incubus phenomenon,” the sleep disorder in which one feels pressure on them and even has a vision of a dark figure or night hag—the origin of the word nightmare. So Lilith and her brood can be seen as a superstitious explanation of those hypnopompic hallucinations, another parallel with revenants or vampires. And also like revenants, they were blamed for inexplicable deaths or illnesses. It was said that Lilith attacked pregnant women because of her resentment of Eve and her partnership with Adam. Thus when a woman died in childbirth or afterward, from the all too common childbed fever, it was said Lilith had taken her. Likewise, Lilith, like her antecedent Lamashtu, was said to prey upon children, blamed for stillbirths and miscarriage, and was also blamed when children died in infancy. She was sometimes said to drink their blood, which aspect had likely been carried down through the centuries from superstitions about Lamashtu, but mostly she was said to strangle babies in their cradles. As one might imagine, then, Lilith took the blame when the terrible and seemingly incomprehensible tragedy of crib death, or what we might today call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, occurred. Indeed, even adults who died in their sleep were said to have been taken by Lilith or her Lilin; it was said that after a succubus or incubus demon successfully seduced someone, they might change form and kill them. Thus, Lilith evolved to become a kind of catch-all superstition, a scapegoat for most mysterious phenomena related to sleep, maternity, and infancy.

Illustration of Lilith’s involvement in the temptation of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden.

As we have seen, through syncretism, dubious satirical texts, pseudepigraphal forgeries, and mystical apocrypha, the myth of Lilith grew through the ages. But how, some may rightly ask, could an orthodox believer, a modern Christian or Jew who credits only canonical scriptures, ever come to believe in the figure of Lilith when she is only explicitly mentioned in Isaiah and even then only in some versions? The answer comes in a unique interpretation of the Genesis Creation story. The book of Genesis actually appears to have two versions of the story of God’s creation of mankind, in chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 1 verse 26, it says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness…’” and concludes in the next verse, which states, “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” Then in chapter 2, it tells a slightly different version of the story, having God make man first, saying in verse 7 “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Only later, beginning in verse 18, is woman created: “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner’… then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.” This double telling of the story is easily explained if one views Genesis as a combination of traditional texts which vary in their particulars. After all, Chapters 1 and 2 have distinctly different styles, present the events of Creation in a different order, and even use different words for God. The orthodox view of the separate accounts is just that Chapter 1 represents a larger overview of the cosmological events of Creation and Chapter 2 zooms in for a more human focus. But if one is wanting to find evidence of Lilith in Genesis, one will certainly be inclined to view the first Creation story as being the Creation of Adam and Lilith, and the second as being an explanation of the reason for Eve’s later creation. When God says it’s not good for man to be alone, it must be because Lilith has fled from Adam, for God is omniscient and must have known such things even before Creation. It’s an interesting interpretation, but one can creatively interpret scripture in many such ways to find evidence of things that aren’t there. Consider the “Gap Theory” or gap creationism. To reconcile the Genesis story of Creation with the geological time scale, theologians have suggested that each day of creation actually represented an entire age, whereas others have said that some extended gap occurred between the creation of the heavens and earth in verse one and the rest of the creative acts that are listed starting in verse two. Such an interpretation allows believers to trust in a literal interpretation of the Bible without denying many of the findings of modern science, such as the age of the earth, and the fossil record, dinosaurs, etc. However, it has also led some to believe that, since there was a first creation, and later a second creation that included mankind, that there must have existed some first attempt at creating humans, a so-called “pre-Adamic” race. Unsurprisingly, in the 19th century, this notion was latched onto by racists looking for some religious support for their ideas that non-white people are inferior, suggesting they are the descendants of a separate Creation, a failed dry run at humanity. All of this from literally reading between the lines, a mythos of hatred born from the blank space between the first two verses in Genesis. We see how these ideas spread and evolve, and how they are used to justify superstition and false beliefs. The development of the apocryphal myth of Lilith is much the same, syncretistically adapted from ancient pagan folklore, fictionalized and expanded on through the inventions and interpretations of charlatans and mystics, until even modern theologians find arcane reasons to credit it because they want to. It seems like it should be enough to cause any honest critical thinker to lose faith in such claims and interpretations.

*

Until next time, remember, ancient texts are often a mish mash, a collage of pieced together traditions, compilations of copied manuscripts, a palimpsest through which can be discerned traces of previous writings and ideas, often falsely attributed to some famous figure when they were actually composed by some faceless scribe. Can’t we just appreciate them for what they are, a priceless cultural artifact that teaches us about our past, without insisting they’re actually some monolithic divine pronouncement?

Further Reading

Blasdell, Heather L. “‘...And There Shall The Lilith Repose.’” Mythlore, vol. 14, no. 4 (54), 1988, pp. 4–12. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26812954. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

Kramer, Samuel N., and W. F. Albright. “Enki and Ninḫursag: A Sumerian ‘Paradise’ Myth.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Supplementary Studies, no. 1, 1945, pp. 1–40. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/20062705. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

Patai, Raphael. “Lilith.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 77, no. 306, 1964, pp. 295–314. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/537379. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

Soza, Joel R. Lucifer, Leviathan, Lilith, and Other Mysterious Creatures of the Bible. Hamilton Books, 2017.

Omens, Charms, and Rituals: A History of Superstition

On many porches right now there rot pumpkins that were hollowed out for Halloween and transformed into lanterns with candles or electric lights, illuminating grimacing grins from within. Long is the history of this ritual, though it was not always pumpkins that were carved, but rather turnips and other vegetables, their glowing visages said to ward off the spirits that walked the earth that day. They are called Jack-o-lanterns, however, because of a Western European folktale about a particular spirit said to walk the earth. The story of Jack of the Lantern, or Stingy Jack in the Irish version, is the story of a wicked man who tricked the Devil. The specifics of the tale vary from region to region, but essentially, this man Jack, either a blacksmith or a common thief, convinced the Devil to transform himself into a coin, which Jack put into his pocket next to a cross, or that he lured the Devil into a tree and carved a cross onto its trunk, or by some tellings he did both, trapping the Devil more than once. The thrust of the story is that Jack promised to free the Devil if the Devil promised not to take his soul. When Jack eventually died, he was too wicked to go to heaven, but the Devil, because of their bargain, could not take him. Thus, he was doomed to forever wander the darkness. The Devil gave him a burning coal to light his way, which some say he placed into a hollowed out turnip. In fact, the legend of Jack o’ Lantern is merely one iteration of an older folktale, in which the man’s name is given as Will rather than Jack, and he is doomed to wander with a bundle of sticks used as a torch, called a “wisp.” You may have heard of the Will-o’-the-Wisp: they are reportedly magical lights seen in the night, said to lure travelers to their doom. They have been called many things through the ages, including fairy fire and fairy lights, hinkypunk, and Irrlicht, or deceiving light, in German, which was later Latinized as ignis fatuus, or foolish fire. The reason for these latter names is clear. The lights were most commonly seen in marshland and swamp, and if a traveler followed them, they became lost, thus making them portents of ill fortune and death. They were first written about early in the 14th century, in a Welsh work that gave another interesting name for the phenomenon: the corpse candle. This indicates that the lights were often seen floating around graveyards as well, which corresponds to the claims of modern ghost hunters who have reported sightings of ghost lights or orbs in cemeteries. As it turns out, there are some rather compelling scientific explanations for this phenomenon. Due to the decay that occurs both in marshes and graveyards, the presence of methane gas likely results in a chemical luminescence, or chemiluminescence. This is, essentially, the much maligned “swamp gas” explanation of UFO sightings, but it remains the most likely rational explanation of will-o’-the-wisp, fitting the features of reports better than other explanations, like bioluminescent insects, St. Elmo’s Fire, or ball lightning. While science provides a rational explanation today, though, it must be recognized that folklore did the same job in ages past, providing a rationalization of an otherwise unexplained phenomenon. And the fact that it was thought to be a harbinger of bad luck too makes sense, for certainly there must have been travelers who wandered into a swamp following the lights they saw there and got stuck, or lost their wagons and carts or even their lives. They saw the lights, and afterward, they met ill fortune or death. But of course, the real cause of it was leaving the road and forging into marshlands, not the luminescent phenomenon in the distance. Such is the nature of superstition. It attributes a false cause to both good and bad fortune, giving believers some agency in it, through ritual, as well as some sense that they understand a world that is full of mystery and misfortune.

To connect this topic to the recent series, the myth of vampires was, from its origin, a superstition. The word derives from a Latin word which means “to stand over in awe,” and it’s typically defined as an irrational belief borne out of ignorance and fear, but as I stated, many superstitions can be seen to have derived from fallacious reasoning, specifically the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, which means “after this; therefore, because of this” and describes the flawed logic of ascribing a cause to some phenomenon simply because the phenomenon occurred after it—your basic confusion of correlation or coincidence with causation. In the vampire superstition, we see villagers assuming that some rampant disease that occurred after a certain person’s death must be caused by that dead person. Thus, it seems, superstition can beget folklore, or vice versa. As a further example of the folklore of vampirism being related to superstition, we see the element of vampire lore that revenants have no reflection in a mirror, which, even if Bram Stoker was first to connect it to vampires, still reflects, if you will, the superstition that mirrors captured and showed the human soul, which Count Dracula did not have. Of course, we can see this explanation of reflection as an attempt to rationally explain, in the absence of a true understanding of the process, why one could see oneself in a looking glass. That wasn’t you in the glass; it was an embodiment of your eternal self. Thus we can easily understand the superstitious belief that breaking a mirror, or even looking at one’s reflection in a cracked mirror, can result in bad luck. In fact, it was sometimes believed to portend death. The very specific number of seven years’ bad luck may have evolved from an old Roman belief that the body and therefore the soul renewed itself in seven year cycles, a superstition that remains popular today, with many believing the erroneous myth that the human body undergoes a kind of cellular regeneration every seven years. This belief about mirrors was once so pronounced that if one broke a mirror, it was considered imperative to grind up its pieces in order to free the soul trapped within. The notion that mirrors separated the soul from the body in this way led many to believe that they made our souls vulnerable to being taken by the Devil or by other spirits. This appears to be the origin of the superstitious practice of covering mirrors after someone has died. If one wasn’t afraid of the ghost of the departed spiriting away one’s soul from the mirror, then one was typically afraid of looking into the mirror and seeing the reflection of the ghost behind them. Thus, mirrors have also long been used as a kind of spirit trap, placing mirrors in doorways to catch any ghosts that might step into them, thinking they were walking into another room. 

Accusing the anointers in the great plague of Milan in 1630. This image comes from Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom. Refer to Wellcome blog post (archive). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

As we see in vampire lore, disease breeds superstition, and nothing is so likely to generate such beliefs as an epidemic disease, like the Plague. The superstitious ritual of blessing someone who sneezes is sometimes claimed to have originated with the Plague, but this is not accurate. Medieval texts as far back as the 13th century describe people responding to a sneeze with the phrase “God helpe you” as a blessing against pestilence. It is true, however, that the Black Plague originated numerous false cause claims as the blighted communities sought to blame the disease on something or someone. These false cause superstitions typically resulted in scapegoating, which we have seen in the libels and persecutions against Jews, when they were said to have poisoned wells. I spoke about this in my episode In the Footsteps of the Wandering Jew. Churchmen also blamed the plague on sin, and on witchcraft. Indeed, in Italy, there was even a name for the scapegoats of the plague, whether Jewish or not. They were called “anointers,” and they were thought to spread the disease through poisonous oils that they sprinkled from vials. This led to many innocent people being hunted by mobs simply because someone, likely a personal enemy or rival, accused them of being an anointer. As an example, in one incident, an 80-year-old man seen brushing off a bench in church before sitting on it was said to be anointing the benches with poison and was set upon by an angry mob and dragged through the street, likely to his death. Other superstitions borne from casting about for a cause of the plague resulted more from ignorance about the nature of disease rather than from scapegoating. As I have discussed before, the miasma theory of disease reigned prior to our modern understanding of germ theory, and it was thought that vapors or emanations spread disease, providing a very basic understanding of airborne disease. The bubonic plague was not airborne, however. It was caused by the bite of infected fleas or by being exposed, through broken skin, to infected material. Nevertheless, as it was noticed that those near other infected or who were around the plague dead frequently became infected themselves, it was thought that they must be contracting the disease by inhaling the infectious vapors, those bad smells, which they reasoned could be countered by good smells, or even just different smells. Thus the line, “pocketful of posies,” is immortalized in the nursery rhyme Ring around the Rosie, inspired by the Black Death, as flowers were kept on one’s person to stave off the smell that slays. This miasma theory of disease also resulted in the superstition that one should hold one’s breath while passing a graveyard. Less logical were other supposed charms against the bubonic plague, such as wearing a toad around the neck or rubbing pigeons on one’s buboes. Nor were all flowers alike considered effective against the plague. Indeed, hawthorn blossoms were thought to actually bring the plague, since they apparently smelled of the plague dead. This has since been explained by science as the presence of Trimethylamine, a compound present in hawthorn as well as in decaying flesh.

Hawthorn trees and shrubs seem to have become connected to numerous superstitions, perhaps because of the smell of death surrounding them. In Vampire lore, it was often stakes of hawthorn, or hawthorn cuttings with thorns, that were used to “kill” vampires or to keep them away. So while they seemed bad luck as they related to the Plague, they were good luck when it came to dealing with revenants, and this mixed significance, as we will see, is rather common. Romans believed hawthorn sacred and used it for torches, or tied their leaves to cradles to ward off evil. Pliny the Elder wrote that destroying a hawthorn bush would get you struck by lightning. Yet when the Christian Church spread, it was claimed that the thorns placed on Christ’s brow were of hawthorn, giving it a negative connotation that was amplified when it was later claimed that witches commonly used the plant in their spell-making. Likewise, the belief that walking under a ladder is bad luck comes from the fact that a ladder, leaning against a building, forms a triangle. Triangles were symbolic of life to Egyptians, and of the Trinity to Christians, so pagan or not, passing through such a sacred symbol was considered blasphemous. Or at least, that’s one explanation. There is also the simpler explanation that ladders were used in medieval gallows, and one just wouldn’t want to pass under those, or the even simpler explanation that you wouldn’t want to pass under a ladder because objects or people were apt to fall on you. The true origins of bad luck superstitions are often hard to pinpoint like this. Was it bad luck to pass someone on a staircase because it was believed ghosts haunted staircases, or because one was more likely to have a bad fall if they ran into someone there? Was it bad luck to let milk boil over because it was believed to harm the cow and make it more likely to stop producing milk, or because milk was precious and only kept in small quantities, fresh, in an age before refrigeration? Is the number 13 considered so unlucky (such that it causes a fear complex known as Triskaidekaphobia) because in ancient astrology it was thought that during the 13th millennium chaos would reign? Or because in Norse mythology, Loki attended a feast of the gods as the thirteenth guest and initiated Ragnarök—the destruction of the gods—with a deadly prank? Or rather, is it because, at the last supper, the betrayer, Judas Iscariot, was the thirteenth person at the table? We may never know, but we do know that, to Jews, it is an auspicious number, the age at which a boy becomes a man, a number representing the word for love. Then again, it has also been suggested that fear of the number 13 actually derives from an anti-Semitic fear of the Jews.

a mummified hand of a hanged man, used for folk healing as well as folk magic. Image credit: www.badobadop.co.uk. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Many superstitions go further than just a fear of bad luck when, like the witnessing of the will-o’-the-wisp, objects or events are considered to be omens of imminent death. Much like one’s image in a mirror came to represent their soul or their self, and the destruction of that mirror was considered an ill portent, portraits too were thought to represent a person’s well-being or true self, and if they fell from the wall, it was thought an omen of death. Perhaps this notion is what inspired Oscar Wilde’s wonderfully creepy short story, “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”—if one could safekeep their portrait for an eternity, perhaps it might render them immortal, and might the portrait itself change along with the quality of its owner’s soul? Likewise, as clocks became were used by more and more people, and as we began to measure our lives in minutes and hours rather than by the progress of the sun in the sky, by the 19th century, a stopped clock had come to represent the ceasing of life. Thus it is no great stretch to understand why a stopped clock that may suddenly and unexplainably chime could be seen as an omen of death. Many were the unsupported claims that a broken clock would inexplicably ring out just before an ill loved one’s passing. This may have been related to superstitions about not talking during the chiming of bells, since that sound had been associated with death all the way back to the Plague, when churches rang their bells to mark a death and were ringing almost constantly. Many such superstitions arose from those who dealt with death and attempted to understand the process by which death spreads, as we saw with the lore of revenants. The souls of the dead were thought to remain a while and to pose some mortal or spiritual threat to the living in other ways besides rising from the grave a vampire, as we saw with beliefs about mirrors. This idea explains why it was considered bad luck to encounter a funeral procession and not take off one’s hat or join the procession for the rest of its march, and it was thought that pointing at such a procession would mean certain death within a month’s time. Likewise, a superstitious individual would not walk over anyone’s grave nor remove flowers from a resting place, and if they felt a chill, they thought someone had walked over their grave—even if they had not yet chosen their burial place. Not all superstitions about the dead involved ill fortune, though. For example, it was thought that touching a dead person at their viewing could impart good luck, could heal certain illnesses or conditions like warts, which they believed were passed to the deceased, or would at least prevent the dead from haunting you. More specifically, it was believed that being stroked by a dead criminal’s hand could cure facial cysts and goiters. It was not so much their criminality but rather their untimely death at the gallows, for if you recall, there was a belief about people having an appointed 70 years of life. Thus, one who dies before their time, while one folk belief said they may rise as revenants, another had it that the additional life denied them acted as some kind of mystical palliative. As murder victims and suicides were not frequently stumbled upon, it was criminals, who were publicly hanged, that became the source of this strange medicine, and it was not uncommon so see people approach the freshly hanged to touch their hands, or for mothers to pass their afflicted infants to the executioner so that he would press the hands of the dead on their faces. The belief was so prevalent that doctors were known to keep withered hands in their kits to rub on their patients.

There are numerous superstitions about animals having premonitions about death as well, for example, dogs, which were invested with prophetic abilities in both the Egyptian and Roman cultures. Perhaps because of this ancient folklore, the howling of dogs became an omen of death in various European cultures. However, some may have had other reasons to be struck with terror at the sound of a howl in the night. If I were speaking of France, you might assume that I refer to the howling of wolves as striking terror into the hearts of those who hear it, but hearing howling at night was also a cause of great fear throughout the UK long after wolves were stamped out in the 14th century. You may suspect that I’m going to bring up werewolves now, but instead, I speak of the beasts on the moor, or folktales about fearsome black dogs. Many are the tales of these supposedly supernatural creatures: the Cú-sith of Scotland, the Gwyllgi of Wales, and the Gytrash of Northern England. But perhaps the most famous is the Black Shuck which is thought to range through countryside of East Anglia. Like werewolves, and like the will-o’-the-wisp, it was thought to haunt dark roads at night and prey upon travelers, recognizable by his blazing eye, which, of course, sounds like it could be mistaken for a will-o’-the-wisp. It was claimed that its terrifying howl could be heard, but not its footsteps as it galloped to set upon you, which of course causes one to doubt that anything was actually running toward those who claimed to have had close encounters with it. If one was not killed by the Black Shuck, it was still considered bad luck to encounter them, and travelers were advised to close their eyes if they heard the beast’s howling, even if it might just be the wind, a specification that certainly suggests many such supposed close calls were only encounters with the howling wind. One encounter describes a more corporeal beast, however. In Suffolk, in 1577, it is recorded that a black dog burst into Holy Trinity Church, leaving scorch marks on the door that today are called the “devil’s fingerprints,” and then killed two churchgoers where they knelt. Accounts like this one, and superstition surrounding the Black Shuck and other black dogs like it would go on to inspire the Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. If I were to act the Sherlock here, I’d point out that archaeologists have examined the teardrop shaped scorch marks and determined they were apparently purposely made with candle flames, and descriptions of the Black Shuck entering the church with the sound of a thunderclap, in conjunction with the fact that a violent thunderstorm occurred on the same night, leads one to believe that the imaginations of those present may have run away with them.

Account of the appearance of the ghostly black dog "Black Shuck" at the church in Suffolk in 1577.

Superstitions about black dogs now lead me back to the trailhead by which I embarked on this investigation, recommended to me by generous patron Jonathon: black cats. Jonathon suggested I devote an entire episode to black cat superstition, and I hope he’s not disappointed that instead it serves as just part of a longer episode about superstition generally. As we saw with other categories of superstition, whether something represents good or bad luck is not always clear and varies from culture to culture. The same is true of cats, and black cats specifically. As with dogs, cats have been domesticated since great antiquity, giving us plenty of time to develop folklore and superstitious beliefs about them. In various global traditions, they long served as symbols for protection, independence, and good fortune. Going all the way back to Egyptian and Norse mythology, cats are considered sacred, servants of the gods, vanquishers of evil spirits. Their positive reputation as protectors of the household grew with their role as mousers over the centuries. And while it is commonly thought in America and many other places that a black cat crossing one’s path is bad luck, in Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, exactly the opposite is true. Owning or even seeing a black cat is thought to be a sign of coming prosperity. Indeed, so strong is the belief that a black cat brings good luck there that it is thought their deaths can bring an end to good fortune. Charles I, the Stuart king, apparently believed as much and set his guards to protect his black cat as if they were protecting his very life, which he believed to be so. As legend has it, his cat died regardless, and the very next day, while he mourned the loss of his beloved pet and his good luck, Cromwell’s men showed up to arrest him, leading to his eventual execution. This story certainly smacks of embellishment, but it illustrates the extent of the belief that black cats are good luck. Another example is the presence of dried cats walled up in buildings as lucky charms. Not only in the UK but also in other European cities and even in the buildings of colonial America, cats that were desiccated through smoking and then placed within the walls of buildings and posed as though in the act of catching a mouse, have been discovered. It’s thought that they were placed there as a kind of scarecrow, to drive off potential ghosts or evil spirits, but in truth, we don’t know the purpose of the practice. One thing that modern science has shown us, though, is why the black cat’s coat is black, and it does indeed seem to indicate that the creatures are good luck. Their coats are black due to a certain mutant gene that also makes them more resistant to disease, and which scientists are studying for possible applications in medicine, specifically to treat HIV.

A depiction of Cathars worshipping a cat as if it were the Devil, and preparing to kiss its backside, an act called “osculum infame,” the kiss of shame. Image credit: cathar.info

Unsurprisingly, we have the Christian Church to thank for demonizing black cats. It seems to have begun with the odd belief that cats are somehow lewd. Well, certainly they do often present their anus to us with an upturned tail, but I rather think that such a belief says more about medieval Christians than it does about cats. I imagine they saw a cat’s exposed rear and then interpreted the cat’s backward glance as some kind of come hither look. Cut to them thumping their bibles and calling cats harlots. Eventually, it was thought that they were not just lewd creatures but also the very Devil in disguise. In the 12th-century tale of St. Bartholomew, the Devil takes the form of a cat. And in the Albigensian Crusade, a 13th-century military campaign against heretics in the south of France, it was claimed that the Cathar sect there did things like kiss the anus of the Devil, who had taken the form of a black cat. Indeed, it is suggested that this was the why they were called Cathars. From there it is no surprise that the same accusations were resurrected against accused witches by the Inquisition. Thus black cats were either the devil incarnate, or they were the familiars of witches. Some claim that the association of witchcraft with cats goes all the way back to Greek mythology, when a figure named Galinthias, servant of Hera, tried to interfere with Heracles’s birth and was punished by being transformed into a cat and cast into the underworld to serve Hecate, goddess of witchcraft. However, this is a stretch. Hecate was more of a goddess of magic, as without the Christian notion of a devil, the concept of witchcraft was not really the same in Greek myth. Also, some versions have it that Galinthias was transformed into a weasel, making this a tenuous basis for the origin of the witch and black cat relationship. Nevertheless, they were believed to be connected, and this is the very origin of persistent superstitions about them. If a black cat crosses your path, it is thought bad luck because it means the Devil has taken notice of you. And a cat is thought to have nine lives because it was thought that witches could take on the forms of their familiars, but could only do so nine times. It may even be related to the notion that cats steal your breath, though this has the pretty simple explanation that cats like to lie on sleeping persons for warmth and may have unwittingly been responsible for smothering some children. But of course, rather than come to terms with such an innocent tragedy, the superstitious want someone to blame, and so it is not a cat that smothered their child, but rather a witch or even the Devil himself.

The suspicion that someone has performed sorcery against someone else has created many a superstition. There is a long-held, widespread belief in a curse that can be placed on people called the Evil Eye. It is mentioned in many ancient texts around the world and is even acknowledged in the Bible and the Koran. Essentially, the Evil Eye is thought to be cast by those who are envious, so it is thought that young children and those who are fit and beautiful are the most at risk. Because of this, outsiders with miserable lives were often accused of casting the Evil Eye, just as they were also singled out as witches. Because the curse, which was blamed for a variety of illnesses, was thought to be cast with a hateful look, people with eye imperfections, like a squint or a lazy eye, were also accused of giving the Evil Eye, when of course they could not help how they looked at people. Belief in the Evil Eye curse brought about numerous other superstitions in the form of lucky charms. The most common were amulets with eyes on them, but another you have likely heard of is the horseshoe. The symbol of the horseshoe has evolved through the millennia, from something that wards off the Evil Eye to something that brings general good luck, and how it is used has also changed, from keeping the opening facing downward to keeping it facing up, but its origin as protection against sorcery is certain. Likewise, there are a variety of superstitions about brooms, such as not sweeping after dark or not taking brooms with you when you move into a new house, all of which originate from the supposed use of brooms by witches. Likewise, it was common practice in the 15th century to put a pinhole in eggshells because it was thought a witch might otherwise use the eggshells to cast a spell on whoever had eaten the egg. Parents avoided cutting their child’s hair or fingernails in the first year of their lives for fear witches might use the cuttings to cast spells against them. Some superstitions that had their origin in fears about witchcraft contradict each other. It was said that cutlery laid crosswise was a sign of witchcraft, and indeed an easy way to support witchcraft allegations against an enemy, and thus even long after witch persecutions it was considered unlucky to lay cutlery across each other. But while it was claimed that witches laid cutlery into the sign of a cross, it was also claimed that they could be made uncomfortable in a room by hiding open scissors somewhere, again because it made the sign of the cross. But problems of logical consistency aside, belief in witchcraft led to belief in numerous apotropaic superstitions like this, such as the hanging of hagstones, or river stones with natural holes in the middle of them that were thought to have been made of hardened snake saliva and were believed to be effective charms against witches, or like the carving hexafoils, designs like pentagrams and daisy wheels that appeared to have an infinite pattern, into the walls of buildings as protection against witches, who were thought to get lost in following the patterns.

As I have looked further into superstitions for this episode, I have happily come to find that they are perhaps one of the more perfect expressions of historical blindness in the sense that the reasons for these traditions are murky. Often, they are the result of ignorance, but also of syncretism, the synthesis of different beliefs that happens when cultures clash. Ancient pagan beliefs are adopted and adapted by Christianity, obscuring their origins in a kind of revision of history. We have seen this again and again in my holiday specials about Christmas folklore and traditions. Another example is the superstition about things moving widdershins, or counter-clockwise. This originated in traditions that worshipped the sun and held sacrosanct its trajectory through the sky, but with the advent of Christianity, it became associated with witchcraft and the Devil. Likewise, the belief that spilling salt was bad luck originated with the simple fact that salt used to be a precious commodity, but Christianity transformed this into an act of the Devil, saying that salt must be sacred because it is used in making Holy Water. This then led to the notion that salt could be used to drive away evil, perhaps in combination with the odd idea that, like the infinite patterns of hexfoils, a pile of salt might confuse and waylay witches and demons who felt compelled to count them all. Thus we have the further superstitions of throwing salt over one’s left shoulder, where the Devil was thought to lurk, or protecting one’s home with applications of salt. What we see here is ancient tradition, twisted through syncretism until we have little sense of its purpose, and strengthened by ignorance, to forge a false cause belief that flies in the face of logic. Now, I may sound a little salty, and you may take my conclusions with a grain of salt, if you’ll excuse the puns, but I think all these examples, and many others, all of which I read about in my principal sources, Black Cats & Evil Eyes: A Book of Old-Fashioned Superstitions by Chloe Rhodes and Superstition: White Rabbits & Black Cats—The History of Common Folk Beliefs by Sally Coulthard, bear out this final evaluation. We live in a world of nonsense that has been handed down to us as wisdom and truth.

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Until next time, remember, every time you tempt fate by boasting about your good fortune, and you knock on wood—or touch wood, as they say in other places—but you don’t know why, it all derives from Druidic belief in dryads, or benevolent tree sprites… or is it from the ancient Greek belief that touching an oak provided protection from Zeus? …or is it just from the 19th-century children’s game of Tig, from which we get the modern game tag, in which touching the wood of a tree made you safe? Jeez, I dunno what the point of researching this stuff is if I get three different answers.

Further Reading

Coulthard, Sally. Superstition: White Rabbits & Black Cats—The History of Common Folk Beliefs. Quadrille, 2019.

Davies, Owen, and Francesca Matteoni. “'A virtue beyond all medicine': The Hanged Man's Hand, Gallows Tradition and Healing in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century England.” Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine vol. 28,4 (2015): 686-705. doi:10.1093/shm/hkv044

“The Devil’s Fingerprints.”  Atlas Obscura, 25 June 2020, www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-devils-fingerprints.

Edwards, Howell G. M. “Will-o’-the-Wisp: An Ancient Mystery with Extremophile Origins?” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 372, no. 2030, 2014, pp. 1–7. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24505048. 

Merelli, Annalisa. “Hysteria Over Coronavirus in Italy Is Reminiscent of the Black Death,” QUARTZ, 24 Feb. 2020, qz.com/1807049/hysteria-over-coronavirus-in-italy-is-reminiscent-of-the-black-death. 

Rhodes, Chloe. Black Cats & Evil Eyes: A Book of Old-Fashioned Superstitions, Michael O’Mara Books, 2015.

The Revenants - Part Two: VAMPIRES in Fantasy

In 1897, the quintessential treatment of the vampire legend was published: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, an epistolary novel that owed much to John Polidori’s and Lord Byron’s first vampire tale, in that again, the vampire is depicted as an aristocrat, living in a castle, who once more preys upon women with a dark charm and sensual allure. However, Stoker’s vampire is an entirely new creation, a bringing forth of the modern legend in its entirety, fully formed, while at the same time acknowledging much of the folklore from which it sprang. Four years after the publication of the novel, an Icelandic translation of the book appeared, entitled Makt Myrkranna, or Powers of Darkness. This edition was adapted from a Swedish version that had been anonymously translated, and whose publisher remains unknown. Interestingly, Powers of Darkness appears to have been translated from some early draft of the novel, with significant differences from the book as the rest of the world has come to know it. Nor was it unauthorized, as Stoker himself wrote a preface, in which, surprisingly, he appears to state that the story is true, or based on true events. He indicates that the characters are real people, stating that he “let the people involved relate their experiences in their own way,” but changed their names. According to Stoker, “I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight.” More recently, the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker, revealed that, according to his research, Bram Stoker had always intended his book to be read as a work of non-fiction, as a warning of a very real supernatural evil that he had discovered. He describes how his publisher refused to print the book as it was, saying that such claims of a blood-letting monster on the loose in London would only cause a panic of the kind they were still recovering from following the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper. He forced Stoker to excise the first hundred pages and reframe the book as a work of fiction. This is a truly intriguing story, which even a hundred years later has led some to believe that maybe, just maybe, there really is such a thing as vampires. However, the fact of the matter is that all of these claims appear to have been made to sell novels. Dacre Stoker has made a name for himself off of his great-granduncle’s work, writing a sequel called Dracula: The Undead, and later a prequel, Dracul. These claims were made by Dacre and his co-author as part of that prequel, suggesting that the completely fictional story that followed, about Bram Stoker himself struggling against vampires, was a believable filling in of the missing story. However, the novel he co-wrote is far longer than the supposed missing 100 pages he claims were censored, and if the Icelandic version were adapted from a complete draft, it too omits everything that Dacre Stoker and his co-author imagined. Furthermore, the claim that a publisher would refuse to print anything on the grounds that it might enflame public fear like Jack the Ripper, whose murders occurred a decade earlier, is somewhat preposterous. An entire cottage industry had sprung up for publishing books about Jack the Ripper, including The Whitechapel Murders Or, The Mysteries of the East End and The History of the Whitechapel Murders, both in 1888, then The Whitechapel Murders, Or, An American Detective in London and The Whitechapel Mystery, both in 1889, not to mention a bevy of journal articles in the intervening years. To suggest that writing about Jack the Ripper was not done, especially a decade later, is patently false. As for the Powers of Darkness, there is suspicion among scholars that, though it may have been adapted from an early draft of the novel, its translator took great liberties with the story that Stoker may not have even known about. And Bram Stoker’s own preface can easily be explained as another publicity stunt, an attempt to drum up interest among a new audience by falsely claiming that the story had some basis in reality, when in fact, it was entirely fictional. It must be remembered, after all, that Bram Stoker, who had long worked in the theater, as an actor’s assistant and as a critic, was nothing if not a showman.

As we discuss the possible basis for the foundational vampire novel, Dracula, many may object and say that of course Bram Stoker based his monster on a true story, at least to some degree, in that it is common knowledge that he based his Count Dracula on Vlad Drăculea, or Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler, the Voivode, or leader, of Wallachia, the famously ruthless son of Vlad Dracul, the Dragon. Vlad the Impaler is said to have been so bloodthirsty that during his campaign to cement his control of Wallachia, when he captured dissident Transylvanian Saxons, he had them impaled, thus earning his name. However, besides Vlad Țepeș not being a Count or a Transylvanian, there is quite a bit wrong with this notion. First, rather than being a hermit in a castle feared by all the peasants for his evil or cruelty, he was widely celebrated as a just ruler and is remembered in Romania as something of a national hero who established peace. His reputation for cruelty was real, however, from his impalement of enemies to the burning of his own subjects for being lazy and poor, so the surviving view of him as some sort of just tyrant is dubious, at best. However, none of this is really relevant to vampirism. There was never any historical connection between Vlad Țepeș and blood-drinking or revenant folklore. The connection only exists in Bram Stoker’s novel, because he took the name Dracula. In the 1970s, it was argued by two researchers, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, that Stoker based his character on that historical figure, but since then, scholars have argued convincingly that he seems not to have known much about Vlad the Impaler at all. He appears to have found the name Dracula in a book on Wallachian and Moldavian history and decided that it sounded appropriately scary. Among all of his papers, no mention of or evidence of research into the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler has ever been discovered. The working name of the character before he changed it to Dracula had been Count Wampyr. But Vlad the Impaler is not the only real life figure that scholars have argued inspired the novel’s creature. Some suggest he may have been more inspired by Attila the Hun than by Vlad Țepeș, as in the novel, the character claims descent from him. Others suggest that Bram Stoker was inspired by the real-life vampire story of Mercy Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, which I spoke about in substantial detail in a recent patron exclusive. In fact, an 1896 newspaper clipping about the destruction of Mercy Brown’s corpse for fear she had turned revenant was found in Bram Stoker’s papers. He had been touring America with a theater company that year, and certainly seems to have heard of the story. Add to that the fact that Stoker makes mention of an English town called Exeter, from where his character Jonathan Harker leaves for Transylvania, and it makes for a convincing argument. However, whether it helped shape the novel at all, the story of Mercy Brown could not have inspired it, for by the time he acquired the clipping, he was already far along in composing it. In fact, the next year it would be published. More recently, one historian, Louis S. Warren, has even argued, rather convincingly, that Bram Stoker based the character of Count Dracula on Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West show had toured London in 1887, at which time Bram Stoker actually spent time with the American showman. Warren believes that, to Stoker, Dracula’s transformation and decay was a direct result of his living on the frontier among other races, and that the novel stands as a reflection on the American frontier and how the colonizer is changed and eventually was colonized himself by the racial other. Read this way, the novel has decidedly white supremacist themes, and the vampiric plague visited upon England in it comes to represent the fear of racial degeneracy. Is this what Stoker was writing about? Is this what he viewed as the true story behind his novel? God, I hope not. In the end, maybe it’s better that we only read the book as a terrifying yarn rather than as commentary on some real threat.

Vlad Țepeș, the Impaler, the usual suspect for the model of Dracula, though Bram Stoker appears to have studied him little during the composition of his novel.

If we are to compare the vampire of novels and films to reality at all, it must be to the original vision of vampires from European folklore, which I described in nauseous detail in part one of this series. So let us look at the vampire, meaning its appearance. How do the revenants of Central and Southeastern Europe, the vampir of Serbia, the Nachzehrer of Germany, the vrykolakas of Greece, compare with the bloodsuckers of modern horror fiction. As I joked about at the end of Part One, by simple appearance, they are very unlike one another. The modern vampire is thin, and pale, but according to folklore, “real” vampires are bloated, supposedly with the blood of their victims but actually with putrefying gasses, and rather than pale, it was a darkening of the skin, or more accurately, a reddening of the skin that typically indicated to real vampire hunters when a corpse had become undead. It is clear enough how this change came about. Pallor is closely associated with death; when one imagines a dead man, one thinks of the color leaving their cheeks, so that was obvious enough. As for the trim physique, from the very moment the folklore entered the realm of fiction, in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the creature had been reimagined as an attractive figure who might walk among us unnoticed. Stoker’s Count was simply walking in the footsteps of Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, himself a caricature of Byron. The vampire never really had a chance to be its true, shambling, distended self, though I think that might have been even more horrifying. The image of the vampire evolved further from the dashing debonair in the 1920s, with the silent film Nosferatu, in which the vampire was depicted more ratlike, or perhaps batlike, and some scholars have suggested this representation was an anti-Semitic trope, presenting the vampire as the feared foreign-born Jew who was seen as an invader of white society, leeching off of and tainting its populace. So the racist meaning behind vampire fiction can again be clearly seen. By the time of Nosferatu, the teeth of the vampire had become a prominent feature, but where did they come from? It is possible that the notion of fangs derived from the receding of gums from the teeth in corpses, just as the receding of skin made it appear that hair and nails were growing, but there is not clear mention of fangs in any folkloric accounts. Indeed, when blood drinking is mentioned at all in the folklore, the vampire is said to have drunk from the trunk of his victim or some other place on the body, not the neck. Polidori’s story makes early mention of teeth marks left by the vampire on the neck, but not of fangs. It seems that this little detail was invented by Bram Stoker, and it certainly sunk in, if you will. There is some evidence, however, which I will expand on momentarily, that Stoker was greatly influenced by the folklore writing of Sabine Baring-Gould, a priest from Exeter, curiously enough, whose description of werewolf folklore was well known at the time, and which I made heavy use of myself in my own series on werewolves. So it would seem that the fangs of the vampire were borrowed from the werewolf.

Also like the werewolf, and likely borrowed from Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves, are the vampire’s shapeshifting abilities in the novel Dracula, as the Count is depicted as transforming himself not only into a bat, as is commonly thought of when one thinks of vampiric transformations, but also into a large dog and a wolf. In fact, though this is pretty accurate to the folklore of revenants as well. “Real” vampires, or revenants, which were not always actually believed to physically leave their graves, appeared on their nightly perambulations as their old self but also were said to appear as dogs and as wolves, but also as cats, goats, horses, donkeys, frogs, chickens, owls, mice, and even butterflies. Strangely, bats are one of the rare animals not named as a form taken by the vampire. This wide variety of forms should cause one pause. If in many cases the dead person who was rumored to have returned from the grave to trouble the living was said to take so many different forms, then it casts even more doubt on eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen revenants. If one believed that a disease was being caused by a revenant, and one was on the lookout for a revenant, especially one that others in town had been claiming they had seen, one might see that revenant in every innocent creature that crossed their path. Or, they might not have seen anything at all, for it was even said that revenants might be invisible. Perhaps this is the folkloric origin of Dracula’s ability to travel by moonbeam or appear as a mist. In reality, though, we must consider that this means any tragedy or hardship or annoyance might have been blamed on a revenant, whether accusers really believed they had seen them or not. If an animal was within view, that was the tricky vampire, and if no animal was around to blame it on, one could just say that the revenant must have been invisible. According to the folklore, only twins who were born on a Saturday and had reversed their clothing could see an invisible revenant, so obviously that would make it hard to spot them. In this way, the vampire was quite similar not only to the werewolf, but also to the witch, who it was thought could appear as an animal and could even make herself invisible through her use of the Devil’s salve. And the similarities do not end there. As we know, witches were women, often outsiders, accused of dealing with the Devil, and so too were werewolves believed to have made deals with Satan. Well, as it turns out, vampires also were often said to have been reanimated through a diabolical power. Indeed, sharing the same pool of potential suspects with witches and werewolves, it was often outsiders or criminals or people believed to be practitioners of sorcery who were expected to turn into revenants after death.

Sabine Baring-Gould, the priest whose folklore writings about werewolves appear to have greatly inspired the novel Dracula.

In fiction, there is some disagreement about how one becomes a vampire. According to Stoker, one only has to be the victim of a vampire to become one, and this reflects some folkloric traditions well, when it was feared that any who died of the disease being blamed on a revenant would themselves become revenants. However, the strange customs behind the vampire myth do not always agree. In later fiction, it is said that a vampire must make a victim must drink the vampire’s blood to become a vampire, but in the original folklore, the vampire’s blood was something of a cure for vampirism. Just as we saw in the story of Mercy Brown with the ashes of the supposed revenant, the blood from the alleged vampire, as well as soil from its grave were often used to cure a victim or to ward off further attacks. And in many cultures and traditions, one did not need to be attacked at all to become a vampire. As previously stated, just as it was common for anyone considered an outsider or who was not well-liked to be accused of witchcraft, the same might easily be claimed to have been reanimated by the devil after their death. Take, for example, the vrykolakas of Mykonos discussed in Part One. De Tournefort specifically mentioned that he was unliked. Another category of person thought likely to turn revenant upon their passing was a person thought to have committed suicide, such as the shoemaker of Breslau. This supposed predisposition toward vampirism meant that there was probably always a handy scapegoat when a disease began to trouble a village, for any person who had killed themselves or who was suspected of sorcery or even who was not well-liked could be the culprit. Consider this list of the types of people most likely to be accused of becoming revenants, compiled by Dagmar Burkhart, expert on Slavic folklore: “the godless…evildoers, suicides, in addition sorcerors, witches, and werewolves; …robbers, highwaymen, arsonists, prostitutes, deceitful and treacherous barmaids and other dishonorable people.” Indeed, it appears that alcoholics were often prime candidates, and they, like suicides, were sometimes exhumed and dealt with as revenants before anyone had reported their supposed return from the grave. The act of suicide itself was not always believed to have opened the deceased to the influence of the Devil, though. Rather, it was the fact that they had died before their time. We see this also among those taken suddenly by some disease or in some other way suffering an untimely demise. In Psalm 90, it is stated, “Our days may come to seventy years,/ or eighty, if our strength endures,” and this line of scripture led some to interpret that God had appointed at least that number of years to all of us. Therefore, if one is taken early, by accident, or disease, or by their own hand, or even by the hand of another, they may rise from the grave a revenant. Murder victims and those who meet untimely ends in the wilderness especially are at risk of vampirism because if their remains are left undiscovered, they do not have the benefit of a proper burial. But none of this may matter, according to some traditions. One may be well-liked, and god-fearing, and live out all their appointed days on earth, but if they were born a certain way, they may be damned from the start to become a vampire. Babies born with teeth, it was said would become a revenant, or those born with a red caul, or with a split lip, or a supernumerary nipple or vestigial tail or red birthmark. Again, the folklore of the vampire is reminiscent of that of the witch, who was said to have been marked by the Devil with some of the very same bodily signs.

One prominent feature of the fictional vampire is its sexual magnetism. From Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula to Anne Rice’s Lestat, vampires are depicted as darkly alluring or even rapacious. They enter the bed chambers of their victims and take them in an intimate embrace, pressing a their red mouths to their victim’s necks, and exchanging fluids. Whether one sees this as a metaphor for sex, or in a more horrifying sense, as a representation of violation, the subtext is there. Surprisingly, this too can be viewed as deriving from some aspects of vampire folklore. For example, the revenant was thought to be a sexual creature. This may be the result of the so-called “wild signs” observed in corpses exhumed on suspicion of being vampires, which is believed to be a euphemism for an erection. Such anatomical reactions are an apparent common thing in decomposing bodies, as a result of the bloating that I spoke about in great uncomfortable detail in Part One. These signs of what must have seemed to be arousal likely then led to further claims about the sexual activity of revenants. It has been claimed, for example, that the revenant was apt to visit his widow and wear her out with his lovemaking. Beyond these reports, though, many were the claims that the revenant entered the bedchambers of his victims and lay down on top of them. This was not necessarily said to be a sexual act, however, or a rape, but rather a physical assault in the sense that the revenant was trying to smother them. But, if we really think about these incidents, we come away with an entirely different explanation. If a person today were to describe seeing a shadowy figure enter their room, and said they were unable to do anything as this figure got on top of them and pressed down, smothering them, we might more likely attribute this to not only a nightmare but the terrifyingly real phenomenon of sleep paralysis with hypnopompic hallucination. Those who suffer from this well-known sleep disorder feel that they cannot move while in a state between sleeping and waking, and the hallucinations that accompany this sensation are often terrifying, involving shadowy figures and creatures entering their room, sitting on their thorax, creating the feeling of pressure there, and sometimes carrying out some sexual act on them. This has been called “the incubus phenomenon,” relating to folkloric demons like the incubus and succubus that were said to seduce and have intercourse with sleeping men and women. Statistical analysis has shown that this incubus phenomenon may be experienced by as much as 11% of the general population, and up to 41% of those who experience sleep paralysis. Rather than a demonic figure, this creature that sits atop a sleeping person is viewed as an old hag in many traditions, also called the Night Hag, and is more of a witch-like figure. In fact, this hallucinated entity is actually where we get our word for nightmare. A mare in Scandinavian folklore was a damned woman who visits villagers in their sleep to sit on their chests and bring them terrifying dreams. Clearly this known sleep disorder serves as a sound rational explanation for many reports of nightmarish revenant visitations.

The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781), a classic depiction of sleep paralysis and the incubus phenomenon.

All that remains to consider when it comes to the vampire myth are the odds and ends, things like the origin of driving a wooden stake through their hearts, their lack of reflection in a mirror, their aversion to silver and garlic, and their reaction to crosses and to sunlight. The staking of a vampire is clear enough; we have observed that because of the folklore of the revenant, many original vampire hunters drove stakes of wood through supposed vampires. The truth of the matter, however, is that this may have originated not as a means of destroying the vampire. For that, beheading and burning served their purposes far better. The stake, it seems, was actually a means of keeping them immobile, driving the stake through their bodies and into the earth beneath so that they could no longer rise to trouble the living. Among the Finns, for example, the staking of a vampire was only to pin it in place. Other folklore indicates that the stake may have been a kind of apotropaic, or charm to ward off the vampire, as it was believed that revenants could be driven away by the mere presence of sharp things generally, not only stakes, but even thorns and knives, which were placed under pillows to ward off vampires. This may have been the origin of the belief that silver could kill a vampire, since the knives kept under mattresses and pillows were often silver. The folklore says little about the effect of crosses on vampires, though we may presume that this Christian element of the myth was incorporated later, with the spread of Christianity, in conjunction with the notion that the Devil was responsible for raising the revenant. Indeed, early accounts indicate the opposite effect of crosses, though. My principal source, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber, describes an incident in which a sword is driven into a suspected vampire, and then it is worried that, because the cross guard of the sword made a cross shape, it would prevent the Devil from leaving the corpse. Garlic, though, it seems, was indeed a recognized apotropaic against vampires, for the sole reason that it was stinky, and it was believed that revenants would be repelled by the stink. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that it was claimed the revenant did not stink as it should have, but the fact is that garlic was not unique. Any stinky thing was thought to repel the vampire, and villagers were known to spread feces on cloth as revenant repellant. As for the absence of a vampire’s reflection, there is speculation that this relates to the notion that vampires had no soul, and mirrors were thought to show or capture the soul. In fact, according to some folklore, it was actually believed that vampires had two souls, and even two hearts, thereby allowing them to survive death. It was thought that vampires talked to themselves because of their dual souls, and I would imagine this led to numerous mentally ill persons being posthumously accused of vampirism. Others have thought that the vampire’s issue with mirrors is that most used to be backed with silver, but the truth of the matter is that the element of vampire lore having to do with mirror images never appeared until Bram Stoker invented it. Likewise, the vampire’s inflammable reaction to sunlight is nowhere to be found in the folklore or early vampire fiction and appears to have been invented in 1922 by F. W. Murnau in his Dracula ripoff, Nosferatu.

There is an explanation given from ancient mythology for many of the elements I just spoke about, however. They originate in the Scriptures of Delphi, the so-called “Vampire Bible.” Said to be passed down from the word of the Oracles at Delphi themselves, it tells the story of Ambrogio in ancient Greece, who was cursed by Apollo, the sun god, to have his skin burned by sunlight, and who thereafter lost his soul to Hades, god of the underworld. The goddess of the moon and the hunt, Artemis, further cursed Ambrogio to be burned at the touch of silver, and grants him immortality but only if he drinks blood to sustain himself. If such a Greek myth were real, it would indeed appear to be the origin of the vampire story. The problem is, the earliest mention of the “Scriptures of Delphi” and the story of Ambrogio that I can find is 2015, and though some vampire enthusiasts claim it was unearthed by archaeologists in Delphi, I’ve seen no evidence of this. It appears to me that this is likely a modern hoax. Thus vampire mythmaking continues today. And fiction writers are not alone in expanding the vampire mythos. Well-meaning scientists and medical professionals too have added misinformation to our understanding of the subject. In 1851, British anatomist Herbert Mayo hypothesized that revenants were merely people in a coma or suffering from catalepsy who had been buried alive and who woke up only when dug up and impaled. This doesn’t account for all the reports of revenants who had no reaction at all when cut open or staked or those who had been in the grave for months and clearly would have been dead regardless of whether they’d been alive when interred. It would also require us to believe that some villages had a habit of burying a great many people alive. Also clearly false is the more recent hypothesis that vampires were actually people suffering from porphyria. This blood disorder, which has also been tried as an explanation of werewolves because of excessive hair growth being one side effect, is raised as an explanation mainly because of the porphyria victim’s sensitivity to sunlight, an aspect of vampires that we know was invented for cinema. However, other aspects lend themselves to this explanation, such as a supposed aversion to garlic because of its sulfur content, which could worsen their condition, and the receding of gums supposedly making fangs (though as we’ve seen, fangs were also never part of vampire folklore). Proponents of this theory claim that the lack of a reflection in mirrors, which we have seen did not originate from folklore, really refers to a porphyria sufferer avoiding mirrors because of how the disorder ravages their faces. And they even go so far as to claim that since the urine of a porphyria sufferer is red, it would have been presumed that they had been drinking blood (which is rather absurd considering blood in the urine is common of many ailments and not some strange condition that would encourage such speculation). The further claim that, since blood infusions would later be used as a treatment, perhaps porphyria sufferers used to try to treat the disorder by drinking blood, is also completely unsupported conjecture. The fact is that as a theory it seems believable, but since the symptoms it attempts to account for were largely fictional, it makes no sense, and furthermore, it makes no effort to account for the fact that those who were accused of vampirism were already dead and buried, and there is not always mention of them having been diseased in life or drinking blood when they supposedly rose from the grave. SO at the end of our examination of vampires, what it boils down to is a superstition, borne from a lack of understanding of disease and death, which has since been embellished by fiction writers and earnest men of science into a wide-ranging legend of an abominable and fiendish monster…who wants to suck your blood!!

Until next time, remember, if there is anything that my Halloween series have shown--from “The Specter of Devil Worship,” to the “Shadow of the Werewolf,” to “A Rediscovery of Witches,” to “The Demoniacs” and “The Revenants”—it’s that monsters, as such, may not be real, but those who claim to hunt, cast out, prosecute, and destroy them certainly have proven themselves monstrous. 

Further Reading

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. Yale University Press, 1988. 

Molendijk, Marc L et al. “Prevalence Rates of the Incubus Phenomenon: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Frontiers in psychiatry vol. 8 253. 24 Nov. 2017, doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2017.00253

Stoker, Dacre, and J.D. Barker. “Bram Stoker Claimed That Parts of Dracula Were Real. Here's What We Know About the Story Behind the Novel.” TIME, 3 Oct. 2018, time.com/5411826/bram-stoker-dracula-history/.

The Revenants - Part One: VAMPIRES in Reality

It was a dark and stormy night when in late spring of 1816 the travelers arrived in Geneva, but more than that, it was a dark and stormy season all around, for that was the “Year Without a Summer,” when the volcanic ash clouds spewed out by Indonesian volcano Mount Tamboro resulted in darkness and unseasonable rainfall. The poet Percy Shelley, his lover and the mother of his son, Mary Godwin, their boy William, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont were in the midst of a tour of France and Switzerland that May, having just traveled through an unseasonably bleak and wintry country to reach Lake Geneva, where they stayed in a small chalet. During a particularly dark and stormy time of their stay, they abandoned their lodgings to stay in the far more lavish Villa Diodati that had been leased by Percy’s poet friend, the famous playboy, Lord Byron. Sexual tension abounded in the Villa during their stay, as Claire Clairmont, whom Lord Byron had previously taken as a lover, sought once again to draw the poet’s attentions, and Byron’s personal physician and companion, John Polidori, tried to draw the eye of Mary Godwin, but she remained devoted to the father of her child, whom she soon would wed, becoming Mary Shelley, though she already referred to herself as Mrs. Shelley. With some among them frustrated in their romantic interests, and all of them frustrated in their recreations, unable to go sailing on the lake because of the foul weather, they stayed indoors, read German ghost stories, and with thunder rumbling and lightning flashing outside, they spoke about the life-giving power of electricity, the then-popular notion of galvanism. This spooky atmosphere eventually led to a friendly contest among the writers, to compose the most frightening story. Lord Byron struggled, starting a story about a man who promised to return from the grave to visit his friend, but in the end abandoning it and working instead on his poem, The Darkness, which reads, in part, “I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” Meanwhile, Mary Shelley too was troubled by a dark dream or nightmare, inspired by all their talk of galvanism. The result was her masterpiece, Frankenstein, the story of a monster raised from the dead. Her tale easily won the day, and today remains a classic of gothic horror literature. But it is Byron’s fragment of a story, which would later be taken up by his physician, John Polidori, and completed as a story called The Vampyre, which would eventually inspire an entire genre of horror storytelling and reinvent an ancient legend as a modern nightmare. Both were stories of things that came back from the dead, but Byron’s fragment was more clearly a representation of the old European notion of a revenant, a person that becomes resurrected and calls on people he knew in life. Polidori used the old Slavic word for a revenant, vampir, but the similarity ends there. In his story, the vampire is a nocturnal aristocrat named Lord Ruthven who preys on women. Clearly, Polidori rewrote the story as a parody of his friend, Lord Byron, but in the process, he single-handedly invented the vampire archetype, a well-dressed and mysterious gentleman with a dark, sexual charisma. In ensuing years, after his story was adapted into plays and an opera, his version of the vampire stood as the model for many imitators, and it reached an even wider audience later that century when a penny dreadful rip-off called Varney the Vampire serialized a similar tale on the cheap for a far broader readership. But today we easily forget that the basis of this fictional trope is a creature from European folklore that many cultures believed was utterly real.

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I often try to create some throughline in episode topics. For example, I had a solid run this summer, from my episode about the Tartaria urban myth to my series on giants, and my examination of the Book of Enoch, and my study of the Flood myth and Noah’s Ark. Often there is no clear transition between my topics, though, like from JFK’s assassination to Tartaria, or from Noah’s Ark to gun violence, or gun violence to MK-Ultra, or Montauk to demagogues. However, if I were to attempt some tenuous connection here, I suppose that demagogues could be seen as a kind of vampire on a democratic society. Vampires are commonly used as metaphors or symbols, signifying greed and misuse. In fact, Merriam-Webster lists these metaphorical uses of the term as valid definitions, including “one who lives by preying on others” as one meaning, and even the disarmingly misogynist definition that a vampire might refer to “a woman who exploits and ruins her lover.” To suggest that the vampire is only present today in fiction or metaphor, however, disregards the continued belief among some that vampires are real. Such modern belief can be traced back to Christian apologism, or more specifically, the work of Montague Summers, the colorful clergyman and popular writer who styled himself as a kind of modern witch-hunter and demonologist in the early 20th century. I have spoken at some length about Montague Summers in my 2-part series Shadow of the Werewolf, as well as in my 2-part series A Rediscovery of Witches, both of which, if you haven’t listened, would make for a great podcast binge this Halloween season. Suffice to say that Montague Summer, who was undeniably erudite and whose work cannot be faulted for lack of scholarship, differentiated himself from any contemporary academic writers on the occult with his apparent absolute belief in his subject matter. He argued that witches really had made pacts with the devil, and that werewolves were real, having also made pacts with the devil. He made similar arguments that vampirism was and remained a real phenomenon. His claim can be clearly discerned in his second volume on the subject, The Vampire in Europe, when he writes of “the fundamental truth, which, however exaggerated in expression and communication, essentially informs the vampire-tradition.” Likewise, he states in no uncertain terms, “That a large number of cases of vampirism must be accounted certain only the most prejudiced will deny. Even in many other relations which cannot be pressed in detail it seems beyond doubt that the main facts are true.” Nor is this an obsolete view that cannot be entertained even by the bright light of modern science, as there exist today various subcultures that believe in vampirism, members of which even consume blood and believe it sustains them. So, in examining the folkloric origins of the vampire, we are not only examining the source material for a literary invention. Rather ridiculously, it seems we are obliged to refute the notion that vampires, as such, ever really existed.

Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where one dark and stormy night, much of modern horror was born.

First, we will examine some of the most widely cited reports of supposed real vampirism, looking at the primary source material to determine the real basis for the legend. One of the earliest firm accounts of such a revenant is preserved in a book of Prussian folklore. In this report, we are told of an affluent shoemaker of Breslau, in what was then Silesia, who committed suicide in 1591, cutting his own throat with a knife. The remains of people who had committed suicide were traditionally buried using alternative funerary rites and were not buried in the churchyard. It was, therefore, not uncommon for the bereaved loved ones to hide the true cause of death. Such was the case of the Silesian shoemaker, whose widow claimed he had died from a stroke and went to great lengths to hide the truth of the matter, not accepting visitors to view the corpse, and having it wrapped tightly so that its wound would not be perceived. Her efforts paid off, and the shoemaker was buried with traditional ceremony. However, rumors soon surfaced about his suicide and became such a scandalous gossip that the town council confronted the widow, who continually changed her story, saying first that he had actually fallen on a rock, then that he had fallen on his own awl and she had thrown it away to prevent others from injuring themselves. However, her neighbors continued to distrust her because they said they had begun to receive visits by the shoemaker. In the tradition of the revenant, the dead man was seen walking the city and visiting people he knew after his death. The text does not call him a revenant, or a vampire, or even a Nachzehrer, a northern German word for the same sort of creature, but rather a Gespenst, or ghost. As is common in revenant folklore, the shoemaker frightened those it visited, waking some up from slumber and in some cases entering their houses and assaulting them in their beds. People left their homes and spent the night in the company of others, keeping their lanterns burning the whole night through, but still they reported seeing the shoemaker making his nightly visit to oppress them. The troubles were so great, that the council determined to open the shoemaker’s grave and see for themselves that he truly was dead. What they found was a great swollen corpse, but they found him complete and undamaged by decay, and the fact that he was not stiff as they expected him to be caused them to believe that his was no normal corpse. Moreover, his skin had peeled away, revealing fresh skin beneath, and it was said not to stink as other corpses stank. They set a guard on the corpse and allowed the townspeople to come and view it for themselves, but regardless, the revenant continued to visit and trouble the people. Finally, the shoemaker’s widow admitted that he had killed himself and urged the council to end the troubles by killing him a second time. In order to utterly destroy the revenant, they cut off his head, hands and feet, removed his heart, and cremated the remains.

Of course we see the bare bones of a vampire story here: a creature that has risen from the dead to attack the living who is finally dealt with by attacking his heart, beheading him, and setting him on fire. As we look closely at the story, however, we see already how different the traditional stories of revenants are from the later vampire tradition. First and foremost, there is no drinking of blood. Instead there is only some noisy bothering of neighbors and perhaps some mild throttling. This is essentially a ghost story, complete with unfinished business. It is not the body itself which rises from the grave to vex his neighbors; the grave appears to have been undisturbed and the visits continued even when the body was watched. Rather, the story seems to indicate that the spirit of the shoemaker set about bothering and even physically attacking people until the truth about his death came out. As we shall see later, there is ample reason to doubt the reports of the revenant’s victims, as many may have imagined the visits, encouraged by the mass panic, or made false reports in an effort to further encourage the widow to come clean about the rumored true nature of the shoemaker’s death, or someone may even have been disguising himself as the shoemaker and going around bothering the people for any number of reasons. But the story of the shoemaker from Breslau does clearly introduce some elements of European folklore surrounding revenants: that when they are exhumed, they appear not to have properly decomposed. Indeed, it is claimed that the corpse of the shoemaker does not even smell bad, although, it should be noted that immediately after stating that there was no stench, the text concedes that “the cloths in which he was wrapped had a repulsive smell.” It seems unrealistic to believe that those who dug up the shoemaker, upon smelling a repulsive stench, then went about sniffing things more closely to determine whether it was the cloth or the corpse itself that stank. So the reliability of the report is called into question. Likewise, we read that the body was “undamaged by decay” but in the same breath it’s stated that it was “blown up like a drum,” as if those who examined it did not recognize swelling as a part of the decomposition process. Thus we must consider that they may not have been the best judges of whether or not the corpse should have been stiff at this stage in its decomposition, or whether the fresh skin they saw beneath the peeling skin was or was not an aspect of normal decay. To these strange features of the revenant in his grave we will add a few more before essaying to provide some rational explanation other than that they represent signs of the undead.

A depiction of a revenant visitation

The next historical account of a supposedly real revenant, and one who can more accurately be called a vampire since he was Serbian, and that is the Serbian word for the phenomenon, comes to us from the 18th century, when Serbia and Walachia were occupied by Austria, and it was noticed that the locals had the strange practice of digging up corpses to “kill” them. In a village called Kisilova, after a man named Peter Plogojowitz died and had been buried, nine different people took ill and died swiftly, after only a day of symptoms. These people, as they lay dying, supposedly claimed that Plogojowitz had visited them in their sleep and attacked them. The villagers knew just what this meant—they had a vampire on their hands. So they opened Plogojowitz’s grave, in which they noticed that his hair and beard and even his fingernails had continued to grow after death, that his dead skin had peeled away to show healthy looking skin beneath, that his body did not stink, and that it was entirely intact after more than three months. More than this, fresh blood could be seen on his mouth, which the villagers believed he had sucked from his victims. To destroy the fiend, they drove a sharp wooden stake through his heart, whereupon great quantities of fresh blood erupted from the wound as well as from his eyes and mouth. Afterward, they burned his remains. This report adds features of the revenant in his grave that we will address in due course: the fresh blood seen in his mouth and flowing after being staked and the growth of hair and nails. Notable is the mention of blood sucking, and the staking of the heart. Here we find the vampire tale more complete but still not fully formed. Some vampire tales make claims about a disturbance of the grave, but more often, as in this tale, there is no indication that the corpse has left the grave or even that the villagers believe he had physically done so and then somehow reburied himself. Rather, again, it appears the revenant is seen as a kind of spirit, whose nocturnal attacks seem to create some effect on the corpse lying still undisturbed back in its grave. It is interesting that the report indicates the corpse is perfectly intact and “fresh,” yet admits an exception, saying, “except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away.” Once again the reliability of the report is questionable based on its own claims and logic. But perhaps most interesting here is the indication that the vampire is being blamed for an illness that is spreading through the village. Vampirism in folklore and fiction has since been portrayed as a kind of plague in its own right. It spreads like a disease when one vampire turns two victims into vampires, who in short order then each turn victims of their own, and so on. We don’t see vampirism spreading like an infection here, but it does appear to be a vector of some other infection in this tale, as we see his victims dying after a brief illness. But these sick villagers only essentially said that they had had nightmares about Plogojowitz. Again, if they even really made these claims, this could very well have been the result of some rumors that Plogojowitz had turned into a vampire. One wonders how many others who weren’t sick might have had similar nightmares with such rumors going around. Viewing the scenario in this more rationalist light, it becomes a case of scapegoating. We know nothing about Plogojowitz’s character in life or how he was viewed by villagers, but for whatever reason, when three months after his death a disease began spreading among the villagers, some chose to explain the mysterious illness by blaming it on the dead man, and the claim took on a life of its own, as it were. Who knows how many cases of vampires can be similarly explained as an attempt to find some comforting explanation for a frightening danger. The village of Kisilova knew of nothing they could do to defeat this communicable disease, but they knew just what to do about a vampire.

The explanation that vampirism was simply a way to cast blame for a plague when there was no one really to blame does much to explain every instance when a village chose to dig up and desecrate a corpse in this way. It was an established belief, which would of course encourage further claims of visitation by a recently deceased revenant whenever an illness was sweeping through a village. According to the account of the vampire Peter Plogojowitz, the people of Kisilova had heard of entire villages being wiped out by such a vampire. Of course, by this explanation, they were actually wiped out by diseases they did not understand, which they only explained by claiming a vampire was attacking them. As the notion that vampires cause disease transformed into the notion that vampirism spread like a disease, the act of digging up and destroying corpses itself sometimes became epidemic. According to a report published in Nuremberg in 1732, it sometimes resulted in villagers digging up entire cemeteries in the belief that they were full of vampires. In the village of Medvegia, a belief that vampires were visiting people and sucking their blood had arisen. The villagers claimed that their troubles could all be traced back to a soldier named Arnod Paole, who had died falling off a haywagon. While still alive, Paole had told people that a vampire used to attack him. He claimed to have finally rid himself of the vampire by eating soil from its grave and smearing its blood on himself. When Paole died, there were further claims that he had turned into a vampire and begun to bother villagers, and that he had even posthumously killed four people. One assumes they probably died from some illness, but regardless, the village dug him up, claimed he was not decayed, and that fresh blood flowed from him and that new skin and fingernails had grown on him. As was their custom with vampires, they staked him, whereupon he groaned and bled profusely, and thereafter they burned his remains. However, in Medvegia we see that whatever plague had been troubling them did not fade, so they needed further scapegoats and therefore claimed that all of Paole’s victims must likewise have been transformed into vampires. Thus they began digging up every corpse that had supposedly been killed by a vampire, which had probably actually expired from some disease, and each of these they decided had also not properly decomposed and showed the signs of vampirism, perhaps because they seem to have exhumed them in the winter, when cold weather slowed their decay. And when they ran out of dead people to blame for the disease and the disease continued to rage, they claimed that vampires had attacked their cattle too, and therefore anyone who had eaten of their meat must also have been transformed into a vampire upon dying. And when they dug these up—these people who hadn’t claimed to have been troubled by vampires but had likely died from the same illness nonetheless—they found that they too showed the signs of vampirism. It makes you wonder how many corpses they would have to observe before they started to suspect that the features they were so certain indicated vampirism might actually have been typical of a corpse in certain stages of decomposition.

An image depicting the rising of the dead from their graves.

Perhaps the best and most revealing report on such peasant superstitions comes to us from a French botanist named Pitton de Tournefort in early 18th century Mykonos, where the Greeks called such revenants vrykolakas. De Tournefort viewed the peasant superstitions more critically, and his skeptical account offers a rarer look at what was actually going on. He described a certain man on Mykonos who was unliked because of his quarrelsome nature, who had been murdered, with the culprit never having been discovered. Afterward, he was said to have been seen walking the island at night, or even entering homes and playing pranks like snuffing out lanterns, overturning furniture, or seizing people from behind and scaring them half to death. After ten days of this, they said a mass, exhumed his corpse, and cut out his heart. De Tournefort observed the practice, remarking on how inexpertly the butcher who completed the task performed it. Rather than observing a lack of stench, de Tournefort describes how the men who examined the corpse burned incense to cover the smell, which causes one to wonder whether that might be the case in other reported instances as well, but that the practice went unrecorded. Nevertheless, de Tournefort asserted that it did not decrease the stench at all, but rather magnified it. In fact, de Tournefort states that he suspects the men would have claimed the body did not stink at all if he had not been present to contradict their claims, giving the sense that a skeptic’s presence was all that prevented them from exaggerating their claims such that they would better match those of other accounts. Instead, some of the men began to cry out that smoke was coming from the body of the supposed vampire after it had been opened, proving it was a vrykolakas, though the botanist was certain that the smoke was obviously just from the incense. Likewise, he described the crowd of people proclaiming that the corpse was not stiff and that its blood was still red and warm, although de Tournefort seemed to express skepticism on the matter. He suggested that some warmth was to be expected when “rummaging about in entrails, which were putrefying,” and he further states, “as for the pretended red blood, …this was nothing but a stinking mess.” After the people thought they had rid themselves of this supposed vampire, the pranks continued, such that townsfolk left their homes and congregated together at night, finding their houses further ransacked and rummaged through upon their return. The believers argued over the proper way to dispense with the vrykolakas, suggesting they should have said mass after cutting out the heart rather than before, etc. Meanwhile de Tournefort had a different idea, suggesting that a number of vagabonds had run wild in the town, vandalizing homes and eating and drinking their fill at night when the villagers left their houses vacant and unguarded. Here we see a further explanation, other than scapegoating for a disease. We see that the supposed vrykolakas or vampire was hated for his behavior and character, and even killed for it. So perhaps others, like Peter Plogojowitz, were likewise disliked, making them a more likely target of blame when a disease came around, or in this case, on Mykonos, a crime wave. In the dark of night, as unknown figures are seen striding outside the home, or when some brute bursts into your house and knocks over your lamp, making it impossible to properly identify him, and goes on to break your things and assault you, who can you blame? Well if the folklore of revenants is common in your culture, you may be more likely to blame the ghost, or the corpse, of that one guy who was always such a dick.

So we have some notion of why a village might decide that a certain dead person was responsible for their woes, and we understand how social contagions work, that such claims might only grow with each retelling, becoming a mass delusion. But what of the claims about the vampire’s body not rotting as is to be expected. We might presume that the claims of there being no smell are exaggerated, but what of the consistent claims that the bodies are still fresh, with new growth of skin, hair, and nails, fresh, uncoagulated blood, with no stiffness as we might expect from rigor mortis, and even that they groan, or sometimes even cry out, when pierced by a stake? First it must be pointed out that, while accounts of vampire killing often claim that there are no signs of decomposition, they almost always belie an ignorance of what decomposition looks like. The falling away of the nose is a clear sign of decomposition, or the bloating that is described in almost every report. Vampire killers often believed the revenant was bloated because it had been drinking blood, but the bloating of corpses is common, due to the release of methane during putrefaction. The lack of stiffness was also a common sign of vampirism, but the fact is that rigor mortis is a temporary phenomenon. During the course of regular decomposition, the body again becomes flexible. Likewise, what they saw as the sloughing off of old skin and the growth of new skin is also a natural phenomenon, something called skin slippage, in which the outer layers of skin peel away, revealing not fresh skin beneath, but raw layers of the epidermis. What they saw as the hair and fingernails growing was actually the flesh having retracted from them, the beginning of a process of shedding the hair and nails. Much is made of the uncoagulated blood, but this too is common. Blood may coagulate but then liquify again, depending on the conditions of the body during decomposition, and the pressure of the gasses bloating the corpse commonly force the pooling blood past the larynx, explaining the supposedly fresh blood on the vampire’s lips. This liquid blood pools in the torso and especially in the heart, further explaining the copious bleeding when the vampire-killers stake revenants, and the very act of violently piercing the trunk of a corpse that has filled with gasses explains the sounds of groaning or even crying out that were frequently reported. Why would some bodies look different from others, though, as so many of these reports claim? The answer is simple. There are many factors that might hasten or retard decomposition, including moisture, temperature, microorganisms, and the presence of air or insects. Indeed, some bodies may actually be unusually preserved through accidental mummification and other processes. Some cultures in which vampires were believed to be common actually buried their dead in lime, which they believed hastened decay but could actually preserve the corpse. Another process is saponification, when fat is transformed into adipocere, causing a pinkish red discoloration in the muscles which may be mistaken for a robust complexion. But a better question is why European peasants would presume that such seemingly unnatural preservation of the dead was a sign of evil when otherwise, as in the preservation of saints, it would be viewed as a miracle of God denoting sanctity. Simply put, the fears these people faced were not fears of a fiendish monster. It was, instead, a quite natural fear of death, something they could not fully comprehend. For this reason, because of that deep-seated dreadful terror at the heart of vampire lore, I would argue that vampires remain the most horrifying of all monsters.

In Part Two we will further explore how this lore evolved into modern myth.

Further Reading

Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. Yale University Press, 1988.

Buzwell, Greg. “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati.” British Library, 15 May 2014, www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/mary-shelley-frankenstein-and-the-villa-diodati.

Summers, Montague. The Vampire in Europe. Taylor & Francis, 2013.

The Enigmatic Kingfish, Huey Long

Huey Pierce Long was a controversial figure on the national stage during the Great Depression. The former governor of Louisiana turned senator made few alliances in Washington. In fact, he had even moved to oppose the New Deal plan of the very popular president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in 1935, he announced his candidacy for U.S. president, a campaign Democrats feared could divide support for Roosevelt, for while he was not popular among his congressional colleagues, he had grown more and more popular among the public, many of whom listened to him on the radio, where he expounded like a preacher on his Share Our Wealth program as an alternative to the New Deal, promising to make “Every Man a King.” And back in his home state, where he had done much to help the common man, he was truly revered by his constituency. “I’m a small fish here in Washington,” he was fond of saying, “But I’m the Kingfish to the folks down in Louisiana.” And it was not just the voting public he held sway over in Louisiana. He still dominated the political scene there. He had handpicked his gubernatorial successor, Oscar K. Allen, and the system of patronage he had established back when he had been governor remained in place, such that, even away in Washington, he could get state legislation passed or struck down seemingly as he pleased. In fact, he was in Baton Rouge on September 8th, 1935, just a month after declaring his candidacy for president, on just such state business. On that day, there was a special session of the state legislature. The business of the day was the ouster of an avowed political enemy of Long’s, Judge Benjamin Pavy. Long had arrived, accompanied by his armed guards, to personally see to it that certain bills would be passed that would allow the legislature to gerrymander Pavy’s district and ensure his political downfall. Huey Long stood tall and proud, secure on his home turf, as he walked between the marble pillars of the Louisiana capitol. Two times that evening, a man in a white suit, Carl Weiss, Judge Pavy’s son-in-law, tried to approach Long and engage him in some sort of conversation, but Long brushed him off. At 9:20pm, Weiss came at Long one more time, eliciting some angry retort from Long that appeared to trigger Weiss into assaulting him. The result was a shootout, as Long’s security, trying to prevent Long’s assassination by Weiss, gunned the judge’s son-in-law down. However, they were too late, for it appeared Weiss had already gotten a shot off. They rushed Huey Long to the nearest hospital, and surgeons immediately went to work trying to save his life. However, they could not stop the internal bleeding from his wound. For two days, Long clung to life, but in the end, he died. His final words were reported as “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.” When his passing was announced to the public, many mourned the death of a great reformer, feeling a loss of hope comparable to what the country would feel 30 years later after the murder of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. Meanwhile, many others sighed with relief to be rid of a dangerous demagogue, an authoritarian whom many believed to be a homegrown fascist akin to Hitler.

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In the previous post, when I revisited my first topic about Trump’s demagoguery, I suggested the current perils U.S. democracy faces are similar to those in the 1930s, and I specifically cited the demagoguery of Father Coughlin. But Huey Long is often mentioned in the very same breath as Father Coughlin. It would have been quite easy to lump him in among the threats to democracy of that period, but Long deserves further analysis, which in turn requires some further clear-eyed analysis of demagoguery. Some scholars reject the term altogether, suggesting it is too difficult to define and is a label too easily flung at those whom we oppose as a means of discrediting them. The word originally only meant “a leader of the people” in ancient Greece, but even so, it has always carried with it a negative connotation, indicative of manipulation or deception. Today, however, we might recognize the validity and even the importance of certain radical political agitation that may not have been condoned in the past. So where is the line between radical leader and dangerous demagogue? Perhaps the ultimate example of a dangerous demagogue is Adolph Hitler. The way Hitler cultivated his public image as a leader of the masses, his spellbinding oratory, his appeal to prejudices and his reliance on scapegoats are all perfect examples of the stereotypical demagogue. In fact, it has been argued that demagoguery is the definite first stage of a fascist movement. It is certainly important, even vital, to remember the rise of Hitler and be vigilant against the rise of another like him. However, comparisons to Hitler are not always the historical parallel we should use. First of all, you run the risk of offending Holocaust survivors with such analogies. Second, you may be too easily dismissed as alarmist or hyperbolic. Perhaps the better example to use when evaluating whether Huey Long was a demagogue would be the stereotype of the Southern demagogue. We can take as our exemplar “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, another Southern governor and senator. A leader of the Red Shirts whom I described in my episodes on the Wilmington Insurrection, Tillman engaged in wholesale race massacres during Reconstruction in his efforts to ensure continued white supremacy. Like others who fall into the Southern demagogue category, Tillman rose to power by whipping up the emotions and prejudices of voters. He exploited the hot-button issues, manipulating the discontent of a white, agrarian culture and blaming all of their woes on the black citizens that he painted as their enemies. The demagogue cultivates his image as a champion of the downtrodden, when often he has never been one himself, as was the case with Tillman, who came from a wealthy slave-owning family. The demagogue is charismatic in their speechmaking, but it is the emptiness of their rhetoric that is more important, since great oratory is not a fault. The demagogue is no resolver of social problems. Rather, he distracts from problems with his scapegoating, and more often than not, race-baiting, as the demagogue’s currency is prejudice and resentment. And finally, revealing that the demagogue cares more for his own elevation than serving those who raise him up, he is no keeper of promises, and he usually reveals himself to be corrupt, engaging in fraud, and betraying the principles of democracy to further his own empowerment. These attributes can be seen very clearly in Hitler, and quite clearly in “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and other Southern Demagogues. But the question of this episode is did the Kingfish meet these criteria?

Southern Demagogue “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman

Huey Long grew up in a district of Louisiana that thrived on populist politics, and he appears to have learned much about the whipping up of crowds from politicians in the so-called People’s Party, which appealed to farmers and rural laborers. Long always presented himself as being one of the working class, from a poor background, but in truth, he was from an affluent family, most of whom were Democrats, the party of Jim Crow segregation and black disenfranchisement until the party realignment that was underway during Long’s lifetime. Here we seem to be checking a box in favor of demagogue, as Long cultivated his image as one of the common man, when in fact members of his own family, upset by his later politics, publicly contradicted his tales of growing up poor. However, self-presentation is an artform practiced by all politicians, especially today with their teams of public relations experts and publicists and media messaging strategists. Adopting a rustic persona and reinventing oneself to appeal to the public is almost a requirement of the job. Yes, it’s disingenuous, but it’s also, maybe, a commonplace evil in a world where all politicians show up to disaster areas with their shirtsleeves rolled up as if they really intend to physically do anything beyond giving some prepared remarks. This alone we might dismiss as a matter of optics, a politician doing what politicians do. So let us search for further signs of demagoguery. He started his career as a lawyer, and even back then we can see his tendency to fight for the little guy, winning compensation for his clients from the enemy he would focus on throughout his political career: big corporations. His political career commenced with a position as Public Utilities Commissioner, in which role he again championed the less advantaged, supporting independent oil companies and taking on the behemoth Standard Oil. His critics will point out that he had a conflict of interest here, as he actually owned stock in the independent oil companies that he was helping. This assertion certainly paints Long as a corrupt and deceitful leader whose supposed principles only served his own ends. However, recent legal scholarship casts doubt on the long-held assumptions that Huey Long improperly profited from independent oil company profits. As it turns out, the stock shares in question, in the independent Win or Lose oil company, came into his possession years after he first began fighting for companies like them, even after he had left the governor’s office. And regardless, in his work for the Utilities commission, he not only fought for smaller companies, but also for the consumer, pushing for affordable rates. It may be difficult to argue that Huey Long was not corrupt, but to characterize all the genuinely beneficial reforms he pushed for as cynically self-serving is unfair.

During his governorship, Huey Long did undeniable good for the state of Louisiana. It is somewhat absurd to read his critics argue that he only exploited the poor and disadvantaged to achieve power, but then concede that he did actually keep his promises and enact reforms that benefitted them, but also claim that he only did so to hang on to his power. It’s a bit like arguing that a certain saint does not deserve to be sainted because they only did all that charity work and performed all those miracles in an effort to become a saint. It’s rather hard to discern the purity of one’s motives, since we judge by their actions. In office, Huey Long enacted so many reforms they became known as the Long Revolution, and the reforms would be considered progressive even by today’s standards. He pulled the state out of its Depression nosedive with broad infrastructure projects that vastly improved employment. Yes, some projects may have been vanity projects, like a new governor’s mansion and a new capitol, but they put laborers to work all the same, and most projects were not, including the construction of a new seawall and spillway to shield New Orleans from flooding, improvements to that city’s port and warehouses, a new airport, numerous bridges and railroads, and almost 4,000 miles of newly paved roads, a record at the time for a state in the Deep South. Beyond these projects, he built new health care facilities and fought for more sanitary and compassionate mental health facilities. In education, he allocated funding to improve school facilities and provide free textbooks, and as a result increased enrollment in public schools. He also established night schools and managed to significantly reduce adult illiteracy in Louisiana. Those who call him a demagogue argue that he only helped all these people in order to serve himself, but he actually did much to empower local government over big government, which would seemingly reduce his own power. If demagogues don’t keep their promises and are in the business of distracting from real world social issues by blaming scapegoats, Huey Long doesn’t fit the bill. He drew attention to real social ills and enacted concrete programs to alleviate them. The enemies he vilified were the extremely wealthy and large corporations, validly pointing out a concern that we must recognize has only gotten more concerning: that many of society’s ills derive from the distribution of wealth. It causes one to ponder, can it really be called scapegoating if you are accurately casting blame?

A Huey Long for Governor campaign flyer

While he won the enthusiastic support of Louisianians, especially poor and rural citizens, Long made many enemies as governor, and later, in Washington. Perhaps this accounts for the divisive nature of his legacy. The first time he ran, in 1924, he lost, but in 1928, through his innovative campaigning and captivating speeches, he succeeded with the slogan “Every Man a King but No One Wears a Crown.” Early in his tenure as governor, having made enemies of industrialists with his proposal of an oil tax, he was nearly removed from office under an impeachment resolution that listed accusations ranging from bribery through patronage and controlling the courts through his appointments, to carrying concealed weapons and suborning murder. The last was hearsay, a rumor that Long had suggested, while drunk, that someone kill a rival’s son and leave him in a ditch. The accusations resulted in an all-out brawl in the legislature, remembered as Bloody Monday. Long insisted the whole impeachment campaign was a conspiracy by Standard Oil to prevent his reforms, and in the end, after a battle of bribes and counter-bribes on both sides, Long was victorious. Afterward, he came to dominate state politics, such that one critic rewrote his slogan as “Every Man a King but Only One Wore the Crown.” His mechanism of influence was machine politics. He cultivated allies in the legislature through patronage. He would appoint legislators to positions in state agencies, providing them additional income, and then expect them to play ball when it came to passing laws for his reform programs, and as we saw on the day he was shot, he attended legislative sessions in person, ready to bowl over opponents of his agenda with his folksy and charming rhetoric, as well as his scathing personal attacks. His opponents he thereafter dealt with harshly, supporting those who ran against them in elections and even using his power to take petty revenge, like firing anyone in their family who happened to work for the state. It’s no wonder he was disliked by those who stood in his way, and absolutely his system of patronage was ethically dubious, but those who admire his reform programs, and especially those who benefitted from them, like the poor, tended to view him as playing the game the way it had to be played in order to keep his promises and make his changes. One argument is that he may have started out an idealist and only resorted to the corrupt means that his enemies employed because his ends justified them. Moving beyond his time as governor, though, after his election to the Senate, when he remained in firm control of Louisiana through his machine and the puppet governor he’d chosen to replace him, it may very well be that he succumbed to his ambitions, not wanting to give up his influence, and seeking greater power in Washington, whether because he lusted after it or because he really believed that only he would use it for the good of the country.

At first, Huey Long allied himself with Franklin D. Roosevelt and campaigned for him, but eventually he turned on the president, opposing his New Deal programs as not doing enough to resolve the hardships of the Depression. It has been claimed by his critics that Long only moved against Roosevelt because the president had blocked his further political ambitions, but again, this is a matter of presuming Long’s motivation. It is certainly true that he had his eye on the presidency. He even wrote an imaginative account of what his presidency would be like. He anticipated dividing Roosevelt’s support, resulting in a Republican presidency, after which Long believed he would be swept into office. His critics further claim that his alternative program, the Share Our Wealth Society, was little more than a ploy to get him into office by bribing the poor for their support. And it is true that his alternative program was rather light on details and perhaps overpromised what could be accomplished at the time, but looking at it in a modern light, Huey Long was advocating for many reforms that were ahead of his time. He spoke about the richest 2% owning far too much of the wealth, and he proposed capping wealth and redistributing it to the poverty-stricken. He wanted to enact a temporary moratorium on debt during the economic crisis, a policy that was recently enacted under the Trump administration and furthered under Biden to provide relief during the pandemic. But more than that, Long pushed for universal healthcare, free college education, and a universal basic income. All of these proposals are still advocated for by progressive reformers today. So perhaps Long’s program was not the transparent ploy that some historians have claimed. Certainly Roosevelt recognized the appeal of it, as he came to view Long as “one of the two most dangerous men in America,” the other being General Douglas MacArthur. To address this threat, Roosevelt sicced his IRS on Long, putting his finances under the microscope in an effort to bring him down, and played Long’s own patronage game against him, declaring, “Anybody working for Huey Long is not working for us.” Roosevelt recognized not only Long’s threat to his presidency and to his New Deal programs. Almost certainly, Roosevelt’s assessment of Long as a danger reflected the belief common among Long’s critics that he was a fascist. Indeed, many were the comparisons of Long to Hitler. One New Dealer called him “the Hitler of one of our sovereign states,” and one journalist suggested Long could possibly “Hitlerize America.” American Communists called him “Louisiana’s Hitler,” and described him as “the personification of the fascist menace in the United States.” Domestic sympathizers of fascism said he was “the nearest approach to a national fascist leader.” Even Huey’s own brother said he was “trying to be a Hitler,” and some historians and biographers have immortalized this view of him. But was it accurate?

Long delivering a speech with his signature awkward gesticulation, which was sometimes compared to Hitler’s oratorical style.

There are indeed undeniable parallels between the Kingfish and fascist dictators like the Führer and Il Duce. They all rose to power in the wake of the Great Depression, taking advantage of the public’s dissatisfaction with an ineffective government. They were all mesmerizing orators and master propagandists. Huey Long pretty much invented the modern campaign media blitz. He was the first to outfit a truck with speakers and have it driven through the streets to encourage people to attend his rallies, and he was the first politician to use radio for national addresses, a practice that both FDR and Hitler later took up. However, in several key regards, Longism does not match up with fascism. A key element of fascism was race hate and racial scapegoating, obviously with the anti-Semitism of Nazism but also the Italian fascist racism against Slavic ethnic groups. However, Huey Long, while known to make remarks that betrayed a typically Southern view on race, was said by one who knew him to have “far less racial prejudice in him than any other Southerner in the Senate.” In his reform programs, he helped the poor black community the same as the poor white, securing jobs for black workers, improving conditions for black students, and reducing illiteracy among black Louisianians from 38% to 23%. He even insisted that black citizens too must receive an equal share in his plan to redistribute wealth. “Black and white, they all gotta have a chance,” Long said. “They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children.” As for anti-Semitism, despite working with some rabid anti-Semites, like Gerald L. K. Smith, Long himself was not anti-Semitic, having close Jewish friends and allies, one of whom, Abe Shushan, he honored by naming the new airport in New Orleans after him. Beyond these differentiations, there is the fact that Long’s politics were simply too far left to be considered fascist. You’ll hear some ill-informed people claim that fascism and Nazism were leftist movements, for the simple reason that Nazism was short for National Socialism, but Hitler was never a leftist or socialist. He used the term to gather broad support, but he explicitly said that he was redefining the word. In 1923, he said, “I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.” Very quickly his party revealed itself as a far-right movement, and that is how fascism is always and has always been characterized, despite what some who fear the far left might claim today. Nazism and Italian fascism both rose in clear opposition to Communism. Now Huey Long presented himself and his Share the Wealth proposals as an alternative to Communism, but his proposals were certainly far too socialist to be considered fascist today, especially since, when he had power, he did not forget about the people to whom he had made promises, as Hitler did, but rather delivered reforms to improve their condition. And Long himself certainly resented the comparisons, responding, “Don’t liken me to that sonofabitch.”

While Huey Long was no fascist, the further argument is that he at least had authoritarian tendencies. And of course, while fascism is undoubtedly a phenomenon of the far right, leaders on the far left of the political spectrum may indeed be autocrats heading a totalitarian state. One need look no further than Stalinism for an example of this. Examining Huey Long for evidence of authoritarianism, we find definite cause for concern. Even T. Harry Williams, one of Long’s most admiring biographers, concedes that Long, while seeking the power to overcome his opposition so that he could do good, may have ended up grasping too much after power and doing inadvertent harm. In wielding his unprecedented influence over the state legislature, he betrayed some rather anti-democratic sentiments, such as when one lawmaker reminded him that Louisiana had a constitution they were bound to follow, and Long replied, “I’m the constitution around here now.” As a senator and presidential hopeful, when he was pushing for wealth redistribution and was asked how he might respond as president if the Supreme Court blocked his program, he said he would get Congress to pass a law that extended the Supreme Court bench to include all congressmen and would have the case considered again. While I acknowledge and even distrust and denounce the counter-majoritarian nature of the Supreme Court, especially today as an openly partisan and extreme right bench rolls back civil rights, what Long was proposing, effectively merging the judicial and legislative branches of government, was not just unrealistic but extremely dangerous. While these remarks and Long’s unprecedented influence over every aspect of the government in Louisiana may be indicative of some anti-democratic tendencies, when we hold up Louisiana under his auspices to scholarly criteria for a totalitarian regime, we find that it doesn’t quite fit. A totalitarian system is characterized not only by a leader who holds extraordinary power as Long held. It is further characterized by the existence of only a single party and an official ideology, which just wasn’t the case with Longism. It is further characterized by an iron-fisted control over media and education and the economy, none of which Long ever held. Indeed, Long struggled with opposition newspapers and rival parties, and he once said to a newsman who suggested he was a dictator, “You and I both know that if the people want to throw me out they’re going to do it.” Besides the broad power Long wielded in Louisiana because of his political machine, the one other criteria he could be argued to meet was his commanding of a “secret police” capable of terrorism. Long’s use of the state police as his personal security was widely criticized, with comparisons unsurprisingly made to Hitler’s Brownshirt private army. And in 1928, he pushed the infamous Act 99 through the legislature, establishing the Bureau of Criminal Identification, a law enforcement agency independent of the police, which Long controlled by appointing its head officers, and which was capable of making arrests without a warrant. Long’s critics declared it his own Gestapo… but it didn’t engage in official campaigns of terror as predicted. In fact, today, it is just the wing of the state police in charge of fingerprinting.

Huey Long surrounded by his armed guards.

When Long first established this bureau, the BCI, it was specifically to investigate a number of armed militia groups that had formed in opposition to him and which had engaged in criminal violence and armed insurrection. These groups were, like so many others then and today, openly racist, overtly likening themselves to white supremacist movements like those that enacted reigns of terror all over the South during Reconstruction, much like those I described in my series The Coup on Cape Fear. These groups were responsible for death threats, not only to Huey Long but also to the Long-supportive administration, headed by Long’s successor as governor, Oscar K. Allen. They attempted arson on more than one occasion, and once even took a pot shot at Long’s home in New Orleans. At one point, when during a recount for a voter referendum on some constitutional amendments, Governor Allen declared martial law, necessitating that the recount occur under armed guard, many cried fraud, but the clear reason that Allen had to call in the National Guard that day was that these militia agitators had staged an armed rebellion in the district where the recount was occurring. Hundreds of armed members of the opposition militia group calling itself the Square Deal Association had stormed the East Baton Rouge Parish courthouse. And rather than some draconian crackdown, Allen’s declaration of martial law resulted in the Square Dealers dispersing without violence. These Square Dealers were the central focus of the BCI, who had infiltrated them with informants. It was because of these spies that the BCI was able to arrest many in this group the very next day, when the BCI surprised fifty armed Square Dealers at the Baton Rouge Airport. A shootout ensued, but no one was killed. Several were arrested, and the group’s leader fled across state lines. The informants that the BCI had among these opposition groups also provided information on meeting locations, at some of which Long stated they had recorded evidence of murder plots. Ever the purveyor of political spectacle, Huey Long dramatically read the minutes of these meetings on the Senate floor. Indeed, if they can be trusted, it does seem that the men at the meetings were talking about killing Long, specifically shooting him and sinking his corpse into the Gulf of Mexico weighted with chains and speculating that Roosevelt would pardon them for doing it. Whether this was idle talk or earnest plotting remains unclear, but all this seems enough to warrant Long’s security details and the establishment of the special investigative force, even if it does not excuse the unconstitutional granting of unlawful search and seizure powers. When later that year Long was killed in the Louisiana capitol, his armed guards failing to protect him, unsurprisingly, the event spawned a number of conspiracy theories, which I intend to discuss in a patron exclusive Blind Spot.

The figure of the Kingfish, Huey Long, is hotly contested by biographers and historians who variously call him a hero or a despot, a champion of the people or a demagogue. I have endeavored to judge him fairly in this episode, and to indicate where I thought he may have been unjustly criticized or unfairly characterized, but I must be clear that I don’t approve of his machine politics or his lack of regard for the separation of powers and for constitutional rights. I think that his plan for the redistribution of wealth, while admirable in many regards, was simplistic and unrealistic as outlined and likely a calculated attempt to steal the New Deal thunder and help him realize his designs on the presidency. I think Long actually showed his lack of support for the working classes in numerous ways, such as his lack of support for labor unions, his failure to push for a minimum wage law in Louisiana, and his opposition to the ratification of the Federal Child Labor Amendment. Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder what concrete beneficial reforms he might have managed to achieve as president. On the other hand, while Long may not fit many of the criteria of a demagogue or a fascist, when we apply the same criteria to Donald Trump, an unsettling conclusion must be drawn. Huey Long kept his promises to the people who supported him, whereas Trump, who made concrete promises such as investing $550 billion in infrastructure, bringing back U.S. manufacturing jobs, guaranteeing 6 weeks paid maternity leave, and generally improving the economy, healthcare, and education, did not keep the promises he campaigned on. He was carried into office largely by poor, rural whites, convincing them that he was fighting for them, but inequality only deepened when Trump was in power. Huey Long did not distract from real issues by race baiting, is common of demagogues and fascists, but Donald Trump ran on hate for immigrants, specifically Latin American migrants and Muslims, and since that time, he has made his political opponents and the media into his constant scapegoats, blaming the left and fake news whenever his corruption is revealed. Huey Long was regularly accused of corruption and graft, and after his death, those who inherited his political machine were definitively caught using it in corrupt ways to enrich themselves, but try as his critics might to posthumously link their crimes to him, Long has remained unimplicated in their crimes. Conversely, Trump ran on draining the swamp or ridding Washington of corruption while acting as corruptly as any President before him, or worse, conning donors to his campaign and his defense fund out of hundreds of millions and flagrantly enriching himself through the powers of his office. He is a compelling, if buffoonish and overdramatic speaker, as was Long and as was Hitler, and he certainly benefits from propaganda in conservative news media and through online disinformation campaigns. While Long was a progressive populist and used his control of law enforcement to combat lawless militia groups, Trump has proven himself a far-right extremist, far closer on the political spectrum to textbook fascism, and his apparent personal command of white supremacist anti-government paramilitary goon squads like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys serves as a far more apt comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and they have proven themselves more prepared to engage in terror campaigns. As I acknowledged at the beginning of this episode, comparisons to Hitler and fascism can often be viewed as offensive or alarmist or hyperbolic, and I do not make the comparison lightly. I’ve laid out the criteria and considered it thoughtfully, as you’ve seen. At a certain point, after comparing how something looks and how it swims and how it quacks, you’ve just got to admit when it passes the duck test.

Further Reading

Amenta, Edwin, et al. “Stolen Thunder? Huey Long’s ‘Share Our Wealth,’ Political Mediation, and the Second New Deal.” American Sociological Review, vol. 59, no. 5, 1994, pp. 678–702, https://doi.org/10.2307/2096443.

Haas, Edward F. “Huey Long and the Dictators.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 47, no. 2, 2006, pp. 133–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4234177.

Hogan, J. Michael, and L. Glen Williams. “The Rusticity and Religiosity of Huey P. Long.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol. 7, no. 2, 2004, pp. 149–71, https://doi.org/10.1353/rap.2004.0040.

Leuchtenburg, William E. “FDR and the Kingfish.” American Heritage, vol. 36, no. 6, Oct./Nov. 1985, www.americanheritage.com/fdr-and-kingfish#1.
Jeansonne, Glen. “Challenge to the New Deal: Huey P. Long and the Redistribution of National Wealth.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 21, no. 4, 1980, pp. 331–39. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4232034.

Schafer, Elizabeth D., and Anthony Connors. "Huey Long: Was Huey Long a Progressive Reformer or a Dangerous Demagogue?" History in Dispute, edited by Robert J. Allison, vol. 3: American Social and Political Movements, 1900-1945: Pursuit of Progress, St. James Press, 2000, pp. 86-94. Gale In Context: Global Issues, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2876300019/GIC?u=sjdc_main&sid=bookmark-GIC&xid=6decfee2.

Seidemann, Ryan M., et al. “The Kingfish’s Mineral Legacy: An Analysis of the Legality of State Mineral Leases Granted to W.T. Burton and James A. Noe During the Years 1934–1936 and Their Relevance to Former United States Senator and Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long.” LSU Journal of Energy Law and Resources, vol. 5, no, 1, 2017, pp. 71-152. LSU Law Digital Commons, digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/jelr/vol5/iss1/8/.

The Perils of American Democracy

This installment is greatly focused on the historic figure of the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. Any who may not read on because they simply don’t want to hear about him anymore, I understand. But to any who object because they resent partisanship in political discourse and historical analysis, I would argue, at this point, that criticism of Donald Trump’s actions in office and out of it is no longer partisan. If you care about American democracy, you should listen on.

It was recently reported that President Joe Biden took some time in early August to sit down for a 2-hour conference with a group of history scholars who spoke to him with some urgency regarding the historical moment in which the United States now finds itself. Specifically, this varied group of historians included Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham, Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss, expert on Human Rights Allida Black, Pulitzer -winning journalist Anne Applebaum, and Sean Wilentz, whom you may remember for his unfortunate criticism of the 1619 Project, which I spoke about in my defense of the project. These experts raised concerns not only about the rise of authoritarianism and threats to democracy around the world, but specifically to the danger that American democracy currently faces. These historians are not alone. According to a very recent NBC News poll, “threats to democracy” have replaced concerns about the economy as the most important issue to voters. Many are those who think they’re clever but only reveal their ignorance by pointing out that “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” but of course, a republic, by definition, is a democracy. Specifically, it is a form of government in which power resides in the voting populace, with their will exercised by their elected representatives. Or as Founding Father Alexander Hamilton once wrote of the Constitution, “This representative democracy as far as is consistent with its genius has all the features of good government.” The fragility of American democracy is not a new concern. Even back when our democratic system of government was still in the intermediary stage between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, we more than once almost went a different way with our experiment. In 1782, there was there a conspiracy among the leaders of the Continental Army, who had not been paid, and who threatened what would essentially have been a coup d'état, proposing to establish a constitutional monarchy with General Washington as its king. Had it not been for Washington’s famous rejection of the offer and subsequent efforts to quell the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy by arranging payment for the troops, our country might have taken a decidedly different path. Then in 1787, during the convening of the Constitutional Convention, rumors swirled about the Continental Congress scheming to offer a proposed regency over the United States to Hohenzollern Prince Henry of Prussia. Indeed, the anxieties and the protest ran so high that the conclave at the Philadelphia Convention had to print an official denial that they intended to establish another monarchy. For decades, these rumors and accusations were unsubstantiated, but in the early 20th century, corroborating evidence appears to have been found in the royal Prussian archives in Charlottenburg. A letter from Henry of Prussia, addressed to an old friend, Baron von Steuben, a Prussian-American general who had whipped the Continental Army into shape during the Revolution and was retired in New York at the time of the Philadelphia Convention, remarks pretty directly on the offer. In French, Henry writes, “I confess that I cannot believe that we can resolve to change the principles of the government which has been established in the United States of America, but if the entire nation should agree to establish others, and would choose for its model the constitution of England, according to my judgment I must admit that it is of all constitutions the one that seems the most perfect to me.” Now if either the Newburgh Conspiracy or the Prussian Scheme had succeeded in their designs, we cannot claim that America would be any less a democracy than is the UK, but both stories serve to show that now is certainly not the first time the fate of our particular brand of democracy has been threatened. This is not to say that concerns are unwarranted. Rather, it is to demonstrate that vigilance is required to preserve our way of life.

Let us begin this discussion by bringing the blog full circle back to the topic of my very first installment, which I removed from the podcast feed a while back because the sound mix wasn’t great and the subject matter caused some new listeners who started at the beginning to not give the podcast a chance. However, the transcript is still available here. Its topic was demagoguery. From the establishment of our federal government, the biggest threat to American democracy has always been the danger of a demagogue coming along and manipulating the people for his own benefit. George Washington wrote to Marquis de Lafayette during the Constitutional Convention that he feared “some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his Country so much as his own ambitious views” might exploit the opportunity to seize power. And during the convention, numerous speeches indicate that this danger was on many minds. James Madison spoke of the “Danger of Demagogues,” Elbridge Gerry asserted that “Demagogues are the great pests of our government, and have occasioned most of our distresses,” and Alexander Hamilton warned over and over against the threat of demagogues. In The Federalist Papers, he warned that they were the historical cause of the overturning of most republics—men who start out as demagogues, “paying an obsequious court to the people,” thereafter becoming tyrants. This danger is one of the principal reasons for the checks and balances baked into the system. Specifically, the power of impeachment was the ultimate check against a demagogue chief executive. So what is a demagogue? We might judge from one revision to the records of the convention, in which Elbridge Gerry states that “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” This term, pretended patriots, had originally been taken down as “demagogues” and was later changed. This sentiment seems rather anti-democratic at first blush, as if the people don’t know what’s good for them and need governing, but in fact, his concern is exactly that some authoritarian ruler may fool the American people into raising him up, that the populace might be exploited by one who only pretends to serve them but in fact serves only himself. I’ll revisit the quote from James Fenimore Cooper that I shared in my first episode, “The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people…. The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners and…appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning…instead of manifesting the frank, fearless qualities of the democracy he so prodigally professes.” In that first episode, without stating it outright, since back in 2016 it seemed gauche, I implied, rather heavy-handedly, that this described Donald Trump to a T, as it were, and I went on to compare him to Lewis Charles Levin, a 19th century nativist demagogue. Now, today, there are many valid reasons that the public fears U.S. democracy may be in peril, such as polarization, misinformation online, loss of trust in the media, etc. But without leaning too heavily on the I-told-you-so button, I must argue that the principal threat to our democracy in recent years has been and continues to be incorporated in the person of the former president. There are many historical parallels to the danger we now face and the threat he continues to represent, and we will examine them, but it must be conceded that this existential threat to American democracy, embodied and incited as it is by a disgraced former leader of the country, is utterly unique.

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, by Howard Chandler Christy (1940)

After the failure of the Capitol Insurrection on January 6th 2021, it seemed Trump had finally been revealed as the anti-democratic force that he clearly is. More than a year later, with the revelations of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s central role in inciting the insurrection made more and more clear, it has been truly disheartening to see so many Republican representatives and talking heads on conservative media fall in line to defend the indefensible. And now, since the FBI search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago and the revelation that Trump illegally took classified documents out of the White House and kept them at his private residence for years, it has been further dispiriting to see Trump’s civilian foot soldiers launch more than one assault on FBI offices. These criminals who have taken up arms against federal law enforcement in what should rightly be considered a second insurrection do so because they think the agency is wrongfully persecuting Trump, and they believe Trump’s explanations that he was just taking work home with him because don’t we all do that? When it was revealed that the “work” Trump removed from the White House included classified and Top Secret documents, these true believers credited Trump’s further explanation that he had actually declassified the documents he took home, under a standing order that anything he took out of the Oval Office be automatically declassified. This last claim was called “preposterous” by national security experts who explain that the classification system has been established over the course of numerous executive orders since World War II, requiring the head of whatever department or agency originally classified the document to review them before declassification and to consult with any other agency or department that may have some interest in the classified material before officially removing the classification marking from the document. Anyone who would believe that the very act of removing the document from the Oval Office declassified it just because Trump said it did, without any official executive order to change the declassification process, simply doesn’t understand the matter and should defer to the experts. The fact of the matter is, Trump appears to have broken numerous laws by taking these documents home with him. Section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code specifies that a person removing classified information without authority and keeping them “at an unauthorized location” can be fined and imprisoned for five year. Of course, Trump is arguing that, as the chief executive, he had that authority, but the Presidential Records Act of 1978 further clarifies the powers of a sitting President when it comes to document handling. It is pretty fitting that Trump, who is the only U.S. president to have been impeached twice, has now run afoul of a law passed because of Richard Nixon, another flagrantly corrupt President who made history as the only president to have resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office. When Nixon resigned in 1974, he wanted to take all of his presidential documents home with him, including recordings that were important evidence of his crimes. Fearing that evidence would be destroyed, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, making Nixon’s records public property. And in 1978, having learned our lesson about what a corrupt president might try, the Presidential Records Act was passed so that no future president could remove documents from the White House like Nixon tried to do. Under this law, the American people own those records and documents, and upon a president leaving office, they must be removed directly to the National Archives. Trump’s further explanation that his exit from the White House was simply chaotic, and that the documents were taken by mistake, is perhaps more believable but does not excuse his actions. What it reveals is that he was so certain that he would succeed in overturning the election that he never bothered to pack and ended up having to do what many call an old fashioned shit-shove. However, ignorance is no justification, and since it has come out that someone in his inner circle informed the FBI that these classified materials were in his possession, it seems apparent that even if he didn’t realize what he'd taken at the time, he certainly must have known a year and a half later, especially after a grand jury subpoenaed Trump for the documents in June and he still did not surrender them, necessitating the FBI search of his home.

In fairness, we do know of at least one other American president to have taken home classified documents, and it was a Democrat: Lyndon B. Johnson. Of course, this was years before the passage of the Presidential Records Act and decades before section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. In 1969, when Nixon took office and Johnson vacated the White House, he secretly told a staffer to smuggle out some highly classified documents. The contents of the documents and the reason for their removal takes us back further, to the 1968 presidential race, when Richard Nixon, who had previously been Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president and had been thwarted in his presidential aspirations by the popular John F. Kennedy, Johnson’s late predecessor, ran against Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s VP. This was during the height of the war in Vietnam and the anti-war protest movement. In fact, the American public’s widespread opposition to the war was one of the principal reasons LBJ chose not to run for president again, though he had only served one term as an elected president. As election day drew near in 1968, Johnson saw a path to ending the war in Vietnam in a way that would be acceptable to him, and wanted to pursue it, believing that any indication of his administration ending the war might help Humphrey beat Nixon. However, Richard Nixon became aware of these efforts, and in a stunning betrayal of his country, worked to sabotage peace efforts. Through Anna Chennault, who raised funds for the Republican Party and led the political support group “Republican Women for Nixon,” Nixon made contact with the South Vietnamese government and put pressure on them not to cooperate with Johnson’s peace initiatives. President Johnson, in turn, became aware of Nixon’s sabotage and ordered the FBI to place Chennault under surveillance. From wiretaps, he uncovered evidence of Nixon’s plot “to monkey wrench it,” as one of Nixon’s aides put it. Unsure of what to do with this information, Johnson was on the eve of the election convinced by his cabinet advisers to bury the story. Their reason was that disclosure of the story would be bad for the country, in that it would irreparably harm the American people’s trust in their elected leaders. Certainly this would have been the case. Nixon was elected the next day, but even if disclosure of the story right before Election Day had resulted in a victory for Humphrey, the story would have shown a former vice-president and popular presidential candidate playing politics with the lives of soldiers. In between 1968, when the war in Vietnam might have ended, and 1975, when it did end, countless further lives were lost that might have been saved but for the callous political chess game played by Richard Nixon. And in hindsight, it seems Johnson’s noble motives for keeping Nixon’s treachery a secret were all for nothing. The American public was already disillusioned with the government and its elected leaders. They had been since the start of the Vietnam War and especially since the assassinations of the 1960s that many believed had been orchestrated by our own government. And certainly after Watergate, any vestiges of trust in the American presidency were obliterated regardless. Johnson’s surveillance of Americans in contact with the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., was not, at the time, illegal, nor was his removal of classified documents relating to what that surveillance uncovered. In fact, in telling this story, I would argue that rather than comparing what Trump did to what Johnson did, a more apt comparison is to compare Nixon’s betrayal of the country to Trump’s alleged treason.

Richard Nixon gives a speech on the conflict in Vietnam, which he prevented from being resolved in order to win the presidency.

Here we address more clearly what makes Trump a clear and present danger to American democracy. Clearly he was unwilling to give up power and sought to unlawfully overturn the election and steal the presidency. Anyone who denies this now is performing mental gymnastics and ignoring all the evidence presented in the January 6 Committee hearings. But what makes both the insurrection he clearly orchestrated AND his removal of highly classified documents from the White House even more egregious is the evidence that he has improperly colluded with hostile foreign governments. In the wake of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, when it was revealed that some of the classified documents seized were marked above Top Secret, or S.C.I., which stands for sensitive compartmented information, and that among these were documents containing U.S. nuclear secrets, speculation has run rampant that Trump may have been enriching himself by selling secrets to foreign governments. What evidence is there that Trump has actually done this? The evidence is mostly circumstantial. For example, in the weeks before the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump hosted a controversial Saudi-Arabian funded golf tournament at his golf course in New Jersey, and the timing between this event and the revelation that the FBI recovered classified nuclear documents from Mar-a-Lago resurrected some former allegations raised in 2019 by the House Oversight Committee that the Trump administration attempted to “rush the transfer of highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia,” even suggesting that his actions may have violated the Atomic Energy Act. Even more recently, since it’s been revealed that a Russian-speaking woman “infiltrated” Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s circle, by posing as a member of the Rothschild banking family, Russia is brought to mind. If we are going to worry about Trump betraying American secrets to a foreign government, we should really be talking more about his collusion with Russia. Throughout his presidency, as the collusion between Trump’s election campaign and Russia was being investigated, Trump maintained that it was a baseless conspiracy theory, but unlike most baseless conspiracy theories, there is overwhelming evidence that his campaign worked with Russia, even if he managed to insulate himself personally. Also unlike baseless conspiracy claims, the evidence for Russian collusion has been vetted and uncovered by credible investigative journalism, not fringe researchers. Again, denying Trump’s involvement with Putin’s Russia takes a purposeful refusal to acknowledge overwhelming documentary evidence. Though Mueller’s report, heavily redacted by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, didn’t explicitly implicate Trump himself, his investigation resulted in the conviction of numerous advisers and aides to Trump who had lied about their involvement with Russia, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Steve Bannon. Then there are the uncovered connections between Russia and his administration and close family members, like his Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, his White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his son, Don Jr. As for Trump himself, even discounting the questionable contents of the so-called Steele Dossier, the opposition research that purported to reveal that Trump had been cultivated for years as a Russian asset through blackmail, Trump’s very public praise of Putin in the years leading up to the 2016 campaign, his public call for Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee—which they promptly did—and his actions favorable to Russia while in office all go to support, if not prove, that he may have had, and may still have, an inappropriate relationship with a foreign power that should cause all Americans even greater concern after learning that he attempted to secretly keep classified nuclear documents after being voted out of office. 

The warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago did not actually list the Presidential Records Act as a reason for their search. Rather, it cited the section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that criminalizes the destruction or concealment of documents intended to obstruct an investigation, as well as a section of the U.S. Code dealing with the concealment of public records, and, rather importantly, it cites the Espionage Act. This law was passed in 1917, during World War I, long before Harry Truman penned the first executive order governing the classification of sensitive documents. When searching for a historical parallel for potential prosecution under the Espionage Act of persons accused of mishandling nuclear secrets, one cannot help but consider the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the summer of 1950, amid the height of the Second Red Scare, as the Korean War began, a number of Jewish members of the American Communist Party were arrested for conspiracy to commit treason. It began with Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass, who worked in the nuclear program as a machinist and was charged with stealing secrets related to our atomic bomb technology. Greenglass pled guilty and named Julius, his brother-in-law, as a co-conspirator. The Truman administration then leaned hard on Julius Rosenberg to get him to name others in their spy ring, but Julius maintained his innocence. The Truman administration claimed Julius was the head of the ring and arrested Julius’s wife Ethel, with whom he had two young sons, despite Greenglass’s insistence that his sister was innocent in the matter. Ethel’s arrest seems to have been only a means of coercing Julius to talk, but he remained uncooperative. So they pursued a death penalty, still, it seems, mostly to scare Julius Rosenberg into giving up others in the ring. However, what Truman seems not to have counted on was the clamorous mob mentality of the American people at the time, who had been led to fear Soviet infiltration and to mistrust all Jews as Communist conspirators. According to polls taken at the time, almost three-quarters of the country wanted to see the Rosenbergs executed. Internationally, however, there were nearly universal calls for clemency. Finding himself in a bind, Truman simply passed the buck to his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who feared looking weak and, over the protest overseas as well as the counsel of his own advisers, chose to capitulate to the bloodlust of the people, and sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths in 1953. To the end, they maintained their innocence, and for decades, many social critics and scholars likewise argued that the case against them was weak, with evidence predicated on the testimony of an informant trying to save his own skin, evidence as absurd as a Jell-O box being in their possession that was said to be carried as a signal to other spies in the ring, when of course, in the 1950s, one would be hard-pressed to find a household that did not contain a box of Jell-O. These critics were mostly silenced, however, in 1995 with the public disclosure of certain cables intercepted by the Venona project, a U.S. counterintelligence program, which showed that, indeed, Julius Rosenberg had been part of an atomic spy ring.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in custody.

The fact that the Espionage Act was invoked on the FBI’s warrant to search Mar-a-Lago does not indicate there is any evidence that Trump was selling or disclosing information related to national defense. The Act is used not only to prosecute those who spy for a foreign power but also those who mishandle secrets, including those who leak secrets to the media as whistleblowers. It seems pretty clear, however, that Trump, who openly reviles leakers and all legacy media outlets, was not doing the latter. However, even if he were caught giving American secrets to Russia or the Saudis, let me be clear that I am not advocating for the death penalty. Even in the case of the Rosenbergs, I would argue that justice was not served by taking their lives. Certainly the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg was inconclusive. She was accused over the denials of their informant, and the only evidence against her was a set of notes that she allegedly typed, but it’s impossible to ascertain who actually typed the document. The extent of her crime might have been some vague knowledge of her husband’s activities and tacit approval of them, but this should not have been enough to extinguish her life and leave her children parentless. Even if you do believe that her passive involvement earned her a capital punishment, there is the matter of the unequal apportionment of such sentences. David Greenglass’s wife Ruth was just as likely to have been aware of their activities, but she was never charged. And Greenglass himself, who was more directly guilty of stealing atomic secrets, was sentenced to 15 years and only served nine of them. We might attribute this to his cooperation with investigators, but others involved also were not sentenced to death, such as Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who actually worked directly on the bomb at Los Alamos and only served 9 years. When we consider the Rosenberg case with this context, they appear to have been singled out, perhaps because of Julius’s alleged leadership position in the ring, or perhaps because they had been uncooperative, or perhaps because they were Jews from an immigrant family. Whatever the case, I agree with scholars who argue that in trying not to appear weak, Eisenhower clearly demonstrated his weakness by sacrificing their lives to boost his approval ratings. Ironically, though, while I would not advocate for Trump to face the same sentence as the Rosenbergs, even if it were proven beyond doubt that he did indeed sell or surrender nuclear secrets to a foreign power, he does advocate for death sentences in such cases himself. Speaking about Bowe Bergdahl, Trump on several occasions advocated for shooting traitors.

One should not ask whether or not the former president is capable of treason. He is a human being, and thus fallible. He is capable of it. He has shown throughout his careers, both business and political, that he has no qualms about putting himself before his country. Consider his years of tax avoidance, or his serial disregard of the Emoluments Clause as he used the power of his presidency to enrich himself. If you’re unaware of any of these facts, I might suggest that you choose different news sources. Regardless, though, asking whether he betrayed his country in his handling of Top Secret documents is something of a moot point. The very fact that he incited an insurrection at the Capitol in his efforts to overturn the legitimate results of an election and retain power against the will of the American people is proof enough that he has already betrayed his country and done damage to our democracy. However, as I said, he is just one man. The fact that this man, who openly admires dictators, was elected U.S. president and was thus able to do all this damage is more of an indictment on those who voted him into office, though, than it is to him alone. It is the people who raise up demagogues. And it is the fact that so many Americans voted for Trump and continue to support him despite everything that really has the historians who met with Biden worried. They compared the political climate today to other times in U.S. history when American democracy was at risk, such as before the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln cautioned, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Does this mean we face the threat of another Civil War, as we did in the disputed election of 1876? Or is our situation more like the years before the U.S. joined World War II. I favor this analogy, since just as today we see an entire wing of the support for Donald Trump coming from White Nationalists, the threat to American democracy in the late 1930s was not just from Hitler but also involved a rise in fascist sentiment and anti-Semitism within America, fueled by demagoguery. While fascism was spreading across Europe, Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a radio program, spread fascist ideology to his some 30 million listeners. He had started out as a booster of Roosevelt and the New Deal, but his broadcasts turned more and more anti-Semitic, until finally he was praising fascist policies implemented by Hitler and Mussolini. In a kind of deplatforming akin to what happened to InfoWars demagogue Alex Jones, Roosevelt eventually intervened to get Father Coughlin’s program cancelled and make his newspapers illegal to mail. Father Coughlin faded into obscurity after that, unlike Alex Jones. Perhaps it is counter-democratic, but history has shown that the best way to weaken a demagogue is to deny them a platform. Donald Trump, however, is a different beast entirely. Having once held the highest office in the land, voted into office by 63 million citizens and winning the vote of 74 million Americans even when he lost his reelection, he simply cannot be deplatformed. When social media companies tried, validly citing his spread of misinformation and incitement of unlawful acts on January 6th, he simply started his own platform, and his followers, as is their nature, followed.

Father Charles Coughlin giving a speech.

In the years since Trump’s election, numerous books have been published pondering the future of democracy, with titles like, How Democracy Ends, and How Democracies Die. The number of magazine, newspaper, and web articles about democracy being in danger, or in crisis, or decline are countless. And this spring, the Brookings Institution started The Strengthening American Democracy Initiative. Tellingly, the 1930s saw the same rise in alarmed concern for the health of democracy. All over the country, lectures were delivered with titles like “The Future of Democracy,” “The Prospects of Democracy,” “The Crisis of Democracy,” and “How to Save Democracy.” And the similarity did not end at the fact that they faced the spread of authoritarian ideology via demagogues over mass media, just as we do today. Their concern, much like ours in the wake of January 6th, also stemmed from what appeared to have been a failed coup. In 1933, shortly after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, numerous right wing paramilitary militias, most of them explicitly white supremacist, formed for the express purpose of inciting rebellion against the progressive president. If this reminds you of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, it should. In this volatile climate, it was not so surprising when, that summer, a Marine Major General named Smedley Darlington Butler informed the FBI that he had been approached by a cabal of Wall Street businessmen and asked to lead a fascist coup, marching on Washington at the head of an army of veterans, to eject not only FDR but also the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and every other politician in the order of succession. In their place, Butler was tasked with raising up a dictator. Just as Trump-supporters and their complicit media outlets today call the Russian scandal a hoax, so too did much of the press declare that the Business Plot, or the Wall Street Putsch, as it was called, was a hoax, but the congressional committee tasked with its investigation found it to be all too real. And neither were they in the business of just stirring up baseless political controversy. In fact, according to Butler, the committee actually protected the wealthy conspirators by having their names redacted from their final report. It might be tempting to say worries in the 1930s were nothing but hand-wringing, and that the same is true today, that the Wall Street Putsch never would have succeeded in overthrowing democracy, and neither were the Capitol insurrectionists really capable of doing irreparable harm to our democracy. Maybe that’s true. But what about the next time? What about the next demagogue, the next coup?

As I said at the top of this episode, this is not a partisan argument. Any truly patriotic Republican must be just as alarmed as I am by Trump’s actions and his influence on their party. Really they should be even more concerned. But with the recent primary results, in which so many of Trump’s picks took nominations and most of the incumbent Republicans who voted to impeach him lost their support, his stranglehold on the GOP’s electorate appears unyielding. If deplatforming won’t thwart Trump, the most powerful and probably most destructive demagogue in American history, then prosecuting him for his crimes may. And if it is impossible to hold him accountable for his attempt to unlawfully overturn the election, then we must prosecute him under the laws listed on the FBI’s warrant. We need not lock him up, as he was so fond of chanting about Hillary Clinton when she was accused of being careless with classified communications. Rather, a simple fine will suffice as long as he is convicted under the third law on the warrant, Section 2071 of title 18 of the U.S. code, which criminalizes the removal and concealment of records. Conviction under this law makes him ineligible for holding federal office. As for his followers, who pose the real threat, we must welcome their legal protest but likewise aggressively prosecute those who resort to violence and insurrection, which we know they are prone to do. And afterward, we must remain vigilant. We must work to foil the next demagogues, who may have seen what Trump proved was possible and prove themselves more capable than he of carrying it off. And it is not just the next demagogue we must worry about, but also the next coup, which may not be a coup of force but rather a more insidious legal coup. Take, for example, the pending case Moore v. Harper that will be considered by our abjectly partisan Supreme Court. This case will determine the constitutionality of the “independent state legislature” theory, which if recognized as valid by this packed bench, would give state legislatures not only carte blanche to aggressively gerrymander, but would also grant them the ability to throw out presidential election results and appoint electors as they please. Essentially, it would make the overturning of legitimate presidential election results legal. So raise your voice, cast your vote, and pray to whatever power or principle you hold dear that the Department of Justice and elected representatives who genuinely seek to preserve democracy will have the moral fortitude and courage to do what must be done.

*

Until next time, remember, according to the Democracy Index, the United States is already deemed a “flawed democracy.” If we slip further into the autocratic range of the spectrum, it will have been a pretty short and sad run for a country that prides itself on representing freedom to the whole world. After all, we could only truly consider ourselves a democracy after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making us a relatively young democracy compared to most others, like, for example, New Zealand, which as a self-governing colony became the first country in the world to adopt universal suffrage in 1893. We may like to pretend we were the grandfather of democracy, but for most of our existence, we were a democracy in name only. And calling yourself a democracy means nothing. To illustrate, Hitler and Mussolini were also quite fond of boasting about their “democracies.”

Further Reading

Denton, Sally. “Why Is So Little Known About the 1930s Coup Attempt Against FDR?” The Guardian, 11 Jan. 2020, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-fdr-roosevelt-coup-attempt-1930s.

Farrell, John A. “Nixon’s Vietnam Treachery.” The New York Times, 31 Dec. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/nixons-vietnam-treachery.html?_r=0.

Herenstein, Ethan, and Thomas Wolf. “The ‘Independent State Legislature Theory,’ Explained.” Brennan Center for Justice, 6 June 2022, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/independent-state-legislature-theory-explained.

Krauel, Richard. “Prince Henry of Prussia and the Regency of the United States, 1786.” The American Historical Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 1911, pp. 44–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1832837.

Lepore, Jill. “The Last Time Democracy Almost Died.” The New Yorker, 27 Jan. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died.

Lynd, Staughton. “Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?” Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 9, Feb. 2011, pp. 43–53. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.14452/MR-062-09-2011-02_4.

Myre, Greg, and Wynne Davis. “The Reason Why Presidents Can't Keep Their White House Records Dates Back to Nixon.” NPR, 13 Aug. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/08/13/1117297065/trump-documents-history-national-archives-law-watergate.

Savage, Charlie. “Laws and Lists in Search Warrant Offer Clues to Trump Document Investigation.” The New York Times, 12 Aug. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/08/12/us/politics/search-warrant-trump-investigation-documents.html.

Scherer, Michael, et al. “Historians Privately Warn Biden That America’s Democracy Is Teetering.” The Washington Post, 10 Aug. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/10/biden-us-historians-democracy-threat/.

Schwartz, Jon. “  It’s Not Just Trump — LBJ Took Classified Documents Too.” The Intercept, 11 Aug. 2022, theintercept.com/2022/08/11/trump-fbi-mar-a-lago-classified-documents-lbj/.

 West, Darrell M. “Trump Is Not the Only Threat to Democracy.” Brookings, 25 July, 2022, www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/07/25/trump-is-not-the-only-threat-to-democracy/.

Quinn, Melissa. “A Look at the Law Governing Presidential Records.” CBS News, 9 Aug. 2022, www.cbsnews.com/news/a-look-at-the-law-governing-presidential-records/.

Stranger Things Have Happened - Part Three: The Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project

On a summer afternoon in 1752, as storm clouds gathered over Philadelphia and rain spattered the city, writer, diplomat, inventor, scientist and all-around polymath Benjamin Franklin did not seek shelter inside as so many others did. Rather, he saw an opportunity to conduct an experiment that he had been planning for some time. He prepared a kite, but rather than a paper kite, this one was a silken handkerchief stretched over crossed sticks, making it more likely to withstand the wind and the rain of the storm, and he attached to the kite a house key. Most Americans are very familiar with this experiment, but in its countless retellings, it has become a historical myth, with many claiming that, in conducting it, Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity. In truth, electricity had been a recognized form of energy for more than a thousand years. In fact, numerous scientists had studied the nature and effects of static electricity, going all the way back to 546 BCE, when Thales of Miletus (Thay-leez of Meal-le-tus) produced electricity by rubbing wool against amber. The purpose of Franklin’s experiment, rather, was just to prove the electrical nature of lightning. This was a popular theory at the time, winning French scientists accolades for their speculation on the topic, based on the observation that lightning appeared to be attracted to spikes, or high points, a fact about which Franklin himself had formerly been skeptical. The design of his kite experiment, however, clearly demonstrates how much was known about the conduction of electricity. Franklin attached a wire to the top of his kite, and made sure that the twine was wet, so that the lightning, or “electrical fire” as he called it, would be conducted from the wire at the kite’s tip down to the key at the end of the twine, which would collect the charge. And to protect himself from the electricity, at the end of the wet twine, where the key was tied, he attached another string, this one of silk, which he did his best to keep dry, for he held the other end of it. At the conclusion of his experiment, he was able to charge a rudimentary capacitor, called a Leyden jar. He published the details of the experiment, and thus the myth was born. Some other mythical aspects of the experiment have to do with where he stood, with some accounts describing him being in a field, when in fact he explicitly described standing in a doorway so as to keep his silken tether dry. Other versions have it that he climbed the spire of Christ Church to conduct the experiment, but this is a corruption. In fact, he intended to use the spire on Christ Church for his experiment, but at the time the church had no such steeple. Franklin even financed its construction by organizing a lottery, but it would not be built until a couple years after he went ahead with the experiment using a kite instead of a steeple to reach the height necessary. And lastly, most tellings of the story have it that the key-adorned kite was struck by lightning. If that were the case, Benjamin Franklin would very likely have been killed. In fact, the year after, a similar experiment in Russia did end up electrocuting the physicist conducting it. Rather, in Franklin’s experiment, the wire collected the ambient electricity in the storm cloud and conducted it to the key. This experiment, which for a long time was referred to as the Philadelphia Experiment, really happened and was rather momentous in the study of electricity and meteorological phenomena, but like other real incidents in history, it has gathered myths over time. In contrast, today, the term “The Philadelphia Experiment” is used mostly to refer to another momentous scientific achievement around 200 years later. The difference is, this one never really happened. However, it too has evolved into numerous historical myths, including wild conspiracy claims that our government has abducted children for psychic experimentation, opened portals in time-space, and brought actual monsters into our world.

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I described this series as an exploration of the historical and pseudo historical basis of the Netflix series Stranger Things, and it is here that we veer into the decidedly pseudohistorical. Some may protest that the topics I’ve been covering, MK-Ultra human experimentation and CIA-sponsored studies of anomalous mental phenomena, were not the actual basis of the series. Rather, the creators of Stranger Things were inspired not by history but by 80s science-fiction, and this is certainly the case. One of the great pleasures of watching the series is in identifying each bit of homage that they’ve woven into it. But we can see that one of the biggest influences on the show, Steven King’s Firestarter, was itself influenced by the intelligence projects I’ve been discussing. The novel clearly references MK-Ultra drug trials as well as CIA efforts to develop a psychic asset in its premise about a scientific intelligence agency that gives test subjects psychic powers by dosing them with a psychoactive drug. Certainly the first season of Stranger Things, which has government agents chasing after a little girl with psychokinetic powers, owes much to King’s novel and its film adaptation. However, it has been reported that the show’s creators certainly were inspired by the real-life urban legend of the Montauk Project, which I will be discussing in this episode. The original name of the series was actually Montauk, and a couple of years after the series premiere, the creators were sued for plagiarism by a man who claimed to have pitched them a feature film called The Montauk Project, about an abducted child, secret experiments in a military installation, and an inter-dimensional monster. Eventually the lawsuit was withdrawn, either because the case was weak or because the plaintiff was paid handsomely to drop the charges. Regardless, these facts are enough to confirm that the story of the Montauk Project, a wild and thoroughly debunked tale that continues to be believed by many fringe researchers and paranormal conspiracy theorists, was the principle basis for the show Stranger Things. However, before we can even begin to approach the story of the Montauk Project, we must first examine the legend of the Philadelphia Experiment, which would become the bedrock upon which the later legend was built.

Promotional material produced to help sell the concept of Stranger Things, made to look like a dog-eared Steven King paperback, with the original title: Montauk. Via ScreenCraft

The legend began in 1952, when Morris K. Jessup, a UFO researcher, received a letter from someone calling himself Carlos Allende, who took issue with Jessup’s urging of legislators to fund research aimed at completing Einstein’s Unified Field Theory as a means of developing antigravity propulsion and advancing space travel technology. Over the next year, Jessup received more than 50 letters from Allende, who claimed that, contrary to common knowledge, Albert Einstein actually had completed his Unified Field Theory and had used it while working with the Navy on a top secret experiment. For any other lay person, like myself, the Unified Field Theory was the idea that all the forces of nature, specifically the field equations of relativistic gravitation and electromagnetism, must be connected and thus should be describable with a single, integrated theory. This notion obsessed Einstein, who indicated in a 1923 Nobel lecture that he “cannot rest content with the assumption that there exist two distinct fields totally independent of each other by their nature.” He worked on unification for the last thirty years of his life, even poring over his notes on his deathbed, but he never achieved a working theory. Some say this is because he was simply ahead of his time, as back then, only two subatomic particles were known, whereas now we’ve discovered several others. Also, only the two fundamental forces of nature he was trying to unify were recognized, but now we recognize two others, the so-called strong and weak nuclear forces at work inside of atoms. Others will say that Einstein was simply not keeping up with the vanguard of physics in his day because he had rejected quantum mechanics, or they will say he had simply strayed too far from physical reality in his mathematical theories, which more and more had to involve theoretical dimensions in order to work. Today, it’s thought that string theory, which likewise requires the theoretical existence of numerous dimensions, may eventually lead to the Theory of Everything that Einstein sought, though string theorists too have been criticized for straying too far from physical reality and not producing testable theories. However, according to Morris K. Jessup’s mysterious correspondent, Carlos Allende, Einstein actually did complete his unified theory and tested it at a Naval shipyard in Philadelphia, in 1943, when he managed to make a naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Eldridge, disappear. According to Allende, as part of the war effort, Einstein was applying his unified theory in an effort to make the warship invisible, but as an unforeseen result of the experiment, the destroyer was teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, and back again. Allende knew about this because he had witnessed it. He had been a merchant mariner aboard a shipping vessel at the time, and he had seen strange equipment brought aboard the Eldridge, such as transmitters and generators, as well as what appeared to be a Tesla coil that that was wrapped around the entire vessel. Before the ship disappeared, he claimed to have seen it become enveloped in a bright green haze. Over the course of his many letters, Allende described the experiment in greater detail, explaining that sailors aboard the Eldridge became disoriented, that when the vessel reappeared in Norfolk, some crew members’ bodies had physically fused with the solid matter of the ship’s bulkheads, and that some had disappeared entirely.

In the spring of 1957, the year after Jessup had received the increasingly strange letters from Allende, agents from the Office of Naval Research contacted him. They had in their possession a volume of Jessup’s 1955 book, The Case for the UFO, that had been anonymously sent to them annotated by what appeared to be three different people using different colored ink. Something in the annotations, which implied knowledge about the propulsion technology of UFOs and suggested Jessup was too close to figuring out the truth, had interested the agents, and of course this helps fuel conspiracy theories about official cover-ups. When Jessup read the annotations, he found their technical jargon similar to that of Allende and showed the officers Allende’s letters. According to the story, these Naval investigators went to the Pennsylvania return address that appeared on the letters, but found only an abandoned farmhouse. Afterward, the Navy seems to have lost interest—or maybe they had never been all that interested at all?—but Morris K. Jessup grew more and more obsessed. The legend almost died with him, however, when Jessup committed suicide in 1959 without publishing anything about the Philadelphia Experiment. However, Allende would not let it die. He began writing further letters to UFO researcher Jacques Vallee almost a decade later, and word of the strange story spread throughout the UFO researcher community. In 1968, a book was published, and suddenly the Allende Letters, and copies of the annotated Jessup book—called the Varo edition, after the company that made 127 reproductions of it—became nearly mythical among UFO researchers. These conspiracy theorists variously speculate that Jessup was actually murdered—even though there is evidence of his psychological distress before his suicide, resulting from a failed marriage and poor health after an automobile accident—and that Carlos Allende, who remained in hiding for his entire life, posting letters from various locations in America and Mexico, was actually an extra-terrestrial. Then in 1979, the story of the Philadelphia Experiment really reached prominence in the public imagination when a widely read paranormal writer, Charles Berlitz, who had previously popularized the idea of the Bermuda Triangle, teamed up with UFO researcher Bill Moore to write a book about it. Listeners of the show should recognize those names, as Moore and Berlitz were the duo who later popularized the legend about the Roswell Incident, and Moore would eventually be made a pawn in the UFO disinformation games of Rick Doty, helping to torment Paul Bennewitz and propagate the hoax Majestic 12 documents. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I invite you to listen to my three-part series UFO Disinfo, released last year around this time. Moore, who also apparently corresponded with the mysterious Carlos Allende, expanded on the mythology. The experiment was code-named Project Rainbow, Berlitz and Moore wrote, and the research into invisibility may have applied Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, but Einstein’s theory had been completed by Townsend Brown, an inventor of questionable background and character who claimed to have developed in the 1920s an antigravity thrust technology, called the Biefeld-Brown effect, that today is recognized as a misunderstanding of the ionic or coronal wind phenomenon. Furthermore, according to Berlitz and Moore, the application of this unified field technology toward invisibility was developed by mathematician and Manhattan Project collaborator John Von Neumann. Of course, exactly how Townsend’s “electro-gravitation” might have produced invisibility, let alone achieved teleportation, is, unsurprisingly, not exceedingly clear.

Morris K. Jessup

Carlos Allende’s story was, of course, dubious from the start. For example, if he had seen the ship disappear and reappear in Philadelphia, how did he know where it had teleported to? And why was there no record of the event from other witnesses? Even if no others on Allende’s ship had seen it, the sudden disappearance of a destroyer, which would have displaced around 2,000 tons of water, would have been noticed simply because of the resulting turmoil in the waters, as it would have created massive waves that would have crashed through the naval shipyard. In fact, ship logs and naval records indicate that the ship may not have even been in Philadelphia in October 1943, and in 1999, sailors who had served on the Eldridge reunited and said the ship never docked there. And in 1994, in an article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee writes about an interview he conducted with one Edward Dudgeon, who had been a sailor aboard the U.S.S. Engstrom, which had been docked at the Philadelphia Naval shipyard in October 1943. Dudgeon revealed rational explanations for everything Carlos Allende might have observed if he really were there, watching the strange activities on the destroyers in the Navy yard at the time. They had indeed been loading unusual high-tech equipment onto destroyers that night. These included new sonar devices as well as new depth charge launchers, and rather than being wrapped in Tesla coils, they were being wrapped in high-voltage cables to alter the ships’ magnetic signatures, making them more difficult for magnetic torpedoes to target. It was a process known as degaussing, and it sometimes produced no smell of ozone, as Allende described. It’s even possible that Allende may have overhead a sailor saying something about how it would make them invisible, not to the naked eye or even to radar, but to torpedos. As for the green haze, this was a common enough occurrence at sea, a weather phenomenon called St. Elmo’s Fire, caused by electrical discharge, which we might assume to have been pronounced by the degaussing process. And Dudgeon even offered an explanation for the disappearance of whatever ship Allende had seen and believed was the Eldridge, as well as its appearance in Norfolk and reappearance at Philadelphia in too short a time for such a journey. According to Dudgeon, who actually claimed the Eldridge was there in Philadelphia, which does conflict with other reports, a destroyer leaving the Philadelphia shipyard one night, appearing in Norfolk shortly thereafter, and then reappearing back in Philadelphia would have seemed impossible to a merchant marine, as their ships would have to take a 2-day trip to the harbor entrance, but the destroyers were able to take the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal, an inland channel, that would make such a short trip possible, and necessary, as Norfolk was where such ships were loaded with ammunition. Therefore, it is somewhat understandable that such a tall tale might be told by a merchant marine who saw the destroyers loaded up with secret anti-submarine technology and witnessed the unusual and definitely classified process of degaussing the ships, and who may have seen the ships engulfed in a strange kind of green fire during the process, and who later that evening noticed a ship had departed but the next morning saw it was present again, and perhaps even later heard through the grapevine that the same ship had been at Norfolk in the middle of the night, a round trip that would have seemed to him impossible to complete in so short a time if he were unaware of the shortcut naval warships were taking between the two Navy yards.

It is impossible, though, to give Allende the benefit of the doubt and suggest he may have actually been there and seen something that he honestly mistook for a ship teleporting. From the beginning, in his correspondence with Jessup, there was evidence that he was perpetrating a hoax. How, for example, could a merchant marine aboard a separate ship have even known all the particulars he claimed to know, down to Einstein’s involvement and his secret completion of the Unified Field Theory? And what else but an elaborate hoax could explain his annotation of Jessup’s book, in which he pretended to be three different people, or rather beings, engaged in a conversation in the margins about mere humans and their inability to grasp the explanations of various paranormal phenomena. The only rational alternative to it being a hoax is it being the product of mental illness. In 1969, though, Carlos Allende, or a man claiming to be him, appeared at the Arizona office of APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and confessed that his letters and annotations in the Varo edition of Jessup’s book had been a hoax. Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz chose not to believe this, though, and Allende later recanted. However, a year after the Berlitz-Moore book, Carlos Allende was discredited once and for all. In 1980, researcher Robert Goerman, who happened to live in the Pennsylvania town Allende had given in his return address, decided to look into it. Apparently little serious research had been done to track down Allende, as the address previously said to have been a vacant farmhouse was not vacant at all, and Goerman was pretty easily able to locate the estranged parents and siblings of Carlos Allende, whose real name, it turned out, was Carl Allen. In fact, it further turned out he knew the man’s father pretty well, and the family was only too willing to share stories about the eccentric drifter he had grown up to be, showing Goerman all the letters Carl had sent home over the years, in which he bragged about being the author of books that he had merely scribbled in, including not just Jessup’s book but Berlitz and Moore’s as well. The portrait that emerged from Goerman’s interviews was of a mischief-maker possessed of a gifted intellect. According to the Allen family, Carl had squandered his potential and had nothing to show for his life but a widely-believed urban legend. That legacy, however, continued on strong even after his discrediting in 1980, with a feature film dramatizing the story of the Philadelphia Experiment in 1984 executive produced by horror master John Carpenter, whose work, including his self-composed synth scores and the 1982 classic The Thing, has been paid extensive homage by the series Stranger Things. Indeed, this film adaptation of Berlitz and Moore’s book seems to have gone on to inspire the next clever fabricators of urban legend who came along, or rather, if they are to be believed, the movie just jogged their erased memories.

Carl Allen, AKA Carlos Allende, fabricator of the Philadelphia Experiment Hoax.

Around 1988, a videotape called The Truth about the Philadelphia Experiment began circulating in ufology and fringe belief circles. The video featured three men talking to a small audience in a private Long Island residence while they shared a slide show projected onto a bedsheet. Underground tapes like these sold for $20-$30 a pop and were copied and shared among likeminded conspiracy theorists who felt like such videos made them privy to secrets of which the sheeple were blissfully unaware, and it was through such independently produced and disseminated media that misinformation and hoaxes were spread before the advent of the modern Internet in the 1990s. In the video, the three men, Preston Nichols, Duncan Cameron, and Al Bielek, spoke about how they had recovered long repressed memories about their involvement with outlandish secret government experiments after viewing the film The Philadelphia Experiment. Preston Nichols claimed that he had been working in the 70s and 80s as a microwave engineer on Long Island but began moonlighting at nearby Montauk Airbase, ostensibly to work on their radar equipment. But he had recovered memories, he said, of his involvement with a series of bizarre experiments in an underground bunker at Camp Hero, a military installation that was at the time officially abandoned. According to the mythos, John Von Neumann, who Berlitz and Moore had claimed was instrumental in the development of the technology used in the Philadelphia Experiment, had gone on to further develop the electrogravitic field technology and apply it to some completely different purposes. Using technology contributed by Nicola Tesla for the Philadelphia Experiment, Von Neumann supposedly designed a chair that amplified and relayed human thoughts to a computer, which through some hocus pocus field technology then materialized that thought into reality. They could think of a can of beer and then it would appear, so real they could drink it. What does this have to do with the Philadelphia Project, you may be asking? Well, so the story goes, the participants used this technology that brought into reality whatever the person in the chair thought about, in conjunction with weather manipulation technology that allowed the opening of vortices, to open wormholes through space and time. Exactly 40 years after the Philadelphia Experiment, they opened one such wormhole and became linked to the field that had teleported the Eldridge from Philadelphia to Norfolk and back. Enter Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron, who claimed to be sailors aboard the Eldridge who leapt overboard during the experiment and landed in Camp Hero, 40 years in the future. Through an astonishing coincidence, Bielek and Cameron were not just any sailors. Bielek was a brilliant scientist-engineer who had been closely involved with the technical aspects of the Philadelphia Experiment, so he went to work at Montauk in the 1980s, and Cameron just so happened to be a gifted psychic, making him the perfect operator of the Montauk chair. All three of them claimed to have only recently remembered these events, after having seen the 1984 film, because they’d had their memories wiped by CIA brainwashing techniques. This is perhaps the least outlandish aspect of their story, but as we saw in part one of this series, it too is hard to credit, since the CIA failed to ever develop any such targeted amnesia effects. But however convoluted and unbelievable the story already sounds, strap in, because it only gets more tortuous and preposterous from here.

In the 1990s, terrestrial radio became a major channel for the spread of such hoaxes and conspiracy claims, and the biggest purveyor was Art Bell, host of Coast to Coast. Al Bielek and Preston Nichols appeared numerous times on Art Bell’s program to promote their claims and, of course, to sell copies of their tape, or of the series of books, co-authored by one Peter Moon, that Nichols began to self-publish in 1992. Over the course of these retellings, as the Montauk Mythos was revealed, or coalesced, or evolved, or was sporadically improvised—however you want to look at it—it grew more and more sensational. Al Bielek claimed to be a man out of time, whose identity had been rewritten. He was actually Ed Cameron, he said, and Duncan was his brother, but over the course of their time travel experiments at Montauk, he had gone back and forth in time and had even been age regressed into a 1-year-old’s body to have his identity erased, which seems far too elaborate a plan to get rid of him when the shadowy group running the Montauk Project could have just had him killed. It conveniently accounts, however, for there being no record of either Cameron on the Eldridge and also explains why there is no evidence that he, Al Bielek, had ever earned the advanced degrees in science and engineering he claimed to possess. As for who that shadowy Montauk group was, as with much of the story, this changed over time. It was a secret government operation a lá Mk-Ultra, involving Nazi scientists recruited via Operation Paperclip, performing experiments on psychic test subjects. Or rather, it was the project of a secret Nazi order that had survived the fall of the Third Reich and, funded by Nazi gold, sought to bring the Reich back through manipulation of the timeline. But then again, it used technology not just developed by Tesla and Einstein, but by extra-terrestrials who had signed a secret treaty with the U.S. government. The projects undertaken with the teleportation and time travel technology developed were equally wide-ranging and fantastical. For example, they claimed to have teleported to a facility beneath the pyramids on Mars in order to deactivate a defense grid that prevented aliens from entering the Solar System, and they described a plot to go back in time, assassinate Jesus Christ with a pistol, steal his blood, clone it, transfuse it into Duncan Cameron and then have him arrive on a flying saucer to Earth, the idea being that when scientists tested his DNA against traces on the Turin Shroud, they would have successfully faked the Second Coming. As with much of the mythos, these supposedly brilliant scientists seem to lack a fundamental grasp of much of the technical claims they make, for example, a blood transfusion does not change one’s DNA. But we will look at the plausibility and logical flaws involved with their story shortly. To conclude, we should point out the parts of their meandering mythology that seem to have inspired Stranger Things. According to the books, the Nazis or aliens or Nazi aliens behind the project began abducting children in the 1970s to experiment on them, torturing them and either uncovering their innate psychic abilities or cultivating them. Finally, in an act of resistance to the project, Bielek’s psychic brother, Duncan, used the thought-form-generating chair to bring a monster into being, and as this monster rampaged through Camp Hero, they ended up having to destroy the lab’s equipment to make it dematerialize, resulting in the end of the Montauk Project. Here we see all the seeds of the Netflix series Stranger Things, from missing children, to experiments on abducted psychic children, to the opening of portals with the power of the mind and the drawing of a monster into our reality. But as we will see, and as you should already be able to discern, the show was not based on anything real. It was inspired by a work of fiction that is even more far-fetched than the show is, and that only masqueraded as a true story.

Al Bielek, supposed time traveler.

As I started to write this section of the episode, which the entire series has built up to, it occurred to me… do I really need to debunk so absurdly ridiculous a conspiracy claim? Is it not enough to stick my thumb toward some of the most outrageous claims these people have made and just shrug? It feels embarrassing to even dignify the story of the Montauk Project by putting effort into disproving it, like it’s beneath me. However, if I were to share it without demonstrating its clear falsehood, I would be engaging in the same kind of media amplification that allows hoaxes like these to spread and achieve the status of legend. So here we go. It should be enough to point out that the burden of proof is on those making the claims, and as they are extraordinary claims, according to the Sagan standard, they require extraordinary evidence, but none has ever been provided. Oh, it’s been promised, though. For the remainder of his life, until his death in 2007, Al Bielek assured the public that he was working on a definitive book that would demystify the science behind all the experiments he claimed to have been involved with, but unsurprisingly, this world-shattering treatise on teleportation and time travel never appeared, nor is there any indication that he ever penned an academic article that he attempted to get published in a scholarly journal, or that he ever made an effort to demonstrate any of his claims to a bona fide scientist. Oh but he sure made the time to coauthor a book on “UFO conspiracies” with paranormal writer Brad Steiger. Likewise, when asked in an interview why Preston Nichols didn’t publish anything regarding the secret scientific advancements he was always on about being privy to, he hand waved the question by saying there was no market or audience for that. I’ll just point out, first, that there would obviously be a massive market for such a scientific breakthrough, including any number of private corporations that would jump at the chance to patent such technology, and second, Nichols was tacitly confessing here that he was in the business of promoting paranormal conspiracy theory because there is an audience and market for that. As for the credibility of the men, consider Bielek, who has been caught in errors both logical and technical and then simply changes his story. Even if you were to believe his claim that his true identity was erased, along with evidence of his higher learning, one fundamental lie about his background has been discovered. He claimed to have never heard of the Philadelphia Experiment before seeing the film and recovering his memories, but UFO researchers have revealed that they had known Bielek since the early 1960s and known him to be obsessed with UFOs and with the Philadelphia Experiment, even owning and sharing a copy of the annotated Varo edition of Morris Jessup’s The Case for the UFO (something Bielek himself eventually conceded), so it’s pretty clear that his entire story is founded on a fundamental lie. As for Preston Nichols, discrediting him takes us to darker places. After the publication of Nichols’ books, when he would speak about Montauk on the paranormal circuit, men began to approach him saying they thought maybe they had been Montauk boys and had their memory erased. Preston encouraged them in their beliefs, meeting with them privately to “deprogram” them of their falsified memories. Numerous participants in these deprogramming sessions, including Nichols himself, describe how he touched the subjects’ bodies with his hands in something like the Mesmeric stroking I recently described in my Blind Spot exclusive minisode on Mesmerism and hypnosis. But more than that, it has been established that Preston Nichols convinced these men that in order to deprogram them, he had to masturbate them, while applying some kind of electromagnetic radiation—a well-known pseudoscientific alternative medicine called radionics. At the end of this bizarre journey, then, it becomes strikingly clear that these men perpetrated an elaborate hoax to make money off of the famously credulous UFO conspiracy theorist community, and at least one of them, Preston Nichols, used his mystique to take sexual advantage of numerous men.

So there we have it, the dark heart of the source material for the Netflix series Stranger Things. I greatly enjoy the show, and I’ll say that I’m far better able to suspend my disbelief while watching it than I am while reading about the Montauk Project. It is very strange to think that it was likely inspired by this outlandish conspiracy claim that has been used to molest its adherents. So after all, we might say that the series Stranger Things is not based on any real history, since the elements of real history it uses were present in the fiction that inspired it, and the story of the Montauk Project is also fiction. Indeed, the books that established and expanded the Montauk mythos, including those written by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, as well as later books written only by Peter Moon, and books written by Stewart Swerdlow, one supposed Montauk boy who underwent the handsy deprogramming of Preston Nichols and then claimed to have recovered his memories about Montauk, all of them are published by Sky Books, Peter Moon’s publishing house, and all of them are officially categorized as fiction despite their claims to authenticity. In fact the Sky Books slogan is “Where science fiction meets reality.” However, if you visit their website, you’ll be directed to their sister website, The Time Travel Education Center, and if you dig in there, you’ll feel like you stumbled on the web presence of a cult. And that’s essentially what it is. In fact, it has quite a lot in common with that other, more famous conspiracy-addled, Internet-based cult, Qanon. Like it, the Montauk cult has become a breeding ground for baseless conspiracy delusion. Qanon’s habit of trying to integrate all conspiracy theories has been remarked on before, including by myself in my series on Illuminati conspiracy claims. Like them, Preston Nichols, Peter Moon, and Stewart Swerdlow have brought every conceivable conspiracy theory into the fold, managing to weave in legendary artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the Spear of Destiny, and enigmatic figures like John Dee, L. Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley, and Jack Parsons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one talking point of Qanon was being spread by Stewart Swerdlow long before the purported revelations of Q, as Swerdlow was known to claim that the Montauk boys were tortured in order to extract that sweet adrenochrome from their pineal glands… never mind that adrenochrome is derived from the adrenal glands, which are nowhere near the pineal gland. One wonders if Al Bielek ever would have made such an elementary error as this. Really, this is representative of the general devolution of hoaxery that we see today. Whereas thirty years ago, one had to be a clever and convincing storyteller capable of spinning an intricate yarn and firehosing technobabble on live radio, today we have conspiracy influencers like Canada’s Qanon Queen Romana Didulo who just uploads videos in which she claims to be “the only visible leader on this planet,” suppressed by, who else, pedophile globalists, and she still finds dupes to eat it up, turning their sometimes violent ire on whoever she targets, be it healthcare workers for administering vaccines or police for enforcing business closures and masking. Honestly, it’s this nauseating reality today that makes me so nostalgic for my childhood in the 1980s, and for stories like Stranger Things, in which an innocent but savvy group of kids overcome the machinations of bumbling but no less nefarious adults.

The less than impressive Preston Nichols.

Further Reading

Goerman, Robert A. “Alias Carlos Allende.” FATE, Oct. 1980. Carlos Allende and his Philadelphia Experiment, windmill-slayer.tripod.com/aliascarlosallende/.

Margaritoff, Marco. “Inside The Montauk Project, The US Military’s Alleged Mind Control Program.” All That’s Interesting, 7 May 2022, allthatsinteresting.com/montauk-project.

Metzger, Richard. “THE MONTAUK PROJECT: THE IDIOTIC CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT INSPIRED ‘STRANGER THINGS.’” Dangerous Minds, 4 May 2020, dangerousminds.net/comments/the_montauk_project.

The Philadelphia Experiment from A to Z, www.de173.com/.

Tretkoff, Ernie. “This Month in Physics History: Einstein's quest for a unified theory.” APS News, vol. 14, no. 11, Dec. 2005. APS Physics, www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200512/history.cfm.

Valee, Jacques F. “Anatomy of a Hoax: The Philadelphia Experiment Fifty Years Later.” Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 8, no. 1, 1994, pp. 47-7 I. CiteSeerX, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.541.6200.

Stranger Things Have Happened: Psychic Spies

In a previous series, I spoke in great depth about Nazi occultism. Among many in the Third Reich, their nationalist and racial ideology was founded on a view that Germans were the descendants of lost race, and that the power of this race survived in ancient Norse runes, Teutonic magics, and legendary artifacts scattered around the world. Heinrich Himmler was the most prominent and influential of these true believers, and he started Das Ahnenerbe, the Institute for the Research and Study of Heredity, to investigate and prove the veracity of his obsessions. The man he placed at the head of this organization was Karl Maria Wiligut, a medium who claimed to be in psychic contact with the lost Aryan race Himmler imagined were his forerunners. Wiligut had previously been certified insane, but Himmler believed in his abilities, and under Wiligut, Das Ahnenerbe delved into more and more arcane areas of study, beyond the archaeological expeditions to prove their theorized heritage or the pseudoscientific conjecture about weird cosmological views like the Hollow Earth Theory or the World Ice Doctrine. Through the “Survey of the So-Called Occult Sciences,” they investigated spirit channeling, divining, astrology, and other forms of extra-sensory perception, or ESP. However, Adolf Hitler called all of it “nonsense” and complained about Himmler wanting to bring back the mysticism they had left behind when he had suppressed the Catholic Church. Indeed, in 1941, Hitler launched Special Action Hess to suppress the occult, arresting all known practitioners of ESP or the divining arts, be they fortune-tellers, astrologers, healers, or just anyone who claimed to be clairvoyant, and he seized all their literature and the trappings of their arts as well, including crystal balls and tarot cards. But Hitler had good reason for this outside of his distaste for their supernatural claims. The Special Action was named after Rudolph Hess, his former deputy Führer, who in May of that year had secretly flown to Scotland on an unauthorized peace mission and been captured. Hitler believed Hess had been encouraged in his plans by false horoscopes manufactured by the UK as propaganda, and this, it seems, was the real reason for the suppression of the occult in Special Action Hess. While the Nazis were earnestly studying divination and anomalous mental phenomena, British intelligence was making use of such practices in more devious ways. It is unclear whether Hess really was influenced by fabricated horoscopes, but it is known that British intelligence, aware of how many Germans trusted in astrology, did forge horoscopes as propaganda. In fact, they engaged the services of a woman famous for claiming to be a “witch,” Sybil Leek, to write these bogus horoscopes. Likewise, the most famous astrologer in America, Louis de Wohl, whose popular syndicated column, called “Stars Foretell,” usually focused on the war in Europe, was unbeknownst to his U.S. readers actually a propagandist for British intelligence, fabricating reports for the sole purpose of convincing Americans that the U.S. should enter the war. In the aftermath of the war, as U.S. intelligence competed with the Soviets to seize Nazi science, it was discovered that Das Ahnenerbe was taking ESP seriously, and much as the race for mind control began, this marked the very start of what would become a Cold War psychic arms race. 

If you haven’t read part one of this series, check it out before reading on. It’s not a single story, and you can enjoy this installment alone, but you should know that this series is an exploration of the historical and pseudohistorical basis of the popular Netflix series Stranger Things. As you may or may not know, the premise of that show involves a psychic character whose powers were studied and cultivated by a secret U.S. government experimentation program. In part one of this series, I discussed the very real human experimentation programs conducted by the CIA under the cryptonym MK-Ultra in search of mind control technology, and in this episode, we will look at government sponsored programs studying extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. These categories of phenomena cover most of the capabilities of the psychic character in Stranger Things, who demonstrates the ability to move objects with her mind, see others’ thoughts or memories, and even spy on someone over a great distance as though through out-of-body experience, a technique that has come to be called “remote viewing.” Just as all of the dastardly human experiments undertaken by MK-Ultra were absolutely true, so too are the U.S. government studies and experiments with ESP. However, whereas Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA eventually came to accept that the elusive mind control drugs or techniques they sought did not actually exist, many of the scientists involved with ESP programs were true believers. What we must consider in this installment of the series is not just what happened, but also whether what happened was genuine anomalous mental phenomena or can be more rationally explained. Among the first government-sponsored ESP experiments organized after World War II were those in 1952, when the Department of Defense tasked J.B. Rhine with studying the psychic powers of animals. Rhine had coined the term ESP back in the 1920s and conducted some of the first experiments to study it in his Parapsychology Lab at Duke University. For the DoD, he conducted tests to determine whether dogs could psychically discern the location of landmines, whether cats could telepathically follow instructions to choose one food dish over another, and how homing pigeons made their way home. His experiments with dogs and cats yielded no results that couldn’t be explained by chance, and as for the abilities of homing pigeons, those remain a mystery today. After these failed experiments, the U.S. government’s interest in ESP resumed, perhaps unsurprisingly, when it coincided with its search for a viable mind control drug.

J.B. Rhine, Father of Parapsychology, testing subjects’ ESP abilities with Zener cards. Via NCDR.gov

Under the umbrella of MK-Ultra, Subproject 58, headed by Morse Allen, involved the search for the legendary “magic mushroom,” a fabled Mexican drug that it was thought could be useful, if not as a mind control agent then perhaps as a poison. The problem was that the “magic mushroom,” or teonanáctl, the “god’s flesh” mushroom, had never been proven to really exist. In his search for it, Morse Allen had sent a chemist to masquerade as a botany professor and infiltrate various mycology enthusiast groups, with little luck. Eventually, a man who had reportedly traveled to Mexico and been in contact with shamans who used the mushroom in their rituals came to their attention. They learned of him through a third party, Andrija Puharich, a towering figure in the study of ESP. Puharich had been fascinated with the topic since he was a child and believed he had calmed an aggressive dog with only the power of his mind. After serving in the armed forces, he earned a medical degree and published numerous papers theorizing that some unknown energy force connected to the brain and nervous system might explain anomalous mental phenomena. Dashing and charismatic, Puharich seemed to attract wealthy benefactors who gladly bankrolled his research projects, allowing him to start the Round Table Foundation, dedicated to experimentation that might take the topic of ESP out of the realm of parapsychology and into the realm of science proper. Among the admirable work that Puharich undertook was the study of human hearing, which he suspected may overlap with or provide insight into ESP. During the course of his foundation’s study of the topic, a revolutionary surgery to restore hearing was discovered by one of the doctors on his staff. Furthermore, during his study of psych ward patients who hear voices, it was he who discovered that a man’s dental fillings can actually receive the broadcast of nearby radio stations and thereby saved some otherwise mentally healthy individuals from unnecessary institutionalization. Puharich left his Foundation for a time to work for the government. Having delivered a speech to the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, the Army thought ESP might just be a worthwhile field of inquiry and called him back into service, stationing him at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, and tasking him with finding “a drug that might enhance ESP.”

It was, of course, during his search for ESP-enhancing drugs for the Army that Puharich first took interest in the “god’s flesh” mushroom, which legend had it provided divinatory powers to the shamans who consumed them during rituals. However, when Puharich tracked down the explorer who had found the Mexican mushroom-eating shamans and brought him to the CIA’s attention, hoping to get security clearance and join MK-Ultra Subproject 58, there was a problem. Puharich was viewed as something of a crank, and for good reason. He had a habit of giving in to his confirmation bias and falling for the acts of stage mystics and charlatans, becoming obsessed with each new psychic he studied. In fact, his interest in the “magic mushroom” had only been stirred because a spirit channeler named Harry Stump had claimed while in a trance that it “would stimulate one’s psychic faculties,” and Puharich took this as gospel truth. In the end, Morse Allen chose not to grant Puharich security clearance and instead circumvented him, approaching the explorer, a man named R. Gordon Wasson, who happened to also be the vice-president of J.P. Morgan bank, directly. Financing his further expeditions, the CIA was then in on the ground floor when Wasson became the first white man in history to partake of the drug and returned to America with enough of the mushroom that the CIA could grow more. Once again, as with LSD, the CIA was responsible for the entrance of psychedelic mushrooms into our culture, and though Puharich had been cut out entirely, Wasson still gifted him a supply of the drug. Leaving the Army, Puharich returned to his Foundation and began further experiments, locking up the supposed psychics who obsessed him, like Harry Stump, in Faraday cages as a laboratory control and feeding them mushrooms. Gradually, Puharich’s personal life and his experiments would drift out of control, until both his marriage and his Foundation failed, but he always found a way to stay afloat. He sold his services as an expert in mushroom toxicology to the Army and later won funding from various other government entities, like the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA, for further ESP experimentation programs throughout the 1960s, all the while investigating a variety of purported psychics. In the 1970s, his study of one such individual, Uri Geller, would eventually bring the CIA around to working with him after all. As the Cold War had dragged on, it was feared that the Soviets had themselves a psychic super soldier. Therefore, we would need one ourselves, or at least we would need to seem like we had one.

Andrija Puharich, perhaps the most prolific tester of psychic phenomena on behalf of the U.S. government.

The CIA had good reason to fear Soviet progress in psi research, but they also had good reason to doubt it. The reason for this dichotomy was that intelligence reports had revealed the ESP and psychokinesis studies the Soviets were conducting, but there was always the strong possibility, especially in so fantastical a field, that what they’d learned was actually disinformation intended to mislead the U.S. about their capabilities. Certainly it was true that the Soviets were conducting psi experiments, and they had taken care to do so under euphemistic names, trying to present such research as strictly scientific since any mysticism or religion was anathema to good Marxists. So their research facilities were given pseudoscientific names like the Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena, and the topics of their research were equally coded. Psychokinesis, or PK, what we might call telekinesis today, was referred to as “emissions from humans,” which if I were a little less mature I might make a crude joke about. Likewise, telepathy was called “long-distance biological signal transmission.” But what troubled U.S. intelligence more than these was what they called “psychotronic weapons.” Intelligence suggested that the Soviets’ investigations in the area of so-called biocommunications were two-pronged; they studied individuals who claimed to be capable of the phenomena, but they also developed weapons meant to neutralize the capabilities of such persons, which meant devices that generated “high-penetrating emission(s),” typically microwave or electromagnetic, intended to interfere with brain function. Indeed, it was discovered in 1962 that such emissions were being actively transmitted toward the upper floors of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which realization sent U.S. intelligence scrambling to study the technology themselves. Though their research could not definitively prove that the emissions were having a harmful effect on embassy staff, certainly the presence of the microwave radiation disrupted U.S. intelligence operations and had them chasing their tails for a while, secretly testing the health of everyone in the building. There are other theories and considerations with the Moscow Signal, of which I’ll have more to say in a patron exclusive, but perhaps that was the point of it, just to mess with their heads in a psychological sense. Such an objective could also be ascribed to the most terrifying of supposed Soviet breakthroughs in psi: the experiments conducted on Ninel Kulagina. This woman, a former Soviet soldier, was purported to be gifted with astounding psychokinetic abilities. The West knew this because state-run Soviet television had produced a special documentary about her, showing her moving small items like matches and salt shakers with her mind. Think of the scenes in Stranger Things when the psychic character sits staring at a Coke can, trying to crush it with her thoughts. But U.S. intelligence had acquired supposedly classified footage of Kulagina supposedly stopping a frog’s heart with her mind, which raised the possibility of a psychic assassin being able to perpetrate untraceable murders. Of course the American intelligence community recognized that it might all be fake, that the feats shown in the footage were a clever fraud, and that the TV program as well as the classified film in their possession was just propaganda. Just the same, it seemed the U.S. was in the market for our own psychics capable of telekinesis, or at least some people we could suggest were capable of it to the world and specifically to our Communist rivals.

The candidate that Puharich brought to the CIA’s attention was an Israeli man named Uri Geller who had made quite a name for himself. He performed in theaters like a stage magician, but he claimed his powers were real, not illusion. Not only did he perform feats of supposed mental telepathy, but he also bent spoons with only the power of his mind, or so it seemed. Unsurprisingly, Puharich took an interest and brought him to America for testing, and when he called up the CIA to say he had a genuine telepath capable of psychokinesis, the agency was so pressured by rumors of Soviet psychic soldiers that they took Puharich up on his suggestion of funding his research with Geller. However, the CIA still thought Puharich a liability, and furthermore, there were rumors that Geller was with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. If American and Soviet intelligence were in the business of finding or pretending to find psychic assets, then it followed that Mossad may have been following suit. Furthermore, the feat that brought Geller great international fame was when he appeared to predict that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, had been killed, information that might have been advanced to him by his handlers to bolster his claims. The CIA therefore insisted that an agent of their own, Kit Green, oversee the study of Geller, and to distance themselves from association with Puharich and his foundation, they directed their funds to the Mind Institute of Los Angeles, an organization created by Edgar Mitchell, a former astronaut interested in the research of psychic phenomena whom they insisted be involved. Despite what seem to have been precautions taken to avoid exposure in the press, Uri Geller’s celebrity in America and the UK continuously rose, such that it was compared to Beatlemania. Considering the kinds of mystifying feats he performed and how much of a household name he was, I would compare him more to David Blaine today. The height of his fame came when he went on BBC Radio and urged all of the UK to concentrate with him at the same time, willing a spoon to bend, and the BBC’s switchboard was inundated with calls from listeners claiming to have bent spoons and other items in their own homes. Of course, these reports were never confirmed, nor could they be, really. But aside from the obvious doubts about Uri Geller’s abilities, which we will discuss next, there is the burning question of why the CIA, who were conducting classified research into his abilities, would allow him to parade them around the world on a press tour. On paper, Puharich was blamed for this breach of secrecy, but one cannot help but wonder if this is exactly what the CIA wanted: well-publicized reports that they too had in their employ psychics whose powers might rival those of the mysterious Ninel Kulagina.

Ninel Kulagina, moving a compass in what is certainly a Soviet propaganda film probably faked using magnets under the table.

With Geller’s fame arrived accusations of fraud. But these were not lobbed just by sardonic journalists in the usual skeptical editorials. Geller’s outrageous claims of possessing supernatural powers and his unprecedented celebrity were enough to galvanize the scientific community. Astronomer Carl Sagan, mathematician Martin Gardner, and psychologist Ray Hyman came together with magician James Randi, who insisted Geller was an illusionist rather than a genuine psychic, and formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a noted skeptic organization that is still active today, for the sole purpose of combatting the surge in irrational belief they were observing. Most criticism of Geller comes down to his act being a pretty typical stage magician’s act, using distraction to pre-bend spoons and then hold them in such a way as to dramatically reveal the bend, making it look as if it is only then being bent. Indeed, there have been times when Geller refused to even perform if magicians were present, likely because he knew they would see through his tricks. As for his telepathic demonstrations, he has even admitted that his manager, a young man named Shipi Shtrang, helped him to fake certain psychic feats like guessing audience members’ license plate numbers. As for secondary effects, such as the people who claimed Geller had somehow imparted to them the ability to bend spoons themselves, a simple explanation is that mass delusions can be encouraged by the power of suggestion, and that believing a thing to be true can have concrete effects that may seem to confirm its truth, a phenomenon related to the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy or the Tinkerbell effect, a sociological concept called the Thomas theorem, which states that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” But regardless of skeptical opposition, the CIA continued their experiments with Geller. According to later declassified reports, Geller was the subject of experimentation by nuclear scientists working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who tested his ability to affect the computer program cards inside an ICBM, exploring the proposition that a person with psychokinetic abilities could feasibly deactivate nuclear missiles in flight. Strangely, after these experiments, the scientists involved experienced weird poltergeist activity at home, seeing unexplained phenomena like floating images and orbs. It was so bizarre that Kit Green, the CIA agent overseeing the experiments, reportedly came to believe that they had become the focus of a CIA psychological operation, using drones and holograms—the fact that a CIA man, and one who himself said he ran the ”weird desk,” would think this the likeliest explanation of such paranormal phenomena goes a long way toward supporting some of the theories about UFO disinformation programs that I discussed in previous episodes. Aside from this, though, it’s hard to know what to make of this bizarre report. What is more curious, to me, is the fact that the results of one of the Geller experiments was declassified in 1979, revealing that a magnetic program card had seemingly been erased when Geller was concentrating on it. If the result of this experiment is to be trusted, why would U.S. intelligence declassify it? It occurs to me that, if this were a genuine breakthrough in the use of psychic powers as nuclear self-defense, we would want to keep it secret at all costs. However, if it were not genuine, but we wanted our enemies to believe we were developing such capabilities, only then would we want it declassified. Framed in this manner, it makes one wonder how much of U.S. intelligence’s psychic experimentation programs that have remained classified were purposely falsified and leaked as disinformation, just as it was suspected that the footage of Ninel Kulagina had been.

Uri Geller was not the only psychic asset being studied by the CIA in the 1970s. Another man, studied at the same facility where Geller was often studied, the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI, was Ingo Swann, who formerly acted as a psychic test subject for the oldest psychic research organization in America, the American Society for Psychical Research. During his time with the ASPR, he began to undergo experiments involving the projection of his consciousness outside of his body, called travelling clairvoyance. These experiments involved suspending a tray in the air across the room and asking him what was on it. These experiments drew the interest of a physicist named Hal Puthoff, who invited Swann to SRI, a laboratory affiliated with the Defense Department, and reportedly tested him by directing him to agitate a magnetometer located several feet below him, encased in concrete. The story differs according to the telling, with Puthoff and Swann describing a perturbation of the device’s readings as having never been seen before or since, representing it as a successful demonstration of Swann’s psychokinesis, while other scientists have suggested it was a relatively common frequency variation for which Swann merely took credit, or that the machine had malfunctioned coincidentally and remained out of order afterward. One thing is certain, though; they never repeated the experiment, which any scientist worth his salt would have done before thinking to tout it as evidence of anything. During his time at SRI, Swann adapted his travelling clairvoyance routine and renamed the feat “remote viewing,” a name that Hal Puthoff and another physicist at SRI, Russel Targ, preferred because it sounded far more scientific. At first, their remote viewing experiments involved an individual going somewhere and concentrating on what they saw while Swann sat in a Faraday cage and tried to sketch what he thought the individual was looking at. However, since they were working for the CIA and clearly developing techniques for espionage, even if they weren’t openly acknowledging it, it became apparent that, even if this process produced results, it was pretty pointless, since if they were sending an operative into the field to infiltrate some site, they wouldn’t need the remote viewer at all. Rather, to be useful, Swann discerned that a psychic would need to be able to remote view any location, without a person present at the site sending back willful thoughts about the place. He came up with the idea that they would use coordinates. Kit Green asked an acquaintance for a set of coordinates, not knowing what was at the location, and Swann sketched the place. The results were rather vague, and at first didn’t seem to match the location Green’s acquaintance had provided: a family cabin. However, when another individual volunteered his remote viewing services, the details were far more precise, and it appeared the remote viewers were focused not on the cabin but rather on a top secret military facility called Sugar Grove just nearby the cabin.

Uri Geller, celebrity psychic, displaying a spoon he claims to have bent with his mind. Notice the film does not show the spoon bending. Gif uploaded by MindBob on Tenor.

This other, more accurate remote viewer was a Scientologist named Pat Price, and he presented himself to the researchers at SRI in a very strange way. He just approached them while they were out buying a Christmas tree for their lab and said he could help. Later, when Ingo Swann was in the process of attempting to remote view the coordinates provided by Kit Green, Price just called up Puthoff and offered his services. Curious, Puthoff gave him the coordinates, and a couple days later, Price called him back with an astonishingly detailed account. When it was discovered that the two men, Swann and Price, seemed to be viewing the Sugar Grove facility, Price’s reading raised alarms. Apparently, it was so precise that it described the color of filing cabinets and the names that appeared on the files therein. Even the rather credulous Hal Puthoff could hardly believe it and came to suspect Price was a CIA plant, ordered to approach them and test whether they could detect a fake who might have been feeding them sensitive intelligence as if it were psychic impressions. After all, Geller was still suspected of being Mossad, so the CIA had reason to fear they might be fooled. Very quickly, though, the interest of the agency shifted from Ingo Swann to Pat Price. Swann left SRI, perhaps a little resentful, and Price left to work directly for the CIA. This can’t necessarily be taken as evidence that he wasn’t working for them all along, however, as it’s quite possible that because of Price’s performance, the CIA decided the program at SRI was a liability, and Price left just to come back into the fold, his operation concluded. Certainly the CIA got out of the psychic research business after that, but not until after a very mysterious event. Pat Price was on a visit to Las Vegas in 1975 and met up with Kit Green and Hal Puthoff for dinner and reminiscence. At dinner, he left early, not feeling well. Afterward, he died of a heart attack in his room. An unidentified man arrived later with Price’s medical records and waived an autopsy. The researchers at SRI suspected murder, but who to suspect? The CIA themselves, or perhaps the KGB? Apparently, the Church of Scientology even came under suspicion. In the end, though, we don’t know what Price did for the CIA, or why he might have been killed, or whether he even was killed, for after all, he might have simply succumbed at 57 years old to a cardiac event.

After the CIA discontinued their funding of the psychic research at SRI, Uri Geller continued in his quasi-mystical, illusionist-esque career, fading slowly into relative obscurity and becoming something of a joke. Most recently, he threatened to telepathically prevent Brexit, and obviously failed to do so. While the CIA may have given up on remote viewing, though, the U.S. government in its entirety did not, and afterward, the Defense Intelligence Agency revived the endeavor under the codename Stargate Project. With a manual for training soldiers to remote view written by Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann, they kept psychics on the payroll, loaning them out to whatever agency or branch of the armed forces wanted to use them, until the project was declassified in 1995. At that point, as the DIA sought to transfer the project back to the CIA, two academics, statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman, one a believer and one a skeptic, were engaged to evaluate the 20-year project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they came to opposite conclusions, but Hyman’s reservations, published in Skeptical Inquirer, show that, even 20 years later, much of the same fundamental problems with psychic research remained. The problem of inadequate laboratory controls has always been an objection of skeptics. For example, the original remote viewing activities of Ingo Swann and Pat Price, in which they described the Sugar Grove facility, were completed at home, with no supervision.  They could have researched the coordinates or received outside information. Additionally, the problem of the bias of the researchers who undertake these studies, like Puharich and Puthoff, who were always entirely convinced of their subjects’ abilities, was always an issue. Just the same, in the 90’s, Hyman’s central objection was that all the remote viewing studies, which involved the evaluation of sketches to determine likenesses to the target supposedly being viewed, relied on a single judge, the person conducting the experiment, who was invariably a believer. He pointed out that even statistically significant results, which seemed to indicate something more than chance, were suspect until independent judges could reproduce the same results. And the repeatability and reproducibility of supposedly successful results in psychic research has also always been problematic, with researchers routinely claiming that results cannot be reproduced if observed by non-believers, a difficulty that should not be and is not an issue in science generally. In the years since its declassification, remote viewing became the stuff of satire, like the book and movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, and today these experiments are something of a laughing stock to many, despite the former participants in the program and practitioners publishing numerous books and speaking regularly on the paranormal circuit. But even as far-fetched as their claims are, they still pale in comparison to the final and perhaps biggest inspiration of the series Stranger Things, which was an outright hoax.

The Stanford Research Institute group, from left to right: Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, Kit Green, and the mysterious Pat Price. Via Vice.

Until next time, remember, in science, experiments must devise positive tests to discern whether a phenomenon is present or absent, but no such tests have ever been devised for psychic powers, which are defined negatively: when normal explanations are eliminated, researchers claim that is evidence that psychic phenomena exist. But that’s not how science works. You can’t point to any fluctuation in the data of your study and claim it proves your pet paranormal phenomenon is real. 

Further Reading

Hyman, Ray. “Evaluation of the Military’s Twenty-Year Program on Psychic Spying.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 20, no. 2, March/April 1996, pp. 21-23. Center for Inquiry,  cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1996/03/22165045/p21.pdf.

Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little Brown, 2017.

Stranger Things Have Happened: MK-Ultra and CIA Mind Control

In 1925, at the Geneva Conference for the Supervision of the International Traffic in Arms, world leaders took the initiative to renew the international prohibition on chemical warfare that had previously been affirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and to this prohibition was added a ban on what was then a new frontier in warfare, bacteriological weapons. Before World War II, every major world power had ratified the Geneva Protocols, except Japan and the United States, which actually would not ratify it until 1975. Before that time, though, the U.S. would undertake numerous secret experimentation projects that would violate these international standards as well as the forthcoming Nuremberg Code and many of our own laws, in order to keep up in an arms race that may have been, in large part, a paranoid fantasy. Intelligence reports in the early 1940s convinced the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that the Japanese, that other holdout from the Geneva Protocols, was developing advanced germ weapons, and in response, President Franklin Roosevelt created the first American biological weapons research agency, the War Research Service. By 1943, upon the direct request of Winston Churchill, who feared Nazi Germany was preparing a biological attack on Britain, Roosevelt authorized the Chemical Corps to begin developing and stockpiling biological weapons at its newly designated Biological Warfare Laboratories at Camp Detrick, a training base under the command of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. At Churchill’s urging, the US began preparing 500,000 bombs full of anthrax spores, which were thankfully, never used. Throughout the war, administrators of the War Research Service were convinced that Nazis and the Japanese, who were engaged in experimentation on human subjects, were far more advanced in their biological weapons research, and when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was formed for the express purpose of recruiting Nazi scientists, those at Camp Detrick took interest. Typically any individual who had been an “ardent Nazi” or had been guilty of war crimes could not be recruited and would have to face a tribunal in Nuremberg, but Operation Paperclip, so called because of the use of paperclips to mark the files of “troublesome” cases, offered a way to bring even the worst Nazi offender into the fold of American scientific intelligence. They simply “bleached” their files, erasing their history of involvement with the SS or the Gestapo and expunging any record of human experimentation. Operation Paperclip is a mainstay in many a modern-day conspiracy theory about the clandestine activities of U.S. intelligence. Regardless of the lack of support for some conspiracy claims that revolve around Operation Paperclip, it is well established that the program existed, and that the U.S. government whitewashed the crimes of Nazi mad scientists so that we could put them to work for ourselves. After all, if we didn’t take them, the Soviets would, or so the justification went. Among the notorious figures who were shielded from international prosecution in exchange for their efforts to further American biological warfare research were Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, whose crimes were legendary. Blome murdered thousands of concentration camp prisoners by exposing them to nerve gas, infecting them with typhus, and experimenting with ways to give them cancer. Ishii, at his secretive Unit 731 labs in Manchuria, killed as many as 12,000 test subjects in some of the most horrific experiments ever conducted: exposing them to poison gas, electrocuting them, popping their eyes out in pressurized chambers, injecting subjects with air to cause embolisms, burning them alive with flamethrowers, and freezing them slowly to study hypothermia. He exposed his victims to countless diseases, including cholera, syphilis, bubonic plague, and anthrax. Frequently he concluded his experiments with vivisection, dissecting the subjects while they were still alive in order to better study their organs at the time of death. He was truly a monster, and rather than see him face justice, General Douglas MacArthur guaranteed him immunity in exchange for his expertise. This would prove to be the genesis of state-sponsored American mad science. We may never have committed atrocities at this level, but as you’ll see, we did not balk at secret human experimentation.

*

Besides reading thoughtful blog posts, I’m unsure what your preferences are for entertainment. I enjoy a good book, and I stream probably too many movies and series. If you’re like me, you recently enjoyed or intend to soon binge the latest season of Stranger Things. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the new season or even if you haven’t watched the show at all. I’ll reveal no spoilers here, beyond some vague references to its premise. This series will not be about the show, but rather about its historical and pseudohistorical basis. Recently I overheard someone talking about the program, telling someone else that it is based on real events. To clarify, the show prominently features a character who was the subject of human experimentation sponsored and overseen by the U.S. government. This person was referring to real CIA human experimentation programs and appeared to be suggesting that the American government really did conduct the kind of esoteric research and mad science portrayed in the show. But of course, this is only partially accurate. Clandestine intelligence programs did indeed engage in mind-bending experiments on human subjects, and these certainly did, in part, seem to serve as inspiration for what is portrayed in Stranger Things. You heard me refer to these programs before, in my series UFO Disinfo, which suggested that U.S. intelligence could feasibly be staging UFO sightings and encouraging UFO culture as part of a long-running psychological operation. That, of course, was, admittedly, a conspiracy theory, but it was supported by the fact that we know such psyops and programs that experimented on U.S. citizens definitely existed, having come to light despite being the subject of a massive government cover-up. This is no baseless conspiracy speculation. It happened. However, much of what is presented in Stranger Things, such as secret government development of psychic agents capable of remote viewing and telekinesis, derives from a combination of fact and fiction, and some of it, such as the idea of experimentation on abducted children and the opening of portals, entered the public consciousness through hoaxes and baseless conspiracy claims. In this series, I plan to reveal the astonishing truth of what U.S. government-sponsored mad scientists really did, after which I will descend into the realm of what is exaggerated or misrepresented and what is outright fabrication.

Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, two mad doctors guilty of crimes against humanity in WWII whose work was studied and furthered by U.S. scientific intelligence.

After the Second World War, President Harry Truman dissolved the secret intelligence agency the Office of Strategic Services, but in signing the National Security Act two years later, in 1947, he formed a new clandestine intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency, to address the threats of Soviet Russia and Red China. Two years into its operations, in 1949, a particular event drove the agency into the business of mad science. That year, the show trial of  Hungarian Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty struck fear into the Western world. Mindszenty had resisted the Communist ruling party of Hungary, and after his arrest and confinement, he appeared befuddled during his show trial, speaking in an unconvincing monotone as he confessed to charges of conspiracy and treason. Senior CIA officials suspected that Mindszenty’s behavior proved that Communists had developed some revolutionary approach to interrogation or even some sort of mind control technique, accomplished with some drug or through hypnosis, or perhaps by a combination of the two. And the CIA were not alone. In response to the Mindszenty trial, the Chemical Corps formed a secret group at Camp Detrick to develop drugs specifically intended to be used for coercion. The next year, the CIA director approved a new project, called Bluebird, that authorized experimentation on prisoners, defectors, and refugees with the sole purpose of developing “Special Interrogation techniques” that could result in “control of an individual.” That year, as Project Bluebird got up and running, the CIA began to believe its own anti-Communist propaganda. An anti-Communist propagandist who formerly worked for the OSS created a media sensation with an article published in the Miami News alleging that Communist China had perfected a mind control technique the author dubbed “brain washing.” Believing this propaganda entirely, one CIA official who would later rise to become its director, Allen Dulles, focused much of the CIA’s resources on mind control projects. Project Bluebird established secret prisons and torture houses in Germany, and later in Japan, at which they employed former Nazi doctors whose records had been bleached by Operation Paperclip, at which they continued the legacy of Nazi human experimentation, studying all kinds of physical torture techniques and dosing prisoners with a variety of drugs, including amphetamines, heroin, and mescaline, all in an effort to see if these Special Interrogation techniques would make prisoners more cooperative, encourage them to reveal secrets, alter their personalities, or induce amnesia. These operations expressly violated the Nuremberg Code that such experiments be conducted only on witting and willing subjects, but those involved justified such violations through their belief that their enemies were doing the same, and such codes did not apply during conflicts with enemy states who themselves violated the codes. This rationalization was predicated on a fundamental error, though, as it would be revealed years later that Mindszenty and other prisoners who were believed to have been “brain washed” by Communists had not been the victims of some cutting edge drug-induced mind control, but rather had been worked over with rather mundane torture techniques and psychologically manipulated using the well-known, long-used approaches that interrogators had known for decades were effective at breaking spies and prisoners of war.

In 1951, amid the fearmongering of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was creating a paranoid panic by convincing many that Communists had infiltrated every level of American society, Allen Dulles put the CIA’s mind control program into high gear, hiring one Sidney Gottlieb to head the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff—in other words, Project Bluebird, or as they then renamed the expanded program, Project Artichoke. Gottlieb was an unusual fellow, a chemist with a club foot and a love of folk dancing who lived a strange double life, as a spiritual back-to-nature type at home and as a zealot devoted to perfecting mind control at all costs at work. Gottlieb would rise to become the CIA’s mind control czar, as well as its chief developer of poisons and poison delivery systems, and the programs he directed would be responsible for the destruction of countless lives. He is by far the most notorious of American mad scientists, our own Dr. Mengele. Under his auspices, and under the supervision of Morse Allen, the callous former director of Bluebird, the “Special Interrogations” evolved to become known as the “Artichoke Method” and to include far darker practices. Their torture techniques came to include ever more creative and cruel approaches, such as exposing subjects to radiation and extreme heat, and giving them electroshock treatments. Allen unsurprisingly found these practices less than effective, especially electroshock. While he could easily reduce his subjects to vegetative states using this tool, he could not use it to extract information from them, nor could it erase specific memories and leave them otherwise unaffected. It was simply a needlessly elaborate way to lobotomize. Their use of drugs on subjects evolved during these years as well. First they used tetrahydrocannabinol, or what cannabis users may better know as THC, which they referred to as TD, or “truth drug.” But finding that it mostly either relaxed the subject or induced fits of laughter, they moved on to cocaine, hoping that its tendency to induce talkativeness may be useful, but as that talkativeness seemed to derive from elation rather than relaxed inhibitions, it proved useless as well. From there, they tested heroin, but they found this only useful when withheld from addicts, who would be more likely to cooperate in exchange for a fix. Lastly, they turned to psychoactive drugs, more specifically mescaline, following once again in the footsteps of Nazi madmen who had experimented with the drug in Dachau. It is unclear how many of their test subjects at their secret torture houses in Germany may have died, or how comparable their death count may have been to those of their Nazi counterparts, but one document did indicate clearly that the disposal of corpses was “not a problem.”

One of the few extant images of Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra, seen here preparing to testify in 1977 about his career with the CIA.

Although Artichoke men did not find mescaline to be useful as a truth drug or mind control agent, another more recently discovered psychoactive drug piqued their interests. Lysergic acid diethylamide-25, more commonly known as LSD or just acid today, was derived by accident from ergot fungus in a Swiss laboratory in 1943. Although very little was produced in Switzerland at first, it showed up on the CIA’s radar, and Artichoke men performed some dosing experiments with it, finding it just as ineffective as other drugs they administered without further, more brutal Artichoke methods applied. Sidney Gottlieb, however, took especial interest in the substance, which he felt bore further study. As has long been common practice among chemists experimenting with drugs, Gottlieb and other scientists used LSD themselves in order to evaluate its effects, and Gottlieb was enamored of it. He marveled at how powerful an effect even the tiniest dose seemed to have and wondered what could be accomplished with larger doses combined with other Artichoke methods, like torture and hypnosis, deciding that LSD would prove to be the key to his quest for mind control. He sent men to Sandoz labs in Switzerland, who had developed the drug, bought out the world’s supply of it, extracted a promise from the lab not to produce any of it for Communist regimes, and then tasked an American pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, with cracking its chemical composition and synthesizing massive amounts for the CIA’s use. Furthermore, believing that environment and personality played a major role in each subject’s reaction to the drug, he convinced his superiors that their experiments must be expanded beyond their current scope. There was only so much they could learn by dosing themselves or dosing prisoners. They needed a variety of people from different backgrounds, who might be experimented on without their knowledge, outside of the specific context of captivity, which did not provide an accurate sense of how the drug might be used in the field. This required a massive domestic program to illegally experiment on civilians, a program that would be “ultra-sensitive” and require the utmost secrecy, with many levels of insulation to prevent all but a few from knowing its extent. Allen Dulles, now director of the CIA, authorized this program with Gottlieb at its head. Gottlieb named it MK-Ultra, using a prefix common for Technical Services Staff projects, along with a cryptonym that indicated how ultra-secret the program must be.

Some of Gottlieb’s early experiments on civilians appear to have been conducted brazenly, in public. In 1952, some agents lured a young American artist named Stanley Glickman to a café in Paris popular among expatriates. There it is likely they dosed Glickman, who panicked when the drug hit him and fled. Seeking treatment at American Hospital, which had a secret relationship with the CIA, Glickman later claimed he was further dosed with hallucinogens and given electroshock. Glickman’s life was ruined. He never resumed his artistry and was transformed into a paranoid recluse for the rest of his years. Meanwhile, in America, he engaged Dr. Paul Hoch of New York Psychiatric Institute to secretly dose one of his patients, a tennis player who was being treated for depression after a divorce. This poor unsuspecting patient, Harold Blauer, was injected with psychoactive drugs 6 times over the course of a month, and when he requested the treatment be stopped, Dr. Hoch injected him with a dose 14 times greater than the previous doses. He died after about 2 hours of flailing. Conscious of the fact that he would need to exercise more discretion, Gottlieb hired George Hunter White, a corrupt narcotics officer and alcoholic who had developed a taste for the drugs he confiscated, to set up a safehouse in New York in which subjects could be unwittingly drugged in a safe and controlled environment completely wired with surveillance so that Gottlieb and others could later examine the resulting behavior. White posed as an artist or a sailor and prowled Greenwich Village, luring underworld types back to the safehouse where he dosed them, confident that their various illicit lifestyles would discourage them from going to the authorities following their experiences, not all of which were unpleasant. And even when a subject inevitably sought medical attention and declared they had been drugged, White’s law enforcement connections protected both him and MK-Ultra. As this safehouse operation continued, Gottlieb remained interested in mental health institutions as useful environments for more terminal experiments, which could be taken to further extremes. In 1953, he arranged with Dr. Harris Isbell of the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky to perform the most egregious LSD experiments ever undertaken. Using drug addicted patients as subjects, many of them African-Americans who technically agreed to the experiments in exchange for a fix of heroin, Isbell administered lysergic acid in exponentially larger doses over the course of 77 days. Even the most ardent enthusiast of the recreational use of LSD will shudder in horror at the thought of tripping every day for two and a half months. It would be mind-breaking.

A photo of the notorious George Hunter White, on file at Stanford Special Collections in Palo Alto, via SFWeekly.

Astonishingly, Gottlieb directed these human drug experiments with immunity until 1953, when finally a slipup of his own caused him some difficulties and threatened to expose MK-Ultra. In the fall of that year, Gottlieb invited several Camp Detrick men to a classified retreat at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake, in Maryland. Among the attendees was one Frank Olson, an expert in the aerosol delivery of chemicals. Olson was a man privy to many sensitive secrets. He had played a role in Operation Sea-Spray, in 1950, when the U.S. Navy attempted to simulate a biological weapons attack by releasing what it believed was a harmless bacteria on San Francisco and ended up making numerous San Franciscans ill with urinary tract infections, one of whom died, and possibly causing a mysterious pneumonia cluster. Recently, after visiting European black sites where Artichoke work continued, he became disillusioned with his work. He confided to a friend that he was troubled by the CIA’s use of drugs and torture on prisoners, and their collaboration with Nazi scientists. Before attending the Deep Creek retreat, he had spoken of resigning. While at the retreat, he and several other Camp Detrick men were unknowingly dosed with LSD by Gottlieb himself, who only informed them after the drug had taken effect. Later reports indicate that, while he was under the influence of the drug, some of his colleagues may have confronted him about his decision to leave the CIA. Afterward, Olson became depressed and preoccupied. His family worried about him. The CIA assigned a psychiatrist to speak with him. He became increasingly agitated over the next several days, and paranoid about being dosed again or being arrested. Just before Thanksgiving, he was taken by his colleagues to New York, where he slipped away and wandered around the city in something like a fugue state. On November 28th, he plunged to his death from the window of a hotel room he shared with Gottlieb’s chief lieutenant, Robert Lashbrook. According to Lashbrook, Olson, in a state of undress, had run across the room and leapt at the window with such force that he crashed through the drawn curtains and the glass to fall to his death. Outside of the exact dimensions and extent of the crimes against humanity committed during the course of the program, Olson’s death is perhaps the central enduring mystery related to MK-Ultra. Was Olson dosed more than once during the days after Deep Creek, thus explaining his increasingly aberrant behavior? Was he targeted by his colleagues as a subject for testing because of his recent reservations about their work? Did he commit suicide, or was he murdered to cover up MK-Ultra? One thing is certain, as evidence would later show: a cover-up did occur. Police were told the death must be kept quiet as a matter of national security, Lashbrook’s background was falsified to investigators, and Olson’s family was handled by convincing them their patriarch had died from a “classified illness” and paying them off with survivor’s benefits. In the end, there were a few investigations, but it resulted, at the time, in nothing more than a memo stating Gottlieb had shown “poor judgement.” It was less of a genuine slap on the wrist and more a pantomime of one.

Afterward, MK-Ultra continued its work in renewed secrecy. George Hunter White moved to San Francisco and opened new safehouses wired for surveillance, this time staffed with prostitutes whom he trained to dose johns, engage in less than typical sex acts with them, and afterward to get their sex partners talking. It was part of a new initiative to study sex in conjunction with drugs as a means of eliciting sensitive information, an initiative White called Operation Midnight Climax. In practice, however, these brothels became dens of debauchery. George White spent most of his time sitting on a portable toilet behind a one-way mirror, watching sex acts and drinking martinis by the pitcher. MK-Ultra contractors and CIA agents, including Sidney Gottlieb, would visit regularly not on business, but rather for pleasure, seeking the free services of sex workers employed by the agency. Meanwhile, MK-Ultra’s engagement of medical professionals to perform horrific human experiments only increased, insulated through an academic organization, The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which they used as a front to dispense “grant money.” One contractor, who like others was unaware that he actually worked for the CIA, was Donald Ewen Cameron, president of both the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. At facilities in Canada, Cameron conducted experiments that on their surface seem very similar to those depicted in the fictional program Stranger Things, as they involved sensory deprivation, a procedure that is shown numerous times on the show. But Cameron’s work is far more horrific than it appears in Stranger Things. Believing that he needed to “depattern” the minds of his subjects before they’d be susceptible to the “psychic driving” he attempted in his mind control experiments, Cameron’s subjects were first sedated and then subjected to extreme periods of sensory deprivation. These were not a matter of hours but rather of weeks, and sometimes months, locked in dark water tanks. It resulted in patients forgetting how to walk. Afterward, he administered electroshocks far stronger than any other psychiatrists dared. Finally, the patients were fed LSD and fitted with helmets that played recorded phrases like “My mother hates me” on repeat. These horrifying experiments typically resulted in complete mental breakdown, with subjects reverting to infantile development stages. These were otherwise normal individuals who had come to him for help with issues like anxiety and post-partum depression. The destruction of their minds was nothing less than a state sponsored crime against humanity.

Donald Ewen Cameron, prominent psychologist and conductor of horrific torturous medical experiments funded by the CIA.

There is no telling how many lives were destroyed by the MK-Ultra program over the course of its existence, as after it was finally shut down, having failed to produce any working technological or pharmacological mind control techniques, the CIA had all records relating to the project destroyed during the panic caused by Watergate. What we know only emerged later in the 1970s, when the Presidential Rockefeller Commission, the Congressional Church Committee, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were formally tasked with investigating CIA crimes and abuses. By that time, Gottlieb had retired, and when questioned, he claimed to have little recall of the project’s activities. In 1976, journalist John Marks obtained boxes of redacted files under the Freedom of Information Act and wrote the first definitive exposé of MK-Ultra, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. By that time, the wider effects of Gottlieb’s experiments had been felt by everyone in America, if not the world, as it became clear that his encouragement of experimentation with hallucinogens extended to universities, where major counter-culture figures like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey helped to spread its use as a recreational drug and means of enlightenment among the general populace. And as the years have passed, more and more people have come forward to sue the CIA for being the unwitting subjects of their experiments, including Frank Olson’s family, who went on a crusade against the agency. We have further learned that their psychological experiments may have unexpectedly resulted in mass murders. It was in later years revealed that mafia figure Frank “Whitey” Bulger had been extensively experimented on early in his prolific criminal career, during which he murdered 19 or more. The Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was also part of an abusive, CIA sponsored psychological experiment during his time at Harvard, long before his reign of terror. And there is even a conspiracy theory that Charles Manson was the subject of CIA experiments, although I am not prepared right now to evaluate those claims, which smack a bit of unsupported conspiracy speculation. Suffice it to say that the extent of the terrible effects of these Nazi-esque crimes committed by U.S. intelligence can only be speculated on. And at the end of John Marks’ revelatory book, he speculates about the different directions that MK-Ultra mind control research may have taken afterward, under some other classified cryptonym. He mentions genetic engineering, a science that we know has grown by leaps and bounds, as well as brain stimulation, the domination of subjects by surgically inserting electrodes to remotely stimulate specific areas of the brain, a deeply unsettling prospect. Lastly, he suggests that they may have directed their funding toward secret research with a more fantastical focus, such as extra-sensory perception or other psychic abilities. This notion is certainly reflected in fiction like Stranger Things, which promotes the idea of secret government research in this area, and in Part Two, we’ll see to what extent this is, surprisingly, quite true.

Further Reading

Kinzer, Stephen. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt and Company, 2019.

Marks, John. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control; The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.

Gun Violence in America

In Manhattan, in January of 1911, satirical novelist and muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips took his usual route from his Gramercy Park apartment to the Princeton Club, a private club for the Ivy League university’s alumni. Phillips cut a tall, impressive figure, wearing light summer suits in winter, handsome with striking pale eyes. When he arrived at the club, a man he did not know approached him, lifted a handgun, and fired several bullets into Phillips, crying out “Here you go!” before shooting himself in the head. As Phillips slowly died from his gunshot wounds, he expressed confusion about who his murderer had been, but police had little trouble determining the motive, remembering that Phillips had not long ago come to them about a series of threatening letters he’d received. His killer was Fitzhugh Goldsborough, the deranged son of a wealthy family whom he believed Phillips was lampooning his fiction, some of which satirized rich, entitled youth. The coroner who examined their corpses, who regularly corresponded with the press to offer them grisly statistics on New York deaths, afterward spearheaded a campaign against the easy acquisition and public carrying of concealable handguns, a campaign that was met with much public support. Just five months before the murder/suicide outside the Princeton Club, a dockworker had shot popular New York Mayor William Gaynor in the neck. Gaynor had survived, but the incident had touched off a robust debate about whether mental illness, or the media, or our national culture had contributed to the crime. After the Phillips murder, the debate shifted to focus on the fact that a disgruntled and violent individual had been so easily able to acquire a gun and carry it to the marina where the mayor was waiting to board a steamship. The push for gun legislation in 1911 was further championed by a State Senator named Timothy Sullivan, who framed the campaign as a solution to gang violence. The reign of terror of certain street gangs was very real to New Yorkers. Less than ten years earlier, the Jewish-American-dominated Eastman Gang of the Lower East Side had clashed with the Italian-American dominated Five Points Gang in a bloody shootout on Rivington and Allen Streets. When police arrived, the two gangs turned their guns on the officers. The streets had been transformed into a warzone, and in the intervening years, the gang wars had continued. Senator Sullivan introduced gun control legislation in 1911 that instituted licensing for the possession of any firearm and left the decision of whether to issue a carry license up to the licensing authority, the police, who rarely granted the privilege of carrying firearms in public. This gun control law has been criticized as a way for Tammany Hall politician Timothy Sullivan, portrayed by his rivals and critics as a crime lord himself, to have his adversaries arrested by having firearms planted on them. Indeed, it’s been said that some street toughs took to sewing their pockets shut so that police could not plant handguns on them. It has also been argued that police racially-profiled members of immigrant communities when enforcing the law, which certainly seems to be the case. The first man imprisoned under the law was an Italian, and in an editorial after his conviction, the New York Times praised the judge for the 1-year sentencing, saying that it “suitably impressed the minds of aliens in New York that the Sullivan law forbids their bearing arms of any kind,” while also, to their credit, asking, “would it not be well to ‘get after’ the notorious characters who are not aliens?” and conceding that “’frisking’ such persons is less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.” Regardless of such ulterior motives or corrupt enforcement policies, though, the Sullivan Law shows us that there was a time, before the rise of the powerful gun lobby, that gun violence could be responded to with reasonable gun control legislation. While there is evidence that this law greatly reduced suicide rates, there is no evidence that it reduced New York homicides, and certainly it did not prevent Payton Gendron from legally buying a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle at a gun shop in Endicott, New York, and opening fire on the patrons of a Buffalo supermarket in the recent racially-motivated massacre. I would argue, though, that it is difficult to quantify what heinous crimes by mentally ill individuals might have been prevented just because they were discouraged by the licensing process. But regardless, what the law shows us is that, a hundred years ago, it was not portrayed as un-American to consider gun control legislation in order to reduce gun violence. But as I sat down to write this, it was in the news that the conservative activist justices packed onto our Supreme Court, who also just overturned established precedent in order to reduce civil liberties and rescind reproductive rights, have also ruled this New York gun control legislation unconstitutional. And they have done this in the wake of the most heinous school shooting since the Sandy Hook Massacre, just one month after nineteen children and two teachers were shot dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. To put a little perspective on this, the same gun rights activists who protest the push for sane gun control measures in the wake of every mass shooting, arguing that it’s more appropriate to mourn quietly than to demand real social change after such a tragedy, are simultaneously applauding the erosion of established firearms legislation during a mass shooting’s aftermath. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd. And I don’t want to hear that “Now is not the time” evasion. It is long past time to talk about Gun Violence in America.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. Whenever a gun rights proponent tells you that it’s not appropriate to discuss change or legislation in the wake of some gun violence, they are displaying a clear blindness to history. In modern America, that is the only time when significant gun control legislation has ever been passed, and it used to be that the Nation Rifle Association supported such legislation and even helped draft it. Among these reactive gun control measures were the 1934 National Firearms Act and the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. These measures were enacted in direct response to the gangland gun violence of the Prohibition Era and mass murders such as the St. Valentines Day Massacre of 1929, when seven Irish gangsters were stood against a garage wall and gunned down. The more direct impetus, though, was the attempt of a lone gunman on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life in Miami in 1933, when he was President Elect. The attempt failed, though the Mayor of Chicago was killed in the hail of bullets fired by the assassin. Recently, a conspiracy theory emerged that the assassin was working for the mafia and that the mayor was his true target, but at the time, the fact that a lone fanatic with a revolver bought from a pawn shop could come so close to ending his life put a fire under Roosevelt to push for gun control legislation. At first, the National Firearms Act was intended to require the registration and prohibitive taxation of all firearms, including handguns like the one that had nearly killed Roosevelt, but in the end, it ended up only focusing on “gangster weapons,” including machine guns and short-barreled shotguns and rifles. The later firearms act of 1938 made licensing a further requirement of gun sellers, and prohibited the sale of firearms to certain persons, such as felons. The NRA again supported these measures. They were, after all, founded as a sporting and marksmanship club focused on promoting gun safety. In fact, the year after the 1938 legislation was passed, the President of the NRA, Karl Frederick, stated “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” 30 years later, in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, after learning that Lee Harvey Oswald had acquired the murder weapon through the mail on the cheap with an NRA coupon, the NRA agreed that the mail-order sale of guns must be prohibited. And again, after the further assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the NRA was very involved with the drafting of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which replaced and updated the two existing firearms acts, introducing serial numbers, a minimum age for gun ownership, a restriction on sales across state lines, and the prohibition of sales to known drug addicts and the mentally ill. What those without historical blindness must see is that there is a long history of passing gun control measures in response to acts of gun violence, and that the NRA used to champion the gun control legislation that today they call unconstitutional.

The aftermath of the attempted assassination of Roosevelt in Miami, when Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was shot.

Although the NRA supported and helped craft the Gun Control Act of 1968, we see the beginning of their transformation about this time, as they used their influence to block the most sweeping of the bill’s measures, including the licensing of all gun carriers and a national registry of all firearms. President Lyndon B. Johnson called them out for this in a speech, saying “The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby,” and within a couple years, the entire platform of the NRA would change after an ill-fated raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, during which an NRA member who was believed to be stockpiling weapons illegally, was shot and paralyzed. After that, the NRA began to oppose any federal enforcement of gun control legislation, and began to tout the Second Amendment as a protection of an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, which it was never intended to be. I’ll explain and support this further later in the episode, but suffice it to say that the argument of individual gun rights being protected by the Constitution never even came up in the debate over the sweeping gun control legislation of the 1930s, and such rhetoric had previously been the domain of militant groups like the Black Panthers, whom the NRA had vehemently opposed and whose supposed right to publicly carry firearms they refused to recognize when just a couple years earlier, in 1967, they had supported the Mulford Act in California, a bill to prohibit the carrying of loaded firearms publicly without a permit. Ever since this turn to the right in the 1970s, when new leadership set out to become the obstructive political force they remain today, the NRA defined and constructed gun ownership as a social identity, and for many gun owners, including some close family members of mine, it is one of the major pillars of their personal identity. They cultivated this notion of gun ownership as a social identity principally through their longstanding publication, American Rifleman, and thereafter politicized this social identity, such that support for gun rights has become a conservative Republican litmus test. Because of the NRA’s influence on their constituency, as well as because of their large campaign contributions, the major political figures and media apparatus of the right have further encouraged the notion of gun ownership as a distinct and legitimate social identity, one that Republicans claim as their own. Like the modern Republican Party generally, seemingly devastating scandals have arisen that should have caused the NRA’s dissolution entirely. After the 2016 election, it was revealed in a U.S. Senate Committee on Finance Minority Staff report that the NRA had become a Russian asset in its election meddling campaign, demonstrating that NRA officials sought out Russian money and facilitated the political access of known Kremlin agents, including Maria Butina. Republican apologists for the NRA argue that they were acting as individuals rather than on behalf of the NRA, but subsequent investigations by the New York Attorney General have revealed widespread fraud and cronyism in their organization. But the NRA simply left New York for Texas, declaring bankruptcy, and appears to be no less influential after these scandals. As one President who took money from them to further their agenda once said of himself, they could probably shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters.

Despite the growing power of the NRA to kibosh any gun control legislation, they have been unable to stop certain major gun control legislation, especially when it is enacted on a wave of outrage after an infamous act of gun violence. Early on they even found themselves at odds with their Republican allies. After he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., in 1981, Ronald Reagan supported the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, more commonly known as the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks and a waiting period. By the time the act was passed, the NRA was able to get the five-day waiting period replaced by an instant computer background check, and until such a system could be put in place, they sought to fight the mandate. They financed a series of lawsuits in an effort to take the bill to the Supreme Court, which they succeeded in doing in 1997, winning an opinion that compelling law enforcement to run background checks was unconstitutional. The decision had little effect, though, since state and local law enforcement mostly chose to continue running the background checks of their own accord, and soon the background check database was in place. By this time, though, there was a much broader piece of gun control legislation for the NRA to fight, this one too passed in the wake of an act of gun violence that could not be ignored. On January 17th, 1989, a station wagon full of fireworks that had been parked behind Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, not far from my own home town, was set on fire, creating something of a distraction as a deranged and suicidal drifter in a flak jacket named Patrick Purdy set foot on the school’s playground, took position behind a portable building with an AK-47 that he had acquired quite easily at a gun shop in Oregon, and started firing. He wounded more than thirty that day, and he murdered five children before taking his own life. The unthinkably heinous act resulted in numerous pieces of gun control legislation. In California, the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989 prohibited the transfer and ownership of more than 50 different semi-automatic assault weapons, the George H. W. Bush administration banned the importation of assault weapons that the ATF determined had no “sporting purpose,” and in 1994, a Federal Assault Weapons Ban was passed along with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of that year. The Assault Weapons Ban prohibited large capacity magazines and, much like the California law, banned the manufacture of specific semi-automatic assault weapons for use by civilians. Rather than restrictions on handguns, it is measures like these, meant specifically to fight mass public shootings, that gun control advocates have been urging after every mass shooting for the last 20 years. We have had them in place before, and it did not result in tyranny. The only reason we must advocate for these restrictions again is that the Assault Weapons Ban had an expiration date, and in 2004, it was not renewed.

Portraits of the children murdered by Patrick Purdy, from clevelandschoolremembers.org

Let us look further at the ten years 1994 to 2004, when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was in place. Perhaps this seems rather a recent time period for a history podcast to be discussing, but since gun rights proponents act like banning assault weapons would spell out certain doom for our democracy, it seems memories are so short that we must remind many that less than 20 years ago we had such a federal law and it wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, it appears to have had a measurable effect on gun violence. The entire rationale behind the ban was that violent incidents involving assault weapons and high-capacity magazines typically involve more shots, more victims, and more wounds, and statistics support this assertion. Rather ridiculously, assault weapon apologists argue that the recoil of these weapons means worse aim and thus we cannot assume assault weapons are better able to strike more people. If that were the case, of course, it just makes them even more useless for sport or home defense, rendering them suitable only for spraying rounds into crowds. In other words, it just proves they are unsuitable for civilian use and especially dangerous in the hands of a mass murderer. Critics of the Assault Weapons Ban also claim it had little to no effect on crime, but the hard data disputes this. According to a 2001 study of the impacts of the ban in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, not only did criminal use of assault weapons decline in the years after the passage of the Assault Weapons Ban, but gun murders generally declined around 10%. Critics contend there is no proof of causation, that this reduction in gun homicides may have been due to other factors or the cyclical nature of crime stats, but since the ban’s expiration, the share of crimes involving high-capacity semiautomatics has increased from 33% to 112%, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of Urban Health. Still, mass shootings continued to occur during the years of the ban, including one of the worst school shootings in our history, the Columbine High School Massacre of 1999, whose perpetrators used weapons that remained unbanned, including a variant of the banned semiautomatic TEC-9 pistol that because of its slightly different name, the TEC-DC9, remained legal. Rather than proving that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was pointless, though, this instead proves that it was, if flawed, still working, and rather than abandoning it, such a ban should be improved, and such loopholes closed. Looking closely at data on mass shootings collected by Mother Jones, we can see that 18 mass public shootings occurred during the decade before the ban, while 15 mass shootings occurred during the ban. The difference between these decades may not appear striking, but let’s look at the decades since the ban’s expiration. During the ten years after its expiration, mass public shootings more than doubled, to 36, including the devastating Viginia Tech and Sandy Hook Massacres. And in the following 8 years, up to today, 61 mass shootings have occurred, and actually more, since Mother Jones’s data ceases in mid-June and these horrific crimes seem to be perpetrated weekly at this point. (In fact, as I was editing this podcast episode, I was compelled to record this insert to acknowledge that on Independence Day, a shooter in Highland Park, IL, injured 47 and killed 7 by firing at parade-goers with a high-powered rifle from a nearby rooftop. During the aftermath, a Republican state senator urged everyone to “move on.”) It is certainly true that not all of these mass shootings were committed using assault weapons, but almost all are committed using semiautomatic weapons with removable high-capacity magazines. As of 2017, according to the aforementioned study published by the Journal of Urban Health, “Assault weapons and other high-capacity semiautomatics appear to be used in a higher share of firearm mass murders (up to 57% in total).” Furthermore, a 2019 comparative study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that during the decade of the federal ban on assault weapons, mass shootings were 70% less likely to occur. But even if we were to discover that banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines did not reduce the growing number of these mass shooting incidents, perhaps it would at least make a difference in the average number of victims, making such incidents far less deadly. There is no logical reason that I can see not to update, improve, and renew the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Only conservative ideology and an entrenched, uniquely American gun culture stand in the way.

What makes America different from other Western democracies, and other nations generally, that we have developed this deep-rooted gun culture? Make no mistake, we are different. Among the top 10 countries that tolerate civilian gun ownership, we simply own more, at an estimated 120 guns per 100 residents, more than twice that of the next highest country in gun ownership, Yemen, according to the 2018 Small Arms Survey. When we look at gun murders as a percentage of all homicides in 2020, as reported by the BBC, it appears one is far more likely to be shot to death in America than in any other democracy of comparable size. In the UK, gun homicides made up only 4% of gun-related killings, unsurprisingly, considering the UK’s ban on military style weapons and handguns. In Australia, which passed sweeping gun control legislation after a series of mass shootings in the ’80s and ’90s, gun murders stood at only 13% of 2020 murders. In Canada, which generally ensures gun accessibility but maintains stricter controls of the same kind as the US, 2020 saw gun murders comprise 37% of the total. But here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., a whopping 79% of murders were gun-related. And probably because of our spotty and lax laws and the sheer number of guns in hands here, 73% of all mass shootings worldwide between 1998 and 2019 occurred here in America, as determined by a study in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. Our reluctance to address this problem with strong legislation is also pretty unique. Take New Zealand’s response to the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch as an example. Within a month, the government had passed legislation banning semiautomatics and magazines, and within a few more months, they created a national firearms register and tightened restrictions on gun licensing. Their quick action to address the problem should make Americans feel ashamed of our own government response. We may be tempted to blame the NRA for this gun culture entirely, but that would be inaccurate. The connection between Americans and guns stretches back a long time before the NRA was ever formed in 1871 as a marksmanship club. Some have suggested that gun culture originated in the Wild West, when it is thought that every man must go about armed, and good guys with guns stood down bad guys with guns on a daily basis, but much of the tales of the American West are exaggerated. In fact, an opposing argument could be made that the Wild West was actually the origin place of American gun control laws, as Western towns nearly universally decreed that no one within town could carry a firearm, according to gun policy scholar Adam Winkler, and these “blanket ordinances” resulted in actually very low crime rates in such notorious towns as Deadwood, Dodge City, and Tombstone. Others might see the origin of American gun culture being related to the carrying of pistols by gentlemen, replacing the rapier around 1750 as the symbols of their masculinity, which they wielded in duels over perceived slights, but this fashion originated in Europe rather than the Americas. Certainly guns remain the phallic symbol of many an American male’s sense of manhood today, but in France and Britain, for example, where the most recognizable pistol dueling methods were established, the masculinity of men is no longer dependent on their gun ownership. So what makes American gun culture different?

Image of al old frontier town with the gun control ordinance clearly posted: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.” Courtesy Saint Joseph’s University

Americans’ love affair with deadly weapons can be traced all the way back to our independence, and even earlier. Much can be attributed to the fact that early Americans were colonizers and frontiersmen. By frontiersmen, I don’t mean gunslingers. I mean settlers—farmers, hunters, trappers. Those who sought to tame the wilderness relied on firearms for survival and subsistence. Wild game was a major part of their diet, and occasionally they had need of a firearm for defense against not only some human aggressor, but a dangerous wild predator. Farmers too relied on varmint guns to dispatch vermin that threatened their crops and predators that threatened their livestock. During the many conflicts and skirmishes that can loosely be called part of the American Indian Wars, the average settler’s firearms were used to maintain possession of land they had taken in their encroachments on Native American territories, viewing themselves as acting in self-defense against marauding savages. Therefore, it was not uncommon for young boys to be given rifles as a symbol of their passage into manhood. The frontier and its dangers are long gone now, though, and have been for more than a hundred years, and other nations that began in recent history as a colonial settlement of wilderness, such as Australia, have proven better able to put down the wild gun culture that helped them tame their frontiers. No, America remains different, and this difference can be attributed to our Founding Fathers’ insistence that a right to bear arms is a God-given, inalienable human right—a right not recognized by any other Western democracy. How did gun ownership come to be viewed as a human right here and nowhere else? It all boils down to the politics of the American Revolution. In colonial America, English Whiggery was a popular political force, and the radical Whigs’ distaste for militarism contributed to revolutionary sentiment in America. According to this political position, “standing armies” represented the greatest threat and evil to man’s liberties. To American Whigs, George III’s stationing of troops in the American Colonies was an act of tyranny. After the Boston Massacre, when British soldiers shot five Americans in a crowd that was hurling insults, snowballs, and stones at them, John Adams called it “the strongest proof of the danger of standing armies.” This Whiggish aversion to standing armies, or to George III’s army in particular, is further reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which bemoans the fact that the King “has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” and can be seen to have still been on the minds of legislators years after the ratification of our Constitution, when they amended the Constitution to prohibit the quartering of soldiers in civilian houses. To radical English Whigs and American Whigs, or Patriots as they’re sometimes called, the solution to the evils of standing armies was a well-armed citizen militia, members of which could be trusted to act according to civic virtue. George Washington himself saw the folly of this early on, as he found the citizen militiamen under his command “incapable of making or sustaining a serious attack.” A historical myth has been perpetuated that America’s independence was won by the heroism of armed civilians, but in truth, militia troops performed quite poorly compared to Washington’s Continental Army. And after the Revolution, in their effort to bolster their citizen militia, our Founding Fathers endorsed gun laws that today would probably chafe even the most dyed-in-wool gun rights advocates: a 1792 law required all eligible men to buy a gun, report for muster, and register their weapons with the federal government.

It would not be long before the inadequacy of militia forces became apparent to all. In the War of 1812, when undisciplined militiamen embarrassed the country in failed stands against British troops, it became clear we needed to expand our own standing armies and could not rely on a militia. But by that time, the Constitution had already been amended with the Second Amendment, which states, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” I think most people know the argument in favor of gun control pointing out that this amendment only protects the rights of “the people,” meaning the country generally, to bear arms as part of “a well-regulated militia.” That much is apparent in the text. This “right” appears intended only to ensure the existence of a militia, not a well-armed general populace. What I don’t think many citizens realize is that this amendment, like the third amendment about quartering troops, is an artifact of an obsolete political view that America should rely more on militia forces than on a standing army. The fact that the U.S. promptly course-corrected after the War of 1812 and now has one of the largest militaries, and arguably the best equipped military, in the world, means this amendment is logically obsolete and should be subject to repeal and replacement. But even if one refuses to acknowledge that this amendment is only focused on strengthening and safeguarding militia forces, it actually explicitly urges regulation and in no way suggests that such regulation would infringe on the right being described. And it should be emphasized that this is not only the interpretation of modern gun control advocates. Until the latter half of the 20th century, it was the interpretation of legislators and the Supreme Court. In 1886, in their landmark decision on Presser v. Illinois, the Supreme Court held that “state legislatures may enact statutes to control and regulate all organizations, drilling, and parading of military bodies and associations except those which are authorized by the militia laws of the United States [emphasis mine],” clearly finding that the Second Amendment only applied to official national militias. In 1934, when Congress worked to restrict gangster weapons, the Second Amendment was not raised once during congressional testimony, clearly indicating that it wasn’t seen as relevant to such legislation intended to restrict individual access to firearms, and in 1939, when the law was finally challenged under the Second Amendment in the case of the United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court again ruled that the Firearms Act’s restriction of certain guns was entirely Constitutional, in that its provisions did not have any “reasonable relationship to the prevention, preservation, or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” So there was strong judicial precedent here for the interpretation that the Second Amendment is not even about the individual rights of gunowners and therefore has no bearing on either state or federal gun control legislation. But just as today’s Supreme Court is bent on overturning established precedent based on ideology, conservative justices recently managed to overturn this decision as well. In the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the interpretation that the amendment protects an individual’s gun ownership rights, independent of militia affiliation—but even that ideologically split opinion, misguided as it may have been, confirms that “the Second Amendment right is not unlimited” and specifically seeks to preserve longstanding prohibitions on gun possession by felons and the mentally ill, and even suggests that the only firearms protected at those that were in common use at the time of the amendment’s ratification, leaving the door open for the banning of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

The focus of the Second Amendment on a “well regulated militia” specifically reflects Whig politics at the time and the distrust of “standing armies,” much of which goes back to the Boston Massacre, pictured.

Rather than really contend with this argument about the true intention and purpose of the Second Amendment, though, gun rights activists employ fallacious arguments to present gun control as itself an evil. They will claim, rather absurdly, that the problems of gun violence can only be resolved with more guns, using the “Good Guy with a Gun” argument that if only more people were packing in any given gun crime situation, then criminals could be better stopped before they commit their acts of violence. According to this logic, an increase in unregulated exchanges of gunfire between civilians is viewed as a best case scenario and a solution to violent crime, and a society in which firearms have become as common as cell phones is dreamed of as the safest of societies, despite the obvious additional increase in suicides and lethal gun accidents that such a society would inevitably see. Really clever sophists will even twist history to make gun control laws look evil. These “twistorians,” if you will, point out that the first gun control laws were racist, disarming slaves and free Blacks in order to enforce White Supremacy. There is truth to this argument, which makes it rather insidious. Think of my episodes on the Wilmington Insurrection, when White Supremacists acted to prevent Black citizens from arming themselves against the violence that they were openly planning. The South, and even some Northern states, had always disallowed gun ownership among slaves and free Blacks, for the obvious reason that they feared rebellion, and following the Civil War, many Southern states adopted Black Codes that continued denying firearms to Black citizens. Enforcing this disarmament were armed white posses, called Regulators, who ran roughshod through Black communities. Some of these went about their marauding masked and called themselves the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, in the 1860s, legislation like the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the first Civil Rights Acts, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, were indeed intended, at least in part, to guarantee freedmen the same rights to bear arms in self-defense that their white oppressors enjoyed. Yet still, Southern states remained intent on disarming Black communities under Jim Crow. In the 1880s, faced with the growing scourge of lynching, Southern Blacks armed themselves and in several cases fought off bands of murderers. Through the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, Black communities continued their tradition of arming themselves to fight back during race massacres, like those in Colfax, Louisiana; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Even during the Civil Rights Movement, passive resisters were aided by armed community defense organizations. And the Black Panthers, as previously mentioned, were the OG gun rights absolutists. All of this is absolutely true, and yet entirely irrelevant to the self-evident fact that stronger background checks and laws prohibiting the ownership of high-capacity assault weapons are necessary to reduce mass public shootings.

While statistics on gun ownership are lacking without instituting a comprehensive national system of gun registration, according to Pew Research Center, as of 2017, white men are twice as likely to report owning a gun as non-white men. And I’m willing to go out on a limb and predict, in the absence of firm data on the subject, that it’s white men by far who possess high capacity assault rifles of the sort that most gun control advocates today want to ban in order to reduce mass public shootings. However, Black Americans far more commonly report having been shot or threatened with a gun compared to white Americans. The simple fact that, today, gun violence disproportionately affects Black Americans, making them 10 times more likely to die by gun homicide, and making their children 14 times more likely to be shot and killed according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, certainly highlights the fact that any reduction in gun violence achieved through stronger gun control legislation will logically save Black American lives. Let us not forget that many recent mass shootings, like the recent massacre in Buffalo, the 2021 shooting in Winthrop, MA, the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso as well as the Dayton, Ohio, Entertainment District shooting literally hours later, the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the 1999 Independence Day weekend spree killings across the Midwest, were committed by white supremacists as hate crimes against one race group or another. Times change. Gun rights used to be a racial justice issue, but now gun control is. Gun rights proponents who raise the issue of the racist origins of gun control either haven’t thought out their argument or are deflecting with a bad faith argument. No legislation to disarm some races and not others is proposed by advocates of stricter gun control, nor would any such legislation ever be passed as long as the 14th Amendment remains in place. So if these gun rights advocates are worried about inequality before the law and selective enforcement, about gun laws disarming minorities unfairly because of discriminatory implementation by authorities, then they are essentially acknowledging the existence of systemic racism, which, at the risk of stereotyping, a lot of these guys don’t really want to do, as fixing that would mean restructuring society, especially when it comes to the justice system and urban planning. We don’t fight systemic racism by refusing to pass necessary laws for fear they will be inequitably imposed; rather, we fight it by exposing and correcting the inequities themselves.

Howard Unruh, whose “Walk of Death” is widely regarded as the first mass public shooting of the modern sort.

The bare fact that mass public shootings have evolved since the time of our Founding Fathers, in ways they likely did not imagine, to become a unique societal evil today, stands as evidence that something must be done, and especially here, where it may not have begun, but where it is by far at its worst. The first mass shooting as we might define it today occurred in Hyderabad, in what is now Pakistan, in 1878, when an Iranian infantryman murdered his lover for her infidelity and then went on a shooting spree. However, the United States, shamefully, may be the origin of the mass school shooting. Some point to a massacre at a school during Pontiac’s War in 1764 as the first, but I would count that as a raid perpetrated by a band of Delaware during a time of war. Rather, the first genuine school shootings in U.S. history, according to our more modern understanding of such acts, occurred back to back in 1891, when one man attended a school exhibition in Liberty, Mississippi, and fired his shotgun into a crowd of students and teachers, and another man, only twelve days later, entered a parochial school in Newburgh, New York, and fired his shotgun at students on a playground. But it was not until the mid-20th century, 150 years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, that the true horror of mass public shootings began to reveal itself, when Howard Unruh, a disturbed veteran, took his “Walk of Death” in 1949, strolling through his neighborhood and shooting thirteen men, women, and children dead. The 1960s saw mass shootings evolve to sniper attacks, when a California teen injured ten and killed three by taking potshots at vehicles on the highway with his father’s rifle before killing himself, and when a Marine sharpshooter perched in the University of Texas clock tower managed to murder fifteen people and wound thirty-one others before being killed by authorities. After a spate of mass shootings by deranged postal workers in the 1980s and ’90s, as well as since, the narrative around mass shootings was focused for a time on workplace shootings, and the term “going postal” was coined, referring to being driven to violence by anger and frustration related to one’s occupation. But today, mass public shootings have become so common, and have evolved with the weapons being used to become so much deadlier, that the old terms spree killing, postal killing, workplace shooting, sniper attack, and even mass murder, seem inadequate, either too narrow or too vague to really describe the problem. Mass public shootings are a national dilemma that the Founding Fathers just could not have anticipated. To use a frequently raised but I think apt analogy, the problem can be likened to automobile deaths. Because of the unsafe and sometimes reckless use of a technology that was not around at the framing of our Constitution or the ratification of our Bill of Rights, annual deaths in motor vehicle accidents were exceedingly high for a long time. Just as the gun lobby today resists regulation, automobile manufacturers then resisted vehicle safety legislation, but it was passed regardless, increasing safety standards for automobile manufacturers and requiring the installation of seat belts. Legislators recognized a uniquely modern public safety hazard and took legislative action to remedy it, resulting in a significant reduction of road fatalities. I guess we are just fortunate that, in that case, there was not some outmoded constitutional amendment about the freedom of saddle makers to decide on what safety straps to manufacture, or the rights of stagecoach drivers and carriage passengers to sit on their benches unencumbered by restraints.

To clarify my position, I am not urging total civilian disarmament. I firmly believe that the populace should have access to well-regulated firearms for home protection and sport. And I even have some sympathy for the central conviction of most gun rights advocates that the right to bear arms is an important safeguard against tyranny. But the threat of tyranny was far more imminent in the wake of American Independence, whereas today it only seems to fuel the baseless conspiracy fantasies of paramilitary militia men and seditionists. These gun rights advocates have feared an oppressive government declaring martial law for decades, imagining that every mass shooting is actually a staged “false flag” operation to be used as justification for a clampdown and a total disarmament of the populace that never actually occurs. For 8 years, the gun-toting right was certain that Obama intended to disarm the populace so he could establish some kind of socialist dictatorship. What really happened was that he urged the passage of sane gun legislation, which was killed by the Republican Senate minority through the abuse of the filibuster. In fact, the closest we’ve come to a President actually declaring martial law was when Obama’s successor, a gun rights advocate who took a lot of money from the NRA, looked into imposing martial law, not to take guns but rather to overturn lawful election results in a coup d’état. The hypocrisy of gun rights advocates who fear an oppressive government turning around and supporting a literal attempt to overthrow our government is profound. As is the hypocrisy of our conservative-packed activist Supreme Court bench, who defend the authority of state governments to interfere with women’s bodily autonomy but deny the authority of a state government to regulate firearms. The fact is, gun control must be viewed as a pro-life issue, as the Catholic Church has long argued. Those who believe themselves the moral champions of life need to start advocating for the protection of it after birth. The fact that we, as a country, did not come together to protect our children from mass shootings after Sandy Hook, and that now, after the recurrent horror that occurred at Uvalde many continue to resist, is a national shame. And it will only get worse if we don’t wake up and smell the blood of our children.

Further Reading

“America’s Gun Culture – in Seven Charts.” BBC, 25 May 2022, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081.

Briggs, William. How America Got Its Guns : A History of the Gun Violence Crisis. University of New Mexico Press, 2017. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1423319&site=ehost-live.

Christopher S. Koper, and Jeffrey A. Roth. “The Impact of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapon Ban on Gun Violence Outcomes: An Assessment of Multiple Outcome Measures and Some Lessons for Policy Evaluation.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, pp. 33–74, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007522431219.

Clarke, Kevin, and James Martin. “A History of Violence: Gun Control in America.(VANTAGES Ql NT: 1967-2013).” America (New York, N.Y. : 1909), vol. 215, no. 2, 2016, p. 31–.

Coleman, Arica L. “When the NRA Supported Gun Control.” TIME, 29 July 2016, time.com/4431356/nra-gun-control-history/.

Depew, Briggs. “The Effect of Concealed-Carry and Handgun Restrictions on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from the Sullivan Act of 1911.” The Economic Journal, vol. 132, no. 646, August 2022, pp. 2118–2140, doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac004.

DiMaggio, Charles et al. “Changes in US mass shooting deaths associated with the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban: Analysis of open-source data.” The journal of trauma and acute care surgery vol. 86,1 (2019): 11-19. doi:10.1097/TA.0000000000002060.
Duwe, Grant, et al. “Forecasting the Severity of Mass Public Shootings in the United States.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, vol. 38, no. 2, 2021, pp. 385–423, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09499-5.
Eddlem, Thomas R. “The Racist Origin of America’s Gun Control Laws.” The New American (Belmont, Mass.), vol. 30, no. 18, 2014, p. 35–.

Fortgang, Erika. “How They Got the Guns: A Look at How School Shooters Are Getting Weapons So Easily.” Rolling Stone, 10 June 1999, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-they-got-the-guns-175676/.

“Gun Violence Is a Racial Justice Issue.” Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, 2019, www.bradyunited.org/issue/gun-violence-is-a-racial-justice-issue.

Hofstadter, Richard. “America as a Gun Culture.” American Heritage, vol. 21, no. 6, October 1970, www.americanheritage.com/america-gun-culture.  

Kopel, David, and Joseph Greenlee. “The Racist Origin of Gun Control Laws.” The Hill, 22 Aug. 2017, thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/347324-the-racist-origin-of-gun-control-laws/.

Krajicek, David J. “How Author's Death Over 100 Years Ago Helped Shape New York's Gun Laws.” New York Daily News, 19 Jan. 2013, www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/1911-shooting-led-ny-gun-law-article-1.1240721.

Lopez, German. “How Gun Control Works in America, Compared with 4 Other Rich Countries.” Vox, 14 March 2018, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/4/9850572/gun-control-us-japan-switzerland-uk-canada.

Lacombe, Matthew J. “The Political Weaponization of Gun Owners: The National Rifle Association’s Cultivation, Dissemination, and Use of a Group Social Identity.” The Journal of Politics, vol. 81, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1342–56, https://doi.org/10.1086/704329.

Platt, Daniel. “New York Banned Handguns 100 Years Ago ... Will We Ever See that Kind of Gun Control Again?” History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/141708.

Silva, Jason R. “Global Mass Shootings: Comparing the United States Against Developed and Developing Countries.” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 21 March 2022. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2022.2052126.

Spitzer, Robert. “How the NRA Evolved from Backing a 1934 Ban on Machine Guns to Blocking Nearly All Firearm Restrictions Today.” The Conversation, 25 May 2022, theconversation.com/how-the-nra-evolved-from-backing-a-1934-ban-on-machine-guns-to-blocking-nearly-all-firearm-restrictions-today-183880.

Winkler, Adam. “The Secret History of Guns.” The Atlantic, Sep. 2011, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/.

The Deluge and the Ark Seekers

The literal interpretation of the Bible has throughout history resulted in conflicts with and repudiations of science. The view of the Earth as round or of the Sun being the center of the solar system, for example, were strongly contested by biblical literalists who believed that, if the revelations of their ancient scriptures appeared to contradict a scientific revelation, then science must be wrong. Perhaps no field of science has come into greater conflict with religion than that of geology. According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created all things over the course of six days at the beginning of time, which was almost universally placed by theologians around 4000 BCE. Thus, the discovery of fossil remains became problematic. As early as the 6th century BCE, philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon recognized that fossils were the remains of living creatures, and the great age of these remains was apparent. The presence of lifeforms that may have preceded Adam challenged two biblical notions: that no life existed prior to Adam’s creation, and that death did not exist until after the Fall of Man. Early attempts by Christian theologians to address these problems tended to the absurd. They claimed that fossils represented the early models of abandoned creations, a notion that conceives of God as a kind of tinkerer in a workshop and would seem to undercut the claim of God’s omniscience and infallibility. Otherwise, fossils were thought of by churchmen as “sports of nature,” or “capricious fabrications of God,” hidden purposely within the Earth, likely as a test of mankind’s faith in the Bible. This notion of scientific discoveries that contradicted biblical claims being tests of faith would be asserted again and again. But men of faith had another explanation up their sleeves to account for fossils: the Flood of Noah. Most of us likely know the story. Angered at the sinfulness of mankind, as well as the sexual escapades of certain rebel angels among humanity, God sent forth a deluge to wipe the slate clean. The fountains of the deep broke up, and the windows of heaven opened, and it rained for forty days and forty nights, drowning the entirety of the earth, even the highest mountains, killing all living things, even every creeping thing, except for Noah’s family and a breeding pair of every animal, who were saved from the flood in a massive boat constructed according to God’s design to preserve life. This was the perfect explanation for fossils as it was supported by the Bible and did not threaten Judeo-Christian belief, and thus early Christian apologists, like Tertullian and St. Augustine, took it up and spread it wide. In the Renaissance, though, it began to be questioned by thinkers such as Leonardo DaVinci and Bernard Palissy. In the 17th century,  Nicholas Steno pioneered the science of stratigraphy, laying the foundation, so to speak, of our modern geological principle of the superposition of rock strata, and in the 18th century, the father of modern geology, James Hutton, by examining such strata, first began to recognize the enormity of the geologic time scale. The science was irrefutable, and despite some orthodox holdouts, like Cotton Mather and others in the 19th century who believed mastodon bones were actually the bones of Nephilim giants destroyed in the Flood, gradually the thinking men of Christianity defected and came to recognize that the findings of geologists could no longer be denied, necessitating some change in their understanding of the age of the Earth and the narratives in the Bible. The fact that science and reason won out in the late 19th century may be surprising to those of us today, who, like me, were raised to believe that dinosaur bones were baked into the earth at Creation just to mess with our minds, that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Biblical Flood, and that Noah’s Ark was sitting atop a mountain in the Near East somewhere, waiting to be discovered by some brave Indiana Jones-esque archeologist. What happened between then and now to so reverse the victory of science over religious superstition?

There is a name for what happened after the 19th century victory of science over biblical literalism to explain the commonality of modern belief in the literal and inerrant truth of the Bible. We can identify as the principal reason for this change the rise of Fundamentalism, a global religious phenomenon at the beginning of the 20th century that sought to move society away from secularism and revert to a religious order, enshrining spiritual traditions over democratic or humanistic values. Specifically, in the United States, the Christian Fundamentalist revival reacted strongly against the influx of non-Protestant immigrant populations and their growing awareness of other world religions, as well as against the perceived elitism of educators who taught concepts they felt were at odds with the teachings of their scriptures. Sound familiar? One of the principal scientific doctrines that Christian fundamentalists opposed was that of evolution, which, because of the great time frames required, they felt contradicted the story of a 6-day creation in Genesis and the long formerly held notion that Creation had occurred only about 6000 years ago. In opposition to the teaching of evolution, Fundamentalists began to call their literalist biblical view Creationism, and to suggest it was an equally scientific alternative. Formerly, Creationists were content to alter their views of the Biblical story of Creation to accommodate science. These Old Earth Creationists suggested that each day of Creation actually represented an entire geological age, or that there was a gap of millions of years between the creation of heaven and earth and the creation of light, a gap omitted and unacknowledged in Genesis chapter one. But more and more, such an accommodating view seemed unacceptable to fundamentalist Creationists. One writer who rejected anything but the most strictly literal reading of Genesis was George McCready Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist. Price adhered to the teachings of his religion’s founder, Ellen G. White, who emphasized the infallibility of scriptures and who wrote extensively about visions she’d had regarding the global flood described in Genesis. Price published his pseudo-scientific Creationist writings extensively, between 1906 and his death in 1963, and even posthumously. His writings attacked evolution by exposing what he claimed were logical errors made by theoretical geologists. He criticized all the principles of stratigraphy and propped up a form of flood geology updated for the 20th century. The scientific community did not take his work seriously and his writings even drew refutation from prominent fossil experts like David Starr Jordan, the President of Stanford University, who pointed out that his claims were predicated on “scattering mistakes, omissions, and exceptions against general truths that anybody familiar with the facts in a general way can not possibly dispute.” Nevertheless, when the Scopes monkey trial, the ultimate challenge to evolution in schools, came along, Clarence Darrow relied on Price’s claims in his arguments against the Old Earth Creationist arguments of William Jennings Bryant, who saw that religion could accept science without conflict. After Price’s death, his writings on flood geology were taken up by the next generation of Creationists, who touted the idea of “Creation Science,” a contradiction in terms, of course, since such an event as divine creation cannot be observed and tested and is, therefore, outside the purview of science. Creationists John Whitcomb and Henry Morris even managed to enshrine Price’s version of flood geology as the orthodox position of fundamentalists in their 1961 book, The Genesis Flood. So-called Creation Science was eventually ruled unscientific and kept out of public school science curriculum, as was its successor, “Intelligent Design.” Both were declared little more than thinly-veiled religious crusades pretending at science. But the culture war waged from every fundamentalist preacher’s pulpit has been very successful in turning the minds of congregants like, for example, my parents, against consensus scientific fact, and organizations like the Institute for Creation Research and the Discovery Institute, as well as countless Creationist websites and groups, continue to cast doubt on the scientific reality of the great age of the earth, which has since been empirically confirmed through observation and testing countless times, such that it is beyond reasonable doubt.

George McCready Price, the resuscitator of flood geology and champion of “Creation Science.”

Ever since the Renaissance, believers in a literal global flood and Noah’s Ark have attempted to demonstrate how this fantastical story is actually very believable. Since it was taken for granted that, being in the Bible, the story must be accurate, Renaissance thinkers tried to determine how such a ship must have been designed to accommodate so many creatures. According to the scriptures, the ark was constructed out of 450 cubed cubits of gopher wood and sealed with pitch against the floodwaters, as well as supernaturally sealed up by God himself according to Genesis 7, with only one window described, apparently in the top of the vessel to let sunlight in. So there was some question of how the occupants disposed of their feces. Early 15th century Spanish theologian Alphonso Tostado handily explained this issue away by imagining the interior of the ark, with Noah’s living quarters on the upper decks and a series of stairs that allowed him and his sons to feed the animals in their stalls as well as to carry away their waste, which they must have fed into the bilge of the craft, he claimed. Hand waving the foul stench that must have emitted from such an arrangement, he explained that “[o]ne could also believe that the odour of the dung was miraculously carried off so that the air was not corrupted.” In the next century, French geometer Johannes Buteo did Tostado one better, calculating the precise interior measurements and determining how much space animals of certain kinds would require, as well as how much space would be needed for feed, and how the ship might accommodate all of this, as well as a gristmill and smokeless ovens for Noah and his family’s subsistence. From the Renaissance to the modern age of Creationism and science denial, thinkers have postulated just how the feat of housing a breeding pair of each creature could have been pulled off. Logically, they could do without pairs of any hybrid creatures, like mules. They would need only a breeding pair for all the animals such hybrid species originated from. Just how they would determine that the pair they chose would be successfully reproductive is unclear, but you could always hand wave that by suggesting God had pointed out which pairs to take aboard. However, they must have had more than a pair of some creatures so that they could feed them to the carnivores. Certain animals, of course, required more room than others. For example, snakes, some thought, would be content to wind themselves around beams and would need no chambers of their own, though I can’t imagine having loose snakes on a boat would be a great idea, especially those of a venomous variety. Johannes Buteo even considered where Noah might have fit aquariums to save species of marine life, hitting on one of the major problems with the Flood Myth: why marine lifeforms would even be destroyed by a flood. Buteo considered that perhaps fish were without sin and thus allowed to swim free outside the ark, in the waters of the Deluge.  But this was far from the last of the problems with the story. When naturalists in the Age of Exploration began to document the variety of unique animal species in different regions of the world, the question was raised, if these creatures had been made at Creation and then preserved on the same Ark, and their presence was explained by the dispersion of species after the landing of the Ark, then why were some species only found in one place while others were found in many places? This would not be the last problem with the Flood myth with which biblical literalists would have to perform mental gymnastics to contend.

One of the principal impossibilities of the story of Noah’s ark comes from the construction of such a massive and seaworthy vessel itself. Creationists will say that God himself gave Noah the ship’s specifications, or they would vaguely suggest that ancient man was capable of many great feats of engineering, as seen in the Seven Wonders of the World. The problem is, if ancient man really had this divine knowledge of massive shipbuilding, then it unaccountably disappeared afterward. If Noah lived for hundreds of years after making it back on dry land, why was this God-given science of naval architecture promptly lost? We’re meant to believe that Noah traveled to all kinds of different habitats to acquire all kinds of different animals, which would certainly mean that some species he was entirely unfamiliar with, not knowing the dangers they posed or the requirements for how best to house them. Yet somehow, he was able to design quarters for each that would allow him to water each at an appropriate height and keep each from injuring itself within its enclosure. All within a boat the size of a skyscraper that could withstand the buffeting of violent waves. It would have been the greatest feat of engineering in all human history, and if we’re to believe God provided Noah with complete instructions, blueprints, if you will, then it beggars the imagination that Noah would have been capable of reading and following them. After all, he was just a humble farmer. On that topic, how could a farmer have paid for all the timber and all the labor it would have required to build such a construct? The only comparable ancient feat of engineering, the pyramids, is estimated to have required the labor of 100,000 people. Moreover, he would have needed many tons of pitch to seal it up as the scriptures state he did, but pitch, a natural hydrocarbon formed underground at extreme pressures, would not have existed in the antediluvian world if we are to subscribe to flood geology. Lastly, there is the simple impossibility that 40 days of rain could possibly drown the entire world, even its highest mountains. Ancient apologists, using the hints in the scriptures about the firmament separating the waters above and below, as well as the verse about the fountains of the deep being broken, held the belief that there had formerly been a great mass of water suspended overhead, as well as a watery abyss below ground, all of which waters crashed down and sprang to the surface at once. But even if one were to credit such a weird cosmogony, it doesn’t explain how so much water would disappear so quickly, such that the ark could find land again after only 150 days, and after a year and change the earth was all dried out again. The suspension of disbelief required is extraordinary, leading some believers to concede that maybe it wasn’t worldwide, but rather a regional flood.

1493 artist's depiction of the construction of the Ark.

As I reported in the beginning of my series on giants, in 1872, a British banknote engraver named George Smith who was such an enthusiast of the British Museum’s collection that they hired him to study some clay fragments taken from Ninevah, cried eureka one day when he had translated a portion of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh that appeared to confirm the biblical story of the Flood. In this passage, the story of Uta-Napishti or Utnapishtim is related, in which he is forewarned by the god Ea of a catastrophic flood that would be sent by the god Enlil, and therefore urged to build a ship for the survival of his family and animals that he preserves. In this version, the storm subsides after only 7 days, when his ship lands on a mountainside. As with the biblical tale, there is an account of Utnapishtim releasing a bird to ascertain whether the floodwaters had sufficiently receded. Unsurprisingly, George Smith thought he had discovered proof of the literal truth of the Bible and evidence against the geologic time scale and evolutionary theory. Unfortunately for proponents of this claim, the math doesn’t precisely line up. Those who believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible typically place Creation at around 4004 BCE, and the Flood at around 2348 BCE, judging by the dubious genealogies I discussed in the previous episode. The oldest surviving version of the Gilgamesh poem is dated to around 2000 BCE, but it purports to tell the story of a Sumerian king who, based on surviving Sumerian sources, like the Sumerian King List, likely lived around 2700 BCE. Now, to qualify this, the lengths of the reigns of antediluvian and post-diluvian kings in the Sumerian King List are just as problematic as the genealogies of Genesis, with figures ruling for many thousands of years before the flood and many hundreds of years after. Nevertheless, all signs point to the Epic of Gilgamesh being a mythical tradition that predates the story told in Genesis. And since Smith’s discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, other Near Eastern flood myths that predate Genesis have turned up. There is the Mesopotamian Epic of Atra-hasis, which appears to have preceded the Gilgamesh epic and to have served as the source for the story of Utnapishtim found in that poem. In this epic, Atra-Hasis is the Noah figure, warned again by Ea of Enlil’s intentions and told to build a roofed boat sealed with pitch. The predecessor of the Atra-Hasis epic, the Eridu Genesis or ancient Sumerian creation myth, was discovered in 1893 on a tablet in the ruins of the ancient city of Nippur, founded around 5000 BCE, and it was translated in 1912. In it, one Ziusudra is commanded by the god Enki to build a boat and preserve his family from the coming storm. So as we can see, rather than going to prove the veracity of the Genesis flood myth, these other Near Eastern flood myths actually show us that the Genesis flood story is just a common myth of the region, passed down from Ancient Sumeria, to Babylonia, and then incorporated into Judaism, whose founder, Abraham, is believed to have lived in Sumerian Babylon.

If the Genesis flood is merely a retelling of the Sumerian flood myth, then it would stand to reason that it is the story of a localized flood, perhaps relating to the annual flooding of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in Mesopotamia, which may have seemed to drown the whole world for Mesopotamians, but was certainly not a global Deluge. Some will protest this, pointing to other flood myths not originating from the region, such as the Greek myth of Deucalion, but of course, the myth of Deucalion seems to have been borrowed by the Greeks, a migration of myth, which did not require an actual flood to have taken place. It has sometimes been argued that the lack of flood myths in Asia proves that all flood myths describe a regional rather than a global event, and this certainly holds true when no flood myth appears to have been preserved by ancient civilizations. However, there were Asian flood myths. In India, the story of Manu tells of a sole survivor of a flood, who built a boat and ran aground on a mountaintop. And in China, there were no less than four separate flood myths, those of Nü Kua, Kung Kung, Kun, and Yü. Even as far away as Central America, a variety of Mesoamerican peoples appear to have had their own flood myths. This is no proof of a worldwide flood, however, but rather evidence that people everywhere are the same. If they live in an area prone to flooding, they fear the flooding, and believe it was sent by a god, and any who survive a flood in a vessel come to believe they have been spared by a god, and they tell their children as much. The variation in these more distant traditions is enough to prove that they hold little resemblance to the Near Eastern traditions and represent the separate legends of distinct regions, based on local floods if based on any actual event. In Mesoamerican myths, the survivors do not preserve animals, just themselves, in hollow logs, and afterward are turned into dogs or are obliged to repopulate the world by lying with a weird supernatural dog that takes the shape of a woman. In the Indian myth, Manu is more like Adam, being the first man, and he is told of the coming catastrophe by a fish to whom he had previously been kind. Again, not preserving animals, Manu alone survives, and creates woman by pouring sour milk into the sea after he lands. The Chinese myths are perhaps the most distinct, as they do not tell of a sole survivor that rides out the flood on a boat but rather of a hero who saves the world by controlling the flood. These myths clearly seem to have originated from flood-prone regions around the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, where inhabitants had to develop flood management techniques, such as retention barriers and drainage, in order to survive.

The so-called Flood Tablet, containing the flood myth preserved in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In 1997, a new, seemingly credible scientific hypothesis was published by two marine geologists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, proposing that around 8,000 years ago, the Black Sea, which had previously been a freshwater lake, was suddenly and cataclysmically inundated by seawater that broke through a natural dam. According to them, this “sudden infill” hypothesis would mean the displacement of a great many Neolithic farmers, whose oral tradition about the catastrophe may have been the origin of Near Eastern Flood myths. By their estimation, an earthquake caused the natural dam to break, resulting in a violent jet of water they figure was 20 times more powerful than Niagara Falls. To support their theory, they produced sophisticated computer models, cited certain seafloor features they argue could only have been caused by the currents of this catastrophic inundation of saltwater, identified a “debris fan” in the area where they believed the flooding would have deposited materials, and pointed to saltwater mollusk fossils in a certain sedimentary layer that they argue must have appeared suddenly. I am not much opposed to this theory myself, as at its heart, it argues for a non-literal interpretation of Genesis. First of all, if the theory were proven accurate, it would not prove anything about the origin of the flood myth. And if one chose to believe it did, it necessitates a non-literal reading of the Bible. It would mean the flood was local, not global. It would require acknowledgement that the Genesis story is just one mythologized iteration of a mytheme passed down through multiple cultures, and it would mean the time frame of Creationists is dead wrong. The world could not have been created 6000 years ago if the flood described in Genesis occurred some 8000 year ago. However, the scientific community has not been so open to the possibility. In the years after the first work of Ryan and Pitman appeared, a great deal of peer-reviewed scholarly research was published refuting their claims. According to academic consensus today, all evidence suggests that the Black Sea gradually filled with saltwater over thousands of years prior to the date that Ryan and Pitman pinpointed. Their evidence comes from cores taken from the Black Sea floor that show sediment laid down under several meters of water at a location that Ryan and Pitman claim would have been dry at the time. Moreover, they mapped an entire history of the slow rise of water levels by identifying on the Black Sea floor the lagoons and beach ridges that steady rise must have caused. They even discovered a delta where sea water was pouring into the Black Sea 10,000 years ago. Ryan and Pitman offer alternative explanations for all their findings, but the scholarly community rightly points out that they are outliers, and that they have proceeded in their investigations on very unscientific grounds. Ryan, it seems, had been obsessed with the myth of Noah’s flood for 30 years, and all his findings are colored by his desire to prove the truth behind the myth in some way. This may have made for more popular science, grabbing the attention of news organizations and the general public, but it did not make for a sound scientific process.

William Ryan is not alone in his obsession with the Flood myth. For most, however, the object of their obsession is not geological evidence of a flood but rather the ark itself, a kind of MacGuffin artifact that many Christian wannabe Indiana Joneses have sought for about a century. These ark seekers follow clues in ancient writings as well as more modern rumors. Their first clue is in Genesis, Chapter 8 verse 4, when it says the ark came to rest “upon the mountains of Ararat.” But where is that? In the first century, CE, Flavius Josephus recorded a rumor that the ark could be found in eastern Turkey, or Armenia, a rumor that would be repeated by numerous other writers, including Eusebius of Caesarea, over the next several centuries.  Likely because of this well-known rumor, a certain mountain in Turkey came to be called Ararat by medieval Europeans. Then in the 14th century, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville was published. In this work, which I discussed in my episode on Prester John, the English knight Sir John Mandeville writes of a monk who found the ark on Ararat and managed to bring back a plank of it as proof. Mandeville gave precise details about the abbey at the base of the mountain where the plank was kept, but no such abbey has ever been found, and most scholars now believe the Travels of Sir John Mandeville is entirely fantasy, and that even its knightly author is a literary construct. In the late 19th century, rumors once more surged. In 1883, a New Zealand newspaper printed a hoax about an avalanche revealing the ark, and the story circulated widely. In 1887, one John Joseph Nouri claimed to have summited Ararat and discovered the ark. Something of a mysterious figure, he made a career out of this claim, traveling widely and lecturing about his discovery without every offering any proof. In 1940, ark seeker fever arrived in America, when a Christian fundamentalist pamphlet called New Eden published the claim that a Russian pilot named Roskovitsky had discovered the ark on Ararat in 1917. In the first example of a recurring theme about atheists attempting to hide the discovery of the ark because it represented evidence of the Bible’s accuracy, the story claimed that the Bolsheviks promptly destroyed Roskovitsky’s report on the discovery as soon as they took power. In 1982, one Violet Cummings published a book entitled Has Anybody Really Seen Noah’s Ark? in which she promoted numerous unverified rumors and fired up a generation of would-be ark-seekers. Though no one had ever found proof of Roskovitsky’s actual existence, she claimed to have tracked the story down to Roskovitsky’s widow. She also repeated a story told to her by a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher who claimed an Armenian peasant once told him about a group of British atheists hiring his father as a guide on their expedition up Ararat. They intended to prove the ark was not there, but upon finding it, they supposedly “went into a Satanic rage” and swore the peasant’s father to secrecy, threatening to torture and murder him if he ever revealed that they had found the ark. Beyond the conspiracy of atheists to cover up the truth of the Bible, the old Smithsonian cover-up chestnut also shows up in the lore of the ark seekers. In 1972, a story appeared about a joint expedition between the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society in 1968. Supposedly, this expedition recovered all the remains of the ark, as well as the alabaster coffin of Noah, which still contained his remains. Unsurprisingly, the Smithsonian investigator, whose existence has never been confirmed, was said by the pseudonymous author, whose identity has never been revealed, to have hidden all this evidence because it would pose a problem for evolutionary theory, which it wouldn’t.

John Joseph Nouri, mystery man who claimed to have found the Ark, was at one time committed to an insane asylum in America, and was later crowned Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church.

There have been numerous real expeditions to Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. Let’s have a look at how those turned out. In 1829, Friedrich Parrot ascended Ararat, and in his account of the expedition, he claimed Armenians believed the ark was atop the summit and, conveniently, prevented anyone from getting near it out of a sense of respect for the artifact. In 1876, James Bryce climbed Ararat and claimed to have found a piece of cut wood. This represents the first of many claims of recovering ark fragments that cannot be proven genuine. In 1955, French adventurer Fernand Navarre scaled the mountain and brought back a piece, not of gopherwood but of oak. He had to lie to the Turkish government about why he was entering the country, a common aspect of more modern ark expeditions, and he took many photos of himself and his son during their climb. He claims to have found the ark, covered in ice, and to have sawed off the piece he brought back. Suspiciously, he took no photos of the actual ark. Afterward, he claimed to have had an expert in Cairo date the wood to between 4,000 and 6,000 years old, but his piece of wood has since been carbon dated to around the 7th or 8th century CE. In 1982, fundamentalist Christian astronaut James Irwin, who had undertaken an Ararat expedition after resigning from NASA, fell 100 feet down the mountain and was knocked out cold. He returned a month later, despite his wife’s concern that his head injury had left him less than rational, as he insisted his family join him and that they could do without the proper equipment. When that expedition likewise failed, he came back in 1983, this time with a guide, and he found some wood sticking out of the snow during his climb. He was sure he’d found it, but had to descend without it due to a blizzard. When he managed to find it again 11 months later, he discovered that it was, in fact, a pair of abandoned skis. So it went with Irwin’s expeditions. In 1985, Kurdish guerillas prevented his ascent. In 1986, Turkish authorities detained him and his film crew on suspicion of espionage. Eventually, he gave up, and his ill-fated attempts represent well the attempts of all ark seekers. When they aren’t lying, they are simply failing.

The efforts of Creationists to prove their flood geology and of ark seekers to discover Noah’s big boat continue today. In fact, in 2016 in Kentucky, a Creationist theme park opened called Ark Encounter, complete with a 500-foot ark that they claim is “life size” and “historically accurate,” including exhibits that show you how Noah was able to fit and feed all those animals, though the supposed replica ark is only a façade with just three decks open to the public. Elsewhere in this theme park, one can take children to visit a Creation Museum, attend presentations at the “Answers Center” that reveal “Answers in Genesis,” and even enjoy an entertaining virtual reality experience called the “Truth Traveler.” As this is all clearly an elaborate indoctrination center, children unsurprisingly receive free admission. But, today, the search for the ark is more like the search for UFOs. Rather than mounting arduous expeditions, ark seekers pore over satellite imagery and point at “anomalies,” arguing they have finally found the ark. Despite all the weight of reason and evidence to convince the world that the story of Noah’s Ark is just a myth, fundamentalists anchor their faith on the literal truth of this tale and every other tale in their religious document. Surely much of this urge can be attributed to xenophobia and ethnocentrism, for if a fundamentalist admits that the stories told by their religion are mere myths used as analogies and metaphors to teach spiritual lessons, then they must admit that other religions have about as much claim to truth as theirs. Now don’t get me wrong. Archaeology has proven the literal truth of certain elements of the Bible. For example, the real existence of Gath, home of Goliath, or the actual site of Jericho, the city in Canaan whose walls miraculously fell when the Israelites sounded their trumpets. But archaeology tends to discredit at the same time that it confirms. Excavations of Gath turn up no giant skeletons, nor do excavations of Canaanite cities like Jericho for that matter, and excavations of Jericho show that it was not highly populated and was never a walled city at the time when Joshua is supposed to have assaulted its walls. But Christians should not take the findings of science as discrediting their beliefs. Those beliefs hinge on the idea that a moral code has been vouchsafed to them by a deity. The Bible’s inherent worth is as a moral document, not as a historical record. Disproving the literal accuracy of any story within it does not reduce its value as a vehicle to convey moral lessons. If fundamentalist Christians would place more value on the spiritual content of their scriptures than on their value as any kind of accurate chronicle, they would find themselves mostly impervious to the discoveries and criticisms of scientists.

American astronaut and failed ark seeker, James Irwin.

Further Reading

Birrell, Anne. “The Four Flood Myth Traditions of Classical China.” T’oung Pao, vol. 83, no. 4-5, BRILL, 1997, pp. 213–59, doi.org/10.1163/15685322-90000015.

Conant, Eve. “In Search of Noah’s Ark.” Newsweek (International, Atlantic Edition), Newsweek LLC, 2003, p. 46–.

Holden, Constance. “‘Noah’s Flood’ Theory Questioned.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 296, no. 5577, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002, pp. 2331–2331, doi.org/10.1126/science.296.5577.2331a.

Kerr, Richard A. “Marine Geology. Support Is Drying up for Noah’s Flood Filling the Black Sea.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 317, no. 5840, 2007, p. 886–.

Montgomery, David R. The Rocks Don’t Lie : a Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood. 1st ed., W.W. Norton, 2012.

Moore, Robert A. “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, Winter 1983.  National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark.

Schiermeier, Quirin. “Noah’s Flood.” Nature (London), vol. 430, no. 7001, 2004, pp. 718–19, doi.org/10.1038/430718a.

Toumey, Christopher P. “Who’s Seen Noah’s Ark? (controversial Ark Sightings).” Natural History, vol. 106, no. 9, Natural History Magazine, Inc, 1997, pp. 14–17.

Weber, Christopher Gregory. “The Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, Summer 1980.  National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/fatal-flaws-flood-geology.

The Secrets of Enoch (An Apocryphal Catechism)

In Genesis, Chapter 5, a written account of the family line of Adam is given. This genealogy states, in every major translation and in no uncertain terms, that Adam lived for 930 years. His son Seth lived 912 years, and Seth’s son Enosh lived 905. Enosh’s son Kenan lived to 910, his son Mahalalel lived to 895, and his son Jared lived to 962. The oldest was Jared’s grandson, Methuselah, who it’s said reached the astonishing old age of 969. Those who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible must therefore explain why early mankind enjoyed such extreme longevity while we, today, who enjoy far longer lifespans than many in the past, still have an average life expectancy of only seventy years and change. According to one obsolete explanation, there had once been a solid dome around the earth, referred to as the “firmament” in Genesis, which somehow enabled such longevity, perhaps by shielding us from ultraviolet radiation? Apart from outmoded cosmological notions, there is the rather simpler, faith-based explanation that, since it was sin that took from us our immortality, shorter lifespans simply reflect the greater influence of sin in the world. That would seem to suggest that, since we live longer today, there is actually less sin today than there was in, say, the Victorian era, known for its strict morality and religiosity, or even the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church’s power was at its height. I’m not sure many Christians would actually agree with that. Luckily, the very next chapter of Genesis offers a handy explanation, right before acquainting the reader with the Nephilim, giants that issued from an unholy union with fallen angels, according to most understandings. In verse three of Chapter 6, God, seeing that angels were marrying human women, declares that his “Spirit” will not always be with mankind, and since people are made of flesh and are therefore corrupt, our “days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” So it would seem people only lived to such advanced age because of God’s Spirit, which somehow was present and lengthening our lives at least through the flood, when Methuselah’s grandson, Noah, lived to 800 years. Only over the next dozen or so generations did the longevity fade, until Moses reached only a paltry 120 years old. Again, does our increase in lifespan today mean God’s Spirit has returned? Or is it more likely that these unbelievably great ages are the result of an error, as some religious scholars defending the scriptures have claimed. It has been argued that their real ages had simply been multiplied by ten, but Genesis 5 also shares what age these men were at when they fathered children, and though most seem far too old to be fathering children, this solution would mean some of them were fathering children at only 6 years old! Another has suggested that the great longevity of the first patriarchs was a mistranslation, counting months as years, which does seem reasonable, making Methuselah more like 80 years old rather than almost a thousand. Further rational explanations are that generation gaps existed in the record, requiring ages to be lengthened to account for a greater passage of time, or that each patriarch listed was actually just the most prominent figure of their epoch, making of the chapter less a genealogy and more a who’s who of those millennia. Being no apologist, I would offer the additional explanation that Genesis is mythology and should not be defended as a legitimate historical record. But there is one entry in this list of long-lived patriarchs that bears further scrutiny. Great-grandfather of Noah, and father of Methuselah, Enoch, he who was said in magical traditions to have received the hidden knowledge of the world from angels and to have preserved it from the Flood’s destruction, is revealed in verses 23 and 24 to have only lived 365 years before “he was not; for God took him.” If one wants to learn more about Enoch, and his being taken by God, one must look beyond the canonical books of Judaism and Christianity, to the apocryphal book that bears his name, a book steeped numerous mysteries.

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I am happy to finally be making another entry in this thematic series after a couple years. Anyone who has not listened to the first Apocryphal Catechism, called Gnostic Genesis, may want to go look for it and listen first. In it, I discuss the concept of apocrypha and pseudepigrapha as well as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which is somewhat required knowledge for this episode. I have been wanting to discuss the apocryphal Book of Enoch for a while now, ever since my episode about Hermes Trismegistus, in which the character of Enoch figures prominently, as Hermetic tradition conflates the two. Furthermore, after my episodes about Giants, in which I discussed the Nephilim of Genesis 6 as well as ideas about Flood myths and the lineage of Noah, previously discussed in my episodes on the Lost Tribes of Israel as well, it seemed the perfect time to tackle the topic, as Enochic traditions are deeply connected to these topics. To start a conversation about The Book of Enoch, though, we must first clarify which books of Enoch we mean, as there are several. The book most think of when one says The Book of Enoch, which is now called 1 Enoch, is a text that was long believed lost. The prophecies of Enoch were referenced in Jude, but no written source for them had ever been turned up. Some manuscripts, Ethiopian in origin, appear to have circulated during the Renaissance, but still the book remained legendary, with many not believing the rumors of its existence. Not until the 18th century were authentic copies of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch discovered and brought back to Europe by Scottish adventurer James Bruce, during his expedition to find the source of the Nile, and these were not translated into English and properly recognized until 1821. Some fragments of 1 Enoch were found in Greek and Latin, but its great antiquity was not confirmed until 11 fragments of it, written in Aramaic, and three in Hebrew, turned up in caves in Qumran in 1948, as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. But even within this first Book of Enoch, there are several different works, The Book of the Watchers, The Book of Parables, The Astronomical Book, and The Dream Visions, each of which scholars believe originated from a different time period, with different authorship, making 1 Enoch more of an anthology than a coherent work. To further confuse matters, there are also a 2 Enoch, which is the work more specifically called the Secrets of Enoch, a 3 Enoch, and a Book of the Giants, which is often lumped together with the others because of its subject matter. Like the different sections of 1 Enoch, these other three works appear to have been composed in different eras, though there is no firm scholarly consensus on the origins of certain of them. To simplify, we will speak more generally in this study of Enochic tradition, taking all the literature as a corpus, in the sense of a group of works on the same subject instead of works by the same author, since all of them are doubtless pseudepigraphal.

James Bruce, a Scottish explorer who found the source of the Blue Nile and rediscovered the Book of Enoch.

Of course, the principal reason why I’ve chosen to discuss Enochic traditions now is that they offer retellings of the story of the Nephilim from Genesis 6, about which I spoke in some detail in Part One of my recent series on giants. I spoke of the few places in which the word Nephilim had been used and why it was translated as giants, and I also gave some alternative views on who the bene Elohim or “sons of God,” who fathered the Nephilim, may have been, other than angels have sexual intercourse with human women. Some, however, may look at the same story, as told in Enochic tradition, as a disproof of any rationalist interpretation of Genesis 6. In the Book of the Watchers, by far the oldest of the Enochic texts, as well as in other texts in the corpus, it is made explicitly clear that the sires of the Nephilim were indeed angels, called “Watchers” here. In fact, these rebel angels are even named, chief among them Shemihazah and Asa’el, and their crimes were more than just lusting after women. They are said to have taught mankind the evils of sorcery, thus providing a separate origin myth for magic, different from that which blamed Zoroaster and the Magi, as I spoke about in a previous episode. The evil magical practices taught by the Watchers were such abominable traditions as metalworking and using cosmetics. I can almost hear the gasps of horror. With these and other variations on the story of Genesis 6, it becomes the story of the origin of all evil, a kind of demonology. The offspring of the Watchers with human women are clearly said to be not only giants, but murderers who drink blood and practice cannibalism and bestiality. The fallen Watchers, in the end, are bound and imprisoned in a pit, and their evil offspring are wiped out by the Flood God sends as punishment, although in this tradition, it seems rather a punitive act against these Watchers and giants that drown the rest of humanity rather collaterally. And even then, it didn’t do the trick, as it’s said that, though the evil giants’ bodies were destroyed in the Flood, their spirits were not, and this was the origin of demons, who resented, oppressed, and even occasionally possessed surviving humans.

Just to nip in the bud any argument that the Enochic corpus represents evidence of the truth of the Nephilim story in Genesis 6, it should be noted that even the oldest of the works, The Book of the Watchers, is believed to be no older than the 3rd or 4th century BCE. Whereas Genesis, although supposed to have been written by Moses, who is sometimes believed to have lived in the 13th century BCE, has been shown by scholars to have actually been written in the 5th or 6th century BCE. This means The Book of the Watchers was written hundreds of years after, clearly as a kind of expansion on the mythology that was already out there. Some scholars assert that the early chapters of Genesis were not composed until the 3rd century BCE, but even if that minority position were proven accurate, it would still only mean that both accounts were writing about events that had supposedly occurred about 2000 years earlier. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the accuracy of the accounts. Moreover, the story of the Watchers fathering Nephilim with human women is told over and over in the Enochic corpus, varying with each telling, and in some cases appearing to be midrashes, or rabbinic interpretations, of the story. In other words, it is clear from the Enochic literature alone that the story of the Watchers and the Nephilim was a mythological tradition that had been and continued to be retold in innumerable variations, as the basis for differing philosophical and doctrinal positions. It is even told as an allegory in 1 Enoch verses 83-90, in what is called the Animal Apocalypse, which uses animals to tell the story much like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In this passage, it recounts how certain stars fell from the heavens and then had sex with cattle, producing offspring that were entirely different species, including donkeys, camels, and elephants, which then devoured the cattle. If the story is treated in such a clearly metaphorical manner here, could it not have served some metaphorical purpose in every iteration?

A symbolic painting by George Frederick Watts (depicting the ideas of Love and Life and unrelated to the subject at hand) that some think illustrates well the story of the Watchers taking human wives.

With the suggestion that the story of the Watchers and the Nephilim may be allegorical, we are led to a variety of interpretations that reveal what meaning, other than literal, that the myth may have always had. For example, an astrological meaning has been found in the story. The names of the Watchers, it is pointed out, correspond with those of meteorological phenomena and identifiable heavenly bodies, such that it is really a story about the ill omens of irregular astronomical phenomena or of stars that alter their paths. The example from the Animal Apocalypse perfectly illustrates this interpretation, as the Watchers are depicted as stars that left their proper place and cause all kinds of trouble. Other interpretations require some further discussion of historical context. As discussed in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, in the 8th century BCE, Assyria conquered the Kingdom of Israel, during which ten tribes were lost. After that, during the 6th century BCE, the Kingdom of Judah saw their temple destroyed and their people placed in captivity by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. After the Persian conquest of Babylon, Cyrus the Great allowed their return and the reconstruction of their temple, and it was later in this Second Temple period, after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Mediterranean and the age of Hellenism that followed his death, that Enochic literature became popular. One theory is that the story of the Watchers actually represent the Diadochi, Alexander’s generals, who defied Alexander’s wishes after his death to seize control over parts of his kingdom. The allegory works well, as the Watchers are described in decidedly martial terms as the generals of their own armies of angels, and they rebel to seize power for themselves, going native, as it were, on the Earth. Presenting the intermarriage of the Watchers and human women as an evil that results in corruption may also be seen as a lesson for the Jews not to mix with outsiders, and especially not to breed with them. Another interpretation suggests, rather convincingly, that the story of the Watchers was really a criticism or satire of all the neighbors and enemies of the Jews, whether Assyrian or Babylonian or Persian or Greek. The very nature of the Watchers as heavenly beings that lust after human women can be seen as a spoof of polytheist religions popular among their enemies in which deities were known to father children with human women. Think, for example, of the comparison I drew between Heracles and the Nephilim in a recent patron exclusive. If this were the purpose of the story, it would seem to have been an effort to subordinate the gods of their neighbors, suggesting their lustful deities were actually nothing more than the disobedient servants of the most high Jewish god.

Interestingly, just as the apocryphal Enochic corpus greatly expands on the tradition of the Nephilim, it also greatly expands the mythology surrounding the cataclysm that destroys them, the Deluge, and especially the lore surrounding Noah. According to the Enochic traditions, Noah was not necessarily a regular man. It is reported in 1 Enoch that, when Noah was born, his father Lamech was concerned about some unusual features of his appearance. His skin was unusually white, with platinum hair and eyes that shined. Lamech took the child to his grandfather, Enoch, was known to be wise. As we know from elsewhere in the Enochic corpus and from alchemical lore, Enoch had come into possession of divine knowledge, either from visions bestowed upon him by angels and written down in a book, or from the mysterious emerald tablet he discovered in a cave. Regardless of the source of his wisdom, it is clear why Lamech would come to him with his concerns, for Lamech believed his infant son’s strange appearance meant that he was actually the offspring of a Watcher, and Enoch knew all about the Watchers. It is striking here that whiteness and blondeness and bright eyes, features that Nazis and other white supremacists would later claim make one pure or superior, are here seen as an indication that Noah was of corrupt or mixed blood, the progeny of fallen spirits, and thus a demon like the other Nephilim. It may be the first indication of someone being viewed as a white devil. Enoch, however, says that is not the case, and that rather, these features are a sign that Noah had been chosen by God. As it turns out, Enoch already knows that the Deluge is coming as a judgment on the corruption of the Watchers and Nephilim, and he asserts that his great-grandson has been chosen for deliverance from this flood. This is a remarkable straying from the Biblical story of the Flood, in which Noah is chosen because of his righteousness and learns of the Flood directly from God. In the Enochic tradition, he was chosen before he could really display righteousness, and his family had known about the coming destruction for generations. As the story unfolds, Enoch bestows his divine wisdom on Noah before his ascension and transfiguration, either in the form of a book or the Emerald Tablet, and Noah becomes a magician and a healer, specifically an exorcist, able to expel the spirits of the demonic Nephilim when they enter people. Interestingly, Noah’s whiteness corresponds with insidious ideas about race after the Flood, with people of color having descended from one of his sons, Ham, who was supposedly cursed with dark skin. However, according to the Enochic tradition, it seems pretty clear that the strange whiteness of Noah, which may have passed to some but not all of his sons, appears to be something of an aberration, like albinism. I’m sure a white supremacist will look at this story and argue that it confirms whites are God’s chosen people, but an alternative interpretation is that it depicts whiteness as an inherited disorder and shows the earliest whites believing themselves superior to all others, such that they believed God wanted them to live and everyone else to die off.

The Birth of Noah by James Tissot

The Enochic corpus and other Second Temple apocrypha seem to refer at times to a Book of Noah that some scholars doubt ever existed. If it did exist, then the palimpsest that is Enochic apocrypha is further important in that it may be reproducing passages of a lost work. The simple fact that lost books of scripture exist cannot be denied. 1 Enoch itself had been a lost book outside of Ethiopia for centuries. Moreover, there are numerous proposed lost books, such as a proto-gospel that preceded the others, a certain “Severe Letter” written by the Apostle Paul, and the “Ascents of James,” said to be a heretical text. These are just some of the lost texts of Christianity. There are numerous Judaic texts that are believed to have been lost, and several Manichean texts. Moreover, we know the custom of Jewish pseudepigrapha to attribute works to major biblical patriarchs, and it would seem unusual if there had never been a pseudepigraphon attributed to so major a figure as Noah. Finally, there are explicit references to Noah writing a book, or to the “writing of the words of Noah,” in various apocryphal works and fragments. However, skeptics find it suspicious that content said to be from these writings of Noah seems to vary from work to work. On the other hand, when the content of other books is alluded to, it is usually pretty faithfully rendered. This has led some doubters to suggest that references to a Book of Noah are only literary devices, such as when the trope of the Book of Life is used in scriptures, with the metaphor of being blotted out of it. If there is no literal Book of Life for one’s name to be blotted out of, it has been suggested that references to a Book of Noah may only refer metaphorically to the wisdom of Noah or the lessons to be learned from his story.  Others have suggested that the Book of Noah is merely folkloric, much like the Emerald Tablet or the book containing the wisdom of Enoch, which certainly doesn’t seem to be the same as the pseudepigraphal works of the Second Temple period that I am discussing in this episode. By this view, it is as ridiculous to theorize about a real Book of Noah as it is to entertain the literal existence of Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon, a book that only exists in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

The way in which this question of whether there existed a pseudepigraphical Book of Noah butts up against the question of whether there ever existed writings penned by the man Noah, and whether Noah the man ever actually existed, is similar to one of the central mysteries of the Book of Enoch, which revolves around the chronology of when certain passages were written and what they refer to. This is because some parts of the Enochic corpus appear to refer to Christ, and since some portions of it predate Christianity, it is argued that these passages represent a pre-Christian prophecy that has been fulfilled. This mystery has to do with the cryptic phrase “the Son of Man,” a term that is used frequently in scriptures just to mean humanity, as in, the sons of man, but in some cases, with the definite article “the Son of Man,” has been interpreted to mean a specific heavenly being, one who is seen in certain visions, such as those of Daniel, as being in the presence of God and in a position of authority. Christians interpret this vision as depicting Christ, the son of God, who was given human form, “like a son of man,” as Daniel states, and who it is believed will stand at the right hand of God. Despite the fact that with this language Daniel only appears to be describing a a man, or someone who looked like a man, being in the presence of someone he calls the Ancient of Days, never actually calling him God, the Christian interpretation has led to many mentions of a “son of man” being interpretated as references to Christ. As it happens, in the Book of Parables, the second section of 1 Enoch, the protagonist is called “the Son of Man,” used as a proper noun. Now we may presume that this was an allegorical trope, like naming your protagonist John Everyman to indicate that he represents all mankind, but many Christians take it as evidence that the Book of Enoch foretold the coming of Christ. The problem with this interpretation is that most scholars see the Book of Parables as a later addition to the Enochic corpus, suggesting that these Christian themes and some veiled allusions to events in the 3rd century CE, indicate that it was actually written in Christian times, making these passages far less prophetic. Indeed, this section, the Book of Parables, was never found among the fragments of the Book of Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A depiction of Enoch’s ascension.

These references to the Son of Man, far from confirming the beliefs of Christians, should actually be rejected by those who adhere to an orthodox view of Christianity. Indeed, this aspect of the book begins to approach why Enochic literature was excluded from the canon, as it leads to the notion that there are two powers in heaven. The vision of Daniel told of multiple thrones, and spoke of this one who was like a son of man being given “authority, glory and sovereign power.” Likewise, in the Book of Parables, this Son of Man sits on God’s throne, in glory and judgment. The Christian doctrine of the trinity was promulgated to explain scriptures that appear to indicate that there may be two coequal powers, as these passages indicate, arguing that Jesus is one and the same as God, along with the Holy Spirit, so it’s all just one godhead. But the Enochic corpus suggests a different interpretation. In the lore of this tradition, prior to Christ, there was another man, or son of man, who had ascended to heaven. It was Enoch, who was taken up by God instead of dying. Thus, the most common interpretation of this passage is that Enoch is the Son of Man, and it is further developed in 3 Enoch, when Enoch’s transfiguration into an angel is described. Later traditions suggest that Enoch was transformed into an archangel named Metatron. The name Metatron, which sounds like a transformer, was never mentioned in the Enochic texts, and some argue that it is derived from phrases elsewhere used for the Angel of the Lord, and this accords well with the interpretation that Enoch, the Son of Man, who was raised above other sons of men and raptured into heaven, was transformed into an angel and given his own throne and power equal to that of god, an idea so dangerous that it would lead to the Book of Enoch being suppressed and lost for centuries.

While the doctrine of two powers in heaven was heresy to orthodox Judaism, since Christians applied their bit of sophistry to explain away these multiple gods as one, it shouldn’t have been so problematic to them. However, there was a further problem posed by the Enochic literature, that may explain its exclusion from Christian canon at the Council of Nicaea. This problem is that, the story of Christ, in several respects, appears to match in key regards, the story of Enoch. Let us consider these parallels. Like Enoch, Christ ascends and is transfigured and then sits enthroned in heaven in judgment on mankind. And just as, according to 1 Peter, Christ descends into Hell and condemns the rebel angels there, so too did Enoch visit the disobedient Watchers and declare their punishment to be eternal. While some of these similarities may be explained away if the Book of Parables is indeed a later, Christian-era addition, some elements originate in portions of the Enochic corpus that are considered definitely pre-Christian, which raises the question of how much of the story of Christ may actually have been recycled myth. Of course, to suggest the Council of Nicaea excluded Enochic texts to hide this may be something of a conspiracy theory. The Council of Nicaea may simply have excluded Enochic traditions because they had already been excluded from the Jewish canon or because they were pseudepigrapha, and thus, by definition, a kind of forgery. But knowing as we know now that 1 Peter and all the canonical gospels are widely considered pseudepigrapha as well, with the exception of John, whose author remains a mystery, it rather seems more like the church fathers just picked and chose among a variety of dubious texts falsely attributed to famous figures in order to best reinforce that creed they chose to adopt. Regardless of whether the story of Christ is really the story of Enoch, or vice versa, though, the lesson to be taken here is that all such doctrine and dogma should be viewed with skepticism, based as it is upon a hodgepodge of antiquated writings that, despite all the claims of the faithful, are clearly crafted by man.

Further Reading

Baxter, Wayne. “Noachic Traditions and the Book of Noah.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, vol. 15, no. 3, May 2006, pp. 179–94. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1177/0951820706066633.

Boyarin, Daniel. “Beyond Judaisms: Meṭaṭron and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period, vol. 41, no. 3, 2010, pp. 323–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24670476. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

Elliott, John H. “1 Enoch, 1 Peter, and Social-Scientific Criticism A Review Article on a Major 1 Enoch Commentary.” Biblical Theology Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 1, Feb. 2009, pp. 39–43. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1177/0146107908100115.

Etz, Donald V. “The Numbers of Genesis V 3-31: a Suggested Conversion and Its Implications.” Vetus Testamentum, vol. 43, no. 2, 1993, pp. 171-187. BRILL, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/156853393X00034.

Lumpkin, Joseph B. The Books of Enoch: The Angels, the Watchers, and the Nephilim (with Extensive Commentary on the Three Books of Enoch, the Fallen Angels, the Calendar of Enoch, and Daniel’s Prophecy). 2nd ed., Fifth Estate, 2011.
Mearns, Christopher L. “Dating the Similitudes of Enoch.” New Testament Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 1979, pp. 360–369., doi:10.1017/S0028688500004975.

Paz, Yakir. “Metatron Is Not Enoch: Reevaluating the Evolution of an Archangel.” Journal for the Study of Judaism: In the Persian Hellenistic & Roman Period, vol. 50, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 52–100. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.1163/15700631-12501239.

Roark, Kyle. “First Enoch 8 and the Origins of Civilization.” Henoch, vol. 41, no. 2, July 2019, pp. 188–203. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=145759442&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

The Myth of a Lost Mound Builder Race

The first European explorers and settlers to set foot in North America during the 15th and 16th centuries found many large conical hills dotting the landscape of certain regions. During Hernando De Soto’s expedition across what is today the southeastern United States, he and his men passed by many of these and believed them to be nothing more than hills, but others he saw in the midst of populous native cities, with temples and the houses of chiefs built atop them, and he understood them to be manmade. By the time of French and English exploration and settlement, after De Soto’s expedition had decimated indigenous populations by introducing European disease, the cities too had disappeared, leaving only the earthen mounds, which looked to many an untrained eye like natural features of the landscape. Eventually, though, it became common knowledge that these were actually tumuli, or burial mounds, akin to the barrows of the Old World, and they were frequently destroyed by farmers seeking to level their fields, or by treasure-hunters who never found the riches they dreamed of within, just skeletons and artifacts that would only be of interest to antiquarians. Before the Revolutionary War, the consensus among the educated and scientifically-minded was that, of course, they had been built by the tribes of Native Americans who had first been encountered in the New World and who still remained there, in constant conflict with white settlers, but gradually, this belief came to be replaced by the idea that Native Americans, whom they considered “savages,” simply did not have the wherewithal to build such monuments. Rather, they must have been the work of a predecessor race, a superior breed of people more like Europeans and thus probably white, who had been wiped out by the native peoples they believed to be so barbarous. This myth of a lost race of mound-builders would breed countless theories of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact, as did the question of the origin of Native American peoples, and eventually, it would be enshrined in a uniquely American religion. It seems to have started with the vivid imagination of a Congregationalist preacher named Solomon Spalding, who encountered theories about the Old-World origins of a Mound Builder race in college at Dartmouth. After giving up preaching, he lived first in Western New York, before moving to Ohio, both regions with numerous ancient mounds, about which locals and visiting antiquarians told many stories and shared many theories. Eventually, Spalding shared his own, very publicly, telling many an acquaintance about a historical romance, or fiction, that he was writing, and sharing various drafts of it with whoever wanted to read it. The principal conceit of his story was that it was a translation of an ancient scroll found in a burial mound, which revealed the hidden history of the Mound Builder race. His manuscript would never be published, but, as some testimony reveals, it may have been taken from a printer’s office and copied by a young Baptist minister named Sidney Rigdon. After that, a young burial mound treasure-hunter in Western New York named Joseph Smith began claiming that an angel had revealed to him the location of a book of gold plates buried within a mound, which once translated by Smith, likewise told the story of the lost Mound Builder race. The fact that, later the same year that Smith published The Book of Mormon, Sidney Rigdon and several members of his congregation in Ohio would be converted to the new religion, and Rigdon would become Smith’s chief lieutenant, has led many to suspect that Rigdon planted the seeds of this new religion by secretly providing Solomon Spalding’s manuscript to Joseph Smith for use as a model. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, the entire basis of Mormonism, a religion claiming nearly 17 million converts today, remains that the ancient Mound Builders of America were actually a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel who found their way to the New World. According to the Book of Mormon, Native Americans too are descended from these Lost Tribes, but are derived from a separate tribe that engaged in idolatry and therefore were cursed with dark skin and descended into savagery, destroying the light-skinned Mound Builder tribe. This is the core of a quintessentially American myth, that the impressive ancient earthworks of our land were not constructed by the ancestors of the Native Americans we know, but rather that Native American peoples savagely wiped out this noble and white antecedent race. It is a myth that reveals the foundational racism that our country was built on, and that, despite having long been irrefutably debunked, survives today, in the dogma of the Latter-Day Saints, in the deceptive pseudohistorical work of several influential authors, and among the thickets of false claims blithely made online.

A depiction of Joseph Smith, who in his youth had been a treasure hunter, excavating a mound after he had founded a religion on the idea of a lost Mound Builder race.

The subject of this episode is one for which I have laid an extensive foundation. Many topics that have long been of interest to me, and that I have written about, in the podcast and in my historical fiction, are closely related to the myth of a lost Mound Building race in ancient America. Most recently, obviously, my series on giants ties directly into it, as 19th century claims of uncovering enormous skeletons in Native American burial mounds were encouraged by the idea that Native Americans could not have created such gigantic earthworks, and that instead they had been constructed by a mythical lost race in antiquity. In fact, as I mentioned briefly, Aaron Wright of Conneaut, Ohio, who is said to have claimed that he found a giant skull that fit over his head like a helmet, actually knew Solomon Spalding and gave testimony regarding the similarity of Spalding’s manuscript to Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon. The claims about giant remains in Conneaut mounds were certainly one among the many stories about Mound Builders that inspired Spalding, and probably, by extension, Mormonism. If you want to learn more about the relationship between Mound Builder legends and treasure-hunting and Mormonism, including a depiction of a likely scenario for how the Book of Mormon was composed and what influenced its composition, I wrote a historical novel all about it, which I researched and wrote over the course of a decade. Some of the subject matter relevant to both Mormonism and the Mound Builder myth I discussed at length last year in my series on the Lost Tribes of Israel, and I followed up that series with a survey of the many inscribed stone frauds that have been perpetrated to support the pre-Columbian transoceanic contact claims and, more specifically, the supposed Hebraic origins of Native Americans, a few of which I also dramatized in fiction. In fact, this story, of the quintessentially American myth of a lost Mound Builder race, even corresponds with the myth of an Aryan race, which I devoted most of an episode to discussing in my three-part series on Nazi Occultism years ago. In the late 18th century, an English linguist in British-controlled India named William Jones, remarking on the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek and unable to conceive that something of value might have been contributed to mankind by a people of color, came to the baseless conclusion that an unknown white race had first brought this Proto-Indo-European language to India, and had since “degenerated” through racial admixture with the dark-skinned native peoples of India. This, of course, was the birth of a doctrine that would drive Nazi racial theories more than a hundred years later in Germany, and that survives today, sadly thriving in the dark dens and bastions of White Nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, neo-Confederates, the Christian Identity movement, and the Alt-Right. But long before it inspired these groups, it inspired the white inhabitants of a newly-independent United States of America to likewise imagine that there had once been a white predecessor race in their country as well, one quite superior to the Native Americans with whom they were locked in a perennial struggle for possession of these ancient lands.

Just as there were many theories about the racial heritage of Native American peoples, many and varied were the pet theories about the origins of the Mound Builder race that, by the mid-19th century, were believed by most Americans to have preceded them. Reflecting this connection to the myth of an Aryan race that was popularized by scholars in British India, some theories suggested the Mound Builders had been “Hindoos.” Of course, the term “Hindus” actually refers to a specific religious group, but these Mound Builder claims used it more generally to mean supposed ancient immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, likely meaning the mythical Aryan race posited at the time. It is ironic that these theorists refused to believe that the peoples they wrongly called “Indians” were responsible for the mounds, preferring instead to credit peoples more accurately called “Indians.” James McCulloh’s Researches on America, for example, suggested that the ancient Asian ancestors of Native Americans who crossed into the Americas via the land bridge at Beringia were more specifically from India, and that they had been trapped here by the sinking of Atlantis. Likewise, John Clifford’s “Indian Antiquities,” a series of letters published in Western Review, perceived similarities between the myths of Native Americans and the cultures of India, and though Judeo-Christian tradition had nothing to do with either, he believed the Bible provided insight into the construction of mounds in America, suggesting they had been further attempts to build to the sky after the fall of the Tower of Babel. Both men actually suggested that, though descended from “Hindoos,” it was indeed Native Americans who had built the mound—but not the native peoples of North America, whom they agreed were incapable of such feats. Rather, they argued it had been those indigenous to Mexico, the so-called Toltec peoples, who had been known to build impressive stone pyramids in Central America. This notion that the Toltec or Aztec Mesoamerican cultures actually originated as the Mound Builders before moving southward was quite popular, and it retained the critical element that the Native American tribes of the day were inferior, could not of built the mounds themselves, and likely drove the superior mound-building culture southward with their violent depredations.

Painting of Mound Builder Myth proponent Caleb Atwater.

The arguments of McCulloh and Clifford were further promoted in 1820 by Caleb Atwater, in his Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio and Other Western States. Close listeners to the preceding series on giants may recall the antiquarian Atwater had been excavating mounds in Conneaut, Ohio, and had declared that the skeletons there were very small, effectively refuting the claims that local man Aaron Wright had found giant skeletons in Conneaut’s tumuli. Atwater’s work borrowed heavily from John Clifford, and Clifford’s partner, French polymath Constantine Rafinesque, took umbrage, afterward engaging in a lifelong feud with Atwater, whose theory of Native American origins he vehemently opposed, so much so that, taking a cue from Joseph Smith, he would eventually resort to perpetrating a found manuscript hoax of his own to convince the world of his more traditional view of the Asiatic origins of Native Americans, a fraud I plan to discuss further in a patron exclusive episode. But attempting to disabuse the intellectual elite of their quickly multiplying historical fantasies was a losing battle. The Hindu/Toltec theory was only one among a plethora of popular notions about who the lost Mound Builders had been, and most of them were popularized by the work of one man, Josiah Priest, an undereducated leatherworker who started his writing career in 1825 publishing a work, The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed, that pieced together the work of other writers, including Ethan Smith, whose work View of the Hebrews had popularized the notion that Native Americans were actually Jews from the Lost Tribes of Israel. But in Priest’s later 1833 work, American Antiquities, and Discoveries in the West, he attempted to synthesize numerous competing theories about the origins of the Mound Builders. No longer were they merely lost Israelites, but also Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Norwegians, the Chinese and the Welsh. To give an example of his arguments, let’s look at the last group, the Welsh. Priest raises the Welsh myth of Prince Madoc, who was said to have sailed to America in the 12th century, and he shares certain claims about Native American tribes that some believed, without convincing evidence, could be of Welsh extraction. This legend had formerly been used by Queen Elizabeth to assert a claim over the new world, but the legend itself only appeared after Columbus’s voyage, in poetry, seemingly adapted from medieval tales such as the legendary voyage of the Celt, Brendan the Navigator. This is a good example of the unreliability of the claims of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact that were folded into the myth of a lost Mound Builder race, which Josiah Priest gathered and attempted to stitch together in his work, whose subtitle describes well the claims of this myth generally: “Being an Exhibition of the Evidence that an Ancient Population of Partially Civilized Nations, Differing Entirely from Those of the Present Indians, Peopled America Many Centuries before Its Discovery By Columbus, and Inquiries into Their Origin, with a Copious Description of Many of Their Stupendous Works Now in Ruins, with Conjectures Concerning What May Have Become of Them.” By this time, theories about Mound Builders had moved from a highly debated topic among an intellectual elite to a fashionable issue for discussion among less educated folk, who were Josiah Priest’s readership, and the notion of a lost Mound Builder race, whatever their origin, had proven entirely more popular.

That wasn’t always the case. In fact, prior to the Revolution, it was common for those who took an interest in mounds to logically assume they were the work of the only known residents of North America. In fact, as detailed in one of my principal sources, the exhaustively researched The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost White Race” by Jason Colavito, a founding father and one of probably the earliest scientific investigators of mounds, Thomas Jefferson, strongly believed that Native Americans had built these tumuli. He had good reason to believe it, since he had several times seen local Native Americans make pilgrimages to a mound on his property known as Indian Grave. Later in life, he made a study of the country’s tumuli, noting the difference between temple platform mounds that had been observed by the Spanish and burial mounds like the one on his property, and in order to answer questions of whether these were cemeteries used over generations or mass graves used in the aftermath of battle, he undertook a cautious and systematic excavation of Indian Grave. In doing so, as Colavito notes, he essentially invented the practices of modern archaeology, in stark contrast to the haphazard and destructive excavations of antiquaries of the day. Jefferson’s study, which presumed as an undisputable given that all such mounds were the work of “Aboriginal Indians,” would be spread far and wide, and in fact would end up reproduced in the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1797 to 1823. However, the encyclopedia placed Jefferson’s description in its section on barrows, tacitly comparing this practice with Old World funerary customs and thereby contributing to the growth of the myth that they had been constructed by some culture other than that of Native Americans.

Depiction of a cross-sectional mound excavation like that which Thomas Jefferson pioneered.

This implicit suggestion in the Encyclopedia Britannica was still something of an outlier view in the 1780s, but it came to be the view of Daniel Webster, of Webster’s Dictionary fame, who accepted Jefferson’s conclusions about Native Americans being responsible for smaller burial mounds but insisted that larger mounds and temple platforms must have been the work of Spaniards, a common enough claim at the time, or of ancient Celtic immigrants, given their similarity to European barrows. But such a view was certainly not commonly accepted yet and was even controversial. One who took exception to Webster’s claims was Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, a great American patriot called “Conqueror of the Old Northwest” for his role in winning the Northwest Territory from the British in the Revolutionary War. Clark had seen many a mound in that region and scoffed at the idea that De Soto’s expeditionary forces could possibly have constructed them during the few years of their inland exploration. Moreover, in contradiction to a central tenet of the Mound Builder Myth, that extant Native Americans had no knowledge of who had built the mounds, Clark informed Webster that, in his communications with leaders of the Kaskaskia and Cahokia tribes, they explicitly told him that the mounds had been built by their ancestors, in a time when they had been far more populous and gathered in “large towns,” specifically indicating that mounds were not only burial grounds and temple platforms, but also served as the location of the “palace” of a tribe’s leader, which supports our modern understanding of the uses of some mounds. Again, in 1803, the Reverend Dr. James Madison of the American Philosophical Society argued that the mounds were the work of Native Americans, but he was countered a couple years afterward by Unitarian minister and Harvard librarian Thaddeus Harris, who argued that Native Americans simply were not ingenious enough to accomplish such works, taking instead the view, which would become so popular, that they were the work of a Mexican native culture. So we see at the turn of the 19th century the myth in its infancy, still resisted by the rational and scientific-minded, but it was not long before it exploded, making this fiction into consensus reality. 

The growth of the myth was helped early on by the claim that another Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, took a view opposite that of Thomas Jefferson. According to Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, a French consul who claimed to have travelled in America with him, Ben Franklin scoffed at the notion of an Asiatic origin of Native Americans, preferring the notion that Inuit peoples had immigrated to the continent from Scandinavia and the tribes of the American South from Mexico. Writing in 1801, Crèvecoeur says Franklin likened burial mounds to European barrows and insisted, like others, that Native Americans had no knowledge of their construction, which of course was blatantly false, as Clark had already shown and as other evidence which I will later review further shows. Crèvecoeur writes that Franklin believed the Mound Builder “much further advanced in civilization than our Indians,” and looked forward to a time “[w]hen the population of the United States shall have spread over every part of that vast and beautiful region,” believing that “posterity, aided by new discoveries, may then perhaps form more satisfactory conjectures.” As Jason Colavito astutely discerns, this grasping after some grand lost history does indeed seem to represent a desire for the creation of a history for America that could rival the storied pasts of European nations, but more than that, these words about spreading across the continent reflect the growing desire for westward expansion, a tendency that would find its apotheosis, later that century, in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In reality, Crèvecoeur had entirely fabricated the remarks of Benjamin Franklin, plagiarizing and adapting the words of others and placing them into the Founding Father’s mouth. Franklin actually believed the unsupportable argument that Spaniards had built the mounds of North America. We know this to be false, since the chronicles of Spanish explorers actually record their expeditions’ encounters with native cities and make specific mention of mounds.  Nevertheless, the remarks Crèvecoeur falsely attributed to Franklin would later be reprinted, devoid of context, in an encyclopedia and would be read and believed by many.

Portrait of Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, literary hoaxer and plagiarist.

While Franklin’s sentiments on this topic may have been falsified, other prominent politicians of the day evinced genuine belief in the Mound Builder myth. In 1811, DeWitt Clinton, Mayor of New York City, Lieutenant Governor of the state and soon-to-be presidential candidate, gave a speech to the New-York Historical Society in which he stated that the mounds were not temple platforms or burial places but military fortifications built by a lost race that had been destroyed in a race war by extant Native Americans, and he suggested that any native peoples who claimed they were the work of their ancestors were simply trying to take credit for feats their people did not actually accomplish. Years later, after acceding to the governorship, Clinton refined his claims to argue that this lost Mound Builder race was in fact the Scythians, which, as you may recall from my episode about the Tartaria delusion, was a vague racial designation applied to all peoples residing north of the Black Sea and east of Europe. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson devoted much of his State of the Union report to promoting the myth of a lost Mound Builder race, stating, “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.” And in 1837, future president William Henry Harrison addressed the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, stating that an ancient people, ancestors of the Aztecs of Mexico, had originated within the boundaries of the U.S. and built the “stupendous” earthen mounds here before fleeing “from the face of a tyrant, and the oppressions of unfeeling taskmasters,” suggesting the Mound Builders “had been made to yield to a more numerous…people…. Forced to fly before a new swarm from some northern or southern hive.” Jackson was a Democrat, and Harrison a Whig, but in this point there was broad bipartisan agreement. Indeed, both men had distinguished themselves in the American Indian Wars, which still raged and would continue to the end of the century. And here we approach the real heart of darkness within the Mound Builder myth: that it was a tool of propaganda used to justify their subjugation of Native American tribes.
In case you weren’t paying attention in your high school history class or your Survey of American history course in college, or in the likely event that your curriculum gave this aspect of American history short shrift, allow me to highlight it here. From the colonial period, through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, the United States was in a sporadic but near constant state of war with Native American tribes. These are typically better known by the names of individual conflicts with specific tribes or regions, such as the Cherokee-American Wars or Chickamauga Wars, the Northwest Indian War, Tecumseh’s War, in which William Henry Harrison was intimately involved, and the Creek and Seminole Wars, fought ruthlessly by General Andrew Jackson. Then, during his Presidency, with the passage of the Indian Removal Act, Jackson, with Congress’s approval, used the full power of the U.S. government to forcibly relocate Native American tribes to land promised them beyond the Mississippi, an unfathomably destructive displacement involving concentration camps and death marches and precipitating further conflicts, such as the Second Seminole War. Among the numerous tribes forced to take the “Trail of Tears,” the Choctaw, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, and the Seminole, historians estimate as many as 15,000 perished from diseases like cholera and dysentery. Those who survived would see their treaties broken once again as white settlers continued to press westward and settle the frontier lands that had been promised to them, triggering battles like Little Bighorn, and massacres like Wounded Knee. Surviving tribes would find themselves hemmed into reservations, and see their children taken and indoctrinated in draconic reeducation camps they called schools. The terrible irony is that Native American peoples had built impressive and populous cities and had established healthy trade relations across a vast and prosperous culture that was laid low by European disease and massacre, reducing their cities to abandoned mounds and their peoples to nomadic warrior tribes. Yet the pale-faced interloper had the audacity to tell them that those cities hadn’t been built by such as they, that some superior race had constructed those cities, and that they deserved to be driven from their lands and hunted to extinction because they had done the same to the builders of those cities—their cities! It is difficult to find a more appropriate word for our treatment of Native American peoples than “genocide.” Indeed, our push westward for more land to settle and our concomitant annihilation of the Native Americans that stood in our way would eventually inspire Hitler and the Nazis in their push for lebensraum, and the race myths they used to justify genocide were not unlike our own.

As belief in the myth of a lost Mound Builder race became the political dogma of the U.S. government during Indian Removal and thus became common among the public, it gradually came to be considered empirical truth even by the scientific community, thus entering textbooks and furthering its propagation. During the 1840s, the most ambitious survey of these earthworks, excavating some 200 mounds, was undertaken between 1845 and 1847 by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, and their report, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, ended up being the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution. In it, they draw the conclusion that, since the earthworks themselves and some artwork found within was supposedly “immeasurably beyond anything which the North American Indians are known to produce, even to this day,” the mounds must have been the work of some superior race, likely related to Central or South American civilizations. With this work’s flawed conjecture, the myth was for several decades enshrined as unassailable science, and in 1847, we see the first example of a textbook, History of the United States of America, Designed for Schools, promulgating the falsehood. A quarter century later, the myth was still going strong in history primers like that written by George Quackenbos, and even in grammar texts, like that of John Jacob Anderson. One of the most ambitious history publications of the 1870s, the mostly cribbed and ghost written 39-volume history of eastern North America by Hubert Howe Bancroft, further disseminated the myth. Among the evidence leveraged by many of these scientists, historians, and textbook compilers were a variety of hoaxes that had been perpetrated with the express purpose of providing evidence for the lost race hypothesis. One was The Traditions of De-Coo-Dah, a book written by antiquarian and Mound Builder myth believer William Pidgeon, published in 1852, in which he dubiously claimed that a mysterious old Native American man had entrusted him with the secret truth about the Scandinavian origin of the ancient Mound Builders. Likewise, in 1859, one Nelson Lee falsely claimed to have been a captive of the Comanche and to have been told by a Chief Rolling Thunder about a race of ten-foot white men who had built the ancient earthworks. Most of the fraudulent evidence for the myth came in the form of inscribed stone hoaxes, though, most of which I previously discussed in my episode “Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories” and some of which I dramatized in fiction that I released in patron exclusive audio productions. These include Dighton Rock, the Grave Creek Stone, The Newark Holy Stones, the Bat Creek inscription, and the Michigan Relics. There was one such inscribed stone fraud which I mentioned only in passing at the time, though, which I think illustrates well the false evidence leveraged by writers promoting the myth of a lost Mound Builder race during these years, and I will tell its story here, intertwined as it is with the final scientific repudiation of the myth.

Illustration of the fictional De-Coo-Dah

In 1877, a Lutheran minister named Jacob Gass who spoke only German fluently and thus preached principally to German immigrants, made a seemingly astounding discovery during some of the mound explorations on a farm near Davenport, Iowa, that he had undertaken out of a great interest in antiquities.  At the time, the most pressing questions, the resolution of which would make any local scientific academy world famous, were, of course, the identity of the mysterious Mound Building race, and also whether man existed contemporaneously with the mastodon. Astonishingly, Gass pulled inscribed tablets out of the mound that seemed to conveniently resolve both of these mysteries. First, they appeared to bear written language, alphabetic signs that thus proved the ancient existence of a culture separate from that of known Native Americans, who never developed a syllabary until the Cherokee created a writing system in 1821. The presence of writing was common among inscribed stone frauds, of course, but the Davenport Tablets went further. With illustrations, it depicted the earthworks of the Mound Builders being used as altars for human sacrifice. Another illustration depicts a mastodon or elephant, handily answering the question of whether that animal lived simultaneously with the Mound Builders. The plate was further found with some pipes carved into the same elephantine shape. And lastly, a separate tablet appeared to depict astrological symbols and the makings of a calendar, firing further speculation about the Old World origins of these mound-building people. The Davenport Tablets made Gass and the Davenport Academy fantastically famous, and numerous scholars supported their authenticity, citing these artifacts and their questionable translations of the characters inscribed thereon as proof that the Mound Builders were descended from Noah after the Flood, or that they were Hittites, or whatever pet theory they wanted to spread. Eventually, though, some scholars expressed doubt, most notably Cyrus Thomas, the new head of archaeology for the Smithsonian Institution who would go on to finally destroy the Mound Builder myth in academia. He pointed out the ludicrous coincidence of these items conveniently answering all the most popular questions of the day, all being found by the same man. He pointed out that Gass’s own descriptions of the find indicated that the burial place where he found the items appeared disturbed, with bones scattered, unlike the orderly burials with complete skeletons observed elsewhere at the same site, suggesting some intrusive and more recent burial during which the tablets may have been planted. And finally, he cited rumors that Gass had been involved in the discovery of several fraudulent artifacts before. The controversy did not die easily, but almost a hundred years later, in 1970, University of Iowa professor Marshall McKusick appears to have solved the mystery, demonstrating that a conspiracy of men had planted the artifacts, which they had carved from slate roof shingles stolen from a local brothel, and planted them as a prank on Reverend Gass, whom they called a “windjammer and a liar.” When the sham items suddenly became valuable because scientific academies wanted to buy them, though, they ended up covering up their fraud, in many cases with the assistance of the academics who so yearned for the artifacts to be genuine!

The Davenport Tablets.

This demonstrates how thoroughly the myth of a lost Mound Builder race had taken hold of not just the public but scholars as well by the 1880s, when, as it happened, the Smithsonian and its Bureau of Ethnology had come under the leadership of John Wesley Powell, who strongly, and correctly, doubted the myth. Such was the pressure from the government that the Bureau served that Powell at first had to appoint a believer in the Mound Builder myth to head up their investigation of earthworks, but thankfully, Powell found reason to fire him and hire Cyrus Thomas instead, knowing full well that Thomas would not shy from refuting the myth. After nearly a decade of systematic research as the principal archaeologist in the Bureau’s Mound Exploration Division, Cyrus Thomas published his 700-page Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, in which he methodically disproved the myth of a lost Mound Builder race and demonstrated that they were, indeed, the work of the ancestors of known Native American peoples. He unceremoniously demolished the supposed evidence of inscribed stones, showing them to be frauds, and he denied the claims that Native American culture was too undeveloped to have organized such civilizations. Evidence provided by De Soto’s chronicler reveals, after all, that at the time of first European contact, many Native Americans lived in populous walled cities that demonstrated large-scale agricultural cultivation. Thomas further refuted the claim that Native Americans had no knowledge of who had constructed the earthworks and had never been seen to build such mounds themselves, citing specific historical accounts of both. He further disproved the claim that metal artifacts discovered in mounds revealed metallurgical skills that Native Americans had never been seen to possess, revealing that these objects had been made from copper native to Michigan, requiring no metallurgy, and since such copper artifacts were discovered even at a great distance from Michigan, it just served as further evidence of the sophistication of Native American civilization prior to European contact, as they must have had established trade networks from Michigan all the way down to Florida. Cyrus Thomas’s final conclusion that “the theory which attributes these works to the Indians [was] the correct one” reverberated through the scientific community. No scholars worth their salt would ever again make such fools of themselves as to resurrect the myth of the Mound Builders.

Cyrus Thomas, the man who disproved the myth of a lost race of Mound Builders.

Unfortunately, such a sea change in academic thought does not always filter down to public opinion, and as Jason Colavito shows in his thorough work, the popular press continued publishing books that promoted the myth long after Cyrus Thomas had decimated it in his report, just as newspapers continued to publish giant hoaxes that fed into it. The myth seemed to disappear during the middle of the 20th century, but in the late 1960s, the myth was folded into the growing UFO myth when Erich von Däniken published his book positing the visitation of ancient astronauts. Suddenly the American earthworks were not just the work of a lost white race, or of giants, but of aliens. Anybody, it seems, but Native Americans. Other fringe pseudohistorians, Most notably Graham Hancock, have since taken up Däniken’s torch, and broadcast and cable television have been some of the worst purveyors of this nonsense, producing slick and sensationalist specials on the topic. The History Channel is perhaps the party guiltiest of propping up this long-disproven racist myth in series like Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed. Meanwhile, on the Internet, promoted by mystic wackos and conspiracy theorists who believe the Smithsonian is involved in covering up the truth, the Mound Builder myth thrives, co-opted and supported, unsurprisingly, by White Nationalists who appreciate its claims of superior white antecedents. Even as recently as 2019, Graham Hancock published a bestselling volume titled America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization, in which he perpetuates a mythical connection between Native American earthworks and the lost continent of Atlantis. So as we have seen with countless topics, even if an idea has long been debunked, it seems there will always be a market for frauds, hoaxes, and myths, even when, at their dark heart, they represent an evil and destructive ideology.

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a “Lost While Race.” University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.

Feder, Kenneth L. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. 10th ed., Oxford University Press, 2020.

McKusick, Marshall. The Davenport Conspiracy. The Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa, 1970.

Silverberg, Robert. Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth. New York Graphic Society, 1968.

No Bones About It! Part Two: GIANTS in the "New World"

During the era of European exploration and colonization, as the Columbian Exchange created a flow of crops, diseases, and beliefs between continents, new legends of giants came back from overseas. Early European settlers came to believe that some native inhabitants of the “New World,” that seemingly mythic and alien land across the globe, were themselves giants. But were these merely the exaggerations of explorers seeing for the first time a new people that impressed them, just as in biblical times the Israelites saw the robust inhabitants of Canaan and feared them as giants, as I discussed in part one of this series? For example, it is said that Tuscaloosa, the chieftain of Mississipian tribes in the modern day state of Alabama was a great giant whose stature impressed conquistador Hernán De Soto. But how tall was he really? Apparently he towered at about a foot and a half over all of De Soto’s Spaniards, but this is no precise measurement, and it is a well-known fact that the average height of European colonizers was relatively low, at about five and a half feet, give or take some inches. So it sounds more like Tuscaloosa was just a tall man well over six feet, and given that he was said to be the most impressive of his chiefdom—unsurprising, since an imposing physical presence has helped many a man in many a culture rise to power—we can otherwise infer that the rest of his subjects were of rather more average height. Similarly, when John Smith explored and mapped the Chesapeake region in 1608, he reported a “giant-like people” inhabiting the Susquehanna River’s mouth. Specifically, he described “the greatest of them…The calfe of whose leg was three quarters of a yard about, and all the rest of his limbs so answerable to that proportion.” Now, this description seems rather more focused on the brawn of the tribe he ended up calling the Susquehannocks, with mention of their height curiously absent. And again, like the Israelite spies in Canaan saying, “Hey, we  may not want to mess with them, they’re giants,” John Smith gives this description on his maps as a warning to colonists, and we have no way of knowing how exaggerated it may be. We do know that over the next hundred years or so, these Susquehannocks had further contact with European settlers in Maryland and with the French during the Beaver Wars, and there is little further mention of them being giants. So was it hyperbole, or had Smith just seen one really big guy, but not preternaturally large? Even among Native Americans themselves, there are legends of giants, and we see them engaging in the same kind of exaggeration of the other as being gigantic. Among the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, there was legend that the Erie tribe were a bunch of giant cannibals, but again, European contact with the Erie does not bear out such claims. It seems, rather, that the Iroquois Confederacy were just slandering their enemies, whom they would eventually destroy, along with all their allies. As we saw in part one, ancient folklore and poetry cannot be treated as credible evidence, and now we may categorize the reports of explorers in the same realm, as unreliable oral traditions. What is needed, as I stated previously, is an osteological record, one single preternaturally lengthy human femur, to prove the existence of giants in the past.

In 19th century America, the claims of giant bones became part and parcel with baseless claims about the ancient builders of the impressive tumuli, or earthen mounds, that are found across the U.S., throughout the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River Valley. These burial places fired the imaginations of white farmers and antiquarians alike, who propagated the racist myth that the builders of these mighty structures could not have been related to the Native American peoples they knew, so there must have been some lost race that had inhabited the New World before European settlement. This lost race of mound-builders, unsurprisingly, was said by many to be a lost white race, and in the 1800s to be a lost white race of giants, whose enormous bones were said to be found within these mounds by many a farmer and antiquarian turned grave despoiler. So what of these giant bones? Where are these bones, that we may measure them and determine whether they may indeed belong to mastodon rather than man? Funny story. These bones were often said, rather conveniently, to have self-destructed shortly after discovery. One Harvey Nettleton, writing on the history of Conneaut Township in northwestern Ohio, claimed in 1841 that around 1800 a man named Aaron Wright had been digging up graves in the area, and the bones he discovered not only were gigantic but also “on exposure to the air soon crumbled to dust.” In fact, 20 years prior to Nettleton’s account of Wright’s discovery, an antiquarian named Caleb Atwater, a major proponent of that lost Mound Builder race myth, had actually published a report of his findings in burial mounds near Conneaut, which specifically stated that he had “found skeletons of people of small stature,” but despite that, Nettleton’s larger than life account proved more popular and long-lived. Specifically one image seems to have struck a chord, that a skull Wright had discovered was so large he had been able to place it over his own head like a helmet. Nettleton’s story about Wright was widely reprinted, and reproduced and summarized by various historians, until elements of it became a kind of meme. We see in further stories produced by other antiquarians and recorded by different historians the same claims about massive skulls fitting over the heads of those who find them, and of other giant bones that are witnessed upon excavation but, alas, cannot be examined by experts because they had disintegrated as soon as they had entered local folklore. It may be impossible to tell if elements of this tale were invented out of whole cloth by Harvey Nettleton forty years after the fact, just to spice up his sketch, or if they were told by Aaron Wright and passed into legend and local oral tradition. A simple genealogical search turns up a real Aaron Wright born in 1775 who lived in Ashtabula County, Ohio, and was buried at Conneaut Township. This was likely the same Aaron Wright who gave evidence against the authenticity of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon in an affidavit collected by Dr. Philastus Hurlbut around 1833. It may be that this little-known individual, who contributed somewhat to the skeptical view of early Mormon claims, also made a hoax claim that has long outlived him and added greatly to the legacy of this false notion.

Diagram of mound excavations at Conneaut.

The same holds true for other supposedly large bones said to have been recovered from burial mounds throughout the 19th-century. It proves difficult to ascertain whether they were hoaxes or mistaken identifications of mastodon bones or perhaps a combination of the two. One antiquarian, T. Apoleon Cheney, who was known as Doc even though he had not earned the honorific through formal education, claimed to have discovered more than one giant skeleton in a Western New York mound that he excavated with a partner, a bona fide medical doctor, Frederick Larkin. As one of my principal sources, Brad Lockwood’s On Giants, clarifies, Cheney’s most widely cited work, Illustrations of the Ancient Monuments in Western New York, 1859, is actually widely misquoted, since this work really only contains illustrations and no text. However, it is clear, from later editions of his work and from the passages in other works that summarize his supposed findings, that Cheney did indeed claim he had found giant skeletons in a mound, that in fact he staked his reputation and founded a career on the claim. At a mound on Cassadaga Creek, near the town of Conewango, he claims that he “discovered nine human skeletons, which had been buried in a sitting posture…The skeletons were so far decayed as to crumble upon exposure to the atmosphere, but were all of very large size.” Here again, the meme of the self-destructing evidence is reproduced, but Cheney claims that one femur remained, whose measurement of 28 inches proved the stature of the man to whom it belonged. That’s about ten inches longer than the average adult male’s femur, and if such a bone were genuine, and determined by a paleontologist to belong to a human being, it would indeed constitute evidence that it was the remains of a tall person. You’ll find some online claiming that a femur is about a quarter of one’s height, so a 28-inch femur would make for a height of over nine feet. However, from what I have been able to determine, forensic anthropology tells us such a calculation is too simple, and to calculate the likely height of a male by the length of a femur, converted to centimeters, one must instead multiply by 2.32 and then add 65.53, which in the case of the 28-inch femur gives us a likely height of seven and a half feet. Unusually tall indeed, but no monster. The further problem, though, is that this 28-inch femur was never preserved for analysis, and more than that, after Doc Cheney’s death, his excavating partner, Frederick Larkin, the only medical professional on the scene to examine these supposedly gigantic skeletons, ended up writing his own book, Ancient Man in America, in which he revealed Doc Cheney’s claims to have been exaggerated. As Brad Lockwood reveals, having tracked down a copy of this rare text, Larkin writes, referring to Cheney’s claims about the giant skeletons at Cassadaga, “That the Mound-Builders were a trifle larger than the present type, is very probable; but that they were giants eight and ten feet is all fabulous. I have seen many skeletons from mounds in different states, but have seen none that will much exceed the present people now living. … The subject under consideration has enough of the marvelous about it to gratify almost any imagination without resorting to giants.”

As we have discussed more than once, in the 19th century, newspapers regularly ran stories of dubious origins that made improbable claims, hoping that sensational content would increase their circulation. For more on this, see my episode on the prolific newspaper hoaxer, Joseph Mulhatton, or my episode Unfit to Print: A History of Bad News. Anyone today who points to 19th-century newspaper reports about the discovery of giants as ironclad evidence of its truth should rightly be laughed at and mocked until they delete their accounts. Only rarely in the 19th-century might a newspaper follow up on such a report. For example, in 1883, after printing a report about the discovery of a nine foot skeleton in a gravel pit, the Indianapolis Journal afterward published the report of a local physician who investigated and refuted the claim, saying they were more like the remains of a five foot eight inch man, calling the incident “a giant fraud and an imposition on the credulity of the people.” The problem is, such follow-up reports were rare. 19th century newspapers in many states published story upon story of giant skeletons without ever bothering to follow them up with the reports of experts who had determined them to be frauds. It became so common that Mark Twain actually decided to pen his own hoax, getting a spurious tale of a petrified giant published in a Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper, with the telltale detail that the mummified giant had his thumb pressed to the side of his nose and his fingers spread, a well-known gesture showing contempt or derision, as if the giant were taunting the reader, saying “Na-na, na-na, boo-boo. Stick your head in doo-doo.” In this atmosphere of rampant giant hoaxes, it is no surprise that the greatest of them all, the Cardiff Giant hoax, about which I spoke in detail and which I dramatized in fiction in my recent patron exclusive episode, was so credulously received by the public. Mark Twain found this hoax, and especially the fact that P.T. Barnum created a fraudulent version of this fraud, quite hilarious, inspiring him to write a short story about the Cardiff giant’s ghost haunting the wrong remains. The fact that these widespread hoaxes about giant skeletons were publicized so avidly by newspapers but their debunking was not, and the fact that Doc Cheney’s claims about giant bones in burial mounds became so widely read while his more educated partner’s denial of those claims was mostly lost to history, is just clear evidence of the old saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots.” Ironically, that quotation is typically misattributed to Mark Twain, when really it is a common corruption of an older quote by Jonathan Swift.

Illustration of the Petrified Man from 1882 edition of Twain's Sketches, New and Old, depicting position of the supposed giant's hands.

So it seems fake news in newspapers then begets fake news on the Internet today. These tall tales about giants having been discovered in burial mounds in America may have taken a hiatus of several decades, but with the advent of the Internet, they have seen a resurgence. If you spend much time searching for giants online, you’ll find a bevy of paranormal and conspiracy blogs claiming that a race of red-haired, cannibalistic giants was spoken about in the lore of various Native American tribes. One story has it that the Paiutes trapped this race of red-haired giants in a cave, where they suffocated them with smoke. The evidence is the fact that a cave was discovered by guano miners in western Nevada, and there were indeed many artifacts and remains of the native tribe that had lived within, and the hair of some, having been preserved, looked reddish. The problem is, as Brian Dunning has pointed out in an episode of Skeptoid on the topic, none of the remains recovered were actually of an unusual size, nor did the artifacts appear made for the use of larger people, and the redness of their hair was just the loss of pigmentation in hair that was formerlydark. Moreover, the actual Paiute legends do not appear to include red hair or gigantism. As usual, though a genuine archaeological find is cited, the find did not actually support the claims made online. And other stories don’t even rely on real finds. For example, Steve Quayle, a self-proclaimed giantologist, promoted to his website’s readers a claim made on a random blog, perhaps as satire, that mummified giants had been discovered in Iowa by a farmer named Marvin Rainwater on his land near Kossuth Center. According to the story, Rainwater happened upon a stone tomb while digging, and inside he discovered the mummified remains of seven figures, each ten feet tall and with long red hair. The find was apparently even verified by archaeologists from Georg von Podebrad College in the nearby town of Zoar. What is even wilder is that this report was supposed to have been made recently, as it spoke about materials being held at the State Historical Society awaiting DNA testing. However, when someone actually contacted the Historical Society, they discovered not only that such a find had never been reported, but also that, Kossuth Center and Zoar are both ghost towns, and no college named after the 15th-centuiry Bohemian king Georg von Podebrad has ever existed. Moreover, the farmer that the story says discovered the tomb, Marvin Rainwater, appears to have been named after a country-western singer from the 1950s. The Internet abounds with blog posts that to this day repeat this story. If you’re lucky they may include a disclaimer that it may be a false story, urging readers to “please research it out and judge for yourself.”

Another strange fake news story regarding giants appeared in 2016. This one connects to the biblical story of a giant with extra toes and fingers from Gath, Goliath’s stomping ground, which I spoke about in Part One, and it also incorporated the popular red hair trope of these recent giant hoaxes. The story, which originated from a dubious interview with a supposed military contractor on the YouTube channel of a fringe conspiracist who produces a lot of content on the topic of giants. Already it doesn’t have a lot of credibility. The interview subject, called only Mr. K, described an encounter between an American Special Forces unit and a 13-foot-tall giant wielding a sword. The giant was described as having red hair, of course, and extra toes, a bonus, and also more than one set of teeth—a common detail from old 19th century giant skull discovery stories, which archaeologist Andy White has proven was actually just a common 19th century phrasing used to describe nice teeth, meaning a skull have two intact rows of teeth, top and bottom. Essentially, this hoax purposely incorporated elements from other hoaxes and from old fake news reports and from the bible in order to bolster its claims. Snopes reported a denial of the incident from the Department of Defense, but that isn’t going to do much to convince conspiracy nuts. Hoaxes like these are designed to be nearly impossible to disprove, since any denials are simply proof of the cover-up. Typically, fake giant news on the internet arrives in the form of an image of uncertain origin, shared and gone viral online, purporting to show a person crouched over some ridiculously massive skeleton or skull, with no actual information to fact-check and just the simple claim that the discovery of giants has been covered up. Snopes and National Geographic have debunked such images as manipulated photos and even tracked down the origin to a photoshop contest called “Archaeological Anomalies,” which challenged participants to fake strange pseudo-archaeological discoveries. Yet despite being revealed as fraudulent images, they continue to be spread along with the claim that the scientific community is hiding the discovery of these giants.

This is one manipulated image from the photoshop contest that has been passed off as real in conspiracist memes.

One extremely popular story is of gigantic skeletons with horns having been discovered in Sayre, Pennsylvania, and this one too is typically accompanied by a dubious image of a horned human skull. Even as recently as March this year, fake news memes circulated Facebook about this archaeological discovery in the 1880s, stating that besides the bony projections above the eyebrows of skulls recovered at the site, the skeletons themselves were of an unusual height, averaging 7 feet. The image concludes with the claim that “The bones were sent to the American Investigation Museum in Philadelphia, where they were stolen—never to be seen again.” In fact, there was no such institution as the American Investigating Museum, but there was indeed an excavation in Sayre, which took place in 1916 rather than the 1880s as the Facebook posts claim. Conducted by the so-called “Dean of American Archaeology,” Warren King Moorhead, as well as Pennsylvania historian George Donehoo and Alanson Skinner, archaeologist, ethnographer and curator of the Museum of the American Indian, or the American Indian Museum, which may be the origin of the false American Investigating Museum. This excavation was the culmination of an expedition to find the relics and remains of the Susquehannock tribe that Captain John Smith had long ago suggested were giants, so there may have already been some expectation that the remains uncovered might be those of giants. The New York Times and a variety of other newspapers reported on the find, specifically claiming that the remains of 68 men were found, averaging seven feet, “while many were much taller,” and with them were buried artifacts of unusual size to match their stature. The column further describes their notorious “protuberances of bone.” On first blush this would appear well-documented, but we have seen that we should not trust old newspaper articles and must look further for subsequent corrections. Indeed, only 2 weeks after the first news reports about gigantic, horned skeletons spread far and wide, the archaeologists themselves set the record straight in a lengthier feature article in the Times. In it, they make no mention of horned skulls, and state more specifically that they estimated the height of the skeletons at about six feet six inches, certainly tall enough to appear imposing to a European of average height making first contact with the tribe. In another newspaper column that has been uncovered, Alanson Skinner is quoted as setting the record straight on July 14th, 1916. He states that they had excavated 57 skeletons rather than 68, and that they appeared to be “perfectly normal individuals with the usual relics.” He further explains the origins of the horned skull as the result of a reporter misunderstanding or being misled about, or perhaps purposely misrepresenting, what was actually found: “a deposit of dear antlers,” laid over the bones, “hence, I suppose, the skull with horns on it!” In the Times feature article, they further describe other artifacts placed atop the bones: “Over the head of one of the skeletons was a bear’s jaw, indicating the bearskin headdress,” which the man had presumably worn in life. One wonders that this did not start a further rumor that this had been a fearsome race of men with two sets of jaws!

Beyond the claim about horns, which is rather unique among such stories, the claims of gigantism among the skeletons excavated at Sayre are pretty tame. A height of seven feet is not unheard of, though it may have been unusual for that to be the average among more than fifty people in a group. However, the archaeologists themselves corrected that to more like six and a half feet, which of course is even less difficult to believe. But it must be pointed out that determining the actual height of any of these persons in life would have been exceedingly difficult. As mentioned previously, modern forensic anthropologists have gotten it down to a science, able to determine the likely height of a man or woman based entirely on the length of a femur, but in the infancy of the science, skeletons were often measured as they lay, or if found in a sitting or curled position, manually laid out to be measured, a process that would not yield an accurate result. The reason for this is that once the flesh and cartilage of vertebrate remains have decomposed entirely, skeletons become more spread out and scattered than they would be when the bones are tightly attached with tendon and ligament and encased within the body’s musculature. This process is called disarticulation, and the effects of bone dispersion during disarticulation was not the subject of much scientific study until the 1970s. Indeed, the fact that skeletons dug out of burial mounds in the Americas were often reported to be unusually tall could be entirely explained by the fact that the farmers and antiquarians measuring them did not adequately understand the spreading of disarticulated bones. Even among the experts digging up the Susquehannock graves at Sayre, Pennsylvania, all were archaeologists and ethnographers, not anatomists or experts in fossilized remains, and therefore might not even be expected to know how best to measure the remains they disinterred. Moreover, their description of the graves they excavated seems to indicate that assembling a single skeleton would not have been a simple task. In the New York Times feature, they explain that “in some cases the bones had been buried long after death when the flesh had disappeared, and in these instances, the skull was usually deposited in the grave, and the long bones, fingers, and ribs heaped beside or over it. …in some of the graves a number of skeletons were found heaped together.” Just how they reassembled and measured remains deposited in such communal graves is a pressing question, as are the calculations they may have used if they reached their height estimations based on the measurements of long bones.

This image of the supposedly genuine horned skull that accompanies most online claims about giants skeletons in Sayre, Pennsylvania, can only be found online at Surnateum, the Museum of Supernatural History, which claims to have the object in its possession. It is easy to see here that it is NOT a giant skull.

So the horned giants of Sayre, Pennsylvania, appears to have been a fake news story from a bygone era recycled as a fake news Internet meme today that continues to convince Facebook aunties that preternatural skeletons have been discovered in Native American burial grounds. Further investigation into the image that always accompanies the post, of a seemingly human skull with horns and a kind of wreath around it, unsurprisingly reveals that it is not related to the Sayre, Pennsylvania, excavation at all. The paranormal podcast Astonishing Legends did some admirable investigation into this image in their series on giants, The Tall Ones, particularly in Part Two, and determined that the skull is supposedly held by an online Museum of Supernatural History called Surnateum, and they claim it is of normal human size but originated in France as a ceremonial object for cult worship of the Horned God of Wiccan belief. The fact that this website has more than one photo of the skull, the image typically spread with the Sayre excavation story and another with the skull sitting atop a basket—an image that I have been unable to find on any other website using reverse image searches—tends to support their claim that it is in their possession. However, as Astonishing Legends rightly pointed out, Surnateum appears to just be a website, with no physical location to visit and view exhibitions. Moreover, the Internet Archive shows their website has been active for about 10 years, since 2012, and searches of Google Books and the Ngram viewer turn up no publications mentioning the museum, which tends to cast doubt on their claim of having acquired the skull in 1952. However, using reverse image search and the Wayback Machine, I was able to track down the earliest surviving posting of this image, to an old StumbleUpon post in 2006 that mentions Surnateum and its claims that the skull came from France in the first half of the 20th century. However, on this post, which appears to be one of the first times the image was shared on the Internet as far as I can determine—the poster links to a mysticism messaging board page at Thothweb.com that is no longer working and is not archived in the Wayback Machine—the poster states that the skull’s whereabouts were at the time unknown, contradicting the museum’s current claim. All that remains would be for an expert in photo manipulation to examine the images for signs of falsification. But even without such analysis, I think it is fair to conclude that this artifact, if it even exists, is a fake. If the person or persons running Surnateum want the public to believe their claims that they possess this object, have examined it and have determined that “the horns are genuinely part of the skull,” they need to make the object available for scientific examination and public scrutiny. Regardless, even according to them, it is not the skull of a giant.

Believers in such giant hoaxes, though, fail to be convinced by the point that such bones do not appear to exist, for none are today exhibited publicly or have been surrendered for scientific examination. Instead of this logical evidence that such bones do not exist, conspiracists take it as evidence that the bones have been hidden away and covered up! We see some insinuation of this in the text on the viral horned skull image, and it was there all the way back in 2006 on the obscure StumpleUpon posting of the image I managed to find. The notion that the scientific community’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of giants was tantamount to a cover-up is not exactly new. Even during the Cardiff Giant hoax, critics of the statue passed off as a petrified giant were dismissed as obfuscators attempting to make the public doubt the truth of the Bible. But today, this conspiracy theory has gelled into a specific claim found on many websites and in numerous conspiracist books that the Smithsonian Institution is in particular responsible, taking giant bones and then purposely losing them so that they can never be examined again. These conspiracists even see NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as part of the plot. This admirable law, passed in 1990, made it illegal to dig up burial mounds and required the return of items to culturally affiliated Native American tribes. Well-known scholar and skeptical writer Jason Colavito has written the most extensively on the absurdity of this claim and has even traced it to its recent origins. Having done the research, Colavito makes a strong case that no claims of a Smithsonian cover-up ever existed before fringe researcher David Childress began to make them in the 1990s. Childress is not much of a reliable researcher, as he is known for making a lot of baseless claims about lost civilizations, UFOs and sasquatch, many of which rely on conspiracy speculation. Childress seems to have started the idea of “Smithsoniangate” in 1993, in defense of his racist ideas about a lost white race of Mound Builders, and the entire idea, ludicrously, may have been inspired by the iconic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, cited by Childress as an analogy, in which the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a massive warehouse. As Colavito points out, though, it is strange to think that these conspiracists believe the Smithsonian is some monolithic organization that controls the entire narrative of physical anthropology in the world. Such a conspiracy would need to be global, including every museum and research university on the planet. We know that such a conspiracy just defies simple logic. Furthermore, he points out that NAGPRA is only enforced on Federal land, so any extant giant skeletons out there on private or state land would not be subject to this supposed cover-up, yet we still find no big bones to support these claims. Lastly, though since the 1860s the Smithsonian has been on board with the Cuvier explanation of massive bones as belonging to extinct megafauna, it has been pointed out that, in the late 19th century the Smithsonian was still known to publish the work of antiquarians and archaeologists who claimed to have measured skeletons between 7 and 8 feet uncovered in mound explorations. Though these heights are not superhuman, and could still be explained by the spreading of disarticulated bones improperly measured, the reports seem to prove beyond doubt that back when such claims were commonly made, the Smithsonian was just as likely to amplify them as to silence them.

To conclude this series, perhaps it is time to take a wider and simpler view of the phenomenon, taking into account some relevant findings of modern science. If the claims about giants were accurate, it would mean that mankind has greatly reduced in size over the millennia of our existence. This is the concept of the degeneracy of humanity that lies behind all these tall tales. But modern science tells us that we are not shrinking over time, but rather growing. The average height of Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries was in the mid-five-foot range, and today we creep closer to a six-foot average. There are many reasons for a growth or reduction in average height among populations, though, and it tends to be dependent upon local conditions, making any calculation of worldwide averages misleading. Think about the shorter Europeans arriving in America and encountering the taller Native Americans that they thought to be giants simply because the natives might have had a half a foot or a foot’s greater height. Scholars who study average height across the ages argue that the height we reach depends on health trends related to climate and the availability of food. Considering this, it may be no surprise that Europeans were of shorter stock than the Native Americans they encountered. Science tells us that childhood nutrition has a lot to do with eventual height. A welcoming climate and plenty of food signals to the hypothalamus that living conditions are optimal, and thus the body should grow as quickly as possible in order to develop sexually and procreate. This further explains why heights have continued to grow on average in modern times, as nutrition and medicine have improved. However, rather than a steady growth over time, studies show cycles of height fluctuation. In the Middle Ages, it appears mankind was taller, but then heights began to fall before rising again centuries later. Fossil records of archaic man and subspecies like Neanderthals tend to show that we started out shorter, around five foot, five foot two, not as towering monstrosities or as diminutive little gnomes. And all the data we’ve gathered shows that our fluctuations in height have remained within a certain range, between about 5 feet and six feet, where average height tends to plateau. Of course there are exceptions, outliers typically related to physical conditions like those I’ve already discussed, but all signs point to the existence of giants as nothing more than fantasies that have always loomed large in our collective imaginations.

*

Until next time, remember the words of not Mark Twain, but rather Jonathan Swift, who in full, wrote, “[a]s the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”

Further Reading

Colavito, Jason. “How David Childress Created the Myth of a Smithsonian Archaeological Conspiracy.” Jason Colavito, 31 Dec. 2013, www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/how-david-childress-created-the-myth-of-a-smithsonian-archaeological-conspiracy.

---. “Is the Smithsonian Conspiring to Suppress the Truth about Giants?” Jason Colavito, 28 July 2013, www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/is-the-smithsonian-conspiring-to-suppress-the-truth-about-giants.

Dunning, Brian. “The Red Haired Giants of Lovelock Cave.” Skeptoid, 26 Nov. 2013, skeptoid.com/episodes/4390.

Lockwood, Brad. On Giants: Mounds, Monsters, Myth & Man; or, why we want to be small. Dog Ear Works, 2011.

Hill, Andrew. “Disarticulation and Scattering of Mammal Skeletons.” Paleobiology, vol. 5, no. 3, 1979, pp. 261–74. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2400259.

Leutwyler, Kristin. “American Plains Indians Had Health and Height.” Scientific American, 30 May 2001, www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-plains-indians-h/.

“A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes.” Quote Investigator, 13 July 2014, quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/.

“Mummified Giants ‘Found’ in Kossuth County.” Iowa Historian: The Newsletter of the State Historical Society of Iowa, vol. 17, no. 2, Spring 2003, p. 4, www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/45917253/spring-2003-state-historical-society-of-iowa/5.

Palma, Bethania. “Did U.S. Special Forces Kill a Giant in Kandahar?” Snopes, 31 Aug. 2016, www.snopes.com/fact-check/u-s-special-forces-killed-a-giant-in-kandahar/.

“The Petrified Man.” The Museum of Hoaxes, hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_petrified_man.

White, Andy. “The Modern Mythology of Giants: ‘Double Rows of Teeth.’” Andy White Anthropology, 28 Nov. 2014, www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/the-modern-mythology-of-giants-double-rows-of-teeth.

“Why Are We Getting Taller as a Species?” Scientific American, 29 June 1998, www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-we-getting-taller/#.

No Bones About It! Part One: GIANTS in the "Old World"

In the wake of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, believers in the literal truth of scriptures struggled to reconcile the new scientific understanding of prehistory with the biblical story of two progenitors in paradise and a global flood wiping out all but a pair of specimens of each animal species. In the 1870s, one uneducated man named George Smith got a job at the British Museum mainly because he was always hanging around there and scrutinizing the shards of clay tablets they displayed from Mesopotamia. After studying the artifacts for a decade, he one day deciphered an account of a deluge destroying humanity, all except for one man and his family. Smith leapt out of his chair and tore articles of his clothing off in his excitement, for he believed, and would convince others to believe, that he had just discovered evidence confirming the truth of the biblical flood story. What he had actually discovered was the world’s oldest known poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and for the rest of his life he would track down further shards, completing the text. What we can determine from the fact that this poem contained a flood tale similar to that of Genesis, along with the fact that many other cultures have produced comparable legends, is a worthy topic, but not the one we investigate today. In seeking to hold up the translated Epic of Gilgamesh as a primary source document proving the truth of the Bible from a literalist view, George Smith also promoted another fantastical claim made in the scriptures, for the ancient poem he had discovered was about a giant who stood seventeen feet tall. Long had it been believed by biblical scholars that in ancient prehistory, there had been a race of giants who inhabited the Earth, or that humans used to be much larger but had been growing smaller and smaller through the millennia, a process they called the degeneracy of the human race. The Bible gives us stories of mighty giants, Og and Goliath, whom it traces to the races of giants, the Rephaim and the Anakim. But more than this, it tells us of the origin of giants in Genesis 6, when it reveals that bene elohim, or “sons of god,” believed to be angels, came to the daughters of men and had children with them. These children, identified by biblical scholars as the original giants, were called the Nephilim in the original text. So while some might believe that mankind was created as a race of giants and has grown gradually more diminutive, such as French savant Mathieu Henrion, who in The Degeneration of the Human Race calculated that Adam was 128 feet tall and Eve 118 feet tall, others see a race of giant springing from an unholy union between fallen angels and human women, a kind of hybrid species that must have been destroyed by the flood. But of course, a poem, like Gilgamesh, whose historical accuracy cannot be confirmed, can never serve as evidence of the existence of such giants, whether they be early humans or angelic hybrid beings. The only scientific evidence for their existence would be bones, an osteological record of their existence. Many are the reports and repeated claims that such bones did exist and were at one time seen and even displayed, recorded by such ancient chroniclers and natural philosophers as Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Flavius Josephus, Plutarch, Philostratus, and Augustine, but words are not bones and can prove nothing but that stories of giants have long existed. Early editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica reprinted a lecture delivered to the Academy of Science at Rouen in 1764 by one Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a French science writer and surgeon, which lists dozens of enormous skeletons found throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Therefore, to many in the 19th century, the Epic of Gilgamesh’s depiction of an enormous protagonist was not fantastical. In the science literature and in newspapers of the day, as well as in sermons shouted from the pulpit, they were told that the evidence of ancient giants was endless, that it had been definitively proven. So they believed, without ever having seen gigantic human bones for themselves. And why hadn’t they seen them? Because they were nowhere to be found. If there were so many reports of colossal skeletons proving the existence giants, where are they? As one of my favorite musical groups, They Might Be Giants, once sang, “They might be giants/ They might be fake/ They might by lies/ They might be big, big, fake, fake lies…”

As we undertake this massive study (sorry, I might be making a lot of giant puns), we must start with what seems to me the root of all giant mythology, the Nephilim of Genesis. For biblical literalists, everything comes back to proving this throwaway line accurate. As mentioned, the verse in question, Chapter 6 verse 4, seems to indicate that Nephilim were the product of a union between angels and human women, but that is not the only interpretation. The words bene elohim, translated as “sons of god” and interpreted to mean angels, have alternative interpretations. Second century rabbis held that this verse described nobility interbreeding with commoners, while Augustine, writing in the 5th century, argued that it referred to intermarriage between the godly sons of Seth and the women of the lineage of Cain. But what is really interesting is the word Nephilim, which is the word usually translated as “giants.” There is no consensus of what this word means, and some versions of the scriptures just use the word Nephilim and make no attempt to translate it. Some argue that Nephilim is actually a form of the verb naphal, or “to fall,” making Nephilim more accurately a plural noun designating these people as “the fallen ones.” So why was it ever translated as giants? The only hint in this verse is that it says the Nephilim were “mighty men” and “men of renown.” We must look elsewhere in the Bible, where the word Nephilim is also found, to discover a link between Nephilim and giants. In Numbers chapter 13, verse 33, in the story of the 12 spies sent from among the Israelites to surveil the inhabitants of Canaan, we are introduced to the Anakim, the sons of Anak, who it says were descended from the Nephilim. Never mind how descendants of the Nephilim survived the Flood God sent to destroy them, I guess. Here, again, some versions of the Bible translate Nephilim as giant, but it is the description of the Anakim in Canaan that gives us the first hint of great size, as some spies reported that, compared to the Anakim, the Israelites were “like grasshoppers.” OK, but if we are to take this literally, considering a grasshopper maybe an inch high, compared to maybe an average five foot height among the Israelites, that means the Anakim must have been at least 300 feet tall. And if we are not to take this literally, if as seems more likely it was a matter of hyperbole, then it opens up the possibility that the spies were not talking about physical stature at all, but rather an indication of how powerful their foes seemed, perhaps in their fortifications or armaments. It is noteworthy that not all of the dispatched spies appear to have remarked on the Anakim being giants, which it would seem must be the first thing observed if they had been 300 feet tall, and their buildings large enough to house men of such height. Therefore, perhaps saying they felt like grasshoppers compared to them was simply another way of saying they appeared impressive, or “mighty,” as the earlier verse described the Nephilim. However, if we look at the preceding verses, we actually do see them mention the inhabitants of their promised land being “great in stature,” but hilariously, it is explicitly stated that this is a “bad report.” Verses 31-32 state: “But the men who had gone up with him replied, ‘We cannot go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are!’ So they gave the Israelites a bad report about the land that they had spied out: ‘The land we explored devours its inhabitants, and all the people we saw there are great in stature.’” It is then that they raise the legend of the Nephilim. Read with this context, it almost appears that the spies simply felt they were outmatched by the Canaanites and therefore tried to dissuade the Israelites from attacking them by lying about them being giants. Even a biblical literalist can take this meaning from the text.

Return of the Spies, 1860 woodcut by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld depicting the return of the 12 spies to the Israelites with their report of giants in Canaan.

The story of the 12 spies raises another possible rational explanation for all biblical giants, a viable alternative to the notion that any of these peoples were actually physically gargantuan to any preternatural degree. Instead, perhaps all of them were just what you might call giants among men, or men of renown, as the first verse mentioning Nephilim calls them. Just as the Canaanites whom the Israelite spies claimed were Anakim descendants of the Nephilim may have just been imposing figures that struck fear into their heart, perhaps that was case for many another supposed giant. We see Nimrod depicted in later generations as a giant, when the book of Genesis only calls him a mighty warrior. Then there is Og, a king said to be descended from the Rephaim, another group said to be connected to Anakim and Nephilim and thus to have been giants. Og is said to be a giant because the Bible describes his bed as being very large, but of course, a king might be expected to have a very large bed. So is being remembered as a giant simply one of the perks of being rich and powerful, or renowned as a great warrior or leader? That certainly seems to be the case with the notorious and mysterious Gog of Magog, corrupted to become two figures, Gog and Magog, later associated with Mongol horde and, due to the growth of fearful legends, becoming giants and even beasts. And this myth was translated by Geoffrey of Monmouth into a legend of a giant in Albion named Gogmagog. Reputation breeds legend, which invariably ascribes superhuman qualities to figures. Scholars now believe that Gilgamesh was indeed a real king, who perhaps inspired the writing of poems in which he was depicted as physically larger than he actually was. We see the same thing happen more recently, in America, with our tall tales. Any U.S. citizen is probably familiar with the legend of Paul Bunyan. Many are the roadside attraction carvings of this gigantic lumberjack and his equally massive pet blue ox. Some researchers have suggested that the oral tradition that started this tall tale had its origins in a real lumberjack. One suspect is a French-Canadian lumberjack named Fabian Fournier, nicknamed “Saginaw Joe,” while another is a little know soldier who fought in a Canadian rebellion named Paul Bon Jean. These claims remain unverified, but it illustrates well the idea that, even in more modern times, the exploits of a real person might end up blowing that figure up to outsized proportions.

It is harder to make such interpretations work with stories that explicitly mention a figure’s measurements, however. We may dismiss vague statements about stature and contrasts to insects, and we might disregard Gilgamesh’s seventeen-foot height, recorded as it is in an epic poem, which we expect to be fictionalized. But what are we to make of the character of Goliath in 1 Samuel chapter 17, verse 4, the Philistine, champion of a city called Gath, said to be a descendant of the Rephaim and described quite precisely as having a height of “six cubits and a span.” In today’s common measurements, that would make Goliath almost nine feet 9 inches tall, or nearly three meters. There is no getting around this precise measurement. In fact, it is the only specific height recorded in all of the Bible. Well, not so fast. As I said before, words are not bones that can be so easily measured. So we must examine further. In modern times, an archaeological site known as Tell es-Safi has been revealed to be the Philistine city of Gath from which originated Goliath, as well as numerous other giants, if the scriptures are to be believed on this account. Professor of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies Jeffrey Chadwick, who is involved in excavations at the site, argues that such measurements actually varied from place to place in the ancient world, and that at Gath, a cubit would have been around 54 centimeters, or 1.77 feet, and a span, sometimes thought of as half a cubit, was actually reckoned there as being about 22 centimeters, or 0.72 feet. So by his reckoning, if Goliath was 6 cubits and a span by Gath metrics, that would have made him over eleven feet tall. However, some earlier versions of this Bible verse, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, have Goliath ringing in at only 4 cubits and a span, which would only be about 6 foot 9, or if Chadwick is correct, more like 7 foot 10. While the former is tall but not abnormal, by our standards today, the latter does seem pretty gigantic—but not unheard of. The tallest man on record, Robert Wadlow, measured nearly 9 feet in height! Still, Chadwick suggests that the 4 cubits and a span measurement may be suspect as well. He notes that the composer of 1 Samuel would not have had the chance to measure Goliath, so the measurement must have come from oral tradition. He further observes that a wall he has excavated in what was once Gath happens to measure exactly 4 cubits and a span wide, and he speculates that applying this exact measurement to Goliath may have been a way to indicate, metaphorically, how stout and impenetrable he was as their champion, likening him to their protective wall. That does little to explain the supposed great weight of Goliath’s armor, also mentioned in those verses, but it does make the exact measurements of the figure seem far less certain. And if you need further evidence that Gath was no city of giants, take the words of Professor Aren Maeir of the archaeology department of Bar-Ilan University, who was in charge of the Tell es-Safi dig site as he describes the excavation’s findings: “There are no skeletons of people who are taller than NBA centers.”

David and Goliath, a color lithograph by Osmar Schindler (c. 1888)

Another tale out of 2 Samuel, chapter 21, verse 20, tells us of yet another man from Gath of “stature,” said to have been descended from the Rephaim, and so typically translated as a “giant.” This figure lacks any specific height, but we are given the further interesting detail that he “had on every hand six fingers and on every foot six toes.” Interestingly, this story raises the idea of a giant as a kind of monster, or some sort of mutation with other differences from humans besides his great height. It leads one to think of the giants of Greek mythology, such as the Gigantes, described by Ovid as having a hundred arms and serpents for feet, or the Cyclopes with their single eyeballs. It leads one to wonder if there might be medical explanations for such tales. The giants of Greek myth may be more difficult to explain in this way, but Goliath and other biblical giants said to be from Gath might be explainable. For example, modern science and the annals of the Guinness Book of World Records tell us that, indeed, giants do exist, but not as the towering monstrosities of myth. Rather, they are unfortunate people who suffer from pituitary disorders that are passed hereditarily, causing conditions such as gigantism, or acromegaly when onset occurs during adulthood. These individuals suffer greatly from their conditions and do not tend to live to any advanced age. The tallest man on record, Robert Wadlow, who was eight foot eleven and over 400 pounds, passed away at 22 years old. As has been argued in at least one scholarly paper, the Bible’s mentioning of more than one supposed giant in Gath may suggest a family in the area whose member’s suffered from just such a familial pituitary disorder. The researchers further speculate that one member of said family may have had the genetic mutation polydactyly, the growth of extra fingers and toes. There are even known overgrowth syndromes, such as Simpson-Golabi-Behmel syndrome, which result in facial and skeletal abnormalities and polydactyly, causing one to wonder if some ancient giant stories might not be accurate records of individuals living with physical disorders that sadly made them appear monstrous to others. If this were the case, it would have been rare then, as it is now, explaining why their remains tend to be elusive.

While we would expect the remains of such medically afflicted persons to be rare, ancient reports of the discoveries of such gigantic remains actually seem quite common, as previously stated. Herodotus talks of the discovery of a “coffin seven cubits in length,” or about 10 and a half feet, and the report that the body inside was equal in length. Plutarch talks of the discovery of “a coffin of a man of extraordinary size,” thought to be Theseus. Phlegon of Tralles, in his On Marvels, shares a report credited to Apollonius about the discovery of “a sepulchre of one hundred cubits in length, in which there was a skeleton of the same dimensions,” and further tells the tale of some Carthaginians digging up “two skeletons placed in coffins, one of which was twenty-three, and the other twenty-four cubits in length,” or between 34 and 36 feet. Perhaps my point is already becoming clear. These reports describe the dimensions of coffins or tombs, only sometimes with further assertions that the remains within were of the same length, when of course, a thing cannot fit within a container of the same length. Never mind the fact that these reports are all secondhand or even further removed, none having been observed by the persons writing about them, and thus are no better than legends, even if there is truth to them, there is a simpler explanation. Sir Jean Chardin, a travelling French scholar of the Near East, was among the first to observe that ancient peoples were known to make tombs and sarcophagi much larger than the bodies they contained. For the same reason, mummified remains often gave the further impression of great size when the remains within were not unusually large. It seems to have been a way to give a strong impression of the dead. Some such reports throughout history mention actual massive bones, though. For example, in Crete alone, there are reports of earthquakes and floods opening chasms and revealing skeletons between 50 and 69 feet in length, if we can trust standard modern cubit conversion. The question remains: Where are these skeletons? Do we actually have a bone to pick, so to speak?

While the massive bones and giant skeletons reportedly discovered in ancient times have long since been lost to history, we have a simple explanation for them derived from the supposed bones of giants that have been displayed in more modern times. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, near the castle Chaumont in France, a series of huge bones were unearthed and thereafter exhibited in various cities throughout the country. According to their exhibitor, they were the bones of a Teutonic barbarian king, and according to a Jesuit priest, Jacques Tissot, who helped publicize their existence, their size proved the claims of giants in scriptures. These bones are kept today at the French National Museum of Natural History. Certain gargantuan bones discovered in the Americas even convinced one of the fathers of paleontology, Franciscan naturalist José Torrubia, that the legends of antediluvian giants must be true, prompting his composition of the influential work:  La gigantologia Spagnola. In the American colonies of the 18th century, Puritan minister Cotton Mather, early adopter of smallpox inoculation practices and erstwhile instigator of witch hunts in New England, firmly believed that enormous bones unearthed in America definitively proved the existence of the Nephilim. In 1705, a discovery of huge fossilized molars and leg bones near Albany sent Mather into a tizzy, declaring to the world that proof of antediluvian giants had been discovered in the New World. There were already rumblings, however, from critics, that all these enormous bones, some of which were even being displayed in houses of worship, venerated as gifts from God to validate the beliefs of His faithful, were not actually giant human bones at all, but rather from large beasts. The skeleton of Teutobochus, the barbarian king exhibited throughout France, was exposed by a member of the Medical Faculty of Paris, Jean Riolan the Younger, as being the bones of something like an elephant, perhaps one of Hannibal’s, left behind during his campaigns in Gaul. Certainly, the anatomist Riolan could discern that its exhibitors had merely arranged the bones into a vaguely human form. And the famed naturalist Georges Cuvier was among the first to suggest that the large fossilized bones and teeth found in the Americas and promoted by Torrubia and Mather appeared to belong to the extinct mastodon. Think back to the many reports of dead sea serpents that I discussed in my series on the subject, and the so-called globsters that washed up on shores and were presumed to be sea monsters but were in fact whale carcasses or the remains of other known marine animals. As the science of paleontology has progressed, all such giant bones have been proven to be the remains of mastodons or other creatures. In fact, with the cartilage having decomposed away, the mammoth skull appears to have one large hole in the center, giving the impression of a single massive eyeball; thus it has been argued that mammoth bones were also the origin of the myth of Homer’s giant Cyclops.

An example of an elephant skull with a central nasal cavity that may have been mistaken for a single cyclopean eye.

Claims of the bones of giants being discovered continued throughout the 19th century, many of them said to have been dug out of Native American burial mounds in America, and I will discuss these in great detail in part two of this series. Let us conclude part one by examining the so-called Giant of Castelnau, which is really just a few bone fragments excavated from a Bronze Age cemetery near Montpellier, France, in 1890. The anthropologist who dug them up and afterward promoted them as evidence of a giant, was Georges Vacher de Lapouge. According to Lapouge, it was “unnecessary to note that these bones are undeniably human, despite their enormous size,” but it’s unclear how he determined that they were human and not, for example, those of a mammoth or some other creature. In the surviving sketch of the fragments, which is all we have to judge by, we see half a femur and a portion of what he claims is a tibia, but the length of neither could have been measured, broken as they are. For scale, they are sketched with a “normal” humerous recovered from the same site, which itself is fragmentary. It begs the question, why not depict them in comparison to intact bones of the same kind, his fragment of a femur next to a normal whole femur? It seems sketchy, if you’ll excuse the pun. Lapouge states, “The volumes of the bones were more than double the normal pieces to which they correspond,” which would tend to indicate they may not have been human, or at least not “undeniably” so. An anatomist from Montpellier reportedly examined them and called them “abnormal in dimension,” but perhaps they were only abnormal if one was insisting on seeing them as human. The same anatomist stated that they were “of morbid growth,” or “diseased.” Is this evidence that they were simply fragments of the skeleton of a person with some pituitary disorder or overgrowth syndrome that resulted in skeletal abnormalities? Another professor from University of Montpellier, according to The Popular Science News of Boston, August, 1890, determined the bones were “normal in every respect.” So what are we to believe? The bones were reportedly given over to the French Academy of Sciences, where they have since, apparently, disappeared. Perhaps this is because they were nothing more than unremarkable bone fragments that didn’t actually warrant much attention and thus were filed away and forgotten, but as we will see in part two of this series, such cases today tend to encourage baseless conspiracy theory.

Further Reading

Acocella, Joan. “How To Read 'Gilgamesh.’” The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/how-to-read-gilgamesh.

Bressan, David. “Fire burn, and cauldron bubble… Bones of Giants.” Scientific American, 29 Oct. 2013, blogs.scientificamerican.com/history-of-geology/fire-burn-and-cauldron-bubble-bones-of-giants/.

Cole, J.R. “It Ain't Necessarily So: Giants and Biblical Literalism.” Creation/Evolution Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 49-53. National Center for Science Education, ncse.ngo/it-aint-necessarily-so-giants-and-biblical-literalism.

Dahlbom, Taika Helola. “A mammoth history: the extraordinary journey of two thighbones.” Endeavor, vol. 31, no. 3, Sep. 2007, pp. 110-114. ScienceDirect, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160932707000610?via%3Dihub.

Donnelly, Deirdre E., and Patrick J. Morrison. “Hereditary Gigantism-the biblical giant Goliath and his brothers.” The Ulster Medical Journal, vol. 83, no. 2, May 2014, pp. 86-88. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4113151/.

“Fragments on Giants.” Jason Colavito. www.jasoncolavito.com/fragments-on-giants.html.

Jarus, Owen. “Biblical Goliath may not have been a giant.” LiveScience, 1 Dec. 2020, www.livescience.com/was-biblical-goliath-a-giant.html.

Lockwood, Brad. On Giants: Mounds, Monsters, Myth & Man; or, why we want to be small. Dog Ear Works, 2011.

“New Excavation Reveal Goliath’s Birthplace Was More Giant than Believed.” Israel Faxx, vol. 27, no. 149W, July 2019, p. 11. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=137768865&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

“New World Giants: The Study of American Fossils by ‘One of the Founders of Paleontology.’” Martayan Lan, www.martayanlan.com/pages/books/B5726/jose-torrubia/la-gigantologia-spagnola.

“A Pre-Historic Giant.” Popular Science News, vol. 24, Aug. 1890, www.google.com/books/edition/Popular_Science_News/vmHnAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Giant+of+Castelnau&pg=PA113&printsec=frontcover.

“A Race of Giants in Old Gaul.” The New York Times, 3 Oct. 1892, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1892/10/03/106086633.pdf.

White, Andy. “Cotton Mather: America's First Nephilim Enthusiast.” Andy White Anthropology, 26 Feb. 2015, www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/cotton-mather-americas-first-nephilim-enthusiast.

The Lost Empire of Tartaria

You have heard of the ancient lost civilizations of Atlantis. Perhaps you’ve also heard about the lost continents of Lemuria and Mu. You’ve heard me talk about beliefs in the lost cradles of civilization Hyperborea and Ultima Thule. But have you heard about the lost empire of Tartaria? Depending on your interests and thus the calibration of your YouTube recommendation and search algorithms and the pages you find promoted to you on Facebook, you may have learned a great deal about this globe-spanning mega-civilization in recent years. For example, you may have been surprised to find out that this ancient civilization, which originated in central Eurasia as a vast kingdom encompassing most of Siberia, was so successful that it spread around the world, even into the Americas, and that even today we can see the remnants of the civilization’s grand architecture. Your surprise may have turned to wonder and dismay as you learned of a great worldwide catastrophe, a flood akin to Noah’s but composed of mud that destroyed most evidence of this magnificent civilization. Your wonder and dismay likely further turned to shock and outrage as you learned of a global conspiracy to suppress the history of the Tartarian Empire, to cover up the existence of this mud flood, and to claim the impressive accomplishments of their advanced culture as our own. So throw out everything you know about the history of the world, disregard everything you think you understand about ethnology, geography, architecture, and geology, and prepare to be awakened from the sleep of ignorance, liberated from the herd of the sheeple, and initiated into the mystery of Tartaria!

*

If you’re still reading, I’ll come clean. I don’t actually believe this claptrap. But there is something very satisfying to me about the idea that some proponent of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy mythos might stumble upon or seek out this blog post and think at first that I’m promoting this nonsense, when actually this is perhaps the most absurd pseudohistorical conspiracy delusion I’ve ever heard. It cannot be taken seriously, making it a perfect topic for my April Fools episode. However, there are other reasons I feel compelled to address this somewhat obscure claim now. First, it is new and growing. Some have likened it to Qanon because of its agglomeration of other conspiracy claims, and while it is still in its infancy, it seems important to make the public aware of it and its rather surprising implications. According to Brian Dunning, whose Skeptoid blog and podcast covered it briefly about a year ago, the Tartarian Empire claims exist solely online, having first appeared on Youtube conspiracist channels around 2016 and gaining traction in 2017 and beyond on Reddit, Facebook, and elsewhere. He confirmed this using Google Trends (though when I tried to reproduce his findings, I was seeing it spike more in 2018). A quick search of word frequency in publications using Google Ngram corroborates that the topic became more common in the mid- to late 2010s but also suggests that it was not a purely online phenomenon, although any early conspiracist publications could very well have been inspired from online content, rather than vice-versa. However, the reliability of these tools in determining the origin of such pseudohistories and conspiracy claims is decidedly questionable. For example, it is entirely possible that these conspiracy claims crossed over into the English-speaking world from foreign language publications that aren’t mined in an Ngram search, or from online content in another language that, if I understand the tool correctly, wouldn’t show up in a Google Trends search, even if it were set to conduct a worldwide search, because the keyword used is in in English. This appears to be the case with the claims about a global Tartarian Empire, as there is good reason to believe this pseudohistory originated in Russia and may have spread to the West as online propaganda or disinformation. So, surprisingly, this ridiculous topic is actually very relevant to current events, particularly the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in the Ukraine. But I will get to that. Let us start with a simple refutation of the Tartaria mythos.

Historical map designating most of Inner Eurasia and Siberia as “La Grande Tartarie”

It has been suggested that the entirety of the Tartaria conspiracy myth can be blamed on conspiracists looking at historical maps and getting confused because of their ignorance of certain aspects of history. In truth, there appears to be something far more insidious behind this conspiracy myth than simple misunderstanding and well-meant speculation, but let’s have a look at this explanation just the same, as we will have to address the name Tartaria anyway. So the idea goes that the whole thing is due to the fact that many old maps label massive swathes of inner Eurasia as Tartaria, or Tartary. It is claimed that, lacking the knowledge of what this term referred to, conspiracists jumped to the conclusion that there must have been a huge kingdom or nation-state called Tartaria that has since disappeared. From there, the theory goes, they let their speculation about this presumably lost civilization run wild. It is certainly true that these old maps using the label of Tartary or Tartaria are frequently raised as evidence for these outlandish conspiracy claims, and their proponents do indeed reject the simple and historically accurate explanation for why these regions were called Tartary. Prior to the 18th century, the West lacked much knowledge about the peoples and societies within Siberia and Central and Inner Asia and simply called all of them “Tatars”, which then became “Tartars,” and their lands “Tartary.” It was a blanket term, similar to the way ancient Greeks called all the lands northeast of Europe Scythia, and any nomadic people from that vague area came to be called Scythians. Some scholars suggest the initial name “Tatar” derived from a Chinese word, dada, which dated to the 9th century C.E. and was used to refer to any nomads north of China. Indeed, it was the bellicose northern peoples of the Eurasian Steppe that the Chinese had built the Great Wall to keep out who would eventually come to be called “Tatars” by the West, such as the Manchu and Mongol peoples, as well as Turkic tribes. As mentioned in my episode on Prester John, a legend that somewhat coincides with Tartaria claims since it talks of a magical kingdom in the same region, the term “Tatar” appears to have become “Tartar” because of a racist pun. According to Matthew Paris, King Louis IX of France, hearing news about the hellish ravages of Mongol forces invading Europe, said of the so-called Tatars, “Well, may they be called Tartars, for their deeds are those of fiends from Tartarus,” which of course was the Latin name for Hades. Thus the corruption “Tartars” was supposedly coined, basically calling the Mongol hordes demons from hell. As the West did not have much concrete knowledge of the political geography of the region from whence these hordes had come, European cartographers indiscriminately slapped the name Tartary, or Tartaria, onto vast tracts of land. In subsequent centuries, the label was persistently applied to a wide range of distinct peoples and regions, such that later maps might distinguish Lesser from Greater Tartary, or Eastern from Western Tartary. Eventually, as ethnological knowledge of the region’s peoples grew, further distinctions had to be made, such that those in Manchuria were called Manchu Tartars, and those in the eastern reaches of the Russian Tsardom were called Muscovite Tartars. Gradually, the term was dropped altogether, with only the occasional remnant to be found. As will be seen, the origin of the Tartarian Empire conspiracy claims found online today are not the result of simple ignorance of the story behind some old cartographic labels, but this ignorance is clearly exploited by or feeds into the conspiracy claim, providing plenty of fodder for supposed primary source evidence that may seem convincing to a lay person who encounters these conspiracy claims online. 

It is because of such out of date and inaccurate maps, along with a heaping portion of racial stereotyping, that the belief in a Tartarian Empire in the Americas can be found. That’s right, we are not only talking about an inner Eurasian lost civilization. As I indicated in the beginning, believers claim the remnants of a lost Tartarian Empire can be found all over the United States as well. As evidence, they will cite maps from the 17th century that happen to have the word “Tartorum” near the Bering Strait and visually group North America with Eastern Asia according to the same color. With a simple translation of the Latin, they would be able to tell that the blurb with the word “Tartorum” is describing the Mongol tribes on the other side of the strait, not in North America, and describes a simple rural life that is very different from the technologically advanced civilization they imagine Tartaria was. Likewise, they will bring up a 19th century map of the “Distribution of Races in the World” that, again, color codes sections of Eurasia and much of North America to indicate the presence of the same culture. This racist 19th century map chooses the color yellow for Asia and these portions of North America, and tellingly, it labels these areas Mongolian, not Tartarian. The cartographer appears to have mistakenly conflated Mongolian and Inuit cultures, as the portions of North America identified as Mongolian are predominately north of the Arctic Circle. Of course, in the distant past, Native American peoples likely did migrate across the strait and were distantly related to Eurasian nomads. Specifically, ethnologists recognize that the Yupik aboriginal peoples dwell in both Alaska and Siberia. But again, we are talking about rural nomads, not an advanced civilization that, according to believers, is responsible for the construction of architecturally magnificent edifices. Nevertheless, to the proponents of the Tartarian Empire fiction, these cherry-picked maps are evidence that Grand Tartary, the mythical civilization that they have built up in their minds to Atlantean proportions, was present in the Americas, and though their own false evidence would suggest it could only be found above the Arctic Circle, they claim it was present everywhere. As proof, they point to almost any ornate building constructed in any architectural style other than modern, and they say that must have been a Tartarian structure, because we don’t build things like that in our culture. This may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. They really do point to any pre-modern structure that is especially impressive and elaborately decorative, and they claim it was not built, could not have been built, by builders of our culture.

Racist 19th century map asserting Mongolian cultures are present in North America.

In some ways the conspiracist proponents of a global Tartarian Empire are traditionalists, or nostalgists. They seem to value only an old-fashioned or ancient style of building and reject all modernist architecture as ugly, nondescript, and thus inferior. One Norwegian Youtuber focused on Tartaria, Joachim Skaar, lumps all of modernist, and therefore non-Tartarian, architecture together under the label of Brutalism, although that is a very specific offshoot of Modernist architecture that emerged in the 1950s and declined in the 1970s. However, the name and the aesthetics provide a striking counterpoint to what he and others call Tartarian architecture, which again lumps together many known styles, from Classical, Baroque, Gothic and Renaissance to Beaux Arts, Neoclassical, Second Empire and Greek Revival. Again, any sufficiently ornate building, with columns supporting entablatures with carved friezes and cornices with scrollwork, or any building with an especially elaborate roof like a mansard or a cupola or a large dome, seems, in their fevered imaginations, to be a relic of this lost civilization. As evidence, they hold up old photos from 19th century America, in which can be seen such grand edifices, usually municipal buildings like city halls or state capitols, rising above simple wood frame houses and shacks, or on otherwise empty stretches of dirt fields. To them, these are evidence that 19th century Americans were living among the ruins of this vanished civilization, when in fact the photos depict nation building. With a basic grasp of the fact that the construction of such government buildings was well funded, and that architects were specifically sought out and well paid to design impressive architectural structures, it’s quite clear why such projects were initially surrounded by empty space and simple A-frame clapboard hovels. But like most conspiracists, the Tartarian Empire proponents believe there are secrets to uncover in almost any old book or photo they pore over, no matter how widely available they might be. They find beautiful old buildings that no longer exist, and they decide they have uncovered another clue about the destruction of Tartarian structures. For example, the Chicago Federal Building, whose dome was larger than the U.S. Capitol’s dome, but which was demolished after about 60 years, or the slender, 27-story Singer Building in New York City, which for a time was the tallest building in the world but was leveled in the 1960s. Their speculation about the ancient and mysterious origins of such buildings simply disregard their known history. To wit, the head of the Singer Manufacturing Company, makers of the famous sewing machines, commissioned the Singer building as their New York Headquarters and hired architect Ernest Flagg to design it. Such historical details, to the Tartaria conspiracists, are just more lies covering up the truth.

Perhaps the most absurd claim they’ve made is that the impressive temporary complex of ornate facades built out of straw and plaster of Paris for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—the so-called White City—was actually a grand Tartarian metropolis that “they” have pretended was not real. Much of their idiotic claims boil down to not just ignorance of history, but amateurish misunderstandings about architecture that I imagine would really gall any actual architects. They point to the fact that grand buildings of certain distinct styles can be found all over the world, but of course that is because architectural trends spread internationally. They claim that the shift away from these ornate buildings that are so aesthetically pleasing to them, and the movement toward the concrete and steel architecture of modernism, is a clear sign of the disappearance of the Tartarian culture, when in fact, there are plenty of books written by Modernist architects and city planners like Le Corbusier that expound on their reasoning and argument for moving away from more classical styles. And finally, they claim that our culture simply couldn’t have produced such beautiful structures, and yet plenty of New Classical architects design such buildings even today. Take for example, the neo-Gothic Whitman College at Princeton, built in 2002, or the Classical Greek architecture of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center built in Nashville, the so-called Athens of the South, in 2006. Simply put, one gets the impression that these Tartarian Empire Youtubers and Reddit posters are just basement dwellers in boring towns who have only recently discovered the beauty of fancy buildings and simply cannot believe such structures are American. Instead, they envision a massive mega-culture of advanced builders. Joachim Skaar, the aforementioned Youtuber, has been quoted as claiming, “The same people that built the Capitol in Washington built the pyramids in Egypt,” and that gives us a sense of the great depths of ignorance displayed by these conspiracists.

An image of the State Capitol of Iowa, with less impressive buildings surrounding it. Just the sort of image that looks like proof to a Tartarian Empire believer.

Equally absurd are their explanations for why there does not exist ample archaeological evidence of this widespread culture, aside, from, oh, say, all the surviving buildings they claim are artifacts of the culture and all the photographs of their buildings that are no longer standing. Well, they say there was a worldwide catastrophe that destroyed much of their culture. It was much like the Flood of Genesis, in that it swept into every Tartarian city across the globe, destroying the inhabitants and their records and monuments. They call it the “great reset.” Unlike the biblical flood, though, this was a “mud flood,” and in its wake, entire grand Tartarian cities were left entirely or partially buried. Just what would cause such a global flow of mud is not typically clarified. Some have suggested that it was the result of a worldwide volcanic event, caused by mud volcanos. Mud volcanos are real, and instead of producing magma flows they produce slurries of warm mud. However, even some cursory research into mud volcanos would reveal that they are typically small and don’t cause mass destruction. In fact, they are often identified more as hot springs, and can be enjoyed as natural mud baths. It’s pretty clear some Tartaria “researcher” went looking for a feasible reason for the “mud flood” they invented, found mention of a mud volcano, and said “Bingo!” not bothering to read much more into the topic. But of course, anyone who would believe in a global mud flood isn’t thinking too hard about the science of geology or the analysis of strata performed at any dig site that could handily disprove their “theory.” But they still find supposed evidence for their mud flood, once again in old photos. They bring up black and white photos from the 19th century that show people digging, whether employing hand shovels, mule teams, or steam shovels, especially if there is a fancy building around them. Of course, civic engineering requires a lot of digging like this, even today. Hills must be flattened and depressions filled in order to make streets flat. It’s no great mystery. But Tartarian Empire conspiracists go further, pointing to photos of Gilded Age buildings with windows at ground level and saying that they all appear to be sunken into the ground. Again, these “theorists” seem woefully unfamiliar with buildings generally, but maybe they aren’t basement dwellers after all, since if they were, they would easily recognize these as basement windows. But perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this mud flood aspect of their claims is that, since they’re using photos from the 1800s as evidence, they played themselves and had to place their supposed worldwide mud flood catastrophe in the 19th century. That’s right. These geniuses claim that a global catastrophe happened sometime between the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, and there is no record of it anywhere, and they don’t even bother explaining how it only seemed to affect the Tartarians and us lousy non-Tartarians escaped it just fine.

But hold on! The other element of the so-called “great reset,” besides the global destruction caused by the mud flood, was the purposeful erasure of Tartarian history. Or at least, that’s what they claim. In fact, believers in Tartaria claim that most major armed conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries were actually about Tartaria. They say Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia was really a war against Tartaria, and that after the mud flood, the World Wars of the 20th century were all actually just excuses to destroy all remaining traces of Tartaria. What is their evidence of such a cover-up? Well, they too use Google Ngram, and they find it suspicious that use of the words “Tartaria” and “Tartary” plummet to nonexistent following the 19th century. But of course, we know why that is. It’s because we stopped using an inaccurate blanket term that was actually a pun suggesting they were from hell and instead started calling them Mongols or some other more accurate name. However, never let it be said that conspiracy speculators aren’t ingenious, for they managed in their blindly focused keyword searches to turn up an obscure declassified CIA report on “National Cultural Development under Communism.” In it, there exists a paragraph that is presented as smoking gun evidence of a cover-up of Tartaria’s history. It reads as follows:

…let us take the matter of history, which, along with religion, language and literature, constitute the core of a people’s cultural heritage. Here again the Communists have interfered in a shameless manner. For example, on 9 August 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting in Moscow, issues a directive ordering the party’s Tartar Provincial Committee “to proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history.” In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten—let us be frank, was to be falsified…

The obvious problem here, of course, is that the CIA appear to be condemning Communist revision of “Tartar” history, which simply isn’t in keeping with the idea that the erasure of Tartarian history was a global conspiracy, which likely would have to involve the CIA. But the real issue is that this oft-used quote is taken entirely out of context. Only this paragraph in the entire report mentions “Tartaria,” and this is only because they are quoting a Communist committee that uses the term. The rest of the report makes it clear that the CIA is talking about Communist attacks on Islam and the Muslim peoples within their authority. Furthermore, if they even gave enough context to quote the entirety of the last sentence, it would be revealed that the history of these Muslim people was being rewritten, or falsified, “in order to eliminate references to Great Russian aggressions…so that the Russians always appear in a good light.” And this, the fact that Russians have long been engaged in a revision of history, producing a pseudohistory intended to serve their political purposes and falsely burnish their image, leads us to what may be the true origin and sinister purpose of this batshit crazy conspiracy claim.

Mud Volcanoes at Gobustan State Reserve. Not exactly a global threat. Image credit: Nick Taylor, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The way that the Tartaria conspiracy claims blithely do away with massive parts of world history somewhat reminds me of the claims of chronological revisionists that I previously discussed at great length in a three part series. Indeed, searching Google Trends for Tartaria, one sees Phantom Time, the chronological revision theory of Herbert Illig that I spoke about in my series, listed as a related query. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the origins of the Tartaria claims can actually be traced to the chronological revisionist writings of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. I encourage listeners to go back to my Chronological Revision Chronicles series, specifically Part One, The Fomenko Timeline, to hear more about this figure and his theories. In brief, Fomenko claims to use statistical analysis and astronomical data to prove that entire eras of accepted history didn’t actually occur. Instead, he argues that much of accepted history is actually duplicated from medieval history. He has been nicknamed The Terminator due to his penchant for finding reasons to delete vast swathes of history, and his rewriting of biblical history has drawn the ire of the Russian Orthodox church. But Fomenko found popularity and success in writing about history, with his “New Chronology” book series, History: Fiction or Science, bringing him far more fame than he had ever earned as a mathematician. He claims to be politically impartial, but historians and critics of his work, especially Konstantin Sheiko, who wrote extensively about the implications of Fomenko’s claims in his PhD thesis, point out that Fomenko’s work fits clearly into an ethno-nationalist tradition of producing pseudohistory and alternative history that presents the Russian people and their history in certain favorable ways. As the CIA report I referenced indicates, this historical negation, denialism, and revisionism had been perpetrated by the Soviets, but as Sheiko describes, it continued, in a somewhat different vein, after the fall of the Soviet Union, as Russia sought out some post-Soviet identity. Among these pseudo-historians, Russian identity, its greatness, is in its power and control of space on the world map, thus they find reason to suggest that a great Russian Empire existed long before the Soviet Union or the Tsardom of Rus. Others in this category see Russian identity wrapped up in racial heritage, and they trot out the old myth of an Aryan people. Though he feigns academic impartiality, Fomenko’s work is at the forefront of this movement to forge a false ethno-nationalist historical identity for Russia. When he eliminates entire periods of history, he typically claims that they are duplications of Russian ancient history. The Holy Roman Empire? Well that is just the appropriated history of a great Russian Empire. His alternate history is at its heart, one in which the accomplishments of Russia are far greater, and its greatness has been stolen from it and attributed to other regions and historical periods. According to Fomenko, the Mongols, formerly known as Tatars or Tartars, did not exist, as such. Instead, he claims that there existed a vast Slav-Turk Empire, not a Mongol Horde but rather a Russian Horde. In this way, he and other Russians can deny that they ever came under the Mongol Yoke. The Mongol invasion, he claims, was a myth invented by the Romanov Dynasty and the Church. In fact, Genghis Khan was a Russian, complete with European features. So under it all, all the mathematical reasoning, the elaborate statistical and astronomical proofs, behind Anatoly Fomenko’s New Chronology, we see the ugly head of Aryan mythology, of white supremacy, rearing.

Is the Tartaria nonsense actually the New Chronology repackaged? In turn, is it just Russian ethno-nationalist propaganda as the work of Fomenko is revealing itself to be? Well, you could describe both as the myth of a vast Siberian / Inner Asian empire whose history has been stolen and erased. Tartarian conspiracy nuts also scrutinize old portraits of Genghis Khan and speculate that he may have been more European-looking, more white, than he is otherwise portrayed. In their reaction against the historical distortions of Tsarist and Church propaganda, Communists initiated their own revision and falsification of history, as the CIA observed in the aforementioned report, and after the fall of Communism, a new false history has emerged, still intent on painting Russia in the best light, and justifying its geopolitical powerplays. Just as Vladimir Putin today justifies his invasion of the Ukraine with falsehoods, claiming that it has always been a part of Russia and has no historical right to independence, his nationalist rhetoric is validated by, or perhaps inspired by, the pseudo-historian Anatoly Fomenko, who claims that Ukraine has no identity apart from Russia, for its people were always only part of his “Russian Horde.” This pseudo-history tacitly justifies war crimes. So what am I arguing? I suppose I am arguing what others before me have argued: that the Tartarian Empire conspiracy myth originates from Russian disinformation, spread online to the Western world by professional Russian propagandists, and transforming along the way, through a weird digital version of the telephone game, to something almost unrecognizable. This may itself sound like conspiracy speculation, but the fact that Russian propaganda programs are active in spreading disinformation through bots and puppet accounts run out of troll farms is well known. We also know that they are involved with the encouragement of the growth of conspiracy claims. Hell, that goes back a long time before Qanon and COVID-19 conspiracies on social media. Back in the 1980s, the KGB ran a disinformation campaign aimed at encouraging the baseless conspiracy claim that the U.S. government was responsible for the creation and spread of HIV/AIDS. Now, there is a fast-spreading conspiracy theory about the existence of an ancient, suppressed mega-empire that originated in their region, and it is remarkably similar to the ethno-national propaganda Russia’s president spouts as a pretext for expansion, asserting the Russians are just reclaiming what has always been theirs. Tell me that doesn’t sound like there is a connection. What’s really scary is if Putin starts to assert that the ancestral claim of the Russian people extends all the way to America, where the Tartarian Empire is said to have formerly reigned.

Anatoly Fomenko, mathematician and ethnonationalist propagandist masquerading as a legitimate historian. Don’t @ me.

As with that other conspiracy mythos, Qanon, that has likely been encouraged every step of the way by Russian disinformation campaigns online, the Tartarian Empire hoax has grown to become a mega-theory as its proponents take a buffet-style approach, incorporating into the myth complex any pet theory or crazy notion they fancy. One can imagine that it’s especially hard to control a conspiracy narrative once it has been fed to the conspiracy nut community. Thus we see claims about the Illuminati come in to explain the worldwide cover-up, or of the Jewish World Conspiracy, which isn’t that surprising considering its connection to Russian claims of Aryan supremacy. To further explain why the existence of Tartaria had to be covered up, conspiracists have incorporated elements of the fantastical claims about Atlantis or hollow earth civilizations: namely that the Tartarians had advanced technology, free wireless energy technology to be more specific, and that the powers that be conspired to hide this from the energy dependent masses. And then, there is the doozy—that Tartaria was actually peopled by giants. Never mind that all the buildings they identify as Tartarian are made for regular size people. They found a few photos of grand, oversized doors, and of course they found statuary and paintings depicting, you guessed it, giants. They link the existence of giants in the lands of Tartary through the tales of Gog and Magog, which have historically been associated with Mongolians, as I discussed in my episode on Prester John. And from there, it just devolved into photoshopped hoaxes of gigantic bones. But the argument against the historical existence of giants deserves to have its own episode and would be too much of a digression here at the end of this one. To conclude, let’s just hope that the fringe nutcases who have taken up the Tartarian standard and run with it online continue to take the idea in such ridiculous and fantastical directions that it becomes ever more laughable, and thus, if we’re lucky, useless as Russian propaganda.

 Further Reading

Dharma, Nagato. “Tartary / Tartaria — The Mystery of an Empire Lost in History.” History of Yesterday, 2 July 2020, historyofyesterday.com/tartary-tartaria-the-mystery-of-an-empire-lost-in-history-a99abb5cc9b6.

 Elliott, Mark C. “The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2000, pp. 603–46, https://doi.org/10.2307/2658945.

 Mortice, Zach. “Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture.” Bloomberg, 27 April 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-27/inside-architecture-s-wildest-conspiracy-theory.

“National Cultural Development Under Communism.” Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, 11 Nov. 2016, www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp78-02771r000200090002-6.

Sheiko, Konstantin. “Lomonosov's bastards: Anatolii Fomenko, pseudo-history and Russia's search for a post-communist identity.” (PhD thesis) School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 2004. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/222.

“Tartaria: The Supposed Mega-Empire of Inner Eurasia.” Reddit, uploaded by u/EnclavedMicrostate, www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/ieg2k0/tartaria_the_supposed_megaempire_of_inner_eurasia/.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Four: The Vigilante

At the moment the first shot was fired on Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, a motorcycle cop named Marrion Baker, recognizing the sound of a rifle shot from on high, looked up toward the Book Depository and saw some pigeons take flight from the building. While other authorities were engulfed in confusion, looking first at the grassy knoll, Baker sped over to the Depository, ran inside, and demanded to know where the elevator was. The building manager, Roy Truly, led him to the elevator, but it appeared to be unresponsive. Truly afterward came to believe that Oswald had purposely left the elevator’s grate open so that it could not be called back down. If this is the case, then it was poor planning. While it meant that authorities could not take the elevator to investigate his sniper’s perch, it also meant they would have to take the very same stairs that he was taking. After firing his three shots, Oswald exited his sniper’s nest between the stacks of books, rushed to the staircase, ditched the rifle, and began his descent. However, as he approached the second floor, he heard the sound of other footsteps on the stairs below and exited toward the nearby lunchroom. That was when Officer Baker, who had given up on the elevator and taken the stairs, saw him “hurrying” off, and called out for him to stop, which Oswald did. Officer Baker, presuming that the presidential assassin must not be an employee at the Depository but rather someone who had gained entrance to the building for the sole purpose of taking a sniper position in its upper windows, asked the building manager with him if he recognized Oswald. Roy Truly answered that indeed, Oswald was an employee, and Baker let him go. This left Oswald in a perfect position to establish the alibi he would later provide police—that he had been in a lunchroom at the time of the shooting. He bought a soda pop from the machine, and lingered momentarily. If he had remained in the building, it certainly would lend some weight to the notion that he had been framed and knew nothing about the assassination, provided one ignores the physical evidence on the 6th floor and the witness testimony that shows his premeditation and planning of the murder. However, he did not stay in the building. Instead, he fled, and his flight is further strong evidence of his guilt. After buying his Coke, he walked through the second floor offices toward a different staircase, and he was seen by another Depository employee as he passed near her desk. She said something about the President being shot, and he mumbled an indistinct reply. She found the encounter “strange.” Then he went down the front stairs and out the front doors of the Depository, which had not yet been locked down as only three minutes had passed since the fatal head shot and chaos still reigned on the Plaza. Later, when the police had the building locked down, they gathered all of its employees for questioning, and Oswald was the only one missing. And even later that day, when giving his alibi, he gave the lame excuse that he had immediately left, without checking with his boss, because he assumed work would be canceled for the day because of the assassination. Outside, his movements indicate not the leisurely trip home of a man unexpectedly given a half day off, but rather a man trying to get away from the scene of a crime. He would normally have waited for a bus on Dealey Plaza, but on this day, he walked resolutely east on Elm, away from all the commotion, in the opposite direction from his boarding house. Ten blocks away, he ran up to the door of a bus in transit and pounded on it to get it to stop and let him on. On the bus, unnoticed by Oswald, happened to be one of his former landladies, who later described him as looking “like a maniac” when he boarded the bus. Sirens increased, and traffic kept the bus from continuing on, and Oswald suddenly rose and demanded a bus transfer, exiting the bus and walking to the station two blocks away. However, instead of boarding another bus at the station with his transfer, he instead hopped into a taxi cab, something he later admitted himself that he had never done before, a further indication that he was in panicked flight. Also telling is that he directed the taxi driver to take him not directly to his boarding house, but some blocks away from it. After walking the remaining distance to his room, he entered, and a couple minutes later, he left again. A housekeeper who saw him said he was “in a hurry” and “all but running.” Though it was warm, he left with a jacket on, because he was carrying his revolver in the waist of his pants.

*

In this final installment of the series, I want to tell Oswald’s story to the end, which means also telling Jack Ruby’s story, but I also want to address some of the larger logical flaws of conspiracy claims generally, as well as the difficulties inherent in refuting them. Many conspiracy proponents will not even attempt to exonerate Oswald, since the evidence of his involvement is so overwhelming. But there are those who will try to assert that he was a complete patsy. As one of my sources, JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy by John McAdams, observes, one can talk until one is blue in the face about Oswald’s psychological and ideological predisposition toward political violence—as I have in this series—and all it does is help make the case that Oswald would have been a perfect patsy, since he was just the sort of person one would expect to take a shot at the President, and therefore the perfect person to frame for it. Those conspiracists who attempt to find corroboration for Oswald’s alibi—besides requiring their audience to disregard witness statements about Oswald smuggling his rifle into the building, to doubt physical evidence that the rifle found was Oswald’s and that he had been in the improvised sniper’s nest, and to disbelieve testimony that placed Oswald on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination—rely instead on outlier witness statements that are easily discredited. For example, the secretary of the Depository’s vice-president, Carolyn Arnold, claimed she had seen Oswald in a booth in the second-floor lunchroom at 12:15pm. Never mind the fact that Oswald’s actual alibi claimed he had been eating in the first-floor lunchroom and had only gone to the second-floor lunchroom to buy a soda. The fact is that numerous workers who were in both lunchrooms have stated that Oswald was not present in either location, and Ms. Arnold never started saying she had seen him there until 15 years afterward, when a conspiracist author questioned her. In statements to the FBI not long after the assassination, she said she wasn’t sure whether she might have seen him fleetingly in a hallway, and then that she certainly had not seen him. We see this time and time again. Conspiracy speculators get a witness alone in a room and somehow, magically, get them to remember entirely different details years after the fact. Others claim that Oswald could not have been in the stairwell immediately after the shots were fired, before Officer Baker saw him rushing toward the second-floor lunchroom, because those critical witnesses who had been in the fifth floor window below his sniper’s nest, Junior Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and Harold Norman, had afterward taken the stairs themselves and not encountered him. However, according to those men’s testimony, they remained upstairs for ten to fifteen minutes. Other employees who said they had been in the staircase following the shooting also can be confirmed not to have been in there until several minutes after Oswald would have taken them and then ducked out upon hearing Officer Baker’s footsteps approaching from below. But more than any of these refutable claims, Oswald’s shocking actions after leaving his boarding room with his revolver prove beyond any doubt that he was no innocent on that day.

The soda machine from which Oswald bought a Coke following the assassination in the Book Depository’s second floor lunch room.

The armed Oswald waited at a bus stop, but seeing no buses, he got impatient and started walking. He still had the bus transfer, and after walking about a mile, he was only a few blocks from catching a bus that would have connected him to a Greyhound headed for Mexico. We can’t know for sure that that was where he was headed, though, because he never made it. A Dallas police officer in a patrol car, J.D. Tippit, saw Oswald walking hurriedly and, probably recognizing that he matched the description of the assassin being broadcast to all police units based on witness statements, he pulled over and stopped him. Police had done this numerous times elsewhere in Dallas that day as the manhunt for the gunman unfolded. Numerous witnesses saw what happened next. Oswald said something to the officer, and Tippit got out of the vehicle and came around toward him. That’s when Oswald brandished his revolver, shot Tippit dead, leaving four slugs in his body, and fled down the street, emptying his spent shells as he ran. The witnesses to this murder include a woman waiting nearby for a bus, two women in their nearby home who came to the front door upon hearing the shots, and a cab driver parked nearby eating his lunch. All picked Oswald out of a lineup that day. A man driving a pickup only about fifteen feet away saw the entire thing, and though he was not brought in for a lineup—a failure of the police that conspiracists claim means he could not identify Oswald—he later, with high certainty, identified Oswald as the shooter from photographs. Numerous further witnesses saw Oswald fleeing the scene as he ran past some used car lots, and identified him in lineups and from photographs. As he ran through a gas station, he even dropped his jacket, which his boardinghouse’s housekeeper identified as the one he had left wearing, and which Marina identified as one of the only jackets he owned. Moreover, the shells he emptied were recovered and later matched ballistically to his revolver, to the exclusion of all other weapons. One of the slugs recovered from Tippit was also matched conclusively to his weapon, which would be on his person when he was apprehended not long later. The evidence in the Tippit murder case was just as clear and conclusive as that that of the assassination case, but of course, conspiracists still find reason to speculate. They ignore the wealth of witness and ballistic evidence, instead investigating Tippit’s personal relationships and suggesting he was actually murdered by someone else in retaliation for a torrid affair he was having. Or they suggest Tippit was part of the conspiracy—since conspiracies can apparently be as massive as one needs them to be, so why not?—insinuating that he may have been there to aid Oswald’s getaway but then turned on him, or that he may have been sent to kill the patsy but Oswald got the drop on him. When conspiracist writers find Oswald’s murder of Tippit too problematic, they sometime just gloss over it, mentioning it only in passing, and presenting it as an unresolved murder that can’t be conclusively tied to Oswald. As you can see, though, that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

Still fleeing from the scene of the Tippit murder, Oswald entered a shoe store. Sirens were in the air, and the shoe store manager saw Oswald enter the lobby of his store, looking scared, and staring out at the street. After some squad cars passed by, the manager watched Oswald walk back outside, look toward where the police had gone, and then head the opposite direction. He felt Oswald was acting very suspiciously, and since he had been listening to the radio broadcasting reports about the assassination, he began to suspect it could be the assassin. He followed Oswald, who ran toward the nearby entrance to the Texas Theater, and when the clerk in the box office wasn’t looking, walked inside without paying. The shoe store manager spoke to the ticket clerk, making her aware that a man had just gone in without paying and voicing his suspicions that the man was running from the police. After ensuring that the exits were secure, they called Dallas police, who arrived shortly, entered the theater, and as officers with shotguns fanned out, they raised the lights. When the officer walking up the aisle scrutinizing the filmgoers came to Oswald, he told him to stand. Oswald stood, raised his hands, shouted, “Well it's all over now,” threw a punch into the policeman’s face, pulled out his revolver, and pulled the trigger. Thankfully, it failed to fire. Oswald was subdued, handcuffed, and taken to a patrol car. The police found his ID on him as well as his false ID with the name Alek Hidell, the one he had made himself. “Which one are you?” they asked him, and he smirked, replying, “You figure it out.” At the station, Oswald was interrogated on and off for twelve hours over the course of about 45 hours, during which he lied about everything, saying he had no knowledge of the name Hidell, even though he had a fake ID with that name on him, claiming the Marines had never given him an undesirable discharge, that he’d never lived at the address where he’d taken photos with the rifle, that he’d never handed out leaflets for Fair Play for Cuba, and that he’d never been to Mexico. Conspiracists who want to believe the alibi he gave during those interrogations just tend to gloss over all the other lies he told, or they suggest that nothing in the interrogation can be trusted, claiming it is highly suspicious that the police did not record any of their questioning of Oswald. In fact, there is nothing suspicious about this at all if you investigate the practices of the Dallas police in 1963. At the time, an early version of Miranda rights was state law in Texas, and according this law, any statements made during interrogations had to be produced in writing and signed by the person being questioned before they could be used in court. So their questioning of Oswald was purely for informational purposes, since even if he confessed on tape, they would have had to get him to sign a confession before they could use it. Because this law effectively made the recording of interrogations pointless, from their view, the Dallas police did not even have a tape recorder at the time. But regardless, the record of Oswald’s statements during his interrogation have been corroborated by more that twenty-five detectives, district attorneys, Secret Service Agents, and FBI agents who participated. Hell, some postal inspectors were even present, questioning him about his use of post office boxes, and confirmed the statements made during interrogations. So I suppose this vast conspiracy implicates even the U.S. Postal Service, if we’re to believe a veil of secrecy was kept over his interrogations as part of the plot.

The murder scene of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Image courtesy University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.

The Dallas police were somewhat overwhelmed by the press during the weekend they had Oswald in custody. At one point, over three hundred journalists had gathered on the third floor, making it nearly impassable with all their equipment and wires. The police were walking a tightrope between ensuring security and granting press access to the biggest story in history. When it came time to transfer Oswald, they weren’t sure how to manage it. At first they wanted to use an armored car, but the two cars that they acquired were either too small for Oswald and his guards, or too tall to pass through the ramp to the basement from which they intended to depart. Eventually, they settled on using the armored trucks as decoys and simply hustling him out in an unmarked car. They cleared the basement of everyone but about 30 members of the press, and posted a guard at the top of the ramp, but just before Oswald was brought out, the guard at the ramp left his post to direct traffic as one of the decoy vehicles departed, giving the opportunity for someone to descend the ramp from the street and blend in with the press unnoticed. Oswald was brought down the stairs and out before the bright lights of the reporters, and then a man pushed through the crowd and fired a pistol into Oswald’s abdomen. The shot was fatal, and the act of vigilantism would forever ensure the common belief that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, and that the conspirators had sent someone to silence Oswald. The shooter was a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, and entire books have been written just focused on him and his supposed involvement with a conspiracy. Conspiracists will claim he knew Oswald, that he had been on Dealey Plaza during the assassination, that he had ties to the mafia. To place the endcap on this entire story, and to evaluate the claims about Oswald’s murder, we must know who Jack Ruby was, why he was there, and why he did what he did.

Jack Ruby’s birth name was Jacob Rubenstein, born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Chicago. Like Oswald, he was of below average intelligence according to IQ tests and his educational attainments—he only ever finished the 6th grade. Also like Oswald, he may have suffered some psychological disturbance, some of which can be traced back to his parents. His father beat his mother and was frequently arrested on assault and disorderly conduct charges. After their separation, his mother beat him regularly. Eventually, she was deemed unfit, and Ruby was placed in foster care. She would later be committed to a mental institution. Whether inherited from his father or instilled in him by years of abuse at the hands of his mother, Ruby developed a problematic temper and violent tendencies, earning a reputation as a street fighter in his youth. In his twenties, after a few years in California working menial odd jobs, he returned to Chicago, where he found work through a friend as a union organizer. Many conspiracists suggest this shows he was involved with the mafia, but in fact, when he had been working for the Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union there, it had been legitimate. Later, the local mafia did take over the union, at which point Ruby lost his job with them. After that, he went into business for himself, selling novelty items like plaques, keychains, salt and pepper shakers, bottle openers, etc. He was never successful, and after serving in the Army Air Force in World War II, he ended up moving to Dallas, where his sister Eva ran a nightclub. For the talkative Ruby, who loved to be in the middle of the action and make acquaintance with anyone he came across, it was the perfect industry, and he threw himself into it. Some conspiracists believe he was a mafia front man, bringing the Chicago mob’s business interests to Dallas, but in truth, he was never solvent. By 1963, he was running two nightclubs with his sister, but over the years he had been involved with six and lost money on all of them. FBI investigators who were intimately familiar with all aspects of organized crime in Chicago actually questioned informants after the assassination, both low level and high ranking, and none even knew who Ruby was. Some Dallas mafia figures sometimes attended his clubs and knew Ruby, but so did a great many police officers. In fact, one Dallas mafia figure actually visited Ruby in jail after his murder of Oswald, which actually seems to prove that the Dallas mafia had nothing to do with Oswald’s murder, as a mafia leader would not go and visit one of his hitmen in jail after they were caught. Finally, some of Ruby’s business dealings prove he had no ties to the mafia. During the years leading up to the assassination, he was having problems with a stripper’s union, the AGVA, which was itself involved with the mafia. So the clearest link between him and the mafia puts him at odds with them. Finally, those who knew Ruby best insist that the mafia would never have wanted anything to do with him because he was a snitch, always ingratiating himself with the Dallas police, inviting them to his clubs, and running his mouth in conversations with them.

A young Jack Ruby in his Army Air Force Uniform. Image tweeted by TheSixthFloorMuseum

Understanding the aspect of Ruby’s character that drove him to befriend police officers is important to understanding why he was there at the police station, likely having walked down the ramp just as the officer posted there had left it unguarded. After he shot Oswald, he said, “I am Jack Ruby. You all know me,” and it was true. Most did know him. In fact, he had been in and out of the police station over and over since Oswald’s capture, drawn to the center of this historic moment and trying to make himself useful to those who were present, whether they be policemen or reporters. Again, like Oswald, he seemed to relish any attention. For years he would loiter around police stations and newspaper offices, offering help to these professionals and inviting them to his clubs for free drinks. Many thought him a “kook,” a “creep,” or a “psycho,” while others viewed him as a colorful character, which seems to be how he viewed himself as well. In addition to his efforts to befriend police officers by offering information about petty crime, he frequently gave tips to newspapers, and their description of him gives a clear sense of his activities: “He is just a guy that calls on the telephone, and he knows everybody in town,” according to a newsman who took his tips. There is some sense that he actually thought, in his simple way, that he was an amateur reporter. That is certainly one of the ways that he gained entrance to the police station during the weekend that Oswald was being interrogated, and according to those who observed his activity in the station, he was just being his awkwardly amiable self, inviting people to his club, attempting to help people where he could, and chatting with people about his hatred for the “lousy Commie” who had murdered his President. Those who knew him afterward described his tendency to seek publicity and be attracted to centers of important activity. “He was a known goer to events,” said Seth Kantor, a member of the press corps who saw Ruby on the day of the assassination hanging around Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy had been taken, and thought it was “perfectly normal to see Jack Ruby standing there.” Another reporter who knew Ruby told a researcher, “If there was one Ruby trait that stands out, it is that he had to be where the action was. He was like horseshit, all over the place.” This perfectly describes his activity between the assassination and his murder of Oswald. After learning of the assassination, and by all accounts being severely shocked and dismayed about it, it appears he may have driven directly to Parkland Hospital, and later that evening, on two separate occasions, he managed to get onto the third floor of police headquarters, even standing outside the room where Oswald was being questioned and at one point trying to enter but being stopped by police. The next day, Saturday afternoon, he was again seen wandering around among the press and police, handing out passes to his nightclub. To many, this appears to be a concerted effort to infiltrate the police department. But most there knew him, and he was introducing himself to those who didn’t. And it simply makes no sense for Ruby to have been part of a longstanding plot to kill the President’s assassin, or the patsy taking the blame for it, since if Oswald’s capture had gone any differently, if he had been arrested by state troopers or the FBI or anyone but the Dallas police, Ruby would not have been to able to get so close to him. Also, if Ruby had been tasked with murdering Oswald and intended to do so despite his own certain capture, he had an opportunity to do so on the night of the assassination, when Oswald was led past him, passing just a couple feet away from him. It appears, based on a lump in his jacket visible in photos of him that day, that he was likely carrying his pistol the entire time. Ruby later denied carrying his pistol and also denied his frequent presence within the police station that weekend, but witnesses and photographs refute him, and he was probably lying because he intended to fight the charge of premeditation in court, and all this seems to show he was stalking Oswald. But was he?

On the morning of Oswald’s transfer, Ruby was at a nearby Western Union office, wiring money to one of his dancers. The clerk who helped him did not believe he seemed in a hurry. In fact, he could have had no idea when Oswald was to be transferred because it had been delayed by some further interrogation and because Oswald had asked to change his clothes at the last minute. When he walked over to the police station afterward and made his way down the unguarded ramp toward the press gathered there, according to him, the opportunity just kind of presented itself to him. In his own words, it would have had to have been “the most perfect conspiracy in the history of the world” to work as precisely as it did. Conspiracists claim that such coincidence is impossible. They point to discredited witness statements claiming Ruby knew Oswald, or placing him at Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, even though numerous witnesses have sworn that Ruby was in a newspaper office placing an ad for his nightclubs when the assassination occurred. Whether or not it was a premeditated or an spontaneous act, his true motives are clear. Witness after witness describe his terrible dismay and grief at having learned of Kennedy’s assassination. During his visits to Parkland and the police station, it was all he could talk about. He was openly crying throughout the weekend, despite reportedly not being the type of person to cry in public. Between his visits to the police station, he was at his nightclub, which he decided to close indefinitely, despite his dire financial situation, out of respect for the President and his family, and his employees said that he was inconsolable and incoherent in his anger and depression. His sister, who he sat and watched news reports with on Friday between visits to the police station, said he was crying so hard he was “sick to his stomach.” She described him as “a broken man,” and quoted him as saying, “I never felt so bad in my life, even when Ma and Pa died…. Someone tore my heart out.” In numerous conversations that weekend, people spoke about how someone ought to take Oswald out, and it has further been stated that Ruby was highly suggestible. After killing Oswald, when police asked why he had done it, he said, “Well, you guys couldn’t do it. Someone had to do it.” And finally, his sister further described his great sadness upon reading a newspaper article that said the First Lady may have to return to Dallas to attend Oswald’s trial. Many statements by Ruby suggest he thought he would be treated as a hero, and felt persecuted when he was afterward not released from jail and instead tried for murder. So was there premeditation? Had he been hanging around the police station hoping to take Oswald out? Or did all these feelings and motivations just overwhelm him in that moment when he saw Oswald, and his well-established temper flared when, according to what Ruby’s brother Earl claimed Ruby told him, “there was a smirk on his face, and he thought, Why you little s.o.b.” Regardless of what the truth may be about premeditation, what seems apparent is that it was a classic case of vigilantism.

One of many images capturing Ruby’s murder of Oswald taken. Via Dallas Morning News

Even if we were to disregard the evidence that Ruby had no connections to the mafia, to Oswald, or to a larger conspiracy, simple logic tells us that there was little point in sending someone to silence Oswald. By the time Oswald was killed, he had already been interrogated for 12 hours. He’d had plenty of time to spill the beans on any conspiracy about which he might have had knowledge. Likewise, the many claims about those with special knowledge being silenced by murder squads just doesn’t hold up. Conspiracists claim there are more than a hundred suspicious deaths related to the assassination. More than half of these died of natural causes, and more than half also died more than ten years later, which gives them ages to have divulged anything they might have known. It’s the same problem with the idea that George de Mohrenshchildt was silenced in the 1970s, a decade and a half after he testified before the Warren Commission. Of those supposedly mysterious deaths that occurred within a year of the assassination, some were even convinced of Oswald’s guilt, which makes it seem like there was no reason to silence them, and many had very minor connections to the case. There is the further problem of selectivity. For example, one witness of Oswald’s murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit would be shot dead by an intruder in his home a few months later. The claims that this was an act of a conspiracy to silence a witness begs the question why this one witness was brutally murdered while a dozen others who saw the same thing were allowed to live. Furthermore, we must ask why none of the plethora of witnesses on Dealey Plaza are included on this list of witnesses that had to be silenced, while many of them are simply journalists who afterward published about the case. This just illustrates the central problem with most conspiracy speculation: the refusal to acknowledge coincidence. My source JFK Assassination Logic by John McAdams highlights numerous logical problems with conspiracist thinking just like this. Conspiracy speculators rely on cherry-picked, outlier testimony that is demonstrably less credible than other witness claims, they engage in the creation of false memory in leading interviews with witnesses years after the fact, they mislead readers by presenting evidence stripped of important context, and they present an argument that suggests most evidence points to conspiracy, when if that were the case, official investigations would have come to far different conclusions. Finally, they demand that believers suspend disbelief in the face of truly odds-defying scenarios. Simply put, large-scale conspiracies are not plausible. As McAdams demonstrates, even if the odds are extremely low that one member of a given conspiracy might betray the rest and reveal the plot publicly, for any number of reasons, the more people involved in the conspiracy, the higher the probability it will be revealed to the world. Conspiracists like to point to real, genuine conspiracies in their efforts to demonstrate that their claims hold water, but any conspiracy that really occurred stands as evidence against the believability of their claims, since all such genuine conspiracies have been uncovered by whistleblowers and journalists.

After the release of the first part of this series, I was accused of playing down the events surrounding the JFK assassination, of taking a “nothing to see here” point of view. This from conspiracy believers, perhaps unsurprisingly, began to think that I myself have something to hide, that I am engaging in cover-up. I’d like to conclude this series by addressing this. Of course I’m not saying there is “nothing to see here.” This is the longest series I have ever produced on one topic for this podcast. There is a ton to see here. I’m saying that what there is to see here is far different from what many have been led to believe. And far from suggesting that the Dallas police and the FBI have done nothing to contribute to this confusion, they have given the public real reason to be suspicious of them. For example, the night after the assassination, while Oswald was being questioned and Jack Ruby was slapping backs around police headquarters, an assistant district attorney leaked to the press that they intended to indict Oswald for killing Kennedy “in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy.” Later, he invented another story to anonymously provide the press, that Oswald was an FBI informant. In explanation, the attorney, Bill Alexander, explained that he “never much liked the federals” and put out the phony stories to keep them occupied. It’s things just like this that have led to many thinking massive conspiracy is more likely than any mundane explanation, and distrusting authorities who insist the opposite. Then there is the FBI, who appear to have genuinely engaged in a cover-up after Oswald’s capture. Before the assassination, the FBI agent tasked with looking into Oswald after he turned back up on their radar had gone to the Paines’ house and spoken to Marina. Oswald had been so upset, continuing to believe the FBI was hounding him, that he went to the FBI office in Dallas and left a note for the agent (whose name he misspelled) demanding he leave his wife alone. After Oswald death, this note was destroyed. According to the FBI, this was because there was no need to keep it if Oswald could no longer be tried in court, having been killed. In truth, though, this appears to have been a genuine cover-up. Far from a wide-reaching conspiracy, though, the simpler explanation is that Dallas special agent-in-charge J. Gordon Shanklin ordered the note’s destruction just to cover his own butt. J. Edgar Hoover was already certain that Oswald was guilty, and it appeared there would be no need of the evidence, so the only purpose it might serve would be to indict Shanklin and his office as having dropped the ball and not recognized Oswald as the threat he was. So am I convinced law enforcement never acted improperly or was never negligent in this case? Absolutely not. But for all the reasons I’ve given over the course of this series, a massive conspiracy to murder the President is simply not supportable. Of course, it makes a great story, though, and when told by a competent, if unscrupulous, storyteller, it can even convince someone who knows better. That is the case with Marina, Oswald’s wife, who knew her husband better than anyone, and whose testimony demonstrates so clearly that Oswald was a desperate and disturbed individual acting alone. Today, the 80-year-old Marina, despite everything she knows about his temperament, his attempt on Walker’s life, and his behavior the last time she saw him, believes that her husband was innocent, because “[t]here are just too many things,” things conspiracist writers have told her and convinced her are true. In the 1980s, in fact, some conspiracist writers convinced her to approve of Oswald’s exhumation in an attempt to prove that a KGB impersonator had been buried in Oswald’s place. Unsurprisingly, forensic pathologists confirmed using medical and dental records that the remains in his grave were indeed that of Marina’s husband, Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

“Exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald's casket at Rose Hill Cemetery (Fort Worth) for examination of the body in Dallas, Texas.” (1981) Courtesy Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. UTA Libraries Digital Gallery, https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10009894.

 Further Reading

 Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Three: The Lone Gunman

With his wife Marina so near the end of term and ready to deliver their second child, it was determined she should continue to stay with the Paines while Oswald moved into a room at a boarding house closer to Downtown Dallas, where he was searching for work. It worked out well when Oswald, who couldn’t drive and had no vehicle, got the job at the Book Depository, as it was just a 2 mile bus ride from his boarding house. On some weekends, he caught a ride the 27 miles to the Paines’ house to be with Marina. He caught that ride with his new co-worker at the Depository, Buell Frazier, the brother of Ruth Paine’s friend, through whom she had first gotten the lead on the job at the Depository. Marina gave birth to their second daughter in late October, and Oswald saw them at the end of most weeks, otherwise settling into his new job at the Texas School Book Depository, where he was known to sit by himself in the lunchroom and read the day old newspapers. Later the next month, some of those newspapers contained an announcement that President Kennedy’s motorcade would be passing right through Dealey Plaza, smack in front of the Texas School Book Depository. Some conspiracy speculators charge that the motorcade’s route was changed in order to give Oswald his shot at Kennedy, but there is no evidence for this beyond one newspaper misreporting the route, showing a different one that would also have provided a clear shot at Kennedy from the Depository. Regardless of what newspaper Oswald may have read the news in, it’s clear that he did read it and began to hatch a plan, seeing a far more massive opportunity to change history than that which he had attempted to seize in firing his rifle at General Walker. What makes it clear is his behavior during the few days between the news releasing and the day of the assassination. On Thursday, the 21st, the day before Kennedy’s arrival, the notoriously stingy Oswald splurged on a big breakfast, and at work, he asked Buell Frazier to give him a ride to the Paines’ house, an unusual request for a Thursday. He explained it away by saying he needed to fetch some curtain rods from their house for his room at the boarding house, something that his furnished room already had. Sometime before leaving with Frazier, probably using materials present at work, he crafted a long sack by taping together pieces of paper. Marina was surprised to see him that Thursday. He usually called ahead, and he was acting somewhat desperate, trying to kiss her and being more affectionate than usual, saying he missed her and that he “wanted to make peace” with her. Marina brought up the President’s visit, thinking Oswald would relish the opportunity to expound on politics, as he usually did, but Oswald refused to talk about it, claiming he knew nothing about Kennedy’s visit, and remaining quiet through dinner. At some point, Ruth Paine recalled that he had gone out to their garage, where he had stored a bundle that the Paines thought was camping equipment, wrapped up and leaning against a wall, but which Marina knew was his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. When he left to go back to work the next morning, November 22nd, he left almost his entire savings, $170, on the dresser for Marina, telling her to take as much as she needed and “buy everything.” He also left his wedding ring behind. He walked to Buell Frazier’s house carrying a long, taped up, brown paper parcel, placing it in the back seat of Buell’s car and then simply staring at Buell’s sister in the window to indicate his readiness to leave. It struck her as unusual. When Buell came out and asked what was in the back seat, Oswald said it was the curtain rods he had mentioned previously. Some have tried to claim that Frazier and his sister’s estimation of the length of the package shows that it couldn’t have been Oswald’s rifle, even disassembled. However, curtain rods were never found inside the book Depository, but the Mannlicher-Carcano was, hidden between boxes near a stairwell. Moreover, the package they saw him with that morning, made of brown paper and tape of the kind found in the Depository, and which Buell saw him take into the Depository that day, was the same as an improvised paper bag that would later be found at what appeared to be a sniper’s nest. On the sixth floor of the Depository, which was under construction and almost entirely empty at the time of Kennedy’s arrival because employees had taken their lunch and gone out to watch the passing motorcade, stacks of books had been moved to create a little hiding place by the south-east corner’s window, obscuring anyone’s view of someone standing in that corner looking down on Dealey Plaza. In that makeshift alcove, crime scene investigators found a palm print and a right index fingerprint on boxes, later identified as matching Oswald’s prints. Inside that improvised paper bag found in the sniper’s nest were fibers that matched the blanket that Oswald had kept his rifle in before taking it from the Paines’ garage, and silver nitrate tests would later reveal Oswald’s palm and fingerprints on that bag as well. Along with this evidence were three rifle shells that would later be conclusively proven to have been fired by the Mannlicher-Carcano abandoned elsewhere in the building. That Mannlicher-Carcano was confirmed to be the same rifle Oswald held in the famous backyard photos, as mentioned in Part One, but more than this, a palm print matching Oswald’s was lifted from the stock by Dallas police, and partial fingerprints found on the trigger guard would eventually, through photo enhancements reveal 18 matching points, convincingly identifying them as having been left by Lee Harvey Oswald’s right ring and middle fingers. This evidence alone, from the testimony of Frazier and his sister, the Paines, and Marina, as well as concrete evidence afterward documented by Dallas police, appears conclusive. But those who believe in a conspiracy to murder Kennedy have been determined, through the years, to make this a far more complicated puzzle than it actually is. As the author of one of my principal sources, Vincent Bugliosi, told the Los Angeles Times: “Because of these conspiracy theorists who split hairs and proceeded to split the split hairs, this case has been transformed into the most complex murder case in world history. But, at its core, it’s a simple case.”

Hearing the evidence laid out like this should be convincing—damning, even—but if you have invested your belief in any of the many longstanding conspiracy theories surrounding this case, perhaps because you read a conspiracist book or two, or because you watched the Oliver Stone film JFK, or simply because you have heard too many friends or family members regale you with their secondhand regurgitations of conspiracist reservations, then I’m sure you are already formulating objections. Fingerprint evidence can’t be trusted, you might protest, or, If it was Oswald’s rifle, then of course it would have his prints on it. Notwithstanding the witness testimony that entirely details his efforts to retrieve the rifle himself and smuggle it into the Depository after the newspaper announcements of Kennedy’s motorcade route, those who want to believe Oswald was a patsy will contend that someone planted the rifle and the shells, even though there is no evidence of anyone else entering the Paines’ home and having the chance to fetch the rifle from their garage. Also, a complete frame job, I suppose, would entail knowing which boxes Oswald had recently touched on the 6th floor, so that when they built the sniper’s nest, they could use boxes that had his palm prints on them. And since no mysterious strangers were witnessed by the many book Depository employees that day, it would mean the conspiracy would have to be composed of other employees there. A more feasible conspiracy claim is that Oswald did fire his Mannlicher-Carcano, but that he was not the only shooter that day, that the supposed conspirators allowed him to take his shots but took shots of their own as well to ensure the job was done. This notion, that there were other shooters present, within the book Depository or on the patch of grass between a parking lot and a fence along Elm Street near the railroad overpass—the so-called “grassy knoll”—or elsewhere, has become the central thesis of nearly every conspiracy claim surrounding the JFK assassination. According to these narratives, Oswald may have been a shooter, but he was not the shooter. It’s these claims that we must examine in order to achieve a clear picture of what happened on that chaotic day. But first, let us take a moment to imagine and remember the historic and tragic moment with something approaching respect and sympathy for a beloved life that was lost.

The President’s motorcade, minutes before shots were fired on Dealey Plaza.

At 12:30pm on November 22, 1963, the presidential motorcade turned from Main Street onto Houston Street, to much fanfare. Crowds lined the street, cheering, as John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie waved. In the convertible limousine’s fold-down jump seats sat Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, also waving to the crowds. In the front seat, driving and riding shotgun, were two Secret Service agents. Kennedy himself had chosen to do away with the plastic bubble top that might have saved his life that day, preferring to have nothing between himself and the gathered people. As usual, all was not as it may have seemed with the President, who presented a public image of great vigor despite personal health struggles. Under his suit, he wore a back brace strapped against his body with ace bandage. Despite any pain or discomfort, though, he also wore a smile as he passed through Dealey Plaza toward the Texas School Book Depository. He had a nice luncheon to look forward to—roast beef. When the first shot rang out, many thought it was a vehicle backfiring, or maybe a firework. But the following gunshots, and the terrible commotion inside the President’s vehicle, made it very apparent what was happening. Dealey Plaza exploded into panic and pandemonium, screams of terror and anger, shouts of confusion, filling the air, ringing through the plaza’s strange acoustics, and echoing, like the gunshots, even today.

Among the claims made to support the idea that Oswald could not have committed this heinous act alone are the claims that he was not a good enough marksman, or that his rifle was not accurate enough, or that its bolt action could not possibly be operated fast enough. It is odd that conspiracist authors have decided Oswald was a terrible marksman when he actually qualified as a sharpshooter with the Marines. The superior officers in charge of the marksmanship branch and Oswald’s training, who actually have some idea of Oswald’s skill with a rifle, Sgt. James Zahm and Major Eugene Anderson, have gone on record as saying Oswald was a fully capable marksman, and more than that, that the shots taken from the Depository were not especially difficult, that it was, in fact, “an easy shot for a man with the equipment he had and his ability.” A marine who served with Oswald, Nelson Delgado, is sometimes quoted as remembering Oswald not hitting his targets, but Delgado didn’t serve with him at the time when he received his marksmanship training and therefore was not an authority on his abilities, as were the officers who trained him. Another tale has it that Oswald came up empty handed on a rabbit hunting trip in Russia, but of course, hunting rabbit is far different than taking a pot shot at a man in a slow-moving convertible, and Oswald’s brother Robert remembered Oswald complaining about that hunting trip, saying his rifle’s firing pin had broken. Robert himself had been hunting with Lee more than once and has stated, “He was a good shot.” So that leaves his equipment, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, which conspiracist authors allege is universally condemned as slow and inaccurate and a terrible choice for sharpshooting. Certainly it may not have been the absolute best choice, but Oswald chose it because it was the right price. He clipped a coupon from the magazine American Rifleman to buy it. As for Oswald’s particular Mannlicher-Carcano, when the FBI conducted shooting tests with it, they found it “very accurate.” It had come with a four power telescopic scope already assembled, easily seen in the backyard photos, and the FBI firearms expert who examined it stated that it required hardly any adjustment within the range of the assassination shots, and that such a scope would allow even an untrained marksman to operate the weapon like a sharpshooter. And it was further determined that the rifle had little kickback, which would aid in maintaining aim after firing and rapidly working the bolt-action to reload. The false claims about Oswald’s rifle seem to have no end. It’s been claimed that it had a “hair trigger” that would have made sharpshooting difficult, but it was determined that its trigger needed 3 pounds of pressure, a full 2 pounds more than anything considered a hair trigger. Some have even claimed that Oswald could not have used it properly because it was set up for a left-handed person, but the $7 scope on Oswald’s rifle would be used exactly the same way by a lefty or a right-handed person. That only leaves the claim that Oswald could not work its bolt-action quickly enough to fire off the shots.

Three shells were found in the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the book Depository. According to the Warren Commission, the three shots had been fired in just about 5 to 5 and a half seconds, and during the FBI’s testing of the weapon, they determined that it took 2 and a quarter seconds to work the bolt action and take aim, which meant firing all three shots seemed impossible. However, it has been proven more than once that it is possible. A 1975 CBS documentary recorded the efforts of 11 marksmen to fire three bullets from a similar weapon at a moving target, and some were able to fire all three shots in only 4.1 seconds and still hit their marks. The House Select Committee a couple years later also conducted such tests, and as a result, they lowered the minimum time to fire three good shots from the Mannlicher-Carcano to less than 3 and a half seconds. And it must be kept in mind that, according to Marina, Oswald obsessively practiced the bolt-action on his rifle, such that he must have been expert at working it. Regardless, though, there is good reason to believe that Oswald took well more than 5 seconds to fire his three shots. You see, the entire basis of the 5 second time-frame is based on the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie filmed by a local dressmaker. The Warren Commission worked under the assumption that the first shot fired must have hit, since Oswald must have had the time to aim carefully with that shot. In the film, Kennedy and the Governor seem fine, then Zapruder’s view of them is obscured by a sign, and afterward, they appear to be reacting to their gunshot wounds. Knowing that Kennedy must have first been struck while he was passing the sign, and further knowing that for a few moments as he approached the sign, until a certain point while passing behind the sign, he must have been obscured from the sniper’s view by a certain oak tree, it was determined that the first shot must have been fired just after emerging from the foliage and while obscured momentarily from Zapruder’s camera—at frame 210 of the Zapruder film. Knowing from the consensus of eyewitness testimony that the head shot, which can clearly be seen on the film, was the final shot, this allowed them to determine that the three shots had been fired in 5 to 5 and a half seconds. One of these bullets struck Kennedy in the back, exiting his neck and further injuring Governor Connally. The bullet believed to have caused these injuries was later discovered intact in Connally’s hospital gurney. The final bullet entered the back of Kennedy’s skull and created a massive exit wound on the right side of his head. The problem with the Warren Commission’s timeline is that they presumed the first bullet hit Kennedy in the back, the second bullet missed, and the third hit his head. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that Oswald’s first shot, the shot many witnesses believed was a backfire, was taken before Kennedy passed behind the oak tree’s foliage, and that this was the shot that missed, making the second and third, taken after he emerged, the only two that hit. This would make sense; one can imagine Oswald aiming and then taking a hurried shot before Kennedy went out of sight behind the foliage. Governor Connally, who survived, always insisted that the first shot, which he had heard, had not been the one that struck him. Multiple witnesses describe hearing the first shot just as their car turned from Houston onto Elm in front of the Depository and passed behind the oak tree there. Oswald’s acquaintance Buell Frazier, on the Depository steps, heard it that way, as did a witness half a block away, and another standing on the corner of Houston and Elm as Kennedy’s limo made its turn.  Up on the railroad overpass, another witness described the first shot coming as the corner was taken, and even the President’s own driver and another Secret Service agent remembered it that way. In fact, some witnesses even report having seen sparks as a missed shot struck the pavement. One man even had minor injuries likely from chips of concrete striking his face. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez (about whom I had occasion to speak when talking about his hypothesis regarding the mass extinction of dinosaurs in my episode on the Chicxulub Crater) suggested that evidence of a first missed shot could be discerned through “jiggle analysis” of the Zapruder film, that is, examining the film for blurs caused by Zapruder jerking when the first shot startled him. Sure enough, a significant jiggle was detected at the moment when Oswald would have been about to lose his shot because of the obscuring foliage as the President’s limo completed its turn. If, as this evidence suggests, this was the first of the three shots, then Oswald would have had something more like 8 whole seconds to fire the three rounds.

Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, Warren Commission exhibit 139.

Then there are those conspiracists who claim there were more than three shots. For writers who push the idea that shooters other than Oswald were present on Dealey Plaza, such as on the grassy knoll, it is imperative to suggest more than three shots were heard, or that they were heard from directions other than the book Depository. The 200 or so witness statements that speculate on the origin of shots are sometimes given as a percentage, to the effect that some startlingly high percentage of the witnesses believed the shots came from the grassy knoll rather than the book Depository, but conspiracist authors, such as Josiah Thompson in Six Seconds in Dallas, have been caught falsifying the numbers and misrepresenting the testimony. The fact is that 88 percent of the witnesses heard exactly three shots, and only 5 percent claimed they heard more. Likewise, the largest portion of the witnesses, 44 percent, could not determine where the shots came from, and of those who believed they could, most—28 percent—identified the Book Depository, with only 12 percent suggesting the grassy knoll, and only a measly 2 percent saying they heard gunshots from multiple directions. This last bit is important. Hardly anyone claimed they heard shots from more than one direction. So that means those who heard shots originating from a different direction than the Book Depository, from which we know three shots had been fired, were likely just confused by the acoustics of the plaza, which are known to make pinpointing the location of a sound difficult. Numerous witnesses even specifically mentioned being confused by echo patterns and admitting to uncertainty because of them. These acoustics could easily explain the few witness statements about a fourth or fifth shot as well. But the most confusion regarding number of shots was created by the House Select Committee in 1979, when they obsessed over a recording from Dallas police channels apparently captured from a motorcycle officer’s radio whose microphone was stuck on and capturing constant audio. The thing is, they didn’t know whose mic it was, or if it was even at Dealey Plaza that day. No gunshots were heard on the staticky recording, but they had experts pick it apart for inaudible sounds. A first set of experts said they found “impulses” that may have been gunshots, and after attempting to recreate the impulses by firing two rifles on Dealey Plaza, from the Depository and the grassy knoll, recording it, and then comparing these impulses, they suggested that the recording had been on or near Dealey and recorded four shots. Their certainty was 50 percent, but then just as the Committee had been ready to deliver its conclusions, a second pair of experts they consulted claimed it was as high as 95 percent. Then a Dallas policeman who had been accompanying the motorcade offered the dubious statement that sometimes his mic gets stuck, and that clinched it for them. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, which had been moving inexorably toward a finding that Oswald acted alone, changed their conclusion to declare that JFK was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” all based on that mysterious recording. Conspiracy lovers just about did backflips, of course, but they were less excited when the officer afterward listened to the recording and said it couldn’t be his mic, because no sirens were heard when he accompanied the motorcade to Parkland Hospital. And the entire farce of the police channel recording would be revealed within a few years, when National Academy of Sciences experts made out some cross-talk on the police channel recording that was known to have been spoken by a sheriff one minute after the assassination. So the audio evidence of four shots that swayed the committee in favor of conspiracy, on which no gunshots or sirens could actually be heard, and which might not have even been a recording of audio at Dealey Plaza, had actually been recorded after the time in question, making the supposed “impulse patterns” observed by audio experts nothing but further crackling among the static.

Some eyewitnesses claimed they saw multiple shooters in the Depository that day, but their testimony has been discredited. For example, a prisoner in the Dallas County Jail claimed he was able to see two men in the sniper’s nest, but he was considered unreliable, not only because of his multiple arrests for behavior displaying mental instability, but also because the FBI determined one could not actually see the Depository from his cell. Other witnesses claimed to see multiple gunmen in windows other than the one around which the sniper’s nest had been made, or on different floors, but their testimony is invariably inconsistent, not matching established facts or even statements they made themselves in the immediate aftermath, and more than once was contradicted by people they had been with, who didn’t see the same thing and also indicated that the witnesses never mentioned seeing such things at the time. On the other hand, a great deal of consistent eyewitness testimony describes a lone man, fitting Oswald’s description, in the 6th floor window that had been turned into a sniper’s nest, even seeing the stacks of boxes behind him, and seeing the rifle in his hands. A Dallas Times Herald photographer and another cameraman who were both in the same motorcade vehicle witnessed this. A court clerk across the street pinpointed the window as well, said as much to his friend, and then directed a deputy sheriff to search there. A student on the street below looked up after the first shot and saw the barrel extended from that window, and then he saw the muzzle flare when it fired again. A fifteen year old boy who had been lifted onto a high perch across the street for a better view said he saw everything in the sniper’s nest, indicating just one shooter and running to a police officer immediately to report what he’d seen. A construction worker named Howard Brennan who had a perfect view of the sniper’s nest described a man fitting Oswald’s description to a T, and even described his lack of expression before the shooting and his self-satisfied smirk after.

Conspiracist writers relentlessly attempt to discredit Brennan because he didn’t express absolute certainty while later picking Oswald out of a lineup, but he did pick him, and later he explained his hesitance to express certainty as a product of fear, since he was having second thoughts about becoming a principal witness against the President’s assassin, thinking it could put a target on him if there really were some conspiracy, as some were already saying. Conspiracist authors like Jim Marrs, and Mark Lane, one of the earliest and most vociferous conspiracy peddlers, bring up Brennan’s poor eyesight to discredit him, saying he was nearsighted and thus could not have seen all the details he claimed. In fact, though, Brennan was farsighted. After the assassination, his eyesight was damaged in a sandblasting injury, but at the time of the assassination, he was actually peculiarly suited to discern the specific details he described from a distance. Regardless of all this testimony from outside the Depository, though, the statements of other Book Depository employees clear everything up. His fellow workers saw him on the sixth floor, lurking near the windows that looked out on the plaza. At about 11:45am, everyone took their lunch, intending to go down and watch the passing motorcade, and several remembered Oswald staying behind. One coworker even came back to get some cigarettes he had left on that floor, saw Oswald near the sniper’s nest window, and asked him if he was coming down for lunch. Oswald said he was not. Another employee came to the sixth floor to see where others were gathering and found it empty, but he did notice the high stacks of books in front of the south-east corner window. He ate his lunch quickly at a different window and then left to find others who were watching the motorcade, joining two friends at a fifth-floor window just below the sniper’s nest. All three, Harold Norman, Junior Jarman, and Bonnie Ray Williams, are critical witnesses, for they heard exactly three rifle shots coming from directly overhead, and they were even seen by some witnesses on the street leaning out their window and straining to see the window above them.

Commission Exhibits 1301-2, revealing Oswald’s sniper’s nest, courtesy the National Archives.

Much has been made of the supposed goings on at the grassy knoll further down the motorcade route from the Depository, but if we look closely at the reasons for suspecting a shooter was there, it starts to look entirely like a red herring. Remember that all the physical evidence and the preponderance of witness testimony indicate just three shots were fired, and all from the Depository. We’ve also established that echo patterns in Dealey Plaza confused the origin of sounds. Therefore, it is unsurprising that a couple police officers—not fifty, as some unreliable witness testimony claimed—went first to the grassy knoll to search for a gunman, and that they very quickly discerned there was nothing there. Being urged by most witnesses to search the Depository, that building quickly became the focus of their search. As with much conspiracy speculation, claims involving the grassy knoll often rely on mistaken witness statements, like that of a woman, Julia Ann Mercer, who was stuck in her car during the motorcade’s passage and said she saw men taking a gun case from a pickup truck and taking it to the grassy knoll. It turned out that the truck was stalled, and the men were getting tools from the back in order to fix it. The Dallas police had been monitoring the vehicle as they tried to maintain security on the plaza. Much of the speculation about the grassy knoll derives from witness statements that a puff of smoke was seen there during the shooting, but any modern ammunition a second shooter would have been using would be mostly smokeless, and the strong northerly wind that day would not have allowed smoke from a firearm to simply linger in the air. If something smoke-like were momentarily seen above the grassy knoll, it’s more likely that it came from the exhaust of an abandoned police motorcycle, as one witness described, or from the nearby steam pipe which would shortly thereafter scald the hands of a Dallas police officer searching the area. Other than these mistaken reports, there are the unreliable accounts of people seeking attention, like Jean Hill, who was swept into the drama because she took a Polaroid picture of the back of Kennedy’s limo at about the time of the third shot. Her early reports show a lack of reliability, getting all kinds of things wrong, like not being clear on the number of people in the car with the President, saying she saw a dog in the car, and claiming things happened that did not, for example, attributing exclamations to the First Lady that no one in the vehicle heard her make. Hill’s story became more and more lurid as she had further chances to tell it. First she added that she heard five or six shots, the later ones from an automatic weapon. Then she said police fired back on the shooters, which clearly never happened. Then she said she gave chase to a suspicious man, even though photos taken in the wake of the assassination picture her not having moved from her original spot on the south side of Elm. Her statement was afterward taken by a Times Herald reporter, but in later retellings, she claimed it was some mystery men impersonating Secret Service agents who questioned her. In that initial interview, she emphatically asserted that nothing had drawn her attention during the shooting, but more than 20 years later, she was enthusiastically providing conspiracist author Jim Marrs with details about gunmen firing from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. To explain why her later claims don’t line up with testimony she gave to the Warren Commission, she claims that she was coerced to alter her story, even though a stenographer was present and recorded none of the threats and manipulation she describes.

On and on it goes with the witness claims about the grassy knoll. A tiny portion of another woman’s faded Polaroid is blown up and said to show a mysterious badged man with a rifle, though in fact it just appears to be foliage. A man in a nearby railroad signal tower, who had a view behind the fence on the grassy knoll, said he saw two men behind the fence, standing apart as if they did not know each other, but then after speaking with conspiracist author Mark Lane, as happened with more than one witness, he changed his story to say he saw a flash of light as though one of the men had fired a gun. In fact, though, he has admitted that he was busy at the time of the assassination, having to work the control panel in his tower, which required him to have his back turned to the entire scene. Fifteen years after the fact, yet more grassy knoll shooter witnesses came forward, one claiming to have seen men with CIA IDs there, and asserting that he heard bullets flying past his ear. Another says he saw a man in a suit enter the railyard behind the grassy knoll and pass a rifle to another man, who disassembled it. But the problem with these latecomers’ claims is that others who were present in those areas did not see them there, casting doubt on whether they were there at all, or at least on whether they were where they claim to have been. This is the same credibility problem that all the grassy knoll claims suffer: there are other witnesses who were present and saw nothing of the sort. There are numerous witnesses confirmed to have been within view of the grassy knoll who saw no shooters peeking over the fence, and three who were standing just in front of the fence who certainly would have been aware if a rifle had been fired just behind their heads. And there were police stationed on the railroad overpass for security purposes who would have been able to spot any gunmen firing from that fence in broad daylight. Yet claims about the grassy knoll never cease. One writer, David Lifton, determined to make the grassy knoll idea work despite its problems, fell so deep into his scrutiny of faded photos that he began to see all sorts of strange things, convincing himself that conspirators had somehow managed to build fake trees on the knoll as a kind of hunting blind. He claims they must have built this artificial foliage without anyone on the busy plaza having noticed, and then afterward removed it in the days following the assassination, when the entire plaza was an active crime scene, again without anyone seeing them. And more than that, in the shapes and shadows of photo enhancements he made himself, he believed he could make out men in those fake trees wearing headsets and spiked imperial Prussian helmets, using periscopes and manning machine gun emplacements. In fact, he was pretty sure that he recognized General Douglas MacArthur somewhere among those black-and-white blotches. To illustrate the absurdity of the notion that General MacArthur was hiding in fake trees on the grassy knoll to oversee Kennedy’s assassination that day, it’s helpful to know that there was much mutual respect and admiration between the two, who had both served in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. At the time, MacArthur was 82 and frail, ailing from cirrhosis, which would take his life in less than a year. Kennedy had actually already made plans for MacArthur’s state funeral. Upon hearing the news about the assassination later that day, MacArthur sent Jackie Kennedy a powerful telegram, which reads, “I realize the utter futility of words at such a time, but the world of civilization shares the poignancy of this monumental tragedy. As a former comrade in arms, his death kills something within me.” Unfortunately, it’s quite typical of conspiracy speculators to not consider the human side of their claims, to toss out connections and spew ill-considered allegations, just hoping something sticks, never really considering that the names they throw out belong to actual people with rich lives and relationships and feelings.

A Polaroid photo taken the moment after the fatal head shot, in which can be seen a few people standing on the grassy knoll and, if we may judge by their postures and the direction of their gazes, clearly not hearing shots being fired from behind them.

The last and, to some, most important element to consider in this forensic mess, so relentlessly obfuscated by conspiracy speculation over the years, is that of the single bullet, dubbed the “magic bullet” by doubters, that was determined to have entered Kennedy’s back, exited his neck, and then caused multiple wounds in Governor Connally, thereafter remaining intact and ending up in the governor’s hospital gurney. There is, of course, much to be said about the actions and statements of the doctors who treated Kennedy at Parkland, the taking of his body out of Dallas on Air Force One, and the results of his autopsy at Bethesda, and the conspiracy narratives that have been spun around these events. In fact, there is so much that I will be releasing a patron exclusive on the topic. To conclude this episode, let us only look at the so-called “magic bullet” trajectory. Using the visible reactions of Kennedy and Connally on the Zapruder film to determine when they were struck, the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee encountered a timing problem. It appeared to them, looking at Kennedy’s arm movement and a later change in Connally’s facial expression, when he opens his mouth widely—a moment in the Zapruder film that Connally himself identifies as when he was shot—that there was too long between their reactions. They both tried to explain this away by saying Connally simply had a delayed reaction, but Connally himself said he instantly felt the bullet’s impact. This discrepancy, which conspiracy speculators take as proof they had been struck by different bullets, has since been resolved by expert modern enhancements of the Zapruder film in the 1990s. It can now clearly be seen that between frames 224 and 227, Kennedy assumed “Thorburn’s Position,” a neurological reaction to spinal injury as the bullet passed near his sixth vertebra, and Connally, nearly simultaneously changes his posture. His lapel can even be seen to flip up in the same spot where there was later seen a bullet hole in his shirt. The moment he picked as when he was hit, when he opens his mouth widely, was more likely a reaction to his first attempt to take a breath after being shot, when his lung collapsed. With the timing problem resolved, there is the further question of the bullet’s path through Connally’s chest and his right wrist and then into his thigh.

With the timing problem resolved, there is the further question of the bullet’s path through Connally’s chest and his right wrist and then into his thigh. The famous claim of those who mockingly call it a “magic bullet” is that it would have had to make impossible turns in midair to make all of Connally’s injuries. There is no surprising refutation here. That’s just simply untrue. Computer recreations of the Zapruder film have demonstrated that Connally was in a perfect position for the bullet to take its path, turned in his seat to search for the source of the first gunshot he had heard. Fired downward from the Depository’s sixth floor, as recreations proved it must have been, the bullet passed through Kennedy and entered Connally’s back, changed course slightly within his body when it struck his rib, exited below his right nipple, then passed through his wrist, which was in front of him holding his hat, and entered his thigh only a short way. The path of the bullet can even be discerned in the Zapruder film when one sees the movement of his hat at the moment his wrist is struck. Some have claimed the bullet later found in his gurney was too “pristine” and must have been planted, but it was a full metal jacket round, designed to pass through its targets as it did, and it was slightly damaged. The doctor treating Connally at Parkland immediately suspected the bullet must have survived intact when he saw how shallow the wound in his thigh was, and he even suggested Connally’s belongings be searched to find it. Lastly, anyone who watched the film JFK knows that much has been made of the motion of Kennedy’s head when he was struck by the last shot. “Back and to the left” echoes in our minds, having even become a darkly humorous meme, parodied in Seinfeld. Conspiracists claim the head’s backward movement demonstrates that he was not shot from behind but from in front, from the grassy knoll. However, again, conspiracy proponents are just talking out of their asses here, pretending to be experts on the human body’s reaction to gunshot wounds. Actually, doctors with expertise in gunshot wounds say that every person reacts differently depending on numerous factors. Some of the factors identified by experts for Kennedy’s backward movement include a neuromuscular spasm, triggered by the destruction of his cortex, causing his back and neck to stiffen, a reflex heightened by his tightly strapped on back brace, which prevented him from falling forward. Another factor is the so-called “jet effect” cited by Nobel prize-winner Luis Alvarez, who observed that the explosive force of his massive exit wound on the front right side of his head may have actually thrust him back in the opposite direction. Regardless, though, if conspiracists will only believe the shot came from behind if there is a forward motion, they should be satisfied by the fact that enhancements of the Zapruder film indeed show him jerking a couple inches forward before his motion back and to the left.

A diagram of the single bullet’s remarkably unmagical path, included in Posner’s Case Closed.

Further Reading

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part Two: The Activist

On Wednesday, April 10th, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald tearfully admitted to his Russian wife Marina that he had been fired from his photoprint trainee job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. His eyes welled up with tears as he blamed the FBI, who he assumed had spoken to his employer and gotten him fired. In fact, after his second interview, the FBI appears to have lost track of him for the time being because of his frequent moves, but Oswald’s inflated sense of self-importance made it hard for him to believe they weren’t hounding him. Marina could tell he was on the edge of something that night, as he ate dinner tensely and silently. After dinner, he left the house, and Marina became anxious, pacing and fretting over what she should do. She had no great love for her husband, who had long abused her physically and mentally, but she relied on him. He had refused to teach her any English, probably so that she was wholly dependent on him, and it worked. Her only friend was Ruth Paine, whom she had met through the Russian émigré circle that had cast them out because of their dislike of Oswald and because of Marina’s reluctance to leave him despite his abuse. Ruth, however, who could speak some Russian, as she was learning the language, remained close with Marina, wanting to help her but fearing retribution from the volatile Oswald. On this night, though, Marina feared telling Ruth about her suspicions. Four days earlier, Lee had left the house with his rifle, the one she had photographed him holding, and he had returned home without it. She had worried since then that he intended to do something terrible with it, and tonight she had an awful feeling. If she told Ruth, though, her friend might report Lee to authorities, and she feared being left alone America, unable to speak the language, with no husband to support her, especially now, as she was pregnant with their second child. So instead of calling anyone, she went into Oswald’s little study, where she found a note with a key set on top of it. It appeared to have been left for her, written in Russian, telling her where his post office box was located, telling her to reach out to the Soviet embassy for help and assuring her that once they found out what had happened to him, they would come to her aid. The note read like a last will and testament, instructing her what to do with his papers and belongings and how much money he had left behind for her, but it ended by telling her where she could find the city jail in the event that he had been captured alive. Needless to say, the note only upset her more, driving her to near desperation when Oswald finally returned before midnight. He looked quite shaken himself, breathing as if he had been rushing home on foot, and pale-faced, as if terrified. When Marina confronted him about his note, he confessed that he had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, the right-wing extremist he had been stalking, by shooting at him in his home. He wasn’t certain whether he had succeeded, for after taking his shot, he had fled and buried his rifle. He turned on the radio, expecting at least to hear about the attempt, but was disappointed when he could find no news about it. Marina slept poorly, fearful of police tracking dogs leading authorities to their door. When she woke, she found Oswald hunched over the radio. She did not understand the English spoken by the broadcaster, but she gathered the gist of the report when Oswald angrily said, “I missed.” In fact, he had only just missed his mark. His bullet had gone slightly off its course when it passed through a wire screen, causing it to carom off the window’s woodwork before striking the glass. Lee explained that he had been planning the assassination for months, showing her photos he’d taken of Walker’s house and maps on which he had traced his escape route. He assured her that killing Walker would be like killing Hitler before the Holocaust, that the ends justified the means, but Marina extracted a promise from him that he wouldn’t try to kill Walker again, threatening to go to the police with evidence of his guilt if he ever did such a thing, and insisting he go stay with family in New Orleans and look for a new job there just to keep him out of trouble. For days afterward, she noticed Oswald having violent nightmares in his sleep. She feared her husband was irredeemably sick in his mind.

*

It did not take long for conspiracy believers to begin messaging me about claims I “overlooked.” It was implied by some of these reply guys that I had some ulterior motive for the position I am taking on the Kennedy assassination, or that I have knowingly presented false information for which there is no evidence. True to the character of a conspiracy speculator, they see conspiracy everywhere, so if someone presents a compelling argument to refute their notions, they must also be part of some conspiracy to obscure the truth. Some of the complaints were about parts of the history that I haven’t even gotten to yet, demanding my position on some conspiracist claim that I will likely eventually address during the series or its tie-in exclusives, such as the claims about Oswald’s friend George de Mohrenschildt being his CIA handler, telling all later in life, and then being suicided just before he could testify. Please realize that I cannot address every false claim or misrepresented detail in this series. It’s not a 5-hundred-page book. If you’re looking for a more encyclopedic refutation of all conspiracist claims, I encourage you to read my sources. Nevertheless, I made attempts to answer the claims about de Mohrenschildt in good faith by responding to one self-appointed social media interrogator, though admittedly in brief, since I was planning a patron exclusive podcast episode about de Mohrenschildt, but my reply was apparently not enough, as I was thereafter accused of using biased sources or even making up sources. I then indicated what my sources about de Mohrenschildt were, but they were rejected out of hand as suffering from “confirmation bias.” Tellingly, my sources’ actual research and evidence were not refuted, but rather the authors themselves, based on reputation, and no preferable or supposedly less biased sources were recommended, likely because any conspiracist authors could likewise be accused of suffering from confirmation bias, as could my interlocutors themselves. What I have shown, however, and what my sources show, is that conspiracist authors’ research frequently omits important aspects of the story and misrepresents information or exaggerates the reliability of witnesses in order to further their theses. It’s easier to attack the researcher in this case than to address their actual research, which is what I and my sources try to do with conspiracist research. So let’s talk about my sources. In part one, I mentioned Gerald Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK as a principal source, and I’ve had loyal supporters of the program message me with concerns about his reputation as a plagiarist. In my view, Posner has answered for his plagiarism and misattribution of quotes, which occurred later in his career, when he was the chief investigative reporter for the Daily Beast and facing deadlines that he asserts resulted in some confusion in handling his source materials before taking responsibility and resigning. As far as I've been able to determine, few aside from the conspiracists who refuse to acknowledge his conclusions have ever suggested his research into the JFK and MLK assassinations was anything but exhaustive, calling it “meticulous” and “authoritative.” What few respected researchers suggest he may have omitted certain details, like Vincent Bugliosi, nevertheless agree with his conclusions and call his work “impressive.” Here I’ll recommend other books as sources that confirm Oswald acted alone: Kennedy scholar and assassination historian Mel Ayton’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt, and former LA County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. One of the conspiracy believers who has told me he would be “monitoring” my work has said Bugliosi’s background makes him biased. Surely this doesn’t refer to his personal scandals, which have nothing to do with his research on JFK and have mostly been raised by those promoting Charles Manson conspiracies, since Bugliosi prosecuted Manson. No one should believe that his abusive behavior in his private life should discredit his research unless one cannot recognize the ad hominem fallacy. Rather, it seems to be a suggestion that anyone with a law enforcement background or any connection to government cannot be trusted in this case, and that’s the same kind of thinking that would suggest everyone involved in every federal investigation of the assassination, whether conducted by the FBI, the Secret Service, or Congress, must be in on the vast conspiracy, which is simply an untenable argument. And I suppose in the conspiracist view, somehow Bugliosi, who successfully prosecuted hundreds of felony trials, including the conviction of Charles Manson, is somehow unreliable, whereas conspiracist author Jim Marrs, who also writes about the Illuminati and Freemasons covering up an extra-terrestrial presence on earth, is credible as a researcher? As you can see, some of my encounters with believers in a large conspiracy to assassinate JFK have left a bad taste in my mouth. Those I’m speaking about shouldn’t be surprised to find themselves blocked by me on social media. I’m sure they’ll take it as some victory that I blocked them, but really it’s just a reflection of your poor etiquette in the tone you took when you came at me online. I only sparingly block anyone on social media. Also, I just don’t have time to trade tweets endlessly with someone who isn’t really looking to consider my view and simply wants to save face and get the last word. I hope you keep listening and maybe keep an open mind, as I have done—yeah, I used to believe there was some shadowy conspiracy involved here, but keeping an open mind when I began to actually examine the research out there, I changed my mind and am now convinced that Oswald was a lone assassin. If you keep listening and still want to get in touch, do it by emailing me through the website instead of making it a performative public challenge, which doesn’t seem conducive to a good faith debate.

*

General Walker, not long before the attempt on his life. Image via Dallas Morning News

Back to the plot, and the pot shot at Walker. Conspiracy speculators have a conflicted relationship with the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to assassinate General Walker just seven months before he successfully assassinated JFK. Some argue that it proves he couldn’t have shot JFK from the Book Depository because his failure to hit the much easier target of Walker in his dining room proved he was a terrible marksman. We will get to the claims about Oswald’s marksmanship and capabilities of his rifle, but it is clear from the evidence of the failed Walker assassination that his missed shot was not proof of poor marksmanship. Walker himself afterward described the scene, explaining that at night, from a hundred feet away where Oswald had likely taken position by Walker’s back fence, the window would have exposed a wide, illuminated view of his dining room, and it would have been difficult to even see the wire screen that threw the bullet off its path and into the wood of the frame. As Walker explained, “[H]e could have been a very good shot and just by chance he hit the woodwork.” But after all, it could not have been so poor a shot, for even with the slight deflection by the screen, wood, and glass, the bullet still only just missed Walker’s head, for he said he felt it pass through his hair. Other conspiracy speculators dismiss Marina’s testimony, even though she knew Oswald better than anyone in the world, and they assert Oswald was not the shooter who attempted to assassinate Walker, or that the same rifle later found in the Book Depository was not the one used to fire at Walker, pointing out that ballistics experts could not conclusively match the recovered bullet to the rifle. This is true, because the bullet was very damaged, but experts did determine that it was highly probable that it had been fired from the same Mannlicher-Carcano, which Oswald retrieved from it hiding place 4 days after the attempt on Walker’s life, because certain marks on the slug matched those on bullets fired by the rifle in ballistics tests after the JFK assassination. Furthermore, neutron-activation tests proved that the bullet had been manufactured by the same company as the bullets fired in Dealey Plaza. Essentially, the 6.5mm cartridges used in both incidents might very well have sat next to each other in the same box of ammo. But even more difficult for these conspiracy speculators to explain is the fact that FBI investigators discovered evidence of the Walker assassination attempt among Oswald’s belongings after the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, five of the photographs Oswald took of Walker’s home have survived. Because this is all very hard to address, some conspiracy speculators, like the famous Jim Garrison, just ignore it, never bothering to mention Oswald’s first foray into politically-motivated murder.

Nor does it seem that Oswald gave up entirely on perpetrating an assassination after his failure to kill General Walker. Only 11 days later, his temper rose when he read in the paper that Richard Nixon was pushing to move against Communists in Cuba, and further reading that Nixon was in town on a visit, Marina says that he took his revolver and tried to leave the house to go find him. Marina lured him into the bathroom before he could leave and then locked him inside. She insisted that she would rather he kill her than leave the house with his gun to murder a political figure. She wouldn’t let him out until he had cooled down and stripped off all his clothes so that he could not easily push past her out of the house. Afterward, it turned out he had misread the paper. It was Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson who was in Dallas at the time, not former Vice-President Richard Nixon. The next day, after he had surrendered his pistol to Marina, Oswald admitted his mistake, and within 4 days, he had taken a bus to New Orleans and arranged to stay with his aunt Lillian there while he searched for a job, according to Marina’s wishes. However, he wasn’t entirely done with politics. Before leaving Dallas, he picked up a stack of leaflets sent to him by Fair Play for Cuba, a pro-Castro organization that he had taken in interest in and may have done a little demonstrating for the month prior. Oswald intended to expand his political activism in New Orleans, but first he needed to get a job. After lying freely on his many applications, he found a position greasing machinery at a coffee company for a buck and a half an hour, so he went in search of an apartment for him and Marina and little June, lying to his new landlady about where he worked. His sense of himself as an outlaw or spy being hounded by the FBI continued, though they didn’t even know where he was. The maintenance job was hard, so Oswald slacked, as he always did, spending his some of his work hours playing hooky at a neighboring garage, where the proprietor had a lot of gun magazines that Oswald would sit and read and even borrow. The owner of this garage, Adrian Alba, a firearm enthusiast, remembered Osborn picking his brain about the subject, asking him which caliber bullet was deadliest to humans. Alba sometimes worked on FBI and Secret Service vehicles, and he would later claim that he had seen Oswald accepting an envelope from an FBI agent who was getting a vehicle serviced at the garage. Conspiracy believers love this story. The problem is Alba mentioned no such incident when questioned by the FBI or the Warren Commission after the Kennedy assassination, only first claiming it fifteen years later because, according to him, he had forgotten it. When the House Select Committee investigated this claim, though, they found no record of the FBI using Alba’s garage all that year.

Exhibit showing Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans.

In June, about a month after Marina and his daughter had joined him in New Orleans at the squalid little apartment he had rented for them, Oswald took her to the hospital and learned that they would not deliver Marina’s child for free, even though Oswald’s income was very small. Marina remembered this as an inflection point in his evolving feelings about the United States. When he had grown to hate Soviet Russia and wanted to return home, he had softened a bit on the U.S., but his hatred of American capitalism had only grown more pronounced since his return stateside. He had many times suggested that they should return to Russia. She remembers that it was after the hospital turned them away that he first made a disparaging remark against President Kennedy, specifically about how “his papa bought him the Presidency. Money paves the way to everything here.” So he threw himself into his political activism for Cuba, believing that, though Russia had let him down, Castro was surely building a perfect Marxist utopia, and the U.S. should leave them be. He started by disseminating leaflets that said “HANDS OFF CUBA” and encouraging people to join his branch of Fair Play for Cuba, which was just him. He never managed to attract any prospective members of the branch he hoped to start, but that didn’t stop him from writing to the President of the organization, as well as to leaders of the American Communist Party, and bragging about all the good work he was doing in New Orleans, lying about his chapter’s growing membership. In a further effort to impress, he tried to infiltrate a local anti-Castro Cuban expatriate group, presenting himself as a supporter and offering to train Cubans to fight Castro. These Cubans were suspicious of him right away, and later, when they happened to see Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in the street, they confronted him, starting a big fight for which all of them were arrested. While the Cubans made bail, Oswald was stuck there overnight. After lying in his police interview about where he lived and worked, he asked the police to contact the FBI. The fact he asked for the FBI, and that an agent promptly came to the station on a Saturday, is latched onto by conspiracy speculators as proof that he was working with them, but the agent who reported was simply the agent on Saturday duty at the local FBI office and was duty-bound to answer such summons by the New Orleans police in order to determine whether the case might be of interest to the Bureau. Their meeting was not secret, and the report that the agent afterward wrote indicates that Oswald also lied to him. It is apparent that Oswald, who believed the FBI was hounding him and getting him fired from jobs, wanted to explain his arrest to the FBI on his own terms. He claimed that other members of Fair Play for Cuba had asked him to distribute the leaflets, giving one of his go-to alias names, Hidell, to the agent. Furthermore, if he really were secretly working with the Bureau, as some researchers have pointed out, it does seem unlikely that he would completely blow his cover by summoning the FBI to him like that.

What really complicates any rational, evidence-based detailing of Oswald’s path to assassinating Kennedy on Dealey Plaza is the sheer quantity of false claims that have afterward been made by conspiracists looking to sell books and witnesses who were either genuinely mistaken or seeking attention. It is nearly impossible to tell the story without stopping every minute to say, “some have claimed this, but here’s why they’re wrong.” For example, it has been asserted that the anti-Castro Cuban arrested for fighting with Oswald, Carlos Bringuier, the New Orleans delegate of the Cuban Student Directorate, was allied with the CIA and staged the fight and the arrest just to establish Oswald’s supposed cover as an activist supporting Castro. Bringuier denies it, and the only evidence of his contact with the CIA came after the Kennedy assassination, when the agency interviewed him about his nephew, who had defected to the U.S. from Cuba. So it is just a baseless accusation that, once made, gets repeated despite a complete lack of evidence that it’s true. This is the stock in trade of the conspiracy speculator. Some claims, however, start with a bit more, a puzzling detail and a coincidence. These are the claims that are harder to dispute, because a conspiracist will never admit to the existence of coincidence. One such rabbit hole has to do with a certain address that Oswald appears to have stamped on a few of his leaflets. Most were stamped with his home address, or with the name Hidell and his P.O. Box, but a few were stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, a building at which a private eye named Guy Bannister kept an office. Bannister was a former FBI agent and Bircher with connections to the intelligence world, and he also did investigative work for Carlos Marcello, a powerful mafia figure, so for a conspiracy speculator, he is the perfect person to connect Oswald to a variety of different groups they like to imagine were behind the President’s assassination. However, both the FBI and the Secret Service investigated this connection, finding that none of the building’s tenants, nor its janitor, had ever seen Oswald there, and none had ever seen any Fair Play for Cuba literature in the building. Years later, though, the House Select Committee on Assassinations and various conspiracist authors managed to find some people to say they had seen him there. One, another P.I. who sometimes worked with Bannister, was a known drunk and liar who had previously stated that he had never seen Oswald there. The other, Bannister’s secretary, likewise said at first that she’d never seen Oswald there, and only later said she had, after apparently being paid by the conspiracist author interviewing her, to whom she would later admit to lying. So with nothing concrete or credible tying Oswald to that address, the only question remaining is why it was stamped on his leaflets. It’s been suggested that it may have been mere coincidence. Oswald was known to use false addresses all the time, and he happened to pass by this address when visiting the unemployment office. Perhaps he even saw a “For Rent” sign on the building and fantasized about opening his Fair Play for Cuba branch office there, even though he didn’t have the money for it. Then there is the fact that this used to be the headquarters for an anti-Castro organization, and Oswald may have seen the former address stamped on some of their old leaflets. In that case, stamping the address of a rival group on his propaganda may have struck him as funny, ironic, or even as a provocation.

The oddball David Ferrie, often connected to Oswald through coincidence.

The wayward stamped Camp Street address also leads conspiracy speculators to link Oswald with a strange man named David Ferrie, an anti-Communist mercenary and self-ordained bishop who claimed to be a cancer researcher, a fighter pilot, and a hypnotist. Ferrie was a strikingly odd character, and looked unusual as well, suffering from alopecia and compensating for his complete hairlessness by wearing a red wig and pasted on eyebrows. Ferrie worked with Bannister as well as for mafia boss Carlos Marcello, but he was further connected with anti-Castro Cubans. Conspiracists argue that Oswald had known Ferrie since he was 15 and had joined the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans, where Ferrie happened to serve as a squadron captain. Ferrie later told the FBI that he never knew Oswald, but of course a conspiracy believer wouldn’t believe him. Records show that Ferrie had been rejected from rejoining the patrol after giving right-wing lectures to cadets in 1954 and wasn’t reinstated until 1958, which would mean he wasn’t there when Oswald was a cadet in ’55, but certain photos have appeared purporting to picture both of them together in a large group. Some such photos were proven to be fakes, while others were not, but regardless, happening to be in that organization at the same time, or even in the same photo, does not prove a relationship or a conspiracy, and Ferrie may have been truthful in saying he didn’t know Oswald if he didn’t remember the youth. The more unusual accusations linking David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald would turn up years later, when Jim Garrison produced six witnesses from the little backwater Lousiana town of Clinton who claimed in testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that they had seen Oswald with Ferrie in a car in Clinton when an initiative was underway to register Black residents to vote. They said that Oswald got out of the car and stood in line with the Black registrants. This certainly does seem like something Oswald would do. He was known to disregard segregation codes out of principle and sit among Black people in public places, such as at his own trial for disturbing the peace. However, it doesn’t make much sense for David Ferrie to have been involved, since he held right-wing views, which of course makes it out of character for Oswald to associate with him at all. It has been suggested that they were involved with some FBI COINTELPRO operation, to infiltrate and undermine the Congress of Racial Equality, which was organizing the registration that day, but this too would be very out of character for Oswald, requiring us to believe he had been building a false persona since middle school, when he was first drawn to leftist politics. A clearer explanation is that the witnesses, whose testimony was sealed by the House Select Committee, were mistaken, or had been misled. Indeed, Garrison produced the witnesses after interviewing over 300 others, and there are clear indications that he and his staff coached them, encouraging them to change their story if it contradicted a known fact. For example, some of these witnesses believed they had seen Oswald in October or later, when the weather was cold, but Oswald and Marina had moved away when the weather was still hot, in September. Moreover, the fact that witnesses identified Oswald and Ferrie and another of Garrison’s suspects, Clay Shaw, may have been because Garrison only showed them those three photos and told them others had already identified them. These problems, as well as inconsistencies among the witnesses’ stories, make their claims less than reliable and leave a conscientious researcher doubting whether there was in fact a connection between Oswald and Ferrie in 1963.

After Oswald’s arrest and trial, at which he pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace, he received a little taste of fame and gloried in it, which certainly does not seem like something that an intelligence agent would be seeking. A local television producer took an interest in him, filmed him demonstrating and then asked to videotape an interview of him. Oswald excitedly wrote to the head of Fair Play for Cuba and to figures in the American Communist Party again, boasting about all the attention his fictional branch of Fair Play for Cuba was getting. With his confidence growing, he agreed to a further television appearance, but he didn’t know that the television producer had since been in contact with the local FBI office. After Oswald had summoned an agent to him in jail, the FBI now knew where he was again and had sent his file to the New Orleans office. The television producer happened to have a contact in the FBI office, learned about his file, and was invited to come examine it, something that, again, it doesn’t seem the FBI would have wanted done if they were using Oswald as some kind of confidential informant or even as a stooge. The result was Oswald’s televised humiliation, in which the reporter confronted him about his undesirable discharge from the Marines and his attempted defection to the USSR. Oswald was revealed as a liar and presented to the viewing public as a turncoat. Oswald was destroyed by the humiliation. He seemed to give up on his political activism entirely, staying at home, brooding, sitting on his porch in the dark with his rifle, practicing its bolt action over and over. As he had always done when unhappy, he fantasized about abandoning the country, this time turning his thoughts to Cuba. When Marina found him studying airline schedules, he revealed to her that he intended to hijack a passenger flight at gunpoint and take it to Cuba, and that she would need to take part, holding a gun on the passengers while he dealt with the pilots. Marina was horrified. Eventually, though, since he had successfully renewed his passport a few months earlier, he decided instead to visit Mexico, planning to go to the Cuban embassy there and lay out a case, based on his Russian defection and pro-Castro activism, for being granted a Cuban visa. He began to teach himself some rudimentary Spanish, and he sent Marina off to Dallas with their belongings to live with her friend Ruth Paine, telling her he would send for her when he was settled in Cuba.

Oswald appearing on television in New Orleans. Image via WDSU TV.

One of the really confusing aspects of Oswald’s story is that, after the Kennedy assassination, numerous witnesses came forward claiming they had seen Oswald in Dallas or elsewhere when he was actually on his trip to Mexico seeking passage to Cuba. This is not that surprising or strange, since mass media coverage often leads to misidentifications. What’s really odd, though, is that even though we know that Oswald was in Mexico—from numerous positive identifications by fellow passengers on his bus as well as at the Cuban and Soviet embassies that he visited while there, along with the fact that the Cuban embassy instructed him to get passport-sized photographs taken and those remain on file, definitively proving that the man in Mexico calling himself Oswald was indeed the Oswald we know—even though we have the evidence to refute these other identifications of Oswald at the time, conspiracists have muddied the waters further by claiming that, instead of being mistaken, these witnesses must have seen an impostor who was going around calling himself Osborn in Texas at the time. For example, an employee at the Selective Service headquarters in Austin said he came in there, but other employees could not confirm this, and no one using the name appears to have signed in. A waitress says she saw him at a nearby café that day, but does not appear to have actually been working at the time. Then a woman who had been an early founder of a certain anti-Castro organization said she’d been visited by Oswald and others in late September, and that later, she was told this Oswald had been saying Kennedy should be shot over the Bay of Pigs. Problem was, though, she couldn’t make a proper identification from photos, and her psychiatrist would later cast doubt on the veracity of her story in his testimony to the Warren Commission. The weight of testimony and evidence falls on the side of Oswald having been in Mexico, and the rest we have good reason to disregard as unreliable.

At the Cuban embassy, the consul disappointed Oswald by not granting him a visa, despite Oswald’s presentation depicting himself as a devoted Marxist, a noted activist, and a friend of Castro’s revolution. It turned out that processing his request could take weeks, but he only had a Mexican tourist visa for a few days. It was suggested that obtaining a Soviet visa might facilitate faster approval of his visit to Cuba, so Oswald made his way to the nearby Soviet embassy. Inside, he spoke Russian, presented his documents, declared he was formerly a defector and needed a Soviet visa immediately because the FBI were hounding him. He even went so far as to claim that he had some crucial intelligence that he would only divulge when they granted him his visa. The staff thought him unstable. When he was told it could take four months for his visa, he began crying out in despair. “It’s all going to end in tragedy!” he exclaimed. KGB agents present at the embassy actually sent a cable to Moscow, which was received by none other than Yuri Nosenko, who would later defect to America, as detailed in my recent Blind Spot exclusive minisode. Nosenko cabled back that they would not grant the volatile and fickle Oswald his visa, so they turned him away, diplomatically, of course. Simply proving his instability, Oswald returned the next day and brandished his revolver, complaining about how he had to carry it because of FBI harassment. They wrestled his gun away from him and kicked him out. After one more fruitless attempt at the Cuban embassy, he eventually returned to Dallas an abject failure, moving in with his wife’s friends, the Paines, who greatly disliked him for his treatment of Marina. In the end, his entire Mexican adventure stands as profound evidence that he was completely on his own.

The Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald got a job with a little help from his wife’s friend after she learned from a neighbor that they had hired her brother. Image courtesy University of North Texas

Back in Dallas, he started looking for a job, and he found it hard, not because the FBI was stopping people from hiring him, as he suspected, but because prospective employers called any former employers and learned that Oswald was a terrible employee. Eventually, with the help of Ruth Paine, who wanted to see her friend provided for, Oswald got a job at the Texas School Book Depository. Ruth had heard from someone who knew someone else who got work there that they may hire Oswald, and she had called herself to recommend Oswald, despite her feelings for him. Here we see the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination coming together, but not arranged by a conspiracy. During this time, Oswald threw himself back into politics, attending one of General Walker’s rallies as well as ACLU meetings with Ruth’s husband, Michael Paine, to whom he confided his beliefs that political change must be forced through some act of violence. We see the development of a possible motive throughout the year, as he came to admire Castro, who had been the target of assassination attempts himself, and who had been quoted in newspapers Oswald read as calling Kennedy a cretin and suggesting that “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” We know from his brush with television fame that he relished attention for his political views, and we know that he believed he might win entrance to Cuba by impressing them with his political activism. We further know that he still had the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, and that he practiced dry runs with it incessantly while brooding. Now we place him in the book depository on Dealey Plaza. Many a conspiracy speculator has suggested that his getting the job there was part of the set-up, as it would give him such a perfect shot at Kennedy, but we know how he got the job—Ruth Paine, who despised him but sympathized with his wife. Was she part of the conspiracy too? Or perhaps her friend, who recommended the Depository, was part of the plot? Or maybe the man who hired him was a conspirator as well? And the fact is, when Oswald got the job, there hadn’t even been plans for a motorcade to pass by the building. Likewise, all of Oswald’s life, which conspiracy believers think was manipulated in order to place him at the scene of the assassination, took place long before any plans had even been made for JFK to visit Texas. The President’s trip to Dallas was not even announced until Oswald was on a bus to Mexico, and if things had gone differently there, he never would have been in Dallas that November. But conspiracy speculators see no problem with a conspiracy involving as many people is it may need to involve. Yet when it comes to coincidence, it seems they won’t even consider that one could possibly take place.

Further Reading

Ayton, Mel, and David Von Pein. Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Warren Report and Lee Harvey Oswald's Guilt and Motive 50 Years On. Strategic Media Books, 2014.

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Moore, Jim. Conspiracy of One: the Definitive Book on the Kennedy Assassination. Summit Group, 1990.

Peppard, Alan. “Before Gunning for JFK, Oswald Targeted Ex-Gen. Edwing A. Walker — and Missed.” The Dallas Morning News, 19 Nov. 2018, www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/11/19/before-gunning-for-jfk-oswald-targeted-ex-gen-edwin-a-walker-and-missed/.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Oswald and the JFK Assassination - Part One: The Defector

Ahead of President’s Day this year, I wanted to devote an episode to dispelling some common myths or misconceptions about a well-known American president. The question was, who? I have been thinking about myths related to the youth of George Washington propagated in textbooks since my post on curriculum controversies, so that was a candidate. I’d further been thinking about conspiracy theories surrounding Abe Lincoln’s assassination since my series on the Jesuits. Both would be interesting, and I’d like to cover both, but no one seems to loom larger in American myth and conspiracy theory than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Why is that? Is it because his assassination is more recent in memory? Yes, but there is something more about Kennedy and his legacy. He is venerated by many as an icon, a hero, an almost messianic martyr. Certainly Lincoln is venerated as perhaps our greatest statesman and savior of the Union, but he doesn’t seem to inspire the same kind of worship as does JFK. Is this notion of the real man earned or more myth than reality? When one looks more closely at Kennedy’s life and presidency, one sees that he has become more of a symbol than a historical figure. Early in his presidency, there was little to distinguish him as being among the great leaders of our history. He took the presidency at the height of the Cold War, and he suffered early humiliation when his efforts to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba resulted in the politically catastrophic Bay of Pigs failure, and likewise was unprepared for his summit with Kruschev that summer, in which, as Kennedy put it, Kruschev “savaged” him. None of this was surprising to his critics, who always viewed him as an impetuous playboy whose father had bought his way into the White House. But to many among the public, Kennedy represented a sea change in Washington, a youthful new hope sweeping away the old ways of the past. Certainly he was the youngest U.S. President, and he was replacing its oldest, but more than this, he appeared intent on ushering in a modernist and intellectual approach to government, filling his administration with Harvard alumni. He inspired such hope for a utopian future that some had taken to calling his Washington “Camelot,” making him the boy who would be king. Certainly he and his wife Jackie’s good looks and seeming vitality did much to inspire this adoration, although much of that was mere stagecraft, as Kennedy actually struggled with numerous longtime digestive and glandular diseases. His reputation as a ladies’ man, or philanderer as we might call him today, does not appear to have been exaggerated, but it has also never harmed his popularity among the American people. And eventually, he did come into his own and begin live up to the great expectations his believers had. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy displayed masterful diplomacy and leadership, deftly, though narrowly, sidestepping a nuclear incident. Afterward, he did much to soften America’s relationship with the Soviet Union. And most admirable today is his decision to make the push for civil rights the central issue of his administration. There may be evidence that he was only looking for some national purpose, or “Grand Objective” and that he was less interested in what that objective was than that we had one, but nevertheless, the simple fact that he chose racial justice and equality as that objective must be applauded. Unfortunately, he would make no real progress in ending segregation. That progress would not arrive until after his murder, perhaps hastened out of respect for him as a kind of martyred prophet. For this was the Kennedy that most Americans saw—a young idealist, an intellectual progressive, a fighter for justice and a champion of hope for all mankind—and this was the promise that was dashed on November 22, 1963, when he was shot dead in his motorcade as he passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. That afternoon, police arrested one Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine, and as would become known afterward, an attempted defector to the USSR. He was accused of the President’s assassination, of having fired the murder weapon from the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked, and of having afterward murdered a police officer on the street. Two days later, Oswald too would be dead, the victim of apparent vigilante violence perpetrated by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby. While JFK the symbol of hope and progress and change would live on, his legend perhaps even strengthened by his untimely end, so too would the mystery and suspicion surrounding his death persist through the decades, long after it should have been resolved, maybe reverberating even more strongly through history than did his actions in life. And among all the alleged intrigue that confuses and obscures the truth of the JFK assassination, oddly, what has been almost entirely lost is a clear picture of the man said to be responsible for it all. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd, and I would venture to suggest that if you simply couldn’t wait for the disclosure of records on the JFK assassination last month, hopeful that some long-hidden truth might finally be revealed, maybe you haven’t read much about the records that have long been available.

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Through the years, as I have researched and produced this podcast, I have come to recognize that the spread of baseless conspiracy theories, whether as propaganda or as popular beliefs that arise rather more organically, represent the central sociopolitical problem of our time. You may protest that political division, racial inequity, or rising authoritarianism are more pressing issues, but I would reply that unfounded conspiracy theories often lie at the root of such issues, or at least contribute to or worsen them. I understand that this is nothing new. I’ve shown it in my exploration of Illuminati conspiracies in early American elections, the rise of the Anti-Masonic political party in the early 19th century, and the spread of anti-Catholic nativism in the mid-19th century. With modern conspiracy theories, though, we see a fragmentation. Fewer are the grand unifying theories of conspiracy, except at the extreme fringe, and many competing conspiracist versions of historical moments proliferate, becoming normalized. In 2013, Public Policy Polling surveyed more than 1200 registered voters. They found that that 20% believed in the long disproven link between autism and vaccination, 21% believed that the U.S. covered up a UFO crash at Roswell, and an astonishing 37% believed climate change is a hoax. Perhaps even more disturbing, 28% believed that a globalist cabal conspired at authoritarian world domination, or a New World Order, which of course is usually just code for Jewish World Conspiracy. Survey results like this appear pretty frequently. In 1991, more than 30% of respondents to another poll expressed belief that Roosevelt allowed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In ’95,  pollsters revealed that around 20% of people they surveyed believed President Clinton had his former aide murdered. In 2007, more than 25% of respondents to a survey believed that 9/11 was an inside job. But king of all the conspiracy theories remains the theory that John F. Kennedy was the victim of a large-scale conspiracy to murder him. In 2013, PPP revealed that more than half of those they polled believed this. More recently, polls suggest that this number is more like 60% or higher. Such numbers have not been seen since 1975 when around 60% of those polled said they thought James Earl Ray had not acted alone to murder Martin Luther King, Jr., a widespread conspiracy theory about which I previously produced a series of podcast episodes. However, like the theories about the murder of King, the theories about JFK’s murder don’t typically agree. Some say Oswald worked for American intelligence, while others say he was working for the KGB. Many argue there were numerous shooters, and some suggest Oswald was not even one of them. The FBI has been put forward as the responsible party, but so has the mafia. With so many competing theories, and so many books published and reputations staked on different versions of events, it’s nearly impossible not to believe something was going on. This is the reason I for so long dreaded delving into this supposed mystery, as it just seemed like too much research to bite off. But then I found my principal source, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, by Gerald Posner, the author of the main source I relied on in my exploration of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. Posner cuts through the many competing theories with clear evidence, indicating over and over where conspiracy theorist authors purposely misrepresent the record or omit important information in service to their own theories. One of the biggest problems with conspiracist literature on the subject, as Posner demonstrates, is that it typically misrepresents, ignores, or gives short shrift to the main suspect in the case, the man that the Presidential Commission tasked with investigating the assassination, the Warren Commission, determined had acted alone in murdering him. As Posner shows, any worthy investigation of the JFK assassination must start with the man Lee Harvey Oswald. The only reason to avoid an in-depth examination of his life would be if one had already decided he was not the lone assassin.

While the Warren Commission delved into Lee Harvey Oswald’s early childhood and psychology to determine whether he may have fit the profile of an ideologically-driven murderer, conspiracist authors like Jim Marrs and Anthony Summers tend to gloss over his youth and his troubled relationship with his mother, preferring to imply that he was perfectly well-adjusted, thus casting doubt on his guilt. This characterization of Oswald couldn’t be further from the truth. His mother Marguerite is almost universally described by those who knew her best as dominating and controlling and withholding of maternal affection. Oswald’s father had died before he was born, and without his support, Marguerite chose to commit her three children to an orphanage until she had enough money to care for them. However, Lee was too young and so would instead be passed between an array of relatives and temporary babysitters, some of whom routinely beat him, calling him “unmanageable.” When he was three, his mother finally put him in the orphanage as well, but two years later, she pulled him and his brothers out and moved them from New Orleans to Texas, into the house of a new stepfather. Another two years later, after many arguments with her new husband about wanting more money, she left back to Louisiana with Lee. Afterward Marguerite would reunite with this husband, and occasional father figure to Lee, but then separated again. This is the pattern of neglect and instability in Lee Harvey Oswald’s early years, shuttled between Louisiana and Texas, sometimes with a father figure in an acceptable residence, but more often in a poor hovel with his cold mother. His brothers would later describe him as withdrawn and brooding in these early years. He was enrolled in school after school, and he was usually older and bigger than other kids. He thought himself smarter than everyone, perhaps because of his age difference, though an IQ test in his youth, as well as his poor literacy even as an adult tends to show this was not the case.

Marguerite Oswald, image courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Like many who believe themselves smarter than those around them, Oswald refused to respect authority and resisted discipline in school. Rather than making friends, he bullied other kids, throwing rocks at them. This early propensity toward violence was clear at home as well, where he once attempted to throw a butcher knife at his brother during a quarrel. At one point during his youth, when he and his mother had moved in with his older, married brother, Lee threatened to kill his sister-in-law with a knife when she told him to lower the television volume, and then he struck his mother in the face when she demanded he put down the knife. His early attraction to firearms was also apparent as early as middle school, when he had made plans to break into a store and steal a Smith & Wesson automatic. Witness after witness after the assassination called Oswald “strange,” “belligerent,” “insolent,” “arrogant,” “a loner” and “a psycho.” At thirteen, he underwent a psychiatric evaluation due to his truancy, and his analyst, a clinical psychologist named Dr. Renatus Hartogs, saw in him “a potential for explosive, aggressive, assaultive” behavior, calling him “intensely self-centered,” “cold, detached,” “an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster who suffers under the impact of really existing emotional isolation and deprivation, lack of affection, absence of family life and rejection by a self-involved and conflicted mother.” Hartogs’s analysis indicates a clear propensity for violence, but he chose not to recommend institutionalization, preferring to recommend probation and further psychiatric help, hoping the boy’s mental state might still stabilize. This evaluation of Oswald is damning in proving that he had long demonstrated the telltale signs of one capable of violence and murder, but what is even more shocking is that many conspiracist authors, including the District Attorney Jim Garrison who was played by Kevin Costner in the film JFK, fail to even mention it.

Jim Garrison and others also cast doubt on the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a rabid Communist, undermining the notion that he might have been driven by ideology to shoot Kennedy. However, according the preponderance of all testimony from those who knew him, his interest in Communism started early, developed throughout his adulthood and during his time in the military, and culminated in his attempt to defect to the Soviet Union. Other students at his middle school have spoken on the record about Lee’s radicalization in his youth, recalling how he would go on and on about the plight of the worker and bragging that he would join a Communist cell if he could find one. Apparently he had found some copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto in the local library, and the ideas he discovered therein became central components of his nascent identity. He was not so much radicalized, but “self-indoctrinated,” as Oswald himself put it in one of his many unfinished pieces of writing. Some have suggested that his desire to serve in the armed forces seems to contradict his newfound Communism, but that is not at all the case. He had wanted to join the Marines long before he had educated himself about Communism, and it remained his best way to escape his domineering mother and stultifying surroundings. He wanted it so much, he demanded his mother lie about his age in a failed attempt to enlist at 15 years old. Afterward, having dropped out of school and taken a job, he continued to read Communist literature, and even this early on, he tended toward thoughts of political violence. He once told a coworker that he wanted to assassinate Eisenhower because of his exploitation of the working class. At seventeen, he finally joined the Marines, but as would happen over and over, when Oswald got what he wanted, he discovered it did not make him happy. While in his youth he had bullied those around him, in the Marines, he was bullied incessantly, which in turn made him even more withdrawn and brooding. He took solace in his identity as a devoted Communist, even though it made his fellow Marines dislike him even more.  He took to flaunting his political leanings, speaking as if he wasn’t himself American, accusing them of being the tools of imperialism and exploitation. When any other Marines tried to engage him in legitimate political debate, he dismissed their views by saying they were misinformed by propaganda. It was while he was serving in the Marines that he first began to consider defection. While stationed for a few weeks in Japan, he met some Communists who talked up the USSR as a Communist utopia, and after that, he began to learn Russian and make plans. According to a fellow Marine who was stationed in California with Oswald upon his return, Lee thought for a short while about making his way to Cuba and even contacted the consulate in LA. However, those plans seem to have evaporated as he took steps to defect to Russia, asking his mother to lie for him again about being disabled and needing care so that Oswald could be discharged, whereupon he immediately took the money he’d saved in the service and booked himself passage to Helsinki, where he intended to apply for a visa at the Soviet consulate and buy a tourist package that would allow him to penetrate the Iron Curtain.

Oswald as a Marine in 1956. (Public domain image).

JFK assassination conspiracy theorists often fall into one of two camps. They say Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited by the CIA while in the Marines, or they say he was recruited by the KGB while in Russia. If they favor the KGB, they may argue he was sent back to assassinate the U.S. president, and if they favor the CIA, they may say he was sent to Russia as a double agent, and was afterward used by his intelligence contacts as a patsy to take the fall when the intelligence community conspired against Kennedy. These theories, and variations on them, give the historical Lee Harvey Oswald entirely too much credit, and basically ignore what we know about his career in the military and his time in the USSR. Those who claim he was recruited by the CIA will say he was connected to the U-2 spy plane because he was posted to the base in Japan where it was kept and tested, but Oswald served as a mere radar operator among many others and would have known the U-2 only as a blip on a screen. They claim that at one point, the CIA arranged for Oswald to be injured so that he could be absent from duty and outperforming espionage, but his fellow Marines testified that he accidentally shot himself, an offense for which he was afterward court-marshalled because his weapon was unregistered. Records further show that he never left the hospital during his recovery. The simple fact is that he was an unstable individual with anti-American views, he did not take orders well, was undisciplined, and ended up being court-marshalled twice. He was hardly a strong candidate for intelligence recruitment. And if the CIA had wanted to get him discharged and have him fake a defection to Russia, he would not have had to ask his mother to lie just so he could get a dependency discharge. When he arrived in Russia, like all other Western tourists who purchase a tour package, he was assigned a guide who was a KGB informant, and Oswald told her about his desire to defect. We know a great deal about Oswald’s time in Russia because of the KGB file on him, which Boris Yeltsin eventually gave to President Bill Clinton in 1999 after its contents had been published by Russian newspaper Izvestia, and more importantly we know about it from the testimony of Yuri Nosenko, the deputy chief of the Tourist Division of the KGB at the time, who would later defect to America and tell all. Nosenko’s division refused to grant Oswald citizenship, he said, because he was useless to them. He had access to no information, and he wasn’t even in the Marines anymore. Oswald was devastated, and his guide afterward found him in his room with his wrist cut. He had left a suicide note saying that it was to be a sweet and easy death, but after being rushed to a hospital, he was saved. Afterward, the KGB ordered that he undergo psychiatric evaluation, and a doctor confirmed his earlier diagnosis of being “mentally unstable.” Nosenko explained that the KGB certainly wanted nothing to do with him after that, but fearful that this deranged American might try to harm himself again while, at the time, Kruschev was engaged in precarious diplomatic talks with Eisenhower, they decided not to kick him out of the country. Instead, they shunted him off to Minsk and gave him an apartment and a job, telling the local KGB division to keep an eye on him. It wasn’t special treatment, as some conspiracists have claimed, but rather standard treatment for defectors, with the exception that they refused to grant him citizenship.

The KGB surveilled Oswald in Minsk, building their file on him, not because he was an asset of theirs but because they believed him unstable and capable of violence. There were still some lingering worries that he could be working for American intelligence, but as they spied on him, they came to believe, as the KGB defector Nosenko put it, that “Oswald was not an agent, couldn’t be an agent.”  They asked themselves, “Would the FBI or CIA really use such a pathetic person to work against their archenemy?” One episode seemed to satisfy the KGB that Oswald could not possibly be an intelligence agent: his radio broke, and he asked a friend he had made to help him repair it. Apparently it was a simple fix, leaving the KGB surveilling him with the impression that he’d had no intelligence training, which would have included some basic understanding of radios. Back in America, the CIA appears to have taken little notice of Oswald’s defection. According to records they’ve released, they did not start a file on him until a year after he ran off to Russia, and the file, a 201, was simply for a person of interest, not a personnel file as some conspiracist writers have claimed. So Oswald was finally living his dream in Russia, working and living in what he believed was the workingman’s paradise. Hoping to convince the Russian authorities to finally give him the citizenship they had refused him, he went once into the American embassy in Moscow and told the consul that he wished to renounce his American citizenship. However, the consul thought Oswald too young and reckless to make such an irreversible decision, so he delayed him, telling him he would have to come back, which Oswald never did as he’d afterward been sent to Minsk. And it was a good thing, too, because it wasn’t long before Oswald became disillusioned with Russia and regretted his decision to defect.

At first, he seems to have been the happiest he’d ever been. He had friends for the first time in his life because people were interested in him as an American defector. Even in love he was suddenly successful, as he found Russian women all too happy to date a man with an apartment. However, when his friends faded because he was no longer such a curiosity, and when a woman he had fallen for refused his marriage proposal by laughing in his face, the shine began to come off the place. He began to find Minsk terribly dull, and he realized that he greatly disliked the job they’d assigned him as a sheet metal worker, and that they had no intention of honoring his request of sending him to study at university. He further came to resent nearly every aspect of the Soviet socialist system, the pittance wages, the compulsory union meetings and gymnastics sessions, the mandatory political lectures, and having to work in crop fields on the weekends. One wonders what Oswald was expecting exactly, since what he came to resent, the extremely regimented and oppressive life of the worker under Soviet Communism, and what he came to realize about their hypocrisy, that there still existed a privileged class, a class of party officials and bureaucrats, elevated above the populace, was already well known in the West. Surely in the many political debates he’d had, someone had told him that the USSR was no utopia, but Oswald must have dismissed their characterization of life in Russia as Western propaganda. Now, though, experiencing it firsthand, he altered his ideology once again, deciding that he was a pure Marxist, and that the USSR had twisted and perverted true Marxism. Eventually, missing the freedoms and creature comforts of home, he decided to return to America, which he considered “the lesser of two evils.”

Associated Press image of Oswald and Marina in Minsk handed out by the Warren Commission.

Luckily for him, the consul had not made it easy to successfully renounce his American citizenship, so he still had it. However, the Russian government was not going to make it that easy for him to leave after all the trouble he’d caused them. Further complicating the matter was the fact that he met another young woman after beginning his arrangements to repatriate, Marina Prusakova, and soon they had married. Like other women, Marina began dating Oswald because of his apartment, but she seems to have agreed to marry him because she was interested in coming to America. Some have suggested Marina was a KGB agent or informant, but this is baseless speculation not borne out by any evidence and refuted by both the KGB defector Nosenko, by Marina herself, and by her family. The sudden marriage meant that now, not only did Oswald need an exit visa from Soviet authorities, but he would also need an American entrance visa for Marina. Some conspiracy theorists argue that it was all too easy for Oswald and Marina to get out of Russia, but records and testimony show otherwise. It took almost an entire year for them to make the required arrangements, and by that time, Marina had borne their first child, a daughter named June. So rather than a shamefaced return, as one might have expected, Lee Harvey Oswald seems to have felt his return to America triumphant, with a lovely little family in tow and, in his mind, unique insights into the failings of both countries. He told Marina that he expected reporters to swarm them upon their return, and he had prepared remarks scorning both the capitalist and communist systems. He was quite disappointed when there were no reporters and no one seemed to care much about his return. With no money or prospects, he had no choice but to return to Texas and move in with his brother Robert in Fort Worth. Shortly after his arrival, someone finally took an interest in him: not the CIA, who had opened a file on him after his defection, but the FBI, who commonly interviewed returning defectors. Oswald sat through the 2-hour interview and flatly lied to the agents, denying he had had any contact with the KGB and claiming he had never wanted to become a Soviet citizen and never tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship. Seven weeks later, the same FBI agents checked in again, extracting a promise from Oswald that he would contact them if any Soviet agents attempted to get in contact with him there in America. Oswald confided to Marina that he worried the FBI thought he was a spy and would never let them live in peace.

The Oswalds did not live in peace, though, and that was not the FBI’s fault but Lee’s fault, for shortly after arriving back in Texas, he began to beat Marina whenever his temper rose. And he was angry quite often. He did not care for his new job, as he’d had to take employment as a sheet metal worker again, and he was also unhappy with their living arrangements, first with his brother, then with his mother before they moved into a rundown shack of their own. During the rest of 1962, the only highlight of their lives were new friends that they made among the Russian émigré community in Fort Worth. Almost all of these Russian immigrants came to sympathize a great deal with Marina. They liked her, but they found Oswald to be intolerable, with his ill-informed political tirades. When they saw the bruises that Oswald left on Marina, they took great pity on her and came to despise Lee for brutalizing her. Some would eventually take action to convince Marina to leave Oswald and even offer her help, but she was hesitant to go through with it, and they were loath to make an enemy of Oswald, whom they believed was “unstable,” “diseased,” and “mentally sick.” Only one of the emigres proved to be a friend to Oswald, a tanned womanizing playboy character in his fifties named George de Mohrenschildt who loved to upset conventions and push the boundaries of people in his orbit. As such, he took a liking to Oswald, who really knew how to push people’s buttons, and Oswald responded well to the attention de Mohrenschildt offered him. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that de Mohrenschildt was Oswald’s handler, working for either the CIA or the KGB, but once again, with no evidence to support it, this is a case of conspiracist authors building a myth through pure speculation. It is quite clear, though, that de Mohrenschildt encouraged Oswald’s radical politics. He used to talk to Oswald about conservative acquaintances in their circle, calling them right-wing fanatics and fascists, and firing up Oswald against them. One particular target of his ire was General Edwin Walker, a segregationist and member of the John Birch Society who had been relieved of duty by Kennedy because he was handing out right-wing propaganda to soldiers. Walker was at the time engaged in an anti-Communist crusade called Operation Midnight, which of course made Oswald hate him. Some in their émigré community have testified that they believed de Mohrenschildt told Oswald in early 1963 that if someone were to kill General Walker, they would be doing the world a service. It was during this year, the year of the Kennedy assassination, that Oswald began to take specific actions that incriminate him as the assassin.

General Edwin Walker, right-wing extremist and object of Oswald’s obsession. (Public domain image)

It seems Oswald began to develop a fantasy about participating in espionage. He read numerous Ian Fleming novels and was seen to possess a book called How to Be a Spy—which really goes to show that he did not have intelligence connections, as that’s not the kind of literature that actual agents are given for training purposes. He found work in Dallas as a photoprint trainee for a graphic arts company called Jaggars, Chiles & Stovall, Inc., which allowed him to develop his abilities as a photographer, something he thought spies must do a lot of in their surveillance work. Probably using the typesetting equipment at his workplace, he forged identification under a false name, Alek Hidell. Under this false name, he ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 special revolver through the mail, and later, a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. While waiting for the arrival of the firearms, he began to plan his assassination of General Edwin Walker. He compiled maps to prepare escape routes, he wrote a manifesto detailing his motivations, and he even went to General Walker’s house and took photographs. When the rifle finally arrived, he came into the yard where Marina was hanging laundry and demanded that she take his photo holding his rifle. Though she thought him foolish, she dared not cross him. His abuse had culminated not long before in threats to murder her and in her own attempt to hang herself with clothesline rope, but Oswald’s recent obsessions had kept his attention elsewhere, so she was willing to indulge him. The photo she took that day is world famous, and the rifle in it is the same one found in the book depository after the Kennedy assassination. This photograph is damning evidence against Oswald, so many conspiracy theorists try to cast doubt on its authenticity, claiming it is a composite, or that the rifle in it is not the same as the one found above Dealey Plaza and determined to be the murder weapon, or that it is all too convenient and suspicious that Oswald would have the photo taken in the first place. All of these claims, however, have been refuted. First, we know why he had the photo taken. In it he is holding a copy of the American communist magazine, The Militant, a magazine that had recently published one of his letters. He intended to send the photo to the magazine. The photo was unlikely to be a composite fake since Marina took multiple photos of him in the yard, each with a slightly different pose, and in the 1970s, 22 photographic experts testified before Congress that not only were the photos real and untampered with, but that marks on the edge of the frame proved they had been taken by Oswald’s camera. Lastly, using enhancements of the photos, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found 56 unique marks that corresponded between the rifle in the photo and the rifle found at the murder scene. So despite the naysaying of conspiracists, the weight of concrete evidence tells us that early in 1963, Oswald, working alone, was planning some violent political act against a public figure, and that he had in his possession the gun that would be used to kill John F. Kennedy before the year was over.

Further Reading

Alcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 31, no. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 211-36. American Economic Association, www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211.

Ayton, Mel, and David Von Pein. Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Warren Report and Lee Harvey Oswald's Guilt and Motive 50 Years On. Strategic Media Books,

Brinkley, Alan. “The Legacy of John F. Kennedy.” The Atlantic, Fall 2013, https:/www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-legacy-of-john-f-kennedy/309499/.

Bugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History : the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

“Democrats and Republicans differ on conspiracy theory beliefs.” Public Policy Polling, 2 April 2013, www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf.

Mailer, Norman. “Why Did Lee Harvey Oswald Go to Moscow?” The New Yorker, 2 April 1995, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/04/10/oswald-in-the-ussr.

McAdams, John. JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, 2014.

Moore, Jim. Conspiracy of One: the Definitive Book on the Kennedy Assassination. Summit Group, 1990.

Posner, Gerald. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Anchor Books, 1994.

Savodnik, Peter. "Lee Harvey Oswald Arrives in the USSR." New England Review, vol. 34, no. 3-4, fall-winter 2013, pp. 161+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A363188964/AONE?u=sjdc_main&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=bbb324c3. Accessed 14 Feb. 2022.