'Saucers, Spooks and Kooks' news roundup

Saucers, Spooks and Kooks is a new movie based on the Adam Gorightly book of the same name, which I enjoyed. 

Here is an official podcast.  You can also read a roundup of other podcasts.  And there's a post on how the movie got made.  And here's the Substack home page.

Watch here.

Adam Gorightly's 'Saucers, Spooks and Kooks' now a movie

Adam Gorightly's book, Saucers, Spooks and Kooks, is now a documentary movie, out Jan. 22. Trailer is above. Preorder here.  And there is a Substack newsletter. 

"The film explores how disinformation helped fuel the UFO mythos, and how that fog continues to cloud what we think we know about UAP."

It sounds like the book, which I liked. See my writeup for the book. 

Adam of course also is an important historian of Discordianism. See his official website. 

 

New documentary coming based on Adam Gorightly's UFO book

https://bsky.app/profile/sskmovie.bsky.social/post/3lyvwlhaqyk2j 

 

I enjoyed Adam Gorightly's Saucers, Spooks and Kooks book, which argues that much UFO lore actually was government disinformation, and now there is apparently a documentary that will be out soon based on the book. 

A Bluesky posting says, "The film is inching closer to a release, thanks to everyone that has helped along the way. Stay tuned for more details and enjoy!"

New podcast with Adam Gorightly

 

Monstertalk, a long-running podcast, has a new interview with Adam Gorightly, listen here.

"MonsterTalk has been promoting science and critical thinking since 2009. We use monsters as a springboard to talk about a variety of monster topics. We’re skeptical of the existence of monsters, but we want to understand the mysterious experiences people report."

Some Discordian documents

Grouchogandhi, KSP has continued to post Discordian documents on X/Twitter, many of them related to the subject of this blog. Here are some recent ones that caught my eye. Above, a headline from an Andy Borowitz piece, I think from the New Yorker.

A Robert Anton Wilson form letter from 1976.

Robert Anton Wilson's prank letter to to an official in the Christian Crusade about the threat posed by Beethoven. (This refers to the Christian Crusade publications about the Beatles being a Communist threat, referenced in Illuminatus!) When I mentioned the letter had no date, Adam Gorightly commented, "No exact date, but seemed clear to me this was among the OM letters RAW sent out at the time he and Shea were working on Illuminatus. These letters started in '68 and it was kind of a short-lived phase around the same time that the Garrison investigation was in full flight."

Follow Grouchogandhi, KSP for more. 

'Second Oswald' podcast series on Kerry Thornley [UPDATED]

 "The limited series sheds light on a little known aspect of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Could the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, been set up to be the patsy? The series focuses on writer Kerry Thornley who served with Lee Harvey Oswald in the US Marines and wrote a novel about him a year before he killed JFK. Thornley would later implicate himself in the conspiracy and became a major influence on Q-Anon and other fringe underground groups through his writings. This is not just another conspiracy theory. Written by former National Public Radio (NPR) commentator and Peabody award winner Andrei Codrescu."

Episodes and  more information here. 

Jesse Walker and Adam Gorightly appear in the podcast. The podcast also obviously is based on work by Adam. [This is an updated paragraph; I didn't know at first if it features Adam. See the comment to this post.]

Here is my previous post on the "Second Oswald" play, Nov. 13 in New York. 

James Shelby Downard gets his due

Adam Gorightly's latest book shows his skills as a publisher and editor, rather than a writer; Stalking the Great Whore: The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard is a collection of writing by the late American conspiracy theorist. 

Here is a review by Robert Guffey. Excerpt: "Highly Recommended: James Shelby Downard's recently published book, STALKING THE GREAT WHORE, is a compelling read. Editor/publisher Adam Gorightly went to a great deal of trouble to preserve this neglected manuscript, most of which was no doubt written in the 1970s. If not for Gorightly's herculean efforts, these posthumously discovered writings would have remained lost forever. Whether seen as fictional or nonfictional, sane or insane, the fact is that Downard's reality tunnel had an incalculable effect on pop culture."

You can also read a long piece by Michael  Hoffman. 

New podcast features Adam Gorightly

 

From the Daily Grail: "UFO whistleblower David Grusch made news this week with his claims of alien contact and a government cover-up. 

"We spoke to @AdamGorightly about why it's worth taking Grusch's claims with a grain of salt, due to the long history of military UFO disinfo."

See my review of Adam's most recent book, Saucers Spooks and Kooks. 

Adam Gorightly on three Discordian books

Adam Gorightly has a new piece up at Historia Discordia which discusses three Discordian-related books. They are Jailbird: The Dreadlock Recollections by Kerry Thornley, put out by the SubGenius Foundation; Stalking The Great Whore: The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard, which Adam has published and which includes a forward by Adam, and Antero Alli's Last Words: Towards an Insurrection of the Poetic Imagination. Adam says that's Alli's last book, but in fact since then Alli has released what is apparently a final last book, Sacred Rites.) 

More information on the three books at the link. Here is a little bit on James Shelby Downard.  And here is Adam's explanation. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, episode 86, Chapter 16

Photo by Stephen Frank on Unsplash

If I were a better-organized person -- somebody more like Eric Wagner, say -- I would have read ahead after I did my last blog post on Prometheus Rising and gotten started on the exercises. Instead, I'm afraid I waited until Sunday to re-read Chapter 16 and look at the exercises at the end of the chapter. 

I have one more crack at the chapter in three weeks, so instead I'll talk about which exercises I'm now taking on, and report back in my next post.

I am most intrigued by two. The first exercise says, "Start collecting evidence that you phone is bugged." 

Since phones have become a more important part of everyone's lives since that sentence was written, thanks to the rise of smart phones, I will modify that slightly to collect evidence people can get all sorts of information from my cell phone.

Exercise 4 states, "Try living a whole week with the program, 'Everybody likes me and tries to help me achieve all of my goals'."

Depending on how I do with the exercises, I may try to tackle one or two others before I post again.

Chapter 16 of course deals largely with the SNAFU principle (i.e., communication is only possible between equals). I recently read a book about a key World War II battle, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege by Anthony Beevor, and one of the elements I noticed was that the battle was a particularly decisive victory for the Russians because Stalin did a little bit better job of overcoming the SNAFU principle than Hitler did.

Perhaps because the first year of the German invasion was such a disaster for the Soviet Union, Stalin was forced to listen to his generals when he finally realize Zhukov could actually win battles for him, so when the Russia counterattack and encirclement of the German army was proposed, he listened and approved the plans.

Conversely, the German army did so well in the early years of the war that Hitler became convinced he was a military genius. When the German army was trapped in Stalingrad and needed to break out to save itself, Hitler would not listen to the advice of his generals and would not allow it, dooming the army to be wiped out.

I plan to re-read the chapter again. One thing I noticed was that parts of it could be interpreted as shedding light on how social media mobs operate. "True conspiracy does exist when a group conceals evidence, spreads deliberate misinformation and coerces or terrorizes witnesses. Any affinity group approaches such behavior to the extent members reinforce each other's participation in the group's reality-tunnel, especially concerning such crucial epistemological matters as what is important enough to notice and discuss as against what is trivial and better ignored." It seems to be coercing and terrorizing people with dissenting views is a part of the social media landscape. 

Finally, there is interesting discussion of UFO theories in the chapter, and if that interests anybody, I would again recommend Adam Gorightly's Saucers, Spooks and Kooks book. 

Adam Gorightly's flying saucer book

 

Saucers Spooks and Kooks, Adam Gorightly, Daily Grail Publishing, 2021.

OK, so I didn't get to Adam Gorightly's UFO book, Saucers, Spooks and Kooks, as quickly as I meant to. It's still his latest book after it came out about a year ago, and it's a really good book that would be of particular interest to Robert Anton Wilson fans; RAW is discussed in the book's long concluding chapter, "Afterward: Adventures in Chapel Perilous." 

Most of you will know Adam for his excellent Historia Discordia website that is fueled by his stewardship of the Discordian Archive, papers from the Discordian movement. The website has excellent articles and recently made available a Kerry Thornley poem, "Illuminati Lady," which Illuminatus! recommended reading but which has largely been unavailable until now.  That archive also produced a "lost" Robert Anton Wilson book, The Starseed Signals, published by Hilaritas Press. Adam has written three books which illuminate the Discordian background of Illuminatus!: Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society; Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Lee Oswald and the Garrison Investigation, and The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture. 

Adam, however, has written at least 11 books, illustrating his wide range as a self-described "crackpot historian," and his latest, Saucers, Spooks and Kooks, chronicles the last several decades of the flying saucer/UFO movement, largely focusing on New Mexico, the site of the alleged flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and of other doings involving secret alien bases, covered-up shootouts between ET's and people, the release of stacks of allegedly secret, allegedly authentic government documents about the U.S. relationship with ETs. The book is put out by the publishing arm of the Daily Grail website. 

Adam takes a decidedly skeptical view toward many/most of these supposed doings and his witty discussion of many of the most outlandish statements is one of the highlights of the book, as when he discusses the claim of the unfortunate Paul Bennewitz that ETs were beaming mind control beams to keep him and others from getting the truth out. Bennewitz had to resort to screening devices such as aluminum foil to deal with the "extraterrestrial electronic harassment." 

Adam shows how many of the claims of UFO enthusiasts -- a flying saucer crash in Roswell, an underground ET base in Dulce, New Mexico, etc. -- emerge over and over again through the years, in many cases because of a possible disinformation effort by U.S. spy agencies. (There is considerable overlap between the UFO groups and military veterans, and Adam argues that Russian spies would target the movement, not so much as to learn about UFOs but to gain access to U.S. military secrets; that's what the U.S. intelligence community was trying to thwart.)

One particular point deserves mention. In 2017 and in 2020, the New York Times published articles about resurfaced Air Force videos of UFOs which helped focus a lot of interest in UFOs by normally sober-minded people. 

In the end, the big Times scoops which attracted a lot of attention at the time, even from usually serious and thoughtful people, did not amount to much, and Adam writes about them: "While mildly intriguing, the video was really no more compelling than a lot of other really blurry examples of UFO porn that litter the Internet. Granted, the pilot testimony added some conceptual weight, but it really didn't bring us any closer to solving the Eternal Mystery."

Saucers, Spooks and Kooks essentially is a two part book. The bulk of it is Adam's UFO movement chronicles, but a long afterward, "Adventures in Chapel Perilous," discusses Adam's own feelings on the movement, on conspiracy theories in general, and how Adam got interested in such topics. Adam also explains Robert Anton Wilson's theories on reality tunnels and how RAW's outlook can be applied to such discussions.

I can recommend Adam's book as a good read that will bring you up to speed on flying saucer lore and will show  you how it relates to the writings of RAW. 

Adam's book is available from all of the usual bookstores as a paperback and ebook; I bought my Kindle at the reasonable price of $7. 

Thursday links

 

Meme I had not seen before. (Source).

New Alan Moore book. 

The DEA is blocking psilocybin therapy for terminal patients. 

Strange Realities Conference. "The Conference will feature presentations and Seminars about all subjects dealing with the paranormal, cryptozoological, occult, conspiracy theory, and UFOs. Presenters include John Tenney, Tim Binnall, Kiki Dombrowski, Nathan Isaac, Steve Berg, Adam Gorightly and much much more."

Magic mushrooms decrease risk of opioid addiction, study finds. 

Another restatement of the SNAFU principle. 

Read a poem referenced in Illuminatus!

From Appendix Nun at the end of the Illuminatus! trilogy: "LORD OMAR KHAYAM RAVENHURST. An imaginary Chaoist philosopher invented by Mr. Kerry Thornley of Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Thornley was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald's, was accused of complicity in the John Kennedy assassination by District Attorney Jim Garrison, and is the author of llluminati Lady, an endless epic poem which you really ought to read."

Illuminati Lady has not been available except in an obscure 1960s zine -- until now! Adam Gorightly has unearthed it from the Discordian Archives, so you can read it now. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, episode 75, Chapter 13

Photo by Klemen Vrankar on Unsplash

After I re-read Chapter 13 for this blog posts, I looked at the exercises as the end, and decided to do the fifth exercise, which is "Did you ever really give a good trial to our exercise, 'I can now exceed all my previous hopes and ambitions?' Try it; and at the same time, try, 'I can be healthier than I have ever been before'."  (That refers to an exercise listed for Chapter One: "Believe that you can exceed all your previous ambitions and hopes in all areas of your life.")

So last night and today, I have been trying to do the exercise, thinking of ways I might exceed my ambitions and hopes, and be healthier than ever before.

I recently turned 65, so it seems to be there are some practical limitations as to how far I can go to meet all of my possible ambitions and health goals. On the other hand, I still have some of the same ambitions are hobbies that I always have had, and as I have semiretired, downsizing my work hours, I now have more time for other things. And although I doubt I can be the healthiest I have ever been in my life, I do have control over whether I am making a better effort to be healthy, by exercising regularly and watching what I eat. 

This seems like something that will take more than a day or two, but I will continue to think on this exercise in the next couple of days, and on what I can do to implement it. 

 A couple of footnotes to the chapter:

Pagans and Christians: In a footnote, RAW writes about the "breakdown of Roman paganism and the rise of Christianity." And he remarks that the Rationalists of the time, "the Stoics, Epicureans and other heirs of the Greek philosophical-skeptical tradition" ignored Christianity "until their society was overcome by the paradigm shift to the new reality-tunnel."

Probably they did ignore Christianity up to a certain point, although seems to me that late in the Roman Empire Christianity became impossible to ignore, and the culture war between the two sides became very heated, as in the fight over whether to remove the Altar of Victory from the Senate House.  (The pagans lost the fight over that and felt vindicated by the various disasters that overtook the Roman Empire, such as the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410).

UFOS: There's a lot in this chapter about UFOs, so perhaps this is an opportune time to mention again that our friend Adam Gorightly has a recent UFO book out, Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius. I've had to concentrate on other reading for the last couple of months, but Adam's book is one my Kindle, and I hope to read it soon. 

The Hilaritas podcast on Kerry Thornley

Long car drives are usually my best opportunity to get caught up on podcasts, so yesterday when I had a lengthy commute I listened to the Hilaritas Press podcast on Kerry Thornley, featuring a long interview of Adam Gorightly by Mike Gathers. 

Lots of good information about the Discordian background of the Illuminatus! trilogy, including about how Robert Anton Wilson apparently drew on the Discordian Archives when he worked on the trilogy. There are show notes at the link and a listing of the apps and services where the podcast can be found.

If you want to know more about listening to the podcast, Adam's Historia Discordia website has information on Adam's books that go into topics in more depth, such as Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society, Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Lee Oswald and the Garrison Administration and The Prankster and the Conspiracy, Adam's biography of Kerry. For more on Adam and his other books, go here. 

New Hilaritas podcast on Kerry Thornley

Kerry Thornley (Creative Commons photo by Sondra London)

Episode 5 of the Hilaritas podcast has dropped, and it looks like a good one. Adam Gorightly is interviewed on the life and ideas of Kerry Thornley. 

Available at the link, and also Podbean, Apple, Google, Spotify and TuneIn. 

Slim Brooks, the Human (Discordian) Fly

Adam Gorightly continues his exploration of odd corners of Discordian history at his Historia Discordia blog with an entry on "Slim Brooks, the Human (Discordian) Fly," an odd character who may have been an intelligence agent who was Kerry Thornley's "handler" before the JFK assassination (or so Thornley thought). 

Adam also posted a nice "Eris of the Month" for October. 

Robert Anton Wilson podcast featuring Adam Gorightly

 The "Where Did the Road Go?" show: "Seriah hosts Greg Bishop and Adam Gorightly.  The discussion begins with iconic writer/philosopher Robert Anton Wilson and Discordianism- and quickly goes... a lot of places!"

More information here. 

FBI releases information on Marjorie Cameron (Jack Parsons' wife)

Marjorie Cameron in the 1940s (via Wikipedia)

Here's some news I suspect will interest sombunall of you, via Twitter:

Nick Redfern: "The FBI has placed its file on Jack Parsons' wife, Marjorie Cameron, onto its website, The Vault. It runs to 154 pages. A lot of interesting info in there!" (Here is the link).

Adam Gorightly comments: "Looking through these files on Cameron, it appears that most of them had been previously released as Jack Parsons' FOIAs, but in past iterations Cameron's name had been redacted. Cameron died in the late 1990s, and so maybe a subsequent Cameron-FOIA request undid said redactions."

Kerry Thornley, hanging out with A.J. Weberman

Robert Newport, left, also an important figure in preserving the Discordian Archives, with Adam Gorightly, in Robert Anton Wilson's apartment in 2001. Photo from Gorightly's Historia Discordia website. 

Discordian historian Adam Gorightly has a new post up, "The Origins of the Thornley/Oswald Manuscript," which explores  Kerry Thornley's relationship to A.J. Weberman, the famous Dylanologist. 

Young people reading this blog entry may not recognize the name, but Weberman is famous for being the Dylan scholar who performed his research on Bob Dylan by going through the singer's trash can. 

It turns out that Weberman also was a John Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist. So a letter from Weberman to Thornley, reproduced by Adam, includes the statement that, for a long time, Weberman was afraid of Thornley. "But your letters have convinced me you are sincere and are one of the innocent bystanders CIA agents working for Garrison dragged into this mess to discredit Garrison's important discoveries," Weberman writes. The sentence refers to Jim Garrison; if you follow the above link, to Wikipedia's article about Weberman you can read about Weberman's book, Coup D'Etat In America: The CIA and the Assassination of JFK. In the same letter, Weberman asks Thornley, "What do you think of Dylan?"

If Adam's blog posts whet your interest in Discordianism or Kerry Thornley, please go here to read about books Adam has written, making good use of the Discordian Archives that Adam maintains and explores. (I have read all of those books.)  Given the failure of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea to maintain their own papers, the Discordian Archives are an important source of documents about both writers; they are the source, for example, of the Hilaritas Press publication of Wilson's lost book, The Starseed Signals.