A Culture of Conspiracy. Michael Barkun
hand behind the film: “It is highly unlikely that any blockbuster movie focusing so heavily on Area 51 would be allowed out into the public domain unless sanctioned by an ulterior motive.”19
John Todd, an itinerant evangelist who spread conspiracy theories through Pentecostal churches in the 1970s, saw the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back as depicting a battle between satanism and the false Christianity of the Illuminati, while the Robert Redford film Three Days of the Condor contained a doubly encoded message. Todd believed the book on which Redford is working as a CIA analyst early in the film was Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, itself an encoded conspiratorial work. According to Todd, Rand had been commissioned to write the novel by “Philip [sic] Rothschild,” allegedly the leader of the Illuminati. Todd claimed that “within the book is a step-by-step plan to take over the world by taking over the United States.”20
Todd’s bizarre claims about Rand’s novel had a deep influence not only in fundamentalist churches but in the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord, a heavily armed commune in the Ozarks affiliated with the anti-Semitic and millennialist Christian Identity movement. Todd’s ideas about Atlas Shrugged were incorporated into a CSA pamphlet titled Witchcraft and the Illuminati. The community apparently learned about Todd’s theory from the pamphlet’s author, Kerry Noble, who had been given one of Todd’s audiotapes by a friend in Texas. Noble went on to read Rand’s massive novel (supposedly in only two days!), and believed that the novel was an Illuminati code book swept the CSA community. Indeed, Noble attributes CSA’s program of arming and military training to the fears raised by Todd. The community dissolved shortly after a raid by federal law-enforcement agencies in 1985.21
As eccentric as Todd’s ideas were, an even stranger example of fact-fiction transposition concerns literature about a subterranean world, according to which alien races inhabit caverns and tunnels below the earth’s surface. The earliest fictional work to attract the attention of those in the stigmatized-knowledge milieu was Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel, The Coming Race. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) is far better known for having written what is said to be the worst opening line in English literature: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Quite apart from his dubious literary talents, however, it is the substance of The Coming Race that commends it to devotees of stigmatized knowledge.
The Coming Race purports to describe the journey of a young American narrator into the bowels of the earth, where he discovers a hidden civilization whose members represent a hitherto unknown race. They lead a pleasant and harmonious life underground, made possible by their discovery of a mysterious and unlimited source of energy called vril. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel obeyed the conventions of utopian fiction and, like many utopian novels, was a vehicle for social satire and commentary. Within a short time, however, it had acquired a different sort of reader, who insisted it was true.22
The transfer of The Coming Race from fiction to fact was facilitated by Bulwer-Lytton’s own flirtations with occultism, which led some in the occult subculture to assume he had adopted the conventions of fiction to cloak an astonishing but hidden feature of the real world. His most influential occult reader proved to be Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), the cofounder (with Henry Steel Olcott) of the Theosophical Society. “The name vril may be fiction,” she wrote, but “the force itself is doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.” While a contemporary writer on the occult, Alec Maclellan, also grants that Bulwer-Lytton may have yielded to some poetic license, he insists, “If, as an initiate, he concealed some of its [vril’s] attributes this is understandable.”23
Believers in vril and The Coming Race kept alive not only the idea of a pool of free energy, but also that of an underground world with its own species and civilizations, a concept that has ramified in ways Bulwer-Lytton could scarcely have imagined. One result has been a vast contemporary literature purporting to describe subterranean caverns, tunnels, and races and speculating that flying saucers come not from outer space but from this underground world, whence they allegedly reach us through hidden openings in the earth’s surface.
The most influential examples of this genre are a set of science-fiction stories published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories between 1945 and 1948. The stories and their surrounding circumstances came to be known as “the Shaver Mystery,” after their principal author, Richard Shaver, a welder from Pennsylvania. Shaver claimed to have been in psychic communication with a subterranean race and to have once physically visited their underground civilization. The “mystery” deals in part with the basis of Shaver’s bizarre claims, and in part with the question of authorship. Some have attributed much of the actual writing, and especially the use of the literary conventions of science fiction, to Shaver’s editor, Raymond A. Palmer. Palmer himself claimed to have written the first Shaver story, based on a ten-thousand-word letter Shaver had sent to Amazing Stories. In an account written during Shaver’s lifetime, Palmer claimed, “While it is true that a great deal of the actual writing of the stories published under Mr. Shaver’s name have been written by me [sic], it has been in an editorial and revisional [sic] capacity, and although the words are different, the facts of the Shaver Mystery are the same and remain original with him.” Shaver himself strongly disputed this account and claimed, “There is very little revision in any of my work, just cutting where it didn’t fit.”24
Regardless of who may have authored the published stories, they took on a life of their own and have come to be treated not as science fiction but as factual accounts. While some writers on the occult, such as Maclellan, regard Shaver’s work as a hoax based on earlier writings such as Bulwer-Lytton’s, an immense Shaver Mystery literature has proliferated, some of it in print but much on the Internet. It has fused with later claims about secret underground bases and tunnels, some of which are alleged to have been constructed by the government and others by alien races. As in so much of the literature from the stigmatized-knowledge domain, complex patterns of cross-referencing and cross-citation have come to be taken as proof. Thus if a claim is made that a contemporary government tunnel system exists, that is deemed to be proof that Shaver was correct, and vice versa. By most accounts Shaver himself believed with absolute conviction in the truthfulness of his stories. This, combined with their appearance in a pulp-fiction venue, served further to blur the already uncertain boundary between fact and fiction.25
STIGMATIZED KNOWLEDGE AND POPULAR CULTURE
The volume and influence of stigmatized knowledge have increased dramatically through the mediation of popular culture. Motifs, theories, and truth claims that once existed in hermetically sealed subcultures have begun to be recycled, often with great rapidity, through popular culture. Although this movement may be observed in a variety of forms, including television and mass-market fiction, the most important and visible venue has been film. Two particularly notable examples are Conspiracy Theory (1997) and The X-Files (1998).
The significance of Conspiracy Theory lies in both the construction of the protagonist and the surprising and dramatic denouement. The protagonist, played by Mel Gibson, gives every indication early in the film of being delusional to the point of paranoia. He lives in a fortresslike apartment, complete with an escape hatch and self-destructive capability. The rooms are a warren of securely locked spaces; even the refrigerator is padlocked. Surrounded as Gibson is by shadowy, imagined enemies, the viewer is surprised by the gradual realization that indeed, there is a conspiracy, one of whose aims is to destroy this lone eccentric who has stumbled across truths that have been successfully concealed from his supposedly normal fellow citizens. In the film’s final frame, the sky above the conspiracy theorist fills with emblematic and all-too-real black helicopters.
The film’s conversion of its seemingly lunatic central character into a seer illuminating the dark side of American life clearly resonated with at least one real-world conspiracy theorist. Michael A. Hoffman II, a Holocaust denier and exponent of multiple conspiracy theories, seemed to find personal vindication as well as a convincing conspiratorial message. The film was, he writes, “a new revelation . . . which restores credibility to the investigators and validates their concerns.” He acknowledges Gibson’s wild, delusional ideas but concentrates on the awareness that while “much of what he says is nonsense . . . the kernel of truth is so potentially lethal that it