The Conspiracist
The following interview with Steamshovel editor Kenn Thomas
appeared in Immerse, a techno/ambient/atmospherica/ industrial/noise/jazz/electronics/
forteana/graphics/film/print zine produced
in the UK. The issue (003) also included an interview with Saucer
Smear's James "It was a Fugo balloon; no it was a Mogul balloon" Moseley
and gives some attention to Philip "'twasn't nothin'" Klass. Visit Immerse
at www.haywire.co.uk/immerse.
Steamshovel Press is the bible of conspiracy theory. Kenn Thomas
is the editor of this quarterly collection of snapshots from the dark side of reality.
From the JFK assassination and Watergate to Area 51 and the Octopus
cabal, Steamshovel is the acknowledged authority.
A Need To Know
Kenn began his quest for the truth, or at least a plausible version of it, at the ripe old age
of five. Although he certainly wasn't conscious of the fact, something happened which
would shape his perceptions for years to come. "When I was five years old they shot JFK!
It guaranteed that one of my strongest early memories always would be of conspiracy. In a
conscious way, though, as a reader and student of Conspiracy, the best I can track it is
back to comedian Lenny Bruce. My early abiding interest in Bruce's comedy led me to
Paul Krassner's The Realist (Krassner ghosted Bruce's autobiography), and from that I
learned about the work of Mae Brussell, the intellectual foremother of conspiracy research
in the US."
Such synchronicity still lends a guiding hand. "Recently, while looking at my copy of
Bruce's 1957 samizdat booklet, Stamp Help Out!, I noticed reference to Wilhelm Reich, which I thought was
rather far out. In 1957 Reich was embroiled in his final battle with the Con, and it killed
him. Bruce eventually came to understand that his own life was ruined by a police conspiracy."
Kenn's abiding interests in both hidden history and the works of the 'beat' generation
of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs led to the first early attempts at formulating a
fanzine of sorts.
"Steamshovel began as a small newsletter circulated primarily to convince
book publishers to send review copies of books. It had a secondary
purpose of presenting an interview with Ram Dass I conducted that I was unable
to get published elsewhere. This story is recounted in the introduction to the
Steamshovel back issue anthology, Popular Alienation.
"Like most writers, I resent the predicament of having to do work without
guarantee that it will be published and paid for, so Steamshovel became
my outlet for writing that I didn't already have pre-sold. At the time, I worked
as the rock music critic for a daily newspaper and was getting a lot of things
published in local and regional newspapers and magazines. I began to notice,
however, that the more I wrote about things that interested me, the less I had
to say in the mainstream forum."
Genesis Of An Inquiring Mind
The early issues of Steamshovel included an interview with Imamu Amiri Baraka and it
was Baraka's connection with the New York branch of the Fair Play For Cuba
Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole member of the New Orleans
chapter, which propelled Steamshovel in a more conspiracy driven
direction.
"By the time of the third issue of Steamshovel, Mae Brussell had died and Bob Banner, who published a quality
conzine called Critique, abandoned his effort. Conspiracy culture seemed waning. This
happened in the late 1980s: factional fighting beset Mae Brussell's admirers; Oliver Stone's
JFK movie and that damned X-Files show were well into the future; even the impact of the
Internet had not yet been felt fully.
"In a panic, I published a call for papers on conspiracy topics for publication in the following
issue. At the time also, I developed a friendship with someone who had access to
printing equipment. With all the conspiracy-related articles and the free printing,
Steamshovel number four became the first magazine-sized issue. Money
from selling that issue paid for the subsequent issues and I started doing the
legwork to get distribution.
"The current issue of Steamshovel has an interview with the late great Tim Leary and
reproduces a Catholic Charities report on Neal Cassady. So that 'beatnik' thing
remains an important part of the magazine. There's even a newsclipping reproduction
I took from a New Orleans paper in the 1960s: Do Newspaper Boys Grow Up To
Be Beatniks? 'Beatnik' is a vague concept to begin with--it defines everybody from
Woody Guthrie to John Lilly-- (it's actually a red smear, as in 'Sputnik') and difficult to
measure. The only thing the New Orleans paper could say was that you could hardly call
Bob Hope one. This new Steamshovel also has a nine-page article on David
Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald's albino pilot buddy, who lived a 'beatnik' lifestyle."
The Conspirators' Hierarchy
Along the way Kenn has been aided by many in the loose knit research community, most
of whom have been published in Steamshovel's pages. Many have become close colleagues,
one such gentleman being the prolific author Jim Keith, an Immerse icon and penman of
classics like Secret & Suppressed, Casebook On Alternative 3, Black Helicopters Over
America and OKBOMB.
"I met Jim Keith in the flesh first in Atlanta, Georgia at the Phenomicon conference. I knew
of him previously from his zine Dharma Combat, which published many interesting writers
from the marginals arena, including G. J. Krupey, Wayne Henderson and X. Sharks
DeSpot, all of whom later wrote for Steamshovel. After the Heaven's Gate deaths, I pointed
out to Keith that one of the dead, someone named Darwin Lee Phillips, previously played
with a rock band called Dharma Combat. Keith remembered that he gave permission for
the band to use the name. It's possible that Phillips found out about the Heaven's Gate
group through its ad in Steamshovel #9. That makes Steamshovel as guilty as the Hale-Bopp
comet for that Heaven's Gate disaster!"
Another well known comrade in arms has been Jim Martin of the mail order Flatland
Books. "I think I attracted Jim Martin's attention with an article on Reich in
Steamshovel #2. Martin had a tremendous insight for seeing something of
value in Steamshovel as it looked back then. If I had thought of his Flatland
book service at the time, I would have felt (there was) less of a threat to the kind
of marginals/conspiracy material I thought was disappearing and may
not have developed Steamshovel into a zine. He gave tremendous guidance
on what to do and how to do it, from his experience as a printer and bookseller,
and Flatland remains one of the best places to find this stuff."
Economics And The Con
Even with such assistance from the researchers themselves, Steamshovelis still plagued by
the economics of magazine publication, something Immerse is only too aware
of.
"Both subscriptions and news stand sales rise with each issue and I have a hard time
holding on to back issue stock, even with the PopAlien anthology.
Unfortunately, Steamshovel's chief distributor, Fine
Print, just declared bankruptcy. The thousands of dollars it owes Steamshovel appear
somewhere at the bottom of a list of 2200 creditors and Steamshovel may never see the
money. That is currently slowing down production of the next issue considerably. Zine
distributors are notoriously unreliable business partners. Even when they do what they're
supposed to do, they have unfair returns policies and sales practices that I'm told are
rooted in the Mafia. I always am forced to find a book project or hit the lecture trail just
to raise money to produce the new issue. Zine economics are so bizarre that even
success does not guarantee future success."
The Octopus
Steamshovel's editor has been involved in several book projects. The previously mentioned
Popular Alienation collected together the contents of most of the back issues, albeit devoid
of ad copy (so if you want to see the advertisement for the Heavens Gate suicide cult
you'll have to chase down a copy of #9). Recent titles include NASA, Nazis & JFK:
The Torbitt Document and The Octopus: Secret Government And The Death Of Danny
Casolaro. The book on Casolaro's research, co-authored with Jim Keith, has ensured some
recent publicity as has the phenomenal success of 'conspiracy as soap opera' television
programmes like The X Files and Dark Skies.
"The media profile has increased a lot recently due to the publication of The Octopus.
I'm doing a lot of print and radio promotion for that. It covers the case of Danny Casolaro,
who died under mysterious circumstances while he was investigating the Justice
Department theft of the PROMIS computer software, the Inslaw case.
"Casolaro was waiting for the book contract to come forward, with all that he knew, if he
had kept a larger media profile, he may not have suffered his fate. Crossfire, a popular cable
news program here, wanted to have me on in the wake of Heaven's Gate, but I was busy
visiting David Hatcher Childress's clubhouse outside of Chicago, looking actually to meet
up with Nexuspublisher Duncan Roads who never showed. Jonathan Vankin,
author of 60 Greatest Conspiracies, did make that program, however, but
they changed his title from the derisive 'conspiracy theorist' to 'internet researcher', the
new bugaboo.
"The major media always warps things into unrecognisable dimensions. The CBS program
60 Minutes wasted an hour and a half of Vankin's time with an interview
for a feature that only briefly flashed his website. In recent weeks I have talked
to producers from two British documentary teams, one person from the Discovery
channel, and someone else from an HBO special on the making of Mel Gibson's
'Conspiracy Theory' movie. I doubt if any of that will amount to substantial publicity for
Steamshovel."
Torbitt
The new edition of the Torbitt document which Kenn has worked on has also recently
been published, under the title NASA, Nazis & JFK. For the uninitiated, The Torbitt
document was a manuscript written by a Texan lawyer under the pseudonym of William
Torbitt and which claimed to illuminate the inside workings of the military-industrial cabal
who may have murdered JFK. We asked for Kenn's comments on this seminal document.
"The second printing of NASA, Nazis & JFK, which is the title for the edition
of the Torbitt that I annotated and introduced for Adventures Unlimited Press includes an
afterward by Len Bracken making the case that it might be Soviet disinformation. My
annotations were designed to emphasise what the Torbitt has to say about the Paperclip
Nazi role in the assassination, which is certainly not the main point of the document.
"Martin Cannon and Lobster editor Robin Ramsay have both complained that
there doesn't seem to be any independent verification for the existence of Defense
Industrial Security Command (DISC), the police agency that the Torbitt holds out as
culpable in the assassination. I have argued that veteran researcher Penn Jones wrote
about DISC (although his source may have been Torbitt); that a lawsuit was filed in
California over a call made by Oswald to a DISC agent in Raleigh, North Carolina; that the
address of the agency's headquarters should be listed in the city directory of Columbus,
Ohio from 1963; and that (famed JFK researcher, John) Judge connected the group to
Kerr-McGee and the Karen Silkwood murder. Look it up in the current DC phone book
and you'll find something called the Director of Industrial Security-Capital Region, which
basically retains the DISC acronym. So it's real. I think the best thing about the Torbitt is
the view it presents of transnational corporations and how intelligence services work for
them and not the country they ostensibly represent."
Kenn is working on two new projects as well as attempting to get the next issue of
Steamshovel together. "I am currently annotating and writing substantive
introductory notes to Were We Controlled? by Lincoln Lawrence, a classic on
mind control technology to be published this summer by David Hatcher Childress'
Adventures Unlimited Press. The other is a book on the Maury Island incident, the first
UFO sighting of the modern lore. This book will be based on correspondence by one of
those involved, Fred Crisman, who also is suspected of being one of the tramps in the
railroad yard at Dealy Plaza on assassination day.
"At one time, Crisman had Marshall Riconosciuto as a business partner, whose son is
Michael Riconosciuto, the chief informant in the Casolaro case. So that promises to be a
fascinating look at conspiracies spanning the generations. IllumiNet will publish that within
the next six months, in time for the 50th anniversary of the incident."
E-Conspiracy
Steamshovelhave followed the trend in establishing a site on the world wide
web but Kenn is a little dubious about the often heard suggestion that electronic
publishing will replace the printing press.
"I have noticed a pattern common with many websites: an initial enthusiasm where
changes and updates are made often and then a tremendous drop off. Like putting up a
billboard and walking away. Steamshovel has a link to a site that shows the
word 'Shit!' lit up in the windows of a college building from a photo taken on the night of
the Kennedy assassination. That site has been up there unchanged for three
years. The Steamshovel site includes a column called The Latest
Word containing material that never appears in the magazine. I change it often,
but not as often as I would like. It's difficult to make that work pay, so the energy goes
into work that keeps the magazine alive. Steamshovel will never become all-
electronic. If I get to the point where I can change The Latest Wordcolumn
every week, I expect to issue a challenge to other conspiracy websites to do the same.
The Steamshovel website, by the way, is at www.umsl.edu/~skthoma.
Flame Wars
Since the popularisation of the Internet, conspiracy and even more so specifically UFO
related sites have become very common-place. Along with this has come the inevitable
gossip and rumour regarding and between researchers, something which plagues the UFO
community to a great extent (as often reported by Jim Moseley in his irreverent newsletter
Saucer Smear - see interview in this issue of Immerse).
"The acrimony that exists
between many researchers bugs me. It seems to me fundamental to give everyone the right
to be wrong, to suspend judgement until you can come to some complete understanding of
various points of view, and simply to accept that multiple points of view on a topic is as
final as some things get. I don't like anonymous flame wars on the net - although I
understand the need to vent - and so I just do a lot of lurking until I find a productive
conversation into which I can inject some research or analysis.
"One problem is that the
intelligence community does have its assets, infiltrators and provocateurs, so honest
disagreements become charged with the suspicion that one or the other side is spreading
disinformation. In many cases, the charges are true. I had one such person follow me to
London and demand an audience with a BBC producer I had traveled with to an infra-red
imaging lab to test a Reichian orgone
box. The same person has supplied disinformation about Reich to the so-called 'skeptics'
press, including CSICOP (Committee For The Scientific Investigation Of Claims Of tTe
Paranormal), Skeptical Inquirer and Martin Gardner, for many years. There's an essay
about this on the Steamshovel webpage called Toxic Disinformation."
Phil Klass His "Little Nobodies"
Kenn's disparaging views of the sceptical community extends to the crown king of
Ufological debunking, publisher of the Skeptics UFO Newsletter and many books on the
subject, Phil Klass. Klass was interviewed by Immerse, along with Jim Moseley, at the
1997 Fortean Times UnConvention and that interview appears elsewhere in this magazine.
Comparing and contrasting Kenn's and Phil's viewpoints is an interesting
exercise.
"The last time I saw Phil
Klass quoted in the New York Times, he sniffed that those who have UFO experiences are
'little nobodies' craving attention. It's obviously a prejudiced and unscientific point of
view, especially concerning a phenomenon that has affected all kinds of people over all of
human history, no matter what one thinks of any particular case or set of cases. I do think
it's interesting that as the Fortean Times becomes more mainstream, it begins to have more
people like Phil Klass show up at its conferences. Without putting too fine a point on it,
since I do still have immense respect for the Forteans, when I sat on a panel with Peter
Brookesmith at the last UnCon (in 1996 Kenn lectured on the Casolaro/Maury Island
axis, Wilhelm Reich's persecution by the US Government and took part in a panel
discussion on the topic of UFOs and Governments) he argued that Belgium could not be
part of the international UFO cover-up because, well, because they're Belgian! He was
being clever, of course, but it's the kind of quip, like Klass and his 'little nobodies' remark,
that shows the rush toward a dismissal of the topic rather than engagement with
it."
Extradimensional UFOlogy
"A much more reasoned point of view about UFOs than that of Phil Klass recently was
expressed to me by Steamshovel contributor Roy Lisker, who is a scientist and a
mathematician and has reached no closed-minded conclusions about the
phenomenon:"
"...suppose that it was
possible that a sentient consciousness in our world could exist entirely on the surface of a
two-dimensional plane. This mind would be unable to conceive of a third dimension,
except as an unpicturable mathematical construction. If it were possible for one of us to
communicate with this being, we might say something like: "Don't you realise that all you
have to do is go 'up'?" Say we then took a stone and dropped it through his plane. He
would interpret this event, a simple causal phenomenon in our world, as an uncaused,
arbitrary event in the physics of his world. However, the true causes of the disturbances
created by the stone passing through his world would be intrinsically unknowable to him
as the limitations on his consciousness do not give him access to the third dimension in
which we live.
"Likewise, it 'ought to be
obvious' to us, that all we have to do in order to enter a fourth (spatial) dimension is to go
up* (the direction of "up-asterisk"!). Up* might then be a dimension which is unknowable
to our consciousness-in-the-world by virtue of the limitation or our sensory organs to a
three dimensional continuum. If there was a fourth spatial dimension then, just as in the
example with the dropping of the rock, an event from that dimension could 'pass through'
our world without our being able to reconcile it with our physics. Its causes would be
'intrinsically unknowable'.
"Still, four or more
dimensions pose no problems for a mathematician. In terms of their purely mathematical
content, one can easily plot lines, describe shapes and axiomatize any space with any
number of dimensions. In fact, many of today's mathematicians are only comfortable in
Hilbert's Space, the vector of space of infinitely many dimensions. Four dimensional space,
therefore, is not 'unthinkable' as a mathematical object; but a fourth dimension of physical
space, if there
is one, is unknowable to us, since no-one with a mind like ours can conceive any way of
moving in the direction up*."
Alien Sex Majic
Along with the idea of extradimensional/ultraterrestrial entities, another plausible theory is
the 'alien craft as black project and alien abduction as mind control'. Chief proponents of
this theory are Martin Cannon, author of The Controllers, and Alex Constantine, author
of Psychic Dictatorship In The USA.
"Reich said it best: 'everyone has part of the truth'. Cannon and Constantine have both
presented convincing cases that many alien abduction scenarios serve as government psyops
(psychological warfare operations), as has Jacques Vallee. John Judge makes a good case
that Nazis developed flying saucers. Certainly not all unusual aerial phenomena fall into
this category, though, and not every abduction case tracks back to a
psyop.
"Cannon and I had a tiff
when I tried to get him to do a sidebar to an interview I planned in Steamshovel with
Cathy O'Brien, who claims to have been made into a sex slave by an MKULTRA
program. Cannon believes that O'Brien and her partner, Mark Phillips, are frauds who use
details about a real mind-control program called Operation Monarch to embellish a
dog-and-pony show. I wanted Cannon to do something on the real Monarch; he didn't
want me to give O'Brien/Phillips any space at all. So it concerns me when any researcher
thinks he has the one 'real' answer. It tends to strangle dialogue."
The Wild Side
And what of Kenn's feelings on the convoluted tales of US government/grey alien treaties
and hybridisation schemes of 'Wild' Bill Cooper and others of like
mind.
"Everyone has part of the
truth. Cooper's take on the Kennedy assassination, for instance, that the driver shot JFK
with a .45, has elements of truth. The driver does put on the brakes; you can see them
come on the Zapruder film. There are photos of an agent picking up a .45 slug from the
opposite silde of Elm Street after the motorcade has passed. In fact, disinfo schemes always
contain elements of truth, which is not to say that Cooper is a disinformationalist. He
certainly didn't create the circus atmosphere that surrounds much of the UFO community.
"It's really the nature of
the Beast: an aerial and psychological phenomenon that affects millions; governments
hiding the data they have collected on it to preserve their credibility (which they lose as
well if, as they say, they do not collect data on it); a history that has built up a lore;
entrepreneurs trying to exploit the commercial possibilities of all this excitement. Every
researcher/writer/lecturer is a natural product of that spectacle."
Disinfotainment
Such reasoned and thought provoking views on the UFO topic are indeed rare in this days
of supposed alien autopsy videos, grey and abduction 'mania', and disinfotainment like the
X Files.
"Television is the very
essence of the Conspiracy, a mind-control device that transmits stimulation for the eyes
and ears but leaves the brain wanting. So X-Files, Dark Skies, even programs like Fortean
TV, can never become more than part of the culture of denial. All this stuff about Area 51,
alien abductions, government conspiracies, Fortean phenoms--it's all just fodder for a silly
TV show. Students of the conspiracy culture, publishers of magazines like Steamshovel,
become the
'Lone Gunman' geeks on X-Files. Meanwhile, X-Files writer Chris Carter lectures for the
CSICOP, which happened recently."
OKBomb
The ongoing trial of Oklahoma bombing suspect Tim McVeigh is another media circus
waiting to happen but thus far seems not to have received the epic international
proportions of the OJ Simpson trial. With talk of a decidedly conspiratorial defence
strategy by McVeigh's attorneys, it may soon become a media led case of 'conspiracy on
trial'.
"Lois Fortier just testified
and even the mainstream news reports noted that her story sounded very rehearsed. She's
the wife of McVeigh chum Steve Fortier. Both of them at first insisted that McVeigh could
not have had anything to do with the bombing but when the FBI threatened them with
the death sentence, they changed their story and made up the current one. Steamshovel
reported on this in issue #14.
"Hoppy Heidelberg, the
person whose common sense questions caused him to be
dismissed from the original OKBomb grand jury, has stated openly that police authorities
will not call in certain witnesses because they may be informers or provocateurs attached
to government undercover operations. Apparently McVeigh isn't even telling his lawyers
about who he worked with. He's either taking it all like a good soldier or they never got
that mind control implant out of his butt (as detailed in Immerse 001). I cannot see how a
conviction will arise out of all this, and I called it right when the criminal trial jury
acquitted OJ Simpson. Anyone following the case in
the papers would do well to read Jim Keith's OKBomb! book from IllumiNet. It asks all
the pertinent questions."
TWA
800
The other current mass media 'conspiracy' story has been the TWA Flight 800 splashdown.
We asked Kenn what the current climate's like - Stinger, US Navy friendly fire, mechanical
failure or, as some of the more extremists have alleged, UFO?
"The theories now also
must account for these continued sightings of missile-like objects in nearby airspace by
pilots and airline passengers, as well as the eyewitnesses to the missile event when the plane
came down. Pronouncement by the National Transportation Safety Board that mechanical
failure took down TWA800 will satisfy nobody, especially anyone familiar with Sherman
Skolnick's exposure of that agency's cover-up of the 1973 Chicago Midway crash that killed
E. Howard
Hunt's wife Dorothy and other Watergaters. Skolnick discussed this with
Steamshovel in issue #11. The NTSB is now floating its TWA800 'mechanical failure'
conclusion in the press to see how the airlines respond."
History is a Lie
The mainstream press titillate the masses with coverage of 'wacky' conspiracy theories,
which are more often than not more plausible than the official version. The history books
are unfortunately much the same, the victors write the history and the first victim is the
truth. Conspiracy theory is shunned as 'nutters talking about aliens and faked moon
landings'.
"The process of tenure and
promotion often involves conspiracy, if I understand university department politics
correctly. So academics have a vested interest in steering away from the study of the
process. After tenure, you find people like John Mack (tenured at Harvard) and Courtney
Brown (tenured poli sci professor at Emory University who claims to also work as a
remote viewer) who come forward with things. Also, educational bureaucracies must insist
that they know the 'truth' about things, even though they mostly just regurgitate
government and corporate media
reports, which by any measure is a tiny, distorted part of the spectrum of available
information. Many postal workers in this country keep better historical files than many
history professors, who often work from pre-fabbed textbooks."
--Leigh Neville with Dashwood II
Steamshovel Press is
available from PO Box 23716, St. Louis, MO 63121 at the current subscription rate for
four issues at 26US dollars or 7US dollars per copy. Steamshovel also sells Popular
Alienation, NASA,Nazis & JFK, and The Octopus. Kenn can be contacted via email
at kennthomas@umsl.edu or
browse Steamshovel's website by going to http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma
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