Blow'd Up Real Good (Part Two)

What can you see?

from Antonioni's Blow Up

I must be something of a disappointment as a conspiracy theorist, because I don't know what the fuck is going on.

I mean, I have an inkling. Like David Hemmings in Blow Up, the closer I look the worse things appear, and it doesn't take a Dante to know that everything is going to Hell. Though perhaps it takes a Nostradamus to believe we know how, and when, because maybe he just made shit up, too.

The End has been a long time coming and its anticipation has been with us from the beginning, so perhaps abductees and channelers and psychonauts have been on strangely familiar ground when entities and "spirit guides" and the chemistry of nature have reportedly told them that "Earth time is desperately short" (as Arthur Shuttlewood related he was told, in his Warnings from Flying Friends.)

Albert Bender, arguably the first "Men in Black" contactees, was warned of a pole-shift due in 1953. Knud Weiking, supposed voice of "Orthon," claimed he'd been told there would be a nuclear holocaust on Christmas Eve, 1967. Alarms raised of the Earth's imminent incineration, flood, or "cleansing" are not just facts of the fringe, but also of mainline contactee religions. (As virtually every religion is.) Perhaps one example is the closely guarded and apocalyptic "Third Secret" of Fatima, which the "Beautiful Lady" shared with her three young contactees.

It's a game tricksters play, whether human or not quite so, as John Keel experienced during the Mothman flap. He was warned of a catastrophic plane crash by an "Asian-looking character" calling himself Apol, seated in the back of a black Cadillac. He went on to say the Pope would soon be assassinated, followed by three days of darkness and worldwide power failure. There were many other warnings from other strange sources and allegedly channeled spirits that something dreadful was about to happen, but none which pointed unambiguously to the dreadful thing which did, except perhaps for a lucid dream Keel was told six weeks earlier by a Point Pleasant resident of "a lot of people drowning in the river and Christmas packages floating everywhere in the water." For the most part, wrote Keel, the "contactees would be manipulated, used as robots to propagate beliefs and false frames of reference, and then be discarded to sit in the darkness and wonder why the world was not as they had imagined it."

Does this trade in fear and false prophecy sound familiar? Or maybe rather, does it feel familiar, because it's not something I've often heard discussed.

Fritz Springmeier, the "Christian Identity" white supremacist, convicted bank robber and victim-triggering expert in "Illuminati mind control," published in a mid-90s newsletter that "The leadership in both Russia and the U.S. are preparing for war. From 8:00A.M. to 6:00P.M. on June 6, 1996 the proper alignments will occur to detonate numerous nuclear devices." Then in 1999, he wrote "Over two weeks ago, this author was given inside information that the New World Order had pulled all their key people -- specialists, and so forth out of San Diego, CA. These people were given a secret high-level briefing which told them to leave San Diego by April 3 [1999] and that their reason to leave was that Russia was going to drop nuclear bombs on San Diego, Seattle, NYC...."

On his October 18, 2001 broadcast, Alex Jones said "Within 2 years I'm predicting...that you're going to see a suitcase nuke in this country. You're probably going to see a release in a few years of something communicable. And I am predicting that you will see a lot of conventional bombings in the next year or so." In March 2005 he predicted Arnold Schwarzenegger would "save children at a school shooting, or there'll be some type of bombing, and he will land by helicopter and run in and direct things. I predict it - I see it all aligning. I see it all coming together. I see their plan, clear as day." More soberly, on August 10, 2006 he announced "There is a 90% chance we are gonna see bone-shattering mega-attacks in the United States, Canada, or England or Israel in the next couple months - by mid-October. We're talking about the total end of America, total martial law. I am predicting you will have huge terrorist attacks in the Western world by, at the latest, late October."

More recently, last August, there was the so-called Kennbunkport Warning issued by Webster Tarpley, alleging "massive evidence" for a "new 9/11 terror incident...over the coming weeks and months." A number of its signatories, including Cindy Sheehan and Cynthia McKinney, have since claimed their endorsements were forged and their support for its claims misrepresented, while critical readers of the Statement have been labeled "divisive" and "COINTELPRO" by Tarpley and his supporters.

I've been guilty of it, too. I've been suckered by channeled "insiders" who predicted the other shoe was about to drop. I don't want to be again. Conspiracy research is not a prophetic art. We can see clearly enough to make out the broad strokes on the big canvas, and we can tell it's not going to be a pretty picture, but we're kidding ourselves - actually, entertaining ourselves - if we believe we know how it's all going to turn out. Or that some Unnamed Other is going to come along and tell us, rather than trick us.

Fixing dates for the end of the world and bouncing with goosebumps from one fabricated scenario to the next is imposing a false narrative upon a story that has yet to be told. And the temptation is great, in part because many of the plot points are whispered suggestions of the storyteller who'll never tell us the whole story, but simply means to give us a good fright. This seems to hold, whether the story is Springmeier's "insider's" or Shuttlewood's "flying friend's."

It's a perverse fact of the conspiracy industry that it incubates credulity within those who claim to "Question Everything." But that's the nature of industry, to nurture its market, and the nature of conspiracy, to place every honest and dangerous inquiry into disrepute.


What can you see now?