pattern was noted almost thirty-five years ago by Richard Hofstadter in his examination of the paranoid political style. He observed that the more sweeping the claims, the more “‘heroic’ [the] strivings for ‘evidence’ to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.” The result is a literature that, “if not wholly rational, [is] at least intensely rationalistic.” Indeed, conspiracy theorists insist on being judged by the very canons of proof that are used in the world they despise and distrust, the world of academia and the intelligentsia. For all its claims to populism, conspiracy theory yearns to be admitted to the precincts where it imagines the conspirators themselves dwell.17
FACT-FICTION REVERSALS
The commonsense distinction between fact and fiction melts away in the conspiracist world. More than that, the two exchange places, so that in striking ways conspiracists often claim first that what the world at large regards as fact is actually fiction, and second that what seems to be fiction is really fact. The first belief is a direct result of the commitment to stigmatized-knowledge claims, for the acceptance of those claims rests on the belief that authoritative institutions, such as universities, cannot be trusted. They are deemed to be the tools of whatever malevolent forces are in control. Hence the purported knowledge propagated by such institutions is meant to deceive rather than enlighten. The baroque conspiracy theories that are so much a part of the stigmatized-knowledge milieu are presumed to be explanations that expose the misleading—and therefore fictional—character of public knowledge. Because stigmatized-knowledge claims and conspiracism insist on the illusory character of what passes for knowledge in the larger society, the equation of fact with fiction seems relatively straightforward. The belief that fiction is actually fact, however, is less obvious.
Conspiracy literature is replete with instances in which manifestly fictional products, such as films and novels, are asserted to be accurate, factual representations of reality. In some cases, they are deemed to be encoded messages, originally intended for the inner circle of conspirators, that somehow became public. In other cases, truth is believed to have taken fictional form because the author was convinced that a direct representation of reality would be too disturbing and needed to be cloaked in fictional conventions. In still other instances, fictionalization is deemed to be part of the conspirators’ campaign to indoctrinate or prepare a naive public for some momentous future development.
The most common fiction-is-fact assertions deal with films, and especially the science-fiction films that have played to an immense audience in recent decades, such as the Star Wars cycle and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In a 1987 press statement, John Lear, the estranged son of inventor William Lear, claimed not only that the U.S. government had close and continuing contacts with extraterrestrials but that an inner circle of powerful officials had “subtly promoted” the films E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind so that the public would come to think of extraterrestrials as benevolent “space brothers.” Somewhat similar claims were made by conspiracy writer Milton William Cooper, who said that the films were “thinly disguised” descriptions of contacts that took place in the early 1950s between extraterrestrials and the government. The most sweeping claims of this kind have been made by Michael Mannion, whose “mindshift hypothesis” asserts that the “shadow government,” whose members know about aliens, has been systematically “reeducating” the American public. According to Mannion, this campaign has touched virtually every area of popular culture, from films and television programs to the lyrics of popular songs. Hence every fictional reference to UFOs and their occupants is actually a purposeful representation to serve the ends of the secret elite who deal with the aliens behind the scenes.18
Such views have been met with skepticism by some conspiracists, either because the use of motion pictures in this way would mean that too many people would know the “real truth,” thus making secrecy harder to maintain; or on the grounds that films have as much potential to mislead as to enlighten or indoctrinate. Thus Jon King suggests that the prominence given to the mysterious Area 51 in the 1996 film Independence Day is a “smoke screen,” for the most secret alien-related activities have actually been transferred elsewhere. Nevertheless, he still sees a sinister 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
