Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Dupont families; the central banks of England, France, and the United States; the world copper market; and many major corporations. The Council of 13, of which Todd claimed to have been a member, executed decisions of the Rothschild tribunal through its control of churches, political institutions, and voluntary associations. Thus, among its lackeys were the World Council of Churches, the Anti-Defamation League, the Council of Foreign Affairs [sic], the United Nations, the FBI, the CIA, the Communist Party, the John Birch Society, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Masons, and the Knights of Columbus. In Todd’s mind, the Illuminati were Satan’s coordinating mechanism, through which diabolical forces insinuated themselves into virtually every aspect of American life.38
Todd not only exposed the depth of the Illuminati’s penetration, he also claimed to know its “Plan for World Takeover.” It involved removing the Republicans from control, repealing the tax exemption for churches, criminalizing genocide (which Todd interpreted as meaning that converting someone from one religion to another could result in a murder charge), awarding martial-law powers to the president, and passing an antihoarding act. At the same time, Israel would cause World War III, and the financial machinations of the Rothschilds would leave all Americans at their mercy. Todd even incorporated Charles Manson’s “helter skelter” plan, in which the country would be terrorized by motorcycle gangs.39
By the late 1970s, Todd’s increasingly strident attacks on other Christian religious leaders had begun to erode his support. During these years, he predicted that the Illuminati’s plan would begin to be implemented in fall 1979. In 1984, Todd was placed on five years’ probation for incest and in 1988 was sentenced to thirty years in prison in South Carolina for rape.40 He was subsequently involuntarily committed to a behavioral-disorders treatment program as a sexually violent predator. Todd was a man of many names as well as a prolific litigator while in custody, where he generally sued as “Kris Sarayn Kollyns.” In one curious filing, he attacked personnel at his institution for preventing him from practicing his Wiccan religion, an odd complaint for someone whose brief moment of fame was tied to his claim to having unmasked the witchcraft conspiracy.41 In response to what must have been his last foray in the judicial system, a later court reported that “the plaintiff died on or about November 10, 2007.”42 Notwithstanding the strange trajectory of his later life, his ideas maintained an independent existence. They were adopted wholesale by the heavily armed Christian Identity commune, the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord, which published a summary of Todd’s conspiracy beliefs in a 1981 pamphlet, Witchcraft and the Illuminati.43
The penetration of Illuminati superconspiracy theories into fundamentalist and right-wing circles was predictable. The former found them a vivid demonstration of the devil’s doings, while the latter used them to conceptualize a cunning, shape-changing literature of the “New Age.” The New Age is a construct variously described in terms of the counterculture, self-actualization, neopaganism, and individual spirituality. The appearance of Illuminati themes in this amorphous area has, however, been limited to a relatively well-defined segment of the literature— specifically, that concerned with UFOs and extraterrestrials.44
One of the earliest attempts to link the Illuminati with UFOs came in 1978 from Stan Deyo, an American expatriate in Australia. His book The Cosmic Conspiracy fused Illuminati theory with dispensational premillennialism and a variety of UFO speculation generally referred to as Alternative 3. Alternative 3 began as the eponymous 1977 British television program that purported to expose a plot in which a secret organization of the superrich kidnapped and exploited scientists in order to create a clandestine space-colonization program that would allow them to escape the earth before pollution and overpopulation reached catastrophic levels. Though widely considered a hoax, both the television program and a subsequent book quickly came to be accepted as fact by many conspiracy theorists.45
Deyo’s book is not entirely coherent, but the basic argument may be reconstructed as follows. The Illuminati’s remote origins lay in the “mystery school of Moses,” whose esoteric teachings were amplified and transmitted by Solomon and the master masons who built Solomon’s temple. In time, however, these “mysticists” split into two factions, one religious and one antireligious. The Illuminati provided the leadership for the “perverted,” antireligious faction.46
The Illuminati went underground after the French Revolution (Deyo, not surprisingly, cites Robison), but their hand remained visible in subsequent upheavals: “modern ‘observers’ must surely concede that the most daring and diabolical social experiments in the history of man are presently illustrating the basic tenets of Weishaupt’s school in both Russia and China.” Far from limiting their activities to Europe and Asia, however, the Illuminati have insinuated themselves into centers of power in America. Indeed, according to Deyo, the Great Seal of the United States is full of Illuminati symbolism (a theme commonly found in conspiracist literature). The fixation on the seal emphasizes its reverse side. Conspiracists like Deyo insist that the pyramid capped by a single eye is an Illuminati symbol, and they translate the motto “Novus ordo seclorum,” not as “A new order of the ages,” but as “New world order.” He concludes that from a scriptural point of view, “America is either a pawn of the modern Babylonian mystery school or the seat of the ‘new Babylon’ mentioned in Christian prophecy.” The Illuminati’s power structure is made up of familiar elements: the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers (an organization of European and North American movers and shakers), the Club of Rome (a private international organization of civil servants, academics, and business people devoted to the study of global problems), and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (a London-based foreign policy think tank founded in 1920).47
To this point, there is little in Deyo’s arguments to differentiate them from theories already introduced by Robison, Webster, Griffin, and others. He enters new territory, however, with the appearance of his variation on Alternative 3. Powerful though the Illuminati are, their ultimate goal, “the establishment of a dictatorial world government,” has remained just out of reach. It could be achieved, Deyo speculates, only in a sufficiently charged atmosphere of global crisis. A crisis of unimaginable dimensions could both maintain cohesion within the Illuminatist forces and induce the population to accept unprecedented regimentation. What might induce people to give up their freedom? Deyo suggests that an appropriate catalyst would be an invasion by UFOs, in either of two scenarios. One envisions a fake extraterrestrial invasion, in which conspirators on earth produce an armada of seemingly alien flying saucers manned by human impostors, in order to create an artificial common enemy against which humanity could unite under a world government—an idea similar to that proposed by André Maurois in his 1923 tale, The Next Chapter: The War against the Moon.48
But Deyo seems more attracted to a scenario drawn from Alternative 3, in which cascading deprivations lead an increasingly desperate humanity to accept the leadership of seemingly benevolent “space brothers,” who are in reality the conspirators in disguise:
I can see it now . . . frozen in an energy crisis, saddened by the Watergates of the world, dying from environmental pollution, starving from food shortages, frightened of a global nuclear war, sick of the moral decay, afraid of the daily news, bankrupted by global monetary fluctuations, unemployed from economic depressions, crowded by the ever present birth rate, frightened by the suspicion that a global weather catastrophe was about to happen . . . man-kind . . . would have been ready for “Alternative Three.”
In Deyo’s variation, the conspirators bring in spacecraft manned by “teams of highly-trained actors,” who offer their leadership in “the greatest attempted deception of all history.” The Illuminati, having discovered the secret of antigravity propulsion, can now use their fleet of flying saucers first to control the earth and then, if circumstances require, to leave it.49
Deyo then takes this strange idea one step further by linking it to dispensational premillennialism,
