My Top 10 Favorite Conspiracy Books

Here's a list of my ten fave books about conspiracies, UFOs, the paranormal, and etc. Even more than being books I love, the titles on this list are great for the "beginner" who is just starting to delve into these topics of interest:



10. Hollywood Babylon, by Kenneth Anger

This book isn't about the "Entertainment Illuminati" per se -- but it maps out the framework upon which much of that lore is based. Come thrill at the utter murderous debauchery of Hollywood (where life is apparently cheap)! The author/filmmaker was, and is, heavily into the occult, idolizing Aleister Crowley and working with such luminaries as Anton LaVey and Jack Parsons' widow Marjorie Cameron -- so if anybody would know about the Illuminati's influence in the movie industry, it would be this guy. Also had a sequel book with gorier photos.

9. Dead Names, by Simon

Purporting to be a history of the "Simon" version of the Necronomicon, this book provides not only a nice history of the occult in New York City and background on one of the most famous books of magic in the world -- but it also gives you an "insider's" look at the mass corruption (with possible connections to international espionage) of the various "Orthodox" Christian churches. You'll never quite feel like you're getting the complete story from author Simon, in part because the author is really Peter "Sinister Forces" Levenda (who has a great deal of fun with it all).

8. Subliminal Seduction, by Wilson Bryan Key

If you are into spotting the "secret messages" behind pop-culture, this book is the Bible. Key's ground-breaking work analyzes advertising for "hidden" subliminals (most involving sex) designed to help sell products. These subliminals include sex acts painted in ice cubes and the word "sex" drawn faintly all over photographs. You'll literally never look at ads the same way again; this might mean that you are going as mad as Key, or stumbling upon one of the greatest conspiracies of all time.

7. Hellhounds On Their Trail by R. Gary Patterson

An exhaustive look at the connection between the occult and the music industry, this book is a must for anybody interested in Illuminati/pop-music lore. As with "Hollywood Babylon," the secret societies within Music aren't named as such, but it becomes quickly clear that something bigger and more systematic is going on rather than a handful of unrelated cases. This is one of the few books that have massively creeped me out; as if there was something demonic hidden in the pages themselves (which I realize sounds corny, but that's how I really felt).

6. The Secret History Of The World, by Mark Booth

An epic overview of the history of esoteric thought since the dawn of recorded time, and of the secret societies that keep this knowledge alive (and hidden). You get a really good foundation in alchemy and occult symbology here, and it's stuff you can then apply to a whole host of other research. The only caveat is that, like "Dead Names," you always feel like the author is not telling you the full story -- or that he may have an agenda of his own (I am specifically referring to Booth's postscript entitled "Is The Anti-Christ Already Here?" -- a sharp departure from the balanced tone of the rest of the book).

5. Book Of Lies: The Disinformation Book of Magick

This is one of the very first books that introduced me to the word of conspiracies and the occult, and as such it was very formative for me. It covers it all: Crowley, Hitler, Sirius, William Burroughs, Lovecraft, LaVey, psychedelics, the Apocalypse. It will crack open your head and take you on a whole bunch of different directions (which, strangely, will all sort of take you to the same destination point).

4. The Spear Of Destiny, by Trevor Ravenscroft

This another of those conspiracy "meta-narratives" that ties together a massive amount of different people and ideas -- in this case, the occult, Nazis, secret societies, Christianity, reincarnation, and etc. And again, the narrator seems somewhat unreliable; but more than unreliable, he also seems somewhat mad. The conclusion Ravenscroft makes at the end of this book as to the Jews and the Holocaust is also quite jaw-dropping; the equivalent of driving a car steadily down a road for miles and then taking a sudden and violent left-turn right through the highway's shoulder and into a densely wooded area.

3. The Gods Of Eden, by William Bramley

This is, like "Behold A Pale Horse," a seminal work in conspiriology that countless writers have stole borrowed from. Bramley, a lawyer, systematically goes through the entire history of mankind, methodically building a case that alien "Custodians" have been manipulating humanity. Just like any good lawyer, Bramley will have you convinced of this tale of ancient astronauts and masonic secret societies whether you're a "believer" or not.

2. Sinister Forces, by Peter Levenda

I've admittedly only read the third and last volume of this series -- but its grand, operatic, all-encompassing narrative makes it a titanic work of conspiracy lore. This is Levenda's magnum opus, a work connecting the dots on everything from Satanism to JFK to MK-Ultra to Charles Manson to Jeffrey Dahmer. You can almost feel Levenda fighting off madness/depression/mania as he struggles to part it all down on paper; which is why, more than just conspiracy books, they almost read like works of art.

1. Cosmic Trigger, by Robert Anton Wilson

Yet another meta-narrative, this time weaving together the Illuminati (yes, referred to by name), aliens, synchronicities (as embodied by the "23 Enigma"), mind-expanding drugs, mythology...and of course Aleister Crowley. But what really made me place this book at the top is not just the skillful and humorous way we handles the subject matter -- but his overall advice on how to "handle" conspiracy/occult studies in general. Which is to say: keep an open mind and don't get too hung up o any one point of view (or, "reality tunnel"), as to avoid going stone-cold paranoid and get trapped in the "Chapel Perilous."

There were other books that I've also enjoyed that didn't quite make this list for one reason or another. I quite like David Icke's books, but they are hard to read straight through & are very derivative of other works (read "Gods of Eden" to see how much Icke "borrows"). "Behold A Pale Horse" by Bill Cooper is another book that I just couldn't read straight through, and was really bogged down by all the disparate sources and pages and pages of "official documents." Much of the MK-Ultra lore (Fritz Springmeier, "Trace-Formation," etc.) have some good stuff in it but also seems to go off the rails. Lastly, there's a rich library of conspiracy material with a specifically Christian view-point; I've avoided these in this list, as a lot of it hinges on "if you are not Saved you are going to Hell."

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Star Trek's "The Cage" And "The Gods Of Eden"

Well, Netflix Instant is streaming the original Star Trek TV series -- and may I first say how impressed I am with how well these episodes hold up over time! I've watched them all several times over during the course of my life since early childhood, and they only get better for me.

In this post I'll be focusing on the Star Trek pilot "The Cage" -- which the network tossed back to creator Gene Roddenberry as being "too cerebral." (It's a miracle the original series was able to stay as long on the air as it did).

Heading the Enterprise in this episode is not Captain James T. Kirk but Captain Christopher Pike. Pike is played with equal-parts pathos and leading-man good looks by Jeffrey Hunter, an actor best known for portraying Jesus Christ in the movie "King of Kings." Joining Hunter is Majel Barett as the ultra-serious Number One, and Leonard Nimoy as a somewhat shaggier and rough-around-the-edges Mr. Spock. Certainly not the crew we're used to -- with not nearly the same chemistry -- but generally decent enough to help make this an enjoyable episode despite some of the more "primative" aspects of the pilot. (Think a really great episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits.)

Jesus Christ and Christopher Pike

"The Cage" focuses on a theme that the series will return to over and over again -- that of a superior alien race (or gods, or robots, or what have you) capturing human specimens to observe/enslave. The episode's antagonists, the large-headed Talosians, see humans as just another animal to keep and study in their menagerie of creatures. What they seek to do in this episode is breed Pike with their captive/"guest" Vina and basically create a slave race of humans to populate their planet -- a basic theme that runs through much of the "Ancient Astronaut" and Custodian theories regarding the origins of human life and culture on planet Earth.

"The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property," succinctly wrote researcher Charles Fort early last century. The late Zecharia Sitchin claimed to have translated ancient Mesopotamian tablets that told a tale of a superior aliens, the Anunnaki, who cultivated humanity through genetic manipulation as a hybrid slave race to serve them. What is interesting is that Sitchin's theories dovetail right into the events in the Book of Genesis in the Bible -- specifically, the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah's Ark, both specificaly referenced in "The Cage." The so-called God/gods are, according to the theory, really these Annunaki extraterrestrials.

Building on the Ancient Astronaut research of Sitchin and "Chariots of the Gods" author Erich von Däniken, author William Bramley in his book "The Gods of Eden" posited that humanity are the "property" of extraterrestrials/gods he refers to as the "Custodial Society." As Fort also wrote, these superior beings see the Earth as just a farm, and humans no better than animals.

Seen in light of the Ancient Astronaut/Custodian hypothesis and its relation to myth/religion, the planet Pike lands on, Talos IV, is an Eden of sorts, run by the alien/gods known as the Talosians. The Talosians placate what are essentially their captives/zoo creatures through the use of highly believable telepathic illusions -- basically, virtual reality. As long as Pike and Vina choose to not look behind the curtain and accept these illusions, paradise is maintained. Attempts to pierce the veil, however -- to metaphorically eat from the Tree of Knowledge -- results in terrible mental pain. Just in case viewers miss the allusion to the Biblical tale, Vina repeatedly refers to her and Pike as being an "Adam and Eve" on Talos IV.

(It is interesting to note that von Däniken and other Ancient Astronaut theorists identify the Greek mythological figure Talos as being in reality some sort of extraterrestrial flying craft or weapon)

With their cold, emotionless, behavior, insatiable drive for observation and experiments, and telepathic abilities, the Talosians also bring to mind reported sightings/encounters with aliens. Indeed, the Talosians have the "typical alien look" down pat, with their large craniums and greyish-blue skin. They also bear an uncanny resemblance to the Guardians of the Universe from the Green Lantern comic books (which first appeared in 1960), a (mostly benevolent) alien race who also assumed a role of superiority over not just humans but the galaxy as a whole:

Interesting to note that Roddenberry, like Green Lantern Hal Jordan in the comic books, was an Air Force pilot.

The Talosians -- and many described/depicted aliens in general -- also look very similar to an extraterrestrial/extradimensional entity occultist Aleister Crowley reportedly channeled in 1918, around roughly the same period in which Fort was writing about human zoos, "Lam."

Crowley's channeled entity Lam, and a screenshot from "The Cage" of a sketch of a Talosian

Curiously, Roddenberry was apparently no stranger to channeled entities himself, having worked with an organization in 1975 called "Lab-9" who claimed to be in contact with a group of extraterrestrials called The Council Of Nine (who identified themselves as the figures upon which the ancient Egyptians based their gods). The story goes that Lab-9 hired Roddenberry to write a television script based on the "return" of The Nine, and the man based the main character on himself. When the task of revising the script went to his assistant, an additional in intriguing element was added to the story -- that Roddenberry's fictional alter-ego channeled his successful 1960s television show from The Nine!

One has to wonder if Roddenberry really did receive any sort of otherwordly inspiration for the TV show Star Trek, or at least tapped into some collective well of primal, mythological themes. At any rate, while the man was a self-described agnostic and humanist, and allegedly instructed the writers on the show not to refer to religious themes, "The Cage" is explicitly presented as a twisted Adam and Eve tale told with a heavy dose of alien interference. Its message? That humans prefer freedom above all other things, including life (you know, unless you are horribly disfigured in an accident because your silly alien rescuers/surgeons never saw a human before).

Actor Jeffrey Hunter chose not to return to Star Trek after the pilot, and his role was recast in a later pair of episodes based on that first show, entitled "The Menagerie." In "Menagerie" Christopher Pike is now horribly burned and paralyzed as a result of an accident on his ship, and Spock kidnaps him back to the planet of the Talosians in order that he might benefit from their illusion-creating abilities and live with Vina in a happy telepathically-induced Eden. Like the Biblical Eden, the two can live out their years in a perfect paradise, having no desire, given their true forms, to partake of anything from the Tree of Knowledge and thus break the spell.

Hunter died in 1969, after a series of strokes leading to a fall down a flight of stairs and subsequent brain hemorrhage.

Note: There are many other aspects to this episode that I could have covered here. The Talosians were also apparently very interested in breeding, and when Pike initially spurns Vina, the aliens beam in other female Enterprise crew members as substitutes. The question then becomes: what type of woman does ruggedly handsome protagonist Pike really want? The intelligent and serious Number One, the very young and nubile Yeoman Colt, or the sexual "animal" green-skinned Orion dancer? (a whole post could just be written on the symbology of green-skinned females in pop-culture and mythology)

Further, I've always been interested in the character of Christopher Pike -- while completely different from Kirk (who has more of a roguish charm and sense of humor), I can't help wondering "what might have been."

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