Just in time for the 12th-annual Conspiracy Convention, which takes place this weekend at the Santa Clara Marriott, self-proclaimed “crackpot historian” Adam Gorightly has a new book from FeeJee Press. A dazzling matrix of travel-inspired insanity from California and beyond, Happy Trails to High Weirdness: A Conspiracy Theorist’s Tour Guide is a highly amusing romp through a mishmash of alternative reality tunnels. Even better, major parts of it go down right here in our neck of the woods.
First of all, I must confess that some of Gorightly’s previous conspiracy sleuthing, now included in this new dossier, was the inspiration behind two columns I wrote a few years ago. His interviews with Jeffrey Deane Turner, the dude originally busted for stalking ’80s pop star Tiffany, were so compelling that I had to track down Mr. Turner in Santa Cruz, where he lives.
As Turner and I breakfasted at the Attic, he spilled a congested interdimensional smorgasbord of conspiracy theory. The ’60s sex kitten Tuesday Weld was descended from a bloodline of Druidic witches, as old as Babylon, who indoctrinated her into the Illuminati as a child in order to secretly puppeteer the entire ’60s counterculture.
In the Illuminati, Turner told me, Bob Hope was the entertainment director, and the Rosicrucians are the branch of research and development. The Illuminati, he said, is currently hashing out world domination with the “old secular right-wing of international fascism,” which is now revamped vis-a-vis a worldwide underground expansion of the infamous Process Church of the Final Judgment and spearheaded by one of Turner’s former classmates from Homestead High School.
As I finished my eggs Benedict at the Attic, the 54-year-old Turner told me that Tiffany herself is the founder and leader of a third secret society, the All Nations Group, hinting at another royal bloodline. Throughout our entire conversation, Turner kept circling back to bloodlines and ethnicities, inquisitively probing me on my own genealogy and background.
I have Adam Gorightly to thank for indoctrinating me into the Jeff Turner Experience, much more of which is now recapitulated in Happy Trails to High Weirdness. In the book, he exposes the “Dark Side of the Summer of Love,” including supposed black magic rituals at the Chateau Liberte in the Santa Cruz Mountains, plus lurid histories of the Manson Family and Moby Grape founder Skip Spence.
That only scratches the surface. In the book, Gorightly also illuminates the history of Holy City in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a hoaxish Bigfoot-related press conference in Palo Alto and a “Pilgrimage to Conspiracy Con.” In that last ditty, he reveals a trip to the conference in 2009, which also included a jaunt to Rosicrucian Park and the ill-conceived Quetzalcoatl statue in Plaza de Cesar Chavez. Yes, no matter how hard San Jose’s politicians try to market or rebrand our city, people will always know the Rosicrucians and the poop statue.
The book also includes an authoritative trip to the Retro UFO conference in Landers, where Bob Benson demonstrated a working model of the Integraton, an acoustic energy dome situated on a geomagnetic vortex in the Mojave Desert.
Along with Benson, everyone gets ink: Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, the Church of Satan, JFK, Uri Geller, Elizabethan-era mages, 33rd-degree Masons, Tim Leary, the Sirius Mysterius, Nixon and so much more. Were the UFO contactees actually ritual magickians? You must read to find out.
“Crackpot history is a double-edged sword,” Gorightly says. “I write about a lot of interesting and colorful characters who could be classified as ‘crackpots.’ On the other hand, a lot of people suspect the same of me.” In the end, Gorightly claims all he’s trying to do is question consensus reality in all its manifest forms. Pretty much like any conspiracy enthusiast.
“At the core, this is what good conspiracy research is all about,” he writes. “Looking behind the scenes of world events and asking the tough questions, as to who is manipulating our consensus reality, and what we can do individually—and as a united front—to break free of the programming and thus create our own realities.”
Happy Trails to High Weirdness
By Adam Gorightly
FreeJee Press; $19.95
