Grand conspiracy theory

A grand conspiracy theory is the proposition that the major conspiracies alleged to govern the world — the control of banking and finance, media and politics, military-industrial secrecy, secret-society ritual and the suppression of extraterrestrial contact — are not independent operations but tiers of one coordinated plan run by a single concealed hierarchy. The political scientist Michael Barkun classes constructs of this kind as superconspiracies, in which event conspiracies and systemic conspiracies are nested inside one another. Its extraterrestrial form puts the UFO cover-up at the apex of the pyramid: the folklorist Thomas Bullard describes Milton William Cooper as having joined the UFO secret to the New World Order conspiracy, "ramping up MJ-12 and alien contact into cornerstones of what Michael Barkun calls a superconspiracy, a 'theory of everything' that explains the world in terms of an interrelated hierarchy of conspiracies," and the historian Paul Boyer, reviewing Barkun, singles out Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse as "far more influential" than Stan Deyo's 1978 work in grafting UFO belief onto conspiratorial thought.

Cooper, David Icke, Fritz Springmeier, Laura Eisenhower and Michael Salla each fill the apex differently — a human elite of bloodline families and secret societies, a reptilian or Orion controller above them, or both — and Salla's seven-layer briefing places the controllers of UFO and non-human intelligence information on the sixth. For Cooper the concealment of contact and the government of the world were one question, and he put the stakes of misjudging it bluntly: if his documents were disinformation, he told listeners, "you're in worse trouble than you ever thought of," because the whole human establishment would then be arrayed against them. Bullard holds that the ufological form of the theory collapsed after the ufologist Bill Moore stated in 1989 that Air Force intelligence had fed disinformation to Paul Bennewitz, leaving a real conspiracy that, in his words, "belonged to the imaginations of low-level intelligence personnel and deceptions by one of ufology's own, not to vast machinations of aliens and secret societies"; Cooper read the same statement as vindication, and by the 1990s had come to call the aliens a ruse devised to justify a seizure of power by the secret government.

Origin of the concept

Barkun sorts conspiracy theories into levels by the scope of the alleged plot — a single event, a systemic plan to control a country or the world, or a superconspiracy joining the two. Boyer reports that Barkun characterizes conspiracy belief as an attempt "to delineate and explain evil," guided by three principles: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected, and traces the tradition to the Order of Illuminists founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, whose ideas "have enjoyed a rich afterlife among conspiracy theorists, in works often marked by anti-Semitic overtones" before being combined, in a process Barkun calls improvisational millennialism, with theories of visitation by space aliens. Barkun traces that combination to a "not entirely coherent" 1978 work by Stan Deyo, and finds a bright side to it: if the sinister beings seeking to control the world come from UFOs or Inner Earth, more mundane villains are left off the hook, and anti-Semitic themes have declined with the injection of aliens into the scenario. Boyer also records a variant, which Barkun traces to 1920s pulp fiction, in which the conspirators are reptilian creatures from Inner Earth who take on human form.

Boyer himself urges against dismissing the subculture out of hand, pointing to the record of real conspiracies in recent public life and adding that "nor does the notion of an all-powerful world system seem unduly bizarre in this era of global corporations, instant money transfers, gargantuan media conglomerates and the WTO."

Cooper said he reached the account through top-secret documents he handled as the senior enlisted man in the command center of the Pacific Fleet staff, documents that in his telling stated that extraterrestrials were real, that UFOs were piloted by them and had visited Earth for many thousands of years; they also described an alliance agreed with the visitors at Muroc, now Edwards Air Force Base, in 1954 — the 1954 Muroc Air Force Base meeting — and Cooper cautioned that having seen the documents did not establish that it had happened, since they could have been presented to him to make him believe it. Bullard summarizes the resulting structure in Cooper's telling: Majestic 12 and the Central Intelligence Agency began as groups to handle the alien presence, while the hidden governments of other nations formed the Bilderberg Group to maintain international UFO secrecy.

Institutional and bloodline structure

The institutional backbone Cooper described is a network of bodies he held to be one society with one purpose: the Jason Society, the Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Vatican and others, which "are really one society with one purpose," pulling in different directions over who will rule the New World Order while proceeding toward the same goal. Cooper wrote that Eisenhower turned in early 1953 to his fellow Council on Foreign Relations member Nelson Rockefeller for help with "the alien problem"; the resulting panel, Majority Twelve, comprised Rockefeller, Allen Dulles of the Central Intelligence Agency, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, Admiral Arthur Radford, J. Edgar Hoover and six men from the Executive Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, the "Wise Men" of the Jason Society; and the Bilderberg group, formed to coordinate and control international efforts to hide the secret, "has evolved into a secret world government." The layering was deliberate: the early arrangements, Cooper said, "established a buffer between the president and the information," so that the president could deny knowledge if leaks divulged the true state of affairs, while the Air Force and the CIA "exercised complete control over the alien secret."

The multigenerational dimension is elaborated by Fritz Springmeier, whose work on the Illuminati bloodlines an interviewing radio host summarizes as about thirteen elite bloodlines that have maneuvered themselves into positions of control over the planet, a summary Springmeier accepts as "very well said": "these are generational satanic families." Springmeier holds that the Illuminati maintain control through trauma-based mind control, in which multiple personalities are programmed and given triggers, a technique the host ties to MK-Ultra and other government projects.

The non-human premise

Cooper treated the documents behind his account as undecidable except through one variable: of the Majestic Twelve panel he wrote that "whether this is true or disinformation depends solely upon the existence of aliens." Asked by listeners whether he was feeding them disinformation, he replied that if he were, "you're in worse trouble than you ever thought of," and that it "would be better if there are aliens," because otherwise the Government had perpetrated the whole thing for a purpose nobody knew. Bullard holds that the premise is what divides the two beliefs: conspiracists need "a human villain, some immensely powerful, secret, and malign but ultimately flesh-and-blood" Illuminati, so that the two beliefs overlap but are ultimately incompatible, and he records that Cooper "was ambivalent all along about whether aliens or Illuminati ran the show," sometimes arguing that if extraterrestrials were not visiting Earth it would make sense to invent them to unite opposing forces against the threat. Cooper's later position kept the unified structure and removed the non-human apex, leaving the alien threat a ruse meant to justify a seizure of power by the secret government.

The philosopher Quassim Cassam, writing on conspiracy theories generally rather than on Cooper, argues that believing the moon landings were faked requires supposing that the American government and space agency "actually had the ability to carry out... a stunt like that... and to get away with it for 50 years without the story ever having been leaked," which is to attribute to governments "almost superhuman powers." The attorney Daniel Sheehan, who has represented several UAP whistleblowers, applies parsimony to the origin of the entities rather than to the conspiracy: because humans are the one sentient, upright, technological hominid species known, evolutionary convergence on a foreign planet is "super, super slim," and "the Occam's razor explanation would actually be" that the beings are "sort of related to mankind."

Non-human controllers and the interdimensional layer

The writer John Grace, publishing as Valdamar Valerian, argued that the human conspiracy is only the visible stratum of a deeper one: the extraterrestrial biological entities had interpenetrated human civilization at "the root level," the Illuminati-related groups controlled the areas that interface directly with terrestrial humans, and "what humans view as conspiracy is only a superficial perception of a deeper, multi-level problem." David Icke sets out the same architecture around a reptilian controller: Bullard summarizes Icke as relating "reptilian" aliens to ancient contacts with a reptile species that still manipulates human society from the shadows, and Icke himself describes a cult inner circle, including the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, that controls the sources of information the population receives, with "the real power" in the shadows and, in "the deeper shadows," in "another dimension." The purpose he assigns the arrangement is the harvesting of "low vibrational human energy" — fear, hatred, anxiety — by entities he identifies with the reptilian beings of the astral dimension, an energy that Robert Monroe named loosh. He reads the Jeffrey Epstein case as an operation for creating situations in which people of political and royal influence could be blackmailed.

Laura Eisenhower likens the Illuminati to the Nephilim, who are "supposedly a hybrid between Orion reptilian" beings and are "easy to possess and mind control"; she traces the treaties under which numbers of humans, adults and children, are supplied to the government to an original arrangement among Churchill, Crowley and Hitler, which "established the gray alien agreements with the government." Salla's briefing sets the human elites — ruling bloodline families, transnational corporations and secret societies — beside Inner Earth civilizations and extraterrestrial organizations including the Galactic Federation of Worlds, the Orion Collective and the Draconian Empire, and records that the Draconians have historically appointed from among the human elite a "Pindar" as their chief intermediary with national leaders; Salla says he first met the term in Icke's usage, for the ruler of the planet imagined as a shape-shifting reptilian.

An anonymous poster claiming membership in a ruling bloodline family offered a further variant in the Hidden Hand dialogue posted to the Above Top Secret forum in October 2008: that a Luciferian group soul voluntarily incarnates into the ruling bloodline families as a "catalyst" for spiritual growth through negative polarity, folding the whole conspiracy into a cosmological structure in which its evil serves a larger spiritual economy. Boyer notes that Barkun, who calls such syntheses of millennial religion, conspiracy and UFO material improvisational millennialism, insists on the cultural importance of "stigmatized knowledge."

Open questions

References

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