THE RABBIT HOLE
In October of 2010, I was about a year into working on my first book, Heroes in the Night. That nonfiction book explores a unique subculture of people who call themselves “Real Life Super Heroes” (or RLSH). These are people who adopt their own superhero personas, including homemade costumes, and take on a wide range of missions, including charitable, humanitarian or activist efforts. Some of them also try to fight crime actively, often with mixed results. I had witnessed a scene of complete chaos when a costumed man named Phoenix Jones pepper-sprayed a group of people fighting outside of a bar in Seattle, which caused a confused brawl and the superhero ended up spending the night in jail. Others, like The Watchman in my hometown of Milwaukee, limited his crime-fighting to neighborhood block watch patrols in unusual attire. I had started a blog on the subject which had become popular and was hard at work trying to put a book together.
On October 2nd, I woke up and followed my morning ritual. I started brewing a pot of coffee and flipped open my laptop to see if any e-mails had drifted in overnight.
I did have a new message. It read:
Mr. Krulos,
My name is Richard McCaslin and I used to be known as the Phantom Patriot. I was the RLSH that set a fire in the Bohemian Grove on Jan. 20, 2002. You can read the “official version” of the story on Wikipedia. If you are interested in the whole story, please contact me. I can provide proof of my identity. I just found out about “Heroes in the Night” and would like to participate even though the “mainstream” RLSH community is keeping its distance from me.
Sincerely, Richard McCaslin
My first impulse was to roll my eyes and ignore it. Although I had found most of the RLSH I met to be surprisingly normal, I had already encountered a few cranks and pathological liars. One, Master Legend, claimed he was blessed with powers by a voodoo priestess. He had also posted a story about how he had defeated a couple of criminals after he had pulled a jalapeño pepper from his utility belt, chewed it up and spat it in their faces as a crude pepper spray, giving him the upper hand as he gave them “an all-night tour of Fist City.”
Another RLSH, Neurocybe’X, claimed to have working knowledge of the ice planet Hoth (from the Star Wars universe). One person told me a long tale about his life that involved a secret government RLSH program that I suspected was ripped off from a Captain America comic book. I was sick of lying, attention-seeking trolls wasting my time with fabricated superhero antics.
But the thing that grabbed my attention with Richard’s message was the bit about a Wikipedia page. I checked it out. The short entry said something about a Phantom Patriot engaging in a heavily armed, costumed raid of a place called the Bohemian Grove. I clicked on the entry for Bohemian Grove and scanned over the description. It said that the Grove was a private resort for men only, and only the world’s richest and most powerful men. No media was allowed inside. They also practiced a mystery ritual in front of a statue of a giant owl. It mentioned an infiltration by a conspiracy theorist named Alex Jones. I had not heard of any of this.
I glanced at the time. I had other plans for the day, but my eyes were glued to my laptop, my curiosity in overdrive. I went out and wrapped up the errands I had to do as quickly as I could, and when I got back home, I opened my laptop again and got sucked into a “rabbit hole.” That term is commonly associated with people lost in researching conspiracy topics, a reference to Alice chasing the White Rabbit and descending into Wonderland, where she explores a surreal dimension of madness, ruled by an insane tyrant. The term came into common use by conspiracy theorists after a famous scene in the 1999 movie The Matrix. Morpheus offers Neo a choice: he can take the blue pill and continue to live his humdrum life in a computer-generated simulation… or he can take the red pill and discover the awful truth about the Matrix-world they live in.
“You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes,” Morpheus tells Neo. “Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”
I canceled everything else I had planned and spent the rest of that day (and many other random days after) reading and watching videos about the Bohemian Club and their exclusive redwood retreat, the Bohemian Grove, and the conspiracies associated with it. That led to more and more conspiracies, and the rabbit hole eventually extended for the rest of the weekend and pretty much the next nine years of my life as I journeyed through the alternate reality of Conspiracy World.
Prior to this, I had some knowledge of conspiracies, but not as much as I thought I had. As a teen, I was interested in UFO reports, so I had read several books on case files like Roswell and Area 51, which involved government conspiracy and cover-up. I had read a little bit about the JFK assassination and some articles on 9/11 Truthers and was always amused by supermarket tabloid reports about Elvis being alive and living amongst us incognito.
I was about to go to much darker places.
As I fell down the rabbit hole, I went on a trip to a place that was weird and frightening, sometimes funny, often sad, and occasionally dangerous.
The rabbit hole is a plunge that some people never escape from.