Operation Mindfuck: How a hippy prank made the world insane.

In 1963 in the wake of the Kennedy assassinations the entire U.S media had gone mad with conspiracy theories on what ‘actually happened’. (See- Was Lee Harvey Oswald a Manchurian Candidate?)

Two men, Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson were at the centre of it.

Kerry Thornley sometime in the 1970s. Source

They were burgeoning countercultural figures in the underground press, and they had had enough. They were part of a growing movement of radical youth, the generation of ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’, sick of politics and the values of society which they believed was attempting to control them, and they viewed these conspiracy theories touted by the mainstream press as just another way that ‘The Man’ going to keep you scared and controlled.

Thornley was curiously tied to the assassination of JFK. As a younger man Thornley was stationed in Japan as a marine for several years and had written a book about his fellow marines especially one in particular: Lee Harvey Oswald- the assassin of U.S President John F. Kennedy. The important thing to note, is his book was written in 1962, a year before Oswald killed Kennedy and focused on Oswald’s service disillusionment and defection to Russia in the years following the assassination.

Following the assassination of JFK Thornley was dragged before the Warren Commission (set up to investigate the assassination) then later accused by conspiracist Jim Garrison being part of the plot to kill JFK by the CIA.

One of the foundational texts of Discordianism. Some point it to the very earliest Zines. Source

Wilson was staffer for Playboy though the late 1960s to mid-70s and both men along with others founded a satiric pseudo-religion called Discordianism which ‘worshipped’ the Eris Greek goddess strife and discord.

Robert Anton Wilson (1932 – 2007) Source

Along with Discordianism the two men and their milieu created Operation Mindfuck: they were going to promote the most outrageous conspiracy theory, something so crazy that when people heard it they would not believe it and hopefully they would become more sceptical of conspiracy theories. Writer and early internet pioneer Douglas Rushkoff describes it as an attempt to “destabilize the dominant cultural narrative through pranks and confusion”[i], Wilson called it ‘guerrilla ontology’, another scholar described it as “a deliberate campaign of revolutionary disinformation."[ii]

The two men chose an obscure Bavarian utopian secret society that operated in the late 18th century, the Illuminati. Their thinking was: who in their right mind would truly believe that this old and unknown Bavarian society could truly be controlling public figures in 1960s America?

How wrong they could be. Across the country those in the milieu made outrageous claims, one article purported that Jackie Kennedy had witness LBJ performing necrophilia on the dead presidents headwound[iii], a 1967 march was organised to ‘float the Pentagon’[iv]while Wilson and Thornley worked to “’attribute all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies’ to the Illuminati and other hidden hands.”[v]

Flower Power- This image taken during the March on the Pentagon became an enduring image of the counterculture.

They did by planting stories and false advertisements recruiting people to the Illuminati, they created fake letters gloating in their control of the world and sent them to groups such as the John Birch Society.

In 1969 at a infamous and highly publicised trial brought by Jim Garrison against a New Orleans businessman accusing him of conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK, Discordians managed to sneak one note to one journalist revealing that all the jurors were “all Illuminati initiates. The telltale sign: None of them had a left nipple.”[vi]

Wilson later went on to write the Illuminatus trilogy that parodied and played on many features of conspiracy theories. Source

What was the result?

Wilson in a later 1975 book wrote “none of us were aware, yet, that Operation Mindfuck could get out of hand…”[vii] although the real fruit of the Illuminati conspiracy theory was going to come decades later. It is interesting the remainder of the men’s lives: Wilson wrote about the concept of ‘Chapel Perilous’ which seems partly a justification of his involvement in Mindfuck, in his words:

 “in researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions (called Chapel Perilous in the trade). You come out the other side either a stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way. I came out an agnostic.”[viii]

His contemporary Thornley went the other route and became convinced that he was in fact involved in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy along with Oswald, the CIA, Charles Manson and two other codenamed assassins. [ix] 

The website by Sondra London is a fever dream of MS paint and early 2000s era website creation- enter if you dare.

Thornley ended his days a drug-addicted wandering vagrant and the pair’s avantgarde and surreal experiment backfired spectacularly fuelling a revitalised interest in secret societies and the Illuminati.

Mindfuck's legacy lived on in the dark recesses of the internet. Decades later its tactics went on to be used by the far-right to meme a President into existence.

Sources

[i] Douglas Rushkoff. Operation Mindfuck 2.0. (Team Human September 24, 2021) https://medium.com/team-human/operation-mindfuck-2-0-358f9d237174.

[ii] Stuart Rathbone. Anarchist literature and the development of anarchist counter-archaeologies. (World Archaeology 2017). page 5

[iii] Paul Krassner How the Realist Popped America’s Cherry. (NYpress: 11 Nov 2014)  https://www.nypress.com/news/how-the-realist-popped-americas-cherry-JGNP1020030826308269999.

[iv] Peter Manseau. Fifty Years Ago, a Rag-Tag Group of Acid-Dropping Activists Tried to ‘Levitate’ the Pentagon. Smithsonian Magazine October 20, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-rag-tag-group-acid-dropping-activists-tried-levitate-pentagon-180965338/.

[v] Jesse Walker.50 Years of Conspiracy Theories – Operation. (New York Magazine. November 15, 2013.) Accessed 23/08/24:  https://nymag.com/news/features/conspiracy-theories/operation-mindfuck/.

[vi]Ibid

[vii] Robert Anton Wilson. Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati. NEW FALCON PUBLICATIONS 2020 P.59

[viii] ibid P.6

[ix] Confession to conspiracy to assassinate JFK. From  https://sondralondon.com/tales/confess/03.htm