The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

elaboration, that the war has left an incurable scar on many people, including former prisoners of war—apparently the first such mentions of POWs. According to newspaper accounts, many protestors, Chinese-American groups, former U.S. prisoners of war, and others staged a conference demanding apologies and reparations from Japan. Speaking of reparations, Tanaka told reporters that based on the Peace Treaty, “the entire issue was settled.” Secretary of State Colin Powell, who joined in the celebration, said, “The treaty dealt with the matter 50 years ago,” but added, “at the same time we have the utmost compassion for the veterans who suffered.” Powell is also quoted as saying, “It is the United States position that those claims were extinguished in the San Francisco Treaty.”

USS COLE

On the sweltering morning of 12 October 2000, an inflatable boat packed to the gunnel with explosives slammed into the side of USS Cole as she was anchored in the port of Aden, Yemen. Seventeen US sailors died, as well as the two bombers.

The Yemeni police soon arrested six men, who confessed to having been trained in Osma bin-Laden’s Jihad Camp No. 1 in Afghanistan and being under telephone orders from an al-Qaeda commander in Dubai. Satellite records confirmed that the arrested men had made dozens of calls to other al-Qaeda members in Africa.

Despite the weight of evidence pointing to bin Laden’s outfit, not everyone was convinced of its guilt. The hole in the side of Cole was 40 ? 60 feet, too big and too shaped (some believed) to be made by a rubber dingy full of fertilizer, and seemed to suggest a party with more bomb-making know-how and kit than al-Qaeda boasted. Who had the wherewithal to make the supposedly necessary military, shaped charge?

Shalom, Mossad. Rumours—especially in the Muslim world—became rampant that the Israeli secret service sank Cole with a cruise missile fired from a Dolphin-class submarine. That Israel should be willing to shed the blood of its American ally was not implausible: in 1967, Israeli jets and motor torpedo boats attacked the US intelligence ship USS Liberty for seventy-five minutes. The Israelis pleaded that the incident was a case of mistaken identity; since the Liberty was flying the American flag in international waters no one, up to US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, believed them. The best guess was that the Israeli Defence Force was trying to stop the Americans knowing what it was up to in the Six Day War.

According to conspiracists, the Aden attack was a “black flag” operation in which Mossad sought to frame the Yemen. Worried about improving Washington–Aden relations, Mossad staged the bombing in order to persuade the Americans that Yemen was unreliable, and a breeding ground for terrorism.

Then again, in “The Truth About the USS Cole Bombing”, Lloyd T. Vance and Steven Johnson have the US itself waving the black flag, suggesting at worst that Washington used al-Qaeda as patsy bombers, or at best a refuelling accident was opportunistically turned into a chance to blame al-Qaeda.

You may ask why the US sank its own ship? Vance and Johnson posit the reason as the desirability of getting the “Bush/Cheney junta” into the White House. The Cole calamity made Clinton/Gore look useless (just as poor Jimmy Carter had seemed in the Tehran hostage debacle) so good ol’ kick-ass boys Bush and Cheney became shoo-ins.

Mmm. Reagan might—just—have managed to persuade the Iranians not to release the Tehran hostages for his electoral benefit in October Surprise, but Bush ’n’ Cheney hiring in al-Qaeda (even if Osama was a family friend of George’s) stretches credulity.

Further Reading

www.scribd.com/doc/53626841/The-Truth-About-the-USS-Cole-Bombing

VRIL SOCIETY

In 1947 an article by rocket engineer Willy Ley in Astounding Science Fiction remarked on an occult Berlin group in the 1930s which “called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft—Society for Truth—and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril.”

After issuing two pamphlets, Vril: The Primal Cosmic Power and World Dynamism (about Atlantean free energy technology), and one issue of a magazine, the group seems to have gone kaput.

From these slender sources, post-War conspiracists have woven a thesis that the “Vril Society” was in contact with alien forces from Aldebaran, who instructed on flying saucer technology (shades of the Thule Society), with the power for craft supplied by said Vril. According to French authors Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels in The Morning of the Magicians, the Berlin Vril group was the inner circle of the Thule Society and connected to the English Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Bergier and Pauwels are amongst the most unreliable guides to the esoteric you could fear or find, but Vril does have an English connection, because the originator of “Vril” was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote Vril: The Power of the Coming Race in 1871.

This is an account of a super race, the Vril-ya, that live in caves inside the Earth and use a near magical form of magnetism/electricity, the Vril Force, described by Bulwer-Lytton thus:

… there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for Vril (prana, chi, or qi ). I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in Vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground.

Vril is derived from the Black Sun, a ball of Prima Materia, that supposedly exists in the centre of the Earth. Served by robots and able to fly on Vril-powered wings, the vegetarian Vril-ya can use Vril rods to wipe out barbarians a thousand times their number. (There was some irony in the vegetarianism of the Vril; a smart ad man in the Victorian era combined bovine with “vril” to make “Bovril”, the branded meat extract.)

Bulwer-Lytton’s book is a fiction. This notwithstanding, the Berlin group believed it to be an occult bible, as do handfuls of contemporary conspiracists. Naturally, no German secret society is worth its salt unless Adolf Hitler was a member—and, guess what, historian Michael Fitzgerald has discovered that Herr Schicklgruber (“Heil, Schicklgruber!” doesn’t have quite the right ring about it, does it?) was a member of the Vril Society. A busy boy Adolf, organizing putschs, running the NSDAP, running the Third Reich, attending Vril meetings.

In The Unknown Hitler, Wulf Schwarzwaller, goes even further, declaring that Alfred, Rosenberg, Himmler, Goring and Hitler’s personal physician Dr Morell were in the same Vril Lodge as their fuhrer. And in UFO Secrets of the Third Reich, Vladimir Terziski traces how the Third Reich made contact with the Vril through a hole in Antarctica, which allowed the Nazis to develop a series of antigravity machines culminating in the Andromeda space station.

Vril-powered moon rockets? Now there’s an idea that really is out of this world.

Further Reading

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, 1871

Michael FitzGerald, Storm Troopers of Satan, 1990

Michael FitzGerald, Adolf Hitler: A Portrait, 2006

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 2002