Augustus Owsley Stanley II

This past weekend, Owsley Stanley died in a car wreck in Australia. If you've never heard of the man, you probably aren't a Dead-head; which is to say, you should count yourself lucky.

Augustus "Bear" Owsley Stanley II was born in Kentucky to a wealthy political family. His father was a government attorney and his grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley, was the 38th Governor of Kentucky and a member of the United States Senate.

Like similar characters in these circles - notably, another LSD-obsessed Kentuckian, Alfred M. Hubbard - it's hard to make sense of the events that led up to their life's apex. In 1956, Owsley entered the Air Force. In 1958, he became intensely interested in the Russian Bolshoi Ballet, and made the unlikely career change from military pilot to ballet dancer. But by 1963, he was attending UC Berkeley taking classes in electronics, and it's here that he became fascinated with hallucinogenic drugs. He was producing thousands of hits of acid in his bathroom on campus, and from there they quickly spread all over the country to be consumed by the curious. Apparently even Lee Harvey Oswald tried some of Owsley's LSD just before the Kennedy Assassination, according to FBI memo #NO-89-69-80.

By the summer of '65 Owsley was cranking out 300,000 doses per batch, and was possessed with an almost religious zeal to get everyone on the stuff, by any means necessary. Soon he was best friends with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and became their primary LSD supplier. The Grateful Dead practically adopted him as an auxilliary member, becoming a fixture in their entourage as roadie and drug dealer, and it's said their "dancing bear" logo is an homage to him.

One glowing obituary of the man speaks of him as "a colorful figure who would pour acid into a squirt bottle and spray musicians and fans alike at shows". Whether these people in the audience wanted to be sprayed with LSD, even at the height of the flower power craze, is something that apparently didn't concern Owsley. Jerry Garcia, who apparently didn't care either, is quoted as saying: "There’s nothing wrong with Bear that several billion fewer brain cells wouldn’t fix."

Owsley was the Beatles' LSD caterer during the filming of their disastrous Magical Mystery Tour TV special, which was so monumentally hated by BBC viewers that Paul McCartney issued a statement apologizing for the film's acid-addled self-indulgent nature. As Peter Brown in The Love You Make noted, "It was the first time in memory that an artist was obliged to make a public apology for his work."

In typically naive hippiethink, Owsley defended his LSD crusade this way:

"Psychedelics are a gift of nature that brings tribalism to people; they bring an understanding of the ecology of the planet and the interaction of all living things, because that’s one of the first things you become aware of when you take psychedelics—how everything is alive and how everything depends on everything else. You go take a look at every indigenous culture that has a respect for its environment — unlike the hierarchical approach of the feudalistic structures that the world is now run by — and you will find that these people use psychedelics of some sort, usually in a regular, ritualized manner."

This childish assessment is so blatantly false and ridiculous that I don't even think it needs dissecting here; its naivete speaks for itself. Unfortunately, this dangerous sort of thinking still has a foothold today and many young kids are lied to by bargain-basement "shamans" who really believe that harsh brain-damaging unnatural chemicals have some sort of divine connection to ancient tribal cultures, and that therefore, you should ingest them.

Some may feel I'm being too hard on the guy, especially so soon after his death; but I can't underscore enough the number of lives lost and minds ruined by his shenanigans. That "he meant well" is no consolation. As far as I'm concerned, this guy ruined everything that was great about the 1960s.

From Kentucky to Kennedy

Today is the anniversary of the still-not-fully-explained assassination of John F. Kennedy.

And yes, you need not be a conspiracy-theory type to consider it not fully explained - we do not know and can never know what really motivated Lee Harvey Oswald to do what he did, nor what motivated Jack Ruby in turn to do what he did. Guy Banister died in 1964, David Ferrie in 1967, and Clay Shaw in 1974, so with every major player in the story dead, there's really no chance we can ever really know just what the hell really happened in America on this day in 1963, or why.

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) found both the original FBI investigation and the Warren Commission Report to be seriously flawed. The HSCA also concluded that there were at least four shots fired, that there was a "high probability" that two gunmen fired at the President, which therefore, by definition, is a conspiracy. After the HSCA findings, however, nothing further was done by law enforcement or congress. The Reagan administration didn't seem interested in reopening the case. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the Reagan administration also quashed serious organized crime investigations it had inherited from the Carter-era Justice Department.)

A couple years ago, I here examined allegations about David Ferrie and Jack Martin living in Louisville for a short time, supposedly on some sort of nefarious secret mission. Some say they were here as private investigators to expose a "phony priest" scam, while others maintain they they themselves were behind the scam all along. Knowing how these kinds of spooks work, it wouldn't surprise me if both stories were true - that Ferrie and Martin were double-dipping and getting funding to investigate a crime ring that they were actually members of.

Not much new info has come to light, at least from my meager efforts, since that blog post. Joan Mellen, in her JFK-conspiracy book A Farewell to Justice, takes some pains to drag an ex-CIA "flim flam artist" from Louisville named Thomas Edward Beckham (aka Eggleston Zimmerman) into the matter, but ends up with the same problem as those who investigated Ferrie and Martin - when you're dealing with shady characters like these, it's almost a given that the things they tell you are a mix of truth and lies, and it's up to you to sort them out like a bucket of nightcrawlers.

According to researcher Peter Levenda, Beckham was a Bishop in the Universal Life Church (you know, that bunch popular during the Vietnam War for conferring religious titles to anyone for a small donation) and was not only pals with Ferrie, Oswald and Banister, but with Fred Lee Crisman. Crisman is a bizarre figure who, like Kentuckian Alfred M. Hubbard, seemed to have a knack for being connected to more than his share of spooky goings-on. Crisman's name turns up in connection with The Shaver Mystery, the Maury Island UFO Incident, the "NASA, Nazis & JFK" Torbitt Document, and the totally mind-melting mess that was Inslaw, PROMIS, Kentuckian Charles Hayes, and the death of Danny Casolaro.

And then there's a man named Carl Stanley (aka "Saint Christopher Maria") who was born in Massachusetts in 1902, and died in Kentucky in 1967. Levenda again:

On January 11, 1941, however, and for reasons known only to him, Stanley enlisted in the Canadian Army for the duration of World War Two, being discharged on June 20, 1945 and becoming a Canadian citizen on August 5, 1946. He could not stay out of trouble in Canada, however, finding himself arrested once again this time in Ontario in 1947, receiving a six months’ suspended sentence for theft.

Then, in April of 1950, Stanley attempted to enter the United States via Miami, Florida and deportation proceedings began against him. He did not have a US passport or an immigrant’s visa. Since he was a naturalized Canadian citizen – even though he was born in the United States – and lied about his citizenship, the US government decided to deport him. Deportation procedures took a lot of time, but he was eventually deported on February 28, 1954, only to re-enter (illegally) in April of that year...

From 1964 to his death, he was a bishop of the newly-formed American Orthodox Catholic Church, having been consecrated by Bishop Earl Anglin James of Canada among others...Ferrie had been introduced to Stanley by Jack Martin, an investigator with Guy Banister’s detective agency in New Orleans. Martin has been portrayed as a hopeless drunk in Oliver Stone’s film of the assassination, and has been given short-shrift in other studies of the New Orleans connection. Martin himself ratted out Banister, Stanley and Ferrie to the FBI after the assassination when it became clear that District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating the case. We should not take this all at face value, however, for Martin – even though he pretended to be investigating Carl Stanley – remained a bishop of the American Orthodox Catholic Church for many years after the assassination and until the day he died, even participating in the consecration of Thomas Jude Baumler – a self-admitted fascist and attorney who also worked briefly as an investigator for Guy Banister and as a New Orleans politician in his own right – as late as 1974.

Martin first attempted to have David Ferrie consecrated by another bishop on the East Coast, but the bishop felt that there was something “unholy” about Ferrie, and he declined. Ferrie then went on to Stanley where he was more successful. This occurs in the three year period before the Kennedy assassination.

Then something strange happened.

Immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy in November of 1963, Stanley himself alerted authorities that he thought David Ferrie and Jack Martin were involved. This was what prompted the entire investigation into both Ferrie and the wandering bishops that became the crux (no Latin puns intended) of the Garrison investigation. Why would Stanley have done this? Spite is one possibility, for if Martin’s statements to the authorities are true – and that’s a big “if” – then Stanley had reason to go after Martin since Martin was “investigating” him.

Carl Stanley died in Louisville of an apparent heart attack on March 8, 1967 - just a few days after Garrison arrested Clay Shaw and made a noisy spectacle about how he was about to crack the JFK case wide open.

Does your head hurt yet? Mine sure does. Such is the way of the endless hedge maze that is the JFK conspiracy. Better minds than ours have burned out their brains and devoted their entire lifetime to the matter, convinced that it's a solvable problem and that it must be solved. I say, just enjoy the ride - and it is just a ride. No one understood this more than John Kennedy himself, from the way he lived to, literally, the way he died.

JFK Assassination Conspirators in Kentucky

Something that comes up again and again in JFK conspiracy-theory texts, but is never detailed to my satisfaction, is a report that David Ferrie and Jack S. Martin spent time living in Louisville in the 1950s, ostensibly doing detective work for the Federal Government to investigate and infiltrate a "phony religious order".

But when exactly were they here? Where in Louisville did they stay? And exactly what religious order were they spying on?

Complicating the matter is Jack Martin's later assertion to Jim Garrison that Ferrie had once been a member of a "phony church". Supposedly, Martin was in on the Federal investigation that Ferrie was working on, so why would he try to paint Ferrie as a bonafide member of that same "phony church", years later?

Still complicating it further: we know that Ferrie was openly a priest in the Louisville-based Old Roman Catholic Church of North America (ORCCNA). This is an unapproved offshoot from the Roman Catholic Church, and back in the 50s and 60s was considered by some to be wildly radical for their liberal views and lack of total acceptance of papal infallibility. JFK researcher Peter Wronski called them "a shadowy and highly factionalized heretical sect", which I think is rather unnecessarily dramatic and over-the-top. There are many independent Catholic schism groups out there, and there's nothing wrong with that as far as I can see.

The Catholic Church and the Vatican considered the Old Roman Catholic Church of North America a false church and Ferrie therefore a false priest. Ferrie was later defrocked and kicked out for reasons that are sketchy. A devout Catholic in the conservative 1950s would have certainly have referred to any schism group as a "phony" church, so could the Old Roman Catholic Church of North America indeed be the church Martin spoke of to Garrison? And if so, was this the same church that Ferrie was supposedly infiltrating in Louisville?


Like all JFK-conspiracy matters, it just keeps spiralling off into endless loose threads the more you pick at the fabric:

In 1967, at the request of the New Orleans district attorney's office, the Toronto Police went through Ferrie's old phone records and determined that Ferrie had made seven long distance phone calls from New Orleans to an unlisted number in the 416 area code, which is Toronto. The police traced the number to Earl Anglin Lawrence James, who was - wait for it - a bishop in the Old Roman Catholic Church of North America!

Earl Anglin James vehemently insisted he knew no one in New Orleans, and in fact, had only ever received one call from New Orleans in his entire life: "in March 1965 and it was from Mr. J. S. Martin. It was personal." J.S. Martin? As in Jack S. Martin himself, Ferrie's partner in the Louisville investigation?

Bishop James, incidentally, has been removed from the line of apostolic succession on the official ORCCNA site's list, but the original lineup can be found here and here.


(If you don't know what the heck any of this means, or who David Ferrie, Jack Martin and Jim Garrison are, jump in here or check out Oliver Stone's film JFK, in which Ferrie is played masterfully by Joe Pesci.)