Jimi Hendrix and Fort Campbell

There's a conspiracy-oriented book in progress by Dave McGowan that can be read online, called Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation. According to McGowan's worldview, some sort of ill-defined CIA/Pentagon/mob conspiracy is behind the scenes of the careers of Laurel Canyon-based musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Canned Heat, Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention, Mamas & The Papas, The Turtles, Jan & Dean, The Byrds, Janis Joplin, and even The Monkees. It sounds ludicrous on the face of it, but it's actually fairly gripping reading. There's a lot of smoke there, but there's some fire.

In particular, I was stunned to learn that Jimi Hendrix served in the military and was stationed in Kentucky's super-spooky Fort Campbell. From McGowan's book:

Though he rarely spoke of it, Jimi had served a stint in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. His official records indicate that he was forced into the service by the courts and then released after just one year when he purportedly proved to be a poor soldier. One wonders, though, why he was assigned to such an elite division if he was indeed such a failure. One also wonders why he wasn’t subjected to disciplinary measures rather than being handed a free pass out of his ostensibly court-ordered service. In any event, Jimi himself once told reporters that he was given a medical discharge after breaking an ankle during a parachute jump.

These are indeed interesting questions, and it's also interesting to note, in this vaguely ominous context of nebulous conspiracy theory, that Fort Campbell is also home to the Black Helicopters of the 160th Spec-Ops "Night Stalkers".


I had never heard anything about Hendrix having been in the military, let alone in Kentucky of all places, but sure enough, the story checks out. Hendrix was arrested on stolen-car charges, and was indeed given the choice between prison and the Army by a judge. During his 13 months at Fort Campbell, he met bass player Billy Cox, and together they formed a band called The King Kasuals. They played mostly roadhouse saloons along the Kentucky-Tennessee border during this time, then became the backup band for an R&B singer named Johnny Jones. With Jones, they played prestigious gigs in Nashville, including appearances with Little Richard on the Night Train TV show. Surviving 1965 Night Train footage is currently the oldest video known of Hendrix performing, backing a R&B duo called Buddy & Stacey.


The Smoking Gun website has copies of documents pertaining to Jimi Hendrix's military period, which you can view here.

The borderline-kooky idea that Hendrix was murdered by the CIA has been floating around for years now - supposedly the high concept is that U.S. Government secret agents were fighting a "covert war against rock", trying to get rid of the counter-culture's heroes and destabilize the hippie movement. While I find that idea to be pure baloney (the hippie movement was already pretty much deflated by the time Jimi died in September 1970), I find it slightly less baloney-istic to consider the remote possibility that there's some sort of connection between MK-ULTRA, Hendrix's time spent at Fort Campbell, and Hendrix's death.


And that's where Hendrix's manager, one Michael Jeffery, comes in. Jeffery, believed to have been connected to both the British and the U.S. intelligence communities, has long been a source of suspicion and speculation. Just three weeks ago, the London Telegraph reported that Hendrix's ER doctor believes it is plausible that foul play may have been involved. And Tappy Wright, in his new book Rock Roadie, states that Michael Jeffery drunkenly confessed to killing Jimi Hendrix by force-feeding him pills and wine. Jeffery stood to collect millions of dollars on the star's life insurance policy, says Wright.

Dave McGowan again:

On March 5, 1973, a shadowy character named Michael Jeffery, who had managed both Hendrix and [Eric] Burden, was killed in a mid-air plane collision. Jeffery was known to openly boast of having organized crime connections and of working for the CIA. After Jimi’s death, it was discovered that Jeffery had been funneling most of Hendrix’s gross earnings into offshore accounts in the Bahamas linked to international drug trafficking.

I dunno. After awhile, this kind of stuff turns my mind to mush and I have to go lay down. Next thing you know, someone'll be saying that the CIA brought down Buddy Holly's plane. (Oh wait, someone already has.)

What's in Fort Knox?

I was surprised to see an article in today's edition of London's respected Times newspaper entitled "Is there any Gold inside Fort Knox, the World's Most Secure Vault?" It says:

For several prominent investors and at least one senior US congressman it is not the security of the facility in Kentucky that is a cause of concern: it is the matter of how much gold remains stored there - and who owns it.

They are worried that no independent auditors appear to have had access to the reported $137 billion (£96 billion) stockpile of brick-shaped gold bars in Fort Knox since the era of President Eisenhower. After the risky trading activities at supposedly safe institutions such as AIG they want to be reassured that the gold reserves are still the exclusive property of the US and have not been used to fund risky transactions.

Wow! And this is the Times, not a supermarket tabloid or a conspiracy rag. But wait, it gets weirder:

A month after President Nixon resigned over the Watergate affair, Congress demanded to inspect the contents of Fort Knox but the trip to Kentucky was dismissed by critics as a photo opportunity. Three years earlier Mr. Nixon brought an end to the gold standard when France and Switzerland demanded to redeem their dollar holdings for gold amid the soaring cost of the Vietnam War.

Many gold investors suspect that the US has periodically attempted to flood the market with Fort Knox gold to keep prices low and the dollar high - perhaps through international swap agreements with other central banks - but facts remain scarce and the US Treasury denies that any such meddling has gone on for at least the past decade.

The article then ends on a still scarier note, mentioning that it's expected that at next week's G20 summit, China and Russia will call for the creation of a new world reserve currency amid fears that the U.S. Federal Reserve is responsible for the ongoing collapse of the global banking system.

The Danes

Monday, December 1, 1997. Heath High School, Paducah, KY.

Michael Carneal - then 14 years of age - brought a .38 handgun to school and gunned down the school Christian prayer group, killing three and wounding five more. He then placed his pistol on the ground and said, "Kill me, please".

The day before, Carneal had bragged to everyone that "something big is going to happen on Monday".

Carneal had a history of having been bullied by other students. According to an essay by Mark Ames in the SoMA Review:

Many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions, however poorly expressed or thought through. Michael Carneal, who slaughtered three students in a high school prayer class in West Paducah, was found to have downloaded the Unabomber's manifesto as well as something called "The School Stopper's Textbook: A Guide to Disruptive Revolutionary Tactics; Revised Edition for Junior High/High School Dissidents," which calls on students to resist schools' attempts to mold students and enforce conformity. The preface starts off, "Liberate your life—smash your school! The public schools are slowly killing every kid in them, stifling their creativity and individuality, making them into nonpersons. If you are a victim of this, one of the things you can do is fight back." Many of Carneal's school essays resembled the Unabomber manifesto. He had been bullied and brutalized, called "gay" and a "faggot." He hated the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of so-called normal society and the popular crowd. Rather than just complain about it all the time like the Goths he befriended, he decided to act.

But the story began to get a bit more complicated than the "Revenge of the Nerds" scenario, when Carneal gradually opened up to interviewers and admitted that he had once been controlled by a group of entities calling themselves "The Danes".

Wha? The Danes? Yup, that's what it says right here, the Danes. Here's what the Louisville Courier-Journal said on 9-11-08:

He says now that he had been warned not to reveal them and feared the therapists themselves may have been Danes.

Much of the information about the Danes is in sealed court files and Carneal's lawyer declined to go into detail about them.

"I felt that ... everybody I met might be a Dane," Carneal told a psychologist in 2004 who asked him why he hadn't initially said anything about the delusions. "Even though I didn't tell you, the talking in my head said, 'You told him too much, we're going to kill you now.'"

And LEO Weekly:

In 1998, several psychiatric experts who examined Carneal noted peculiar patterns of behavior leading up to the shooting. For example, the defendant explained that he always showered quickly and covered all of the heating vents in the bathroom to prevent people from watching him, and that he often feared there were people hiding under his bed and peering into his window.... The inmate eventually described hallucinations involving a group of tormentors he called “the Danes,” people he believed were trying to harm him.

Sounds nuts? Maybe so. And yet, the official position of the original prosecutors in the case is that Carneal was examined extensively and found to be perfectly sane and competent.

So... is he, or isn't he? And was he or wasn't he?

And, most importantly, were the Danes real or weren't they?

I'm not quick to believe it was a post-MKUltra mind control experiment, but on the other hand, nor do I instantly and unquestioningly accept the idea that his many experiences with these people were all entirely hallucinatory.

Paducah Chemtrail Blizzards

The "chemtrails" conspiracy theory claims that the contrails left by jet planes are being augmented with various mysterious substances for nefarious purposes. Some versions of the story say it's for mind control, biological experimentation, weather control, and/or "Secret Weapons for Secret Wars"-type stuff whose actual purpose we could never fully grasp.

This fellow in Paducah shot some digital video of what seems to be bits and strands of white gossamer webby filaments falling en masse on a sunny day, and makes the claim that these are dangerous chemicals being dispersed as part of some evil Government conspiracy.

I present it here impassively, neither endorsing nor ridiculing it.

(Okay, I'll ridicule it just a little: instead of shooting endless videos of these webs and posting them to youtube, how about saving some in containers and having them analyzed by a professional lab? Seriously. Either you have a smoking gun or you don't.)