Photographs, which NASA has kept hidden since the 60s, show ancient footprints on the moon. The seal of Skull and Bones, the secret society which counts among its members George W. Bush and John Kerry, is identical to that of the Order, a mystical German subset of the Illuminati, the most deadly of that network of hidden brotherhoods bent on a one-world government. From the chaos of September 11 came the Patriot Act. Is your cable box Scientific-Atlanta? Well, there's a microphone in there, buddy. On the eve of Gulf War I, George H. W. Bush gave a speech in which he mentioned the New World Order three times. Tablets unearthed in the ruins of Sumer tell of reptilian astronauts who crossed their genes with those of early man. A skeleton was found on the moon—human, wearing jeans. When Hitler wanted to seize power, he firebombed his own Reichstag and called it the work of terrorists. The Masonic slogan translates as "Order out of chaos!' If you fold the new 20 in just the right way, you see the World Trade Center on fire. The March 11 bombing in Madrid advances the Illuminati's push for one-world government.

BLACK HELICOPTERS OVER AMERICA

Since September 11, we've been hit by a tsunami of freak-out— the Internet, the newsstands, and the bookstores have filled with counter-narratives that promise to unravel the web that controls everything. Because there are no accidents. Because history itself is manipulated by a secret elite, a hidden hand that orchestrates even the smallest acts of state, FEMA, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, the Illuminati—the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefellers—the Warburgs, the Rothschilds, the Jews! (It always swings back and bites the Jews.) It's a paranoia that plays into the dream life of sons, that forces the big question: What is the old man really capable of? It's the suspicion that you've been lied to, treated as a child, kept in the dark as to the true nature of the world.

In the last several years, the events in the world have gotten so vivid, so ripe, and the official explanations so off-key, that the paranoiacs suddenly find themselves playing the big room: exploding on the Web, a kind of brain pom, their books and newsletters and videos crisscrossing in the mail. At the very least, like a religion, such theories {Bush was on Cipro before the anthrax attacks!) offer a way to order the chaos. Even the most absurd of them have a kind of beauty, a pattern as strange and otherworldly as nuthouse art, a canvas of all-seeing eyes: fascinating in depth and complexity, in what they say about the nation, in how they mark the borders of debate. The first book to question the narrative of the terror war, 9/11: The Big Lie, by Thierry Meyssan, came out in 2002 and was filled with notions that were dismissed by many as insane; yet there was less complaint when Michael Moore picked up some of these same notions in Dude, Where's My Country?, a New York Times best-seller. Then, a week before he received the endorsement from A1 Gore, Howard Dean suggested the same— not as something he himself believed, but as something he knew was believed by others—when he wondered if George Bush had known in advance of the terror attacks. The idea had migrated from the fringe to the mainstream—part of the freak-out.

For theorists, the events of 9/11 are just recent bullet points in an ancient plot: a plan that controls all of history.

And so I decided to wade in, let go, ride it, talk to the leading theorists, harass and be harassed (would I believe? would I be warped?), to read the books that had begun to accumulate like cistern water on the table marked Alternative History at the bookstore near my apartment, a store, considering the Borgesian nature of my quest, appropriately called Labyrinth.

The titles alone suggest the crazed mood of a new American underground:

Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids, by Jim Marrs: "Many researchers today believe the Illuminati [a fraternity of freethinkers founded in 1776 and banned less than 10 years later] still exist and that the order's goals are nothing less than the abolition of all government, private property, inheritance, nationalism, the family unit, and organized religion." Black Helicopters over America: Strikeforce for the New World Order, by Jim Keith: "We are already incarcerated in one of the most devilishly effective concentration camps ever devised: a 'free' society." Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln: "Jesus' wife and offspring (and he could have fathered a number of children between the ages of sixteen or seventeen and his supposed death), after fleeing the Holy Land, found refuge in the south of France." En Route to Global Occupation: A High Ranking Government Liaison Exposes the Secret Agenda for World Unification, by Gary H. Kah: "By communicating in their own esoteric language, insiders hope to be able to further their plan with little resistance." Order out of Chaos: Elite Sponsored Terrorism & the New World Order, by Paul Joseph Watson: "The new American empire, like the British empire of the last century, is just a new mask on the Illuminati Empire." America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, by Antony C. Sutton: "The evolution of American society is not, and has not been for a century, a voluntary development reflecting individual opinion, ideas and decisions at the grass roots. On the contrary, the broad direction has been created artificially and stimulated by The Order." Disneyland of the Gods: An Investigation into Psychic Phenomena and the Outer Limits of Human Perception, by John A. Keel: "From the very beginning man's purpose was to provide slave labor to supply the gods with gold and female companionship."

I interviewed a number of people: Uri Dowbenko, who founded Conspiracyplanet.com; Alex Jones, a radio host ("You're Winston, buddy; it's way past 1984"), who runs Prisonplanet.com; Henry Makow, the inventor of Scruples, "the Game of Moral Dilemmas," and the Jew who believes in the Jewish conspiracy ("Let's stop pretending it isn't real. It is the real source of Communism, the real cause of mankind's moral paralysis and demise"); Texe Marrs (no relation to Jim), who says the mark of the beast, prophesied in Revelation,¹ will be a bar code worn on the palm. His Web site, Powerofprophecy.com, was full of anti-Zionist sentiment, so, in my e-mail, I felt it necessary to identify myself. "I am Jewish, by the way. Not religious or political. Just a person living his life, curious to know the truth."

"I appreciate your identifying yourself as Jewish," he replied. "That shows that you're an upfront guy."

I spoke to Tony Gosling, who operates Bilderberg.org, a site that chronicles Bilderberg, an organization of super-elites, who, or so the theorists believe, set the agenda for the entire world. "Whether they know it or not, [these elites] follow an ancient idea: that Lucifer is the light giver, that he brings illumination ... that he reconciles all opposites."

I spoke to James Whisler, who runs a Web site meant "to provide an antidote to endtime deceptions." "At the highest levels, the elite believe the serpent is also a god," he told me. When I asked if, as a Jew, I would be smoked in the end, Whisler said, "Rich, you're really putting me on the spot."

I learned that for conspiracy theorists the events of 9/11 are just recent bullet points in an ancient plot: yes, it controlled the election and the terror attacks—6 of the 19 hijackers are still alive, 6 were dead long before the towers fell—but, more important, it's a plan that controls all of history. It was like a pool where the shallow end suddenly falls away and—just like that—you're in deep water. And while each theorist has a different obsession, at some point all these obsessions converge into a single narrative:

The conspiracy that began before Clinton or Eisenhower or Lincoln, that's been unfolding since the ancient days, led by a claque of men who worship the ancient gods, who may or may not have been aliens, may or may not have looked like reptiles—gods that left a small group of elites in possession of secrets that have been used to dominate history and promote a one-world government. The symbols of this plot can be seen everywhere, on buildings and in corporate logos, but are most concentrated on the currency, famously on the dollar bill, designed by Charles Thomson, a Freemason, fronted by George Washington, a Freemason, backed by a pyramid missing its capstone, meaning the work is not yet complete, bathed in the sinister light of the all-seeing eye, the symbol of the Illuminati, the eagle, the olive branch, the arrows, the pentagram, all symbols of the occult, the secret wisdom of the ancients, the phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum, New World Order (literally, New Order of the Ages), the program of the Freemasons, who trace their roots back to the secret architecture of the pyramids, the horizon markers for the alien craft, or, further, to the building of the Tower of Babel.

The confused explanations for the war in Iraq, the elusiveness of bin Laden—these things are fertilizer for conspiracy theory.

FREAK-OUT

Why did so many pick this particular moment to bubble over, to go wobbly, to start spelling "America" with a k, to see in every gesture the unfolding of the plot, to confuse the University of Texas hook-'em horns with the sign of the Devil—why did that nice breezy moment of Lewinsky turn into this moment of screaming insanity? The surface answer is, obviously, 9/11, followed by the events in Afghanistan, and Israel, and Iraq. It's not the what—the smart bombs, the dorky newsmen riding into the whirlwind. It's the where. When Delta Force touched down in Panama in 1989 and put a pair of Noriega's red bikini briefs on a goat, not even the people in the asylums went batty. But these new images, the stony wastes and deserts and dung-colored cities, are like windows on our first imagining, dreamscapes from the Bible: it's Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but it might as well be Moabites and Hittites, or old Abraham pimping Sara to Pharaoh, or Joseph decoding the dream of the emaciated cows. Even for those not religiously inclined, it's the Ur-landscape, the land of Crucifixion and Armageddon, parables and prophecies. When Bush sent his armies into Sumer, he was parading a centerfold in front of men who've spent 20 years in lockup. Theorists, even those who seem of secular mind, speak of these events as a fulfillment of prophecy, the final pieces of the plan clicking into place.

But that's just the surface reason; the deeper reason is the end of the Cold War, the breaking up of the great ice floe that set history back in motion. The death of Communism left an empty place. We needed an enemy; in fundamentalist Islam, we found one. Some think that, out of this longing, we actually conjured the attacks. Yes, say conspiracy theorists, but the enemy was not conjured—he was created. Where most people see in the attacks by terrorists we once financed a lesson in blowback, theorists see a stage-managed version of the Hegelian dialectic. Foreign cultures locked in a conflict as carefully constructed as a Michael Crichton novel: Capitalism versus Communism, America versus Terrorism. All of it phony. The Freemasons creating false alternatives, pitting thesis against antithesis, a fake battle meant to result in a synthesis, which had been the goal of the elite from the beginning. u see a bush-league version of this phony dialectic each day on TV, on shows such as Crossfire, where "the left" and "the right" go at it, then, as credits roll, laugh and shake hands; because none of it's real; because James Carville married Mary Matalin. Because, as George Trow wrote, "the referee always wins."

WHERE JOKES COME FROM

A conspiracy theory works like a joke—it appears at times of great stress, in the aftermath of a disaster, when, for a moment, the news is all spectacle, no information. The blacked-out pages of the September 11 report, the Bush administration's confused explanations for the war in Iraq, the elusiveness of bin Laden— these things are fertilizer for conspiracy theory. Where the truth tends to be simple, a conspiracy theory is strange and intricate and involved and ornate and complex. It comes from nowhere and travels everywhere, along the route of a secret postal system—itself the conspiracy theory explored in Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49. A conspiracy theory, like a joke, offers solace, an explanation that confirms an existing worldview. As thought, it's pre-rational, arising not from fact but from belief. It's about faith. It would be great to track a conspiracy theory back to its birthplace, asking person after person where they heard it, following it through each change in evolution, to a dusty piece of ground in Detroit, or Libya, or Manhattan. It would be great, but it's impossible, because, two or three steps back, the trail always vanishes. So instead you study it the way a biologist would, as a natural phenomenon, like an anthropologist staring at those spooky heads on Easter Island.

THE FIVE LAUGHING ISRAELIS

There are various levels of conspiracy. Two guys planning to rob a bank, that's a conspiracy; a Luciferian plan to kill a president who won't play ball, and sticking the patsy in the book depository to take the rap—that's a conspiracy, too. In sporting terms, think of a fixed football game. Level One is the referees subtly shoving the action in the desired direction, blowing the call that keeps the big-market team in the playoffs. As regards 9/11, this would mean members of the Bush administration, consciously or not, missing the signals, or tuning out intelligence reports—from Israel, the Saudis, the C.I.A.—thereby letting the planes slip through, facilitating the disaster that clears a path for the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. "They needed a massive worldwide spectacle of horror to scare people into giving up their rights and supporting this fabled 'War on Terrorism,'" Paul Joseph Watson explained.

According to theorists, much of what passes for news is really code, a secret language that can be read only by the elite.

Level Two is the same game, only now it's not the referees— it's the players on one of the teams, who, for cash or drugs or whatever, drop and fumble and blow all sorts of gimmes. On 9/11, this means the government learning of the attacks in advance, time and place, but someone, maybe Dick Cheney down in his bunker, lip packed with Skoal, saying, Let's take this one for Team Illuminati. "Just look at the very dodgy stock trading on United Airlines shares that went on two days before the attack," Tony Gosling told me. "Deeply suspicious. And apparently the trail goes right back to the administration, to Central Intelligence."

"You have top Pentagon officials, the night before the attacks, canceling their flights to New York," Watson said. "The mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, had his flight canceled, too." (Mayor Brown did, in fact, receive a warning the night before.)

Level Three is the same fix, only now both teams are in on it—that is, the boys in al-Qaeda are working for the administration, flying, on orders from the Pentagon, into the Pentagon. In this scenario, men with beacons, standing in the windows of the World Trade Center, guide the planes to their targets. Then the feds plant a hijacker's passport in the rubble. Then bin Laden confesses on videotape because, as an operative for the agency, that's what he's been trained to do. "The head of Pakistan's intelligence, the ISI [Mahmood Ahmed], was meeting with top White House officials in the days before the attacks," Watson said. "He instructed Umar Sheikh to hot-wire $100,000 to the 9/11 lead hijacker, Mohammed Alta. Ahmed was actually having breakfast with the 9/11 investigative chief, [Senator] Bob Graham, on the morning of the attacks, according to The Times of India."

Level Four: There is no game. There were no terror attacks. The whole thing was a Matrix-like illusion. After the planes were taken and the transponders shut off, they were swapped, like mixed-up luggage in an old spy movie, with other planes, which blasted the towers with missiles and then kamikaze'd into the inferno. "The plane that hit the north tower was not American Airlines Flight 11," Watson writes in Order out of Chaos. "It was not a Boeing 757. It was a bespoke military plane carrying three missiles that created the impression of a plane crash without leaving any wreckage." Or maybe it was Flight 11, only it hadn't been hijacked in a traditional sense—the autopilot was instead hacked into from the ground, the plane flown, by remote control, on to its fiery date with destiny.

The reasoning behind such theories is usually of the naked-eye, gut-sense, this-thing-just-don't-feel-right variety, which, whether in determining the shape of the globe or the place of that globe in the solar system, has long proved limited. And it's tinged with the kind of racism—if that's the right word—that historians say made us ripe for a Japanese surprise attack. As one theorist told me, "A bunch of rag-heads could not fly those planes."

'What the government tells us, that's the wildest conspiracy theory of all," said Alex Jones. "To say 19 guys with box cutters could take over planes flown by former military guys. u or I would fight, much less the guys that fly these jumbo jets—these guys are pretty macho."

And, of course, the top floors of the towers were empty. Because calls had been made. Because flights had been canceled. Because power wants more power. In reports later suppressed, firemen on the scene said the towers had been wired from the inside with bombs—literally an inside job. Or else the attack was carried out by Israel's Mossad. If you want to find the author of a crime, look for the motive. And the Israelis have long wanted to tangle us up in their own war with the lunatics. "Furthering the suspicion," writes Randy Lavello on the Web site Prisonplanet.com, "five Israelis were seen atop a van smiling and celebrating, while taking videos of the disaster from across the Hudson River."

After listening to such talk for hours, what bothered me most was what they left out, the most terrifying memory of that day, not the burning towers visible from the window of my apartment, or the crowds streaming north along Greenwich Street, or the voice of a friend who, when seeing Hasids on Seventh Avenue, said, "They got us into this." It was the look on the face of President Bush when, as he sat in front of a room full of children, he was told that a plane had hit Tower Two. It was not a look of conspiracy, or Illuminati, or master plan. It was a look of animal fear, concern for personal safety, the same look I saw in high school, on the face of a friend, when, during a hockey game against Niles North, he was ordered by the coach to take out the other team's dreaded goon. The more terrifying prospect than control: no control, no authority—that our president had freaked out, that in those hours, as Air Force One zigzagged across the country, we had no president. The goon was out there on the ice, and no one would stand up to him.

When I shared this thought with the conspiracy theorists—"I mean, didn't he look genuinely scared?"—they waved me off as naïve, or else seemed to wonder: "What side of this thing are you on?" Mostly they took time to instruct—for these men, not believing is an affront. "The official time line states that Bush knew what was happening in New York before he even entered the Emma E. Booker school," Watson carefully explained. "According to ABC News, Bush was asked by a reporter as he left his hotel for the school, 'Do you know what's going on in New York?' He responded that he does, and says he will have something about it later. So Bush knew what was happening before [White House Chief of Staff] Andy Card told him about the second plane. In two separate speeches, Bush stated that he saw the first plane hit the W.T.C. even though no live footage was broadcast." From this statement, conspiracy theorists have reached a kind of consensus: because he said he had "seen" the first plane, Bush, rather than having misspoken (maybe he meant that he, like the rest of us, had seen Tower One smoking), must have been privy to some supersecret video made by the C.I.A. To theorists, there is no misspeaking, only disinformation. The look on the face of Bush, according to most everyone I talked to, was a look not of fear but of a point-shaving player behaving as he thought he was supposed to behave. It was the face of an actor.

THE REBEL WING

For theorists, a belief in the global conspiracy offers a way to recast their place in history. No more are they the dupes of the elite; they have awoken from the dream, like Neo in The Matrix, upright in the goo, who now, without guilt, wipes out innocents because they're not human anyway— just characters in a video game. A life of boring afternoons of ordinary problems has been traded in for big drama, for darkness and light. "The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms," Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." "He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.... He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never_Time is forever just running out." The theorist has remade himself into a kind of existential cowboy, Luke Skywalker unloading on the Death Star. What might look to you like a suburban bedroom filled with books and crazy-man newspaper clippings, words and paragraphs circled in red, and some words capitalized for NO APPARENT REASON, is really the cockpit of a rebel wing, hugging the sky, out where earthen atmosphere gives way to starry void.

These men share less a system of belief than a style of thought: it's not the what, it's the how. "When I speak of the paranoid style," Hofstadter wrote, "I use the term as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style." Their thinking has the feverish quality of a kid who has spent a week home from school watching war movies and sitcoms. Everything is part of the plot; everyone is in on it. Your disbelief only proves the conspiracy; your counter-argument only proves brainwashing.² Everything made to fit like in those pre-Copernicus maps of the solar system, where each orbit was twisted to keep Earth at the center of creation. On David Icke's Web site (Davidlcke.net), Randall C. Hale writes, "There are many Americans that will ask for evidence.... To all those who are a doubting Thomas I say this, the evidence is all around you." His list includes: pictures of the Twin Towers being hit; a tape showing John Kennedy being assassinated by those "within our own government"; a non-response to a letter he sent the A.C.L.U.; a non-response to a letter he sent the media. "I personally do not know how much evidence you need," he asks. "I have more than one bloody glove."

Conspiracy theory is really just a branch of literary criticism, a postmodern scene-by-scene deconstruction of the story of the world.

Theorists get most of their information from the papers, the same as you and I, only they break down the text, everywhere finding proof of conspiracy. Certain stories set off alarms across the entire community. Last winter, retired general Tommy Franks gave an interview to Cigar Aficionado that is still being talked about. In it he said the use of a nuclear weapon on U.S. soil could cause "our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass-casualty-producing event."

"When I saw that, you know, I got scared," Alex Jones told me. "I mean, there is the plan. When they call it a fear, it's really them floating their plan."

According to theorists, much of what passes for news is really code, a secret language that can be read only by the elite—not just the words, the news itself, the events, insiders staging spectacles that, like smoke signals, carry messages to their compatriots camped out on the far side of the river. The Pentagon attack, the appearance of five-sided architecture, the pyramid in the logo of the Department of Defense's Information Awareness Office, are all codes sent back and forth across the system. Texe Marrs calls these "dark sentences," the parables of Lucifer, which, in imitation of the parables of Jesus ("Satan is the ultimate rip-off artist"), can be fully understood only by disciples.3 "What did George Bush [41] really mean when he promised, 'I will keep America moving forward, ever forward for an enduring dream and a thousand points of light'?" Texe asks in his book Dark Majesty. "Is this a coded illuminist message? Is it intended only for a special, targeted audience? Who first conceived of the idea of a 'Thousand Points of Light'? And does this strange phrase have anything to do with the long-cherished occult plan for America?" I pressed Texe to answer his own question, and he said, "Yes, it's a dark sentence. It's all about Satan, the Sun God, the solar angel, Lucifer, and how he will send his 1,000 points of light to earth."

MYSTERY BABYLON

There is a painting by R. B. Kitaj called The Jewish Rider. It shows a man, all dandied up, in a white blazer and white bucks, bald, and closed into himself, lost in some private terror. He's on a train; the compartment is its own world of color and light, and the warmth that comes from it is the warmth of expensive fabric or landscape shot in CinemaScope. To me, this compartment is the city, and this rider is the citizen of the city, and in the corridor is an official with a sword, and he wants to see your papers; out the window is a wash of terrain, a Gaza of smokestacks and drainpipes, and it makes you think of Auschwitz. The Rider doesn't see it, but it sees him—it's the world of conspiracy theorists, the suspicious out there who have always had a fear of everything cosmopolitan, the great engine overthrowing the old world. It's why, in call after call, I felt a need to identify myself as Jewish—I thought it would matter to these guys.

It's not just any city. It's New rk: New York as the arrogance of man, as the Tower of Babel, as the city of the plain, as the city of salt, as the melting pot, as smashmouth, as the great whore of Babylon, as Hymietown, as Gomorrah, as Gotham on the river Styx. It's the almost pornographic desire, played out in conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, to see the Apple smote. "Is New York destined for destruction?" asks Gary Kah in En Route to Global Occupation. "The parallels between New York and the great, but wicked, city described as Mystery Babylon in Revelation 17 and 18 are difficult to ignore." It's the secret need tapped into by filmmakers in picture after picture when New York gets smashed: in Independence Day, in which the city is destroyed by laser-wielding aliens; in Deep Impact, in which the city is wiped out by a tidal wave; in Armageddon, in which the city is dinged up by a rock from space; in Escape from New York, in which the city is turned into a prison; in A.I, in which the city is pictured as a flooded relic; in Planet of the Apes, in which Taylor, that magnificent bastard, stumbles across the ruins of Lady Liberty.

James Whisler dismisses The Da Vinci Code itself as part of the conspiracy—the conspirators inventing a phony conspiracy.

LOST TIME

What's the connection between the many thousands of people who believe in a global conspiracy of elites and the many hundreds of thousands who believe they've been abducted by aliens? I went to see Budd Hopkins, the foremost UFOlogist in the Lower 48.

As we spoke, I thought about lost time, that freaky anomaly whereby a person proceeding from point A to point B, from the kitchen to the living room, say, discovers that, in the process, hours or days or weeks have passed, leaving no trace. Those missing hours are a staple of abduction stories, the lost time spent on the U.F.O., being probed and tagged. Or else the aliens take your semen, which, out in the universe, is apparently as valuable as Saudi crude. If you're a woman, a hybrid baby might be planted in your womb, then removed on a future abduction. Later, the genderless, saucer-eyed, eight-fingered baby is taken to the mother, who is told, Hug it, play with it, the aliens being cold and deficient parents.

As Budd spoke—He was bleeding from the nose and anus, so, when he goes to the hospital, they tell him, and no one knows how this can happen, his bladder is filled with semen—I had my own sense of lost time, a fear that, when the interview was over, I would wander outside to discover that years had passed, that the world I had known and loved had ceased to exist. In lost time I found a perfect metaphor for the impulse to buy into conspiracy theories, which is really a battle against the ordinariness of life, all those trips from the kitchen to the living room—terrifying not in being the object of aliens, or Illuminati; terrifying in being at the center of no one's attention.

I learned from Stephanie Kelley-Romano, who teaches a course at Bates College, in Maine, called Conspiracy Rhetoric, that UFOlogists speak of two races of aliens, some tall and Aryan, who give advice and say kindly things, others short and gray, with big heads and no sexual organs: a perfect projection of our own prejudices, the blank evening sky operating as the biggest drive-in theater in history, the screen on which the theorist projects his interior obsessions—Jews, bankers, anal probes, a malignant universe patrolled by semen-stealing butt-freak ETs.⁴ The conspiracy theory, in other words, says less about the world than it does about the theorist, in the same way that the farewell address General Douglas MacArthur gave at West Point, in which he told cadets to prepare for an "ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy," said less about the future of combat than it did about the crazy Americans, just as the legend of a Jesus who escapes the Crucifixion and settles in the South of France says less about Jesus than it does about a European need to get the Messiah out of the clutches of the Hebrews, to de-Jew him into a continental.

As we talked, Budd's pupils turned into galaxies, like something seen through a telescope. It was an almost mystical look, and it made me think of Chip Heath, who teaches a course at Stanford University called Urban Legends, Conspiracy Theories, and Other Distortions in the Marketplace of Ideas. Chip told me that for those who think they've glimpsed the hidden hand—and that's what Budd thinks—the rush is identical to the religious feeling called Awe. "It is a kind of religious experience when you're looking at a beautiful landscape because there is this vastness that really forces you to re-arrange the way you think about yourself and your position in the world, how small you are relative to the whole creation. Conspiracy theories create that same kind of psychological awe."

After saying good-bye to Budd, and getting him to sign one of his books, I went home and watched a movie, and that's when, in my own euphoric flash, I realized what the abductees and the political-conspiracy theorists have in common: it's a fear of infestation, a fear that they've been probed by lizard men. The movie was John Carpenter's They Live, in which the story of the conspiracy is told with the clarity of a myth: the hero, a bighearted, broad-shouldered innocent (played by Rowdy Roddy Piper), Finds a pair of sunglasses, through which, for the First time, he sees the world as it truly is—a large number of seemingly ordinary people are in fact reptilian aliens, and the aliens control everything. The story is shot B-movie-style, jumpy and amateurish, which only heightens the effect, giving a sense that here is a document made in secret, under the nose of the conspiracy, smuggled from the Gulag. Taken literally They Live dramatizes the Budd Hopkins view of the universe: a world of hybrids and invaders, with the earth as a Disneyland of the gods. But as a metaphor, with "aliens" representing Freemasons, or Illuminati, or Jews, or whatever, it's really about the global conspiracy, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the New World Order: all those suit-wearing string pullers who look like us but in fact are not like us at all, are not even human. As one theorist put it: the earth is a field, and man is the crop.

Chip Heath told me that for those who think they've glimpsed the hidden hand the rush is identical to the religious feeling called Awe.

COSMIC WATERGATE

Over the weeks, as I spoke to these guys, and it was always guys, I got a sense not of snapshots but of a single picture broadened and filled in. A series of events, from the ancient past to three minutes from now, that reads like a secret history, a story that doubles back, skips centuries, contradicts itself like the rant of a drunken stranger.

It goes like this:

Four hundred and fifty thousand years ago, a race of aliens, whose planet, the 12th, meaning it was somewhere beyond Pluto, came to Earth to mine the minerals that could save their own, failing ecosystem. To the Sumerians, this race was the Anunnaki, "those who came from above." In the Bible, in passages later suppressed, such as the Book of Enoch, they were called the Nefilim, the Watchers, the observers that have known man from the beginning.

The Anunnaki created the first modern man—a Neanderthal/alien hybrid—to work the mines, ancient ruins of which still puzzle archaeologists. Representations of their spaceships can be found in cave paintings, in mythology, in hieroglyphs in ancient tombs. German mystics, the members of the Thule Society—a forerunner to the Nazi Party—whose symbol was the swastika over a sword, spoke of the lost homeland of the Teutons, an island in the North Sea, where, thousands of years ago, extraterrestrials interbred with humans, creating a race that later lost memory of its origins. In the ancient temple of Seti I, in Abydos, Egypt, carvings, 20 feet off the floor, picture two jet planes and what looks like an Apache helicopter. According to Jim Marrs, ''Kennewick Man'' a prehistoric ice-trapped hunter discovered in Washington State in 1996, "more resembles Star Trek's Captain Picard than he does an Indian."

Twenty thousand years ago, as a result of an alien civil war, or the catastrophe that resulted in the Great Flood—the real tragedy behind the mythical tragedy in all the fairy tales and religions—the Anunnaki fled,⁵ leaving a group of elites with proof of man's true origins and access to the science of the aliens, knowledge the elites have used to dominate history. The hidden knowledge eventually passed to the Knights Templars, who, during the First Crusade, discovered artifacts under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, possibly including the ark of the covenant, the big piece of luggage in which the Hebrews dragged around the Ten Commandments, a radio transmitter to the Anunnaki, to the gods. When the Templars grew too powerful, they were destroyed by the Catholic Church, but not before a remnant infiltrated the Freemasons, which, until the 16th century, had been little more than a trade union.

Modern history begins soon after, when the Jewish banking families who rose out of the ghettos opened by Napoleon, that great illuminated one, made common cause with the Freemasons and their many satellites—the Priory of Sion, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, and, later, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group. Over the years, by infiltrating businesses and taking over governments, these groups have inched ever closer to total control through the creation of a one-world government. "It's about spiritual evolution," Uri Dowbenko told me. "Control the people at the level of daily life, earning a livelihood and so on, so they have no time to spend on spiritual evolution. Keep people acting like animals rather than spiritual beings!'

The last century reads, for the Illuminati, like a string of victories: the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, which gave the elite control of the money, the rise and fall of economies; World War I, which set the stage for Stalin and Hitler, the bastard son of Schicklgruber, a relative of the Rothschilds'; World War II, out of which came the state of Israel, the United Nations, and the European Union; the Cold War, capitalists against Communists, shirts against skins, thesis against antithesis, out of which emerged synthesis, the European currency, the World Court, and the I.M.F. (International Monetary Fund); September 11, which marked the start of Act III, ushering in the Patriot Act and "the War on Terror'.'

From there, it's all prophecy—the mark of the beast, the rise of the great false leader, a phony peace in the Middle East, cloning, splicing, baby farming, converging into the last great war, a battle so traumatic it echoes back through time, into the mythology of all religions. In the New Testament it appears as the throwdown in Megiddo, a ruin east of Haifa, Israel, known in Revelation as Armageddon. In its aftermath, large parts of the planet will be in ruin and the public will demand a one-world government that assures the end of all war: the plan of the illuminated elite from the beginning. It's in this context that the statement by General Franks—the use of a nuclear weapon on U.S. soil could cause "our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize"—sets off a general alarm. "The invisible powers are staging furious, pile-driver assaults against us," writes Texe Marrs. "Their startling goal: To demolish the individual human mind and condition all of humanity to the coming, final takeover of America and the whole earth!'

MAGIC REALISM

Read the history of any nation that's strange to you, the geology and the geography, the names of the heroes and saints, and it will sound like a kind of magic realism, a story in which a train crosses the sky. Now read the history of your own country, or city, or family, with the dates altered and the names changed and the faces scrubbed clean, and it too will sound like myth, something that cannot be believed—that, to me, is the key function of certain stories, to make you recognize the exotic in the familiar. It's also the great function of conspiracy theory, the grand ones, anyway, that spin out like the intricate designs traced by the man in the asylum. Such stories give back your history touched by dementia, in a way that reminds you how implausible even the official story is. In her class at Bates, Stephanie Kelley-Romano asks her students if, after hearing stories of alien abduction, they have come to question their own beliefs, "because alien abductions are similar to religion in many ways. And why is it less rational to believe in aliens than to believe in Jesus? I've read that when sightings of the Virgin Mary go up in Catholic countries, sightings of U.F.O.'s go up in the West. No matter how it manifests itself, it seems we are hardwired for faith."

To theorists, it's not than facts have been made up—the towers did fall, people were killed—it's that we've misread the text.

THE BLACK HAND

Conspiracy theory is really just a branch of literary criticism, a postmodern scene-by-scene deconstruction of the story of the world as it is told on TV and in the newspapers. To theorists, who are like a strange order of monks, unweaving at night what each day is stitched together by reporters and columnists, it's not that the facts have been made up or misreported—the towers did fall, and people were killed—it's that we've misread the text, taken minor characters for principals, confused heroes with villains, missed the crucial plot points and symbols: the all-seeing eye, the pyramid. "Their work is always symbolic," James Whisler told me. "Pentagon attack? That is a Masonic ritual, a philosophical playing out of the third degree of French Freemasonry and the Rites of Memphis, which has a pentagon in it, and a phoenix who rises out of the ashes."

It's as if the story of the world were The Wizard of Oz, and most of us, or so theorists say, have been led to believe that Dorothy is a minor character, and the real hero is the wicked witch, who, with the help of her crack special-ops platoon of flying monkeys, is only trying to bring much-needed order. In other words, our understanding of the world is dangerously incomplete. The characters who really drive the action do not even appear in the text. They are the missing planet that explains the weird fluctuation in gravity.

For theorists, the thrill is catching a glimpse of that hidden world: Alex Jones speaking of Iraq, where, he says, every error is a part of the plan—in the long run, we're meant to fail so that the region can be turned over to the U.N.; The Da Vinci Code, the New York Times best-seller, in which the true identity of Mary Magdalene, and the bloodline of Jesus, has been hidden by conspiracy; or James Whisler dismissing The Da Vinci Code itself as part of the conspiracy—the conspirators inventing a phony conspiracy to replace the tribes of Israel with the bloodlines of Lucifer. " The Da Vinci Code is trash," he told me. "It's them promoting their beliefs. They want to release their beliefs in a way the public will accept." Or it's Borges in "Three Versions of Judas," in which a scholar stumbles onto the hidden truth: "To save us, [God] could have chosen any of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus. He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas."

Conspiracy theory, the spooky yet comforting belief that a secret force guides the affairs of men, reaches its purest form in the legend of the mysterious stranger, a wispy figure who turns up at key moments. In The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P. Hall, who may or may not have been a Freemason, writes of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, at which, when the wigged notables, our great pantheon of Founding Fathers, reached the moment of crisis, when each, by his own arithmetic, realized, This can get me killed, a moment of quaking George Bush fear, a tall stranger stood up and spoke, his words, according to Hall, cascading in a hypnotic rhythm, the rhythm of Mao, of Lincoln, of Lenin, of Hitler. "God has given America to be free!" he said, and the Founding Fathers rushed forward, each signing, John Hancock with his flourish, but when they passed the pen, the stranger was gone. "He had disappeared," wrote Hall, "nor was he ever seen again." This event, Hall suggests, falls into a pattern: whenever the wheels lock up, a bureaucrat at Illuminati Central sends out a field agent, a man in black, or maybe it's always the same man, the eternal Wandering Jew moving through time, slapping the horses, changing the oil, and keeping the caravan rolling.

In the first years of the century, among the shopkeepers of Little Italy, in New York, there was the legend of the Black Hand, a secret brotherhood that was said to underlay society, controlling even the most insignificant event. In The Godfather Part II, young Vito Corleone comes face-to-face with this force, its mark a small, inky handprint. The other toughs are terrified of the power the mark represents, and so, after each crime, give part of their take in tribute to the Black Hand's representative, a dapper old man who wanders Elizabeth Street. To me, this film is a great work of art, and so it's worth considering what transforms Vito Corleone into the Don: it's his determined conviction that there is no Black Hand, there is no secret brotherhood, there is no authority, there is no Illuminati, there is no conspiracy, there is only this old man, and he is there to be taken, as history is there to be taken, by whoever has the strength to face the truth and throw back the curtain.

1. Revelation 13:16-17: "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

2. Brainwashing and mind control are a major subgenre of conspiracy theory, with dozens of testimonials from programmers and escapees, my favorite being a woman named K. Sullivan, who, in a fictionalized account of her life, says she was programmed as a killer and sex slave, in which capacity she serviced, among others, Henry Kissinger, George Bush, and Billy Graham.

3. Mark 4:34: "But without a parable He [Jesus] did not speak to them. And when they were alone, He explained all things to His disciples."

4. On the sketch-comedy show The Kids in the Hall, an actor dressed as an alien says, "We've been coming here for 50 years and performing anal probes, and all that we have learned is that one in 10 doesn't really seem to mind."

5. And the burning bush of Exodus, the fire which flames but does not consume, was really the exhaust pipe of an alien rocket, and the Tower of Babel was really an attempt by old-time man to build a rocket of his own, and Noah's ark was really an Anunnaki laboratory where the DNA of every earthly species was stored.