The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture

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By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Adam Gorightly: Robert Anton Wilson claims that the Discordians were waving the peace sign a few years before them damn hippies and yippies started up. That was the first book written about Oswald, and the only one finished before the Kennedy assassination. By November 1963, according to his own account, Thornley was living in a New Orleans apartment he rented from John Spencer.

Additionally, the "contents of this edition" note in the Loompanics edition identifies the fourth edition as having originally been published by Rip Off Press of San Francisco, California.understand where you're coming from-the passage of time certainly clouds our memories, or distorts them. Thornley said he had been in contact with a couple of mysterious men in New Orleans who went by “Gary Kirstein” and “Slim Brooks. He doesn’t shy away from the less-comfortable aspects of Thornley’s personality and deals frankly with his later descent into paranoia. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In early 1959, just about the time Thornley and Hill were creating Discordianism, Thornley served in the same United Marine Corps radio operator unit as Lee Harvey Oswald.

I bought ‘The Idle Warriors’ and ‘Zenarchy’ when these were finally published in the early 90s, and even wrote to Thornley once in the mid 90s, receiving a letter back enclosing a John Dillinger Died For You Society membership card and credit card. All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated, given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator…That’s the very model of what a true scientific law must always be: a statement about how the human mind relates to the cosmos. When news of Oswald first began to appear, I wondered how any man could have changed so thoroughly in a few short years. And I have this vague feeling that I contributed in some way to something published by Paladin Press. Although a practicing psychiatrist told him that he was schizophrenic, Thornley refused any type of treatment.More alarmingly, Gorightly recounts allegations that Thornley commited acts of sexual abuse against children. EC: I especially like your quote of Bob Black as telling Kerry: "You used to satirize conspiracy theories; now you believe in them. Oddly enough, this isn’t always true within science fiction, which deals by definition in uncertainty. Kerry’s friendship with Oswald, such as it was, came to an abrupt end one day when he made the tongue-in-cheek quip: Come the revolution, you will change all that, in response to Oswald’s persistent griping about ma, apple pie, and the American way. Kerry graduated from CalHi in 1957, and in 1958 attended the University of Southern California to study journalism.