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One narrow, winding road in the Hollywood Hills became one of the most musically creative and the most mysterious neighborhoods in American history. The Doors, the Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, all living within walking distance of each other, all making music that would define a generation. And all that you probably already knew. But here's what you didn't know. Those musicians who founded the scene were, in disproportionate numbers, the children of powerful military and intelligence families who all seem to die at a mysterious age. Living among them were secret occultists, a British satanic church, then eventually the Manson family. And sitting in the hills directly above them was a classified United States military film studio that most Americans still don't know existed. I know this sounds like science fiction, but it's not. This is really Laurel Canyon. So the question isn't whether something strange happened in this canyon. The question is, what exactly was it? Well, today we're going to find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating and controversial stories from all history, from all time, forever. Yes, we deep dive on all things mystical, occult, strange and conspiratorial here at the campsite. So thank you so much for joining me. Truly, every time you click on a video or you, you know, like something or you comment on this channel, you truly help us grow. You help keep the lights on in the tent, keep the fire burning. Now, today we have an absolutely amazing episode. But before we do that, we have a couple of housekeeping things that we do here on the campsite. First off, I want to say something real quick. We have a secret society. If you're interested in secret societies, well, now you can join one@patreon.com Camp Gagnon. That is the inner sanctum. That is the campfire where we all gather with fellow like minded campers like yourself. And just for the price of a cup of coffee, you will get every episode ad free. You're also. I mean, that's literally a cup of coffee every month. Every episode ad free. You're going to get live zooms with me and all the other campers every single month. You're going to get bonus episodes every single month. And you can talk to my dear friend Christos, who is right to my right. How are you, my friend? What's up? Okay, Christos, we don't have a bunch of time because today we're doing an episode that I am absolutely so stoked about today. We're talking about the one and only Laurel Canyon. Now this is a part of like American music history/ CIA intelligence history/ occult mystical history that is like converging on everything that I love. My mom told me about this book by David McGowan that truly like shifted my brain. And I'm so excited we got to do an episode about it. And I think there's no better place to start than going right into the neighborhood that no one really ever suspected. And that's in Laurel Canyon. This is a narrow, winding stretch of the Hollywood Hills. It's pretty, you know, heavily wooded, geographically isolated, especially in the time that we're going to be talking about, and a pass between Los Angeles, like the basin of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. So even by the standards of LA's other canyon neighborhoods, Laurel Canyon was particularly self contained. It had, you know, its own market, its own deli, its own elementary school, its own newspaper. At one point it was really just a world in and of itself. And in the spring of 1965, musicians began going there, flocking to this one canyon from all over the country. And they continued to come, dozens from wildly different backgrounds. And just to be fair about this, because the mainstream account does deserve some explanation for what's going on. So here's kind of the, the big picture, mainstream explanation. LA had a real music industry in 1965. Now, of course, things have changed, but in this time it really was an epicenter for a cultural revolution happening in America. Capitol Records had been founded in Hollywood in 1942. The Beach Boys were on Capitol. Session musicians like the Wrecking Crew were anchoring a major recording ecosystem. But what it didn't have before 1965 was Laurel Canyon as a destination. The canyon itself had no recording studios, no clubs, no industry really. It was kind of like a cheap bohemian enclave, not like a magnet for aspiring rock stars. This was a place for, you know, very like kind of enlightened, spiritual people that wanted to go live in a great, you know, great environment, you know, close to a big city with all the amenities that a city offers. But yet within 18 months, it became the most culturally productive square mile in American music. And by the mid-60s, the people that were converging there that would really make names in the hall of fame of American music came from a very specific kind of family. And we're just going to focus on three of them for right now, because if we list every name, it's almost too many to really understand. So the three that we're going to talk about will illustrate the pattern very clearly. We're talking about Jim Morrison. I mean, you know, the lizard king, the anti war icon, the son of Admiral George Stephen Morrison, a U.S. navy commander. And it has since been widely acknowledged, including by declassified NSA documents, that the second attack on US Ships, the one used to justify the full escalation of the Vietnam War, was at minimum, severely misrepresented and by a lot of serious estimates, just didn't happen at all. This is the Gulf of Tonkin that we're going to talk about in a second. So while Admiral Morrison was at the center of the events that sent 58,000Americans to Southeast Asia, his son was becoming the face of the generation screaming against that war. You can see the irony here, right? Jim Morrison almost never spoke publicly about his father. He told interviewers that his parents were dead. And that's just kind of what the mainstream kind of understanding of his fandom just accepted. And then there's Frank Zappa, the eccentric architect of Laurel Canyon's most transgressive aesthetic. Son of Francis Zappa, a chemical warfare specialist at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Now, Edgewood was the US Army's primary chemical weapons research facility, and in the 1950s and 60s, it ran a program of human experiments on soldiers, United States soldiers. We're talking nerve agents, hallucinogens, psychoactive compounds with a consent protocol process that senate investigators in 1975 found deeply inadequate. Frank Zappa spent the first seven years of his life on Edgewood grounds. Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow, and you stay in the loop with every new drop, religion, Camp, History, camp, and Camp Gagnon. Now, let's get back to it. Now, a lot of what we're going to be covering in this episode has been researched by David McGowan in his book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. It's all about exploring what went down in Laurel Canyon at this time. Now, McGowan's argument here with Zappa is not that Zappa knew what his father was doing and that he was, you know, fully consenting of everything, but it's that he is one of the guys who would become the ringmaster of counterculture. And he himself grew up inside America's most classified behavioral research environment. And that Zappa himself, by every account, every, you know, like, major sort of documentation on his life, very authoritarian in the way that he ran the Log Cabin commune in Laurel Canyon. So there were things about his militant upbringing that seemed to have played a very significant role in creating the man that he would ultimately become. And the third person is John Phillips. Now if you don't know the name John Phillips, you probably know the band that he was the front man of. And that is the Mamas and the Papas. Co organizer of Monterey Pop, author of San Francisco be sure to wear your flowers in your hair. The song that was a nationwide recruitment for this summer of love. This, this moment of young, basically kids in America coming together against the war, all being united under love. Now, before music, this guy, the frontman of the Mamas and Papas. Phillips attended elite military prep schools around Washington D.C. and received an appointment to the U.S. naval Academy at Annapolis. His mother worked for the federal government, his sister worked at the Pentagon for 30 years. His wife's father was, by her own account, involved in cloak and dagger stuff with the Air Force in Vienna. And before his musical career, Philip surfaced briefly in Havana, Cuba at the height of the Cuban Revolution, claiming that he had gone to fight for Castro. So you can see what's happening here, right? Three people, three very specific backgrounds connected to the US government, the military, industrial complex, intelligence. But that's not all. When you widen the scope, the list keeps on going. David Crosby's father was a military intelligence officer and kind of the scion of some of America's oldest dynastic families. Stephen Stills grew up on military bases and attended military academies. Jackson Brown was born in a US military hospital in Heidelberg. The three members of the band America met at a USAF intelligence base near London. Graham Parsons father was a decorated military bomber pilot. Now, McGowan poses the inevitable question here pretty bluntly. Are we to believe that the only kids of that era with remarkable musical talent, the ones that really crafted the architecture of this summer of love, were the sons and daughters of Navy admirals, chemical warfare engineers and Air Force intelligence officers? Or are they simply the ones who got the recording contracts? Before we explore this question any further, let's go back a few years before anyone had ever heard of Laurel Canyon. Okay? We're talking the early 1960s. A genuine anti war movement was forming in America. The first Vietnam War teach in happened at the University of Michigan in March of 1965. The first organized march on Washington followed just a few weeks after that. In all of these demonstrations there were college professors and veterans and students that all had the same intellectual political opposition to what they saw was an illegal war. And then the hippies arrived. Peter Coyote narrated the History Channel documentary Hippies and put it on the record. Some on the left even theorized that the hippies were the end result of a plot by the CIA to neutralize the anti war movement with LSD turning potential protesters into self absorbed naval gazers. Now Abbie Hoffman described watching it happen in real time. There were all these activists, Berkeley radicals, White Panthers, all trying to stop the war and change things for the better. Then we got flooded with all these flower children who were into drugs and sex. Where the hell did the hippies come from? McGowan had an answer for Hoffman and so do mainstream historians, and they are not the same answer. McGowan points out that the FBI's COINTELPRO program targeted the and organizations that were actually trying to change things about the culture. And this is fairly well documented. I don't even know if this is like conspiratorial. I guess technically it is, but like the naacp, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, the government went hard after every serious organization pushing for political change. But what about these musicians that are in the canyon? What about the hippies? They were kind of Left alone. Now McGowan's read on this is that the counterculture and the real political opposition were basically set up by the government as competitors. You see what's happening? The idea here is this essentially give the kids two choices. Organized activism, which the government will crush, or sex, drugs and rock and roll, which the government will just kind of ignore and let's see which one wins. Now if you're a skeptic, perhaps you would say this is exactly what you would expect. Organized activists are an actual threat. Stoned people in a field doing drugs are not. Of course, the government went after one and not the other. There's no conspiracy here, no secret plan. Sure. Another thing about this theory is that it would require the CIA and the US military to have successfully orchestrated one of the most complex and sustained cultural operations in history while simultaneously losing the Vietnam War. Some say that if they were capable of the first, why are they not capable of the second? You know, I've seen people point out like, oh, they're like, you know, brainwashing America while, you know, getting effed up by a bunch of people in a Vietnamese jungle. So documents eventually will tend to surface over time. 50 years after MK Ultra, we have thousands of pages of declassified records about what the CIA was actually doing in the 1960s, but no operational directive about steering the hippies has ever turned up. That is the very skeptical case. And they would say, like, look, this is just kind of, you know, fodder that people are talking about. Now this is basically the mainstream skeptic point of view that, like, there's no covert operation to, you know, like, turn the hippies up to, you know, create this like, false dichotomy in order to control culture in America. Okay, that's, that's the, the mainstream skeptic. And I want you to think about that and keep that in your head as we go through the rest of the episode, because we are going to talk about some of the arguments that this skeptical position can't really explain. And the first of which was sitting in the hills directly ab above the canyon the entire time. And this is called Lookout Mountain Laboratory. This was originally constructed in 1941 as the first motion picture unit and air defense installation. By 1947, it was transformed into a classified Air Force film production facility operating under the 1352nd Photographic Group. We're talking 100,000 square feet of floor space, multiple sound stages, screening rooms, film processing labs, editing suites, and animation department. Climate controlled, like film vaults, underground parking. I mean, it was a massive complex. Its primary documented function was producing and processing footage for the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear weapons testing program. Now, the existence of this facility remained basically classified until the 1990s era when the Freedom of Information act was basically enacted by the filmmaker Peter Caron, who used this footage in his 1995 documentary Trinity and Beyond. That is what is documented. Now here is what's speculated. It's speculated that the facility produced psychological operations material for domestic use and that Hollywood figures like John Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Howard Hawks, Ronald Reagan, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney and Marilyn Monroe all held Lookout mountain clearances. The figure that widely circulates online says that the studio produced over 19,000 classified motion pictures. What is reliably documented, though, is that the facility's output over its lifespan was pretty substantial. But obviously it's heavily classified. It's difficult to know exactly what. Now the US Military has run large scale media production companies for decades. I mean, the Army Signal Corps Pictorial center in Queens, the Aerospace Audiovisual Service, the Naval Photographic Center. Most of these facilities did basically just, you know, documentary work, training and technical stuff. Kind of unclassified boring and just like, you know, a ton of volume of just like, you know, basic operation operational things for the military. Okay, but what makes it interesting and what a lot of historians kind of overlook is its location. A classified military film studio of that scale, operating inside the same isolated canyon neighborhood where the entire countercultural movement was simultaneously being born, definitely raises some Questions. Why is it there? And what specifically was it producing alongside, you know, this atomic bomb footage? Well, we don't know. The files haven't been released, and the fact that they still haven't been released 60 years later is kind of part of the story. So at this point, we've got a classified US military film studio operating in secret inside the same Hollywood canyon where the entire American countercultural movement was being born. We have a founding generation of rock musicians disproportionately descended from military intelligence families. A pattern that could be, you know, mundane post war demographics and a bunch of disgruntled kids that are trying to rebel against their parents. Or maybe something else entirely. Or maybe both. And now entering the picture and making the borders of Laurel Canyon even darker is a cult leader who ran the canyon before things would really take a turn. And Laurel Canyon suddenly wasn't the neighborhood where Satanism and drugs and rock and roll lived. It became the home base of one of the most savage criminal minds of the 60s. The guy preparing the way for all of this was named Vito Pelakes. To the readers of Life magazine, which ran a glowing 1966 feature on the canyon scene. Vito was a colorful bohemian, a sculptor, a Dan. Can we get a picture of Vito while we're talking about this? He was like a dancer. He was a, you know, like the ringleader of an extended commune of young people who called themselves the Freakers. All right? That was like their whole vibe. And they were having fun and loving each other and probably doing some drugs and just, you know, having a good old time. But there's also a darker side to this. Did you get a picture of Vito? I'd love to see him. There he is, old Vito. Do you have a picture of him when he was young? I want to see him, like, you know, leading the leading throngs of like 20 year olds to go do acid. I mean, where is he now? There he is just having a great time, you know, protesting against war, doing drugs. I mean, just the good old days, right, Christos? Absolutely. I mean, Pelakis. Is that a Greek name? I'll check into it. I mean, Vito is pretty Italian, but Palikas I mean, Palakas rather. I mean, it sounds kind of Greek to me. It might be one of your brothers. All it says is he was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the son of Lithuanian immigrants. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So what is the darker side that's happening in this canyon around the time of Vito Palakis? Well, Vito had spent a significant time in prison and reform schools. Before arriving to Laurel Canyon, he surrounded himself with very young, often underage women who he kind of manipulated or controlled through a combination of charisma as well as group psychology. He encouraged a lot of drug use amongst his followers while largely abstaining himself. As super groupie Pamela Disparis put it, quote, vito was just like Frank, he never got high either. They were both ringmasters who always wanted to be in control. Always the ringmaster, always in control. That's kind of the trend here. And then there is the tragedy of Godot Palacus, Vito's three year old son died in the mid-1960s in circumstances that were never fully established. Some accounts say that he fell through a skylight, others say a scaffold. Witnesses reported and Michael Walker's book actually corroborates this, that the child had been subjected to adult abuse in his father's circle before his death. Now, according to sources, when told of the child's death, Vito and his wife allegedly went out dancing. The Gadot Paleka story is one of the most disturbing pieces of this entire story and it connects to one more name, the occult filmmaker, this guy Kenneth Anger, who had reportedly expressed interest in casting young Godot as Lucifer in one of his films. After Godot's death, Anger relocated to San Francisco and eventually cast Bobby Basolo as Lucifer in the film Lucifer Rising. Now this same Bobby Pesola, the same young kid cast in Lucifer Rising, would later become a Manson family member and a convicted murderer. None of this is secret. It's all in Bill Landis biography of Anger and Michael Walker's Canyon history. Later, Vito fled the country in the late 1960s reportedly to avoid prosecution for his own son's death. And this is when Laurel Canyon welcomed its new and most savage ringleader. Charles Manson himself and the entire Manson family showed up at the log cabin. They were looking for Vito. They had heard about the freakers and when they discovered that the freakers were gone, they kind of took up shop. And the parallels between Vito and Manson as ringleaders is not very subtle. Both were considerably older than their followers. Both were self styled gurus that demanded absolute loyalty. Both surrounded themselves with very, very young women through whom they baby basically exercised sexual control. Both used drugs as management while remaining clear headed themselves as you know, much as Charles Manson could be clear headed. And both encouraged a lot of cult nicknames. So for example, Carl Franzoni, Vito's right hand man, wore a black cape and called himself Captain Fuck, literally his name. Manson would later style himself the God of Fuck and also Wore a black cape. And here's McGowan's key insight into all of this. Manson is usually presented as an aberration, a crazy madman who showed up from nowhere. But he didn't appear from nowhere. He walked into a scene already saturated with the dynamics that he operated through. I mean, control, exploitation, communal weaponization, and repackaged all of this darkness as spiritual liberation. Right? The Canyon didn't create Manson, but it was already producing the conditions in which Manson could just slot himself in. He was both an aberration, but also kind of a mirror of what was already going on. So you got Vito, you got Manson, you. And obviously, Manson is connected through, you know, his connection with the Beach Boys and Dennis Wilson and, you know, making music and songs for them, which leads to all sorts of stuff. We did a whole episode on Charles Manson, which you should go check out, but that's basically, we need to know now is that Charles Manson was, you know, they say the day the, you know, the hippie movement died is, you know, the day of, like, the, you know, terrible murders. But regardless, you have this movement in the Canyon that's already running on control and all of this stuff years before the murders that actually kind of ended everything. And when you think that you understand the shape of everything, it all shifts. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break because I want to talk to you about something that happens in your late 20s, early 30s, that no one tells you that basically your ability to handle a night out drinking with the boys completely changes, bro. 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I can't handle the uneasiness of the next day. And Cheers makes it all possible. Now let's get back to the show. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you a scary story. Yeah. Specifically for the dudes. All right? Imagine you're going out with your wife, okay? You're having some dinner. You know, you get some drinks, the vibes are good. And you go back to your apartment, your house, the lights are low. You got a little Miguel playing on the radio. And all of a sudden you realize your piece is like, yeah, dude, I'm actually good. Yeah. Wait, what? We're. We're ready to go. And your piece is like, nah, dude, I'm just actually gonna sit this out. I mean, you're trying everything, all right? And your wife's just looking at you like, all right, are we gonna do this? And you got to be like, maybe. Maybe tomorrow. Well, this doesn't have to happen anymore because I want to tell you about bluechew Gold. Yes. 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This is basically a British cult that had splintered off from Scientology in the early 60s, founded by a couple named Robert and Mary Ann De Grimston, their theology was very strange. They believed Christ and Satan were both valid spiritual forces, essentially equal, essentially worthy of worship. And somehow, despite this, or maybe because of this, how genuinely unsettling that was, they were incredibly good at recruiting. They gained a lot of smart people, like educated people, of course, idealistic young people who were already kind of, you know, disenchanted with mainstream religion. And they were looking for something that felt more true or more honest. And in 1968, they launched a major recruiting push across the United States with, with Los Angeles as the primary target. Now, here's where it gets crazy, okay? And some of what comes next that I'm about to tell you is documented and some of it is alleged. So just to be fair, there is a claim that the Process Church had active ties to military intelligence. And this claim largely comes from one source, an investigative journalist named Maury Terry, who wrote a 1987 book called the Ultimate Evil. Terry alleged that there was a Process faction with connections to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. He also identified a guy named Dean Morehouse, one of Charles Manson's closest associates, as coming out of a Process linked community in North Dakota. Now, those are the allegations, which are pretty serious from a legit journalist, but they are allegations nonetheless. What is documented is that the Process Church specifically targeted the Laurel Canyon music scene for recruitment. They wanted famous people, they wanted cultural influencers, they wanted the tastemakers. They were deliberately fishing in that specific area, trying to get these specific ringleaders. And that's when you start pulling on a thread, and there's a lot of names that are already connected. So again, Kenneth Anger, like we talked about before, the filmmaker occultist, the guy who's, you know, already connected with all of this weird stuff going on. He owned one of the largest private collections of Alistair Crowley memorabilia in the world. Now, Aleister Crowley, if you don't know, was an early 20th century occultist who literally called himself the Great Beast and spent decades being one of the most controversial men in Britain. And he's kind of like a patron saint of rock and roll mysticism. Of course, he's featured on the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's album, I think. Black Sabbath. Yeah, Black Sabbath or Ozzy Osbourne, I can't remember if it was a solo project, wrote a song called Mr. Crowley. I mean, he's up there in the pantheon and has, of course, inspired many people. And we did a whole episode on Aleister Crowley. So if you're interested in that, check that out afterwards. Now, Jim Morrison, by multiple accounts, was a Serious student of Crowley's work. Not, like, casual interest, like, oh, yeah, like, you know, dabble. He was, like, seriously interested. Jayne Mansfield was publicly, openly associated with Anton lavey and his Church of Satan. Now, Jimmy Page, of course, from Led Zeppelin, was so obsessed with Aleister Crowley that he actually bought Aleister Crowley's former house on Lake Loch Ness in Scotland. He also became deeply entangled with Kenneth Anger's film projects and all sorts of stuff. It doesn't end there. Mick Jagger composed the score for Anger's film Invocation of My Demon Brother. And then, of course, you have Donald Kamel, who co directed performance. This is a film that the Rolling Stones made. And he was literally Aleister Crowley's godson. I mean, these are, like mainstream, massively famous people that are all dealing with this occult filmmaker and all have the same sort of morbid obsession with Aleister Crowley. Now, I know that this all is a lot. Okay, if you're a skeptic, you're probably just like, all right. You're just putting a bunch of names together. You know what I mean? If you're someone that's, like, really into the stuff, you're probably hearing this being like, wow, all of these people are connected through, like, Aleister Crowley, Anton lavey. They're all making films with Kenneth Anger. They're all into, like, this occult stuff. They're all doing drugs with each other. It's like, yeah, both things are true. You know, they are a bunch of rebellious, spiritually hungry, you know, young counterculturalists that are into this stuff. And a lot of them do have an interest in the occult. And what does this mean? It's difficult to really say, but as we go further, I think these things will become a little bit less abstract and you'll start to see the threads. So that takes us to August 4, 1969. In a place called Benedict Canyon. Two miles from Laurel Canyon, four members of the Manson family walk into a house on Cielo Drive, literally just a couple miles from Laurel Canyon. They murder five people. One of them is Sharon Tate. Another is Jay Sebring, the most famous hairstylist in all of Hollywood at the time. He literally, like, designed Jim Morrison's look, and he had a salon right there at the entrance of Laurel Canyon. Four months later, December 1969, the Rolling Stones play the Altamont Free Concert. Someone at the concert gets stabbed to death by Hell's Angels while the Rolling Stones are performing. It was supposed to be the, like, West Coast Woodstock, but instead it became one of the most tragic moments in all of rock and roll history. Now, historians have a pretty solid explanation for what happens next. The FBI's COINTELPRO operation systematically infiltrated and destroyed all these serious activist organizations. We're talking, you know, like Black Panthers, all these different movements, they're all getting infiltrated by the actual US military. Record labels figured out that they could sell the aesthetic of the countercultural movement without any of the politics. People burned out. The war kept on going, and the movement ultimately fractured inside. And that was kind of it. I mean, the dream was over. And then, of course, all the death started to roll in. Brian Jones died in July of 69 at age 27. Jimi Hendrix dies in 1970 at the age of 27. Janis Joplin dies in 1970 at the age of27. And Jim Morrison dies in 1971 at the age of 27. Four of the biggest voices of the entire countercultural movement, they're all dead, all the same age, all in less than two years. And this, of course, inspires much of what we know about the 27 Club. Now, the 27 Club is a very real pattern of famous musicians who die right when they're 27. And it's also the kind of pattern that only becomes visible in hindsight. We remember the ones who died 27, of course, and we forget all the other musicians who die at 26 or 31 or 44 or at 90, you know. But I'm not gonna stand here and tell you that it doesn't feel like something's going on because it is strange, you know, like, of course, it's possible that. That a bunch of young rebels that are doing drugs in their 20s happen to die right around the same time. And, yeah, it could just be a statistical anomaly. Is there some type of ritual blood sacrifice going on within Laurel Canyon? I don't know. It's difficult to really make that bridge. But at the very least, you can acknowledge, like, oh, that's a lot. Now, there's another person in this whole saga up until this point that's a very important figure in this whole story. And it's another interesting thread to kind of tug on, to really kind of uncover this whole picture. And his name is Phil Ox. He might be maybe one of the more actually transgressive actors in this entire canyon scene. He was a singer, songwriter, and a true artist, but he was a real political activist. He wasn't doing, like, you know, like, let me go to a field and have some flowers in my hair and, like, hold up a sign, like, he was actually setting A protest, actually organizing, actually really trying to change things. And in his final years, he completely broke down. He became convinced that he himself was actually a CIA operative named John Butler Train, and that John Butler Train had murdered the real Phil Ox and taken his place. I mean, at this point, he was carrying weapons. He was unreachable by the people that loved him. No one could get through to him. Phil ox died on April 9, 1976. He. I don't even know if we can say this for YouTube, but he self deleted in his sister's house. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder not long before that. And they say that John Butler trained the CIA agent idea was just a delusion. This was just a product of his mental illness. And it's an important moment because the single most genuinely politically committed artist in this entire scene just deteriorated into believing that he himself had been replaced by a CIA operative. And now he was gone. So let's just think about this so far in the story, okay? You got a canyon neighborhood that basically invents American counterculture. Inside of it for the entire era, there's a classified military film studio that no one really knows about. The musicians who founded the scene are disproportionately the children of military and intelligence families. The social world is threatened with cult leaders and occult figures and, you know, these kind of crazy, charismatic mad men that are moving in, like, sweeping up the whole movement and the movement itself, right? For all the music and the passion and the feelings behind it, completely fails to stop the war that it said it was. So, you know, staunchly against. I mean, the war went on for just a whole nother decade. And you step back and you look at and you're like, oh, this. This is strange. So when you start to look at it from this perspective and really how David McGowan puts it together in his book, you start to see this pattern, and you start to see how there is ostensibly some type of military influence in this countercultural movement and how this whole hippie movement really achieved nothing other than, you know, great music. And if your instinct is to feel a little suspicious, I think we're right to kind of push back against the standard story, the Laurel Canyon idea of this being just like a magical place for creativity. Like, that narrative is real, but I think it's incomplete. Mainstream histories genuinely don't like to talk about Lookout Mountain. They don't talk about how military intelligence families are involved in the founding of the music scene. They don't talk about Vito Polekis or Dean Morehouse or the Cult dynamics that were baked into the scene, I mean, years before Manson even shows up. And that's the real gap. And I don't think it makes you crazy for looking at it, right? But that's not all of it. I think by looking at this stuff from a critical view, you can feel that there's a sense that there's something kind of missing. You know, a lot of these patterns, of course, can have of a natural explanation, right? There's migration patterns and demographics and, you know, cultural forces of kids rebelling against their parents and creative people coming together and sharing, you know, drugs and ideas and all that stuff is reasonable. But there feels like there has to be something more. And I think that's where we have to really look at all this stuff and acknowledge what we do know and acknowledge what we don't. Right? There's kind of a gap in this historical record. Like, there are questions here that serious historians haven't fully answered. There's like, this weird pattern of all these military kids getting involved and connections with intelligence that isn't fully fleshed out. Right? There's no smoking gun, no confession. You just have this canyon and this massive cultural force and all of these, like, weird kind of threads that are going through it without, like, a real full consensus. Now, Abby Hoffman asked a question that no one had an answer for. It's the question that we talked about before. Where the hell did the hippies come from? Well, here's a partial answer from, again, partially from David McGowan's research. A canyon neighborhood serving simultaneously as the birthplace of American counterculture and the birthplace of a extremely classified military film studio, a roster of founding musicians whose fathers worked in meaningful numbers in the deepest corridors of military intelligence and military research, a social world saturated with cult leaders and mysticism and Satanism and occult networks, and a movement that ultimately failed to achieve any of its political goals in the war that it opposed. And this war continued to kill thousands of Americans for another decade. Now, the complete story of this, it's difficult to really know. You know, it's. I think the question that I ask is, like, what about cultural movements right now? I often look at this and I go, okay, there's obviously something fugazi happening with this cultural movement. Like, where did these hippies come from? They kind of exist to distract. They kind of pull away from actual change. And it seems like in many ways, they're propped up by the establishment. Right? That's kind of how it feels. And I think oftentimes today you can see similar cultural movements where you go, is this purely organic, or is it possible there's an organic seed here that got watered by some type of interest group? You know, like, the most interesting thing about Laurel Canon isn't whether it was engineered. You know, like, it's difficult to know if we'll ever know that. Is it, was this fully a psyop by the government? It's. I don't know if we'll ever get an answer. You know, this place where sex, drugs and rock and roll, counterculture cults, serial killers, they're all communing together and it all happened in one place all at one time. And it seems that it achieved nothing that they said they wanted to. And I think at the very least for me, I just take a step back and really consider what movements I'm getting swept up in. And I think, okay, is it possible there's some military intelligence involved in the things tugging on my heartstrings, you know, on either side of the spectrum? Whatever you are putting on it right now, I think it's worth reflecting on and questioning yourself thinking, is this legit, or is this me getting psyoped? But that's just me. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an abridged history of the Laurel Canyon in the 1960s, based off of Strange Scenes in the Canyon by David McGowan. Now, there's so many things that this book brings up for me where it's like, you start to see, like, how many of these guys are connected. How many of them are, you know, wrapped in with intelligence? And, I mean, like, you know, Charles Manson, like, obviously had connections to MK Ultra. Like, that's. That part is, like, pretty clear. I forget exactly from the Manson episode, but, like, he was going and, like, getting acid from, like, one of the facilities, and San Francisco, that was a part of MK Ultra. I think Sidney Gottlieb was, like. I don't know if it was ever confirmed that he was going to see him, but Sidney Godley, like, one of, like, the main doctors behind a lot of, like, this government research, was, I think, in some way connected to Manson. I don't know if directly, but he was going to that same facility that Manson was going to around the same time. Do you have anything on that? Yeah. So essentially, Manson just was associated with this place. Hey, Ashbury Free Clinic. That's what it is. Yes. And so MKL, which was running from, like, the 50s to the 70s, Sidney Gottlieb is running it. I don't know if Sidney Gottlieb. I don't think he was ever actually in San Francisco or at that official clinic, like, documented on record. And I don't know if it's ever confirmed, confirmed the Manson was going through there. But it was a clinic that a lot of people have suggested has like very clear CIA ties and was in some way like lacing people up with a little. A little bit ass. Little LSD and kind of fueling this whole drug hippie movement. And it's thought that Manson was kind of going through there. And then all of a sudden he ends up like, basically in Laurel Canyon doing like mind control experiments basically on his own cult members. And a lot of people think that he picked it up through these programs that he was involved in. Again, this is speculative, but it's just another interesting ripple. Now, I remember this John Ehrlichman quote, if you could pull that up. This is a quote from John Ehrlichman. He was a top advisor to Richard Nixon and he served as an assistant to the president on domestic affairs. And he was one of the most powerful figures in the White House. Basically during the 60s into the 70s. He was a part of the inner circle. And he has a quote where he talks about hippies that is very significant. And the quote is basically here. It was from a 1994 interview published in 2016. Ehrlichman was quoted as saying that the administration's war on drugs had a political angle. No, as they say, if there's ever a war on something that you can't ever defeat, it's not a war, it's an operation. You know, the war on terror. You're like, what is terror? When are you ever going to get rid of terror? So the quote is basically this. This is from John Ehrlichman, again, one of the senior advisors with Nixon in the late 60s. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to either. To be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. So it seems like to me, if I had to like, make a big picture thing kind of just shooting from the hip here. Again, don't hold me to this, but like, one possible theory is this. You have an actual countercultural movement brewing in Los Angeles. You have a lot of people that are against the Vietnam War. There's a draft for the Vietnam War. They need people to go over there to fight an enemy that they know nothing about in order to stop communism or whatever that means. Now you have this countercultural movement. You Have a bunch of them, right? You have the Black Panthers, you have Americans for a Democr or you have Students for a Democratic America. You have all these like legitimate, like political groups. Cointelpro disrupts those groups. And then you have these hippies that are kind of coming along, and I don't know if they're called hippies yet, but they're these people that are against the war and they're open and they're into free love and communes and stuff like that. And so they start pumping drugs into those communities, right? In the same way they pumped crack into the black community. All of a sudden they're pumping LSD and marijuana and all this stuff into the hippie movement. And then you have all these people that are the cultural leaders, the actual people that really like spearhead the entire movement from a cultural visual standpoint, all connected to military assets, largely speaking. And they go there, all of a sudden they start getting opportunities. They start having writers come in helping them make music. They start getting drugs, you know, handed to them freely, maybe through some type of COVID channel. Again, this is just a theory. And then quickly, this movement that is against the war that could really kind of mature into an actual anti war movement that could really put pressure on the United States government, all of a sudden diverts from that goal and just becomes about sex and drugs and the people that are actually involved in the movement. All of a sudden there's just cause to arrest and round up all of them. So you go to a protest to protest the war, but it's like, oh, what's in your pocket? A drug? Well, we have a war on drugs. And that means you're going to get life in prison. Or you can maybe help us by telling us, you know, who else is involved in this group? Who else is involved in this political action committee that's against the war. Because again, like Ehrlichman said, you can't make a criminal be against the war, but you can make a criminal to be, you know, doing some mushrooms a little bit. You can make a criminal to be smoking a little bit of weed. And so all of a sudden now you can get all these people you have just caused to arrest a bunch of them. You disrupt the whole movement. You make the movement less about anti war or any type of political movement and just make it about doing drugs with your friends in a field. And all of a sudden these people are impotent and they're not able to do anything to actually stand up against the United States government. And then if that were to Work. The war could continue for another decade, and you're still able to pump young men and women into the meat grinder to go die in Vietnam. Or maybe it was just kind of a coincidence that all these, like, young rebels were traveling around and they all have military backgrounds and, you know, as a result, they were, like, well educated, but they wanted to rebel against their parents. So they all go to LA to go hang out and do drugs together. And like every good movement, it turns into some type of brand that can. That gets commodified and capitalism takes its way. And then, you know, the movement gets diluted because it gets way too big and then just becomes about something totally different. And then you have these crazy things like, you know, the Altamont concert and, you know, the Manson family murders. And then people all of a sudden go like, hey, this whole hippie thing has gotten out of control. This is crazy. And the whole thing falls apart. I don't know which one. It's probably a mixture of both, if I had to guess. I think it's a mixture of both. I think, if I had to guess, there's probably movements that happen organically. They kind of spring up, the government sees them and they say, like, hey, we can use this to our advantage or we have to disrupt this. And then they send in some type of operatives to go do exactly that. But they did make some pretty good music at the very least. You know what I mean? We just didn't get a full discography of them, but, I mean, the door is pretty solid. Mick Jagger, you know what I mean? And then this guy, Kenneth Anger. I wonder if we do an episode on him. He's come up a bunch in a bunch of different episodes, and we've never actually dedicated a whole thing to deep diving on him. I just know him as, like, this occultist filmmaker that everyone was kind of, like, fascinating by in that time, but it could be interesting. But you have a picture of him. He looks pretty gnarly. Oh, he's still alive. How old is he? Oh, no, he passed away. How old was he when he died? When was that? 96 years old. Wow. He died in 2023. Yeah. He's an American underground experimental filmmaker. Worked on a bunch of films and not. And he started working together. He made the magic lantern cycle and he has a Lucifer tattoo on his chest. Charming. Could be a good guy for a topic. I don't know. Yeah. What do you guys think? You think this was a completely organic group of people that went to California and made the most influential music of a generation, started the hippie movement and ultimately diluted it so much that the Vietnam march kept on going. I mean, it is kind of crazy that Jim Morrison's dad was involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident that basically precipitated the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, his son is singing for a bunch of kids that are against the war. It also makes you wonder about whether or not this is the beginning of the industry plan. Yeah, it's a good point. I wonder if it's going on now. I wonder how many pop stars are, like, connected to, like, military families. Sounds like the next episode could be an interesting deep dive. I wonder if. I mean, if this works so well back then, there's no way they stopped doing it. You know what I mean? Just flip the playbook. I don't know if it works so great, but I mean, I've heard theories that like, some of, like the more violent, like, gangster rap was kind of propped up in order to wreak havoc amongst the black community. It's one of those crazy theories I heard, but could be. I forget where I heard that from. We'll look into it. Anyway, what do you guys think? Is there anything I missed? If you recently read David McGowan's book, please drop a comment. Let me know if there's anything you learned or if you have any theories based off of hearing this stuff, please let me know. Comment. YouTube, Spotify, I read all of them and I truly love the feedback and the. It's a nice little community we're building here at the campsite. Now, I also have great news. If you like religious content, you know, we talked a little bit about some occult stuff. Well, great news, we have religion camp. That's where we talk about what everybody believes, every religion in the world, and how they're all connected, how they're different, and what we can learn from each and every one of them. If you're interested in historical content, like kind of how we deep dove today, well, great news. We have history camp. That's where we talk about everything that's ever happened. 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