Kenn Thomas and David Hatcher Childress
Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, USA, 1999. $16.00
Kenn Thomas is the editor/publisher of Steamshovel Press, which I like a lot. Somehow he manages to produce Steamshovel, run a full-time job and produce a stream of books on conspiracy-related subjects. He makes me feel lazy. This latest one consists of:
- the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone Files;
- the text of the so-called Kiwi Gemstone, which has nothing to do with the original;
- some fragments of evidence which purport to support some of the claims made in Gemstone;
- some comments on Gemstone, including this writer’s 1978 critique of it;
- and a group of essays which either bear only tangentially on Gemstone – co-author Childress’s ‘James Bond and the Gemstone File’; or not at all – Thomas on Danny Casolaro, the COM12 documents and even the dead Marconi scientists in the UK in the 1980s.
In his introduction coeditor Childress comments that the Gemstone thesis is ‘not just believable, it is downright scary’. But ‘believable’ doesn’t make it for me. What’s required is true or false, preferably; plausible or implausible at minimum. And since some of Gemstone is demonstrably false, much else uncheckable, almost all of it profoundly implausible, the damned thing’s continued circulation these past 25 years is a depressing testament to the intellectual sloppiness of conspiracy buffs. (Which is pretty much what Jim Hougan says about Gemstone in a letter of his about it included in this collection.)