Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

Banister's office first came to public attention in the summer of 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald was to use that address on the Fair-Play-for-Cuba leaflets he distributed on Canal Street. Unfortunately, since I was out of town at the time, I did not learn about this event until after the assassination.

After conversing at Brother-in-law's house that day, we returned to Waterbury's in the evening and again Slim and I sat waiting while Gary "ran an errand."

During either the first or second of those intervals, Where Have All The Flowers Gone? was playing on the fountain juke box.

"Brother-in-law likes that song," Slim said with a chuckle.

"I know," I answered. "That's what he told me."

"You know, that's how he makes his money, stirring up wars for suckers like that to die in. He's that kind of guy. He hires himself out to people who make munitions, et cetera and so forth. And he's right, they never do learn."

To myself I remember thinking: Yeah, maybe.

Possibly that day we sat waiting in the drug store was the same day that I was endeavoring to obtain from Brother-in-law some abortion-causing pills for Jessica, illegally. Jessica thought she was pregnant and her staunchly Catholic parents were not even aware we were making love.

I was anxious to obtain the pills Slim said his brother-in-law could supply, and it seemed like we went everywhere in town first. To a restaurant for coffee at one point, to an anonymous house in the suburbs at another. Brother-in-law went inside for a minute as Slim and I waited in the car. Gary seemed to be enjoying my dependence on him and seemed to be drawing it out as long as possible.

At long last, we went way out in the country and near a clump of trees somewhere he gave me the name of a druggist who "even sells paregoric to little children, he'll sell you anything." As we stood there he also described in rather nauseating detail how the abortion pills worked, gradually poisoning the woman's body until it rejected the fetus, because it could not support both life systems at once in that toxic condition.

So dangerous did it sound that I never went to the druggist. Instead, I tried an experiment in psychological medicine. From a Katz and Besthoff pharmacy I obtained an envelope meant for mailing a credit card application. Then I obtained some Hershey's "M & M" candies (because they looked like pills and that brand carried no markings on the candies themselves), sorted out the white ones, and slipped them into the envelope.

They worked perfectly: Jessica had her period within an hour of swallowing the first placebo. As I hoped and suspected, she had been suffering only from tension brought on by the fear of pregnancy.

In retrospect, though, it seems to me that Brother-in-law probably accomplished his purpose. In his possession was very possibly a recording of our conversation, useful for inflaming Catholics against me whenever so doing suited his purpose, as it may have five or six years later when Jim Garrison first tried to recruit me as a witness against Clay Shaw, only to suddenly become suspicious of me in a way that admitted to no effective reply.

Such a recording, together with my handwritten quotes of the Nazi Propaganda Minister discussing the desirability of eradicating the Catholics, once the "Jewish problem" had been solved, would have served not simply to alienate Garrison, but also to give people like Jessica's father fits of holy rage. That would have been a perfect means for throwing a monkey wrench into a probe being conducted in a heavily Roman Catholic city about predominantly Roman Catholic Cuban exiles.

One of Brother-in-law's oft-repeated statements was: "You know, Kerry, the Nazis had flying saucers towards the end of World War II."

"The real story on 'flying saucers' is finally coming to light," asserted the 7 April 1950 U.S. News & World Report , and I mentioned to Brother-in-law having read in the early fifties an article to the same effect in Reader's Digest . "What the saucers are, how they operate, and how they have been tested in U.S. All can be told in detail at this time," continues the U.S. News piece confidently.

"That story, without violating present security regulations, points to these basic conclusions by engineers competent to appraise reports of reliable observers:

"Flying saucers, seen by hundreds of competent observers over most parts of U.S., are accepted as real. Evidence is that they are aircraft of a revolutionary type, a combination of helicopter and fast jet plane. They conform to well-known principles of aerodynamics. An early model of these saucers was built by U.S. engineers in 1942, achieved more than 100 successful test flights. That project was taken over by Navy in wartime. Much more advanced models are now being built. Just where present saucers are being built is indicated by evidence now available.

"In more detail, the story pieced together from non-secret testimony of responsible U.S. scientists, private observers and military officials is this:

"Early models of the flying saucer, pictured on this page and the next, were built by U.S. government engineers of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Similar flying-saucer projects were begun in Germany and Italy at the same time, in 1942." (p. 13)

Another article ascribing flying saucers to the U.S. Air Force appears in an early Fifties back issue of Reader's Digest , in addition to the article mentioned above.

But searching the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature for the years since those pieces appeared, one looks in vain for any contribution to flying saucer lore that attributes such a mundane origin. Conspicuous, in fact, for their absence are any speculations that flying saucers might be government aircraft of any type.

In recent years the mass media, not known for paying much attention normally to the notions of cranks, has given enormous publicity to the dubious idea that UFOs have existed since prehistoric times and even that the Garden of Eden may have been populated by a couple of space cadets from other planets.

Books about flying saucers are the same way, although in one that soundly debunks the so-called archaeological evidence for cavemen from outer space there appears a photograph of a U.S. government flying saucer as well as the following sentence: "During April 1950, radio reporter Henry J. Taylor claimed that flying saucers were highly secret American inventions, and for a short time a satisfactory explanation seemed to be available." But no mention is made of why such a thesis was only viable for "a short time" in Morris Goran's The Modern Myth: Ancient Astronauts and UFOs (A.S. Barnes & Co., 1978).

A thinking student of this popular media flying saucer literature cannot help but wonder if the invisible hand of very stringent intelligence community censorship did not muzzle free debate at some point in the early fifties.

Thereafter, providing the motivations of the censors were sufficiently strong, as they appear to have been, any other crime, such as an assassination, could be assured of a powerful cover-up if only its perpetrators could somehow involve it inextricably with truthful data about flying saucers.

And I would say, "Yes, you mentioned that already. They also had developed the jet airplane by then."

Looking at me with a grin, he would say, "Yes they had. Furthermore, they were very close to having an atomic bomb."

"Yes. I heard, in fact, that they were working with something called 'heavy water,' used in hydrogen bomb development."

"We can say they were on the verge of arming themselves with nuclear power," he concluded with a sense of satisfaction that I took for Nazi boasting.

I do not know why the obvious possibility that Brother-in-law was recording these sessions did not occur to me.