Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

I was to hear from a friend, Cid Norris, in Atlanta in 1975 that there was in the sixties at Georgia Tech a professor of nuclear physics named Tom Miethe. Moreover, he was known to frequent the Catacombs Coffee House at the corner of 14th and Peachtree.

During that time period, a man identifying himself as a runaway CIA agent, bleeding from gunshot wounds, arrived at the Catacombs without warning and left what he claimed were tapes pertaining to a JFK assassination conspiracy with David Braden, proprietor of the Catacombs.

No sooner had this alleged CIA maverick departed, in great haste, than there arrived a detachment of suited men with badges who, according to the tale told by Ms. Norris, thoroughly searched the premises. "It was weird," she told me, "because they said they were looking for an escaped fugitive, but they were looking under mattresses and in drawers, like what they really wanted was the tapes."

David Braden is thought by Cid Norris to have contacted Art Kunkin of the Los Angeles Free Press and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison about the mysterious information contained in the tapes. Not long afterwards, Braden told Norris he had been warned to leave town, and not long after, he did.

As for Tom Miethe, who wasn't present the night of the incident, he is alleged to have also departed from Atlanta, suddenly and mysteriously, with no word about where he was going, after designing a car engine that did not use gasoline.

Most of what Cid Norris told me was confirmed independently by another Atlanta woman, Anita Teel, who claims to have lived with Miethe for a time. Ms. Teel claims Miethe spoke at least one foreign language, was addicted to collecting guns and binoculars and displayed an impressive ability to pull strings with a phone call to this or that anonymous contact.

"Kerry, there also appear to be flying saucers that are from outer space." At this point he mentioned a name I do not recall, saying, "He met some flying saucer people on the rim of the Grand Canyon. They were dwarfs with enlarged heads and they communicated by means of telepathy with him."

I looked at Slim. "It's true," he said, with a smirk.

Techniques involving the use of high-frequency sound waves exist, and are used within the intelligence community, to produce thoughts from the outside in the mind of an unsuspecting victim. According to a news report based on data released under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA once induced a Soviet agent to leap out a window to his own death by this means. It occurs to me that the same method could be used to produce an illusion of telepathic communication.

"I went to high school with a guy who believed in flying saucers from other planets," I told them. "You would've liked him," I added, looking at Brother-in-law. "Our Senior English teacher asked us to write essays about our politics and he wrote one, insisting that he was a 'Military Fascist.' What surprised us most, though, was that our Liberal teacher gave him a A+ on it. No shit! His name was Hickman. In the essay, he said he expected the flying saucer people to help him take over the world. I couldn't believe it when he got an A+. The teacher, Mr. Surface, even had him read it to the class. He said it was well-written and provocative. I found it so unusual that I borrowed Hickman's essay from him and copied it in my journal."

Brother-in-law responded as if this was something he already knew about, with a pleasant, confident nod.

"Hickman didn't have many friends, and he used to always dress completely in black. Only one guy, another social misfit named Dennis, used to hang out with him."

"Kerry, you know Hitler used to talk about what he called 'the Superman.'"

"Yes, I remember reading something about that. Hitler admired 'the Superman,' but was also afraid of him."

"There was a mysterious man named Gurdjieff, Kerry, whom Ouspensky wrote about."

"Under the initial, 'G.'"

"Yes, that's him."

"Gurdjieff went to Tibet and was functioning as an emissary of the Dalai Lama. There's a theory that he contacted the Nazis by short-wave radio from Central Asia, Kerry, and that it was he who was 'the Superman.'"

In 1978 I found a more complete version of this theory in an Avon paperback called The Occult Reich .

"There is going to come a time when all these things will be very important to you, because you are going to have to deal with them. At that time it will help you to read a book by Peter Viereck called Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind . Can you remember that?"

This particular statement would have been made in or after the spring of 1963, although I'm not certain it was included in the discussion of Tom Miethe.

At this point a sense of chronology eludes me. I recall, though, linking it to a book I read in April of 1963, Psychotherapy East and West , in which the Latin term, meta, was explained in connection with a discussion of the meta-Freudians.

" Metapolitics ," I said. "Yes, I can remember that."

" Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind , he repeated. "It may come in handy in understanding someone you're going to be up against."

I must have looked frightened, because both Brother-in-law and Slim laughed.

"You know, in this generation there are two Dalai Lamas. There is usually only one. That is because… "

"I know, and one of them is sympathetic with Marxism, the sonofabitch!"

"Yes, he is open to Marxist ideas, Kerry, but that doesn't necessarily make him a villain."

"I don't know about that."

"Kerry, have you ever heard that song: 'I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech and a heck of an engineer…?'"

"Sure. Everybody has."

"You know, Kerry, Ockham's Razor doesn't always apply to every problem to be solved."

"What is Ockham's Razor?"

"That's the idea that the hypothesis making the least number of assumptions is most inclined to be the valid one."

"Oh yeah, I remember now."

Occasionally he would launch into a long discourse of Zeno's paradoxes. "You know, from a logical point of view an arrow can never reach its target."

"Why not?"

"Because if it keeps halving the distance between itself and the target it will continue to halve that distance on into infinitesimally."

I didn't like arguments against logic. "Reason is more than just logic; it also requires observable facts; it is a combination of logic and facts. And it is a fact that arrows hit targets."

"If a barber shaves every man in a village, but does not shave himself, yet does not have a beard, then who shaves the barber?"

As best I recall, the answer was that the barber was a woman. But I hated talking about philosophical riddles. For a man who showed such irritation at facetiousness in others, Brother-in-law certainly seemed indulgent of his own digressions.

"Have you heard the story of the riddle of the Sphinx, Kerry?"

"Yes." Whoever this man was, he definitely possessed a classical education. In the French Quarter it was not unusual for college graduates to be working as barkers on Bourbon Street, so, at the time, it didn't occur to me that all this fondness for ancient fables was inconsistent with a gangster's career.

Appropriate to the situation, he often mentioned Faust , and seemed to view himself as a Mephistopheles. "Just think of me as the Devil," he would say with a laugh. "I go around making pacts with people."

As in everything else, his preference in mythological themes seemed heavily weighted in the direction of death and suffering, or, sometimes, power.

"Remember the sword of Damocles?"

"Yeah."

"Remember the Greek mathematician who said, 'Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world?'"

"I like the one you told me about Hitler. About how he said nobody should ever make the mistake of assuming people are any stupider than they really are."