It was a bit after seven, and I should have been downstairs on Plaza Deck, dressed in formal attire and enjoying dinner with the conspiracy theorists. There were about a hundred of them, and they were nearing the end of their week—the last week in January—aboard the Ruby Princess. Many of them were older people, and each of them had paid $3,000 (not including airfare and beverages on board) to participate in the first-ever Conspira-Sea Cruise, a weeklong celebration of "alternative science" hosted by a tour company called Divine Travels. For the past five days, they had debated UFOs, GMOs, government mind-control programs, vaccines, chemtrails, crop circles, and the Illuminati's plan for world domination, all while soaking up the mystical energies of three Mexican tourist towns known mainly for wet T-shirt contests and Señor Frog's.
But I was not on Plaza Deck. I was locked in my stateroom on Baja Deck, picking at a room-service cheeseburger. Earlier that afternoon, a pair of Conspira-Sea presenters had chased me—chased me—from a conference room. This wasn't our first confrontation, and now I feared they were tracking me around the ship, waiting to spring out from blind corners and empty doorways.
Understand that I don't consider myself the paranoid type. Although when I had come across the Conspira-Sea Cruise on a science blog a few months earlier, I'd known I wanted to go, but not because I fear dark forces are out to get me. I used to love The X-Files, and the prospect of discussing Roswell and JFK over piña coladas sounded like fun. So did getting to know some devoted conspiracy wonks. Wondering whether the world is actually as it seems is a uniquely American sport, and there's plenty of evidence that's worth wondering about—this is the country of Watergate and the Tuskegee experiments and the NSA tapping your phone.
But the Ruby Princess was no place for casual wonderers. The Ruby Princess was for people who scraped together three grand to be reassured that their fears and suspicions and theories aren't the lonely fever dreams of basement-dwelling outcasts, that those fears and suspicions are valid, and that others share them. It would be like a weeklong, in-person internet chat room.
Not that that's necessarily a good thing. Chat rooms can be terrifying (virtual) places, rabbit holes of self-reinforcing misinformation. Dip your toe into Reddit or Disqus and you will be bombarded with proof that Bigfoot lives in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and that our government is run by giant lizards posing as politicians. Charlatans with slick websites can now manipulate data, doctor images, and fabricate documents, collecting thousands of followers. But it's not fair to dismiss all conspiracy theorists as web-dependent crackpots, and there's a difference between caution and paranoia—between reasonable skepticism and a wholesale rejection of scientific method. I didn't know what I'd find on this cruise. One of the great blessings of the internet is that it helps us find people who are like us, or who seem to be like us. For example, there are casual Phillies fans, and then there are the kind of Phillies fans who spend endless hours on Phillies fan websites e-conversing with the equally obsessed. Likewise there are people who kind of wonder, fleetingly, whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone before their thoughts return to work and family and whether to take the freeway or the local roads. And then there are people who fly far from home, at great expense, to spend a week on the Conspira-Sea Cruise.
Somewhere in the middle was me, deadbolted in my room. Paranoid.
On a brighter, happier afternoon five days earlier, I boarded the Ruby Princess in San Pedro, California. Flanked by the port's grimy regiment of industrial smokestacks, the ship gleamed majestic white and soared almost two hundred feet into the air. She could accommodate more than three thousand passengers, occupying them with four swimming pools, twelve dining rooms and restaurants, an outdoor movie screen, two nightclubs, a full-service spa, and enough rococo baubles to satisfy Liberace. The ship's central atrium and its giant spiral staircase glittered like a pageant crown. Every corridor stretched into eternity, with identical stairwells crosshatching all nineteen decks.
"I'm so glad you made it!" said Adele McIntosh, the tour company's travel agent, when I finally located the Conspira-Sea check-in desk. She gave me a tight hug, then handed me my name tag and an orientation packet. When I wrote "Popular Mechanics" on my sign-in form, a woman to Adele's right shuffled some papers and nodded approvingly.
"Wonderful to have you with us," the woman said. "We're only now beginning to understand the quantum realm."
The week's seminars appeared to be split into two broad categories. There were those with a magical or highly new age component: "Astral Possession, Psychic Vampirism, and Exorcism," "Gaia-Sophia, Timelines and Global Alchemy," "How to Control the World with Mind Machines." And then there were those that detailed concrete, terrestrial dangers: "Are GMOs and Roundup Causing Disease in Millions?" "Vaccinations: Do You Really Know What's Coming Through That Needle?" A subset of the second group concerned itself with the U.S. legal and banking systems. Unfortunately, the nightly UFO watches had to be canceled because the man who was to lead them had recently suffered a stroke.
Inside my orientation tote bag was a shiny blue bracelet I was supposed to wear at all times. "Makes it easier to find members of the group," Adele said. But that wasn't necessary. Most of the cruisers—the vacationers, not our group—were generally outfitted in bright colors and loud prints. As the days passed, a lot of them began wearing novelty captain's hats from the gift shop. The conspiracy group, on the other hand, was mostly serious-looking senior citizens in "Infowars" T-shirts. Some of them wore casts, others walked with canes. Two relied on motorized scooters. None looked like he or she could afford to spend money frivolously. One eighty-year-old man's toes poked through the tops of his worn leather loafers.
I headed to the windowless conference room that had been temporarily renamed the Liberty Lab.
"Welcome everyone," said Dr. Susan Shumsky, the founder of Divine Travels and (claim to fame) one-time personal staff member of Beatles' guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (Her doctorate in divinity is from the Teaching of Intuitional Metaphysics in San Diego.) "I'd like to begin with a prayer." Nearly everything the woman wore was either bright pink or sparkled. "Breathe in divine light!" she said. We closed our eyes and inhaled. Across the hall, in Gatsby's Casino, slot machines clanged to a piped-in soundtrack of Taylor Swift and Rihanna.
Then sixteen presenters introduced themselves and gave brief synopses of their seminars. Laura Eisenhower—great-granddaughter of Dwight!—said she had been invited in 2006 to join a secret American colony on Mars and that aliens, including some prominent U.S. politicians, are already living on earth in disguise. Dannion Brinkley, a New York Times best-selling author, announced that he had risen from the dead three times, the first after a lightning strike that sent him on a twenty-eight-minute sojourn through the afterlife. "Death is not real," he said. "That's the biggest bunch of crap on earth." Winston Shrout spoke of "commercial redemption," a philosophy that promises each American citizen access to giant piles of secret money.
"Generally I do speak from a little bit of a higher level," Shrout drawled in a thick Kentucky accent. "Because to understand commercial redemption, you have to go into the fifth, and even sixth, dimensions."
The attendees scribbled in their notebooks and eagerly circled items on the schedule. There were pitches for wishing machines, astrological charts, and dowsing rods, followed by screeds against Big Pharma and Monsanto. Sean David Morton, whom AM radio host Art Bell called America's Prophet, vowed to help us get out of debt while sticking it to the American court system. (He did not mention that in 2010 he was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for telling a group of investors that he could psychically predict the stock market or that he tried to escape fraud charges by declaring himself the ambassador of a nonexistent country called the Republic of New Lemuria.)
The biggest name on the program was Andrew Wakefield, the discredited former British gastroenterologist who wrote a highly controversial (and since retracted) 1998 paper that claimed to find an association between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in twelve children. The U.K.'s General Medical Council stripped Wakefield of his license in 2010, by which time he was living in the U.S. where he had assumed rock-star status among the growing American anti-vaccine movement.
Wakefield was superficially charming, if a bit weary. "The story of my life is basically how to take a perfectly good career and flush it down the toilet," he said.
Later that night, in the Michelangelo Dining Room, Dannion Brinkley was sitting under an airbrushed painting of Poseidon. He is six-foot-four, and the flowing scarf under his sport coat gave him the appearance of an aging linebacker who had just returned from an ashram. Several fans were gathered around him. He motioned me over warmly and I sat down.
"What is your motive for being here," he asked, "and what is your intention?"
Puzzled, I looked to the young man on my left, who said he was an orthodontist from Calgary named Leo. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Dannion can immediately tell if people are on the right frequency, like tuning a radio. He's trying to figure out what frequency you're on."
"I'm a reporter for Popular Mechanics," I told Dannion, "and I'm here to learn about the conspiracy community."
He beamed and started telling me about his lightning strike. "Whether or not you believe me doesn't matter," Dannion said. "Because ultimately I'm going to win the argument. You are not going to die, and some of us can get up from the dead."
Before he could elaborate, a pair of presenters, Leonard "Len" Horowitz and his girlfriend, Sherri Kane, breezed into the room and sat down at our table. Online, they call themselves "The Horokane." Len bore a strong resemblance to the Count from Sesame Street, if you had frozen the Count in 1974 and dressed him in Hawaiian shirts. A former dentist from New Jersey with a degree in public health from Harvard, he is most well-known for writing a 1996 book that theorized the AIDS and Ebola viruses are genocidal weapons engineered by the U.S. government to depopulate the planet through vaccination programs. On the cruise, however, he would be lecturing on the key to lifelong health and world peace: the "miracle frequency" of 528 hertz.
According to Len, everything in the universe emits vibrations, and all the positive, life-affirming forces (including the green/yellow light in rainbows) "resonate" at a frequency of 528 hertz. Therefore, all music should be tuned in 528 hertz, rather than the 440 hertz of standard tuning, which he asserted was an evil plot imposed by the Rockefeller Foundation to militarize the world's populace. Len believes that standard tuning aggravates the pineal gland, making all of us emotionally distressed, sicker, and more destructive. He called this "musical cult control."
"You," he said to me, and then paused. "Are … a … digital, bio-holo-graph-ic, precipitation, crystallization … mi-rac-ulous manifestation! Of divine frequency vibrations, forming harmonically in hydrospace."
"Okay," I said.
"That's the frequency that monks used to chant in while making brandy," Dannion added.
Len's face lit up. "When was that?"
"In the 1340s," Dannion said.
"And how do you know that?" Len asked.
Dannion dabbed at the corners of his mouth with his napkin and said, "Because when you die, you know these things. I saw it when I crossed over."
Sherri introduced herself as an investigative reporter who "defected from Fox News." A pretty blond much younger than Len, she seemed to be the great love of his life. "If it weren't for her," Len said, "I might not have known that my ex-wife was working with the CIA to undermine me." (Reached by email, Len's ex-wife denied these allegations.)
"How do you know I'm not working for the CIA?" I joked.
Sherri waved the question off, laughing. "Because trust me, it would be obvious. If you were a plant, I would know."
When the ship lurched away from the dock and the ice cubes in our water glasses chimed under the drone of the propellers, Dannion requested that we all join hands to pray. Len lowered his voice and leaned across the table.
"The real question," he said, "is whether, after you've learned the truth about all this stuff, your editors at Popular Mechanics will even let you write it."
The next morning, shortly before Wakefield's lecture "Whistleblowing in the Public Interest," a tall, lean man wearing a shiny blue bracelet stood near the elevators. His name was Larry Cook. A soft-spoken fifty-one-year-old anti-vaccination activist from Los Angeles, he said he had joined the trip specifically to meet Wakefield, whom he regarded as something of a personal hero.
"The media has tried to destroy Andy," Larry said as he walked toward the back of a dining room where about fifteen other people were clustered. "But it's all lies and character assassination. We don't need drugs and vaccines. If we adopt a healthier lifestyle, we can regain our health without using them. Think about it: If vaccines actually worked, then why do these diseases still exist at all?"
The seminar began. For an hour, Wakefield paced in front of a projection screen, which ballooned his shadow to giant proportions. Slides of children born without arms and others screaming in pain flashed behind him.
"Your bodies are owned by Big Pharma," he said. "It's turning into a science-fiction movie." The audience gasped and shook their heads in disbelief. "This will be the end of the United States of America." During the Q&A portion, Wakefield added, "This is a deliberate eugenics program, a deliberate population-control program."
I looked around the room. People were sitting and listening attentively. For the first two days, I was heartened by how open and friendly most of the group was, even if they sometimes said surprising things. They told me about their lives and how they were drawn to the conspiracy community.
"Ever since I was little, I've just known that something was off," a fit, stylish forty-seven-year-old office manager named Cary told me. "That we aren't being told everything. My family doesn't believe me, but they are totally brainwashed."
I asked her why she thought the government was poisoning its own citizens with vaccines and GMOs.
"Because they want to f--king kill us!" she said.
Not everyone was as cynical. Missy and Ron Hill were a married couple from Florida. Missy had a tousled thatch of short blond hair and wore a black leather jacket. Ron wore sandals and floppy fishing hats. The two had met in church roughly fifteen years ago. When Ron, a truck driver for a cryogenics company, was assigned longer runs, Missy went to truck-driving school so that they could see the country together. It was out on the open road that the couple began listening to the late-night AM radio show Coast to Coast AM, hosted by Art Bell, who is best known for broadcasting interviews with UFO researchers from a remote station in the middle of the Nevada desert.
"There was so much stuff I had never realized was going on," Ron said. "After that, we were kind of hooked, I guess." The couple's interest in "star gates" and global energy fields inspired them to travel to places like Ireland, France, and Spain. Unlike some of the other cruisers, they explored the world rather than hiding from it.
As the week went on, word spread among the participants that I was writing for a magazine that often covered the world of science. First, Susan Shumsky informed me and Dina Litovsky, the photographer on the story, that Wakefield had requested we not attend the preliminary screening of his documentary, Injecting Lies, which alleges that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has ironclad evidence that vaccines are linked to autism but has chosen to hide this alarming connection from the public. (Months later, the film—its title changed to Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe—would cause a heated national debate when it was accepted, then rejected, by the Tribeca Film Festival. In reviews, Variety called it a "scientifically dubious hodgepodge of free-floating paranoia" while The Guardian said it was "probably headed straight to the junkheap with all the other conspiracy films." Only when contacted by Popular Mechanics' research department five months later did Wakefield—through his publicist—offer to send me a link to the film.) Then we were asked by Jeffrey Smith, an anti-GMO activist whose previous career involved "yogic flying," to leave two other panels. After that, attendees began ducking out of photos and complaining about Dina's flash.
On Tuesday morning, we sat down in the front row of a presentation we had not yet been barred from: Len Horowitz's lecture on 528 hertz. While Len fussed with the projector, Sherri set out boxes of nutritional supplements and crystal pyramids for sale. Their flagship product, OxySilver, retailed for $49.40. It contained one listed ingredient: purified water, though its nutritional table also included 5 micrograms of colloidal silver.
"I took some OxySilver, and I'm already feeling better!" a woman in a scooter who'd suffered a recent bout of cancer announced to the room.
Dressed in a black velour jacket and white shirt with a butterfly collar, Len walked over to me. "I just want you to know that if you degrade and disparage me and libel me in your article," he said, "I will devote everything I have to exposing Popular Mechanics and the people behind it."
"I'm not here to degrade anyone, Len," I said. I was somewhat in shock, because our conversation at dinner the first night had been so pleasant. "And certainly not to libel them. What is going on?"
"I am living a nightmare!" he sputtered, his voice rising like water starting to boil. "Every day of my life is like a roller coaster in The Twilight Zone. But I do this because I will not stand by and watch this genocide!" His eyes began to fill with tears. "I think that people should be able to choose how they are going to die, and not be wiped out by the government!"
The initial thrill of a tropical vacation soon curdled into tension and distrust.
Maybe it was the claustrophobia of all those small, windowless rooms. Or the seasickness that seemed to claim more Conspira-Sea participants by the day. I saw fewer of them relaxing by the pool or playing Texas Hold'em. At breakfast one morning, a woman whose father had survived the Holocaust told me that she broke down in tears when another cruiser claimed it never happened.
(One bright spot: During a day trip to the Las Labradas petroglyphs—carvings etched into large boulders on a beach near Mazatlán—Larry Cook calmly mentioned that the reason few people were now talking to me was that I was "pro-vaccine." We had a civil conversation about the issue—me conceding I was swayed by scientific consensus and the mountain of rigorously controlled peer-reviewed studies that have proved vaccines to be safe and effective, Larry remaining skeptical. Neither of us changed our minds, but we didn't get into a heated shouting match or assault each other's motives. In the two-dimensional world of the internet, it is easy for people on the opposite sides of a controversy to become ciphers to be vanquished rather than human beings with legitimate questions and concerns. It's much harder to dismiss someone right in front of you, a person whose story you know.)
That night the ocean whipped itself into twelve-foot swells. Even more people grew seasick. Still, there were enough to pack the Liberty Lab for the Horokane's screening of their documentary about the Paris terrorist attack on the Bataclan concert hall in November 2015, which they maintained was part of one large false-flag operation. It turned out to be a plotless pastiche of Hollywood movie trailers (Wag the Dog, Our Brand Is Crisis), interview segments with survivors of the Bataclan theater attack downloaded from YouTube, and clips of Sherri and Len talking in front of a green screen that had been digitally rendered to look like a news desk. Drawings of Satan and banners denouncing the militant media scrolled behind Sherri's head, as did several advertisements for Len's supplement company, Healthy World Organization.
The film's central thesis went like this: Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel (who represents Eagles of Death Metal, the band that was playing at the Bataclan when it was attacked) was in cahoots with the Lagardère Group, a French media conglomerate that had purchased the Bataclan in September 2015. Because Qatar Holding has a stake in Lagardère, and because the government of Qatar has been criticized for tacitly allowing terrorist groups to do their banking in the United Arab Emirates, and because—and this is where they totally lost me—Ari Emanuel is the brother of Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, the Horokane believed that Lagardère must have orchestrated the attack with the help of Ari Emanuel.
When the film ended, Sherri grabbed the microphone. Her face had turned into a grim, ugly mask, the corners of her mouth pulled downward as if by strings.
"I don't want anybody to leave the room right now," she said. "I have a question." She pointed at Dina, our photographer, who was circling the room taking pictures.
"Come up here," Sherri said. "I want you to tell everybody who you work for."
"I'm with Popular Mechanics," Dina said. "Everybody knows that."
As though she were talking to a small child, Sherri continued, "And can you tell everybody what Popular Mechanics has to do with a conspiracy cruise?"
Someone in the audience interrupted, "You know she's the photographer, not the reporter?"
"Let me ask the questions, okay!" Sherri snapped, turning back to Dina. "And can you tell everyone why Popular Mechanics would be interested in people like us?"
Dina just smiled. "What, you don't think you are interesting?"
"You're taking photos so that you can label us conspiracy theorists!"
Dannion Brinkley groaned. "Let's keep it in 528, y'all," he said.
A woman named Abbie, who taught free yoga classes every morning, also stepped in. "That's enough, guys," she said.
"And who are you?" Sherri said.
"She's a plant!" someone yelled from the audience.
Eyes rolled. Heads shook. People filtered out.
Someone muttered, "She's the yoga teacher."
When we arrived at the Liberty Lab the next afternoon, Len accosted Dina in the doorway. His eyes were the size of dinner plates.
"I want you to see something!" he shouted as he tried to force a packet of papers into her hands, then mine. They were articles from Popular Mechanics debunking bad science. Apparently Len and Sherri had been up all night Googling the magazine and printing out documents in the ship's computer center. There was also a Wikipedia entry that linked the magazine's parent company, Hearst, to the Lagardère Group.
I tried to laugh it off and go around him, but Len wouldn't let me pass.
"Look at this!" he shouted, his face contorting with rage. "Look at this! This is why you're here! You're here in bad faith!"
Larry Cook, who had also been milling around in the hallway, stepped in front of Len to keep him from lunging at me.
"Get your hands off me!" Len shouted at him. "Get your f--king hands off me!"
Armed with a camera, Sherri darted out from behind Len and chased me around the hallway, demanding that I explain myself. As I tried to block my face from the camera, I got trapped against the wall between Len and Larry, who seemed seconds away from a full-on brawl.
"If you don't stop this, I'm calling security," Larry said. Len then challenged Larry to a fistfight in the ship's gym.
That's when I ducked out of the corridor, fled Fiesta Deck, and dead-bolted myself in my cabin for the rest of the night. We had sailed far from the Mexican coast, over reason's horizon. We were now bobbing around on the waters of pure insanity.
The hallway showdown turned the rest of the trip into a blur. Wakefield chummily invited me and Dina to his third presentation, which we declined, only to learn from others who attended that he had planned to ambush us by reading aloud from Popular Mechanics. Dannion Brinkley "read my energies" by giving me a long hug. "You were flowing beautifully just then," he said. "But you're putting love out there to someone who isn't giving it back. You're giving this person too much power. You need someone who can appreciate you … like me!" Winston Shrout, in his farewell lecture, reasserted his position as the third-dimensional delegate to the Galactic Roundtable, noting that many of his clients were "fairies and elves." I learned from Laura Eisenhower that Hillary Clinton may have a supernatural agenda for world domination. "She's not even human," Eisenhower said. "You don't want to know what she is."
I also witnessed something called the Baked Alaska Parade. It was the final night of the cruise. I was eating dinner with Dina in the Da Vinci Dining Room, taking long pulls on overpriced beer. The lights dimmed. The waitstaff, holding LED-lit trays of meringue cakes over their heads, formed a conga line and began snaking around the tables to the song "Hot Hot Hot." Someone with a microphone shouted, "Ladies and gentleman, get those napkins up!" And they did. Everybody in the dining room except Dina and I twirled their napkins in the air while singing along. Olé, o-lé, olé, o-lé. It was kind of silly, but I think the point was to make people feel they were a part of something bigger.
The conspiracy community does the same thing. Its emotional power is much stronger than facts. It offers a worldview in which chaos, randomness, happenstance—the messy, frightening qualities of life that science depends upon and our minds find so hard to accept—simply do not exist. For some, a sinister reason for life's disappointments is more satisfying than no reason at all.
When we finally disembarked, after Dina and I had driven away, a team of special agents with the Internal Revenue Service arrived at the port and arrested Sean David Morton and his wife, Melissa, on fifty-six counts of fraud, including filing a false tax return that sought a refund of $2,809,921. If convicted, the two face more than six hundred years in prison. (Both have pleaded not guilty.) A couple months later, Winston Shrout was indicted for allegedly printing more than $1 trillion in fake financial documents. (He has also pleaded not guilty.) Len and Sherri returned to their home in Hawaii and wrote a long, angry blog post charging me with war crimes and claiming I was part of a top-secret cell of "Pharma Trolls." They also charged Larry, who tried to protect me, as being a double agent for Big Pharma.
Even then, I had a hard time feeling angry at Len.
"I had a brilliant mother who scrubbed the streets at Nazi gunpoint in Vienna," he revealed during one of his last panels, which I attended only after Adele's assurance that she would call security if the Horokane caused any more scenes. "By miracle my mother made it onto one of the last ships out of Europe. By a miracle I am sitting here today. My mother used to say, 'Lenny, you have no idea. Corporate fascism and neo-Nazism could arise at any time and anywhere, in any country.' And I said, 'Mom, I understand your pathology. You're neurotic. Had I been through what you went through, I certainly would feel the same way. You see Nazis everywhere. But I'm sorry, I can't go along with that agenda. I would recommend some good therapy.' "
Then Len's mother received the 1976 swine flu vaccine. After that, she developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disease that attacks the peripheral nervous system. She also developed uterine cancer. When she died, Len became convinced that the vaccine—which was linked to a small uptick in Guillain-Barré, according to the CDC—was responsible for her illness and subsequent death.
Len Horowitz saw something troubling in the world. When bad things happen without cause, some people turn to religion for comfort. Some look for a scientific reason. Some conclude that bad things happen and there's nothing we can do. Not Len. Len wanted a direct explanation. There had to be one. You just had to know where to look.
*This article origionally appeared in the September 2016 issue of Popular Mechanics.
