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A comet, sure! But with a spaceship
in its tail!
Is
there anything about author Gray, other than his association with Khashoggi,
which suggests his truthfulness might be in question?
Biographies
of Gray have him being born in Houston, Texas, in, variously, 1950, 1951,
or 1952.
After
high school he attended St. Thomas University and the University of Texas
before "hooking up" with the Maharishi.
Thus
Khashoggi (whose family of cultists will be covered later) and Gray both have backgrounds which fit nicely
with last week's theme of “cultish involvement” in a 9/11 “Truth Movement”
chock-full of people who sometimes slip and say "data crystal"
when they mean "diskette."
A
profile of Gray called “TOWER OF PSYCHOBABBLE; HEALER OR HUCKSTER?” in
TIME magazine revealed that the cult’s guru, Marshall Applewhite, had known
John Gray’s mother, who owned of a New Age bookstore in Applewhite’s adopted
hometown of Houston.
Gray
fired off a letter of protest to TIME making the point that anyone who
ever walked into her bookstore could be said to have “known” his mother.
But conspicuously absent in Gray’s angry letter to the editor were any
indications that Gray himself might have known Applewhite,
a dead ringer for My Favorite Martian.
John
Gray was a student at the tiny University of Saint Thomas in Houston, we
discovered, while Applewhite was teaching there and becoming
embroiled in a messy scandal involving a homosexual affair with one of
his students.
“Born
in Houston, Texas, in 1951, after high school Gray attended St. Thomas
University and the University of Texas,” begins Gray’s author biography.
Curiously, his most recent bios leap right past this sticky wicket entirely,
going from his being awarded a high school diploma—the only undisputed
educational credential he apparently possesses—to his nine years as private
secretary to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where he became one of the first
TM'ers to 'fly' (read: bounce) during meditation.
A
total psychic re-construct
Enter
Marshall Applewhite, complete with his trademark weird beady eyes. Two
strands most stories highlighted about Applewhite were his conventional
religious background and his torment about his homosexuality.
“The
University of St. Thomas in Houston hired him as an associate professor
in 1966. He became a driving force behind the university-sponsored Houston
Festival Chorus and at one time was head of the music department,” said
The Toronto Sun.
“St.
Thomas fired Applewhite in 1970 for what the college called "health problems
of a mental nature," reported a Houston Chronicle story headlined “Leader
was recruited here; Nurse told him God had kept him alive."
Gray was a student
while Applewhite was getting into trouble rubbing male students the wrong way.
A
call to the University of St Thomas’s Admissions Office in Houston elicited information
that there were only a few hundred students at the school at the time. So Gray and Applewhite
almost certainly knew each other, during what was a bad time
for at least one of them.
“His
particular crisis came in 1970, when university administrators learned
Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student and asked him to leave,”
read one local news account.
"The
firing followed a homosexual affair he had with a student," said the
Washington Post. “Suffering from depression and shame, hearing "voices"
(Applewhite) then checked into a hospital, asking to be "cured" of his
homosexual desires,” reported the Post.
Marshall Applewhite fled to a psychiatric hospital in such disgrace that he must
have felt only a total psychic makeover would do. During
psychiatric re-programming he became involved with a New Age nurse and amateur
astrologer named Bonnie Nettles. They “bonded.”
Maybe Applewhite saw her as offering a way out. Maybe Nurse Betty said, "Look
into my eyes."
There were no "maybe's about the result. The result was Heaven’s Gate.
"Hot pants in Heaven"
“My
mother was involved with all of this back in the early '70s when it all
started -- back when I was just a kid, 12 years old," said Bonnie Nettle's
son after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide.
He
remembered a gathering at Applewhite's Montrose-area residence: "He had
some people over there, and I noticed they were kind of strange. Some of
the guys wore makeup, hot pants, a lot of weird things. And I didn't know
what a gay person was."
So
the re-programming may not have been totally successful..
Straight
guys only rarely wear hot pants.
In
an apparently unrelated development Gray left Houston at about the same
time for Switzerland, where he became—for the next nine years--the Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi's private secretary. Two
separate lives intersected at a tiny Catholic college before spinning off in
bizarrely unexpected directions for both men.
This is probably just a coincidence.
But what happened next had nothing to do with
coincidence whatever. There was clearly something in the mental conditioning Marshall Applewhite received
at Bellaire Hospital in Houston, where he also completely adopted
Nurse Betty's science fiction-cum-Christianity fantasies, that set poor gay
Marshall Applewhite onto his tragic course to immortality as the answer to a
question in Trivial Pursuits.
Despite this obvious conclusion, in
the millions of words written about the cult in the wake of their mass
suicide, we could find not one news report that even raised the question.
Mass cult suicides apparently don't raise eyebrows anymore, or questions of
possible brainwashing or mental programming.
Wow. We were shocked. Shocked! So we decided to commit
journalism. What the hell, we figured...
We
could always raise bail.
"Break on through to the other side."
We
come now to the defining episode, apparently, in John Gray’s life. He describes
it often, in interviews, in seminars and in his infomercials. It concerns
the death of his father, and when we first heard the story it sounded too
weird to be true. So
we checked it out.
Guess what? It is
too weird to be true. Gray
grew up in the well-to-do River Oaks section of Houston, Texas…
John
was “one of seven children of a well-to-do oil executive who died in 1985
after hitchhikers robbed him and locked him in the trunk of his car. His
mother ran a spiritual bookshop and knew Heaven's Gate cultist Marshall
Applewhite,” says the TIME profile Gray found offensive.
Here’s
the story from a sympathetic newspaper profile in the Dallas Morning News:
“It
was 1985, and Gray had just gotten remarried. He and his bride, Bonnie,
were honeymooning in Canada when he got an urgent phone call from his mother
in Houston. His father, David Thomas Gray, had been found dead in the trunk
of his car.
A
retired oil executive, David Gray was a good Samaritan who enjoyed doing
charity work. He also had a habit of giving rides to hitchhikers. One stifling
hot day in July, as David Gray drove to Nacogdoches to visit relatives,
he picked up a couple of hitchhikers.
"They
robbed him and left him in the trunk," John Gray says. "I guess they thought
he might chase them. He wouldn't have. He'd been happy to give his money
to them, and he did."
Someone,
perhaps one of the hitchhikers, placed an anonymous call to police to report
the abandoned car. "But the police didn't get the directions right," John
Gray says.
Finally,
Virginia Gray called police when her husband didn't show up in Nacogdoches.
"She described the car, and they found it, and he was dead in his trunk.
He died of heat asphyxiation in the Texas sun. He cooked in there. It was
very traumatic."
As
the family gathered in Houston for the funeral, John Gray acted on an unusual
impulse. "I wanted to get into the car and see what happened. It just sounded
so horrible."
“He
crawled into the trunk and closed the lid," reported the paper. "He could
see where his father had taken a screwdriver and banged on the hood. He
also noticed that the tail light had been pried open, apparently for air.
John Gray pushed his hand through the opening.”
"My
brother said, 'See if you can reach the button from there.' I went outside
with my hand and reached around to the button and opened the trunk."
John
Gray's face betrays only a trace of irony. "So that was another layer in
the whole thing. He could have reached the button and let himself out.
He wasn't a stupid guy _ I'm not a stupid guy. But when you're inside the
trunk, you're panicking and trying to get out, you don't think about how
you would get in. You have to have a different perspective to see that."
It
was as if his father had left him one last valuable lesson, he says. "And
that was, there are so many problems in this world where people are locked
in trunks, and they just need a different perspective. You need to go on
that other side to solve the problem.
"And
that's kind of what I feel I've done with 'Men Are From Mars, Women Are
From Venus'.
"I'll paint any car for $39.95!"
A
Gray associate’s website drives home the sales pitch. “If only their father
had thought of this, he would still be alive,” wrote
Kathy Gates, Professional Life Coach, at
www.reallifecoach.com
"But
it took his brother on the outside to notice the button. The lesson? Sometimes
you have to step outside the situation you feel trapped in to see that
you're not trapped after all.”
Even
leaving aside for a moment the horrible tackiness of using the death of
your father as part of your sales pitch, we had some problems with this. So we began
to make inquiries.
We
learned that the incident had happened in Nacogdoches, Texas, a small town
thirty miles outside the middle of nowhere. Robbie Goodrich, the editor
of the local paper, remembered it vaguely.
“I
don’t remember too many details. I remember the police never did classify
the death as a homicide. He was somebody that liked to put himself in strange
situations or something.”
Robbie
kindly dug through the paper’s computerized files, and found a story about
Strange Deaths and Unsolved Murders in Nacogdoches County.
“David
Thomas Gray — July 5, 1985 — “Gray’s body was found in the trunk
of his 1973 Mercedes off U.S. Hwy, 59 south of Nacogdoches,” stated the
story, which ran on July 12, 2004.
“The
death was ruled accidental, as Gray evidently died from asphyxia
due to suffocation and heat exhaustion. Family members said Gray had gotten
into his trunk before just to see if he could get out.”
Well
now. This was curious, and warranted further investigation.
A
guy gets carjacked, locked into a car trunk, and dies of asphyxiation…
And the death’s not ruled a homicide. Hmm. A few phone calls
later we were speaking with former Sheriff Joe Evans, who had worked on
the case.
"None of that would be true." “He
died in the trunk of his BMW, that’s right,” he told us. “He was rich and
had retired, and supposedly spent all his time pretty much driving aimlessly
around. According to the family he’d locked himself in the trunk before,
just to see if you could get out,” Evans stated.
So
he hadn’t been carjacked?
“He
was not robbed,” Evans said. “He had all his credit cards, his wallet,
and plenty of cash when we found him. So robbery was not a motive.”
Don’t
carjackers usually rob their victims?
“The
case has always puzzled me,” he admitted. “You could see the family were
all highly intelligent and very well-educated. But they were really strange.
It seemed like they all had completely different lifestyles, and there
was no cohesiveness, they seemed to be all going off in different directions.
It was the most dysfunctional family I’ve ever seen.”
We
told the Sheriff the outlines of the story Gray tells, about his dad being
a good Samaritan and getting carjacked, and the police not being able to
follow directions and get to the car in time.
“None
of that would be true,” he said slowly.
So
what did happen?
Sheriff
Evans said he didn’t know. “We know what his movements were. He’d visited
someone here, stopped at an ATM, got gas and a
quart of oil. One family member made the comment that it was typical of his
father to have done
something like this, lock himself in a trunk. So in the absence of any evidence to the contrary,
the death was ruled accidental. But what he did has never made sense to
me.”
When
a homicide detective in Houston drove out to the mother’s Aquarian Age
Bookstore to relay the news that her husband had been found dead, Sheriff Evans
relayed, he found
her reaction strange.
“She
was having a meeting in the bookstore, and when the detective said her
husband had been found dead, she asked him if he could come
back later, after her meeting was over. The detective told me he said: 'that’s not the way it worked.'”
The
death remains a mystery. Before hanging up, the Sheriff asked us to get
in touch with him if we found anything out.
Karma Chameleons in the CIA
“You know, in a lot of unsolved cases, we’re still in touch with the family
years later, because for them there's no closure. But they seemed like
they just wanted to pick up the body and forget about it. Its not like they were
calling us all the time wondering if
we’d found any leads.”
Then
we discovered a statement about John Grays’ father made recently by Canadian
talk host Barrie Zwicker to researcher
Brian Salter. Zwicker
is reportedly in business with Gray, making him a seemingly credible
source.
Apparently
there has been some talk that David Gray had worked for the CIA.
“John
has a personal life history which I think helps explain why he would become
a 9/11 skeptic,” wrote Zwicker. “He has reason to be deeply suspicious
of the power elite. His father, a Texas oil millionaire, tried to warn
the authorities in Dallas, prior to Nov. 22, 1963, that JFK's life was
in danger. He had heard the rumors circulating.”
When we read this we thought, "Now we
gettin' into it!"
In
our next story we’ll profile the dozen or so companies that together comprise
“Saudi Genesis,” owned or backed by Khashoggi’s network, and take a look at how
they've corporately affected us all...
But
we want to close today's story where it
began...with an attorney who’d incorporated Genesis, and later led the effort
to take it public. In yesterday’s email, we received a notice that he
is--even as we speak!--taking another company public.
The press release was routine. Everyone always has
nothing but nice things to say about each other. No talk of anyone getting
'rubbed out" to mar the air of sunny optimism in the face of an ever-brighter
tomorrow.
He stated, "The…story is a fresh
and compelling one…” The
company’s President and CEO, Dominique Einhorn, said "We are privileged
to be associated with US EURO Securities..."
The
reason we mention it is the name of the company ‘ol
Michael Roy has got hisself excited about.
"Karma Media.”
We’re choosing to see this as an omen. A
signal from the Universe.
A message from the Other Side.
Just
for today, “Karma” has once again proven to our satisfaction the
existence of an Almighty Creator, that, yes! There is a God.
He
even has a sense of humor. |