I met Steve online via Contrail Science, and we’ve met in person several times. He’s an old-school conspiracy theorist who escaped the rabbit hole and now actively tries to help those he left behind. Steve’s journey down the rabbit hole started long before Chemtrails and 9/11, with Watergate and aliens.
It started in 1973 with this guy I met at art school in Chicago, Sherman Skolnick. I was just working as a cameraman, and he was discussing how this Flight 553 that came from Washington to Chicago carrying Dorothy Hunt was brought down by Nixon’s chief narcotics agent. He had all this evidence, like they found narcotics and high levels of cyanide in the pilot’s blood. There was all this crazy stuff, he also mentioned that Spiro Agnew would resign, and months later he did. I didn’t have any information that would counter that, this was before the internet. So it kind of put a little seed in my head—like the government is corrupt, they can do weird things behind the scenes. That’s how it started.
Then I got into the whole Zecharia Sitchin ancient alien thing. I read all his books, it became fascinating, like entertainment. From there I went to David Icke and his first book on 9/11, Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster. That was connecting all these background things of ancient aliens running this one world government behind the scenes, so it confirmed everything I’d accumulated reading Sitchin.
Back then I was excited because I was one of the first ones to know this. It was novel esoteric information, and it increased my ego. It made me an interesting guy all of a sudden. I could talk about these ancient aliens and the connection with 9/11. So I kind of got into it like anyone else, partly for entertainment.
Steve’s interest moved smoothly from Watergate conspiracies, to ancient aliens (the theory that aliens had a significant effect on early human development, like building the pyramids) and then to 9/11. He enjoyed the ego boost this knowledge gave him, the feeling of uniqueness. He then discovered another benefit, a community of friends.
I’ve read studies about how some conspiracy theorists are kind of lonely people. That’s kind of what I’ve seen. Some of them are straight out outcasts, weird, you know, you’ve seen them. Then suddenly they’ve got a family. They have these meet-ups on the first of each month and there would be some really attractive ladies, and we’d have beers afterwards, and it became a family. Ever since then I’ve never had that many friends like that. We were working towards this goal, trying to change the world. Everyone would applaud if you made a good video. You’d stand up and give a little speech, and there would be this great camaraderie. Even the demonstration would be exciting, it seemed we were historical figures in the early onset of a revolution, waking up the world to this horrible government.
It was exciting, it was family, it was fun and for people who did not have much of a social life it fulfilled that too.
A lot of these people, because of their beliefs, they were alienated from their family and their traditional friends, so this became a substitute. They didn’t consider it a cult, it was a political movement with goals to wake up the world, just like the patriots. When you are doing it you’re elated, there’s endorphins flowing. For me it was also all this literature I’ve been reading for all these years coming to fruition. I’m one of the leaders now. It’s a big thing against the whole government and the aliens who rule our world. It’s a fun, violence-free revolution.
We knew we were outcasts, we were doing something almost illegal, so it was kind of exciting. In the group we’d do survival techniques. We’d go up into Topanga Canyon and we’d practice as if the police or the military were after us, how would we survive in the woods. The group even went looking for FEMA camps supposed government internment camps for an impending crackdown, they found some suspicious water system or something. It was like we were about to take down the government, and that was really exciting.
The activities of the group seem to blur the line between a kind of fun fantasy role-playing and a dangerous descent into delusion-driven, almost violent, revolutionary action. It sounds like harmless games in the woods, but “looking for FEMA camps” is the type of thing that Timothy McVeigh did the year before killing 168 people in Oklahoma City.1
For someone whose conspiracy theories spanned the spectrum all the way up to aliens running the world, it was something more in the middle, Chemtrails, that became a dividing line for Steve.
The We Are Change people were very seriously into Chemtrails. I did this interview video, there were contrails making an “A” shape in the sky, and they were pointing to it, saying that’s obviously a Chemtrail, a government plot. I went along, nodding my head, but didn’t really believe it 100 percent. For me it just took looking up the word “contrail,” and it said there were contrails that were short, and other contrails persisted and spread out, and it gave the reasons for that. I tried to explain that to the people at We Are Change, and they threw me out of the group temporarily. So that kind of undermined the whole cause of 9/11 Truth. I was trying to help them by explaining that Chemtrails were bullshit, but those guys were 100 percent behind the whole Chemtrail thing.
They were getting really intense, because they thought they were the first people to expose Chemtrails. This was right before the film What in the World Are They Spraying? So, for me that was the impetus to start looking into it, and your site Contrail Science was just coming up so that was more information I used to defend myself. I nearly got in a fight with one guy because he thought I was the most horrible government agent because I didn’t believe in Chemtrails. So that’s pretty much when I left the organization.
After Steve left We Are Change, he watched how it evolved. He continued to be friends with many of the people there and continued to attend meetings and demonstrations to try to explain what he had found out about “Chemtrails.” But he observed some disturbing trends in the group, observations which helped him further out of the rabbit hole.
The whole group was originally somewhat intellectual, somewhat smart. But the guys who kind of took over were just weird. They would get into the whole other stuff, the Sandy Hook stuff the idea that the school shooting at Sandy Hook was fake, and that was like filling up the whole conspiracy with dirt. They would have arguments because it was splitting up the group, then it became like a power thing. I couldn’t get through to them, they would almost get to a point of violence with me when I would show up. So I decided to stay away.
Separated from the group, Steve decided to take a deeper look into the 9/11 conspiracy theories. He jumped in at the deep end with what Truthers consider to be their strongest evidence: Building 7.
After I left I got the courage to really look into the 9/11 stuff. I went to 911Myths, there were some mistakes in it, but it was pretty good. But really for me it was Building 7. I cut to the chase. I wanted to see what was the reason that building went down. There was the whole column 79 thing, there being no water for sprinklers, the damage to the side of the building, video and photos of the south side of Building 7, you could see the smoke pouring out of the windows, all the windows were broken. All that was never shown, never demonstrated to the Truthers, they just didn’t even know that. Seeing that was a key moment for me.
I’d take the NIST slideshow and print it out and then go out to the We Are Change 9/11 demonstrations and try to explain it to them. At first, I was scared, because I was going against my friends. But then I got encouraged because people gathered around me because they hadn’t seen it. And at that time they were getting forty to fifty people at these demonstrations, but after that it became very small, just a handful. So, I was having an effect.
Then I became almost a villain in the group. I went to one meeting at and one of the leaders, Katy, an actress, she was screaming on the bullhorn, “Look up, google Building 7,” and I remember telling her right to her face: “I did, have you?” And she never came out to a demonstration again.