Secret and Suppressed II — Adam Parfrey and Kenn Thomas: from post-9/11 disinformation to weather warfare, electronic voting, and surveillance
A detailed presentation of *Secret and Suppressed II*: Newspeak, disinformation, the Illuminati, parascience, weather warfare, 9/11, electronic voting, surveillance, and post-2001 alternative research.
Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century, edited by Adam Parfrey and Kenn Thomas in 2008, continues the project of the first Secret and Suppressed in a radically changed information environment: after 9/11, the War on Terror, the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq invasion, expanding digital surveillance, and the explosion of online alternative research. [1][2][3]
The book is divided into four large parts — Newspeak, The Illuminated, Parascience, and The Controllers — and brings together old and new writings by Robert Anton Wilson, Mae Brussell, Jim Marrs, Fletcher Prouty, Jim Hougan, Harry Helms, Joseph P. Farrell, Richard Sauder, Jerry E. Smith, Robert Sterling, and others. [2]
Its central concern is not one single theory but the politics of information: who labels an idea absurd, how official narratives are formed, what happens to anomalous data, how secret programs later become public, and how the internet increases both access to documents and the volume of rumor. The anthology therefore reads as a snapshot of alternative research culture between the late Cold War and the post-9/11 digital world.
The second volume and the post-9/11 world
The first Secret and Suppressed appeared in 1993; the second arrived fifteen years later. In that period the media environment changed dramatically: the internet became mass infrastructure, declassified records became easier to access, and anonymous documents, images, rumors, and alternative websites began to circulate at unprecedented speed. The editors present this environment as a reason for continuing the project. [1][2][3]
The introduction attacks the use of “conspiracy theorist” as a social label and frames the anthology as a place for questions pushed outside mainstream discussion. [3]
Newspeak: language, media, and the suppression of uncomfortable information
The Newspeak section focuses on language, media, propaganda, and the ways questions may be made socially unacceptable. Robert Anton Wilson, Kenn Thomas, and others discuss labels, repetition, selection, and framing as mechanisms that shape public discussion.
Mae Brussell represents a different research style: instead of one single explanation, she follows networks of connections among people, institutions, intelligence services, the far right, and postwar continuities. Later public records concerning the U.S. use of former Nazi intelligence personnel provide historical context for the kind of network research associated with Brussell. [13]
The Illuminated: the Illuminati, secret societies, and cryptocracy
The second section, The Illuminated, returns to the Bavarian Illuminati, secret societies, elite networks, and the idea of “cryptocracy” — rule exercised through informal or concealed connections rather than only public institutions. Adam Weishaupt’s historical Illuminati become a starting point for discussions of modern networks of influence. [14]
In Holy War, Ground Zero, Adam Parfrey places the religious and geopolitical symbolism of 9/11 beside apocalyptic and political narratives in American culture. The anthology thereby treats religious expectation, political language, and networks of power as parts of the same cultural field. [15]
Parascience: secret bases, Mars, UAP, and alternative science
The Parascience section ranges from secret military bases and unusual aerial phenomena to Mars, experimental physics, and technologies portrayed as existing at the edge of institutional science.
The “Face on Mars” is a characteristic example of fascination with an image anomaly. The anthology preserves the cultural moment in which Cydonia became a symbol of possible hidden archaeology on Mars; later high-resolution NASA/JPL imagery forms a later chapter in the same story. [9][16] The anthology similarly places UAP within a longer tradition of questions about secret military projects and extraterrestrial explanations, while current NASA work shows the subject continuing as an organized field of inquiry. [10]
Secret Weather Wars, Project Popeye, and HAARP
Jerry E. Smith’s Secret Weather Wars connects the history of weather modification with military programs and modern theories of environmental warfare. [17] Project Popeye, the U.S. military cloud-seeding operation during the Vietnam War, is an important part of this historical background, and official diplomatic records show how weather modification entered military planning. [4]
The anthology extends this history toward ENMOD, HAARP, and questions about the possible scope of intentional environmental modification. The 1977 ENMOD convention provides the international legal background. [5] HAARP, meanwhile, becomes a symbol in alternative literature for wider questions about military and environmental applications of ionospheric and electromagnetic research.
Experimental technology: Bussard’s Polywell
William W. Flint’s discussion of Bussard’s Polywell represents a different kind of “suppressed” subject: not a secret society but an experimental technology struggling for funding, institutional attention, and continued research. [18]
The anthology places it within a story about possibilities that can remain marginal for institutional, financial, or political reasons. U.S. defense documentation on Polywell supplies the concrete research context in which such work was pursued. [19]
The Controllers: Iraq, 9/11, electronic voting, and surveillance
The fourth section, The Controllers, is most directly tied to the political atmosphere after 2001. Contributions address the War on Terror, prewar claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, institutional failures before 9/11, WTC 7, electronic voting, and the growth of the surveillance state. [8][11][12][20][21]
Harry Helms’s Lingering Questions About 9/11 presents questions that remained part of alternative debate about the attacks. [20] Robert Sterling’s Electronic Votescam turns toward electronic voting systems; during the same period U.S. oversight bodies were publishing technical reports on the security and auditability of such systems. [6][22] The anthology reads these issues through the wider motif of technologically mediated power.
Surveillance, secret programs, and the changing meaning of paranoia
By the time the second volume appeared, debates over electronic surveillance had taken on new weight. The Terrorist Surveillance Program and controversy over communications monitored outside the ordinary FISA process allowed the anthology to connect older alternative language about the “surveillance state” with a new digital infrastructure. [7][25]
This captures one of the largest differences between 1993 and 2008. A “secret” is no longer necessarily only an inaccessible document. It can also be an excess of information, in which an official record, a journalistic disclosure, a personal interpretation, and an online rumor appear on the same screen.
Conclusion: a snapshot of post-9/11 alternative research
Secret and Suppressed II is less a single theory than an archive of a research mood. Its subjects range from historical secret programs and technical controversies to secret societies, Mars, UAP, 9/11, and wider theories of power.
The most important difference from the first volume is the information environment. The second anthology appears when alternative research no longer depends mainly on photocopies, archives, and fringe magazines but on the web. As a result, the question of how to read, connect, and classify an enormous volume of information becomes almost as important as the question of who is hiding it.
Sources and further reading
- Open Library — Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century, Adam Parfrey & Kenn Thomas, 2008 Source
- Ingram/eCampus — bibliography and full table of contents, Secret and Suppressed II, Feral House, 2008 Source
- Feral House — Kenn Thomas & Adam Parfrey, Demons from the Far Side of Truth, introduction Source
- U.S. Department of State, FRUS — Weather Modification in North Vietnam and Laos (Project Popeye), 13 January 1967 Source
- United Nations Treaty Collection — ENMOD Convention Source
- U.S. Government Accountability Office — Electronic Voting Systems, GAO-05-956, 2005 Source
- U.S. Department of Justice — Terrorist Surveillance Program documentation Source
- U.S. Senate / Iraq Survey Group — Duelfer report hearings and findings Source
- NASA/JPL — high-resolution Cydonia Face on Mars imagery Source
- NASA — UAP Frequently Asked Questions / Independent Study Source
- 9/11 Commission — Report and Executive Summary Source
- NIST — Final WTC 7 investigation, November 2008 Source
- National Archives — Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act / U.S. intelligence use of former Nazis Source
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München — 1776: The Illuminati Source
- Adam Parfrey — Holy War, Ground Zero, preserved text Source
- NASA — original Viking and Mars Global Surveyor Cydonia archive Source
- Jerry E. Smith — Secret Weather Wars, preserved text Source
- William W. Flint — The Bussard Fusion Reactor and its Detractors, preserved text Source
- U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General — Polywell plasma-fusion project description Source
- Harry Helms — Lingering Questions About 9/11, preserved text Source
- Robert Sterling — Electronic Votescam, preserved text Source
- U.S. GAO — 2007 testimony on electronic-voting vulnerabilities and failures Source
- Contemporary AP reporting — Cuyahoga County recount convictions, January 2007 Source
- Supreme Court of Ohio — State ex rel. Dreamer v. Mason, 2011-Ohio-2318 Source
- U.S. Department of Justice — Terrorist Surveillance Program litigation and transition to FISA authority Source