BOHEMIAN GROVE

THE CLAIM

That the world's most powerful men gather each July in a California redwood grove to conduct genuine occult rites (human sacrifice to an owl deity, in the strongest tellings) and to secretly set national and world policy, far from voters and cameras.

THE THEORY, AS ITS PROPONENTS TELL IT

The theory holds that the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club in a redwood grove north of San Francisco is where the men who run the world actually meet, and that the ceremony they perform there is not a costume tradition but a genuine occult rite.

The documented facts do most of the recruiting. The club, founded in 1872, does hold a two-week summer encampment attended by presidents, cabinet officers, industrialists and financiers. It does open with a ritual called the Cremation of Care, in which robed figures burn an effigy before a forty-foot concrete owl. Attendance is by invitation, the press is excluded, and the club's motto, weaving spiders come not here, is generally understood to discourage business dealing, which proponents read as an instruction to keep the dealing unrecorded.

The strongest historical claim is true and is the one most often left out of debunkings: in September 1942 a meeting at the Grove brought together Ernest Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer and others in discussions connected to the atomic bomb programme. Real decisions of consequence have been taken there.

The theory's failure is at the ritual. In 2000 Alex Jones entered the Grove with a hidden camera and filmed the Cremation of Care, and the footage is the most-cited evidence in the case. What it shows is an amateur theatrical production with a recorded narration, in which a papier-mâché effigy representing worldly cares is burned to open a holiday. There is no sacrifice, and the footage that was supposed to prove one is the reason the file is graded where it is. What remains after the theatre is stripped away is the same objection the Bilderberg file raises (OSA-101): an unaccountable gathering of extraordinary power, keeping no record.

WHAT IS KNOWN

An unusual amount, because the underlying facts are not in dispute. The Bohemian Club, founded in San Francisco in 1872 by journalists and artists and long since colonized by the businessmen who could pay its dues, holds a summer encampment at Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre redwood property near Monte Rio, California. The membership has included U.S. presidents, cabinet officers, and corporate chiefs; sociologist G. William Domhoff documented the roster and its habits in the 1970s. The encampment opens with the Cremation of Care: robed members ferry an effigy called "Dull Care" across a lake and burn it before the Owl Shrine, a forty-foot concrete owl, complete with recorded voice work and pyrotechnics. It is theater, a costume pageant performed by a club that was founded by theater people and has staged an annual play, the Grove Play, for over a century.

In July 2000, Alex Jones and a cameraman walked in and filmed the ceremony. The footage is authentic and shows exactly what decades of member accounts, journalists' reports, and the club's own program describe: a mock ritual burning a stage prop. Jones narrated it as a genuine occult sacrifice, possibly of a human being, and that narration, not the footage, is the sinister version's entire foundation. No victim, no remains, and no witness to an actual sacrifice have ever been produced.

One heavyweight detail in the file is true, and worth stating precisely. In September 1942, with the club's season over, a planning meeting of the S-1 Executive Committee, the body then steering what became the Manhattan Project, was held at the Grove's clubhouse, with Ernest Lawrence and other senior scientists and officials attending. A secluded, secure venue lent to a war program is a documented fact of the Grove's history. It is also the exception that tests the rule: the one verified instance of world-shaping business at the Grove was a scheduled government meeting using the real estate, not a rite before the owl.

EVIDENCE FOR

• The club is real, exclusive, male, and stocked with the powerful; the secrecy is real ("Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" is the club's own motto against doing business inside).
• The ceremony is real and, on grainy infiltration footage, genuinely eerie. Eeriness is the evidence's ceiling.
• Off-record "Lakeside Talks" by public figures do occur, and the 1942 meeting shows the venue has hosted consequential business at least once.

EVIDENCE AGAINST

• The full ceremony is documented (script, effigy, pyrotechnics, drama committee) as club theater dating to the nineteenth century; Jones's own footage matches those accounts and shows no sacrifice of anything but a prop.
• Decades of member testimony, press reporting, and academic study (Domhoff's above all) describe an expensive summer camp: plays, bands, lectures, and heroic drinking, not governance.
• No policy, treaty, or appointment has ever been traced to a decision taken at the Grove; the elite overlap is explained by the membership fees, not the owl.

ASSESSMENT

Debunked, with the boundaries drawn carefully. Everything atmospheric about Bohemian Grove is true, which is precisely why the myth persists: a secretive club of the powerful really does burn an effigy in robes at night, and once, in wartime, the bomb really was discussed on the property. But the sinister superstructure (actual occultism, actual sacrifice, a shadow government among the redwoods) rests entirely on narration laid over theater. The fair critique of the Grove is the ordinary one about elite access and old-boy networks, and it needs no owl. The bureau's finding: the ritual is real; the religion is not.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE THE GRADE

• Confirmed and unremarkable: the club is real, the grove is real, the forty-foot concrete owl is real, and the Cremation of Care ceremony happens, as Alex Jones's 2000 footage showed.
• To CONFIRMED as anything more: evidence that the ceremony is other than the amateur theatrical it appears to be, or that binding policy is made there. Nixon's own taped remarks about the place, which are far from flattering, describe a social retreat.
• The strongest real instance of consequential business at the Grove is the September 1942 meeting on the Manhattan Project, which is documented. The pattern worth noticing is that the confirmed instance is in the archives, and the alleged ones are not.

FURTHER READING

• Wikipedia: Bohemian Grove
• Wikipedia: Cremation of Care
• G. William Domhoff, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats (1974)
• Philip Weiss, "Masters of the Universe Go to Camp," Spy (1989), a reporter's account from inside the encampment