The Jonestown Massacre
people.uvawise.edu/pww8y/Supplement/SMSup/Cults/Jones50Con.html
CIA Mind Control Run Amok?
Excerpted from 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
A Citadel Press Book Copyright © 1995 By Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen
On November 18, 1978, in a cleared-out patch of Guyanese jungle, the Reverend Jim Jones ordered the 911 members of his flock to kill themselves by drinking a cyanide potion, and they did.
The cultists were brainwashed by the megalomaniac Jones, who had named their jungle village after himself and held them as virtual slaves, if not living zombies. Jones himself was found dead. He'd shot himself in the head, or someone else had shot him. Square-jaw, jet black hair and sunglasses, looking like a secret service agent on antipsychotic drugs, Jones takes his place alongside Charles Manson in America's iconography of evil.
But was Jones really a lone madman as Americans are so often advised about their villains?
Is it plausible that more than nine hundred people took their own lives willingly, simply because he told them to?
Or is there another explanation?
Not long after the slaughter in Jonestown, whispers began–strange hints of human experiments in mind control, even genocide, and the lurking presence of the CIA. At the very least. these stories maintained, the U.S. government could have prevented the Jonestown massacre, but instead it did nothing. At worst, Jonestown was a CIA-run concentration camp set up as a dry run for the secret government's attempt to reprogram the American psyche. There are suggestions of parallel "Jonestowns" and that the conspiracy did not end with the deaths in Guyana.
Jim Jones was born May 13, 1931, son of a Ku Klux Klansman in Lynn, Indiana. His mother, he claimed, was a Cherokee Indian. That has never been verified.
An unsupervised child, Jones became fascinated by church work at an early age. By 1963 he had his own congregation in Indianapolis: The People's Temple Full Gospel Church. It was an interracial congregation, something then unheard of in Indiana. Young Jim Jones crusaded tirelessly on behalf of blacks. He also suffered from mysterious fainting spells, heeded advice from extraterrestrials, practiced faith healing, and experienced visions of nuclear holocaust.
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