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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.
“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, who is reportedly now in business with Gray, and so 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 corproately affected
us all...
But we want to
close today's story where it began...with attorney
Michael Roy Fugler, 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.
Michael Fugler,
Chairman of US EURO Securities, Inc., 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,
Fugler’s “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.
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