Source – rollingstone.com

– ‘…His encounter with the writings of Heinlein and Hubbard was a pivotal event in his life. Until then, he had been a petty criminal and drifter who spent his life in and out of jail. But when Manson was released from McNeil Island in 1967, he was a new figure: a charismatic street preacher who gathered a flock of followers among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco…Hubbard and the Heinlein also shared an interest in the supernatural. Together with their friend Jack Parson, a rocket scientist, they investigated the teachings of the occultist Aleister Crowley and tried their hand at black magic”.

‘Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties’ – By Elisabeth Garber-Paul

A 20-year quest for the truth may have not found any definitive answers — but it definitely changes the story

It’s hard to explain Tom O’Neill’s new book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties without sounding like a conspiracy theorist down a rabbit hole — you try telling your friends that a reporter spent two decades researching the links between one of America’s most notorious criminals and the government’s super-secretive mind-control program MKULTRA without getting a few snickers.
Of course, imagine being the journalist writing it, and you find yourself in an even more uncomfortable position; that’s exactly why it took O’Neill two decades to finally get it published. It started as a story for the now-long-defunct Premiere magazine as a way to cover the infamous murders’ 30th anniversary in 1999. O’Neill originally began looking into the Hollywood connections, retreading a story that, even at that point, had been told countless times.

But when he began to dig into holes in Helter Skelter — the best-selling true-crime tome written by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, which has become the questionable, if de facto, account of the case — O’Neill began pulling strings that raised some very uncomfortable questions: What was the real relationship between Manson and Terry Melcher, the record producer who’d previously lived in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered? Why did Manson keep getting lucky breaks with the law when he was arrested, despite the fact that he was almost perpetually on parole? What really happened during the Summer of Love, when Manson put his family together in San Francisco? What explains the similarities between government funded, LSD-fueled mind-control experiments, and Manson’s techniques? And why were there so many people in his orbit who seemed to have ties to the CIA?

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RS Recommends: ‘Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties’