Last year, Chapman University, which regularly publishes its Survey of American Fears, took a poll asking about ten conspiracy theories, all government cover-ups.

In the most striking result, wrote Jesse Walker in Reason Magazine, 25 percent of the respondents agreed – and another 7.5 percent strongly agreed – that the government is concealing what it knows about the “North Dakota Crash.”

The interesting thing about the poll is that the pollsters had never actually heard any conspiracy theories about a “North Dakota Crash,” there was none, they just threw that in to see how people would respond to a vaguely ominous-sounding episode that they invented.

Still, enough people agreed to make it the sixth most popular theory in the poll, right behind the Kennedy assassination, aliens, global warming,  the Scalia  “assassination,” and the moon landing cover-up.

I blinked a few times after reading the implications of this for democracy, and I got a little nervous.

—

It was after reading this that I remembered an e-mail I get from a  young man named Kean, he claimed he had been reading me ever since I wrote for Wired Magazine and wrote about his hero, Thomas Paine.

He described himself as a once-promising MIT graduate physics student who had broken down and been taken to a secret asylum by agents working for the National Security Agency.

He was guarded day and night.

He said the guards had left him alone for a few minutes, he put his transmitting device together from wires and threads in his room, and a Zircon batter he had stolen from a cell phone.

He said he only had minutes to talk, but it was important, I wouldn’t regret it.

He asked if we could open a “Zoom” chat and I said yes, I was curious, something about him snagged me.

When the chat room opened, I saw that he had turned his video camera off, I could hear his voice but couldn’t see his face. It was strange and seemed dramatic.

The School, he said, would deny any knowledge of him.

Kean’s research into alien activities in America had caught the all-seeing eye of the NSA, he was spirited out of his dorm at night and brought to a secret prison on the New Hampshire-Boston border.

He warned me that if I tried to check him out, the school would deny any knowledge of him, the school worked closely with the NSA.

Today, some bells went off in my head, and I called the school and asked them about Kean.

They denied any knowledge of him.

Kean wrote that what got him kidnapped was a research paper he wrote about what he called the “Trump Tower Crash,” a fierce explosion on New York City’s Fifth Avenue late at night thirty or forty years ago.

The explosion was devastating. Anyone who looked directly at it was incinerated, their bodies turned to ashes. In the morning, there was no trace of the explosion, only a massive black tower called the Trump Tower.

There were still people who, when polled, said they believed the government had covered up the “Trump Tower Crash,” but nobody believed them.

The builder and occupant presented himself as human, Kean wrote.

But he was really an alien, come to plot the takeover of the earth, now coveted by the last living beings on Uranus, whose population was dying from radiation brought by giant meteors.

This man –  he was called Radical – was the leader of the alien invasion.

The building was given a new name – “Trump Tower.”

He was able to transform himself into human shape, except for his Uranian brain, which protruded slightly from the top of his head and had to be covered at all times by a glycerin coated nest, which could withstand any force on earth.

The only problem was it could never be touched or combed. The alien-his name was Radical – would implode and turn into a jelly-like substance if that happened. The glycerine had turned his face orange.

He tended to wave his arms wildly when he talked, and he often couldn’t stop. His plan was to disrupt society and culture and upend any kind of normalcy.

Radical used brain waves and visual imagery to create a television show in his name, using Cerium, silicon, and chromium to hypnotize anyone who watched and turn them into Radical’s obedient slaves.

He even made large yellow hats for his followers, which contained transmitters that made them cheer and applaud on command.

No one had ever seen anything like the Yellow Hats in America, Kean said, they looked liked people in the cult movies, their mines and independence had been stolen from them.

They had become robots, members of Congress, U.S. Senators, Cabinet Secretaries. If you looked into their eyes, it was possible to see that they had become vacant and soulless.

The Yellow Hats loved to watch old zombie movies; they cheered when the zombies came up out of the ground.

People who disagreed with Radical vanished or transported back to Uranus, eaten, or appointed to government positions to be targeted and removed, to weaken any possible opposition to Radical.

Plan One went perfectly.

A few earthlings tried to stop Radical and his Yellow Hats, but they were overwhelmed and ignored, at least at first. Or forced into re-education camps to learn loyalty to the leader.

The TV program was a great hit, and Radical and his Yellow Hat army set out to take over the country by winning the Presidency.

He took command of the government and turned all of the members of his political party into Zycons, robots shrouded in human faces who bowed to Radical’s every word and carried out his every instruction.

Loyalty was the thing, independent thinking was banned and subsumed by mobs of people with labels they loved to wear, they were filled with opium powder.

Radical even had his television network called Otter News, staffed by yellow hat people who used Cerium to recruit angry old white humans who seemed to believe anything they were told.

The idea was to undermind human trust in government, to soften it up when the invasion came.

Do you believe that the government is covering up “The Trump Tower Crash,” a group of rebellious academics asked 1,000 Americans? Fifty-six percent said yes, the government was covering up the Trump Tower Crash. 

Do you care? asked the pollsters. Only 22 percent said yes.

Human leadership seemed alien to Radical, and he sometimes stumbled. When a dread virus appeared to strike down many humans and disrupt their economy, he suggested they drink a bleach product named Chlorox.

Radical never had hard of bleach – he learned it was the only element that could threaten his nest – and he was shocked by the response to his blunder except for the yellow people, who continued to praise and applaud him.

They also helped him to divide the United States, once the most powerful country in the world, and the only real threat to their plans to obliterate humans and take over the earth.

Earlier Uranions had come on to sow disbelief in climate change, the ice caps were melting, and the high flooding had begun.

The people who organized and cried out about the earth were pushed aside, ridiculed, and dismissed. Radical made sure there was plenty of money around for his people; they were pleased.

You see, said Kean, the Uranions are water people. They lived in water deep in the center of Uranus, and out of sight of telescopes or space probes. The melting ice cap was what drew them to earth in the first place.

They loved global warming.

I found myself sitting up late in the night reading Kean’s harried and fearful e-mail. He wrote as if someone or something was stalking him in the night, or looking over his shoulder.

You see, he said, the virus was not a virus.

The virus was the army the Uranions had sent over to finish the job Radical, and his followers had started. Princess Melanus appeared and took the form of a First Lady.

But she never spoke and was rarely seen, and no one inside or out of the White House.  Department by department, Radical let the government workers go, fired thousands of department heads, weeded dissidents and free thinkers out of the government.

Soon, the once proud and storied bureaucracy was a shell, no longer able to anticipate or respond to real trouble, and now a laughingstock in the world.

Prince Junus, who posed as Radical’s son,  became famous in his own right, he was sent to be so mean that Radical would look kind.

There were clouds of lies, attacks, retractions, denials, Radical moved in a storm cloud, and soon, the people were bewildered and frightened and distracted.

They broke up into warring factions, who fought one another but never saw the danger they were in.

They sent their best general,  Fauchee, over to confuse people and drive them into Radical’s arms.  He emerged from the inside of a volcano near Hawaii, looking so gentlemanly and kind that people would trust him and love him.

The virus scared the surviving government bureaucrats so much they closed much of the planet down, and people were angry and defiant.

The Yellow Hats turned the people against the government, claiming the lockdowns were a violation of their rights and freedom.

This was planned so people would not wear masks or keep apart, and the virus spread all over the land and killed tens of thousands of people.

It worked

said, Kean. Divide them and conquer them, humans were too foolish and short-sighted to ever come together or work together. And nobody suspected Radical was anything but a television star with an odd nest on his head.

First, went the plan, gain a platform where people would see you every day, find a medium gullible and corrupt enough to hang on every crazy thing you said or did, and then turn them against each other so that they never stop to take a good look at Radical.

Radical scoffed at the virus and said it would go away like magic. The Yellow Hats threatened health officials, refused to wear masks, hunted down doctors, and worried parents. Sheriffs and police officers refused to prosecute or arrest them.

The Yellow Hat trolls send out millions of death threats and stole phone numbers and identities.

The country started to break down and break up into quarreling mobs. Thousands and thousands kept getting sick.

Dr.  Fauchee said the virus was dangerous and would come back. But by now, nobody would believe him. That was the plan.

The people were divided, and the Uranions knew that when humans were divided – and it was so easy to divide them – they would be too weak and divided to fight back. He singled out the Democratic Party as his major target and any black people who had ever joined.

After a while, they were like bees, dopey in the cold.

The virus did not behave like a regular virus, Kean said. It had a consciousness.

The doctors had never seen anything like it. It seemed to know where to go and how to strike. It moved from one state to another, infested one region, and they mysteriously vanished and popped up in another.

No one could agree on how it had started, and how it traveled, and how long it lasted, or how it spread.

The people around Radical, the guards, the aides, all began to sicken from the virus and were quarantined or worse.

The virus ravaged the big and beautiful cities, and Radical’s Yellow Hats, planted throughout the South, took advantage of the lull to take away the masks, protections, and regulations that had stopped the virus in the North.

They parroted Radical, and he rewarded them. They did everything he said as soon as he said it.

Their instructions were diabolical but brilliant.

What is the virus?,  I asked Kean. I felt as if I were watching a horror movie as a kid.

I knew it wasn’t real but it was scary.

“The virus is Corona, Queen of Uranus,” he said. “She is Radical’s mother.”

I almost laughed. Kean was losing me.

Radical’s governors waited until the virus had begun to spread and expressed shock and determination.

They would never harm the economy again, they said, even though the virus they let back in was destroying it all over again, right under their noses.

No, viral told his obedient Yellow Hats – the only people he would speak with, the only people he would need – there was nothing to worry about.

Tell people it’s just the flu, it’s nothing to worry about. They will believe you because they want to believe you.

Tell the Yellow Hat to spread the word online that the virus would be gone in a few days. It was a mirage, a conspiracy to undermine him. Faucee pretended to disagree with him, but he was a shill, a plant.

When it was over, Faucee would be rewarded with the Southern Hemisphere.

I admit to being riveted by this bizarre story, but Kean’s message seemed to be less and less coherent, he was either tired or sick, and I knew he must be crazy.

“Kean,” I asked, “why have you contacted me? I am nobody; I have no power.”

“Because,” he said, I found out about you in the MIT library, before I was arrested.”You write about dogs, and I found out that dogs were the only creatures on earth who are immune to the Cerion and the Yellow Hats.”

They are our only hope, he said. “There is no one else I could call. I knew the NSA wouldn’t be bothering to worry about you,  you’re not important enough.”

Radical, he said, plans to kill all of the dogs when the planet falls. That made my spine tingle. Zinnia was a warrior, not into nuance or deception, she would climb into Radical’s lap and lick his face.

I was intrigued by the idea that the virus had consciousness and made choices about where it went.  According to Kean, it had an intellect. No wonder if confounded the doctors.

What a great story that would have been for the Twilight Zone.

My brain was racing; I wanted to get to the computer.

Suddenly, everything made sense to me,  the crazy election campaign, Tulsa, all the chaos, posturing, race-baiting and hatred, and blind loyalty, suddenly it made sense to me.

Then, there was a crash, and the screen went black. I looked down at Fate, Zinnia, and Bud, they were all sitting around me in a circle, looking up.

It was late, and my study was dark; the only noise I could hear was the peepers and an occasional truck. I listened to the mournful sound of an ambulance, rushing down the highway with some poor soul strapped up on a stretcher in the back.

I couldn’t wait to tell Maria about the story.

But my stomach felt funny. And I started to cough. Zinnia wagged her tail; Bud ran out of the room and into his crate in the hallway.

I started to cough, and I couldn’t stop.

I suddenly felt feverish, it felt like my whole body was on fire, and my breath got short, just as it had when I had my heart attack.

I turned to look at Fate, but she was down in a crouch growling, her teeth were bared, she was staring just over my head.

____

Author’s Note: The Chapman Survey on American Fears is real, and is published every year. The Chapman Survey for 2020 found that 47.5 percent of  Americans were “afraid” or “very afraid” of the outcome of the Presidential Election. That the number one fear for this year, the year of a pandemic and continuing racial upheaval.