An Ode to Miss Information: A Series Revisited

In July 2006, I posted a seven-part series chronicling an incident in my weird past. It was about a friend, referred to as Miss Texas, who mysteriously vanished amid a haze of intrigue involving the CIA, federal AIDS research, sex-trafficking, false identities and one highly encrypted 3.5 inch floppy disc. Police in New York, Lubbock and Denton Texas investigated her disappearance, but never found her.

Throughout the series I stressed the fact that I never came close to believing the bizarre story she had spun for me. I mean, she constantly stressed to me her fear that she would be “disappeared” by some government agent, and that she relied upon my help not to disappear. I’d play along, but never took her seriously until that fateful day she stepped into oblivion. So naturally, I began to wonder if what she told me had been true in part. Worse, I fretted that my actions, or more accurately my inaction, might have played some role in her fate, whatever that was. I sometimes berated myself thinking, if only I had believed her.

I’d go through a similar scenario when, two years later, someone else briefly entered the periphery of my life. She was an acquaintance of someone who would become a good friend of mine, a young woman whom I’d met only weeks earlier in meatspace after a month of conversing with her in an AOL writers chatroom. A., my friend, introduced us, saying, “X., this is Susan. She’s a writer too.”

“Cool,” I said, during the customary handshake. “What are you working on?”

Instead of answering right away, the steely-eyed blonde gave me the once over, her mouth pursed in a straight line. In retrospect, I believe she was sizing me up to see whether or not she should respond. About three seconds after my query she replied, “I’m working with James Ridgeway on a series of articles about the infiltration of New York and New Jersey strip clubs by the Russian mafia.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said. Out loud. But inside my head, I thought the woman was full of shit. By then, I was quite familiar with James Ridgeway’s work, as a faithful reader of the Village Voice, Mother Jones and other progressive-leaning periodicals. I’d seen a number of his documentaries, starting with Blood in the Face, a movie about white supremacist movements in the US. I even had the honor of speaking with him one-on-one for about an hour. Since his beat consisted of leftist political concerns, strip clubs and post-Soviet gangsters didn’t seem to me a subject that would interest him. What’s more, the world inhabited by A. and Susan seemed a universe apart from his. Where the hell would he have made contact with someone like Susan, I wondered.* The thought seemed a bit grandiose too, something indulging in a James-Bond type of fantasy that involved illicit sex.

I last spoke to A. in 2002.  After that, we lost touch. So I couldn’t find her when I learned, thanks to a 2003 story airing on National Public Radio, that Susan had mysteriously vanished about six months after this introduction. Truth be told, I didn’t even notice at the time because she was such a minor figure in my life. Even so, I felt bad that neither A. nor I realized something had gone wrong with her at the time. And even when you’re talking about a distant acquaintance, someone whom you would have spoken to on five occasions at most, learning about their catastrophe from the national media is somewhat jarring. What’s worse: I realized from the press coverage that I had misjudged her. She was on the level when she told me about her relationship to Ridgeway, and the work that they had done together.

Ridgeway published the book in June of 1996. Titled Redlight, it is replete with photos by Sylvia Plachy.  Ridgeway credited Susan as its researcher. At the release party that month, Susan, visibly out of sorts according to many sources, expressed her fears of being disappeared by either the Russian mafia, Russian intelligence, or the CIA.

And, a month later she vanished, just as she had feared.** Like my friend Miss Texas, she did so amid a web of intrigue just as intense as that spun by the self-proclaimed Lone Star beauty queen. Miss Texas only feared the CIA. Susan not only feared the CIA, mobsters and the SVR, but also a stalker and a bunch of Gen Xers fancying themselves vampires.*** Miss Texas garnered no national headlines, even though the authorities officially investigated her disappearance as well. I guess that’s what happens when your fate has nothing to do with the sex industry or the undead. But they had other things in common. Both left children behind. Both women had a roughly similar physical appearance. Both feared that some shadowy organization wanted to get them. They were roughly the same age, born only three years apart.  Most critical to the point I want to make here, they also shared my personal opinion of them as liars.

Of course, when I found out the truth about Susan, I felt terrible for disbelieving her when it turns out that the story she gave me was accurate to the letter. But while saddened by her plight, I didn’t feel guilt over it. I barely knew the woman. I had no part in her disappearance. There’s nothing I could have done to prevent this particular series of events from happening.

But Miss Texas was another story. I had been wracked by guilt for not extending myself further -- a small price to pay for the protection of a friend. Maybe I could have reacted more strongly instead of just playing along.  And I would have had I believed her from the start.

That was the primary purpose for posting about Miss Texas fifteen years ago. I wanted to share the story, as it actually happened, taking great pains not to embellish, speculate or sensationalize it to see if what she told me was, in fact, credible to most people. Many  commenters regarded the story with a jaundiced eye in the least, with some vacillating on whether it was true, and others seeing the series as a piece of fiction from beginning to end. I found their skepticism quite reassuring. If they didn’t believe the story she told, then why should I? And if I had no basis for belief, then I could at least reason with myself that my inaction was justified. I mean, who can act upon a story that spurious? And Miss Texas was unlike Susan in a key aspect. As limited as our conversations were, Susan never told me anything that didn’t turn out to be the gospel truth. Miss Texas, on the other hand, provably and repeatedly lied to me.

Two years after I posted the series on Miss Texas, a strange e-mail came to my inbox. The subject header read, “Delete after reading.” The missive itself contained only one thing: a link to a YouTube video. I copy-pasted the link to another browser, and lo and behold I saw the face of Miss Texas staring back at me. She didn’t look all that different than when I last saw her, so I wondered when she shot the video. Some time into it, she made an off-hand allusion to the events of 11 September 2001, so she had to have been alive for at least six years since I saw her last.

My first reaction was that of elation. She was alive and well, and I was now off the hook.

I don’t know who sent me this e-mail. My best guess is that Miss Texas somehow came across the series I had written about her. Because of details in it that no one else should know, such as conversations between the two of us, she might have realized who I was. Maybe she wanted to let me know that she was okay, and that I could finally drop the albatross I had around my neck for almost fifteen years by that point.

You’ll note that I refer to Susan Young Walsh by her actual name, but not Miss Texas. On the one hand that's because Susan is most likely deceased and thus free of consequence.  She also deserves props for some impressive accomplishments and abilities.  On the other hand, my elation over finding Miss Texas quickly turned to sadness and a twinge of shame when I learned of her activities after our last meeting. Since she’s still among the living, and, believe it or not, I still consider her a friend, I won’t post her real name here (although I’ve probably given enough information in this post to identify her, if someone wants to spend a day sleuthing the Internet).

During the late-1990s and for all of the Twenty-First Century, Miss Texas, and her husband, have propagated an unfathomable amount of misinformation about parapolitics in general, and about one conspiracy story specifically.

You see, the charges made by QAnon folks and their sympathizers -- that there’s a band of liberal insiders who are sex-trafficking minors, killing them after they’re no longer useful and drinking their blood -- originated in a mythology that Miss Texas helped to create in substantial part.**** She even gave this tale the name most commonly associated with it, Project Monarch. The reckless and unsubstantiated accusations made against such notables as Lecil Martin (better known to history as Boxcar Willie) undermined the credibility of the subject matter it claimed to champion: specifically, the accusation that CIA indoctrinated children into clandestine services through drugs, radiation, and coercive behavioral modification. Moreover, most of this training had to do with compromising US officials through sexual blackmail, or in other words catching them in the act and then blackmailing them.

The original story upon which the Monarch mythos latched onto actually had evidence which included sworn statements, sworn testimony, and medical records. In a 1995 Presidential Radiation Commission hearing two witnesses, Claudia Mullen and Christine deNicola testified that CIA-backed doctors had used radiation as part of their psychological training to become child sex spies.***** I cannot say for certain whether the story is true or not. But I can tell you that it found credibility in the international press, especially in Canada. In the United States, the commission took it seriously at the time. In their report, The Human Radiation Experiments, in a chapter titled “Government Standards for HumanExperimentation: The 1960s and 1970s [pg. 106’],” they concluded:

Central Intelligence Agency documents suggest that radiation was part of the MKULTRA program and that the agency considered and explored uses of radiation for these purposes [i.e. psychological coercion]. However, the documents that remain from MKULTRA, at least as currently brought to light, do not show that the CIA itself carried out any of these proposals on human subjects.

Starting in January 1996, a number of reports had hit the mainstream press. I call them the “whackadoodle” stories, parodies of the 1995 testimony that destroyed all belief in its subject matter. Miss Texas was among those spreading this new tale. Problem was, there could have been children affected by a real program along these lines. Discrediting this story effectively meant discrediting them, forcing them to either face hostile incredulity, or keep the trauma to themselves.

Of course, maybe that was the point. In conspiracy lore we often hear accusations and counter-accusations that such-and-such is a “disinformation specialist,” a person who deliberately clouds the waters of parapolitical inquiry in order to deflect public interest away from an accurate story, and steer it towards an inaccurate one. 

Did Miss Texas actively and witting act in this capacity? Hell if I know. Hopefully not. Her husband has certainly claimed to be a part of the United States Intelligence Community (USIC), although I have no idea if that’s true.

Whatever the case, her propagation of this story would have consequences other than silencing putative victims of an alleged program. As it has now become incorporated in the QAnon narrative, it now has a ton of parapolitical and political ramifications that threaten the nation as a whole.

The public often demands unambiguous, bottom-line answers to complex questions. Either everything is a conspiracy, or nothing is a conspiracy. People bringing forth these stories are either whistleblowers or hoaxers, or perhaps delusional. We typically have neither time nor patience to assess the particulars of each strange account, and form an opinion based on pre-judgment.  As you can see from this post, I’ve been guilty of this tendency myself. In both cases, I decided both Susan and Miss Texas had given me a tall tale. Likewise, most people today regard any conspiracy story as patently false.

Unfortunately, someone has to pay the consequences for accepting a false story simply because it fits with their experiential, ideological or moral perspective. In this case that might possibly include actual victims, if the Radiation Commission testimony is accurate. It definitely includes those who died in the Capitol siege occurring 6 January 2021.

Likewise, someone has to pay the consequences for not accepting a true story because it sounds too out-there to believe. In this case, those who live with the stress of intrigue, a stress that might induce them to self-medicate or consider self-harm, or permanently estrange themselves from their loved ones, or whose private lives become fodder for the national press, or who very well might have been murdered because of their shadow existence, also bear a heavy burden.******

As it goes with life, one moves on. On the minuscule possibility she’s alive, and can read this post, I’m hoping that Susan will regard it as my apology to her. As for Miss Texas, I’ve pitched everything that she left in my apartment, including that nice beige winter coat. I had to: (1) because I have no doubt that she has since replaced it; and (2) the moths had gotten to it.

_____________________

*Because of outside sources, I can now answer that question. Susan had penned some articles for Screw magazine during the early-1990s. Ridgeway contacted Screw’s publisher, Al Goldstein, when researching his own story on strip clubs, asking if he had a reporter who knew anything about the subject. Goldstein personally recommended Susan, and arranged their introduction.

**The disappearance of Susan Walsh has become fodder for the true crime genre, with podcasts, television segments, a documentary and a Wikipedia article devoted to her case.

Also, there happens to be another blonde woman named Susan Walsh who also disappeared. Unlike the one referred to here, she came out of hiding and has since talked to the press.

***Something unknown to me at the time, but recounted in most of the media about her was that Susan had fallen victim to substance abuse around the time I met her. Doctors had also diagnosed her as bipolar.  Consequently, some believe that she might have committed suicide. Some online amateur detectives apparently believe that she was disappeared by her husband, Mark. But Nutley, NJ police have emphatically ruled him out as a suspect, and there is honestly no evidence that I’ve seen that he’s in the least bit culpable. Rumors also abound that she was kidnapped and forced into the sex industry of Russia, or that her drug dealers killed her because she owed them too much money. And people have reported sightings of her after 1996, indicating that she simply ran away to start a new life. All of the above is purely speculative, with no real evidence to back it up.

****At the end of the original series, I speculated that someone who looked a little like Miss Texas might be her, although I doubted it at the time because of differences in physical features. Turns out that it wasn’t her, although she bears some resemblance to Miss Texas. Not only that, but they have worked together in the creation of Monarch mythology. They, and another woman who also bears a resemblance to her contributed as well.

*****Because of their purported neurological effects, radiated materials were said by some to be a means for mind control, or as the late Dr. Margaret Singer would call it, thought reform.

******In a review of cold case files conducted in 2006, Nutley police announced that there was “clear” evidence of homicide in Susan’s disappearance. But to date, nothing has developed since on the case, and that evidence has yet to reach the public.