So Long, Dave McGowan

From my archived blog (November 2015) at donaldjeffries.wordpress.com

I imagine that there are some Dave McGowan fans out there who read my Substack. Dave and I had just started communicating with each other before his early, tragic, and suspicious death. I’ve often been compared to him, which I consider a tremendous compliment. I would love to know his thoughts on the present madness. Would he have developed Trump Derangement Syndrome, or supported him? Dave was brilliant, witty, and insightful. The world isn’t the same without him.

A few days ago, the world lost one of its original thinkers and most extraordinary researchers. David McGowan will probably never be mentioned in establishment history books, but his name and his work will be remembered as long as independent human thought exists.

Dave McGowan’s book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon is an astounding read. It will make you look at the entertainment industry- especially the world of popular music- more cynically and skeptically. Dave found that virtually all of the rock stars who gravitated to Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and 70s came from families with powerful military or intelligence backgrounds.

There should be no logical correlation between musical ability and a military background, but in the world of rock, Dave showed that aspiring musicians in that era with a high-ranking military officer as a father had a leg up on the competition. It strains credulity that all those rebellious rockers just happened to come from the kinds of backgrounds that directly contradicted their images. In one of his interviews, Dave stressed an important point I’d never considered; these rock stars were all of prime fighting age, yet not a single one seemed to encounter a problem with the draft. None of them went to jail or fled to Canada to avoid going to Vietnam.

Dave’s web site, Center for an Informed America is chock full of mind- blowing information. His investigations into 9/11 and the Boston Bombing were top-notch. His series on the Apollo program, Wagging the Moondoggie, is the absolute best work on the subject, in my view. And if you really want to go into the deepest recesses of these rabbit holes so many of us are drawn to, read his articles on the Lincoln assassination. He will have you doubting the event ever happened at all, and you’ll be hard-pressed to prove otherwise.

While I’d been deeply skeptical of our space program for quite some time, until I read Wagging the Moondoggie, I was still somewhat on the fence. Any reasonable person who reads Dave’s work on this cannot possibly believe we went to the moon nearly fifty years ago, yet somehow cannot go back there. As Dave noted, at what point do the masses start questioning this- on the 100th anniversary of the moon landing?

When Craig McGowan, Dave’s brother, first revealed that Dave was very suddenly in a literal battle for his life. I was not only stunned but terrified. At around the same time, I was rear-ended while sitting at a traffic light one night, totaling my car, and I was extremely lucky to walk away with only minor physical injuries. This brought home to me how tenuous our connection with this sphere is, and especially how prevalent premature demises are among those who write what we write.

Fortunately, Dave left behind a wealth of material, on his web site and in his books. He also was interviewed frequently, most of them easily accessible online. I was listening again the past few days to the powerful interview he did earlier this year with John B. Wells, on his Caravan to Midnight program. It was loaded with dangerous, subversive material, and I think it may not be coincidental that Dave was given his deadly diagnosis not long after it. It was eerie watching him (it was one of- maybe his only- video interview), and I was struck by how sickly he already looked.

Those who have read my book Hidden History know that it is filled with references to unnatural deaths. Persons connected in some way to these controversial subjects have an unsettling tendency to die unnaturally. When they do die of heart attacks or cancer- the two biggest causes of death for most humans- it tends to be under unusual circumstances. Other than Jack Ruby, I know of no other person who was given such a devastating diagnosis, with such little forewarning, as Dave was.

Dave was one of the first researchers to persuade me that anything is possible, and that perhaps nothing we perceive is as it seems. Reading his research on the Boston Bombing, and the work others have done on Sandy Hook, the Aurora shooting and other recent, widely-reported events, it’s difficult to avoid feeling like Jim Carrey’s title character in The Truman Show. Maybe we’re all witless reality show stars.

Dave was four years younger than me- far, far too young to die. He had so much more to offer, so much additional cutting-edge, innovative research to test our beliefs and perceptions. He probably would have been all over the recent attacks in Paris. I would love to have read his analysis of the video taken in an alley, which featured an allegedly pregnant woman, hanging from a ledge for several minutes, in the starring role.

It was eerily appropriate that David McGowan died on November 22, the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Dave’s writing and interviews were full of humor, and I think he would have appreciated the macabre coincidence there.

Those of us left behind will still fight the good fight, and hope to awaken each slumbering soul that we can. It isn’t easy going against the grain, and holding opinions that are sure to ignite the ire of conventional thinkers. Dave was going against the grain about as much as is humanly possible. Dave’s Laurel Canyon book seems to have been a tremendous success, but I don’t believe he made much money from it. That’s the reality for most writers, especially those who write about these kinds of subjects. No “conspiracy theorist” is ever likely to get rich.

I never met Dave McGowan, never even spoke to him. We did exchange a few emails, and ironically at the time I first learned that he was sick I was about to suggest that we swap autographed copies of our books. America is so bereft of clear-headed, daring writers, and it’s tragic that one of the best has been silenced. I’m sorry I never met you, Dave, and I understand you weren’t a believer. For what it’s worth, I hope we do get to meet some day in a better, saner world.