A Life That Was Absorbed by a Conspiracy

Thornley served in the Marine Corps alongside Lee Harvey Oswald and afterwards wrote a novel with a character based on him, completed before the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. That accident of timing shaped the rest of his life. He testified to the Warren Commission. Years later, when the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison pursued his own investigation into the assassination, Thornley was drawn into it, was treated as a suspect, and was charged with perjury in 1968 over his account of his contacts with Oswald. The charge did not result in a conviction. He wrote about the experience afterwards and, over time, came to entertain conspiratorial explanations of his own about what had happened to him.

The atlas records this because the two halves of his life became entangled in public accounts and because the entanglement is itself instructive. Discordianism had made a practice out of blurring the line between a joke and a belief, and had circulated the phrase operation mindfuck for the deliberate spreading of destabilising material. When one of its authors was then caught up in a real investigation and a real conspiracy literature, the technique and the situation became difficult to separate, and later retellings of his life frequently do not separate them at all.