He [conspiracy theorist Stan Deyo, author of The Cosmic Conspiracy (1978), “fus[ing] Illuminati theory with dispensational premillennialism and a variety of UFO speculation generally referred to as Alternative 3”, ibid., p. 57] enters new territory, however, with the appearance of his variation on Alternative 3. Powerful though the Illuminati are, their ultimate goal, “the establishment of a dictatorial world government,” has remained just out of reach. It could be achieved, Deyo speculates, only in a sufficiently charged atmosphere of global crisis. A crisis of unimaginable dimensions could both maintain cohesion within the Illuminatist forces and induce the population to accept unprecedented regimentation. What might induce people to give up their freedom? Deyo suggests that an appropriate catalyst would be an invasion by UFOs, in either of two scenarios. One envisions a fake extraterrestrial invasion, in which conspirators on earth produce an armada of seemingly alien flying saucers manned by human impostors, in order to create an artificial common enemy against which humanity could unite under a world government—an idea similar to that proposed by André Maurois in his 1923 tale, The Next Chapter: The War against the Moon.
– A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2013), p. 59
Belief in the existence of American concentration camps in now closely associated with the extreme right, but the original critics of federal efforts to quell civil disturbances came most often from the left. The leading leftist exponent of these ideas was Daniel Sheehan, chief counsel of the Christic Institute. Sheehan saw then – Attorney General Edwin Meese as the architect of mass internment plans. His view is hardly surprising in light of the groups frequently identified with rioting and demonstrations during the 1960s and 1970s: inner-city blacks, university students protesting the Vietnam War, and to a lesser extent, Native American militants. In addition, federal involvement in quelling disturbances suggested potentially significant deprivation of civil liberties, including freedom of speech and of assembly, and the violation of privacy through illicit intelligence gathering. Indeed, with only a few significant exceptions, it was conservatives who sought an expanded federal role in law enforcement, and liberals who opposed it. Over time, however, with the passing of a sense of crisis, left-liberal critics moved on to other issues, while those on the right found more and more to fear.
The unusual involvement of ideological adversaries in this set of issues suggests the extent to which at least certain New World Order concerns appear to cut across the traditional left-right divide. Nevertheless, the left and right had different ideas about what was dangerous about federal antiviolence activities. In general, those on the left emphasized activities that might have a chilling effect on political speech and protest, such as intelligence gathering and the creation of lists identifying allegedly dangerous persons. Those on the right, by contrast, became obsessively concerned with the risk of their own incarceration, creating in the process the concentration-camp legend.
– Ibid., p. 73
In any case, enough individuals believe they have undergone such experiences [of being experimented on by the secret services] to constitute themselves a community of victims, complete with the apparatus of self-help groups and hypnotic regression that is evident in other victim populations. Indeed, self-described mind-control victims tend to resemble other, better-known groups, including those who consider themselves victims of childhood sexual abuse, satanic ritual abuse, and abduction by extraterrestrials. One finds the same motifs of sexual violation and the disbelief of others. To these woes the people focused on mind-control traumas add a repertoire of technologically sophisticated tortures and body implants that allegedly made them robotic servants of the New World Order. Although they have escaped, they warn that millions of others walk among us in an enslaved condition, ready to do the bidding of their invisible masters. Rumors about satanic cults ritually abusing children arose contemporaneously with New World Order conspiracies and UFO abduction tales in the 1980s, peaking at the end of the decade. Bill Ellis’s claim that “abductees … report memories of child abuse and trauma on [sic] a significantly higher rate than the general population” is worth noting. Gareth Medway points out that “in both cases, usually the alleged victim had a traumatic experience at the hands of unearthly beings, aliens or Satanists, and then forgot about it until treated by a therapist specializing in recovering such memories.” These highly conventionalized victim accounts not only tie together outwardly dissimilar groups but also link different historical epochs. Such stories have notable precedents in an earlier America; they resemble the fraudulent nineteenth-century confessional literature attributed to escaped Catholic nuns and Mormon plural wives.
– Ibid., pp. 78-9
A thread that links contemporary conspiracy literature with the fulminations of nineteenth-century nativists is the theme of sexual violation and perversion. The so-called convent literature of the nineteenth century, epitomized by the supposed autobiography The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836), painted a picture of priests and members of Catholic religious orders as sexual predators. That motif has resurfaced in the contemporary work Trance Formation of America, allegedly the memoirs of a Michigan woman, Cathy O’Brien. O’Brien claims to have been trained since childhood as a government “sex slave,” and then to have been ravished by a succession of high government officials, including presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney. She claims that her recovered memories also include sexual violation by priests. The church allegedly worked together with government mind-control projects such as Project Monarch and MK-ULTRA.
– Ibid., p. 133