The Realist

By the end of the decade, she had become a fixture of the conspiracy underground, producing a remarkable body of research.

Paul Krassner, the publisher of The Realist, referred to her as the bionic researcher.

If the spectacle of the Manson murders had helped discredit the hippies, Mae Brussell began to suspect that this had been the point all along.

She connected the family to Operation Chaos, the CIA's illegal domestic spying program, COINTELPRO, military LSD experiments, and government research into mind control.

and bob was uh you know really interested in the way that he thought and wilson was also initially turned on to leary by alan watts and which is very interesting because alan watts uh the british theologian and mystic and great writer and speaker He introduced Bob to three big things in his early young career that set him on his track for the rest of his life, really.

That was Zen meditation in the late 50s, Timothy Leary in 1963 or 64, and after Bob interviewed Leary in 64, after Leary was kicked out of Harvard with his... colleagues uh and living in millbrook wilson did a big interview of leary for paul krasner's the realist and they became friends after that so they remained in touch for you know those six seven eight years leary was sent to prison in 1970 he escaped that later that year ended up being in africa and and uh parts of europe and then was arrested in afghanistan and then by 1973 Leary was brought back, and he was in prison in California, a place called CMF Vacaville, which is sort of a notorious prison from that era.

And so, yeah, so by 1973, Wilson and Leary are friendly, they're friends, and now Bob is able to actually go visit him in prison.

And he does so a number of times, beginning in late 1973 and into 1974.

And as I said, Leary was very well respected for this thing he and his colleagues created in the late 50s, which gets known as the Leary Circumplex or the Interpersonal Circumplex.

which is a really fascinating map or breakdown of human personality and group personality, if you will, or personalities within groups.

And so Bob was excited to meet this man, and you could read about it in the article, Leary's Psychological H-Bomb, which was published in The Realist, as I said, in the 60s.

Great article, a nice profile piece.