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Two of the most accomplished humans to ever exist are out there anonymously, completely unknown, unrecognized for 60 years for their unparalleled body of work, too modest to call attention to their accomplishments -- if Weird Scenes is to be believed.

First, there is the songwriter who wrote hit after hit, singles and albums, music and lyrics, every iconic pop, rock, and folk song from 1965 to 1975, arranging and producing them, guiding marginally talented musical acts to the heights of fame pretending to be the true purveyors of his work, earning them millions upon millions of dollars while getting little pay in return.

Then there is the other guy, the best hitman ever, responsible for hundreds of deaths over many years, eluding authorities all the way from Tahiti to Paris and everywhere in between and beyond, from the 1920s through the present day. You know, the guy responsible for all those alleged suicides by hanging, reported drug overdoses, "accidental" car, train, plane and boat crashes, supposed heart attacks, shootings by spouses, staged murder-suicides. An immortal serial killer with lots of frequent flier miles.

Of course I'm not gullible enough to believe that one songwriter and one assassin would do all that -- it must have been a team effort, like a hyper-classified Brill Building and super-secret double-probation cadre of Jason Bournes. If Weird Scenes is to be believed.

Of course I'm not gullible enough to believe any of the nonsense presented here by David McGowan -- certainly not enough to believe the author's own unfortunate passing due to illness after publishing this book is suspicious, having let all these covert cats out of all these covert bags, despite his repeated attempts to convince me that the untimely deaths of Jim Morrison, Gene Clark, Phil Ochs, Mama Cass, and so many others were exactly that, silencing them from revealing the truth.

The truth about how US military intelligence secretly recruited the sons and daughters of their own agents, plus offspring of the super-rich, and countless others, to stage a music scene in L.A. in the mid-60s that would spawn the hippie movement and distract the youth of America from their growing antipathy to the war in Vietnam and from other social movements.

Or was it organized crime? Or drug dealers? Or corporate America? Or satanists? Or all of them working together to suppress the youth movement? And failing miserably! Anti-war protests only escalated, hedonism and drug use became ubiquitous, civil rights laws were enacted even while race riots tore cities apart, and Nixon ultimately resigned in disgrace.

Or maybe, just maybe, this was an organic music scene, promoted by corporate business interests trying to cash in on the youth movement? That's (for real, not being snide) all of American history in every facet of life. Add it up and the bottom line is privilege -- while the rest of us schlubs work to pay the rent, rich kids indulge their rock star fantasies, and hey, some of them make it!

So, Mr. Occam, apply your famous razor and tell us, which is it? American business interests making money off the largest population boom of the modern era? Or covert, criminal, and occult operations trying to subvert youth culture for their own nefarious ends?

McGowan's methods are textbook examples of misinformation as has become so common in contemporary media. Selective facts, often lacking context. Correlation as evidence of causation, even when correlation is tenuous ("almost exactly", "nearly perfect". and "virtually identical" actually mean inexactly, imperfectly, nonidentical). Multiple degrees of separation as the basis for suspicion, and the inability to absolutely disprove a negative as proof of the opposite.

There is lampshading -- presenting possible excuses for preposterous assertions. Better yet, sarcasm and mocking of counterarguments or even facts -- often by describing facts and obvious Occam explanations as "reported, supposed, claimed," or "alleged(ly)" (used 59 times in the text) and "curious(ly)" (used an astounding 79 times!). Meanwhile, unfounded speculation unsupported by evidence is presented uncritically with benign modifiers like "rumored, seemingly, believed to be, legendary," and the like.

Best of all is the use of questions instead of statements (Tucker Carlson's favorite tactic). McGowan can plausibly deny his massive leaps of faith by saying he's only asking questions. Meanwhile, if the reader answers those questions themselves, they are invested in the results because they are their own ideas, masking the reality that those ideas have been implanted.

I could debunk much of McGowan's presentation in what would probably be as long of a book as he has written. Here are a few:

The hippie movement did not start in 1965 with the Byrds and Mamas & Papas. San Francisco was in full swing, major players having come together years earlier in San Jose and Santa Cruz -- Ken Kesey and his Pranksters had already completed their epic Furthur bus trip to the 1964 New York World's Fair and returned to conduct their acid tests. The New York folk scene, already a decade old, already past its prime.

Greenwich Village folkies or Haight pranksters could not be accused of being agents of the establishment, especially with so many roots in the gay community and among communists. Even Vito Paulekas and his gang in L.A., central to the success of the Byrds and others, were already espousing a hippie ethos (or at least a hippie sense of fashion) as far back as 1962.

Frank Zappa was 12 in 1952 when his father left the chemical weapons program, where Zappa's exposure to chemicals and radium treatment for his illness likely led to his premature death due to cancer years later. The Zappas moved to California, where Frank Sr. was an academic. His mother encouraged him musically, not his father. How could his father, a chemist, not military intelligence, foresee the hippie movement a decade in advance and groom his pre-teen son to be a rock star who could direct it to government ends?

And how does Zappa's obsession with modern classical music fit in? Or his 12 hour days working on music that wasn't even very popular? Or his recruitment of some of the least successful, worst musical acts ever? Captain Beefheart was a high school friend, a non-talent who would never have gotten anywhere without Zappa. Wild Man Fischer didn't get anywhere even with Zappa's help. These guys didn't subvert anything except our musical sensibilities. Alice Cooper was his only big find, and that was some time later.

Emblematic of how McGowan warps all logic: he wonders how Frank's mother could get a world renowned composer like Edgar Varese on the phone to talk to her son, a big fan. Never mind that she failed to get him on the phone, she got his wife. But without a readily available explanation (maybe she called 411, giving it a shot in the dark), the only alternative is that Frank Sr. must have used his influence as a major player in the chemical weapons program to coerce Varese as part of his decade-in-advance scheme. Do you follow, Mr. Occam?

So how did a total non-musician like Jim Morrison write so many great songs? Did he, McGowan muses disdainfully, hum the songs to his bandmates? If McGowan had done his research (he seems to have only googled his way through this book), he'd know that yes! Morrison did indeed sing his lyrics to Krygier and Manzarek and they transcribed what they heard to their instruments. More likely McGowan knew this famous factoid and chose to mislead his readers on purpose.

Likewise, he wonders how Jim and Ray could meet at random on a beach in Venice but not during all their years together at film school. Well, they did actually meet in film school! The scene on the beach was a chance re-union after graduation. And how did the Doors manage to become an overnight sensation? Must have been government influence! No, it did take them a couple of years to hit big -- they sequestered themselves for all that time, quite famously, to learn all their songs, and did not emerge until they had mastered them.

And hey, they all played their own instruments! How about that? Jim's songs were hardly apolitical -- have you ever listened to The End? And what was Jim doing on Ed Sullivan defying the host by singing "higher"? It's not all that unusual for a pop artist to not be musically literate -- hello, Paul McCartney? Can't read or write music. I study guitar with a Rock Hall of Famer who doesn't read music -- that's more the rule rather than the exception, it's more rock 'n' roll to not be classically trained.

So which was it, Mr. McGowan, were the Byrds musically inept, or were at least four of them excellent musicians and/or singers? Roger McGuinn (his name is repeatedly mispronounced) is barely examined, given his musically impeccable background. He was their creative force, the one who made a Dylan folk song Beatlesque -- if his story is not to be believed and the Byrds were totally manufactured by covert forces, then that brilliant idea came from some master CIA tunesmith who has kept that secret to this day, while McGuinn still tours, telling that story every single show?

You really want to hinge your argument on David Crosby, with that golden voice, not being a good enough guitar player? And hey, if you knew the first thing about the guitar, he's actually a unique and outstanding guitarist. That the record company forced them to use Wrecking Crew pros in recording sessions was (again) the rule rather than the exception. Would you say Simon & Garfunkel were inept? The Wrecking Crew played on their songs -- Sound of Silence was a flop as an acoustic folk song, it only hit big when session players were added, so what? That makes it a nefarious governmental / criminal / corporate conspiracy?

But the Byrd that drives McGowan over the edge is Gene Clark. He died of a heart attack at 46, just days after the Byrds' Rock Hall of Fame induction. Quite unusual, doubly so, suggesting another expert job by our singular CIA assassin. Except, the heart attack was caused by a bleeding ulcer, the result of chronic alcoholism, for which he had already undergone surgery, and he had throat cancer. He went on an alcoholic binge after the induction and paid the ultimate price.

For all of his songwriting, of the nineteen Byrds singles that cracked Billboard's Top 100, Clark only wrote or co-wrote two (the only major hit being Eight Miles High). McGuinn wrote or co-wrote seven (not including Eight Miles High) and was the arranger of the five Beatlized Dylan and Seeger hits that were their biggest. For all of his prolific songwriting, only two of Clark's songs scored chart hits -- Eight Miles High and The Turtles' cover of You Loved Me (both co-written with McGuinn, though they were primarily Clark's compositions).

Neil Young went from Canada to L.A. to find Steve Stills. Took a while, but they ultimately saw each other going opposite directions down Sunset Strip in cars. So because it's normally impossible for cars to pull a U-ie on Sunset, even though all five participants in that event say they did pull a U-ie, the only other option available is a vast secret conspiracy? Again, toward what end? Who gains by Stills and Young having a hit with For What It's Worth? Other than Stills and the record company (and the listening public)? It wasn't even a protest song but was inspired by a minor riot on Sunset Strip. It wasn't even that big of a hit!

So what drew these musicians to LA when the music scene was centered in NYC, Nashville, Memphis? And were they really musicians, their music actually played by studio musicians? Could it be (gasp!) that the very proficiency of the Wrecking Crew is what brought them to LA? Where a skyscraper shaped like a record with the name of THE major record label (the Beatles' US label) across the top in giant letters? Where no less a personage than Bob Dylan went to find out what this whole folk rock thing was about after the Byrds transformed his Mr. Tambourine Man?

McGowan alternates the "What drew them?" question with "How is it they all knew each other?" Without ever acknowledging the contradiction therein -- another tactic of misinformation, attack from both sides. Of course the answer is, that's what drew them, that they already knew each other! In addition to many of them having been there in the first place, that's where they grew up -- Crosby, Morrison, Zappa, Jackson Browne, et.al.

Of the "immigrants" -- Stills and Richie Furay were in a band together in NY when they decided to go in L.A. Young, who had played with them when they toured Canada, went to L.A. to find Stills. Joni Mitchell went to L.A. on Crosby's recommendation after he saw her play in a Florida nightclub. James Taylor and Roger McGuinn came to L.A. after playing gigs at the Troubadour. Carole King came to L.A. because her friend Taylor was there. Millions of others moved to L.A. because that's what people have been doing since California became California. Where's the mystery?

McGowan actually doesn't wonder at all what drew Joni, Carole King, and Linda Ronstadt to Laurel Canyon. In fact, he barely mentions them, never mind their stature at the very top of the heap of Laurel Canyon artists. In fact, occult fraudster Aleister Crowley and his birthday are mentioned more often in this book that those three seminal Laurel Canyon figures COMBINED! (19 to 16) -- and he was long dead before the 1960s, and was only ever in L.A. for visits. His birthday is mentioned more than Carole King, whose Tapestry is one of the best selling albums from that era, one of the albums that literally defines Laurel Canyon.

Indeed, McGowan has virtually nothing to say about Laurel Canyon in the early 1970s, when the three women were there, dominating the scene along with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Eagles, and Jackson Browne. Because very few of those artists, other than holdovers from the mid-60s, had anything to do with his military intelligence conspiracy, and just about all of them lived long and productive lives -- almost all of them continuing to be active politically on the liberal side to this day, long after the end of the "mission" would have allowed them to stop pretending.

Then there are the last three chapters of the book -- Harry Houdini, The Police, and the Dating Game Killer. Nothing to do with Laurel Canyon in the 60s-70s. The Dating Game Killer epilogue is an obvious promotion, not even lightly veiled, for another McGowan book. Yet it stands as the consummate example of how he omits, distorts, and outright misstates clear undisputed facts. To wit, all of these things McGowan forgot to mention:

The accused killer was convicted of a lesser charge in his first trial because the victim refused to testify. He was ID'd in Samsoe's murder when a police sketch was recognized by his parole officer. Samsoe's earrings were found in a Seattle locker which the killer never disputed was his (McGowan suggests a frame job), arguing that they were his own (other victims' earrings were also found there). It took that many years to connect him to other murders because a new law allowed DNA collection against one's will (the DNA proving his guilt). He pled guilty to two New York murders and was being tried for two other crimes in L.A. at the same time as the Samsoe trial. McGowan fails to tell us any of this, suggesting that somehow he was set up.

And there is so much omitted and distorted about Dana Crappa that is too extensive to recount. All of this has nothing to do with Laurel Canyon, not even with McGowan's insane conspiracy theory.

Finally, after way too much information, there's this: a lot of actual military intelligence plots have been exposed, notably (in relation to the hippie movement) the MK Ultra LSD experiments, as well as Iran-Contra in the 80s that caused crack to flood L.A. and other cities in an analogous manner. If McGowan's thesis -- that the entirety of the intelligence community tried to take down the entirety of the 1960s youth movement -- was real, we'd know by now, there'd be some real evidence. McGowan's manipulation of Google results does not qualify.