Do you realize?

• Freemasonry’s first American lodge included a Benjamin Franklin among its users.

• The Knights Templar began as impoverished warrior monks then advanced into bankers.

• Groom Lake, Dreamland, Homey Airport, Paradise Ranch, The Farm, Watertown Strip, Crimson Square, “The Package,” are names for Region 51.

An indispensable instruction, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies connects the dots and models the record right on a bunch of greedy gurus and murderous messiahs, crepuscular cabals and suspicious coincidences. Some topics are familiar-the Kennedy assassinations, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, the People’s Temple and Heaven’s Gate-and some astonishing, like Oulipo, a select group of intellectuals who produced crazy formulas for creating literary masterpieces, and the Chauffeurs, an eighteenth-century society of French house invaders, who established fire with their victims’ feet.