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Behind the Gemstone Files |
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The
Skeleton Key AUTHORSHIP ALPHA-1775 GEMSTONES A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z
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Who
is Jim Moore?
After eight years, he says, "I was getting burnt out on the schedule - the grind of having to come up with a fresh hour-long show every week. I started going into re-runs and had to concentrate on moving. The house I was living in was being sold and I was moving out of county and would no longer be eligible to be a CAT-TV producer. In the spring of 1999 I pulled the plug on it, but not until one very powerful last show when I laid out the future we have all come to see since Sept. 11, 2001." He said the celebrity status was getting uncomfortable, as people would come up to him in the grocery store and ask for his autograph and pepper him with questions. One man, he says, came recklessly running across the street, bringing cars to a screeching halt, so he could talk to him and get his autograph. Another time, in a grocery checkout line, he says a man in line behind him noticed the name "The Phoenix Foundation" on his checkbook and asked him if it was the same "Phoenix Foundation" immortalized in MacGyver. "It wasn't but one of the actors, Tex Cobb, who always played a bad guy on the show, told me Henry Winkler had based the show on our Phoenix Foundation after reading one of our first newsletters, published in 1980 or so." [Moore founded the original Phoenix Foundation in 1980, incorporating it in Tennessee. The organization's newsletter, The Omega Report, was the basis for the later TV show by the same name.]
"I ran into truck drivers who swore we were this giant global corporation and that they had seen our trucks on the highways. I don't know who they saw, but we were never the monolithic group featured in MacGyver or the guys on the highway. If we'd had that kind of money, we'd have done an awful lot more than we did. "I never saw myself as a 'TV personality'. I was very intimidated by a camera at first and tried to do the show from a script. That was a disaster so I threw away my notes and just started talking to the camera, ad libbing it and looking at the camera like it was a person in my own living room and we were having a private conversation. The new approach caused the show's popularity to soar." "He just came across as so calm and level-headed," one viewer said, in a comment echoed by a local paper, The Scene, who called him "grandfatherly." "Here he was, talking about things like the end of the world and as horrifying as the material was, he was calming and spiritual about it." The Scene at a few points in its cover story on him, accused him of "ranting and raving" but viewers didn't seem to share that opinion. For years, it ranked as the station's most popular show, Gilchrist said. Many viewers found it by accident, just channel surfing - then froze at what they saw and remain glued to the set. The moment the show (which preceded The X-Files) went off, the phone started ringing. "I met some very good and interesting people," Moore says. "People like songwriter Mickey Newbury, the drummer for the Everly Brothers, city council members, FEMA employees who not only shared my viewpoints about their employer but even brought me inside information. It was a great experience. I was really amazed at how many people watched it, and even more by who watched it." Even the mayor of Nashville at one point admitted he watched the show (and when it was forced off the air, forcefully told CAT-TV board members they'd better straighten up their act and cut out the censorship). But the eight-year episode was not without its frightening moments. "There was one talk, sponsored by the Combat Veterans of America, where I started getting calls ahead of time from so-called out-of-town militia members who asked if they could bring their guns along. I told them no, I didn't think that would be necessary. One guy called up and started asking me questions like what did I think about black and white marriages. I told him I thought if the two people loved each other, it was nobody else's damned business. He got real mad and hung up after calling me some racist names. There were a few assassination threats that led the CVA to post heavy security and metal detectors in the parking lot and at the door." Public meetings were an eclectic mix of New Agers, UFO buffs and hard-core conservatives who felt more at home at militia meetings. "It was then that I realized that no matter how different these people might be - hell, if you locked 'em all in a room for two hours they'd kill each other - once they found they had common ground and a common 'enemy' if you will, it became a different world." Moore says he believes much of the social polarization in today's society is engineered as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy called the Hegelian Principle. "So long as the global power elites can keep us at each other's throats, fighting each other, we pay no attention to what that elite is doing. It's all a big game - a con game - and we're the suckers." His following included nearly as many blacks as whites, and many of the blacks shared the same conservative distrust of the New World Order and power elite. In 1999, he moved to the country where today he lives alone in a small 12x30-foot cabin with electricity but no running water or sewage. There, he says, life is simpler and less rushed. "I can sit at the computer and look up and see a dozen deer not a hundred feet away, or turkeys or raccoons. It's a world I love, and it's every bit as real as the more frightening political world we live in that presses in upon us in the cities." After a difficult year unemployed, he found part-time work as a webmaster and online editor for the Westview (westviewnews.virtualave.net). In August 2001 he underwent emergency open-heart surgery (quadruple bypass) and has been in weakened health since, as he struggles to recover. Faced with staggering medical bills, no job and no insurance, he filed bankruptcy in September, just a week after the 9-11 horror. "There's one person I probably owe the last ten years of my life to," he acknowledges. "I won't give her name, except to call her Penny. She's a professional and I don't want my sorry tale or my problems to affect her. She knows who she is. I lived with her for ten years and I will love her until the day I die. She fed me when I had no food, she put a roof over my head when I had none - and until she decided she no longer supported 'my cause', she encouraged me to dream the impossible dream. "Sometimes in life, angels appear in the flesh and blood form of human beings. 'Angels unaware' was the term Dale Evans Rogers once used. These people don't know they are angels, they just do what they do. Oh, they have faults and weaknesses, but they are still one in a thousand. She was that one in a thousand." Within just a few weeks of beginning cooperation on this project of his life's story, and after releasing chapters of an upcoming book that promises to reveal "what really happened Sept. 11 and what the real agenda is," he was again under surveillance and once more faces jail. This time the charge is back child support. "I called up the attorney just days after I got out of the hospital and she said payments would be suspended until further notice, while I recovered. Then, on May 10, 2002, I got served with an arrest warrant; she denies ever telling me what she she told me, and now claims they don't care if I'm on my deathbed hooked up to life support - I'd better not miss a payment. I've been told they're going to put me away for life and I don't expect ever leave the Williamson County Jail alive. The only alternative is to cough up $17,500 in the next few days. There's no way." In possibly his last weeks of freedom, he has spent his time e-mailing old friends and saying his goodbyes, and getting his affairs in order, as well as trying to prepare a defense. No lawyer will touch his case; Legal Aid has turned him down. He says court rules and procedures have been perverted to deny him even the time to make a response. Medical records have disappeared. His friends report getting strange phone calls and being confronted by strangers in unfamiliar trucks when they enter and leave his home. "Every time I have touched the Gemstone Files, or the events related to them, such as Sept. 11, this is what has happened. If they want to kill me, I guess I'm ready to go home. I've had a good life, not an easy one by any means, but for the most part I've tried to live my life with integrity, with honor and with compassion. And maybe - just maybe - my life is proof that one person can make a difference. Sure, I may have tilted at a few windmills along the way - but, as old Frank said, 'I did it my way.'" For weeks even before this last crisis erupted, he has felt compelled to "get my story down", working until 3 or 4 am, falling into bed exhausted and sleeping for 4-5 hours, then getting up and doing it again. At this writing, Moore has requested and received a continuance. |
"The
hottest levels of hell are reserved for those who,