Preface to King-Kill/ 33: 
James Shelby Downard's Vision
This excerpt from the essay "King-Kill/33" has been out of print since 1987 and the publication of the first edition of Adam Parfrey's conspiracy anthology, 'Apocalypse Culture.' Subsequent editions of 'Apocalypse Culture' (including the current Feral House edition), do not carry it.
The Campaign for Radical Truth in History (http://www.hoffman-info.com) is pleased to make this excerpt available once again, on the occasion of the 33rd anniversary of the immolation of America's only Catholic president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. May his surviving murderers be yet brought to justice.
Convicted Mafia hit-man Charles Harrelson, a suspected Kennedy assassin, is incarcerated in a Federal prison for the contract killing of a federal judge. (The suspect is the father of "Natural Born Killer" movie star Woody Harrelson, who was directed by "JFK" filmmaker Oliver Stone). Journalists have thus far shown little interest in attempting to interview the senior Harrelson and persuade him to provide information which might lead to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for Kennedy's killing.
The late James Shelby Downard's primal way of looking at things, which is the way I think ancient man perceived the world, encompasses a vision that detects every link and every symbol, beginning with the significance of names, then places and then the obsessive actions which stem from the confluence of the two and which have come to be known as ritual. Publisher Adam Parfrey, who first brought Shelby's work to a mass audience, states:
"In Downard's writings, the products of his subconscious bubble to the surface and catalyze painstaking research. The collision of the poetic against the logical works especially well in the field of conspiracy; it remains the freshest approach to a field of inquiry..."
I remember sitting in Shelby's airstream trailer in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1977, along with the great Fortean philosopher William N. Grimstad and Charles Saunders, a brilliant recluse who was a close friend of Jack Kerouac toward the end of the Beat writer's life (a fact missed by every one of Kerouac's numerous biographers; so much for biographers).
Shelby's conversation that day ranged from the occult significance of the Theremin musical instrument to the sorcerous implications of elevators, the relationship he had with an evanescent rabbit named Petey; the sinister connotations of the circus and the mystical topography of the American Southwest, which Mr. Downard knew the way you and I know our backyard.
As he fried our hamburgers, he regaled us in his prospector's drawl with the hidden wonders of a tapestry of coincidences which he wove from the seeming mundane details of everyday living, into a magic carpet of incomparable strangeness and peerless utility.
Parfrey spoke for many of Shelby's friends and associates when he stated: "Downard has influenced me to look with interest upon the details and the fantastic convergences of life..."
For my money, James Shelby Downard is the one man most intimately tied to the once and future November, on the Camelot calendar's 33rd turning of the wheel, in this age of the Revelation of the Method; the era of the deluge of hidden facts made public, which Downard predicted would not liberate us, but only enslave us further.
More than two decades ago he foresaw the coming of this time as the fulfillment of the final dictum of the alchemical rampage of the elephant Must Be; the behemoth run amok in the fields of our nightmares. As the "X-Files" and the other fictional TV shows which neither I or Shelby have ever seen, purposefully muddy the waters with a flood of pop drivel disguised as revelation, the actual truths are lost in the swirl.
James Shelby Downard looked forward to the time beyond Must Be, to the era which will witness the return of could be. After the coming cataclysmic chastisement has run its cleansing course, we will once again wish upon a star and dream a destiny free of the masonic chain that at present binds our nation as tightly as the hangman's rope once bound the rotted cadavers on Tyburn Tree.
Despite having been relentlessly targeted and attacked for more than a half century, Mr. Downard, unlike poor Kennedy, did trip the Harodim on the winding stairs and did slide down the railing, like a child outwitting enormously big and powerful bad guys, by the fortune which Providence reserves for the guileless. --Michael A. Hoffman II
