Jim Jones born May 13,1931 son of Ku Klux Klansman in Lynn, Indiana.  He was the leader of one of the most terrifying events in the 1970's.  He was thought to be a secret agent on antipsychotic drugs.  He had a square jaw, jet black hair, and wore sunglasses almost everywhere he went.

 

Jim Jones on left
 
          Jones was fascinated by church  work at an early age.  By 1963 Jim Jones had his own church and huge congregation in Indianapolis. His church was called the Temple Full Gospel Church.  This church was interracial, which was something not heard of in Indianapolis at this time.
 
          Jim had many ways of leading his church.  He most often led his church with faith healing, visions and advice from extraterrestrials. 
 
         Jim suffered from many things such as: fainting spells, heeded advice from extraterrestrials, practiced faith healing, and experienced visions of the Holocaust.
 
         Jones soon sought guidance from a January 1962 issue of the Esquire magazine.  This magazine told of the nine safest places on Earth.  One which Jones chose was Brazil.  
 
         After spending a short time in Brazil he moved his congregation to California.  Then eventually he moved them to an isolated area of Guyana jungle naming the new settlement after himself, Jonestown.
 
         Jonestown was like a prison.  Kids who were bad were hung into a 6-by-4 foot well.  The kids were hung upside down by there feet into late hours of the night.
 
          In May 1978, Layton a trusted financial lieutenant for Jones, slipped out of Guyana.  She went to the U.S. consulate and later to newspapers with a warning that Jones was conducting drills for a mass suicide.

 

Layton
 
           There was little government action until November 1978.  U.S. representative, Leo Ryan led a delegation of reporters and relatives to Jonestown to check out the problem reported.
 
           Just as Ryan landed in Guyana to investigate human rights abuses at Jonestown Jim Jones ordered him and four other cult members assasinated, as was done.
 
           Jones then decided to put the suicide plan into action.  Reverend Jim Jones ordered 911 member of his flock to kill themselves by drinking a cyanide potion.  They were told that the liquid contained poison and that they would die within 45 minutes of drinking the potion.  They all did as they were told.  If anyone tried to escape they would be shot.

This picture shows the awful destruction to the town and to the people after the mass suicide.
 
           The cultists were said to have been brainwashed.  People even thought Jones held them as virtual slaves.  
 
           Jones was found shot in the head.  We still do not know if Jones committed suicide or was shot by another person.  Among the 911 dead, 270 were young children.  The body count jumped by more than 400 within two days after the suicide. 
 
           Guyanese coroner Leslie Mootoo testified that as many as 700 of the dead people appeared to have been killed, not suicide at all.  Which soon led to many more investigations at Jonestown.
 
          Jones and members were very cultish.  For example Jones claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus as well as Ikhnaton, Buddha, Lenin, and Father Divines. People of the church believed almost anything Jones said so they believed this to be true.
 
          Jonestown was a CIA-run concentration camp.  It was set up as a dry run for the secret governments attempt to reprogram the American psyche.
 
          In all the times Jones moved his church, people thought he was had the occupation from a retired navy man to a gigolo trying to support his family.
 
           " Some people here believed he was an agent for the CIA," one neighbor reported.
 
           He helped out many local and even national campaigns.  He was seen as a healer with much power in the community.  
 
           In 1979 Phil Kerns whose mother and sister died at Jonestown wrote a book.  It was about the possibility of a Soviet Conspiracy behind Jonestown. 
 
           " Jones was a marxist, " Kerns wrote," who had numerous contacts with officials of both the Soviet governments," Among other suspicious facts, Kerns notes that shortly before the massacre two People's Temple members spirited $500,000.00 out of the cult's colony to the Soviet embassy.
 
           Jonestown was said to be a horrible government.  The government experiments were thought of as some sick, racist thing a plan like the Germans', to exterminate.
 
          Some reasons for this mass suicide were the peoples fear of Red Communism and the Nuclear war that the Cold War climate had instilled so many Americans.  Jones preached to the Temple members that his event would keep them safe from World War Three.
 
           There were large amounts of  psychoactive, i.e., mind control drugs found on the site of the suicide.  Larry Layton, Jones' lieutenant who was the only person charged of the killing was described as sinking into a " posthypnotic trance" as he was under Jones.  His own father had even called him "a robot."
 
            " I believe that it is possible that Jonestown may have been a mind control experiment," Holsinger said in a  1980 lecture, " that Leo Ryan's congressional visit pierced that veil and would have resulted in its exposure, and that our government, or its agents the CIA, deemed it necessary to wipe out over nine hundred American citizens to protect the secrecy of the operation."
 
            The "operation," if there was one, may have been continued after the suicides.  There have been attempts to repopulate Jonestown with Dominican and Indochinese refugees, backed by the Billy Graham organization.
 
             There was a Jonestown doppelganger in Guyana even while Jones was still in business.  Self-styled " Rabbi" David Hill, with his eight thousand-member Nation of Israel cult, was powerful enough to earn the nickname" vice prime minister" in his travels through the country.
 
            In 1980, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence announced that there was "no evidence" of CIA involvement at Jonestown.
                                                               

Kylee Templer

8th American History

Rossville Jr. High

Post-World War II America Project

May 2002

 

 

 

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