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“He writes things like, ‘Assuming the above story is true . . .’ or ‘If we accept Lemurian Fellowship stories as fact . . . ,’” says Colavito. “He uses an awful lot of weasel words. Things like ‘seems,’ ‘might,’ ‘could have been.’ And he does that for a very important reason. That way if ever any of this stuff were conclusively shown to be wrong—‘Well, I never said that, did I? I just said it could have been.’ And that’s a characteristic shared by most of the writers in the field.”
“I can’t believe some of the stuff I read about myself,” says Childress, who maintains that Colavito doesn’t get him at all. True, he’s a Lovecraft fan—he has a poster of the writer’s loathsome alien god-monster, Cthulhu, hanging in his game room. But though he’s dabbled in his theories about aliens—one of his books is titled Extraterrestrial Archaeology—unlike von Daniken, he says, he’s not a “gods-from-outerspace guy.” Rather, “my whole thing is that this stuff is from this planet. These giant ruins aren’t built by extraterrestrials. I say they were built by humans. Mankind and civilization goes back 50,000 years or more. What else can I assume is inaccurate in this book? This guy just plain doesn’t do his research.”
Some of Childress’s publications have landed him in legal trouble. In 1996 he published a bit of pseudonymous samizdat about the Kennedy assassination called The Torbitt Document, which mentions a man named Layton Martens, a New Orleans jazz musician and ancillary figure in assassination lore. The book accuses Martens of arms smuggling, stating he was a “second-generation Russian exile Solidarist agent.” Martens, who’s since died, sued Childress, but the case was tossed before it went anywhere because the statute of limitations had run out. “Once we won the lawsuit we could joke about getting sucked into the Kennedy assassination,” says Childress.
In 1998 Adventures Unlimited published a 48-year-old UCLA master’s thesis titled “Flying Saucers: Fact or Fiction,” by a man named DeWayne B. Johnson. When Johnson, by then a retired journalism professor, got word his work had been published without permission, he sued. Childress pulled the book and settled out of court for a sum tidy enough to allow the professor to recarpet his house.
On any given day you can find Jerry Smith either working the register at Adventures Unlimited Bookstore or shipping orders from the warehouse next door. Smith is the author of HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy, which, having sold some 20,000 copies, usually hovers around the number five spot among the press’s best sellers. The book is about the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, an array of 180 radio antennas in the Alaskan wilderness “aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes,” according to its Web site. Smith’s book examines HAARP’s alleged nefarious capabilities as a weapon of mass destruction, including disrupting worldwide communications, burning holes in the atmosphere, changing the direction of the jet stream, and mass mind control.
At Childress’s invitation, Smith moved to Kempton from Reno, initially taking up residence in the World Explorers Clubhouse to finish his second book, Weather Warfare: The Military’s Plan to Draft Mother Nature, which is due out this month. In it he introduces a theory that HAARP played a role in the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia.
Smith, much more than Childress, seems to know the precise location of every book and DVD in the warehouse. Among the boxes and shelves stacked with titles, from Childress’s The Time Travel Handbook to William Lyne’s Occult Science Dictatorship to Jim Keith’s Saucers of the Illuminati, are certain books and authors beneath his scorn. He calls David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist who argues that the world is ruled by a secret race of reptile men, a “lunatic.”
While his employees may guffaw at the mere mention of Icke, Childress has no problem selling his books. Adventures Unlimited is pretty much an open tent among fringe writers, and he publishes many he disagrees with. Childress says the nonjudgmental atmosphere he’s created is what draws these authors to the “Ancient Science and Modern Secrets” conferences he hosts twice a year. His houses (and his bar and bookstore) fill up with friends and authors, and motels from Pontiac to Kankakee are booked by the hundred or so fans who pay up to $120 to mingle with them for the weekend.
Regular customers make pilgrimages to Kempton from as far away as Ohio, Saint Louis, Minnesota, and Canada. One afternoon this summer a middle-aged customer in the bookstore greeted Childress as if he’d walked in on a red carpet. “I call him the Steven Spielberg of the book world,” said the man, who drives to the bookstore once a month from near the Wisconsin border.
“I’ve single-handedly rejuvenated this little town,” says Childress, who employs some ten people among all his businesses, in addition to his wife, Jennifer Bolm, who handles the finances and helps proofread and edit.
At least one other permanent resident of Kempton moved there because of Adventurers Unlimited. E.P. Grondine is a self-published author who came to Kempton a few years ago, after Childress agreed to distribute his book Man and Impact in the Americas, about the effects of asteroids and comets on the evolution of the first inhabitants of the western hemisphere. “David Hatcher Childress is the most successful publisher of fringe literature in the United States,” Grondine writes in an e-mail. “And I wanted to learn how he did it.” He bought a house in Kempton “for about one year’s rent in Chicago” and got to work on a second book. But lately he and Childress haven’t been getting along. Grondine says he’s now working on a piece about Childress’s involvement with Kieninger and other members of the Stelle group. Childress wouldn’t speak on the record about Grondine.
Today nearly 30 Adventures Unlimited books have been translated into languages including Czech, Bulgarian, Korean, Turkish, Italian, French, and Spanish. And there are bookstores affiliated with Adventures Unlimited in New Mexico, Arizona, Liverpool, and New Zealand. Four years ago Steve Zagata took one of Childress’s tours to Egypt, where they made a short documentary. Now he and Childress are producing a travel show based on the Lost Cities series. Last year they filmed in Egypt, Peru, Bolivia, and Costa Rica and accumulated footage for six programs on ancient technology that they hope to sell to the Travel or Sci-Fi channels.
This fall they’ll begin shooting the bigfoot movie, with actors (Childress asked me a couple times if I know any) portraying members of the World Explorers Club hunting the beast. Jerry Smith will play Professor Wexler, Adventures Unlimited’s Indiana Jones-like mascot. Childress says they’re also planning to shoot a series of manon- the-street interviews in Chicago. “We’ll say, ‘Yeah what do you think of Bigfoot? Is Bigfoot a problem? Did Bigfoot steal your baby?’” They have ideas for a couple other movies they’ll shoot in Arizona, where Childress has another house. One is a western about search for lost treasure, the other a Mad Max-type adventure with vampires and gargoyles called “Mexico Death Race.”
I asked a manager at the Vermillion Valley Bank and Kempton mayor Dean Tharp what they thought of Childress and his impact on the town, but neither would say anything about him for the record. When I asked Childress what he thinks his neighbors think, he said he gets along with them fine for the most part. “I still hear the odd gripe around here,” he says. “And my response to that is ‘Yeah, would they prefer to see a bunch of derelict boarded-up buildings instead?’”
Besides, he’s not leaving anytime soon. Civilization is due for a leveling, and Kempton will be a good place to ride it out.
“I often talk about it as a little oasis out in the country,” he says. “I’m happy that the economy is going great. California is our number one market, so yeah, I don’t want to see Los Angeles destroyed in an earthquake. But I have to admit I kind of think it will happen one day. I’m hoping later than sooner mostly. When the shit hits the fan like that you don’t want to be in a major metropolitan area.”
