There is a very good reason why
Reagan survived the
assassination attempt in
1981: he had
mystical help of his own.
When Reagan was elected, he and his
advisors believed that the
curse could be
real, and that Reagan stood a good chance of falling before its
power. So it was necessary to develop
countermeasures to insure that Ronnie would be able to
escape the curse.
It was not believed that the administration could trust the
Cherokees or any other
Indian tribe to provide
accurate information about the curse -- Indians tended to be
Democrats, according to
conventional wisdom, and would not want to keep a
Republican president from dying in office. Besides, it was also believed that Reagan's few
Western movies in
Hollywood could lead to added
hostility from Indians. So since Reagan and his advisors could not bring themselves, for better or worse, to
trust the Indians, it was decided to seek
alternate methods to thwart the curse.
Back in the
1950s, the
Soviets and the
KGB instituted an
ESP research program, and the
CIA, fearful of falling behind in the
psychic arms race, started their own
paranormal research division. After the fall of the
USSR, it was discovered that the Soviets spent most of their time trying to get
gypsy fortune-tellers to read their minds, but the CIA was more successful, merging their
ESP program into
Majestic-12, the
secret division assigned to research the artifacts left at the
saucer crash site in
Roswell,
New Mexico. Majestic-12 had employed the
scientific method,
unscrupulous brain surgery,
illegal drugs, and
good old American know-how to craft a moderately
reliable staff of
telepaths,
telekinetics,
precognitives (with an almost 80% success rate at predicting the
Super Bowl), and one
pyrokinetic (able to light a
match from 30 feet away --
MJ-12 has high hopes for his children). In addition, the CIA and MJ-12 had performed a few
experiments in what can only be called
magick; they had studied
medieval grimoires, researched
primitive shamanism, and performed minor
rituals and
castings -- nothing more impressive than
fertility spells and
seances, but enough to understand the basics.
While the CIA and Majestic-12 were researching all things
paranormal, Reagan was doing his part for the cause. Reluctant to deal much with "
un-Christian" studies like
magick, Reagan contacted prominent
ministers, including
Billy Graham,
Pat Robertson, and
Jerry Falwell, and asked them to
pray for him very, very hard. In fact, the CIA encouraged this -- they knew they were inexperienced in
spellcasting and
psionic techniques, and felt that if
God could give 'em a hand, so much the better. And, though Reagan was not a
Catholic, he was a
movie buff and had seen "
The Exorcist," so he contacted
Cardinal John O'Connor to inquire about the possibility of exorcising the
White House. So with the CIA and MJ-12 casting spells and holding seances and ministers and priests conducting
exorcisms and
prayer breakfasts, preparations for the removal of the curse were well underway by mid-
March of
1981...
Unfortunately,
John Hinckley shot Reagan on
March 30.
Faced with the sudden and
unexpected manifestation of the curse, MJ-12 went into
emergency mode, scrambling several
psychics and
exorcists to the
hospital to perform as many
curse-removal and
healing incantations as possible while Reagan was in
surgery. There were a few
touchy moments, but thanks to both the
surgeons' skill and MJ-12's spells, Reagan pulled through.
While MJ-12 and the CIA believed that their preliminary incantations had helped prevent the initial
loss of life in the shooting, they were also concerned that their
psychics had completely failed to
predict the shooting. This was eventually tied to the
interference of several complete
frauds who had wormed their way onto the
psychic task force -- most notably,
Jeanne Dixon and
Uri Geller -- but some
evidence also suggested that other spells were being cast to
hinder efforts to save Reagan's life. It is believed, though there is no hard evidence to support the conclusion, that
Anton LaVey, founder and head of the
Church of Satan in America, employed high-ranking
moles in Falwell's and Robertson's organizations and worked against Reagan with the intent to
humiliate the
preachers...
There were other
ramifications as well.
Majestic-12's
deep cover agent in the
White House was
disgraced and almost
exposed after the
stress of the
shooting prompted him to proclaim to the
press that he was
in charge at the White House.
First Lady Nancy Reagan was also profoundly affected by the incident and became interested in
astrology -- one of MJ-12's most trusted psychics,
Joan Quigley, was assigned as her official
astrologer.
Finally, some MJ-12 researchers fear that the
hurried nature of their spells may have had an
adverse reaction on the
President himself -- they suspect that a
magical backlash or an unnoticed spell
failure may have caused Reagan's
Alzheimer's Disease...
So has
the Presidential Curse finally been broken? No one knows for sure. MJ-12 hopes that all their work in the
'80s has put it to rest or at least
weakened it significantly, but they admit that there is no way to tell for certain until after
Bush gets out of office...