Bohemian Grove: the owl, and the meeting that mattered
A private club holds a two-week camp in a Californian redwood grove, opening with a robed ceremony before a forty-foot owl. The ritual is theatre. One meeting held there helped start the Manhattan Project.
The Grove covers around 2,700 acres of redwood forest in Sonoma County, California.
The Bohemian Club was founded in San Francisco in 1872, originally by journalists and artists. It acquired a stretch of redwood forest in Sonoma County, and since the late nineteenth century has held an annual encampment there each July.
Attendance is by membership or invitation and is overwhelmingly male, wealthy and well connected. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, industrialists and university heads have attended, which is documented in their own papers and biographies.
The Cremation of Care
The encampment opens with a ceremony in which robed figures process before a forty-foot concrete owl and burn an effigy representing worldly care.
It has been filmed. The most widely circulated footage was obtained by Alex Jones, who entered the Grove in 2000 and recorded the ceremony.
What the footage shows is a piece of amateur theatre in fancy dress, performed by elderly men, with a script and stage lighting. Whether it looks sinister depends almost entirely on the narration laid over it.
The meeting that actually mattered
In September 1942, a meeting held at the Grove brought together figures involved in American atomic research, including Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer, alongside senior industrial and government participants.
It appears in histories of the Manhattan Project as one of the points at which the programme's industrial scale was discussed.
That is the real thing to take from Bohemian Grove, and it is entirely consistent with the mundane explanation: when powerful people spend a fortnight together without staff, minutes or press, consequential conversations happen.
Why the 1942 meeting is the useful case
Because it can be checked, and because it shows the mechanism without requiring anything hidden.
The people who needed to talk — physicists, industrialists, government officials — were already members or guests. They were in one place for two weeks with no press and no staff.
A discussion about industrial capacity for a programme that did not officially exist could happen there in a way it could not in Washington.
The club has been sued
The Bohemian Club has been the subject of employment litigation in California over its hiring practices, and those proceedings produced sworn testimony and documents about its operations. That is a reminder that a private organisation is not beyond the reach of ordinary law, and that the accessible record on the club comes from courts and payroll rather than from infiltration.
What the objection should be
Not the owl.
It is that senior public officials conduct unrecorded discussions with private industry, at a private club, with no register of who spoke to whom about what. That is a legitimate transparency concern, and it does not require any of the ritual to be sinister.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
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Who attends now?
Lists have leaked periodically and the club does not publish one. Unlike Bilderberg, there is no published attendance record, which makes the modern encampment less scrutable than the 1940s one.
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Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
The National Archives
The British Library
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