Who are the Cassiopaeans?
(part II – a personal reflection)

By Vincent Bridges
© 2003

I suppose I should be flattered. To be the object of someone’s obsession is in a way flattering, right up until the moment when the obsessed fan becomes a stalking killer.

For the last couple of years, I have been the object of a whole cult’s obsession, and it has been anything but flattering, to all involved. The Cassiopaeans have made me their primary target and their evil “psychopath” of choice. Their whole mythology rests on the fact that I am some kind of alien reaction machine sent to destroy their work. And if not that, then for sure a cointellpro agent of some kind… This, as I said, has become something of an article of faith within the cult, a fact that is funny in a darkly comic way.

To judge from their denouncement of me, my character, my mental state and so on, one might supposed that I had done some truly heinous thing to these people for them to be so hell-bent on making me into a villain. And yet, as one wades through page after page of hyper-inflated and heavily plagiarised text, one finds that I did nothing to them at all, Didn’t steal any of their money, wreck their cars, steal their furniture, beat them up, or do any “psychopathic” thing at all, Yet, I am labelled a psychopath at every turn.

My “crime,” other than a small mistake in a five-year-old bio blurb for a radio show that went off the air three years ago, was trying to be heard. If I had only gone away when dismissed, none of this would have happened, is the story they try to fly in the official version. So, if I challenge the all-mighty queen of the Cassiopaeans, then I am an evil “psychopath.” Once I was identified as a non-human “Organic Portal” then any sort of harassment and defamation was permissible.

And so it became a moral act for members of the cult to assassinate my character, by any means necessary. The Cassiopaeans told outright lies, wrote letters from supposedly official members of their “Foundation,” misrepresented themselves to universities, magazines and other friends, neighbours and employers in an attempt to get anything they could on me, and then use what they found to completely discredit me. Even with all that work, they didn’t find anything more heinous than a mistake on a single bio blurb.

But that didn’t stop them from continuing to repeat their lies. Here’s one example:
“At the same time, a former group member, an English teacher at the University of Wisconsin, had been researching Mr. Bridges credentials through the databases available to the university where she is employed. She discovered that Mr. Bridges had none of the credits he claimed. She attempted to find references to his early work. She found none. Looking for his name among the publications he had listed in his publishing credits, nothing was found under the name Vincent Bridges.”

The truth, as reported by the individual in question, Dr. Terri Burns, is quite different:
“In any case, my "research" did not show that Vincent's publishing credentials were false. They showed that he had written far more than he'd claimed to… What Laura has done in the sentence where she mentions me is seize upon the one "credit" problem I did find, from an old bio, and run with it for going onto ten months, while ignoring all "research"--basically, all the rest of what anyone found--that showed Vincent has many publishing credentials. When I and others - including Vincent himself - provided information about his publications she did not change any of her statements.”

But, to the Cassiopaeans, none of this matters: “As it happened, based on the information provided by Mr. Bridges, the to-date return on his claims and credentials from the various parties contacted has been 100 percent negative.” Is she just flat out lying? Apparently so…

And so the expose went on and on, from one “deception” to another. Never mind that the deception was coming from the Cassiopaeans… And even though several of my friends from that era contacted them and attempted to set the record straight, on my college career and on other points, they refused to retract anything. Even when they deceived the University of South Carolina to get my college transcript, they only published part of it, and pretended that even though it verified my story, I was somehow still a liar and a fraud.

The best part of their expose is where they took my unpublished novel, I Was the Devil’s Probation Officer, as fact and then wrote to various folks trying to prove I was lying. The response from such people as Michael Aquino was unintentionally hilarious. One fellow even commented that it must be fiction! Yet, still the expose ground on…

In the end, after thousands of words, they could find nothing. Like Bush in Iraq, there is no smoking gun because there never was one. They claim I’m a psychopath, yet can’t point to anything that suggests such a conclusion is in any way warranted. They claim I am some kind of COINTELLPRO agent, yet present not one single shred of anything even faintly resembling evidence that I have any kind of background in or connection to any kind of official, or unofficial, intelligence agency or organization. Why? Because I’m not a psychopath, and I’m certainly not an agent of anything, period.

Like I said obsession is a scary thing…