Back in 1997, when I was visiting my friend Cate in Germany, we took a trip down the Rhine River. We started in Cologne , and traveled on a tourist boat to Drachenfels Castle at Konigswinter, where we took a trip up the mountain on the Drachenfelsbahn to see the castle, then walked back down.
While we were on the boat floating down the Rhine, passing all the vineyards and wineries that make the Rhine's famous Rieslings, Cate pointed out a resort hotel high on a mountain above the river and mentioned that it was one of the meeting places for the Bilderberg Group, which was a secret society of world leaders that met to discuss world affairs.
At the time, I had no clue what the heck Cate was talking about. Since then, I've heard the term mentioned a handful of times, and gathered that there were conspiracy theories surrounding it.
Then, I checked out Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson, which deals heavily with the organization because the group is central to the conspiracy theories of almost all major terrorist and extremist organizations; including radical Islamists, white supremacists, and radical right-wing ideologists like Timothy McVeigh.
Over the past five or six years, more information has become available about the Bilderberg Group, especially because of Jon's book, in which he was able to witness the participants enter a meeting, and later interviewed members of the group. He was also able to witness a ceremony at the Bohemian Grove, whose attendees had a very similar guest list.
But I wonder how Cate knew as much as she did back in 1997.
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