Narrator: To trace the history of America’s secret societies and divine their true motivations presents a unique challenge. By its very definition, a secret society is secret and its rituals and symbols are not easily uncovered. There are thousands of books, media reports, and Internet sites all professing to know the true history of these societies. But few agree on what that truth is.

Pipes: It’s a kind of pseudo-scholarship. It has the form of real scholarship, but it doesn’t follow any of the logical rules that are required by scholarship.

Narrator: Although there are hundreds of secret societies operating in the United States, there are a few whose names appear frequently. They are the Freemasons, Skull and Bones, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the most secretive of all, Bilderberg. Although many of these groups have a public face and diverse membership rolls, conspiracy researchers like David Icke believe these groups are all controlled by one elite group.

Icke: The structure by which the world is controlled by a few people, literally a handful at the very top, is like Russian dolls- one doll inside another inside another inside another. I call this web in which they all fit the Illuminati, the illuminated ones, illuminated to knowledge that the rest of us don’t get. And that Illuminati has been manipulating for centuries to bring about what is now appearing before our eyes.

 Narrator: The notion of a few hands that surreptitiously pull all the strings is not new… it is as old as the oldest secret societies [pictures of Egyptian ruins].

Icke: …with some of the most famous people in the world today. You find out that their rituals are an absolute mirror of the ones that were carried out in Babylon, in Egypt and the ancient world in general. It’s an unbroken span of manipulation from the far ancient world to the present day.

Narrator: While it’s difficult to pinpoint when the first secret societies were formed, cuneiform tablets from the Sumerian civilization may suggest it is as early as 2500 BC. But we do know that Egyptian pharaoh Tahutmos III creates in 1500 BC a group that follows the modern definition of a secret society: elite members who perform secret rituals and possess secret knowledge they use to influence civilization.

Icke: They were the people that built the fantastic structures like the Pyramids and stuff… with knowledge that a primitive people would never have been able to do.

Marrs: The reason a lot of the ancient knowledge had to be kept secret was simply because the knowledge they had would have empowered the people and that is not what the ruling leadership desired.

Narrator: By the end of the First Millennium AD, one small group of 9 French Crusaders form under the name “Knights Templar”.

Icke: Now the official story is that they were created to protect pilgrims visiting the Holy Land, right? Well there’s nine of these guys for nine years… I mean they don’t protect a lot of pilgrims… it was a cover story. They went to Jerusalem and they stayed there for 9 years and they were searching for something and it seems like they found it, whatever it was. And suddenly things changed very rapidly. This small little 9-man organization started to massively expand.

Narrator: Just what the Knights Templar find remains a mystery. The persistent rumor is that they find the Holy Grail, which is, depending on alternate legends, either the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper or a piece of the cross he was crucified on.

Icke: It became one of the most if not the most influential organizations in Europe. To join the Templars you had to give them all your wealth and land, and they were signing up the noble families of Europe. They became massively wealthy, massively quickly.