trappings of a late Victorian Gothic fantasy. There is heavy, dark furniture, medieval armor, animal heads and everywhere there are skulls and bones, including a skeleton the Bonesmen call “Madam Pompadour”.

Icke: If you listen to what people have said who’ve had some experience with that secret society, the Skull and Bones, it is more than a talking shop. It involves worship of the skull.

Rosenbaum: A number of reports say that there are niches with human skulls and who’s skulls they are. Supposedly the skulls are famous people, and there’s one skull that was labeled the skull of Geronimo. The reason why skulls and bones figure so prominently in it is a kind of strain of imagery that dates back to Masonic societies in Germany in which it was important for a youth to contemplate his death.

Narrator: The Skull and Bones initiation ceremony is said to be held in April in The Tomb’s basement. One distinguished member serves as Master of Ceremonies. Once enrobed, he is known as “Uncle Toby”. The shortest senior is appointed “Little Devil” and dons a satanic costume. A Bonesman with a deep voice is dressed as Don Quixote, another is dressed as the college’s founder, Elijah Yale. Still another is given Papal vestments. It would all be rather funny if it weren’t for the fact that among the former Bonesmen are 3 [US] Presidents- William Howard Taft, George Bush, George W. Bush, numerous Senators and Ambassadors, industrialists like William Whitney, CIA agents, State Department officials, and publishing magnate Henry Luce.

Rosenbaum: For close to 2 centuries, Skull and Bones has produced the stewards and leaders of the American ruling class. The Eastern establishment elite core of diplomats, spies, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Presidents…

Icke: The Skull and Bones society seems to be particularly important for bringing American elite bloodline young people into the web and being initiated into the web.

Rosenbaum: I see the Skull and Bones people as, in effect, the people who created the American character, and they had their character formed in the basement of this strange Tomb of Skull and Bones.

Icke: The reason that it is so secret is because if the people of America realized what its elite Presidents of the future get up to, they’d realize that they live in anything but the “Land of the Free”.

Narrator: Reports indicate that within The Tomb, Bonesmen operate on “Skull and Bones Time”, which is 5 minutes ahead of the time in the rest of the world, which is referred to as “Barbarian Time”. Every Thursday and Sunday at 6:30, they gather for dinner in the Firefly Room. Non-alcoholic drinks are served in skull-shaped cups- Skull and Bones is a dry society.

Rosenbaum: Thursday night is a sort of general autobiographical session which in the basement of The Tomb, in the presence of all this occult Masonic ritual of skeletons and coffins and Death’s Heads and all these sort of things, someone spills the secrets of his life, or tells the narrative of his life. But then on Sunday there’s a special session that is given the name “Connubial Bliss”. And in that session it’s a sexual autobiography. It’s hard to imagine George Bush, the former President, chattering away about his early sexual experiences. [Picture of man being closed into coffin] Nonetheless, one feels that he has to have gone through it, it certainly is required of the society.

Narrator: Absolute secrecy is also required. In his 1999 autobiography, George W. Bush devotes just one sentence to his membership in Skull and Bones. “My senior year, I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society so secret I can’t say anything more…” The secrecy, according to some researchers, is there to protect the fact that Skull and Bones funnels its initiates into positions of power and influence. In 1977, for example, George W. Bush forms his first company, Arbusto Energy, with the help of several Bonesmen investors.

Rosenbaum: Skull and Bones is a lifelong society, an “old-boy’ network. It’s a way for members of the Establishment to nurture, advance, promote people who think like them, people who belong to the same kind of class, the same kind of elite culture, and so its power grows, in a way, after one graduates.