Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and the Laurel Canyon Conspiracy

On August 4, 1964, Captain George Stephen Morrison, commanding the USS Bonham Richard off the coast of Vietnam, ordered his crew to fire on what his radar showed as an incoming attack by multiple Vietnamese ships. No casualties resulted on either side—the radar had malfunctioned due to a storm. But President Lyndon B. Johnson used the mistaken Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate U.S. involvement and officially start the Vietnam War. Captain Morrison became a key figure in that conflict. According to a conspiracy theory popularized by author David McGowan, the rear admiral's son may have had his own military mission: grow out his hair, put on leather pants, become the lead singer of The Doors, and sing against the war his father helped start—as part of a government psy-op meant to delegitimize anti-war sentiment before it could spread.

The Theory: Laurel Canyon as a Government Operation

The 1960s anti-war movement began on college campuses, led by respected students and professors from institutions like Harvard and Yale. These were credible, trustworthy voices that made protesting the war seem like the right thing to do. The government, according to the theory, needed to discredit this movement. Their solution: fill it with hippies—people they considered dirty, wild-looking, drug-using, and unreliable. The perfect unsavory image to associate with anti-war sentiment.