Acid is Groovy!
Ted Gunderson, from COINTELPRO to Satanic Panic
Journey inside the mind of Ted Gunderson, whose investigation of the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case launched his transformation from respected law enforcement official to professional conspiracy theorist. This episode uncovers how one man helped lay the groundwork for modern conspiracy culture—from satanic panic to QAnon.
This episode of A Paranoid’s History of the United States follows Gunderson's evolution as he chases phantom cults, promotes tales of government mind control, and claims to expose vast underground child trafficking networks. Through interviews with former colleagues and investigators, we reveal how his FBI credentials lent dangerous credibility to outlandish theories that continue to influence American society today.
Whether you're fascinated by true crime, conspiracy culture, or the hidden forces that shape our collective beliefs, this deep dive into Gunderson's "reign of error" illuminates how yesterday's paranoia became today's viral misinformation.
GUESTS:
Oliver "Buck" Revell. Former FBI Associate Deputy Director who worked with Ted Gunderson during his time at the Bureau. Revell served in various senior roles at FBI Headquarters from 1980 until 1991 and became Associate Deputy Director in 1985.
Lucien Greaves. Activist and co-founder of The Satanic Temple who has extensively researched the "satanic panic" phenomenon. Greaves spoke with Gunderson several times in the early 2000s and offers insights into Gunderson's investigative methods and beliefs.
Ed Opperman. Private investigator and host of “The Opperman Report,” Ed knew Ted Gunderson in the 1990s.
SOCIAL MEDIA
HOSTED BY JOSEPH L. FLATLEY. For bonus content, become a paying subscriber my newsletter for only $7 a month.
INTRODUCTION
Lenny Flatley: I’m Joseph L. Flatley. And from Amphibian Media, this is A PARANOID’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Each week, I explore America’s obsession with conspiracy theories, bringing untold stories to light and challenging what we think we know about our nation’s history.
Archival news footage:
REPORTER: “A former Green Beret and Army Special Forces doctor. A father, a killer.”
REPORTER: “MacDonald’s wife, Colette and daughters, 5-year-old Kimberly and 2-year-old Kristen were found bludgeoned and stabbed in the Ft. Bragg home. An ice pick and a knife among the weapons.”
Lenny Flatley: On a winter’s night in 1970, military police at Fort Bragg, North Carolina received a desperate call. The voice on the other end belonged to Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret Army surgeon, who gasped into the phone: “We’ve been stabbed. People are dying.” What authorities discovered at 544 Castle Drive would become a landmark case in American true crime history.
Colette MacDonald, four months pregnant, lay dead on the master bedroom floor, her arms broken from defending herself against a savage assault. The word “PIG” was written in blood on the headboard above her.
In their bedrooms, five-year-old Kimberley and two-year-old Kristen had been slaughtered – Kimberley’s skull was crushed and her body repeatedly stabbed. Kristen had 33 stab wounds from a knife and an ice pick.
The sole survivor was Jeffrey MacDonald himself. He told investigators that four intruders – three men and a woman with long blonde hair, wearing a floppy hat – had broken into the home. The woman, he claimed, held a candle and chanted “acid is groovy, kill the pigs,” while her companions attacked him and his family.
MacDonald said he was knocked unconscious by the intruders. His lung was punctured in the attack.
Archival news footage: “Ted Gunderson - The MacDonald Case & Satanic Ritual Abuse”
Ted Gunderson: “I had a fantastic life. I really didn’t know what it was all about to be frank. The big picture, the true story, until after I retired and uh what happened is shortly after my retirement I was contacted by a group of doctors from Long Beach California and they said that their friend Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald had been tried and convicted of murdering his wife and two children at Fort Bragg [...] These doctor friends of Dr. McDonald said he was absolutely innocent, would you investigate the case?”
Lenny Flatley: In 1979, Ted Gunderson had just retired as head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office after 27 years of distinguished service.
He started working as a private investigator, charging $100 an hour — which was big money back then. That same year, MacDonald began serving his prison sentence, and his supporters were convinced he’d been wrongly convicted.
They hired Gunderson to investigate.
It only took him one day to draw a conclusion: MacDonald had been “railroaded.” This marked the beginning of Gunderson’s transformation from respected FBI veteran to someone who saw conspiracies everywhere.
The MacDonald case deeply affected Gunderson. Here was a Green Beret, a doctor, someone who seemed to represent the best of America — and he was convicted of murdering his family based on circumstantial evidence.
PART 1
Lenny Flatley: Almost immediately, investigators began to doubt MacDonald’s story. His injuries, while serious, paled in comparison to the devastating wounds inflicted on his family.
Also, the physical evidence didn’t match his account — he claimed attackers tore off his pajama top in the living room, yet investigators found just one fiber there. However, they discovered dozens of pajama fibers in the bedrooms — under Colette’s body, in Kimberly’s bedsheets, and beneath Kristen’s fingernail.
For Ted Gunderson, the MacDonald murders would mark the beginning of a strange journey from decorated law enforcement officer to professional conspiracy theorist, forever leaving an indelible mark on American culture.
He spent the next three decades traveling the country, giving talks and radio interviews about secret satanic groups, CIA mind control, and the “New World Order.” He even claimed the U.S. government was planning mass arrests and executions of Americans.
What makes Gunderson’s story remarkable is that before all this, he had a completely different life. For 27 years, he was a highly respected FBI agent who rose to lead major offices in Los Angeles and Dallas. His transformation from trusted federal agent to someone who spread wild conspiracy theories makes his story both fascinating and sad.
Some people praise him as a brave truth-teller, while others see him as someone who lost his way and fell too deep into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
Interview with Olver “Buck” Revell
BUCK: “I first met Ted when he came to Philadelphia as the assistant agent in charge, and I was criminal supervisor.”
This is Oliver “Buck” Revell, a colleague of Gunderson’s whose distinguished career with the FBI spanned over three decades.
From 1980 until 1991, he served in various senior roles at FBI Headquarters. He became Associate Deputy Director of the Bureau in 1985.
When I spoke to Buck on the phone recently, he remembered his former colleague as ambitious but erratic.
Interview with Olver “Buck” Revell
BUCK: “He was always rather rambunctious and — I supervised the bank robbery kidnap squad, and when we had anything come down that he thought was interesting, he’d come over and ask me if he could go out on the scene with me to see what we were doing. He never tried to take over, but he wanted to see what was going on. So we knew each other pretty well.”
Lenny Flatley: When Gunderson joined the Bureau in 1951, his main qualification seemed to be that he looked the part. FBI files described him as having “above average appearance” and “good taste in clothing.” He stood 6 feet tall and weighed 155 pounds.
In 1965, Ted became Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the New Haven, Connecticut FBI office. There, he led investigations under something called Executive Order 10-450. Signed by President Eisenhower, the order banned homosexuals from working for the federal government.
Subsequent FBI investigations were often cruel — involving surveillance, harsh questioning, and threats to expose employees’ private lives. Many innocent people lost their jobs and had their lives turned upside down during this period, as a result of Gunderson’s investigations.
(MUSIC cue)
Lenny Flatley: Lucien Greaves is an activist and the co-founder of The Satanic Temple. He has extensively researched the “satanic panic,” the moral panic that swept up American media and law enforcement in the latter part of the 20th century.
Greaves spoke with Gunderson several times in the early 2000s.
Interview with Lucien Greaves:
GREAVES: “Ted quit the FBI when he went to the director at that time and was demanding that they needed expanded powers to be able to do wiretaps at will, to be able to do search and seizure at will, and they needed to be able to preemptively act... the Department of Justice standards that were demanding things like probable cause and warrants were just far too prohibitive to work with.”
Lenny Flatley: After 27 years of service, Gunderson retired from the FBI in 1979.
According to Buck Revell, the FBI had kept Gunderson on a short leash — or at least, a shorter leash than he would have in civilian life
After his retirement, all bets were off. Gunderson could get as weird as he wanted.
Interview with Olver “Buck” Revell
BUCK: “I think his behavior became much more aggravated after he retired, obviously, being held in check by requirements in the Bureau and some of his conduct would not have been tolerated, if it had occurred when he was on active duty, but there was concern that he had started getting rather flighty. And so at that time, I was in the deputy’s office and had the responsibility for overseeing the SAC’s. And I raised his conduct issues with that time director, Clarence Kelly. But we, I never saw something that would have caused us to remove it at that time, but he’d started to grow, draw attention to himself in ways that we didn’t think were appropriate. And so I’d have to say that even though I knew him, way back, I did become concerned about his his conduct. And he probably heard some of that — I’m sure he did. And that may be the reason why, as he retired and started moving around, and I had continued to advance in the Bureau and had a senior position in it, that he saw fit to say that I was trying to kill him.”
Lenny Flatley: While investigating the MacDonald murders, Gundserson started telling people that the FBI — and Buck Revell in particular — had put out a hit on him. Buck, of course, denies this.
Gunderson was well aware that being targeted by the government could only bolster his credentials as a “fearless truth-teller.”
After leaving the FBI, Gunderson would dive into some of the most sensational cases of the 1980s.
COMING UP: A preschool rocked by claims of satanic ritual abuse. Secret underground tunnels. And a private investigator shares stories from Gunderson’s second career as a professional conspiracy theorist.
PART 2
Lenny Flatley: When Ted Gunderson left the FBI in 1979, he didn’t fade quietly into retirement. Instead, he launched a second career as a private investigator — one that would see him promote some of the most notorious conspiracy theories of the late 20th century.
The timing is significant. Just a decade earlier, the Manson Family murders had shocked the nation. The idea of murderous hippie cults wasn’t just plausible to many Americans — it was their worst nightmare come to life.
Gunderson threw himself into proving MacDonald’s story. He focused his investigation on Helena Stoeckley, the woman in a floppy hat that MacDonald claims was in on the killings.
Her stories were wildly inconsistent. Sometimes she claimed to have been present during the murders, other times she denied any involvement. She freely admitted that her heavy LSD use had left her unable to distinguish between reality and drug-induced hallucination.
But Gunderson wasn’t interested in these inconsistencies. He had found his star witness, and he was determined to make her story fit his theory.
Lucien Greaves again:
Interview with Lucien Greaves:
GREAVES: “He was working with another investigator and that investigator, you know, said some really damning things about Ted Gunderson and the way he conducted that investigation, too. [...] They blamed some Manson-esque cult, and then there’s a lot of questions as to whether this cult existed at all. [...] And it was the investigator working with Ted who was saying that Ted was very abusive, and trying to coerce this mentally unwell lady to agree that she had something to do with these murders. [...] he was really trying to sell the idea of confessing to a crime that she almost certainly didn’t commit.”
ARCHIVAL: McMartin Preschool
PRESENTER: “In what may become one of the biggest child molesting cases ever on record, seven nursery school teachers were arraigned today on more than 100 counts of child molestation.” / “The accused include the preschool owner 76-year-old Virginia McMartin, her daughter and two grandchildren.”
Lenny Flatley: In 1983, the quiet community of Manhattan Beach, California, was rocked by accusations that would spawn the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history. What began as a single parent’s concerns about possible abuse at the McMartin Preschool exploded into a sprawling investigation involving allegations of satanic ritual abuse, secret tunnels, and animal sacrifice. To give you a sense of how ridiculous things got, one of the children who attended the preschool fingered Chuck Norris — of WALKER, TEXAS RANGER fame — as one of the abusers.
After seven years and $16 million in prosecution costs, the case ended without a single conviction. But the damage was done. Lives were ruined, and a community was torn apart.
In 1990, some of the McMartin parents hired Ted Gunderson to oversee a new investigation. He subsequently pressured an archeologist named Gary Stickel to sign off on a report claiming there were secret tunnels under the school — tunnels that never existed.
The McMartin case perfectly exemplifies Gunderson’s methods. He would take a kernel of public anxiety — in this case, fears about child abuse and satanic cults — and spin elaborate theories that played on those fears. He wasn’t interested in evidence that might contradict his theories. Instead, he sought out witnesses to confirm what he already believed, often using questionable tactics to secure their cooperation.
Interview with Lucien Greaves:
GREAVES: “After I read reports of how he had handled Helena Stokely and that kind of thing, then when I saw him talking about finally getting the archeologist to admit there were tunnels under McMartin, then it all became a lot clearer. It just seemed like he was, he was a guy who, who’s, you know, whose real mission in these things was to, was to close the case.”
Lenny Flatley: Ed Opperman is a Private investigator and a podcast host who knew Ted Gunderson in the 1990s.
Interview with Ed Opperman
OPPERMAN: “I was working for this company called Action Research, and I was selling them telephone company information. And so what happened was there was trouble at the company. The company was going out of business, so um [...] somehow me and a bunch of guys wound up with the mailing list and the phone numbers of all the clients over there. And one of the names is Ted Gundersen.”
Lenny Flatley: What started as a cold call to sell phone records turned into a relationship that spanned years.
Interview with Ed Opperman
OPPERMAN: “See, the other guys were kind of afraid to call him when we all had his number, I was the only one [...] ballsy enough to call the Great Ted Gunderson, you know, and get him on the phone and talk to him.”
OPPERMAN: “I’ve mentioned this before in here, and people get mad at me. But there’s this thing called, like, these lonely, old widows, you know, who like to hire private investigators... And it’s very tempting to take those cases, you know, because they are offering you money. Most respectable PIs wouldn’t take those cases, but Ted took them all.”
Lenny Flatley: “How do you think he got involved in that, like, that whole scene of, like, you know, because he was definitely not just a PI. He was definitely like, an activist, yeah, you know. Like, do you think it was like, you know, another business, like, source of income for him, or like, do you think he was sincere?”
OPPERMAN: “If you look at the people around him, they don’t have the best reputation for credibility.”
OPPERMAN: “But he was the type that he seemed to get mixed up with a lot of people, and a lot of couchsurfing seemed to have gone on in his life, which, I don’t know how you could run a real serious business, you know, like that. There’s some great stories, because he was involved with Franklin cover up too, you know, he was in there. And again, too, you know, there seemed to be, like a lot of people came to a lot of stories. But no convictions, you know, right? And then there’s these really funny stories, man, if you could find them, I interviewed Millar Doug Millar, okay, who was very good friends with Ted Gunderson. And I had my opinion about Gunderson. He had his own opinion, but he starts telling all these stories about Stu Webb and Ted Gunderson and Stu Webb was living at Stu Webb was living at Ted Gunderson’s condo in Las Vegas, and something happened. There was some kind of beef going on there, and they pushed him out of the apartment in his underwear, in his boxer shirts, right? But as Doug Millard describes it, but he’s such a skinny, wiry guy, he climbed up the terrorist or the fire escape in his underwear and went in there and stole all these boxes of material that Gunderson with cases and stuff. And he was working, yeah, I know it’s the crazy stuff. There’s even some story too about guns, guns and being involved in selling Stinger missiles, I think, to Iran or something like that.[...]. It’s hysterical. Just one thing after another with these people.”
Lenny Flatley: As the years went on, Gunderson’s theories became increasingly elaborate and interconnected. He claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag operation carried out by the FBI. He promoted theories about government mind control programs and vast networks of satanic cults. He became deeply involved in promoting the “Octopus” conspiracy theory, claiming that a network of intelligence agencies, organized crime, and corporate interests were involved in everything from drug trafficking to political assassination.
Lucien Greaves again:
Interview with Lucien Greaves:
GREAVES: “I do feel like there’s lasting ramifications to what Ted Gunderson did, and he’s worth understanding. And I feel like to that degree, like Ted Gunderson is, is is under appreciated... his credibility is being ex FBI so bolstered some of this stuff that that really its starting point. Its starting point is this FBI credibility as given to it by Ted Gunderson.”
Lenny Flatley: Gunderson’s theories continue to resonate today. His claims about underground tunnels used for child trafficking have found new life in the QAnon movement. His ideas about satanic cults infiltrating the government echo through modern conspiracy communities. The template he created — taking popular anxieties and spinning them into elaborate theories — continues to be followed by a new generation of conspiracy entrepreneurs.
Interview with Lucien Greaves:
GREAVES: “Well, it’s on hyper drive, and that’s because some of this I feel like is spurred on intentionally [...] Q Anon, I feel like is kind of a product of that, you know, these, the conspiracy theorists, are being used to the benefit of real, cynical, you know, political forces that are trying their their best to, you know, to capitalize on their on their presence.”
Lenny Flatley: The question haunting any examination of Ted Gunderson’s post-FBI career is: did he believe his own theories? Was he a cynical manipulator who knew exactly what he was doing? Or had he genuinely convinced himself that these vast conspiracies were real?
CONCLUSION
SONG “Pawns In The Game” by Professor Griff
GRIFF: “I teach you of the global plan / Designed and hatched by the man with the mark in his hand / Now to the man on the board who has very little meaning / No hatin’ involved, now it’s time to start redeemin’ / Not makin’ it tough, but you have to use your brain / Think about it, we’re like pawns in the game…”
ARCHIVAL: “Ted Gunderson lecture: Exposing Secret Societies”
GUNDERSON: “After one of my lectures here’s about two years ago this is why I changed my mind from and using the word loose-knit network to conspiracy after one of my lectures a gentleman came up and gave me a book. He said Ted in fact that lecture was specifically on the McDonald case Ted here’s what it’s all about take this book and read it and this is the book folks it’s called Pawns in the Game.”
Lenny Flatley: Here, Ted is referring to one of the classics of modern conspiracy literature, Pawns in the Game by William Guy Carr. Published in 1955, the book argues that a small group of “international bankers” have secretly orchestrated events from the Abraham Lincoln assassination, and the creation of the Federal Reserve, to the New Deal.
The book has made its mark over the years, influencing conspiracy theorists, the racist Christian Identity movement, and even hip-hop. Professor Griff named his solo album Pawns in the Game after he was kicked out of Public Enemy in the late Eighties.
This is not a good book, nor is it credible. But it clearly spoke to Gunderson.
Interview with Lucien Greaves:
GREAVES: “I feel like Ted was delusional, but he was also a but he was also a con man. And, you know, I think it’s hard to distinguish between the two, and I don’t think he could either. I think once he decided that something that a certain belief or a certain theory benefited him, he would, he would stick to it, and he would convince himself that it was true.”
Lenny Flatley: Gunderson probably believed this stuff at first. But like many successful conspiracy theorists, he gradually shaped his beliefs around whatever brought him attention and money.
ARCHIVAL: “Ted Gunderson - CHEMTRAILS”
GUNDERSON: “The death dumps otherwise known as chemical trails are being dropped and sprayed throughout the United States in England Scotland Ireland northern Europe and I have personally seen them not only the United States but in Mexico in Canada. birds are dying around the world fish are dying by the hundreds of thousands around the world. this is genocide. this is poison. this is murder by the United Nations…”
Lenny Flatley: That’s from one of many clips of Ted Gunderson that circulate on social media. These days, the same footage gets edited, cropped, and reposted endlessly. The latest version making rounds on TikTok comes with a dramatic claim: that the Illuminati killed Gunderson for exposing what he called “death dumps” — better known as chemtrails.
However, the truth is less dramatic. Gunderson died from bladder cancer in July 2011. He was 82 years old.
Jeffrey MacDonald, the man who launched Gunderson’s career, is still in prison. In 2021, he requested compassionate release from his three life sentences. The court said no. He won’t be eligible for parole for 46 years.
To this day, Jeffrey MacDonald maintains his innocence.
As for Ted Gunderson, we are not done with him yet. Considering his outsized role in the conspiracy scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s, you will be hearing much more from him in future episodes.
Join me next time as we uncover another hidden chapter in American history. This is A PARANOID’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. I’m Joseph L Flatley.