Meet Kerry Thornley, the second Oswald.

Kerry Thornley lived and died in obscurity. But while few people noticed, he invented one of the 20th century’s more influential religions, helped launch ’60s-style sex-and-nature neopaganism, and was a major force behind the first modern libertarian ’zine.

He was also, to hear him tell it, part of the conspiracy to murder JFK, and thus escalate the Vietnam War -- a conspiracy so secret even Thornley didn’t know about it at the time.

Thornley was one of America’s most fascinating unknowns. It is fitting, given the underground nature of his claims to fame, that his first biography, The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, by Adam Gorightly, is published in the quasi-clandestine form of a print-on-demand book from Paraview Press.

Thornley helped his high school buddy Greg Hill invent the comedic religion of Discordianism in dull suburban Southern California in the late 1950s. It was dedicated to the worship of Eris, the Greek goddess of Chaos.

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Discordianism and other weird religions