Alternate Perceptions Magazine, January 2026
Jack the Ripper and the Illuminati
By: Dennis Stamey
No discussion of the unexplained is complete without any mention of secret societies, especially the Illuminati. This clandestine group has been held responsible for political assassinations, school shootings, political terrorism, and even climate change. Is there any proof of such an organization? Absolutely not. Believers do like to point out how Jim Carrey mentioned the Illuminati during a 2014 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Carrey entered the stage making a triangle hand gesture with his tongue poking through the center. He jokingly claimed he was there to be a "whistleblower" and "blow the lid off" the secret society. He went on to facetiously accuse late-night hosts and sitcom stars of being hired by the government to distract the public and turn them into "consumer drones". He ended the bit by pretending to be a "robot" controlled by a phone call to promote his movie. However, conspiracy theorists still believe he broke character to reveal hidden truths.
These buffs go so far as to say that some mass murderers, whether the Manson family or the Zodiac killer, were programmed by the Illuminati to carry out their crimes. Jack the Ripper is no exception, they claim. But why instigate serial killings? To create havoc of course. That’s the nature of the game.
This Illuminati business reminds me of the TV series The Man from Uncle which I used to watch as a kid where a shadowy criminal outfit called THRUSH (Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity), a "supra-nation" without geographical borders was trying to attain world domination. THRUSH consisted of independent units called "satraps" embedded in schools, businesses, and governments worldwide. Even Cold War rivals like the US and USSR joined in a counter group called UNCLE (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) to thwart their schemes. Of course, THRUSH and as well The Man from Uncle concept was inspired by James Bond’s battle against SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) although the outfit concocted by Ian Fleming was more like the Mafia.
Jack the Ripper as a conspiracy? Isn’t that stretching credulity? Well, the murders were extremely mysterious and seem to involve more than a lone maniac prowling the dark streets of London’s rundown Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts. Five women were killed, all prostitutes, between August and November 1888 but three others might have also fallen to Jack’s knife.
The murders occurred three years after Irish radicals, maybe aided by anarchists, set off bombs in London during 1881-1885. In 1884, the most active year for these “dynamiters,” body parts were found strewn in Tottenham, London. Tottenham was also a notorious hangout for radicals.
In 1886, there were torso parts scattered in the streets of Montrouge, a suburb of Paris in November. On March 5, 1886, an anarchist named Joseph Gallo tossed a bomb and fired a gun inside the Paris Stock Exchange. The bomb also didn’t explode, and Gallo's missed his targets although a ricochet did graze a broker's leg. Joseph was arrested and sentenced to deportation. However, this attack was prompted the anarchist movement to conduct larger bombing campaigns such as the ones in 1888–1889 and the more intense "Ère des attentats" in 1892–1894.
Dismembered bodies were later be found in Central London, at the site of the New Scotland Yard, and even in Whitechapel from 1887-1889. Researchers doubt these incidents were related to the Ripper, yet the Pinchin Street torso of September 1889 occurred two months after Alice McKenzie was discovered with her throat cut and abdomen ripped within the same area. A prostitute named Elizabeth Jackson was found hacked to pieces near Battersea that June.
Three of the prostitutes had organs removed and they were also eviscerated with surgical skill. Was Jack a surgeon and was he taking organs as trophies as some serial killers do? Witnesses saw different men with four of the victims shortly before they were murdered and the organs could have been used in bizarre rituals rather than placed in spirits as mementos.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888 by three Freemasons: Dr. William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and Dr. William Woodman, establishing its first temple, Isis-Urania, that same year. A Golden Dawn sect, specifically the Horus Temple, was founded in Bradford, Yorkshire, in October 1888. In December, a young boy named Johnny Gill was found gutted and dismembered in a stable in Bradford.
Hours before the first official Ripper victim died (there was another murder of a prostitute three weeks earlier, but she was repeatedly stabbed by a smaller knife than used by Jack) there were the London Dock fires. Were they deliberate? The conflagration erupted in a warehouse packed with flammable items such as spirits, burning with unusual force. Considering that the fire occurred at a particularly challenging location, a large warehouse containing colonial produce on its upper floor and stores of gin and brandy on the lower level, there was speculation it was arson. However, an official investigation could not determine the cause. But it’s not implausible that someone could have slipped inside the warehouse, poured flammable liquid on the floor, ignited it, and ran off.
After the third murder, someone had scrawled in chalk on the wall of a building “The Juwes are the ones that will not be blamed for nothing.” Below the message was a bloody piece of apron that had apparently been torn from the one worn by the victim. Police thought the message was meant to incriminate the Jews and Chief Commissioner Charles Warren had it erased fearing it would provoke a riot. Tensions against the Jewish population was already running high in the wake of the killings; acts a Gentile Englishmen wouldn’t perpetrate or so many people thought. Was this graffiti another act of terrorism?
Robert Anderson was appointed Assistant Chief Commissioner of the Metro police. He left on September 8, the very day Annie Chapman, the second official or canonical victim, was killed. Anderson was heavily involved in investigating the Irish revolutionary movements, particularly the Fenians (Irish Republican Brotherhood, IRB), for the British government. His work as a counter-intelligence expert on Irish political crime was a major part of his early career and led to his rise in the British Home Office and Scotland Yard. Did this group decide to give him a sendoff in the most barbarous way possible?
I combed the British Newspaper Archives for September 1888 concerning any announcement that the Chief Commissioner was leaving for Switzerland. All we found were a few items talking about his departure days after it happened. If Annie’s death was related to Robert Anderson leaving London and not a bizarre coincidence, this could mean that Irish radicals had infiltrated the Metropolitan Police. No evidence exists of such infiltration although on the other hand, the British government did infiltrate the Fenians using spies and informants. But if extremists had somehow burrowed their way into the Metro ranks, this could explain in part why Jack’s behavior was so calculated. He seemed to know when to strike and when not to.
The last official murder, that of Mary Jane Kelly occurred on November 9, 1888, coinciding with the annual Lord Mayor's Show in the City of London—a prominent event held to commemorate the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor. Public excitement and shock over the killing disrupted the festivities with members of the crowd abandoning the procession to head toward the East End to get a glimpse of the crime scene. It was also the birthday of the Prince of Wales. Was Mary’s killing timed to disrupt the pageant and the birthday of Albert Edward, the future of Edward VII?
Besides torso remains and mutilated streetwalkers, there were disappearances of young girls in West Ham, a district in East London about four miles from Whitechapel. In his 1963 book London by Gaslight, Michael Harrison said that the vanishings began in 1881. As he explained: “Young girls, young boys, middle-aged men and elderly women – all appeared to be equally acceptable as prey to whoever – or whatever – was whipping the victims away. There were, apart from the fact that the persons had disappeared, other factors linking the disappearances.”
The only disappearances I can find reference to include Mary Seward, 14, who lived in West Road (April 1881), Eliza Carter, 12, who lived in Church Lane, ten doors from Mary Seward (January 1882), Clara Sutton who lived in Salisbury Square and was a friend of Mary Seward (August 1882), and Amelia “Millie” Jeffs, 14, who was found murdered two weeks after she vanished in the upper floor of a newly built house near her home and lived on the same street as Mary Seward (January 1890). All the victims were snatched off the street, mostly while running errands for their parents, and in a lot of these cases, suspicious people were seen in the area. This even included a woman.
The idea of an epidemic of vanishings as mentioned by Michael Harrison seems to have been based on a chapter entitled “Urban Napoleon Stanger and the West Ham Disappearances,” in Elliott O’Donnell’s book 1927 Strange Disappearances whose account of this mystery is exaggerated and inaccurate. But we do know for a fact that four girls did disappear and except for Amelia Jeffs were never found.
In January 1883, friends of both the Sewards and Carters were asked to come and look at a girl's body that had been found in a box at a city warehouse, but neither could recognize the corpse which was too decomposed from having been in the box almost a month, and hard to identify as anything except an 'extremely thin and emaciated' female. Were they then five victims?
Was another serial killer at work? Maybe but here’s another weird story that might lend credence to other mysterious vanishings. The Echo of August 10 ran this item about people going missing in Whitechapel: “’But what about the three missing persons?" asked our reporter of the officer, remarking that, as four people had claimed one body, there were evidently mysterious disappearances upon which some light might be thrown. "That I cannot say," was the answer. "Whitechapel is not like any other part of London, no portion of the Metropolis so crowded;’ and the officer in his own words, thus spoke: -‘We have to be very particular about persons coming to identify bodies….’”
Another mystery during this time was the Great Sheep Panic of 1888. On November 3, six days before Mary Jane Kelly was mutilated, across nearly 200 square miles of prime Oxfordshire sheep grazing territory, tens of thousands of sheep went berserk, scattering for their lives. Nobody felt an earthquake and the weather wasn’t necessarily bad at the time.
Two local seed import/export men named Oakshott and Millard from Reading, which was the epicenter of the anomaly, penned a letter to the editor of the popular Hardwicke’s Science Magazine detailing what happened and asking if anyone could offer an explanation.
A portion of it reads: “I beg to call attention to a remarkable circumstance which occurred in this immediate locality on the night of Saturday, November 3rd. At a time as near eight o’clock as possible the tens of thousands of sheep folded in the large sheep-breeding districts, north, east, and west of Reading were taken with a sudden fright, jumping their hurdles, escaping from the fields, and running hither and thither; in fact, there must for some time have been a perfect stampede.” They also added: “The night was intensely dark, with occasional flashes of lightning, but we scarcely think the latter circumstance would account for such a wide-spread effect.” The Live Stock Journal for that year also mentioned that there had been a similar sheep scare in Norfolk around the same time. Charles Fort in his New Lands said that there was an outbreak in Berkshire, which is not far from Reading, the following year.
On the night of December 4, 1893, another panic erupted among sheep herds in the northern and middle parts of Oxfordshire, extending into adjoining parts of the counties of Warwick, Gloucester, and Berkshire.
In a story from the London Times of November 20, 1888, a correspondent averred that “malicious mischief” was out of the question, The idea that a pack or dogs and foxes were to blame was also ruled out since it would have had to have been a concerted action undertaken simultaneously. Moreover, none of the sheep were injured, just traumatized.
But can humans cause sheep to panic? Most definitely since these timid animals perceive our species as predators. Sheep herders are always cautious not to make sudden movements and loud noises. Sheep have a personal space, and when a human enters this zone, the sheep's instinct is to move away. Approaching too quickly can cause panic. A few men strategically placed across parts of grazing lands around Reading, maybe even armed with slingshots, could have easily created a panic which in turn produced a massive rippling effect. Terrorism is certainly not out of the question, particularly considering these phenomena transpired over a five-year period and then ceased.
Berkshire has always been historically famous for sheep farming and the wool trade primarily due to soil in the area which is especially adapted for sheep farming. So, what was going on in London in the 1880s? Was some super-secret group, perhaps a conglomeration of Irish radicals, anarchists, and occultists (anarchists were sometimes drawn to occult societies) behind this strangeness? Were they trying to sow fear and panic? The Ripper murders not only produced trepidation but also made the police look stupid and came damn close to bringing down the government. Perhaps the Golden Dawn was a cover for their operations, but that’s pure conjecture. Yet you have to wonder with all this hype about conspiracies nowadays if this cabal might still exist and is growing even stronger.
