This book ruined Jon Ronson for me. When Hansen begins to call Ronson a liar I really wanted him to be wrong. I checked out Ronson's documentary that covers the same incident as this book and then Ronson's book... Ronson catches himself in the lie since his personal narratives from the documentary and his book contradict one another. I have to thank Mike Hansen for pointing this out.
The older I become and the more I read, I believe less and less that I read.
"Ishtar, another cultural descendant of Athena, was the most important female deity in the Middle East before the rise of the monotheistic religions.... Ishtar is also known as Venus." This on page 80 and although there are other leaps of logic in this section, this particularly jumped out at me because Venus is the Roman name for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and lust, and not Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom (symbolized by an owl) and war. A quick Google search connects Ishtar with Aphrodite, not Athena. It might sound like a quibble, but Greek mythology is something I'm relatively well versed in and once I read one thing that is inaccurate, it puts the rest of the information in the book to question.
The real question, of course, is what is going on at The Bohemian Grove? Is it a place where The New World Order is being planned between child sacrifice? Or is it a place for world leaders to burn away the cares of the world and party like frat boys?
I don't know and neither does Hansen. He saw a ceremony where an effigy was burned and jumped to concluding his initial hypothesis was correct. I don't think he's deliberately lying like Ronson, but there are leaps in logic.