Every July, somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 of the most powerful men in the United States drive up Highway 116 in Sonoma County, pass through a guarded gate in Monte Rio, and disappear into 2,700 acres of old-growth redwood forest for two and a half weeks. No press. No women. No outside communications beyond what they bring in themselves. They eat together, drink heavily, watch theatrical productions, listen to off-the-record speeches from sitting government officials, urinate openly on the trees, and perform a torch-lit ceremony in front of a 40-foot concrete owl at midnight. Then they drive back out and run the country again. This has been happening, without significant interruption, since 1878. And California, somehow, has never fully reckoned with the fact that it's been going on in its backyard the entire time.
How It Started: Journalists, Artists, and the Slow Takeover by Power
The Bohemian Club was founded in San Francisco in 1872 by a group of journalists, writers, musicians, and artists who wanted a place to drink, talk, and be creative without the intrusion of the merchant class. The name "Bohemian" was meant literally — these were people who lived outside conventional society, by the standards of Gilded Age San Francisco. The club's original motto, borrowed from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, was "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" — meaning business deals were not welcome at the table.
Within a decade, the merchants and businessmen the founding members had specifically wanted to exclude had become the dominant force in the club. The artists stayed — the bylaws require that at least 10% of membership come from the arts — but the center of gravity shifted decisively toward power. By the early 20th century, the Bohemian Club's membership reads like a catalogue of American elite: presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals, Supreme Court justices, Fortune 500 executives, media moguls. The annual summer encampment at the Grove became the social event of the year for a certain class of American man.
The first encampment was held in 1878, when a founding member named Henry "Harry" Edwards announced he was leaving San Francisco for New York to pursue his acting career. Fewer than 100 members gathered in a Marin County redwood grove to send him off. They liked it so much they kept doing it. By 1893 they had found their permanent site in Sonoma County. By 1899 they owned it outright, after purchasing the land from a logging operation for a price that would be a bargain a thousand times over by any modern measure.
What Actually Happens There: The Documented Record
We know more about Bohemian Grove than most people realize, because over the decades a surprising number of journalists, activists, and conspiracy theorists have managed to get inside — and because the Nixon White House tapes, now in the National Archives, are extremely candid about what goes on there.
The centerpiece of the encampment is the Cremation of Care, held on the first Saturday evening of the gathering. Members in red robes process by torchlight through the redwoods to the shore of a small artificial lake. There, before the 40-foot concrete owl — built in 1929, designed by sculptor and two-time club president Haig Patigian — a theatrical ceremony unfolds in which an effigy representing "Care" — symbolizing worldly worry and burden — is ritually burned. The voice of the Owl, speaking from speakers embedded in its hollow body, was for many years a recording of Walter Cronkite. The ceremony uses pyrotechnics, orchestral music, and elaborate costuming. It was devised in 1881 by club co-founder James F. Bowman as a way to kick off the encampment by symbolically freeing members from the weight of their responsibilities.
Beyond the Cremation of Care, the encampment features what members call "Lakeside Talks" — off-the-record speeches delivered at an outdoor stage beside the lake by senior government officials, academics, military leaders, and business executives. Henry Kissinger has spoken there. George Shultz. Caspar Weinberger. Dick Cheney. These talks are entirely closed to press and public. No transcript is published. No recording is permitted. According to a memo from Edwin Harper — one of Reagan's assistants — to Alan Greenspan, Reagan's 1983 cuts to Social Security were first discussed and planned at a Bohemian Club meeting two years earlier in 1981. A Reagan advisor reportedly agreed to cut capital gains taxes after being persuaded by venture capitalist Bill Draper while the two of them sat, as one account puts it, "semi-naked at the grove."
The Grove is also organized into over 100 individual "camps" — essentially social fraternities within the larger encampment, each with its own cabins, staff, and social culture. The camp names give you some sense of the vibe: Hill Billies, Mandalay, Silverado Squatters, Poison Oak, Abbey, Better 'Ole, Camels. Members stay in the same camp year after year, building relationships over decades. Hill Billies, historically, has been considered the most exclusive camp, with a membership list that has included multiple U.S. presidents.
The Nixon Tape: A President Talks About the Grove
The most candid window into Bohemian Grove that has ever been made public is a White House tape from May 13, 1971, in which President Richard Nixon was recorded in the Oval Office venting to aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Nixon, who had first visited the Grove in 1950 and became an honorary member in the 1950s, was ranting about San Francisco's culture, homosexuality, and what he saw as America's moral decline. Then he said this:
The full context is even more revealing. Nixon linked the Grove to his broader anxieties about homosexuality and weakness: "Homosexuality, dope, immorality generally — these are the enemies of strong societies. The upper class of San Francisco is that way. It's not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way." The tape was first published in a 2000 Harper's Magazine article and was confirmed by the National Archives as authentic.
What makes the Nixon quote so historically strange is the contradiction it contains. Nixon attended the Grove regularly. He delivered a major foreign policy speech there in 1967, as a private citizen rebuilding his political career, titled "Lakeside Reflections on the Middle East" — and that speech is widely credited as a key moment in convincing the Republican establishment to support his 1968 presidential run. He met Dwight Eisenhower for the first time at the Grove in 1950, as guests of Herbert Hoover. The Grove, in some meaningful sense, made Nixon's career. And yet in private he couldn't stand the place. That tension — between what the Grove does for powerful men publicly and what they actually think of it privately — is one of the most honest things anyone has ever said about it.
The Hidden Camera Videos: What Alex Jones Found in 2000
On July 15, 2000, radio host Alex Jones and cameraman Mike Hanson snuck into Bohemian Grove with a hidden camera. They managed to film the Cremation of Care ceremony, which Jones later broadcast and described as evidence of a secret globalist occult ritual — human sacrifice, devil worship, the works. The footage was grainy and dark, shot from a distance, but it was real. The BBC's documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson was also present — he had gotten in through different means — and filmed his own account of the same ceremony for a BBC documentary.
Jones and Ronson had completely different interpretations of what they saw. Jones called it "a ritual sacrifice" and built an entire conspiracy empire around it. Ronson, in his book Them: Adventures with Extremists, described his lasting impression as "an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the pseudo-pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking. These people might have reached the apex of their professions but emotionally they seemed trapped in their college years."
That Jones knowingly misrepresented what he saw has since been established fairly clearly. Ronson said flatly that the "human sacrifice" never happened — that it was a burning log/effigy, as the ceremony had always been described. Jones knew this and told his audience otherwise. The consequences were not trivial: an ex-Marine named Richard McCaslin, convinced by Jones's documentary that the global elite were committing human sacrifice at the Grove, showed up to the property dressed in a superhero costume and armed with a pump-action rifle, a .45 handgun, a crossbow, a sword, and a knife. He was arrested after spending a cold, lost night in an empty cabin. He found nothing sinister. His flashlight batteries had died.
What the Membership List Leak Revealed
In early 2026, independent journalist Daniel Boguslaw published a leaked 2023 Bohemian Grove membership list containing over 2,200 names. Boguslaw reportedly spent weeks tracking down a Bay Area club member to obtain it, even relocating from Massachusetts to San Francisco in pursuit. The list, organized by camp, included: Paul Pelosi, Conan O'Brien, Michael Bloomberg, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger, former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese III, retired NSA director Admiral Bobby Inman, Federal Judge Carlos Bea, conservative donor Charles Koch, and the late Jimmy Buffett. The camp names — Hill Billies, Mandalay, Poison Oak, Abbey, Camels — gave a social map of the internal hierarchy that had never been publicly documented at that level of detail before.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had been reported by ProPublica in 2023 as a long-time attendee of the Grove, with his trips financed by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow as part of a broader pattern of undisclosed gifts. Thomas's attendance at the Grove — a private gathering with no press, no transcripts, and no public accountability — became a focal point in debates about Supreme Court ethics. The 2023 leaked list did not explicitly name Thomas, but ProPublica's reporting had already placed him there for decades.
What Reddit Says: The Fringe Theories, Ranked by Plausibility
The internet never sleeps and neither does the Bohemian Grove conspiracy ecosystem. Here is an honest tour of what people believe, from the documented to the delusional.
Most plausible — Policy is made here, not just discussed. The documented record on this is actually pretty strong. The Manhattan Project was first conceptualized at the Grove in September 1942, when J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and members of the S-1 Executive Committee met there. Reagan's Social Security cuts were planned at a club meeting. Capital gains tax policy was discussed semi-naked in the woods. The Grove's own website claims "weaving spiders come not here" — that no business is done — while their own members have left paper trails proving the opposite. Reddit's r/conspiracy community has been correct about this one for years: the "no business" rule is largely decorative.
Plausible but unproven — Presidential campaigns are launched here. Nixon's 1968 comeback was widely believed to have been launched at the Grove. The story that Nixon talked Ronald Reagan out of running for president in 1968 by meeting him at the Grove is cited in multiple accounts. Kevin McCarthy was heard being bullish about Trump at the 2023 encampment, per a Politico tipster. The density of Republican political power at the Grove — and the off-the-record nature of every conversation — makes it genuinely plausible that major political decisions get made in the woods.
Fringe but with a kernel — The Lakeside Talks shape policy that never gets debated publicly. Senior government officials delivering off-the-record speeches to 2,000 of America's most powerful men, with no transcript and no press, is a legitimate accountability concern. What does a sitting Defense Secretary say to that room that he wouldn't say on the record? We genuinely don't know. That's not nothing.
Fringe — The owl statue is a Moloch idol and the ceremony is literal pagan worship. The owl predates the conspiracy theories by decades and was designed by a sculptor who also did public monuments all over San Francisco. The ceremony was written by a journalist in 1881 and has been a theatrical production ever since. The word "Care" in Old English means "anxiety" — the ceremony is literally about burning your anxiety away before a vacation. There is no evidence of any religious meaning beyond that.
Clearly false — Human sacrifice, Satanic ritual, secret world government. Alex Jones said it, Alex Jones was wrong about it, an armed man showed up and found nothing. The members are rich old men who drink too much and watch plays in the woods. The scariest thing documented at the Grove is that wage theft lawsuits from underpaid valets have resulted in multi-million dollar settlements — twice. That is genuinely disturbing, and also much more banal than devil worship.
You Decide
The documented record on Bohemian Grove is genuinely strange — stranger than most people know, and less dramatic than the conspiracy theories suggest. What is certain: 2,000 of America's most powerful men gather annually in a place with no press, no public record, and no accountability. Senior government officials deliver off-the-record speeches there. Policy has been discussed and apparently shaped there. The Manhattan Project was conceptualized there. A sitting Supreme Court justice attended for decades on a billionaire donor's dime. The owl is 40 feet tall and Walter Cronkite used to be the voice inside it.
Whether that adds up to harmless elite networking, a genuine accountability problem, or something darker entirely — that's a question each reader has to answer for themselves. The Grove runs every July. The gate in Monte Rio will be guarded again this year. And the most powerful men in America will emerge from the redwoods after two and a half weeks, rested and unburdened by Care — whatever exactly that means to them.