Bohemian Grove: Inside the Elite's Secret Retreat.

The Bohemian Grove is real. Its members are real. The ceremony is real. The Manhattan Project really was discussed there. What remains contested is what all of that adds up to — and why the most powerful men in America keep coming back to a single clearing in the California redwoods each summer for a hundred and fifty years.

Where it started

The Bohemian Club was founded in San Francisco in 1872 by a small group of journalists, artists, musicians, and writers — among them journalist James F. Bowman of the San Francisco Chronicle — who wanted a refuge from what they considered the city's commercial coarseness. The original bylaws emphasized bohemian values: the arts, conversation, and the free exchange of ideas without the constraints of business. Within a few years, however, wealthy patrons were admitted in order to finance the Club's activities, and by the end of the 1870s the character of the institution had shifted. The Club's emblem — a carved owl, representing wisdom — was established in the earliest period and has remained unchanged since. Mark Twain and Jack London were both members in the late nineteenth century, and the Club still cites them, along with Ambrose Bierce and Bret Harte, as part of its founding literary lineage.

The Club acquired the 2,700-acre Monte Rio property in 1899, roughly seventy-five miles north of San Francisco along the Russian River in Sonoma County. The site was chosen for its cathedral-scale old-growth redwoods and its remoteness; the nearest settlement, Monte Rio, had fewer than a thousand residents then and has fewer than two thousand now. The first summer encampment at the new property was held that same year. From the start, the encampment combined three elements that remain the structure of the event today: Lakeside Talks — speeches delivered beside the lake on topics ranging from foreign policy to physics to economics; theatrical performances, including the annual Grove Play, a commissioned original drama with a large amateur cast of members; and the Cremation of Care ceremony, which dates to 1881 and marks the formal opening of each encampment. The 40-foot hollow concrete owl — the Owl Shrine — was constructed in 1929 beside the Grove's lake, replacing earlier temporary structures, and remains the ceremony's focal point to this day.

What began as a bohemian artists' club became, by the middle of the twentieth century, one of the most concentrated gatherings of American elite power in the country's history. The encampment runs for two weeks each July and has continued more or less uninterrupted — through the Depression, two world wars, and the COVID-19 interruption of 2020 — for more than 125 years. Members enter through camps — small wooden clusters within the Grove, each with its own name and tradition — including Mandalay (historically associated with senior Republican power, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger), Hill Billies (Nixon's camp, also Ronald Reagan), Cave Man (science and technology), and Owl's Nest (Herbert Hoover's camp). The camp structure is one of the Grove's more revealing organizational features: where a man is camped tells researchers who he knows, what he does, and how he moved through the institution.

What the theory claims

The core claim, across every variation, is simple: the Bohemian Grove is not a social retreat. It is where the real decisions get made — informally, off the record, and entirely out of reach of voters, shareholders, and the press. A place where Lakeside Talks delivered to a rapt audience of cabinet members, Nobel laureates, Fortune 500 CEOs, and generals are not post-political rumination but live policy formation; where casual conversations between a future president and a future vice president shape the direction of a war twenty years later; where the men who will decide, the men who will fund those decisions, and the men who will execute them can meet for two uninterrupted weeks without a single reporter or spouse in the vicinity.

Researchers who hold this framing argue that the institutional structure of the United States — the visible parts, the White House and Capitol Hill and the regulatory agencies — is only the surface of how power actually travels. The real mechanism, in this reading, runs through a small set of invitation-only institutions at which the personal relationships are formed that later become phone calls that later become policy. Bohemian Grove is cited alongside Bilderberg (the annual invite-only conference founded in 1954), the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Pilgrims Society, and the modern World Economic Forum as nodes in what researchers describe as an interlocking elite-coordination system. The Grove's distinction within that system is that it is older, more entrenched, more explicitly ritualized, and — critically — the only one that meets physically, in private, in a single wooded location for two weeks at a time.

The harder framings go further. Believers who focus on the Cremation of Care argue that the ceremony is not a vestigial theatrical tradition but a working ritual rooted in older esoteric or pre-Christian traditions — that the 40-foot owl represents not a Club mascot but a continuation of Moloch, Lilith, or Minerva as understood within the Western occult lineage; that the nighttime burning of an effigy by hooded figures across a black lake is not pageantry but something closer to invocation. Others argue that what happens during the two weeks extends beyond the ceremonial into activities the Club has always denied outright — rumors that have circulated since the 2000s and have never been substantiated, but which the Club's insistence on total secrecy does not help to dispel.

The theory, finally, is also about what is not said. For a gathering of 2,500 of the most powerful men in the country, held in the same place every summer for more than a century, the Bohemian Grove produces remarkably little primary record. No official transcripts of Lakeside Talks are published. Membership rosters are not publicly released by the Club. Photography inside the Grove is forbidden. Outside reporters have been kept out for a hundred and fifty years. In a country whose political history has otherwise been exhaustively documented, the Grove's documentary silence is itself, for believers, the point. Institutions that have nothing to hide, researchers argue, do not work that hard to ensure nothing leaks.

The variations

Most serious academic treatments of the Grove stay in what might be called the soft framing — that the institution is primarily a class-cohesion mechanism for the American upper class, unusually consequential not because of any single decision made there but because of the cumulative network effects of the same 2,500 men meeting in the same place for decades. The sociologist G. William Domhoff, whose 1974 book The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats remains the standard academic treatment, is the clearest exponent of this view. Domhoff, a UC Santa Cruz professor whose broader career focused on the mapping of the American power structure, returned to the Grove in a 2005 follow-up, The Bohemian Grove: Facts & Fiction, which distinguished what the documentary record actually establishes from what later researchers had layered on.

Peter Martin Phillips, in his 1994 UC Davis PhD dissertation A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, mapped the Club's network of member relationships and identified patterns of policy influence radiating outward from the encampment into the Fortune 500, the federal bureaucracy, and the major US think tanks. Phillips's work is the most methodologically rigorous treatment of the second framing — the coordination-mechanism framing — and is often cited by independent researchers who want the case made in measured academic language.

The more esoteric and ritual-focused readings have been carried largely by independent researchers and broadcasters. Alex Jones, whose July 15, 2000 infiltration alongside British filmmaker Mike Hanson produced the first widely circulated video of the Cremation of Care, is the primary figure in this tradition. Jones's documentary Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, assembled from the 2000 footage, remains the single most-viewed primary artifact of the Grove's inner life; it brought the owl, the hooded figures, and the ceremony itself into public consciousness for the first time in a way that earlier written accounts had not. David Icke, Mike Hanson (in his 2004 book Bohemian Grove: Cult of Conspiracy), and the broader conspiracy-research milieu have extended the ritual interpretation in various directions. Within that broader milieu, some readings have absorbed the Grove into larger control-system narratives; others have kept it as a discrete object of focus.

What believers point to

The documentary anchors for Bohemian Grove research are unusually concrete for a subject this often dismissed. The Manhattan Project meeting of September 13, 1942 is the single most-cited documented fact: it is in the official histories, it is in the Atomic Heritage Foundation record, it is confirmed by the personal papers of Ernest Lawrence and Arthur Compton. The point believers make is not that this meeting was secret — it wasn't, in the long historical sense — but that the most consequential single weapons program of the twentieth century had, as one of its planning venues, the same redwood grove where, today, Fortune 500 CEOs and cabinet secretaries gather for two weeks each summer. The pattern is the argument.

The Nixon 1967 Lakeside Talk is the second anchor. In July 1967, then-private citizen Richard Nixon — out of office since his 1962 gubernatorial loss in California, widely considered finished politically — delivered a Lakeside Talk titled "The Changing World," addressing roughly 2,000 members on the emerging international order. The speech is broadly credited with rehabilitating Nixon within the Republican elite and making his 1968 presidential run viable. Contemporaneous accounts, including later interviews with members, have Ronald Reagan — also a Grove member, also at the 1967 encampment — agreeing that summer not to contest Nixon for the Republican nomination. A single Lakeside Talk, delivered to a non-voting audience, is widely considered one of the moments the 1968 Republican primary was decided.

The 1971 Nixon tape is the third anchor. In a 1971 Oval Office recording released as part of the Watergate investigation, Nixon — by then president — described the Grove to John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman as "the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine," referring to the theatrical tradition and the all-male Grove Play. In the same set of conversations, he described the Grove as essential to American elite networking and credited it with his own career. The tape is part of the National Archives' Nixon White House Tapes collection and has been widely quoted in academic work on the Club.

The Philip Weiss 1989 infiltration is the fourth. In November 1989, Spy magazine published Philip Weiss's essay "Masters of the Universe Go to Camp," based on his week of under-cover reporting inside the Grove. Weiss, posing as a member's guest, observed Lakeside Talks, attended the Grove Play, witnessed the Cremation of Care, and recorded the names and behavior of attendees including Henry Kissinger, Caspar Weinberger, William F. Buckley, and senior Reagan-administration figures. The piece is the first major mainstream exposé of the encampment and remains the most-cited journalism of the pre-Jones period.

The Alex Jones 2000 infiltration — the single most consequential popular-research intervention on the Grove — occurred on July 15, 2000, when Jones and British filmmaker Mike Hanson entered the Grove on foot, carrying hidden cameras, and filmed portions of the Cremation of Care from a concealed position overlooking the lake. The footage, released shortly afterward as the documentary Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, is the most widely circulated visual record of the ceremony and the only extended video of the ritual that has ever reached a mass public audience. The Bohemian Club acknowledged the infiltration and declined to press charges, a choice researchers have read as the Club's calculation that a criminal trial would produce more attention than the footage itself.

Beyond those anchors, researchers point to the member lists. Seven US presidents — Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush — have been members. Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Caspar Weinberger, Alexander Haig are all documented. The Rockefeller dynasty is represented through multiple generations, including David Rockefeller. The Hearst dynasty through William Randolph Hearst. Media through Walter Cronkite (long identified as a Club member and reportedly the voice of the Cremation of Care narration in several years). Literature through Mark Twain and Jack London. Business through generations of Fortune 500 CEOs — Bechtel, Chevron, Bank of America, Pacific Gas and Electric. The question researchers keep returning to is not whether influence passes through the Grove, but how much, of what kind, and whether the public record has any realistic chance of ever establishing what.

The connections people make

Around the documented Grove — the members, the ceremony, the Manhattan Project meeting, the Nixon career-launch — a larger constellation of adjacent claims has formed. These are not the Grove's core documentary record. They are the connections independent researchers draw between the Grove and other elite institutions, and reading them is the closest most researchers come to what they believe is actually happening.

The Bilderberg and Trilateral adjacency. Bilderberg, founded in 1954 by Dutch Prince Bernhard as an annual invitation-only conference of North American and European political and business leaders, has substantial membership overlap with Bohemian Grove. David Rockefeller, a Grove member, co-founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 with Zbigniew Brzezinski. Multiple Grove members — from Henry Kissinger forward — have been on both the Bilderberg steering committee and the CFR board. Researchers read the overlap as evidence that these institutions function as a single coordinated layer of the elite; the institutions themselves describe the overlap as a natural consequence of operating in the same world. What is not disputed is that the same roughly 200 names recur across the invitation lists of all three institutions year after year.

The Council on Foreign Relations and the think-tank layer. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded in 1921, publishes Foreign Affairs and has served as the primary training ground for US diplomatic and national-security leadership for a century. Grove members have dominated its leadership: David Rockefeller served as CFR chairman 1970–1985. Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, and George H.W. Bush are all CFR members and Grove members. Peter Martin Phillips's 1994 dissertation documented the specific patterns of cross-membership — that the Grove is not an institution in isolation but one node in a dense network of elite-coordination mechanisms that includes CFR, the major foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie), and the Ivy League's senior-year societies (Yale's Skull and Bones, Harvard's Porcellian).

The Skull and Bones pipeline. Skull and Bones, the Yale senior society founded in 1832, has produced a disproportionate fraction of American elite leadership, including William Howard Taft, Henry L. Stimson, Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John Kerry, and numerous CIA officials. Prescott Bush (Skull and Bones 1917, father of George H.W. Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush) was also a Grove member. The overlap between Bones and Grove has been documented by several researchers — Alexandra Robbins in Secrets of the Tomb (2002), Antony Sutton in America's Secret Establishment (1986). Researchers argue that Bones feeds the Grove the same way Eton feeds the British civil service: a long pipeline of men who know one another before they are anyone in public, and who continue to know one another afterward.

The Grove Play and the pagan-ritual reading. The annual Grove Play, staged within the encampment each year, is a commissioned original drama written and performed by members with original musical scores, full staging, and an amateur cast of hundreds. Plays have included adaptations of Greek tragedy, original pieces on themes from Persian mythology, and occasional contemporary satirical work. Researchers focused on the ritual dimension argue the Grove Play is not merely theatrical — that the pattern of Cremation of Care plus Grove Play plus Lakeside Talk, repeated for 125 years, constitutes a sustained ritual framework for a small all-male group whose work in the outside world is enormously consequential. Peter Levenda, in his multi-volume work on occult influences in American and European politics, is the most-cited researcher of this reading. The Club's own position is that the ceremony is entirely theatrical, a Gilded Age tradition with no operational religious content. That framing has not always been convincing to those who have seen the footage.

The Mary Moore archive. For forty years, Mary Moore — a Monte Rio resident and founder of the Bohemian Grove Action Network — maintained what was for decades the most comprehensive publicly accessible archive of leaked Grove material: Lakeside Talk audio recordings, partial member rosters, photographs, protest documentation, and interviews with former members and staff. Moore died in 2022; the archive has been partially preserved and is still referenced by researchers. Her work, more than anyone else's in the pre-Jones period, established that the Grove could in fact be independently documented from outside — that the institution's opacity was not absolute.

Key voices

• G. William Domhoff — UC Santa Cruz sociologist; his 1974 book The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats is the standard academic source and remains the most-cited work on the subject. His 2005 follow-up The Bohemian Grove: Facts & Fiction extends the analysis through the post-9/11 period.
• Peter Martin Phillips — sociologist whose 1994 UC Davis PhD dissertation A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club mapped the Club's network of influence through documented membership and policy data.
• Philip Weiss — journalist whose November 1989 Spy magazine piece "Masters of the Universe Go to Camp" was the first major mainstream infiltration.
• Mary Moore (d. 2022) — longtime organizer of the Bohemian Grove Action Network; her archive of leaked Lakeside Talks and member rosters dates back to the 1980s.
• Alex Jones and Mike Hanson — their July 15, 2000 infiltration produced Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, the single most-viewed primary artifact of the ceremony.
• Daniel Boguslaw — investigative journalist whose February 2026 Substack publication of a leaked 2023 Bohemian Club roster (~2,200 names) became the largest single public expansion of the Grove's documented record since the 1980s.
• Peter Levenda — independent researcher focused on the ritual and occult dimensions of Western elite institutions; his multi-volume Sinister Forces treats the Grove within a broader framework.
• Alexandra Robbins — author of Secrets of the Tomb (2002), the most accessible treatment of the Skull and Bones / Grove pipeline.

For adjacent research, see our coverage of Little St James on a different form of elite-network institution, Operation Northwoods on the documented pattern of undisclosed institutional planning, and the chemtrails program on state-level policy moving from fringe to legislature.

The official position

The Bohemian Club describes itself as a private social club whose purpose is to offer its members opportunities to enjoy camaraderie, the arts, and the outdoors. The annual encampment is described as a summer retreat. The Cremation of Care is presented as a theatrical tradition dating to the late nineteenth century and nothing more. Club spokespeople, in the rare occasions when they have spoken publicly, have declined to release full member rosters, transcripts of Lakeside Talks, or photographs from inside the encampment — describing these privacy practices as long-standing convention rather than active secrecy. The Club's public-facing materials, to the extent they exist, emphasize the literary and artistic heritage of Twain, London, Bierce, and Harte.

The Club has never responded at length to any of the major independent investigations. Domhoff's academic treatments have not produced a Club response. Weiss's 1989 Spy piece did not. Alex Jones's 2000 infiltration resulted in a brief acknowledgment that the incident had occurred and a decision not to press charges; the Club did not otherwise comment. The February 2026 Boguslaw roster leak had, at time of writing, produced no formal Club statement — though members named in the leak have reportedly begun issuing their own individual clarifications or denials about the nature of their membership. The pattern is consistent: the Club does not engage, and has not for a century and a half.

Where it is now

The most significant change to the Grove's documented public record in more than two decades occurred in February 2026, when investigative journalist Daniel Boguslaw published on Substack a leaked Bohemian Club membership roster dated 2023, containing approximately 2,200 names. The Boguslaw leak identified currently active members across finance, technology, politics, media, and entertainment. Named in the leak: Paul Pelosi, businessman and husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Jimmy Buffett (pre-death), the singer-songwriter; Conan O'Brien, the broadcaster; Michael Bloomberg, former New York mayor and founder of Bloomberg LP; Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO; Charles Koch, co-owner of Koch Industries; Charles B. Johnson, chairman of Franklin Resources; and Edwin Meese III, Reagan's attorney general. The roster also contained hundreds of senior figures across Bechtel, Chevron, Pacific Gas and Electric, Bank of America, and multiple private-equity firms. The Boguslaw leak was the single largest public expansion of the Grove's documented record since Mary Moore's earlier roster work in the 1980s and 1990s.

The political consequences of the leak have, as of April 2026, been more atmospheric than specific. No major media outlet has pursued a full story on the roster's contents. The named members have made no collective response. The Bohemian Club itself has not commented. But the Substack publication has circulated widely in the independent-research community, and has reopened conversations — about who exactly is in the Club's current membership, about the relationship between the Club's 2026 composition and its 1970s composition, and about whether the institution's historical opacity remains politically sustainable in an environment of routine elite-adjacent document leaks.

The encampments continue. The 2025 session ran from mid-July through early August, and the 2026 session is scheduled for the same window. The Bohemian Grove Action Network, though diminished since Mary Moore's 2022 death, continues to organize an annual protest outside the Monte Rio entrance. Occasional leaks of individual Lakeside Talks and photographs still surface. The broader question — how much influence actually moves through the Grove in 2026 compared to institutions like the World Economic Forum, compared to the newer tech-elite conferences at Sun Valley and Herb Allen's annual gathering — has not been answered, and likely cannot be from outside. What the Boguslaw leak established, for the first time in this much detail in this long a window, is that the question is still worth asking.

Go deeper

Frequently asked questions

What is the Bohemian Grove?

A 2,700-acre private redwood campground in Monte Rio, Sonoma County, California, owned by the Bohemian Club of San Francisco since 1899. Every July, roughly 2,500 men — US presidents, cabinet officials, Fortune 500 CEOs, military leaders, Nobel laureates — gather for a two-week encampment that combines Lakeside Talks, theatrical performances, and private meetings. The Bohemian Club itself was founded in San Francisco in 1872.

Where is the Bohemian Grove located?

Monte Rio, in Sonoma County, California, about 75 miles north of San Francisco along the Russian River. The land is a 2,700-acre old-growth redwood forest the Bohemian Club has owned since 1899. The nearest town, Monte Rio, has a population of roughly 1,200 and hosts an annual protest during the July encampment organized by the Bohemian Grove Action Network.

Who are the members of the Bohemian Club?

Documented past and present members include US Presidents Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, as well as Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, David Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, Walter Cronkite, Mark Twain, Jack London, and numerous Fortune 500 CEOs. The February 2026 Boguslaw leak added approximately 2,200 additional names including Paul Pelosi, Jimmy Buffett, Conan O'Brien, Michael Bloomberg, Eric Schmidt, Charles Koch, Charles B. Johnson, and Edwin Meese III.

What is the Cremation of Care ceremony?

The opening ritual of the annual encampment, first performed in 1881. Held at night beside the lake, robed figures carry an effigy representing "dull care" across the water by boat to the base of a 40-foot hollow concrete owl statue, where the effigy is burned. The Club calls it theatrical tradition; outside researchers' interpretations range from symbolic theater to ritual with older pre-Christian roots.

Why is there a giant owl statue at Bohemian Grove?

The owl has been the Bohemian Club's emblem since its founding in 1872, representing wisdom in Club iconography. The 40-foot hollow concrete statue by the lake — the Owl Shrine — was built in 1929 and is the backdrop for the Cremation of Care. Some researchers argue the owl references Moloch or Minerva; the Club maintains it is simply the Club mascot.

Has a US president attended Bohemian Grove?

Yes. Every Republican president from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush has attended. Richard Nixon's July 1967 Lakeside Talk "The Changing World" is widely considered the launching point of his 1968 campaign. Nixon later said: "Anybody can be President of the United States, but few can ever have any hope of becoming President of the Bohemian Club."

Was the Manhattan Project planned at Bohemian Grove?

A key planning meeting took place at the Grove on September 13, 1942, attended by Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, and senior officials from the US Office of Scientific Research and Development. The meeting is documented in the official histories of the Manhattan Project and confirmed by the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

What did Alex Jones film at Bohemian Grove?

On July 15, 2000, Alex Jones and British filmmaker Mike Hanson entered the Grove on foot with hidden cameras and filmed portions of the Cremation of Care. The footage was released as the documentary Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove. The Club acknowledged the infiltration but did not press charges.

Can you visit Bohemian Grove?

No. The Grove is private property and the encampment is members-only. Uninvited visitors have been escorted off and in some cases arrested for trespassing. The Bohemian Grove Action Network organizes annual protests in Monte Rio during the July encampment.

What was in the February 2026 Bohemian Club membership leak?

In February 2026, investigative journalist Daniel Boguslaw published on Substack a leaked 2023 Bohemian Club membership roster containing approximately 2,200 names. Named: Paul Pelosi, Jimmy Buffett (pre-death), Conan O'Brien, Michael Bloomberg, Eric Schmidt, Charles Koch, Charles B. Johnson, and Edwin Meese III, among hundreds of others across finance, tech, media, and politics. The leak was the largest single public addition to the Club's documented record in more than two decades.