David McGowan author of "Weird Scenes from the Canyon" has an aggressive cancer

[Peter Lemkin]

I read his whole Laurel Canyon series, and found many parts to be very interesting, other parts just weird, while some of it contained huge leaps of logic and speculation.

Yes, some parts are weird indeed, and some parts take leaps into speculative areas somewhat unsupported. However, I do think the book and his research has merit. There are just too many persons and strange things going on in one Canyon in L.A. to be completely chance events. No doubt some of the events are not connected to the others, but something was going on there IMHO. It needs further investigation and I see it as a tangle of starting points from which to do so. The fact that Manson had some connections to the Canyon and that so many of the bands that became prominent did as well, and that so many of them came from military and/or intelligence families is just beyond strange and what statistics would explain. Many books I found 'weird' at first turned out to contain information - of course, others did not after a closer look and cross-checking. My hunch at this point is there was something to his thesis...though it may not be exactly on target.