Origin

During WWII, the Allied forces were tipped off by Aleister Crowley that the Nazis had discovered the malleability of reality. They knew that if they could make enough people believe in an idea, reality would make it true. The Allies were unknowingly already using it. America's admiration for scrappy heroes made the US military an unstoppable underdog. They would confirm Crowley's story when a US solider, who was present at the raid of Hitler's bunker, found paperwork going back centuries. He smuggled them back to America, where they were studied by a special council convened by President Truman. Councilman and famed fimmaker, Frank Capra, suggested they use the research to create a new propaganda agency, which became The Department of Truth.

Creation

The Department of Truth debuted in the first issue of a comic series of the same name by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds

Institution

Mission

The Department of Truth is a covert government agency which is responsible for stopping conspiracy theories from spreading too far and becoming tulpas or thought-forms. The more people believe in them, the more they alter reality. This requires that their agency stay completely secret or else how they do their job could change.

Current Staff

• • Director: Lee Harvey Oswald
  • Field Agents:
    • Ruby
    • Cole Turner
    • Darla
    • Chuckie
    • Charity Sinclair
    • Hunter Hill

Analysts:

• • Hunky; media
  • Frank; internet
  • Doc Hynes: archivist
• Former Staff:
  • Frank Capra: First Director
  • Huck: First Hunter
  • Hawk Harrison: Defector

Locations

• Rock Bottom: Department of Truth headquarters are in a basement under the Library of Congress
• Fort Knox: The lock-up of records from the Ministry of Lies, the most secure place in the world because people believe it to be. Thus, the records don't change as reality does. People also believe there is gold at Fort Knox, even though it is at the depository next door. Since people believe, it manifested, and the gold found at Fort Knox is used to fund the Department of Truth.
• Area 51: Area 51 is the location where they keep a UFO, however, the UFO keeps changing shape as pop culture moves aliens away from flying saucers.

History

Middle Ages

For centuries, Rome built an empire across the known world. The barbarians of the north grew stronger as the Roman Legion grew weaker. In time, the empire would fall, and Europe would reorganize as a series of small kingdoms competing for superiority. The Pope and the Vatican remained in Rome, struggling to keep influence, while an assumed prophet named Mohammad was converting Christians in the Holy Land to a new religion, Islam. The only tools the Pope had at his disposal was a new order of monks networked through Europe and a profoundly dangerous weapon, the calendar.

The Church knew it could alter reality if it convinced enough people to believe in a shared idea. They created a new warrior king in Charlemagne that could relate both to the descendants of the Romans and the barbarians, however, Charlemagne never existed. The calendar was designed to jump recorded time centuries into the future to hide his assumed history. Despite this, because so many people believed he existed, so did his supposed bones in his supposed grave. In addition, there were rumors of 500 year old witches poisoning children, who were simply old-world pagans who refused to use the new calendar and were determined to teach the truth. They called themselves The Enlightened (or in Latin, Illuminati).

The Church continued this practice by folding in pagan rituals and symbols so that people didn’t need to change their behavior too much as they converted. The merchant class, who travels and is witness to the diversity of cultures, sees through this and starts creating their own secret social clubs based in an affinity for the other cultures. This forces the Church to start using the pagan symbols against their followers instead of recruitment. This is how Satan becomes horned and cloven-hooved to turn people away from those secret clubs. Thus the Crusades were started.

WWII

Aleister Crowley was an English occultist who was influenced by the secret clubs that the Church stood against during the Middle Ages. He sought to re-contextualize the Book of Revelations as ritual sex magic. He named himself The Great Beast 666 and spoke of a counterpart, The Scarlet Woman, named Babalon. He formed the philosophy, Thelema, the mantra of which was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” He hoped if enough people believed he was the wickedest man in the world, that would give him power. For a while, it worked. Crowley was in Berlin during the rise of Nazism. He recognized that the Nazis had discovered the power of belief and were trying to alter reality to fit their needs. Crowley fled to London hoping to inform the Allied powers and be of use in their fight against the fascists.

In 1945, the Soviet’s red army raided Hitler’s bunker. They found the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his wife burned. An American spy hiding in the ranks of the Soviets discovered a library of documents going back to the Roman Empire which proved Crowley’s claims that the Nazis had learned about the malleability of reality. The spy was able to get them back to Washington, where President Truman convened a special counsel to study the materials. Among that group was noted film director, Frank Capra. Capra believed the documents and proposed an agency to Truman that would sell a version of an America that everyone can believe in, thus founding the Department of Truth. At the same time, the Soviets started their own version, mockingly naming it The Ministry of Lies.

Cold War

Jack Parsons was a rocket scientist and fan of Aleister Crowley’s work. While hanging out with other secret society magic-enthusiasts, Parson befriended sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard. They sought to touch the other side through a Working, a ritual summoning of the divine feminine. They even shared their plans with Crowley, who warned them not to. Nevertheless, the duo went out into the Mojave Desert to commune with Babalon. In the middle of the sandstorm, where Parsons was pleasuring himself and Hubbard was writing it all down, the door to the otherside swung open and the Scarlet Woman stepped forward. She was followed by a fleet of flying saucers that are spotted all over America, some of them even crash landing. The Iron Curtain goes up. The Doomsday Clock is set. The Cold War begins, starting troubling times for DOT.

The DOT's first crisis was Senator McCarthy's witch hunt of communists in the state department. The more media attention that McCarthy got, the more believers there were. It gave cover for real spies, who became more and more difficult to identify. The American "war machine" also struggled pushing communists out of Korea and Cuba, thanks to the "scrappy American hero" idea backfiring. As black youths fought back against racist state violence, a fear of scrappy rivals took over the aspiration to scrappy heroes that helped us win WWII. President John F. Kennedy started to question a war machine that couldn't win.

By 1963, Kennedy threatened to shut the DOT down. Previously, US Marine Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited by the Department of Truth to go undercover with the Soviets. He spent two years embedded in the Ministry of Lies. Director Capra let it slip that Kennedy would be more useful a martyr in front of him. Oswald took this to heart. He went off the radar to assassinate the president, but it was the Scarlet Woman who actually pulled the trigger. The DOT set up the Jack Ruby incident, while Oswald would be assigned to covert investigations from now on. He would be partnered with a fifteen year old prodigy, Doc Hynes, investigating UFO sightings. Doc had been specifically studying fear of “men in black," the government shadow men trying to stop the belief in UFOs and by extension the belief in a better future, per Doc’s theory. Unfortunately, Lee’s aggressiveness in the field led to Doc requesting a transfer to archives.

Watergate

Lee was invited to Director Capra’s meeting with newly elected president, Richard Nixon. There, they informed Nixon that the real Cold War was waiting for whose propaganda would alter reality first. Lee proposed hiring Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing, which, if done correctly, would manifest the Apollo 11 in real life if enough people believed it, which they did. The Apollo 11 astronauts made it to the moon, and Kubrick’s memories of the film shoot were nothing but a half-remembered nightmare.

Unlike Kennedy, Nixon had a great affinity for the Department of Truth. He saw the DOT as the perfect weapon after seeing what they could accomplish with Apollo 11. He also clocked Oswald on their first meeting and admitted to him that he had wished he pulled the trigger himself. He used them to take America off the gold standard internationally, strengthening the power of the currency as an idea. He expanded the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and drove a wedge between China and the Soviets. Nixon believed he was unstoppable and thought, with the Department of Truth, that would be his new reality.

Lee didn’t like the direction this was going, so he used the one strategy that he never used before: the truth. They leaked everything to the press. Lee had a final meeting with Nixon, which lasted 18.5 minutes. Nixon demanded he make it go away, but Lee refused. The die was already cast. The more people who believed Nixon was a crook, the more he was a crook. Because of Nixon, the existence of the Department was no longer shared with the Presidents.

Satanic Panic

The peace and love movement of the 60s gave birth to serial killers, doomsday cults, AIDS, drug epidemics, and left wing terrorists blowing up government buildings. America was in a rough place, and Oswald, who had taken over as Director of DOT, was obsessed with Reagan’s shining city on the hill vision for America. He tasked new field agent Hawk Harrison with coming up with a way to make more Americans believe in it. Hawk started to push the cheery televangelists, but people are programmed to define themselves in opposition to something.

Satanist became America’s new favorite villains, thanks in part to a discredited psychology book called Michelle Remembers, which purported to use lost memory techniques to reveal the blocked out Satanic childhood abuse of its subject. These types of Satanists only ever appeared in fiction, and real Satanists were goth libertarians looking for an easy thing to rebel against. Complicating matters was popular musicians co-opting that easy rebellion, spreading that symbolism nationwide. Hawk was at an impasse because he had no one single person to pin it on, until Cole Turner.

Cole was a young child (and future DOT agent) who was manipulated by a fame seeking psychologist into accusing his teachers of satanic ritual abuse. He told stories of a hidden passageway behind the shelf that held the play-doh, which led to a basement where the faculty was feeding on children and trying to get Cole and his classmates to join in. Part of his recollection was the Star-Faced Man, a figurehead for Hawk to finally use. Hawk re-designed the Star-Faced Man and started subliminally reintroducing it to Cole and to other children at the center of Satanic Panic hysteria. He had even set up a television appearance where they were going to push Cole and his homegrown monster, however, Hawk was attacked by the Star-Faced Man the night before. Sensing his power, Hawk killed the Star-Faced Man campaign before he could be spread any further.

Militia Movement

Anti-government sentiment was growing in the 1970s, and Hawk liked to lean in, in his early days. When it came to conspiracies associated with fluoride in the public water or chemtrails, Hawk would hire public water employees and airplane engineers to be on the DOT payroll. This way, the conspiracies of poison wouldn’t need to come true if the rumor of the operations being funded by government agencies was already true. He did the same thing when rumors of evil government insiders using black helicopters for secret missions, commissioning the DOT’s own black helicopters. This is when Hawk’s efforts started to backfire.

Despite Ronald Reagan campaigning on making a new America based on an old, conservative America myth, the right-wing militias that sprung up around the country didn’t buy in. Making matters worse, the Soviet Union fell, and America lost their WWIII boogeyman. For decades, they replaced it with a secret American cabal represented by Bush’s CIA and Clinton’s international free trade deals. Hawk wanted to use his black helicopters to shut down a small militia at Ruby Ridge publicly so that the evil government they feared wouldn’t come to pass. It did not go well. A 14 year old boy and his mother were killed in a standoff with US Marshals.

This started a chain reaction that was out of Hawk’s control. The US government targeted another militia in Waco, Texas, without the cooperation of Hawk or the DOT. This resulted in the deaths of 14 children. Two years later, homegrown terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, as an act of vengeance against the government for Waco. Almost 170 people were killed with roughly 750 injured. Hawk took it very hard.

Tulpas

Wild Fiction Classifications

• Class One: Intangibles, like ghosts and poltergeists. Usually audio/visual only. Least dangerous class
• Class Two: Close Encounters, aliens and UFOs. This phenomena tends to be quick, so it is not considered the most dangerous class
• Class Three: Cryptids (or critters), the most dangerous because true believers imagine them as living, breathing animals.
• Class Four: A rare story that cannot be contained.

Characteristics

Because they do not quite exist, they are hard to look at and weird to be around. Photographic evidence ends up as a blur. They give off light strong enough to possibly give a witness a sunburn. Witnesses are also prone to nausea and even seizures. However, because people believe they are real, they are completely capable of being shot, tranquilized, or trapped.

Pop Star Problem

The unique combination of parasocial fandom and a gossip industry has turned popstars into problems to the Department of Truth. Examples:

• Marilyn Monroe was a tulpa that replace Norma Jean
• Elvis Pressly became the first fourth kind of wild fiction to be documented by the DOT
• Avril Lavigne and conspiracies that she has been replaced by a lookalike.

Star-Faced Man

In the 1980s, America was subjected to a mass hysteria called the "Satanic Panic." People believed that their were satanic cults across the country that was using children as ritual sacrifices, although it wasn't true. Cole Turner went to one school that received accusations. When his parents received a letter from the school with an official statement, they sat him down and interrogated him about it. He apparently made accusations of abuse during this questioning, but as an adult, he does not remember making those accusations nor the events he was accusing the school of. What he did remember was the Star-Faced Man, a cannibalistic demonic man with a pentagram carved on his face.

Cole's official questioning transcript and recording were given to Department of Truth agent Hawk Harrison. Hawk took Cole's initial Star-Face Man sketch and made it even more grotesque. He started sneaky it into Cole's Saturday Morning Cartoons so that a month or so later, Cole could redraw it. This character would be replicated and shown to other kids centered around satanic panics. Years later, when Cole was recruited to the Department of Truth, his only question was if the Star-Faced Man was real. While checking records, he found more recent children sketches of the Star-Faced Man, which leads Cole to request opening an investigation into the tulpa.

Bigfoot

In the beginning, the Department didn't know how tulpas worked and were hunting sasquatches just to stop a panic. The Jerry Crew footprints and the Paterson-Gimlin film were all real hoaxes that helped develop the thought-forms. They pushed the tales of the African wild men (which ended up being gorillas), Nepalese Yeti stories, and Native American lore from culture to lies, which is where the fictions come from. Sasquatches were categorized as a class three "wild fiction," the most dangerous class.

Agents hunting sasquatches are often mistaken for true believers by other true believers. When those believers get too close, the Department will consider eliminating them to stop the spread of the belief. Hawk had contacts in Hollywood that helped keep Bigfoot as a joke.

As part of his field agent training, Cole was taken on a Bigfoot hunt with Hawk and another field agent, Darla. They informed him on the rules regarding wild fictions. Unbeknownst to them, a true believer named Evan had sneaked up behind them. He followed them and heard everything they said. Evan believed they would kill him so he took out his rifle and considered taking them out first. He was interrupted by the Bigfoot the field agents were hunting. Before Evan was attacked, Darla was able to shoot and kill the Bigfoot. Hawk convinced Evan that he finally knows the truth and can finally give up the chase, which Evan agreed to. Hawk required Cole and Darla to not report it to Director Lee.

Mothman

Agents Lee and Doc were investigating UFO sightings across the country as possible tulpas. They noticed a number of them groups in the Ohio river valley, especially West Virginia. So in order to witness one themselves, they started to plant sightings in an attempt at controlled manifestation. Unfortunately, their wording ("strange flying objects") was not specific enough. What caught on with the local population was a man with wings and red eyes which would eventually be dubbed "The Mothman."

People started to believe that the Mothman was an omen of an upcoming tragedy. That belief got so strong that on December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed, resulting in the deaths of 46 people, two of which have never been recovered. There were claims that the Mothman was hovering above the bridge during this incident. Lee and Doc were forced to change their investigation to a hunt. Relying on tranquilizers, they managed to capture The Mothman. This was the first time a tulpa was captured alive, according to the DOT. Neither the Soviets or the Nazis had ever accomplished it.

It is currently stuffed and hanging in Fort Knox.

The Patsy

John F. Kennedy saw no value in the Department of Truth, and Director Capra saw no value in Kennedy. Capra thought his "Camelot" vision was a detriment to what they were doing and that America didn't need a boy king. He mistakenly lamented that Kennedy would be more useful as a martyr to Oswald, who was tracked down by some of his colleagues from The Ministry of Lies. They gloated about gaining ground on America, so Oswald took matters into his own hands.

He set up in the Dallas book depository with a rifle, but it was the Scarlet Woman who took the shot. Oswald ran and hid out in the Texas Theater. As he sat there, he saw another version of himself manifest, a tulpa representing the evil that authority does in the shadows. Flickering and nausea inducing, the Dallas police raided the theater and arrested the tulpa. The real Oswald was secured by the DOT, and they set up Jack Ruby to take out the tulpa.

Hawk Harrison came to believe that the DOT may have saved the wrong Oswald and that the DOT is being run by a tulpa.

The Hatman

The Hatman is similar to the Slender Man. He started as a social media meme, created by young internet users using cough syrup to get high. He was imagined to be the opposite of machine elves, helpful sprites that maintain reality and are often visualized by users of DMT. DOT computer tech, Frank, had a run in with Hatman when he targeted an old, estranged friend of Frank's, eventually earning her job at DOT.