The video that sent me spiraling looks like a Fox News report. There’s President Donald Trump in a screen within a screen, sitting at the Resolute Desk. He smiles broadly as he signs an executive order. Then, b-roll, panning above a vast two-wing building identifiable as a hospital by its helipad. Next, an interior shot, sweeping across a gleaming white room occupied by sleek screens and glass-domed beds, space-age Sleeping Beauty contraptions.
“Breaking now,” Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, says from what appears to be a Fox News studio, “President Donald J. Trump has announced a historic new healthcare system: the launch of America’s first medbed hospitals and a national medbed card for every citizen.”
I saw this video the night Donald Trump posted it for his 10 million–plus followers. I watched it several times, genuinely shocked. The president of the United States had promoted one of the cruelest conspiracy theories on the internet: the dark fantasy of medbeds.
The first thing to know about medbeds is that they aren’t real. Instead, they are the subject of an imagined plotline in which the military or some group of elites has access to extraordinarily advanced technology that can quickly and painlessly cure the human body of anything. In this fiction, peddled by right-wing conspiracy-theory influencers, the end to all disease and disability will arrive when Trump defeats his enemies and releases medbeds to the public—one of the many rapturous delights promised for that day. This conspiracy theory operates on a doomsday preacher’s ever-shifting timeline: The medbeds are always on the horizon, or being released imminently, or secretly already out there.
There’s no good gauge of how many people believe in medbeds or Trump’s ability to deliver them. But a critical mass keeps the theory alive and rocketing around the internet. Trump’s post, I realized, had marked its entry into mainstream politics.
Trump’s account deleted the video the morning after posting it. (We reached out to the White House several times for clarification on why but received no response.) But the damage had been done. This was September 2025, and A.I. videos were getting more convincing by the day. There was a telltale uncanniness to it—people clapping too slowly, as if underwater—but there was no disclaimer that it was fake. More to the point, the president had posted a video of himself speaking to the camera to make the announcement. It was easy to see how a viewer might think the report was real—or at least a nod to something real that was coming.
At the time, I wrote a short article explaining that medbeds were another disturbing idea to come out of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that promises that Trump is secretly plotting to expose and arrest a cabal of evil elites trafficking children and poisoning society. I wrote about the president’s recklessness in giving this specific conspiracy theory his stamp of approval. After all, if someone thought a miracle cure was right around the corner, they might be more likely to stop taking their medication or skip burdensome treatments. The piece received a decent number of readers, and a couple of radio shows reached out to have me on to talk about Trump and his supporters who believe in medbeds. Then the internet, and everyone else, moved on.
But I did not. I couldn’t stop thinking about medbeds. I found myself increasingly stuck on how nonsensical it all seemed, that such a patently absurd idea—magic beds!—could find its way to the most powerful person in the world.
How, I wondered, had this happened? Had anyone involved in perpetuating it stopped to consider that it wasn’t harmless? That some people might stop taking insulin or pursuing chemotherapy, or that other desperate people would be given false hope? More than with any other conspiracy theory I had ever encountered, I needed to know who was responsible.
What followed was a nearly yearlong obsession that, for stretches, took over my life. The search for the source of the medbed conspiracy took me into the world of scammers and crystals and alien invasions and broken families and sci-fi movie sets and the Arizona desert. I corresponded with con artists and attended a strange “medical” appointment that promised me invisible surgery and extraterrestrial matchmaking. I discussed lizard people and societal collapse with true believers. There was an entire month when I couldn’t stop talking to my editor about UFO discussion boards. I had grim conversations with many people about the horrors they’d seen after their loved ones fell into the world of medbeds.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that my search for the origin of medbeds was about more than this one conspiracy theory. It was about how we came to such a dark moment in American life.
In the end, I got answers—both about the origins of this specific conspiracy and about much more. And, after digging through layers of internet ugliness, I found the last thing I expected: a reason to believe we might just make it out of our current mess.
It’s been about a year since Erika Looney decided she needed to cut her mother off.
The moment came while she was driving to pick up her 8-year-old son, who has a developmental disorder. The school had called; he had hit another child. And then, sitting passenger in her Honda Accord as they went to get him, her mother said something that crossed a line: “It’s just a matter of time, and he’ll be completely fixed.”
Erika knew exactly what her mother meant: Stop worrying, the medbeds are coming soon. She had heard it many times before, particularly on her son’s bad days. Erika understood why her mother, Bambi, would want medbeds to be real. It wasn’t just for her grandson. Bambi had lost a foot in a tractor accident when she was a child. But this time, Erika couldn’t bear it. Because of a rare chromosomal condition, her son will require full-time care for the rest of his life. With the way his disorder manifests, Erika’s family can’t do something as simple as go to the movies. She knows not to hope for a cure. And that day, Erika was too worn out and too upset to be patient anymore.
“I flipped out, and I said, ‘I’m sick of this shit,’ ” Erika recalled. “I just shut down. And I think that’s really the moment I started blocking her out.” After that day, Erika stopped talking to her mother, even when she encountered her in her house. In May, she finally told her mother to move out.
I heard a lot of stories like this as I dove into the world of medbeds. I found some of them in discussion forums. Other times, I was interviewing believers and, more often, their bewildered loved ones. People told me about parents who resisted treatment for cancer; a father-in-law who almost died of sepsis after neglecting a urinary tract infection; a father who, on his deathbed, complained that the medbeds weren’t there to save him; and an uncle who died after postponing medical care, sure that medbeds would soon arrive.
These believers had, like so many conspiracy theorists before them, started from a place of legitimate suspicion of powerful institutions. They merely pushed further than the average internet truth seeker. On Facebook or Truth Social or X, even in texts from friends, they read about suppressed medical devices. They grew curious. They followed those threads to Facebook groups and Telegram channels. They were often, by this point, already convinced something big was coming that would upend our social order, if not our entire understanding of the world. And so, when they ended up in front of miraculous testimonials of healing, often supplemented by A.I.-generated photos or videos, they took it seriously. Now they crowdsource questions about when the beds will come and how they will work and argue over which medbed whistleblowers are real and which are frauds. They try to decode world events, looking for clues that the promised day of “awakening” has arrived.
For Bambi, it was during the pandemic that she suddenly began talking about medbeds. Not long after, she started going on about Democrats eating babies. Later, Erika would realize that medbeds had been Bambi’s entry point into the world of right-wing conspiracy theories. Bambi, a woman in her late 60s, began consuming conspiratorial media so religiously that she set timers to make sure she didn’t miss podcasts. Eventually, she stopped taking her medication for high blood pressure and diabetes. Her blood sugar levels grew perilously elevated. A baffled Erika felt that her mom had been replaced with a combative and paranoid stranger.
But to Bambi and those like her, medbeds are a source of comfort. The idea reassures believers that true patriots like themselves will soon be financially secure, respected, and healthy—and it also offers more immediate relief too. It provides a sense of community and the thrill of holding forbidden knowledge. In the Facebook and Telegram channels, believers share their stories of physical suffering and cheer each other on. Often, they post about loved ones with terminal diseases, trying to calculate whether the medbeds will arrive in time. “Any day now!” people write in the comments. They discuss what they’ll do first once they regain their vitality. Some fantasize about running around with their grandchildren.
The daughter of another medbed believer recalled her mother’s words: We won’t have those aches and pains anymore; your dad’s heart will be better. “What’s heartbreaking,” the daughter told me, “is the hope.”
But that hope, it turns out, is also profitable.
The reply came within hours, and it was good news: With a refundable $500 deposit, I could secure an appointment with a medbed specialist in D.C. “Welcome to the Med Beds Technology Registration Department, where we facilitate access to cutting-edge quantum medical technology for health restoration and wellness enhancement,” the email read.
In the forums, I had noticed some accounts insisting that medbeds were already being rolled out. Official-sounding email addresses floated around, offering bookings and stringing people along before asking for large payments.
I reached out to an account I found in a Telegram chat that offered a medbed appointment. The reply came from a purported government agency, “the National Quantum Coordination Office.” I asked questions about the technology and how the process would work; it was firm in saying I could get answers only at the actual appointment, which I could reserve with a Venmo payment.
I had found this email, and others, through accounts affiliated with a figure known as “Skye Prince.” There are numerous Skye Princes in the various medbed channels, but the original is a short-haired, ruddy-cheeked Australian woman named Kerrie-Ann Thornton, who claims to be a former medbed nurse with insider information. Though Thornton says on her website that the medbeds will be free, she and her impersonators also serve as a gateway to the many ways you can currently spend money on medbeds. There’s a Swiss company, for example, that sells “virtual medbeds”—$2,500 for nothing but the vague promise of DNA reprogramming. A U.S.-based chain of medbed operators called Tesla BioHealing has been flagged by federal regulators for claiming that its “Life Force Energy” treatments can cure stroke paralysis, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, and terminal cancer. Some operators simply ask for fees to jump customers ahead on “waiting lists” when the medbeds do eventually arrive.
I never sent any money to the National Quantum Coordination Office, so I never got the answers the appointment promised. But despite the typos and inconsistencies in the emails, I understood how such an unsophisticated scam might actually be effective if the mark was sufficiently confused—or frightened.
I thought of one 64-year-old woman named Johna, with whom I had been emailing. Johna told me she believed that the medbeds would cure her metastatic breast cancer. She no longer has any trust in established medicine, not after watching the deaths of two of her own children, which convinced her that doctors intentionally keep patients sick to “keep the money coming in.” So when she discovered a medbed Facebook page two years ago, she was intrigued. She began corresponding with an official-sounding Skye Prince account on Messenger and filled out an application for a healing appointment. Following instructions, Johna bought a Vanilla Visa gift card, loaded it with $300, and prepared to pay her medbed appointment fee.
As Johna was about to send her information over, she suddenly grew suspicious. She decided to question the account, and it eventually admitted that it wasn’t the real Skye but someone doing administrative work on her behalf. Johna backed out of the chat, realizing that she’d only just escaped being scammed.
But the near miss didn’t scare her away from medbeds. Instead, she decided she needed to know more about the real Kerrie-Ann Thornton. She sought out other Facebook groups. She was impressed that the real Skye Prince was calling out the copycat accounts and that she insisted the beds would be free. “I believed her words to be genuine,” she wrote to me.
In the end, Johna fell in deeper.
There was, as I’d discover, a lot deeper to go.
It is impossible to separate the rise of medbeds from the mutant growth of QAnon.
QAnon, as many people think of it, is long gone; Donald Trump never fulfilled QAnon’s original promises, and the figure known as “Q” went silent years ago. But in the collapse, Q’s followers dispersed and attached themselves to new communities and interests, and today QAnon’s form is a vast tangle of fantastical and often contradictory storylines.
The medbeds conspiracy theory is part of this mess. The QAnon DNA is right there: Somewhere secret, perhaps in deep underground bases, there are medbeds. Some nefarious force is keeping them from the public—or, alternatively, medbeds are being kept a secret by the Good Guys for nobler and more strategic reasons. Soon enough, though, Trump will reveal the beds, and a new age of vitality will begin. Sometimes, the medbeds promise patriots more than just healing: near immortality, or something even more dazzling. One QAnon account I found argued that medbeds would activate our 10 strands of dormant DNA, giving us telepathic abilities.
One woman, whom we’ll call Anna, told me of an aunt who, like many medbed believers, carries on all the old QAnon ideas: a still-living John F. Kennedy, secret reptilians in the British royal family, Democrats who eat babies. Anna is staying with her aunt in hopes of persuading her to visit a doctor for severe neurological pain. Anna has instead been able to see how bad it’s gotten: Her aunt is so certain of the medbeds’ imminent arrival that she won’t seek medical help for a broken arm. Her aunt has converted $600 into worthless Iraqi dinars and Zimbabwean dollars that she thinks she’ll be able to use to get access to the technology when it becomes available.
You can find similar Q-colored chatter of medbeds on X, Facebook, Rumble, Gab, Bitchute, Parler, and elsewhere. These kinds of discussions have been common on these platforms since 2022. But go back earlier, and the talk starts to dwindle. Before 2018, it disappears: The platforms are almost entirely void of the medbed conspiracy.
Instead, when people spoke about medbeds, it was in the context of science fiction. Star Trek had do-it-all hospital beds called biobeds. The 2012 film Prometheus featured doctor-free MedPods. Most on the nose was 2013’s Elysium, in which healthcare is sporadic on a post-collapse Earth. On the Elysium orbital space station, Med-Bays (some of them Versace-branded) cure the superrich’s every ailment.
I had for some time wondered whether Elysium had been the inspiration, but my suspicions were heightened when, upon watching, I discovered that the movie’s premise is a Matt Damon–led quest for healthcare access that ends with the Med-Bays auto-deploying to the masses. I even called Phil Ivey, Elysium’s production designer, at his home in New Zealand. He told me that a scam artist had once emailed him about a plan to sell sessions in a “wellness/Anti-aging device as introduced in the blockbuster movie ‘Elysium’!” Ivey had designed Med-Bays to look like real-world MRIs, after all.
There have always been overeager people who, through either extreme wishful thinking or some quirk of brain chemistry, have come to believe that science fiction hides secret messages or covers up for real events. But for a long time, these had been isolated individuals, too few and sparse to have any kind of cultural imprint, and certainly lacking the clout to land a video in the social media feed of the president of the United States.
But somewhere along the way, that changed.
Understanding exactly how that happened and when is critical, and not just for my quest to get to medbeds’ patient zero. It helps us to understand the broader information nightmare in which we’re now living. There’s nothing new about vaccine trutherism, or a belief in a global cabal of elites, or faith in an all-curing snake oil. What’s new is that those theories have gained enough power to alter our daily lives: a Health and Human Services secretary undermining vaccine access for children; a president whose pardon policy is premised on the myth that the deep state stole the 2020 election; the world’s richest man insisting that elites are carting in immigrants to destroy the political power of white people. This is not the first age with conspiracy theories. We’re just living through a time when they’ve escaped containment.
I thought discovering how medbeds had made the jump from science fiction to QAnon would help me understand. I needed to know if there was some cynical political operative or gleeful nihilist behind this mess. I wanted to find out if the conspiracy theory’s originator had known what they were doing, if they now felt delight at the heights their creation had reached. I became obsessed.
So I threw myself down one rabbit hole after another. I spent weeks at a time poring over old social media posts. I worked with researchers who’d had the foresight to maintain archives of 4chan’s main politics channel. I listened to obscure podcasts and read hyperniche blogs. I spent fruitless hours testing my employer’s patience, neglecting my more immediate work while dredging up zero-retweet Twitter posts from the early 2010s.
But it was YouTube that finally cracked it for me. The first medbed mentions, it turned out, came not in Trump-loving channels or via QAnon posters. Instead, they appeared in a different online enclave entirely: the New Age movement, which takes a more metaphysical approach to reality. Spiritually inclined YouTubers discussed medbed healing in videos about frequencies, crystals, and fifth-dimension consciousness. This talk had proliferated in these corners of the internet as early as 2015—three years before MedBeds landed in QAnon spaces.
In these forums, one name kept coming up: Captain Randy Cramer. In one video I found, Cramer, a serious-looking man in his 40s, discussed “holographic regenerating medical beds” back in 2015. In it, he referenced comments made in 2014, though they seem to no longer exist on the internet. This was and still is the earliest recorded mention I could find. I was fairly certain I had identified the conspiracy theory’s starting point.
I left Cramer a voicemail. Had he been the first to talk about medbeds? Would he be willing to speak to me about them?
Two days later, I received a call. Yes, he said, he had been the first. And he was happy to talk. I bought a ticket to Sedona, Arizona, to meet Cramer in person.
I arrived in Arizona with a heaviness hanging over me. I had seen so much ugliness online. I had heard so many stories of real-world harm inflicted on sick and elderly people. And here I was, headed to meet the man I believed had started it all. I was apprehensive.
But Sedona, one of the great New Age capitals of the world, almost immediately shifted my perspective. Pink Jeeps shuttled tourists to healing vortexes. Every third shop stocked bins of crystals. A woman I met during a UFO tour said she had signed up for a “healing chamber” experience from a vendor that also offered telekinetic spoon-bending lessons. At a store selling harmonic healing devices, I watched a man cradle a swaddled Chihuahua within a 9-foot-tall golden pyramid structure in an attempt to heal the dog’s vertigo. In this context, medbeds seemed conceptually like fun oddities, akin more to palm readings than to predatory disinformation. I decided I had to try out a medbed for myself.
I found Sedona Quantum Consciousness online, via an advertisement for its Cell-Well Medbed, which appeared in photos to be a souped-up tanning bed. This wasn’t the kind of medbed featured in QAnon chats and scam pages: These real-life “medbed” experiences provide significantly less spectacular promises and don’t claim to be using classified government information. Still, there were similarities. The bed I would try was actually a “tachyon chamber,” a device that, the owner assured me over the phone, was even more like a real medbed than the one I’d seen online. I was told it had healed diabetes sores, infertility, a frozen shoulder, and the common cold. It cost $75 for a 20-minute session.
I met the owner, Ada Tourtsakis, at her yurt on the outer edge of Sedona’s civilization. I was ushered in and asked not to take any photos of the tachyon chamber, which occupied its own inner sanctum in the yurt and was the proprietary technology of a man known only as Cobra. The tachyon chamber turned out to be, essentially, a narrow room. On the floor was a single mattress, low to the ground, with carnation-pink satin sheets. Quartz crystals sat at each of the bed’s four corners and atop a small glass table to the side. A pyramid of gold-colored rods was situated over the bed. Tourtsakis had me lie down and shuffle upward until the pyramid’s center was over my hips. She turned off the light and closed the door, leaving me with instructions to be open-minded. For 20 minutes I lay alone, in the dark, mulling over what I’d been told.
Tourtsakis explained it to me like this: The process relied on the crystals in the room, which were quantum entangled with particles out in space. Once activated, they created a kind of wormhole in the pyramid through which altruistic aliens from the star cluster Pleiades would emerge. The Pleiadians would then harness spiritual energy from subatomic tachyon particles in order to heal me, performing what Tourtsakis referred to as “surgeries.” Pleiadians, common figures in New Age cosmology, are largely spiritual entities that guide humans toward higher levels of consciousness. In medbed lore, they are one of several kinds of aliens cited to explain the super-advanced “dimensional” medical technology. Tourtsakis had told me that the Pleiadians were the ones who had decided that the pyramid’s center should be at my hips, identifying them as the source of my chronic knee pain. If I wanted, she said, they could also direct me to a new career or my soulmate. I asked if I needed to believe in them for these things to work. She said it didn’t matter. They would help anyway.
The New Age movement isn’t entirely apolitical. Many New Agers do believe in a coming Trump deliverance, and there has therefore always been a New Age contingent within QAnon. Tourtsakis herself believes that Trump will deliver the real medbeds. But in practice, Tourtsakis’ operation felt very different from the version of medbeds I had found on the internet. She told me that most of her clients were tourists seeking spiritual experiences, not desperate sick people. I knew she wasn’t promising a cure for cancer. And though my knee pain hadn’t been fixed, I found the experience relaxing. This felt recreational—not dangerous.
Still, I was aware how dark this could all get. As I walked out into the desert sunshine, I tried to reconcile the suffering I’d seen online with aliens performing metaphysical microsurgeries throughout my body. I was stuck, but only temporarily. Because the next day, I was going to meet the man who had started it all.
Here’s what Randy Cramer says happened to Randy Cramer.
In 1969, a secret branch of the U.S. Marines implanted an unwitting woman with a genetically modified embryo in order to produce one of its new class of supersoldiers. That secret branch then swooped in to train the resulting child—Cramer—starting around age 3 or 4. Cramer’s family was unaware of this middle-of-the-night training thanks to “trace amounts of time travel” that would send him right back to bed as if nothing had happened. At age 17, Cramer was sent off to fulfill his 30-year service in the Marines’ secret space program. Much of that time was spent in the Mars Defense Force, which protected Earth colonies on Mars. “It was pretty much just fight bugs, fight reptiles,” he said.
Then, abruptly, he was returned to his childhood bedroom, a healthy 17-year-old again. This had been accomplished with time travel and cloning technology. And though he has now recovered the full story, at the time, his memory had been wiped. He was left with a vague feeling of waking from a very long dream. He moved through his late teen years with a nagging sense he was different from others.
At around age 19 or 20, he began having regular night terrors and daily flashbacks to “horrific, nightmarish things.” This went on for almost a decade, until, with the guidance of a therapist, he diagnosed himself with post-traumatic stress disorder. He began a yearslong meditation regimen to find the source of that trauma. By his mid-30s, he had unlocked years of memories from his time fighting battles in space.
One of the earliest memories he discovered was of his first medbed experience. It had come in the heat of battle on Mars, after a reptilian alien ripped his arm off. Medics whisked him to safety, gave him a pain blocker, and placed him in a bed with a recessed, plush mat that molded to his body. A mechanical arm emerged from the top, ending in what he described as a giant lamp head. It projected a 3D model of an arm onto the wound. The projection, through its extremely high resolution and particular frequency resonance, tricked his cells into new growth. After five hours of a painless electric tickling sensation, he had a fresh arm, and he was sent back out into battle.
Cramer told me all this, with remarkable directness, in a lengthy interview in the basement where he records interviews for various UFO shows. Instead of his house, we were at a New Age event venue in a strip mall that also contains an apothecary, a dry cleaner, and a head shop. I had arrived to find Cramer waiting for me outside, smoking a joint, patient and pleasant. He turned out to be an ordinary-looking 56-year-old man with a buzz cut and salt-and-pepper beard.
And he was, I was finally sure, the first to talk about medbeds online.
Everything he said tracked with my understanding of the idea’s earliest use. He himself seemed certain no one had mentioned medbeds before him. No one seems to know who coined the term, but the label wasn’t what mattered; it was the idea that the military was hiding a device that could fix everything wrong with you.
After discovering his suppressed memories, Cramer began teaching meditation classes for others seeking to unlock the mysteries of the mind. At first, he kept his extraterrestrial experiences to himself, he said, because he was afraid of the potential blowback. But one day, a person he calls “the brigadier,” who communicates through a device implanted in Cramer’s brain, reached out to tell him that the space Marines would support him going public. The military’s reasoning was that leaking some of the information about these interplanetary conflicts might reduce the shock to the public the day the real revelations came.
And so Cramer became a whistleblower. In 2014, under the pseudonym “Captain K,” Cramer sat for a multihour interview for one of the bigger “exopolitics” YouTube shows. Suddenly, he was a known name in the secret-space-program community, as one of the initial such firsthand experiencers to come forward. He began giving presentations at UFO events and interviews on paranormal programs. From there, medbeds filtered out to the rest of the secret-space-program community and to other alternative subcultures, including the New Age world.
Obviously, Cramer’s claims, which hang on cloning and time travel, are out there. And it would be easy to conclude that he’s running a kind of big con. Cramer has earned money from his secret-space-program tale, selling lessons on “how to make brains smarter, faster, more effective.” More troubling, in 2017 he started a GoFundMe to raise money for the first medbed prototype.
But he doesn’t seem to be riding off medbeds now, in spite of how popular they’ve become. The GoFundMe made only $8,700, according to the archived page. He had decided it wouldn’t be feasible to make a medbed, and he moved on.
The problem is that the world did not, which was partially why he’d agreed to talk to me. He wanted to distance himself from the scams that he was seeing—and from the way he had watched this one minor detail in his life story snowball. Cramer has been going to conferences related to extraterrestrial matters for years, and he knows that his audiences have always been “outside the mainstream.” But starting around 2015 or 2016, the people coming to his talks had gone, in his words, “nuts.”
This was the period when Pizzagate, the proto-QAnon conspiracy theory, began to scramble our political realities. “It starts attracting everybody,” he said of the forums he participated in and the speaking events he attended. “You start getting all the anti-vaxxers in, the New Age people, a bunch of—I don’t know what to call them, other than quasi-deconstructionist neo-Christians. I mean, to them, Jesus was an alien.” He held particular scorn for the flat-earthers, who he thought were plants to discredit genuine research about extraterrestrial technology.
“I’ve done my share of saying, ‘That’s bonkers,’ ” he said, “and it makes people go, ‘You’re a member of the deep state.’ ”
I asked him about the A.I. video that Trump posted of medbeds. Cramer’s no fan of Trump regardless, but the president doesn’t know a thing about medbeds, he said. It was simply him “pandering” to an audience. (Cramer, though also no fan of Democrats, thinks Trump is a “terrible person.”)
Cramer is all too familiar with the medbed fallout. He watched, helpless, as MAGA and QAnon fed his healing technology into the exploitative machinery of politics. In an earlier era, perhaps, Cramer’s leaks about Martian bases and wormhole gates would have remained within his insular world of UFO blogs. But instead, it spread wildly, devastatingly out of control.
I asked Cramer if he regretted telling the world about medbeds. He didn’t hesitate. “Totally, yeah,” he said. “It would have been way better off never mentioning that was a thing, knowing where we are now. I would have shut my mouth and never given people rope to hang people with.”
He has spent years living with the consequences. “People started dropping their really heavy medical conditions at my feet, going, ‘Oh my God, please, somebody, can you help me?’ And I would just be like, Oh, I so wish I could,” he said. “That really shifted how I felt.”
A dozen or so times a month, he said, he still receives emails from people asking where they can get treatments. “Their emails start out, ‘You’re my last hope of not being a crippled, miserable, dead person,’ ” he said. “It’s just heartbreaking emails. And I have to tell them, ‘I’m really sorry. It’s going to be a waste of time. I’m afraid I don’t have the tech.’ ”
I walked away from our conversation with the conviction that the man who started medbeds was neither trying to make money nor influence politics. He was, instead, a true believer.
Specifically, Cramer believes that humanity is on the cusp of a new, better era. Cramer’s vision doesn’t require anyone to send him money or rely on Donald Trump. Instead, he thinks humanity can deliver its own salvation—albeit with a bit of inspiration from aliens. In his telling, our species will undergo rapid transformation once we understand what’s possible. We will stop obsessing over money and fighting over resources and instead organize our society around generosity and kindness. When we’ve done that, we’ll join the rest of the universe in exploring the stars. He thinks this next step is inevitable.
And in a just world, that’s where this would have started and ended: Cramer living in the boundaries of his fun, space-loving subculture, meditating in the Martian desert landscapes of Sedona, not hurting anyone.
But that’s not the world we live in. In the world we do live in, a guy named Randy in Arizona, who just wanted to talk about aliens’ love of Earth beer and the annoyances of space-military bureaucracy, instead ended up creating a conspiracy theory that has baby boomers on Facebook refusing to go to the hospital and begging Trump to heal their broken bodies.
I left Cramer that day feeling both deeply fascinated by his story and slightly depressed. I’ve worked at Slate for almost an entire decade, writing frequently about fringe conspiracy theories from dark corners of the internet. And over those years, those dark corners of the internet have expanded to be just, well, the internet. The conspiracy theories are no longer fringe: The president of the United States posted a video about magic, cancer-curing beds, and it was routine enough that it’s entirely possible I’m the last person still regularly thinking about it. What Cramer’s story shows is just how ruthlessly efficient the system behind that change is. The internet, suffused with popular anger, drawing from a polarized society, and built with rapacious algorithms, can chew up the most joyful of ideas.
Cramer, I felt, didn’t deserve this. It didn’t seem right that he should have to carry the weight of what more-cynical people did with his idea. But that night, I continued to reflect on the answer I’d gotten to my medbed mystery. The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was something comforting about my conversation with Randy.
Given all the suffering I’d seen, I had expected my medbed search to end with a villain. But there had been no evil mastermind. Instead, the problem was the information ecosystem of our era. As Cramer’s vision moved from one subculture to the next, various algorithms—and the incentive structures of social media—ensured that the wacky and wondrous aspects would be cast off, remaking the idea into a tool for manipulation.
And yet somehow, strangely, I see something hopeful in that. If each conspiracy theory evolved from a dark mind, if human cruelty were the driving force behind all of this, there would be little hope for us. But if the systems around us are what’s responsible for the chaos, those can change. Not quickly, and not easily, but—and maybe I sound like Cramer here—societies can evolve.
The day after talking to Cramer, I returned to the New Age center for a final event before heading out. I joined six others on mats on the venue’s galactically swirled green-blue floors. Cramer was also in attendance, sitting off to the side. A woman sprayed each of us with rose essential oil to help with grounding. She said she had co-created it with a higher-frequency being. Our host, sitting alongside his “BioCharger” machine, prepared us for a session in which he would rid us of parasites inside the body and also parasites out in the world. (We might have an additional bowel movement the next day, he warned.) Inside the machine, which looked like a large blender with a metal doughnut inside, blue and orange lights vibrated within glass tubes, while feathery electricity danced out the top. It cycled through a range of staticky notes—the frequencies that would heal us.
After the session, Cramer, who was a regular at these events, would get down on the floor to show me all the different chambers within the host’s device, eager to explain its settings and how it worked. This, Cramer would tell me, was true quantum science, not something that operated just “off vibes.”
But before we got to that, during the healing itself, I kept looking over at Cramer. It wasn’t just the kind of hard science he liked to geek out about that was going to make the difference here—our guide had told us to focus on love and forgiveness as we were healed. That, he had said, was part of the process. Cramer, I knew, believed in the healing power of meditation. He had said it was how he had healed his PTSD.
I drove out of Sedona with the picture of Cramer still in my mind, sitting on a pouf at the edge of the floor, rigidly upright, eyes closed, hands pointing down and steepled together, meditating on forgiveness and love.