Ron Rosenbaum wrote for Vanity Fair in 1991:
I believe that, in a sense, Danny was correct when he worried he might have been “targeted” with a “slow-acting brain virus.” Not exactly the organic virus he worried about, not Mad Cow Disease or multiple sclerosis. Rather, I believe what destabilized Danny was an extremely virulent strain of the information virus we’re suffering from collectively as a nation: Conspiracy Theory Fever. A slow-acting virus that has infected our ability to know the truth about the secret history of our age.
Don’t get me wrong: I believe there are real conspiracies—Watergate was one; Iran-contra and C.I.A./Mafia plots against Castro were others. But those in the grip of Conspiracy Theory Fever seem compelled to believe that (to paraphrase the Flannery O’Connor title) everything that conspires must converge. That all conspiracies are tentacles of one big Octopoidal conspiracy that contains and explains everything.
The chief symptom of slow-acting brain viruses like Mad Cow Disease is that the brain becomes “spongiform,” riddled with holes. The chief symptom of Conspiracy Theory Fever is that the brain becomes too sponge-like, too absorbent, indiscriminately accepting all facts and conjectures as equals, turning coincidence into causality, conjectures into certainties.
It’s clear that toward the end Danny Casolaro fell victim to this kind of fever. He couldn’t be content with the lowercase octopus of the Cabazon-reservation maze. He somehow had to convince himself and the rest of the world that he’d come upon the mega-conspiracy that explained everything. Even if he died trying.
