FBI Zero Files: glimpse of troubled minds

The FBI keeps the accounts of conspiracies and delusions just in case.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
They are, in a way, the real-world equivalent of television's "X-Files," the fictional secret collection of FBI cases involving alien abductions and grand conspiracies that kept legions of fans entertained for nearly a decade.
But although Fox Mulder and Dana Scully have long since retired to the compost bin of syndication, the FBI's Zero Files thrive in obscurity -- remaining, in their own way, very real.
They exist on nondescript shelves deep in the archives of FBI offices in San Francisco and across the nation, within thick file folders tucked anonymously among thousands of manila clones. And until now, when The San Francisco Chronicle received permission to examine the folders, the Zero Files had never been opened to public review.
Most of the folders in the FBI archives contain the details of closed homicide cases and long-solved bank robberies, rarely seen as they await judgment day or the office shredder. But the Zero Files, each marked with a case number containing the digit "0" in its heart, are different -- very different.
The contents
They are letters, faxes, e-mails and photographs, diagrams and maps, legal papers and photocopies. Some are a single scrap of scribbled paper, others reams of carefully typed explanation, replete with references and footnotes. Some were forwarded to the FBI by courts, police officers or businesses; most were submitted to the bureau by the authors themselves.
Each describes a unique delusion, a single person's fantasy committed to paper and recorded for posterity. Conspiracy theories. Claims of paranormal abilities. Celebrity fantasies. To flip through the Zero Files is to peer into a palimpsest of lunacy, a travelogue of realms where the residents wish very much to leave.
Almost anything can be a Zero File -- the phrase simply refers to items received by the FBI that are "non-actionable," and can include anything from cases handed off to local police to "attaboys" from other agencies.
But when agents refer to the Zero Files amongst themselves, and joke about whose turn it is to feed the captive alien, they are almost always referring to a special category of report -- one that almost defies further description.
Nobody within the bureau has an exact count of how many Zero Files the FBI has stashed away across the nation, but the agency's San Francisco office, a midsize bureau, has a database listing 17,000 items stretching back to the 1970s.
Examined first
And the files demand far more from the FBI than mere shelf space. Each Zero File item landed there only after passing across the desk of at least one agent who spent time making sure it did not relate to any active investigation, represent a threat or offer any avenues for future investigation.
Most agents come to know repeat writers -- "frequent fliers" -- after a few shifts on the duty desk. A glance through the files shows that some agents found themselves acting as counselors of last resort.
"It's almost like being a social worker when you're on the desk," FBI Special Agent Pete LeFranchise said. "There's probably been at least three or four times ... where I've just had to say, 'Look, sir, you need to seek clinical or psychiatric help.'"
Some files, however, are eerie in their seeming prescience or certainty: the poem from a young man that seems to hint at the massacre at Columbine High School; the anonymous caller offering impossible theories of a conspiracy involving the CIA who leaves a return phone number that connects to an internal CIA office number.
This, the FBI says, is the reason the Zero Files stay out of the circular file, why they are searchable and cross-referenced. The Zero Files are kept, agents say, because you just never know.
Psychiatric disorders
To those who study the vagaries of the human mind, the Zero Files are a kind of disorganized textbook, orderless definitions for a dictionary whose entries include terms such as "systematized delusions," "delusional disorder" and "paranoid schizophrenia."
Experts who reviewed excerpts of the files said that despite the grand variety of language, content and topic, many of the authors shared certain characteristics common to delusional disorders. Leading those, they say, is the view that the world is a hostile place, filled with persecutors and conspirators, a world where the writer holds a special place as victim, savior or both.
In such a world, the experts said, everything has personal significance, everything is a hint to the grand plan, from the type of lettering used on a can of instant coffee at the grocery store to the nightly adventures on television sitcoms.
In a world where everyday experiences are part of a secretive criminal conspiracy, the experts said, little wonder that the FBI -- a secretive organization that specializes in uncovering such conspiracies -- would attract attention, either as enemy or friend. Imagine, one expert said, what the CIA has in its version of the Zero Files.