Beast of Brussels

As the President of the United States of America tries to rebrand Large Language Models, or Artificial Intelligence, as Super Intelligence, the CEO's of these companies say they have invented products so good that they will kill us all, unless we purchase more tokens. Super Computer that will kill us? Foreign adversaries and lobbyists flooding streams with bots arguing philosophy and amplifying the divide around data centers? Crazed religious preaching end of times?

Such a story for 2024-2026, or 1974-2026. The myth of a super computer that will kill us all did not emerge freshly from the milieu. I mean Butlerian Jihad anyone? But the current discourse around AI kills us all has many similarities to an early modern folktale, "The Beast of Brussels"A tale that would travel from 1970s ultra-evangelical Christians in America, touch upon an oil war in the Middle East, jump into Russian émigré communities and then into Greek Orthodox networks. A story about the rapture would mix with Luddite techno-fatalism and through post-Soviet communities the Beast of Brussles subsumed an anti-Western—and sometimes antisemitic—meanings.

Imagine a computer so large it occupies three floors of a building in Brussels. It records everyone on Earth, controls every transaction, and gives each person an invisible identifying mark. Refuse the mark and you cannot buy or sell. Behind the machine stands the Antichrist, and it all began with a barcode on a pack of Bubble Gum and ended with Jared Kushner buying a building with mark of 666.

Welcome to the Beast of Brussels. The story has traveled for decades through sermons, books, translations, and online posts.

War of the Worlds Again?

In 1972 David Wilkerson’s released a film The Rapture. The film depicted a Brussels computer controlling commerce through numbers invisibly marked on people’s hands or foreheads. For decades Conservative church groups raised children on these films. Many preachers treated the plot as prophecy[3]

The plot draws on Revelation 13:16–18, which connects a bodily mark, 666, with permission to buy and sell. The film, which did not map to the conspiracy perfectly became the vehicle for the story.The movie used footage of old computers in Bell Labs. Massive tapes spun on what got nicknamed, "The Beast"

Pastors David Webber and Noah Hutchings fabricated the rumors as part of their Southwest Radio Church in Oklahoma City l(ater publish the conspiracy in Computers and the Beast of Revelation in 1986). They preached the supercomputer, secretly the antichrist would lead to the government tattooing everyone with the "Mark of the Beast."

Then in 1976 a fake newspaper carried a mock story to promote the film. The Beast of Brussels began to spread detached from author. The mimetic nature had taken off.Christian Life in 1976 published an article to detail how, like Orwell's "End of the World," some people believed the article as truth. They even published a letter rom writer Joe Musser explaining the story’s fictional nature. Joe Musser had written a novel,Behold a Pale Horse in 1970 which served as source material for the film. The book, part of the three part series, found popularity in the Evangelical community who thought the world would soon end with Jesus bringing in the final judgement.

Juicy Fruit and Killer Barcodes

Just as people fear the AI and data centers the Beast of Brussels developed from a fear of new technology. On June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio the first UPC symbol, the barcode that works with every register, got scanned for the first time. Until then almost all shopping happened anonymously outside of payment. Ever since that first pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum got scanned stores have collected data about shopping. This also revolutionized the supply chain. Naturally people feared it. Fundamentalist commentators interpreted automated data systems as fulfilling Revelation 13 (the 'Mark of the Beast').[7]

The Premise of the Beast of Brussels myth follows a slippery slope fallacy, If products carry numbers today, perhaps people will carry them tomorrow. If computers handle purchases, perhaps a single hidden authority will soon decide who may participate in society. Then in 1981 Mary Relfe’s When Your Money Fails: The “666 System” Is Herewould bring back the story of a supercomputer in [6] The computer becomes a way to connect banking, international institutions, and personal identification to a single feared outcome. It becomes the Deep State.

The Final Battle

The Yom Kippur War began on October 6, 1973.[8] For Evangelical Americans the great Battle between Mog and Gagog had to occur before the rapture. Following the Yom Kippur War, OPEC oil embargoes triggered global economic shockwaves. Common Market foreign ministers met in Brussels in November 1973 to address the crisis. This meeting provided the real-world backdrop for the rumored 'crisis meeting.' [9]here a secret cabal would unleash the super computer. Across conspiracy newsletters, following Relfe's books, stories of stopping the emerging common markets in Europe began to spread.

The OPEC Energy crisis caused deep hardship in rural America. Economic anxiety creates conditions for conspiracies to thrive. People look for external, often unexplained sources of their misery.

Cold War Anxieties

The constant fear of Nuclear war also sparked the eschatological fantasies of "new-Rigt" Christians in the United States. Since the founding of Israel in 1948 Evangelicals saw this as a sign of the end. The Jews had returned home, and soon the rapture would come. At the same time Solidarity in Europe grew. The Rome agreement of 1957 would lead to the foundation of the European Union in 1992. Evangelical Americans and Russian Orthodox, similar to theories of Papal domination, cast the Brussels government as a threat to conservative Christianity.

Russians Pick Up the Tale

Then in 1981 Pavel Vaulin, Beast of Brussels’, a professor of the Russian language and literature at the University of South Alabama, published a translation of part of Relfe’s book in his journal Niva Vaulin was a "refugee" who "fled" communist rule. Other translations circulated through Baptist and Old Believer networks in Russian emigre communities across Europe. In the waning days of the Soviet Union the story, and anti-European Union rhetoric took off in the Greek Orthodox community. All centered around the Beast of Brussels conspiracy.A 1987 pamphlet by the Athos elder Paisios, helped the story reach post-Soviet audiences after the fall of the communists.[6]. Greek and Russian Orthodox adopted the conspiracy in growing numbers through of the the 1980s. 666, Satan, and Super computers all got connected back through Eurpoean Common Markets and computers..[3] Of course not all evangelicals or Orthodox Christians accepted the story, but to me it has the hallmarks of russia mucking about in the Narrative. For the first time we see Evanglelical Christians, Greek Orthodox, and Russian Orthodox take a weird folktale and turn it into an anti-semetic screed against the European Union. Did Russian intelligence get involved? Did Vaulin play an uwitting role or work as a Team player? We may never know, but it gives off that vibe. We would also see an intersection between the Christian Far-Right, New Right lobbying groups, big oil, and Russia for the next forty years. The Beast of Brussles marks the first conspiracy to make the post Soviet Union jump.

The “Building 666”

In the last 2020s the conspiracy saw a brief resurgence. In November 2021, Myth Detector examined a Facebook post claiming that a Brussels “Building 666” housed a computer assigning people identifying codes. The accompanying photograph showed 666 Fifth Avenue in New York. The pictured building was not European Commission headquarters.[10] Turns out the building belongs to Donald Trump's Son-in-Law Jared Kushner, and the loan to pay for the building covered by Thomas Barrack. Maybe folks had it right, and we do see the Mark of the Beast. Jokes aside, as Kushner's involvement with the first Trump Administration got scrutinized his relationship with Thomas Barrack and 666 became a focus of Congressional Inquiry. This in turn sparked the Beast of Brussels conspiacies again

Sources & further reading

1. McVerry, Gregory. Original Beast of Brussels thread. Starting point for this draft; claims have been checked and qualified below.
2. Slashdot. “The Beast of Brussels.” July 26, 2003. Contemporary link to Andy McCue’s silicon.com reporting.
3. Clay, J. Eugene. (2024). “The Beast Computer of Brussels: An American Invention That Conquered the World.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 92(2), 251–275. Published online September 25, 2024. This draft uses the publicly accessible abstract; the full article requires access.
4. Buhler, Rich, & staff. “‘The Beast,’ a supercomputer in Belgium with every person on earth in it—Fiction!” Truth or Fiction?, March 17, 2015. Secondary account of film publicity and the Christian Life correspondence.
5. Musser, Joe. (1970). Behold a Pale Horse: A Novel. Zondervan. Bibliographic record, rather than verification of the novel’s contents.
6. Panchenko, Alexander. (2017). “The Beast Computer in Brussels: Religion, Conspiracy Theories, and Contemporary Legends in Post-Soviet Culture.” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 69, 69–90. DOI: 10.7592/FEJF2017.69.panchenko. See pp. 78–83 for transmission history and p. 86, note 4, for the origin caveat.
7. GS1 US. 50th anniversary of the first retail barcode scan, June 26, 2024. See also GS1’s Mars Wrigley case study identifying Juicy Fruit.
8. Associated Press. “Today in History: October 6, Syria, Egypt launch Yom Kippur War with attack on Israel.” September 25, 2023.
9. European Community foreign ministers. Declaration of November 6, 1973, reproduced by CVCE. See also the November 7, 1973 Hansard debate.
10. Myth Detector. “Is there a ‘Building 666’ that Stores a Supercomputer that Assigns People Codes?” November 22, 2021. Source for the photograph’s identification and the building’s historical ownership.
11. Douglas, Karen M., Sutton, Robbie M., & Cichocka, Aleksandra. (2017). “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 538–542. DOI: 10.1177/0963721417718261. Research review.
12. Heath, Chip, Bell, Chris, & Sternberg, Emily. (2001). “Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 1028–1041. Publicly accessible manuscript.
13. Council of the European Union. Schengen 40th-anniversary declaration and historical background. June 12, 2025.