CIA Historian: “Aliens Control Our Government” (ft. Peter Levenda)

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So I'm here with Peter Lavenda, the author of Sinister Forces, Secret Machines, The Unholy Alliance, and many other books. If we have a crash saucer from the 40s, I would say if we are in possession of it and they're in possession of it too, then there is an agreement between countries that says we're not going to talk about this. It's the Fight Club. JFK was assassinated over quote unquote the alien presence. E. Howard Hunt on his deathbed did claim that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that he knew about it. I mean everybody that represents the blue-blooded brahmins of American society, old money people, were at a saiyan, a freaking saiyan in the woods in Maine on New Year's Eve. What is the Necronomicon and why is the strategic air command interested in the Necronomicon? How much time do you have? At some point somebody did something they weren't supposed to do. It might have jump-started civilization on this planet. Today's episode is sponsored by Incognite. 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So if you care about privacy, autonomy, or just don't want to be the training data for the next AI overlord, get Incognite. Use code AmericanAlchemy at checkout, or go to incognite.com slash AmericanAlchemy for 60% annual plan. Again, that's incognite.com slash AmericanAlchemy and code AmericanAlchemy for 60% off your annual plan. So I'm here with Peter Lavenda, who I couldn't be more honored to be with. I think you are an amazing big picture thinker who kind of consumes all of the data around non-human intelligence UFOs, but also connects them with ancient traditions and religion and mysticism in a super unique way. And in a way that's caught the attention of higher ups in the government. And you've also just led a just a fascinating life. And so I'm really excited for you to be here today, or the author of Sinister Forces, Secret Machines, Man, Gods, and War, and the Unholy Alliance, and many other books. And so yeah, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me. This is great. Absolutely. So I want to start with this idea that reality itself might be somewhat choreographed or scripted, an idea you explore in Sinister Forces. You talk about all these kind of interesting synchronicities where things are written about or talked about before they happen. Do you want to explore any sort of examples of that? Yeah, sure. I mean, this is something that occurred to me when I was really in the very beginning of the Sinister Forces research, which goes all the way back to Watergate. Right? So I started during Watergate for those of you too young to know what I'm talking about. This was this break in of the Democratic Party National Headquarters ordered by Nixon and the whole thing that happened in the 1970s, in 1972. And then it lasted till 1975, the investigations and all of this. And I was following all of this. I was reading three newspapers a day. And I was living in New York, which is where I'm from. And so you're getting a lot of media attention. You're getting a lot of analysis. A lot of people are showing up and they're talking about their backgrounds. And as I'm going through all this, I'm thinking, this is just weird. There's something about this that sort of defies regular analysis of political systems. There's something else at work. And I started pulling at the threads of it. And I think one of the fascinating things that happened, I was starting to research Nazi occultism, because that was going to be a chapter of Sinister Forces. The idea that governments and religion could somehow get together in such a way as to cause this bend in reality, kind of, where it's not just government running people's lives anymore from a purely mundane situation. And it's not the churches from a purely spiritual one. It's like this weird mix of both of them. And what kind of trouble could you possibly get into doing that? So I started looking at that. And I wound up at the National Archives in D.C. And I rented a room in a low-cost kind of hotel off DuPont Circle. And I'm in the room and I bring my suitcase in and I look up on the wall and somebody had left this huge poster of the eye in the pyramid, on top of the triangle of the pyramid. This Illuminati symbol was hanging there in the room where I'm starting to do this research. I'm thinking, this is a little bit too on the nose. So one thing led to another. And it made me realize that there was something else going on. That the... Well, we were learning about Watergate was only really the tip of the iceberg. If you start pulling at the people who were involved, like E. Howard Hunt, right? Famous guy, former CIA officer. The action officer basically in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation, right? So he was done in Miami when all that was going on, trying to organize this invasion. That Kennedy eventually said, no, we're not going to give you air support. You guys are freaking nuts, right? Pull back. Don't do this stuff. But they ignored him, right? Did all this thing. E. Howard Hunt wrote at least three occult novels. Really? Yeah. And he lived on a place called Witch's Island. What? So I'm thinking, well, wait a minute here, right? Let me read the novels. Maybe there's something there. Who does that, right? I just said, I want to read these novels. And oh my God, it's an attack on the Kennedys. The Kennedys as Satan worshipers thinly veiled kind of a story about that. The vitriol that he had for the Kennedys over Bay of Pigs was palpable in this. And he made them Satan worshipers and stuff. It was really cool. So I said, I got to pay attention to Howard Hunt a little bit more closely. Okay. Years go by, it's now 1979, 1980. And I get a job. I'm working for a living as a regular human being. So I get a job in this strange company in Queens, New York, within walking distance of where I was living, which made it nice. I could just walk to work in New York. Nobody walks to work. So I'm walking to this place and I have a desk next to this guy. And this guy in this tiny little company in the middle of nowhere turns out to have been E. Howard Hunt's colleague at the front that they worked for in Washington, D.C. So this guy is working there. What was the front? Well, the front was Robert Mullen Corporation. It was like a kind of a Mormon operation in D.C. that was supposedly a publicity public relations firm. But E. Howard Hunt had his official office there, even though he was no longer quote unquote CIA, but he was operating here. He was part of the plumbers at that time. So Gordon Liddy, everybody was one big happy family. This guy had the office next to him. Also CIA also operating as a front, except this guy was based either in Brazil for a long time or in Singapore. Right. So all these things, I mean, I'm right there, right next to the guy who knows personally E. Howard Hunt. And I'm researching E. Howard Hunt. And he tells me his name, Arthur Hochberg, I guess I can tell his name now because I've talked about it. I printed it. And I went home after he started telling me his whole life story. He's going into CIA. He's going into this, he's going into that. The language is because we both spoke a little Mandarin. He spoke better than I did. And so there was this immediate connection on that basis. And then slowly he just reveals that this was his position. So I go home, I'm going through all my books and there's his name, right? And no one knew what had happened to him. And there he was in this tiny firm, right? Having lost his job at CIA. That's amazing. Because of the admiral. When the admiral came in after Watergate and all this stuff, they fired a lot of action agents, right? A lot of the officers who were actually in the field got fired. It's a big scandal. So this guy lost his job, right? So I'm working next door next to him for like three months. He's telling me stories and stuff. I'm thinking, holy, and here I am researching this, right? This is not possible. If you had been a journalist and you were desperately looking for this guy, you wouldn't have found him, right? But here I am next to him and he's like driving me home in his car. And we're parked in front and he's talking about AFI, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. And then later I get invited to an AFIO thing like 10 years later, right? So this would happen to me all the time. There's something that happens, I think, when you set your attention on something that is somehow entropy reducing. And it attracts more and more of that thing into your life. And it's hard to say whether that is some sort of retro causal relationship or some future that's already sort of set or something. But that's so fascinating. And I was just thinking, you know, E. Howard Hunt, his lawyer, Douglas Caddy told dark journalist, you know, somewhat recently that JFK was assassinating, because E. Howard Hunt is obviously implicated as as much as any agent and the JFK assassination itself. And this guy, Douglas Caddy said that E. Howard Hunt told him essentially on his day, I think as he was dying, that JFK was assassinated over quote unquote, the alien presence. And so do you think that E. Howard Hunt knew about, you know, NHI and aliens and that JFK's assassination had something to do with that? Well, I mean, you know, I like to work with tangible stuff like documents and stuff like that. That's as tangible as you're going to get in a situation like that, I believe. I don't really know if I 100% trusted or believe it. I know that E. Howard Hunt on his deathbed did claim that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that he knew about it. And that CIA was somehow involved, or at least a branch or a rogue element of CIA. I will pretty much accept that as a distinct possibility. Since the beginning, everybody has thought that, right? Because of Bay of Pigs. There was this, I mean, what happened with Watergate? There was all the same Bay of Pigs guys. The same ones who were involved with Bay of Pigs, the same anti-Castro Cubans, now show up in Washington burglarizing the Democratic National Committee. So, yeah, there's a connection, I'm sure there is, right? Who you can take to court over this? I'm not sure. Can I weave something together? And I don't know if this is the case, but like, Nixon was head of the 5412 Commission under Eisenhower, and he used to task Howard Hughes with things that, so 5412 Commission was already created as this interagency kind of coordination body that would give the president plausible deniability on sort of bad things that he wanted to do domestically. And then on top of that, you had this other separation layer where Nixon would task Howard Hughes with doing the really dirty stuff. And so there's this idea that you had these kind of Cuban assassins, they called them the S-Force, or they went by different names, Alpha 66, and Operation Mongoose had something to do with this. And so he created that originally to take out Castro and Shagovara. But that sort of didn't end up happening, obviously, you had the Bay of Pigs, JFK takes over from Eisenhower. And the narrative I've heard is that JFK fires Dulles, Dulles is sort of licking his wounds and really angry at JFK and the Brown Brothers harem and re-operationalizes this S-Force to then take out JFK himself. And what's really crazy is this connects to Watergate because Howard Hughes, his longtime lawyer, or I think like General Counsel or kind of right hand guy, was a guy named Larry O'Brien. Larry O'Brien was running McGovern's campaign and he was the guy whose cell phone got bugged in the Watergate scandal. So it's this crazy, it's because you have to ask, if you're Nixon, why would you ever break into the DNC when you're way ahead of McGovern and the Poles? And obviously Nixon was notoriously paranoid. And so maybe it's because you have this guy, Larry O'Brien, who knows that you commissioned originally this S-Force team of assassins, and then they got operationalized to take out your longest political opponent, even though he didn't want JFK dead. Of course, he would never, you something like that, but he was probably afraid that it would get pinned on him. So it's pretty nuts. It's this crazy story. But everybody knows everybody else. The problem that I have is that it gets tighter and tighter and tighter. And it's the same thing with the nine, this famous thing that I talk about in Sinister Forces, right? You have these disparate individuals. You think they have nothing in common, nothing to do with each other. And then you pull at a certain thread and they all come together. So tell us who are the nine. Well, this actually connects to this whole story too in its own way. So you have the nine. Of course, this was in 1952 to 1953. There's this famous guy, not famous yet at the time, Andrea Puharich, a guy with medical training and technical training. He's involved in technology for medical purposes and stuff. But he also gets involved with a bunch of sort of borderline psychic people, right? Back in the 1940s, early 50s, there were seances and there was like psychic phenomena, research and stuff going on. JB Rine was doing his thing studying ESP. And so you have a guy like Puharich who finds himself up in the woods in Maine. He was supposed to be back in the city. He was going to go to take up a position in California, I think, but he gets involved with these people. And to make a long story short, there's a seance that's held in late 52, early 53. I think it was the New Year's Eve of 52 to 53. And there are nine people involved in the seance. Now, these are not just some casual nine people you pick up, like your neighbors or something, right? This was a DuPont and an Aster and a Forbes. I mean, everybody that represents the blue-blooded brahmin's of American society, old money people, were at a freaking seance, right? In the woods, in Maine on New Year's Eve. These people don't do New Year's Eve that way normally, right? There's big parties and there's champion and there's God knows what. In this case, they're all sitting around a seance table with Andrea Puharich. And one of them is the guy who was the inventor of the Bell Helicopter, right? So- Arthur Young. So Arthur Young is there with his wife. His wife is Ruth Forbes Paine Young, right? She had a lot of names. She was excessively nomenclatured. And so you have, you know, Ruth Forbes Paine Young. She's a Forbes. She was married to George Paine, Lyman Paine, and also married to Arthur Young. So she had all of these pedigrees all mixed in together. And she was the best friend of, I think her name was Mary Douglas, if I'm not mistaken, who was the paramour of Alan Dulles. So Alan Dulles, which keeps coming up in these conversations, his girlfriend is the best friend of Ruth Young, married to Arthur Young. So already there's this weird connection, right? And when I say best friends, I mean, they told each other everything, that kind of, it wasn't like a casual, you know, thing. So they were best friends. And then you had a Dupont, you had an Aster, you had all of these people at the Seance. And they're contacting some spiritual force. And there's a medium, a man from India, who then becomes kind of famous in sort of religious liberalism sort of circles, trying to, one world religion kind of thing, you know, trying to make peace with everybody and all of this kind of stuff that was going on at the time. And so he's conducting the Seance. And he's solving mathematical equations that Andrea Pujaric puts to him to see if he's really talking to a spiritual force. And this guy's answering correctly solving mathematical equations. So then, and this guy evidently materializes out of the clear blue sky, little threads, one for each of the members of this group, they're supposed to wrap around their wrist, makes them Brahmins, like actual Brahmins, in the Indian sense. But there are Brahmins assigned to this exalted rank, this elite status by these nine forces that are spinning somehow above them, which later become identified as residents of a UFO in low earth orbit. The same one that is later than being contacted by Uri Geller, who was then discovered by Pujaric, brought to the United States to be tested. It just gets incestuous. But Ruth and Arthur, they have a daughter who's also Ruth. Her name is Ruth Payne, she lives in Texas, by the way. And she's studying Russian. She's fascinated by the Russian language. She's a Quaker who wants to study Russian. Don't think she ever managed it in her life. But at that moment, she wanted to study Russian. And in her home, she opens her door to some refugees, you know, people who are recent immigrants from Russia, Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina, and their kids. So they're living with Ruth Payne in this house in Texas. She gets him the job at the Texas School Book Depository. So wild. So you have this kind of blue-blooded elite adjacent person whose mother engaged in the seance with Pujaric. And they think of themselves as sort of guardians of the world via this like Council of Nine, you know, non-humans or whatever. And she is somehow housing Lee Harvey Oswald, where if you were to think of like an actor in history or agent who fundamentally shifts timelines in this dramatic way, I mean, he's got to be it. He's got to be it. So it's so wild. And the thing is, she knows him. She goes on vacation a few months before the assassination and visits her in-laws, visits Arthur Young and his wife. Obviously, she discusses the fact that she has this Russian defector in her house, right? We don't know all that was discussed, but we do know now we have scraps of correspondence that have survived between them after the assassination. And Arthur Young's wife is telling Ruth, her daughter-in-law, X-nay on the Oswald gate, right? Do not talk about this, anybody. Do not get involved in this thing. You don't know how bad that's going to be for you. Distance yourself as much as possible. Don't give interviews, et cetera, et cetera. So we know that there was a big discussion about this going on. So how is it that this happens? How is it that this bunch of people having a seance in Maine in 1952 are 10 years later implicated in the assassination of the 20th century? Seems like a level of coordination that is above the heads of all of the participants. Another example of that possibly is you talk about some of people who are interested in UFOs or are involved directly in UFOs in the government, also being related to the JFK assassination, showing up in those two places. Do you want to talk about this? That's what happened. Going back to the original question you asked me, I realized I go around in circles, but as Matthew McConaughey says, time is a spiral. So what we have is what got me involved in this really involved in the UFO thing, because I really wasn't from the beginning. I was interested like anybody would be interested, but not to the extent that I would study it. I'm going through the Warren commission reports, the entire thing, not the summary, but all of the volumes. I'm going through the Ruth Payne, the lady in Texas, the Quaker, studying Russian, and she's talking to the commission, and she's going how she met Lee Oswald and Marina and everything else. Then she starts talking about how just before the assassination, she goes up to visit Arthur Young and et cetera. At that point, Allen Dulles is part of that committee hearing. He stops her. He totally derails that story, and he makes a joke about something else completely unrelated and buries it. She was about to say that she was visiting Arthur Young and Ruth Forbes Payne Young up there in Pennsylvania and was going to talk about this, and he cuts her off. You just read it and you say, what happened? It's like Kevin Costner reading the thing saying, ask the next question. Ask the question. Nobody ever asked the question. They don't follow up with her at all. This would have been a major story. There's also, don't you connect the Morrie Island incident? I'm getting there. That's what happened. I read that and I'm thinking, what the hell was that all about? I pull on that thread. I pull on the thread of Ruth Payne, Arthur Young, and I get to the nine. I'm thinking, what the hell is this? Then I'm looking at the report of Jim Garrison in New Orleans and all that he's doing and he's investigating these people. One of the people he investigates is Fred Krizman. I'm thinking, wait a minute, I've heard that name before. What the hell is Fred Krizman? I pull on that thread. It's Fred Krizman from Morrie Island from 1947. I pull on that and I come up with Guy Bannister, the same Guy Bannister who had an office in New Orleans that Lee Harvey Oswald worked out of, passing out those fair play for Cuba leaflets. It was all in this one office. David Ferry, Jack Martin, all these psychos were in this one building with Guy Bannister. Guy Bannister was the guy. He was the guy in the Pacific Northwest during 1947, during the whole UFO flap with Kenneth Arnold and Morrie Island and all the rest of it. He's up there, Guy Bannister. He's member of the FBI, special agent. He's reporting back directly to Hoover by Telex, which was a form of telegram, which was a form of email in those days. The designation was a special operation or special mission, it was the X-Files, right? Through actual X-Files. He's reporting on UFO sightings. That's his job. Guy Bannister's job is reporting on UFO sightings back to Hoover. That's so fascinating. Yeah, I believe people think that Fred Krizman was one of, there were these three quote unquote hobos that were arrested and they think Fred Krizman was one of those hobos. I don't know if you corroborated that at all. I can corroborate. In fact, he wasn't the only one. I mean, E. Howard Hunt might have been one of them as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was also a rumor that he was there in Dallas that day. And so, and Fred Krizman is, what is the Morrie Island incident for people that aren't aware that there was actually more than one UFO incident in 1947? Right. We always think of Roswell when we think of 47, but Roswell happened just slightly later. Initially, it was Kenneth Arnold. He was a pilot. I think he was with the Civil Air Patrol at the time and he was flying some mission out in the Pacific Northwest in the Rockies and he sees a flight of weird craft going at impossible speeds and he describes them like saucers flying, you know, dipping over the, skimming over the water, which gave rise into the flying saucer scenario. But his description of it was sort of a wing-shaped craft with a sort of a bite out of the end of it, the way he drew it, which is closer to the Horton design, which is a whole other story we can get into. But anyway, so he come up with the idea of the flying saucer. He was the person who started the terminology inadvertently. So at the same time in Morrie Island, which is in the same part of the world in the Upper Pacific Northwest, you had this very strange concept. There's a guy sitting in a boat in Puget Sound and what appear to be UFOs of some kind are flying overhead and one of them appears to be in distress and it rains like shards of metal or a slag or something all over his boat, a small boat, killing his dog, wounding his kid, his son is in the ship and putting a hole in the ship. So he gets back and he talks to his, supposedly his boss, they're doing something in Puget Sound and his boss is Fred Crisman. Now Fred Crisman, it's really hard to find out his background. He's one of these guys with a very murky background. We believe he was OSS during the war, which was the forerunner of CIA. He seems to have known Clay Shaw, which was one of the reasons why Jim Garrison went after him. Clay Shaw and Fred Crisman seem to have known each other well enough that Clay Shaw phoned him at the time that all of this was going on with the Jim Garrison and the Kennedy assassination. He's Clay Shaw. Oh, it's Clay Shaw. Clay Shaw was the one guy that Jim Garrison brought to trial for the Kennedy assassination. If you know the movie JFK, Tommy Lee Jones plays Clay Shaw in that film. So he was the guy that was at the center of it, kind of a CIA funded guy. He had been a CIA contract agent for a while. He was not an actual CIA agent, but he was one of these people that got paid off by the agency to do things for them. We found that out after the trial, unfortunately, not before. So he beat the rap. He did not get acquitted. He did not get convicted. He was acquitted. But he knew Lee Harvey Oswalt. He knew David Ferry. He knew all the players in New Orleans. So he is arrested by Jim Garrison on his orders for having been involved in the Kennedy assassination. And evidently, Clay Shaw calls Fred Crisman. So why? Right? So you're asking yourself, this is the guy that was involved in this seminal incident. And this is not over, right? So Fred Crisman then makes a few phone calls after his friend gets rained on by a UFO. And these phone calls wind up attracting the attention of the United States Air Force or the Army Air Force at the time. They were just transitioning to the Air Force. And two Air Force intelligence agents come and visit Fred Crisman and his partner. And Kenneth Arnold shows up, right? He's invited to this meeting, which is weird. And so all of these guys are meeting, I believe it's in Seattle, and they're all getting together to discuss this thing with the military. Like what happened? What did they see and all the rest of it? I think that there's a lot of weirdness around that meeting. Kenneth Arnold did not have a reservation in any hotel. He just kind of showed up because Crisman said, why don't you come down? We're going to talk to these guys. And Arnold shows up and there's no room at the end until finally they get to the most expensive hotel in town. And they had a reservation already made for him. He didn't know about it. Turns out the place was bugged. Turns out a local journalist got a tape of the entire meeting and he dies shortly thereafter, right? I mean, just too much weirdness around us. But in the end, they give, Fred Crisman gives the Army guys a box of the slag to take back for analysis. This is like tremendous, right? This is UFO slag. So they get back on their plane and they're going to fly back to their base. Their plane explodes in men air. No way. So they die, the material is gone with them. They're worse survivors, but not the two guys who actually were there and took the information. Not the guys who wrote the report, right? Whatever report existed. And everything was gone with them. That was the first fatality that we know of in the UFO, the 20th century UFO phenomenon era where these two Air Force officers. Alchemists, did you enjoy that? If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substack. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video with weekly articles exploring all of the strange forgotten and conspiratorial corners of space, history and high weirdness. So join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack. I am including the full link in the description of this video. Such a wild story and then such a weird connection that you have Fred Christman, who's reporting to Guy Bannister. They're running the X files and do all UFO investigations and then seems like Fred Christman has something to do with the JFK assassination. Just so weird. At least we know the Clay Shaw connection and then maybe he was a hobo who was arrested on the scene. It's just so strange. And then like you said, you have, I think the address was like 544 Camp Street in New Orleans where you had all these guys working together. And they were bishops in a crazy church. So tell me about that. Do you have time? Oh yeah, we got all the time in the world. So there's a crazy church. David Ferry and Jack Martin belong to this crazy church. Jim Garrison could not figure out what the hell was the purpose of this church. How did it fit into this whole thing? He knew that they were X agents. They were running ops. They were white supremacists in many cases. David Ferry certainly was. Guy Bannister certainly was. There was this whole white supremacist thing that was going through the assassination starting with an attempt to the assassination in Florida by white supremacist group. And then there was this group in New Orleans. And Guy Bannister was like this rabid anti-communist as was David Ferry. And so the rabid anti-communism got mixed up with all kinds of other stuff. So there was a church who was headquartered in the Bronx of all places. The American Orthodox Catholic Church, which was a big name for a very small church. The church was mostly clergy and no parishioners. There was actually no followers. Nobody actually went to these churches. It was just priests and bishops for the most part. Mostly bishops, only a handful of priests. So it was a front. It was a front for something. And when the assassination took place, another bishop in Kentucky, a guy called Carl Stanley, calls the FBI directly and says, you got to look at David Ferry and very important name Jack Martin, although it's probably not his real name as we turned out eventually. So you have these two guys, right? And they were both bishops under Carl Stanley, who was a renegade bishop who had a rap sheet a mile along and everything else. But he's running a church out of Kentucky. So Carl Stanley tells the FBI, look at these two guys in New Orleans. They're involved in the assassination. So the FBI then it gets alerted. And they kind of look at these guys. They talk to them that these people are really crazy. We can't make hazard tales of this. We're dropping it. And then later it gets picked up in New Orleans by the DA. So the district attorney, Jim Garrison says, we're going to investigate these guys because there is something fishy because Guy Bannister. And Guy Bannister was very fishy. Former FBI guy, long history in the FBI, retired from the FBI opens up this operation on Camp Street in New Orleans. The building isn't there anymore. I checked a little while ago, unfortunately. But he was operating out of this building. And the fair play for Cuba leaflets that Lee Harvey Oswald was passing out, had the address of Camp Street, the same address. So they're trying to figure out what the connection is here with all these guys, right? And Guy Bannister died in 64. So he died before Garrison could interview him. But Bannister and Jack Martin got into a fistfight over the assassination. Jack Martin threatened to tell the feds all the weird stuff that was going on in his office. And so Bannister pistol whipped him. So he wound up in the hospital over it. So he gets interviewed by Garrison's people and David Ferry gets interviewed by Garrison's people. And David Ferry is a trip. This is a guy with alopecia. So he has no hair on his head. So he puts fake eyebrows and fake wigs. What? So he had a fake red hair wig, red hair for some reason. And the funny thing is that E. Howard Hunt during the Watergate era used a fake red wig as his disguise when he was breaking into people's offices. It was like really funny that he was like an homage to David Ferry. So, but anyway, so David Ferry is considered to be involved in this thing. He commits suicide or is suicided under mysterious circumstances during the investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Jack Martin is the only one that survives. Okay. Years later, I'm interviewing a bishop in Florida who was a friend of Jack Martin. And so I wanted to talk to him about Jack Martin and he gives me photographs of Jack Martin dressed as a priest. Right. And he says, Jack Martin was the guy you went to when you wanted to find out anything about anybody. He said, Martin traveled all over the country. This guy was everywhere. This guy, his resume was, he was unemployed. He was an alcoholic. He was possibly mentally unstable. He was in hospital various times for this. And yet he's the go-to guy to get background information on anybody. Right. Martin was incredible that way. And he stayed in his persona as a priest and bishop the rest of his life. So the photographs I have of him in the 1970s, years after the Kennedy assassination stuff that was going on in New Orleans. And he's in the, in the whole outfit, right? Wow. So you're saying that the Orthodox Catholic Church in the US at the time was acting as some sort of front, possibly coordinating or helping with the JFK assassination? At the American Orthodox Catholic Church, legally came into being in 1965. So it's two years after the assassination, legally in New York. However, it pre-existed in different places around the country. It got coalesced into one group in 65. And this is where it gets even stranger, because in 1965, when all this is done, the leader of that church in the Bronx, in New York of all places, is a Ukrainian priest. He forms his own church as the American Orthodox Catholic Church in the Bronx. And then he starts demanding the other churches submit to a background check by the FBI to make sure that they're acceptable to him in the Bronx, in New York. And a lot of people just said, no, screw this, we're not going to do it. Carl Stanley, the guy who blurted out this thing that David Ferry was involved in the assassination, this weird bishop in Connecticut, he agrees, right? He goes from Connecticut to the Bronx to be anointed by this bishop, this Ukrainian bishop. He goes back to Kentucky and he's dead within a month. Jesus. So I did more digging from a very personal reason, because I knew this church intimately. I was involved with that church in 1968 to 69. How are you involved? Yeah, well, that's a story. I want to hear it. And you know what they say, you know, the first rule of fight club. Well, this is the story that opens up everything for me that makes me suddenly find out that reality is not what we think it is. Okay. To get back to, again, your original question. This is how long we go on one original question. And to get back to that question, reality isn't. Reality is really, really strange. Yeah. And in 1968, I was still in high school. I was a senior in high school in the Bronx. And I had no intention of going to Vietnam. So a friend of mine and I, both with Eastern European backgrounds, decided, you know, one way to get out of this, and I have to admit, I came up with this idea, is that of all the deferments there are, and there weren't many, in 1968, Vietnam was at its height. The Tet offensive was January 68, right? So this is a very dangerous time. If you're a high school senior, you've got like two options, right? Well, three. One is get out of the country, go to Sweden or Canada or something. One is to go into the university and stay in university as long as you possibly can, maintaining a high enough average that you can stay out of Vietnam. But even then, that's like four years. Then after that, what are you going to do? And the other option is just go in the army, right? Say, screw it, I'm, you know, I'm in the army. So those are the three options. But there was a fourth. And the fourth was, the US government would not force you to join the military if you were a priest in a church, some kind, if you were a minister. That was the four D deferment, I believe. And I said to my friend, I said, my friend had a closet full of weird religious paraphernalia, because he belonged to something called the Third Order Franciscans, which is a kind of lay order. It's religious, but not really actually part of a monastic order. It's somewhere in between. But he loved all that stuff. So he had chalices, he had suboria, he had all the fancy implements and stuff. His parents were divorced. So he played one parent off the other. So he would get money from one money from the other. He would buy all this stuff, right? So he had chasables, he had cassocks, he had all the stuff that you really needed as a Catholic priest. He could have opened a Catholic church with all the stuff he had without exaggeration. So I said, you have all this stuff. All we have to do is incorporate as a church and we're home free. That's all we have to do. Then we're priests and screw it. So he said, what? That sounds doable, right? The problem was we were under 18 at the time. We couldn't sign legal documents and we couldn't sign a corporation document. I think in New York, you had to be 21. So we had to find people to sign for us, but we eventually did. And we incorporated the autocephalus Slavonic Orthodox Church of North and South America, incorporated, which is just him and me. And one guy that we knew, an older guy that we claimed was our Archbishop. So we became like priests in this church and that was going to be our function. So we decided in order to make this even realer, if that's a word, we would get dressed in all this weird stuff, Orthodox stuff. See, Catholic stuff, the Catholics had a stranglehold on being Catholic. But in the Orthodox world, there's just hundreds of Orthodox churches because they're national churches. So you have Greek Orthodox churches, Russian Orthodox, Serbian, et cetera, et cetera. There was no Czechoslovak Orthodox Church. So that was our background. So I said, this is cool. We'll make a Czechoslovak Orthodox. It just fell into place. So we do all this, it falls into place, we're done, we got it. We have the weird hats with the veils, we have crosses and stuff. And we look genuine, right? I mean, for two 17-year-olds, we did, which is like a Halloween costume, right? But we kind of pulled it off. And then we decided we were going to gatecrash the funeral for Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated. It was June 68. It was a big blow to me. I thought Bobby was going to be our way of getting out of Vietnam, the end of some of the racial stuff that was going on. So this was like a major blow. Another Kennedy assassinated, right? My friend had different ideas. To him, this was an opportunity. He says they're going to have the funeral in New York City at St. Patrick's Cathedral. We know the people at St. Patrick's. Why don't we just go down there during the funeral and just gatecrash it, you know? And I said, they're going to have the tightest security New York has ever known, if not the country. Another Kennedy assassinated, and the president's going to be there. And the senators and the congressman and the cabinet, and God knows who else, they're all going to be in this room. I don't think so. He says, no, let's just try it. So we got on a subway the night before and we go down and we talked to some guy in there and we're in our full regalia. And he says, oh, okay, I don't know. You're not on the list, but come by and then if we can get you in, we'll get you in, something like that. So we say, okay, cool. We're two 17-year-olds. Does this make any freaking sense at all? No, it doesn't. At all. Yeah. No. So they say, okay, so we say, fine, we're doing it, right? So we go into the church proper. The casket is already there. Bobby is in St. Patrick's Saturday night. So we go up to it and do appropriately religious things. And in the pew, the only people in the church at the time is Rose Kennedy and Jackie Onassis. So they're there praying and we're looking at them and they're looking at us like, who the hell are these people? So we do this thing and we just quietly leave. So the next day, Sunday, my friend says, we're going to do this, right? I said, we can give it a shot. We rent a limo and we rent this limo and we take it from the Bronx to St. Patrick's. It's really weird what you can get away with in a limo, right? The limo pulls up to the side entrance of the church where all the celebrities are getting out. And we're in the limo. So we must belong, right? The driver opens up the door. We get out and all this stuff that we're wearing. And the Secret Service runs right up to us. And we had made a decision, my friend and I, that he would not speak because he's like a foreign speaking person. And I would do all the talking because I'm a fast talker, as you can possibly realize now. But I had to do it in a foreign accent, right? Because we had to be foreign dignitaries. So the Secret Service agent walks up to us and he says, Russian Orthodox representatives? And I say, no, Slavonic Orthodox representatives. And he says, oh, okay, follow me. And he leads us into the church, leads us into the sanctuary, where all the other religious dignitaries are sitting on the other side of the communion rail. If you're Catholics, any of you listening, you know, you don't go on the other side of the communion rail unless you're a priest or an altar boy or something. You have some particular religious sacerdotal reason to be there. But we're stuck right in the front, right? My friend on one side and me on the other, we're just staring at each other. We're in there and all these bishops and clergy and other Orthodox bishops are there. So it's freaking us out, right? But we're brassing it out. We think, well, we're here. You know, no one's going to believe this story. And if I had been anybody else, if I had been a different person, I could have walked in there with a device. You know what I mean? I would have taken out the American leadership is in that room, not just the religious leadership. It's an incredible failure of security that this was allowed to happen. And it's incredibly wrong. And yet we just brassed it out like we belong there. So we did do that. You know, we were there for the whole service. And then because we're the last ones in, we were the first ones out. So we were supposed to lead the procession out of the cathedral. Lead it. No one knew who the hell we were. The TV cameras are pointing at us. The Klee lights are all over us. No one knows who to how to identify us. So there's probably video of you leading a funeral procession for Bobby Kennedy. I've been looking at this for it for a long time. There's a very bad, very blurry video. That's wild. You would think there would be some perfect video of that, but there isn't. That's a forest gump moment. If I've ever had a zealig moment. Yeah, zealig, wild. Yeah. But there is, and I just got just a couple of days ago, a still that somebody got of the procession and the two of us are there. So I know now, you know, this tangible evidence that exists, it's blurry, but it's us. I mean, you could look and you can see these guys don't belong where they are. So we led the procession out. It's another story. But how great was that because I had Andy Williams behind me singing the battle hymn of the Republic. I had Leonard Bernstein conducting the hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah, right? As the door is open on Rockefeller Center and Atlas holding up the world. And this is in June 68. I'm supposed to graduate high school that month, right? And it's like, who needs graduation? Man, this is cool. This is it, but we also know we're in deep shit. If somebody stops us, it's all over. So we know how to get out of the church. There's an underground kind of a passageway. It's not really that secret, but unless you know, you won't know it. So we decide to go out that way. And as we're going out that way, of course, we run into Rose Kennedy and Jackie again, who are also trying to go out that same way. So we get out, we take the subway back. We didn't keep the limo too expensive. And then we got back to the Bronx and went back to school the next day, with teachers and students looking at us and saying, nah, can't be right. So we managed this. But the thing is, the reason I'm telling you this story is because on our way out, we bump into guys from the American Orthodox Catholic Church. The intelligence front. The intelligence front. They're outside. They couldn't get in. We did. That's wild. They couldn't. They're handing us this brochure. They're saying, come and see us. And so we're looking at each other and we said, why not? We never heard of this place. It's near the Bronx Zoo, if that means anything. So let's go and take a look. And we took a look and we wound up joining because we needed, we were two 17-year-olds. My friend turned 18 that month. So we needed to know that we're going to get out of the selective service thing out of the draft. And so one thing led to another and we did. But there was a quid pro quo for this. So I turned 18 at a different time than my friend did. So he got his clearance before I did. So I was brought to the Selective Service Board, the headquarters in New York City, to talk to the head of selective service. He's a really strange guy. I'll never forget him. He wore these elbow patches, a tweed jacket kind of guy, looking like an intelligence guy, looking like Alan Dulles kind of. And he said, okay, no problem. We're going to give you the thing, unless you want to be a chaplain in Vietnam, we can arrange that, making a little joke. Very funny. He says, this is the thing though. He says, the Russians have been moving agents into the United States through the Orthodox churches. Keep an eye out. You let us know when you see one coming through because you know who's real and who isn't. You keep an eye out and just let us know. That's all. And you're cool. So they were trying to basically operationalize you somewhat. Well, the church itself is I found out later. I found out years and years later. I mean, I always suspected because I saw a weird shit going on in that church from the beginning. But I found out years later, going through Jim Garrison's files, he had finally released his correspondence. And when I got to his correspondence and I finally saw it, I found church stationery that I had typed on back in the day. Wild. Where the leader of the church, a guy called Profeta, was writing letters to Jim Garrison, saying, when you're finished with Jack Martin, can you send him back to us? Right? So it's there. It's in print. It's in the files. Well, also a wild synchronicity that you end up researching the JFK assassination. And you had been a part of this American Orthodox Catholic church that was this intelligence front, which had something to do with the JFK assassination. That is a time loop, if I've ever seen one. It doesn't make any freaking sense. It doesn't make any sense. I was 17. How the hell did we wind up in that position? we we what I think is maybe the coolest merch line in the world. When you're wearing it, it's not like you're shilling me or the channel. They're just really epic and I think they look good. We have a couple of amazing designs for you. We have our Cowboy UFO tee. Pretty epic. You see there's a rancher. He's witnessing a UFO. A little cow is getting abducted by the UFO in the background. And then you know that I love mid-century history, specifically spooky science, atomic era stuff. And so we have our atomic age tee here. Pretty cool vibe. You got a robot serving this guy, a little martini, and then a UFO off to the side. Go to AmericanAlchemyMerch.com, AmericanAlchemyM-E-R-C-H.com to check out all of this amazing new apparel. The cowboy tee that I'm wearing is 100% cotton, super relaxed fit. We went for quality on these, so check them out. So they say when you're getting briefed, like, hey, just look out for Russian spies. How much more involvement do you have with the church itself and do you see them do anything else that's suspicious or interesting on the intelligence front? When we were researching for our cover story as Orthodox priests, we had a lot of friends in two different Orthodox churches. One was the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. This is important because it shows up again in New Orleans because all those Russians around Leoswald and Marina, all the people he was being introduced to, okay, were members of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. These were the Russian Orthodox who were anti-communist. They fled Moscow during the revolution, the Russian Revolution in 1917. They fled to Paris first, and then they opened up this operation in New York. So these are Romanovs, right? And they brought all their treasure with them and they brought a lot of priests and bishops and stuff and they established this church on the Upper East Side in Manhattan on Park Avenue and 93rd Street. And we would go in there all the time, right? This was like Dr. Zhivago territory. It was pure Russia. I mean, you were in Russia when you're in those premises, right? So there was a high school there. We befriended the principal of the high school. So we would know a lot of background stuff of what was going on until the other Russians found out that he was talking to us, in which case they pushed him down an elevator shaft and broke his legs. We visited him in the hospital and he says, "'Don't come back again.'" Psh, you know, that was Brother Victor, another whole story. The other church was the one on 97th Street and 5th, and that was the Russian church that owed allegiance to Moscow. That's the one they were running agents through. Okay, we would go there once in a while just to hang out and watch them, because they had a whole different way of doing the liturgy. It was kind of a different setup. And we would just sit there and watch them. And we would know when a young priest showed up from the old country, and there's one particular thing you're taught during ordination, that's a kind of a secret prayer that is responsible for changing the bread and wine into the body and blood, right? Which is a whole transubstantiation thing that we learned about in Catholic school. Well, in the Orthodox Church, it's almost the same, kind of similar. But there's a prayer and a gesture that you do to make this change official, to call down the forces to make this happen. They don't know it, because they didn't go through the actual real training. They went through training to be spies, and they got enough training to pass as Orthodox priests, but they didn't get everything quite often. Sometimes the people in Moscow cleverly kept that back a little bit, and that was a signal to the guys back in the States or abroad wherever that the person they were sending over was not to be trusted, right? He was KGB. So you had priests who were KGB. Now, if you ever watched, there was American television series called The Americans. It was about a husband and wife, deep sleeper agents in the United States during that time. The very last season, for those of you who can go back and take a look, featured finally, because I watched that thing from beginning to end waiting for this, the final season showed the priests who were operating as KGB agents operating as priests. And they were running operations in New York. And so they finally talked about it. But for us, that was a big deal. And that basically kept me out of Vietnam also, right? So this was like an important aspect of all of this, was the fact that all of this was going on. Now, this is all happening in 1968, right? I'm still 18, by that time I'm 18 years old. So now, I'm in the middle of all of this stuff. But I don't know what's related to the Kennedy assassination at all. I have no clue, but I know there's intelligence operations going on. I know this guy is running ops because the only people who ever showed up were FBI, CIA types, right? And he bragged about it, the bishop who ran the church, prophetic. He was very proud of the fact. And he constantly said that his people were vetted by Edgar Hoover himself. That's how the vetting was going on. That's why he called people back to have them vetted. Hoover himself would approve or disapprove his selection of priests and bishops. So this was obviously for what reason, right? And it had to be for an intelligence operation. So we had strange guys coming in from all over the world to become bishops. People didn't even know how to genuflect or make the sign of the cross, right? And we're making these guys bishops, giving them papers and sending them back, photographing the ritual so it looks legit. So this was happening all the time. So we had guys from Italy at one point. So the Italian consulate sent people to observe this one guy becoming a bishop and we're sending him back. But the weirdest one was during the Biafra crisis in Nigeria. Also in the 60s, there was a civil war going on in Nigeria. So you had the Biafraans who were like the Christian element fighting against a Muslim group in Nigeria. So they were looking for independence from Nigeria. So the Nigerian sent us this guy. I'll never forget him, because I had to go to the airport to pick him up. His name was the Holy Prophet, Aluia. That was his name, HP Aluia, Holy Prophet, HP. I picked him up at the airport in, excuse me, in all kinds of African garb, right? So as he would be as an African. So I pick him up at the airport, we take the limo, I guess, back to the Bronx. And he's going on about how happy he is and all the rest of it to be a member of this organization. And we consecrate him a bishop. He's now Bishop Holy Prophet, Aluia. And the Nigerian embassy is there. Now the Nigerian consulate rather, New York is there. It's the Nigerian side, not the Biafra side, not the Christian side, it's the other side, the nationalist side, the federal side, that won him as a bishop, as a Christian bishop, to convince other Nigerians in the Christian side to stay with Nigeria as against Biafra. This was a ploy in the Civil War. The Civil War was raging when we did this. And we put him back on the plane the next day. He goes back to Nigeria. God knows what happened to him after that. We don't know, never heard from him again. This is fascinating. And it's just touching off a whole life for you of catching the attention of intelligence agencies. By accident. By accident. It's through pure serendipity. And I want to make that clear to any conspiratorial audience members because I think that is emblematic actually of your life is it seems like you kind of try to, you seek kind of sacred truth. And I think at times that sacred truth is, incidental to knowledge that might be held by government organizations. And then they get very interested in you. You started this story off by saying first rule, fight club. And then you also said that this story was sort of indicative for you of just how trippy reality is, how there's something else going on. Why is that for you? And how do you think the fight club analogy relates to this? Yeah, good question because I'm glad you picked up on that. I barely graduated high school. I came from a kind of a broken home situation. So there's a lot of weirdness in my family. We had traveled around a lot here and there. Strange things happened to us. And for a while in 1965, 66, I was fascinated with occultism in general, at least what we knew of it at the time, which was not much. And so Ouija board stuff, seance is that kind of thing. So I was like totally into it. And it was the source of paranormal phenomenon. We actually had paranormal phenomenon. We were kids. I was 15 years old. I had a brother and sister were younger. What would happen? You know, table levitation, that kind of the table rising, table tapping phenomenon that the Victorians were so proud of. So we had that, we had tables rising in the air, slamming down, we had knocks on the table, all of that stuff. And I'm going to high school in the Bronx, taking science classes. And I know that I can't talk about this to anybody, right? Because this is against the, they would tell me I was crazy or imagining it and questioning my sanity or whatever. And, but I know what I saw, right? So these things would happen, but only in the beginning. And this is like a key element of how this works, right? This weird stuff will happen in the beginning because that sucks you right in. And once that happens, you cannot deny the evidence of your senses. There's nobody playing a hoax in that room because it's just your family. They don't have, believe me, the wherewithal to carry out a hoax like that. It was a little too elaborate. And that happens. And what happened after that was, members of my family became sort of entranced with this process to the point where the phenomenon never really mattered much anymore. It was the contact with spirits. It was the contact with the other side. That became an overriding thing. And that drained me completely. That was completely something that really bothered me a great deal because it was going nowhere. It was nonsense. At one point we were told there was gonna be an Aboriginal uprising in Australia outside of Perth. It was very specific. And we thought, oh my God, this is going to happen. People are gonna die. So my mother and I- You were told by the spirits. By the spirits in detail. In sort of a download or auditory, did you hear it there? Weegee board, whoa. Letter by letter. This is how draining this is, right? So we have all this information, my mother and I, and we go to the consulate, the Australian consulate in New York to warn them of this. That's how off the charts insane it becomes. Cause they're looking at us like, don't think so. I really don't think so. But thanks for coming in. So I knew pretty much at that moment, if not before really, because I was hesitant to do all this, that there was something totally wrong that was taking place here, right? That the phenomenon in the beginning is the hook, right? And the hook is real. But then you make a lot of assumptions about what's behind the curtain, right? And so you follow that. And wherever they lead, you follow. And that's a serious mistake, right? But pay attention to it anyway. If you're there, pay attention to it, make note. Because this may come in handy later. If nothing else to reassure you that you're not going crazy, but this stuff does happen, but that it means something else. It doesn't mean what you think it is. That you're putting a lot into this more than you're getting. You're putting a lot of attention. You're giving it information, you're feeding it, and you're getting a feedback from what you're feeding it, right? This is a dangerous field for some people. You can go off the deep end if you're already weak. If you're already kind of, you don't have critical thinking ability. You don't have a lot of psychological strength, let's say, from that point of view. This can lead you astray easily. It leads people astray a lot. These are fantasies, right? And the fantasies are really powerful and really dangerous. And fantasies can sometimes become ideologies. And when they become ideologies, they take on another power because they seem like they're real too, more real than the fantasy because they involve real people, real events, real resources. So then you're involved in this thing that I became fascinated with when I started writing Sinister Forces. How do these fantasies influence our actual everyday lives even if we don't believe in the fantastic? But we're in, we swim in a sea of fantasies, of ideologies of people insisting certain things are true when they're not. And you believe and trust these people, right? For whatever reason. And this is what is really dangerous. So when I started to shift my studies away from sort of Ouija Board style occultism, I wanted to know there was something darker. There was something deeper. Is there a way to exert control and not be controlled? Because being controlled to me was a disaster that I witnessed. So how can I then exert control over this phenomenon? Is it possible? And that sort of led me down this path that I've been on since that time, since 1965 roughly, until this time, was to find out how do you exert control over it? And exerting control does not always mean what you think it means. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Mickey Mouse with the mops and the buckets, if you remember the first opening scene of Fantasia, which why would you? But anyway, this is a famous trope, right? The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is out of touch, really. Things they understand how it works because they've watched the Sorcerer and now they're doing the same thing and they cannot control it. It goes out of control completely. So the Sorcerer has to come in and fix it, right? So this is the problem that we face. The idea of control is not always what we think it is. The control sometimes starts internally. You have to build up an internal system of control first, right? And that can only happen when you have an internal system of understanding, when you really know what's going on, when you know yourself. And that doesn't mean in the sort of hippies, sixties know yourself kind of thing. It means something a little darker, maybe a little deeper certainly, but to really know the way you interact with the outside world, that point of tangents between yourself and the outside world. That's where the sort of matrix is, talking about reality to go back to your, again, original question. The idea of reality, what is it? As Robin Williams said, reality, what a concept. It is a malleable concept for sure. And we all have different versions of it. You have to figure out what your version of it is and kind of go from there slowly, step by step. I almost think control is almost a misnomer too. Like having some sort of deliberate intention feels like of utmost importance, but there are all these paradoxes, like probably in order to quote unquote control, you need to like be okay losing control at the same time, having faith in something higher. I think of control, there's obviously the proverbial kind of left hand path and occultism, or the idea of sort of storming heaven or something with, you write about this in your book about celestial ascent traditions, stairway to heaven. And so, yeah, it's like, it feels like this really hard art form that is, you know. You've touched on it exactly, it's an art form. Yeah, it's not a science. Not exactly, not yet. Alistair Crowley famously said, magic is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. It's a pretty good introductory statement. It is an art, you begin to realize it is an art. That which motivates art, that which creates art, that feeling, that artistic expression, that's closer to what this is than science. But science has an input to it, right? The more we understand about the artistic impulse, the more we can kind of isolate the scientific parts of it, understand how they work. If we're talking about consciousness, we are now in that murky territory where art and science kind of mix. And it may be that art will have more to tell us about how consciousness works than science right now, right? Because we're kind of limited into repeatability with science. Science depends upon repeatability of an experiment. And this is what's destroyed a lot of people in the occult field, broadly speaking, especially the mediums, the clairvoyance, the people who claim to predict the future and things like that. Once they've done it a few times, like the table knocking that I experienced, you have that a few times, people want you to repeat it. And you can't, under those circumstances, quite often it's really difficult to do, right? So you make up, you fake it. And that's the part where you lose your soul to this whole process. Where you try to keep people interested, you try to keep the public on your side. You try to prove that your initial experience was real. So you fake another experience, hoping nobody will notice. And that's where you cross the line, exactly. You have to be willing to understand that your experience is possibly non-repeatable, not under scientific laboratory conditions, difficult to do, right? You get like some statistical anomalies with the remote viewers and with all those guys at the SRI and all those guys who were testing all of this, you'll get statistical improvements. You got Ingo Swan who did tremendous work in that area, right? But it's still when you force somebody to do something, unless they're really masters of it already, it's not going to happen. Yeah, it feels like unless something's truly kind of heart-centered, there's always some sort of mean reversion or rebound effect. If you look at all the random event generators, or remote viewing, or any of these things, you end up with all these kind of, infighting dynamics of the participants. You think they're like the most conscious people, but they're kind of like the most unconscious in some ways. And the effects always fail on them in the end. There's always almost this Faustian kind of like blow-up moment at the end where like it all goes to shit. And there's a biblical story of Simon of Magus who uses like black magic to levitate. And then he sees Peter and Paul, levitating much higher. And I think the word Simon comes from the fact that he tried to like buy their ability, which came from God to levitate super high. And so there are all these, it feels like what you're talking about, navigating this terrain is, you're walking a very straight and narrow path. There are a bunch of land mines everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah. And so where does the Fight Club analogy come in? Well, when you're asked to define this field, when you're asked to define, I don't like the word occultism because it sounds like Marxism or Capitalism. It sounds like an ideology and it's not. Or maybe for some people it is. When you're asked to define it, let's use the term magic because it's kind of universal. When you're asked to define it, you can't, you fall apart. You can't define Fight Club. You can't talk about it. If you try to talk about it, the problem is the language that I'm using relies upon a set of assumptions that we all make about what those words mean. And that's a real problem. So we're talking in a language, we think we both understand what we're saying, but there's a point at which I know we're not. Yeah, yeah. And we're trying, we can honestly try, we sincerely want to, but our language itself is in the way. The tools that we're using are difficult. They're providing roadblocks. Yeah, or if you think of each of us as kind of like a measurement instrument, like your aperture needs to be adequately open to sort of resonate with this. It's like the Jesus saying you need ears to hear. Or I have to calibrate to yours. Sure. The other way. So I mean, this is the problem that we face and that's just in English. When you're talking about understanding it from, a Jewish Kabbalah, for instance, I've done a lot of study in that direction or talking about other Chinese alchemy, for instance. I mean, they're using language. We translate it into English. So we think we know what they're talking about, but there's always that point at which we don't know. There's always that point where they're saying something, they mean something else than what is really being translated. So this is a problem. That's why they use pictures. That's why alchemy uses pictures and Chinese alchemy uses pictures. And occultism is replete with images and pictures, which is how to go back to, all the way back to the beginning of this conversation, which is how the abductees and contactees feel that they're communicating with alien intelligences, not through words, but through images. Yeah, it feels like a mimetic layer that is sort of sub-linguistic or something. You know, one of my favorite Terrence McKenna quotes is a secret is not something that isn't told, it's something that cannot be told. So to your point, it's like sort of inherently locked in. And if you were a true secret society, not one of these sort of things that like, I don't know, they wear that sort of fake garb or whatever, then it would be sort of inherently impenetrable and it would like sort of act on some hermit, like truly hermetically sealed layer that like even certain participants in it wouldn't even know they were a part of it. So yeah, it's so fascinating. Now, where do we go from here? Well, what does all of this have to do with UFOs? Because you and Tom DeLong, who I think is extremely knowledgeable on this topic and both of you guys in your own ways caught the attention of some extremely impressive people in the government, people like Neil McCastlin and Rob Weiss, I guess isn't government, he was Skunk Works Lockheed, but adjacent. Do you wanna talk about that process of how, similar to your experience in the Orthodox Catholic Church, how you kind of bumped into the highest levels of government and their interest in the topics of non-human intelligence? Tom contacted me, I think much the way you know, just out of the clear blue sky. And it was the end of 2014, November, I think, when I first, he first contacted me and I didn't believe it was Tom DeLong because I got a lot of weird emails as you might expect. And some very strange phone calls also. And so I, you know, okay. But then I did a little background and got back to him, I think the same day, day later or something. And he said, okay, let's talk. And we spoke on the phone first, we had a lot of very long conversations from 2014 to the beginning of 2015, went on for hours. And, but basically his pitch was, I want to knock on doors, I want to go to their offices, I want to find out what's going on with the UFO phenomenon. Once and for all, I think this is the time, we're going to go and we're just going to do what we can to do it, whatever resources I have due to my celebrity, due to whatever other resources I might have contacts in government and in the military and all the rest of it, we're going to exploit these as much as we can to get to the bottom of this. And why is he reaching out to you to say this? You know, he's, he'd never actually told me point blank why. He never came out and said, this was the moment why. My assumption is because of a presentation I did in Amsterdam around 2000 and I don't remember 2007, eight, nine, something like that, early 2000s. On the secret space program was the name of this thing. I was invited to come there and talk on the secret space program. I had no clue what he meant, this guy, right? In Amsterdam, this Dutch guy contacted me and says, we want you to, you know, whatever you want to talk about, but this is the name, this is the theme, the overall theme. And so I said, okay, I'll talk about, you know, I'll talk about what we've just talked about, about the UFO situation, the connection to the Kennedy assassination. We'll do that, right? So I did that and it was at that symposium that I met like everybody. I met Richard Dolan was there, Timothy Goode was there. In fact, we split a bottle of scotch. Wow. We had nothing else to do. After the whole thing was over, we were in a part of Amsterdam, it was kind of remote from any place else, so we just sat there and drank. I met a lot of people from the industry, I guess you'd call it the community, who were there giving various speeches about various things. But I made this one speech about this. And yeah, it was weird, because it was slides and I had pictures of everybody and I showed them who they were, like in the movie JFK, here's Jack Martin, here he is in real life, wearing the real stuff and there's back and forth. And went through the whole thing and talked about secrecy, government secrecy, where the UFO project was concerned. And I said, you know, this is the problem. You know, there's a lot of weird stuff here. You're not being told the weird stuff. I only happened to know it from an accident. I happened to have been there. And seen some of the weird stuff. I said, the weird stuff is there, but it's all considered classified. However, I said, our information is not considered classified. My personal information is not classified. I said, we need to spin that around where we can tell the government, you know, our information is classified, you can't have it, right? For some reason, I was just riffing because they told me to keep it going because my speech had been too short, right? The other guy wasn't coming on yet for like 15 minutes. They said, can you throw it out? So I said, okay, I'll talk, I'll keep on going, you know? What can I riff on what I just said? And I spin that out to that statement. And suddenly it gets a standing ovation, right? I'm thinking, holy crap, what kind of a crew am I here with? I'm surrounded by all these people who thought this was the point. I'm talking about the Kennedy assassination, you know, Hoover and, you know, E. Howard Hunt and all these guys and Fred Crisman and Guy Benister. And the part they liked was the classified part, right? So anyway, that got carried on a lot of YouTube channels. Suddenly that was all over the place, right? That one particular presentation got a lot of views, hundreds of thousands of views when it first came out. So I think that might have been the trigger because nobody ever associated me with the UFO phenomenon before I had written about it in secret machines. Excuse me, sinister forces. Too many books getting confused. But in sinister forces, there's just one chapter on, well, there's one chapter on the assassination with all these weird guys. And then in a later volume called Communion, there's a chapter on the UFO phenomenon per se. And conversations I had with Whitley Strieber, who had contacted me years earlier for something kind of unrelated. But, you know, we began this long conversation on email, on this subject also. What do you think they meant when they said, come speak about the secret space program? Because that term carries a lot of baggage and is often associated with the network Gaia and Corey Good and this idea of 20 and back or whatever. And this sort of, you know, all that sort of stuff, which seems like, honestly BS to me. And yet you write about celestial ascent. And the idea that you can ascend through seven levels and that there's sort of this map and that maps to the Big Dipper and the North Star. And so does that somehow have to do with some sort of secret space program, that concept? The like cobalastic concept. That would be so cool, wouldn't it? It would be interesting. It would be really cool. I don't think so. No, what you're talking about the 20 and back and all this other stuff, that's supposed to be literal. That's supposed to be, you get into a spaceship and you go, we have technology to do that. And I've heard, I mean, I was on a panel with guys, I mean, who insisted that we have trade agreements with other planets and stuff and we're trading back and forth. Do you believe any of that? Absolutely not. Okay. Not any of it. Yeah, I don't really either. I'm not part of the Corey Good proud or the Stephen Wilcock. If I drop other names and- Same. Is that just- But then sometimes I think about those guys and I'm like, if you wanted to stigmatize a thing, you'd put out a thing that's adjacent to the truth and ridiculous sounding and nobody would ever look at that thing again. And so, I don't know. Is there anything there? From my way of thinking, everything I've heard them say and everything they've put forward, I have to say, I've been to a lot of contact in the desert stuff over the years. Right? I was initially invited long ago to replace somebody, I think, and then I was invited to replace Jim Mars, who was sick that year and who passed away that year, was a good friend. So I was at a lot of contact in the desert things and I've heard a lot of weird stuff. I've been on a lot of panels with people who insisted on things that were just simply not true, especially when it came to comparing all this stuff and mixing it in together with occult ideas. When they started doing that, then they really lost me because they were obviously talking about things they did not know or understand. Stuff that they had read on a website somewhere or something. And so they drew all of these correspondences together and we're promoting these weird combinations of things. And I kept strenuously trying to point that out, even publicly on the dais with everybody else saying, no, that's not how this works. That is not how it works. What do you mean? Of course, no, it's not how it works. Did you listen to me the last half hour? No, it doesn't work. So there's been that pushback. They want to believe in this, it gives them a format, it gives them freedom to make shit up is what it is. And when you throw a cult in there, you can make shit up. Well, it almost feels like based on your discussing the interconnection between the JFK assassination and the UFO phenomenon, that there are sort of reality managers, like maybe even like above humanity that can like choreograph or pull the strings on things. And that does have to do with the occult. Like I think of the Borderland Society, this sort of occult research group like in the 40s, they were aware of certain UFO crashes before the government was. And there's documentation of that. You have stuff with James Jesus Angleton and Hugh Angleton being involved in the Knights of Malta and certain secret societies. And so, and then obviously a lot of the early CIA was sort of skull and bones. And so you wonder, is there some hermetic substructure? Like we think of the government disclosure, like the president knows everything, but like, is there some sort of choreography going on behind the scenes that most humans aren't aware of, maybe a few are? Well, the whole point of sinister forces was that there are sinister forces. Yeah. Right? But these sinister forces are such that to equate them with, how shall I put it, 20 and back? Yeah. No, come on. No, yeah. So I mean, this is the thing. Is there an occult concept here? Obviously we've shown, I think I've shown through documentation, the connection with the UFO phenomenon and the Kennedy assassination as an example. That's, these are documented individuals. Yeah. They've had documented histories, right? So that we know, and the churches, that's again documented, right? So all of this is there. But does that mean there's a cabal of high ranking Freemasons or something pulling the strings? No, no, because that's too public again, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not how this works. So there is a, again, we're talking about Fight Club. Yeah. There is a mechanism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereby these things happen, right? Whereby a mystic, a Belgian mystic, you know, at the turn of the century in Europe could predict Kennedy's assassination. Tell me about that. Well, there was a mystic who wrote the famous play The Bluebird, okay? They made movies out of it. Materlink, Maurice Materlink, Belgian mystic. And he was a mystic. He was an astrologer. He was a mystic. He also won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And he wrote The Bluebird, which they made into various versions. And if we get into Bluebird, that's pulling on a whole bunch of threads that you don't, we really don't have time. Well, Operation Bluebird was pre-MK Ultra. Yes, it was. It was the first MK Ultra. Was it named after Materlink? This is the point I'm coming to make. Okay. Because the same guy who wrote that wrote a play called The Cloud That Lifted. And The Cloud That Lifted is about the assassination of a political leader where shots were fired from a grassy knoll. We don't know how many shots were fired. There's discrepancy. And the guy who fired the shots might have worked for Russia, according to the plot of the play. It's Lee Harvey Oswell. And his name was Alec, which was the Harvey Oswell's name in Minsk. And he lived there. That's wild. That is wild. This was all written before Kennedy was born. So if there's somebody pulling the strings, is it a somebody the way we think of a somebody? Or is it a mechanism of some kind? As Valais called it, a control mechanism. Yeah. It feels like that. It feels like things are sort of, you know, like the, I think the new agey dumb word we use to describe it in a term is like quantum entangled or something, but it feels like that. Like that's one example where the probability of that sort of prediction at that level of specificity so goes beyond like any sort of prosaic explanation around survivorship bias or, you know, like selectivity bias or whatever. And there are tons of other examples. If you look for this sort of thing, there's this book written by Morgan Robertson in 1898 called Wreck of the Titan, or futility, Wreck of the Titan. And the ship is called the Titan and it crashes in the middle of the Atlantic at night. And it's an iceberg and it's the largest, you know, liner of its time and it's in April and it's the same size as the Titanic. And so it's, you get down to like levels of specificity that are insane. And it's like basically a decade before the Titanic. I think some blue-blooded elites were on board, the Astros were on board, the actual Titanic. So you have a lot of these examples. There's a sci-fi author, Dean Koontz, who predicted COVID, the Wuhan lab. You have this kind of modern, you know, self-proclaimed prophet talking about Trump getting shot in the ear, in the ear that he was shot in. It was like four months before it happened or whatever, you have the adventures of Don and Baron Trump and their time traveling adventures, which is a book that was written, I think, also in the 19th century. So it's just crazy how many examples there are. And there was the book that talked about the Texas Tower Sniper before it ever happened. Wow, wow. With specificity, even to the name of the police chief, who was not the police chief at the time, even to the name of the police chief, who was the police chief eventually, the one who solved the case, who got the sniper. His name is actually mentioned in the book and he was not part of the police at that time. He was not anywhere near it, right? So the whole Texas Tower Sniper thing was completely described in advance. Was that Texas A&M? Or were it? Texas A&M. That was A&M, yeah. And so is this like you're glitching into a future that already in a block universe pre-exists and you're sort of like figuring out what's happening, you're getting some download, or is it some sort of predictive programming where you are causing the future by writing about these things? I think we have to go back to Russ Cole. And time is a spiral. Kind of, time is a spiral. The glitch is the proof. The glitch is the proof that this is a malleable reality that we live in. I'll give you an example in Indonesia. I spent some time in Indonesia. Fascinating place. It's a place that from a Western perspective makes no sense because we think of things in a certain way. And when you go to a country like Indonesia, which is a majority Muslim country, over 250 million people, Muslims, the fourth largest country in the world. And you think of it as a Muslim, it is a Muslim, primarily country, but it's replete with Hindu and Buddhist statuary, archeological sites going back hundreds and hundreds of years, which are maintained and kept. And sometimes you'll find incense burning and flowers brought and all the rest of it in this impossible place. They have a series of calendars. They don't use just one calendar. So they use our calendar for business purposes and general international purposes. Then there's the Muslim calendar, which is a lunar calendar. Okay, all Muslim countries do that. But then they have a bunch of other calendars. There's a five-day week calendar, for instance. And they calculate special days, special ritual days based on these things. And the whole point is, it's a civilization very aware, very conscious of coincidence. Coincidence is like the thing that shows you there's a force in the universe. When these calendars start to coincide at specific places, that's like the coincidence that starts something off. So they don't measure time the same way. They're measuring it by solar and lunar and a bunch of other systems. And they interlock kind of. And so they publish books called a primbon, which is like an almanac, right? To tell the future, to decide when you're born, things about your life, what dreams mean and all the rest of it. But then there's the calendars that are very important. So if you're conducting rituals, you have to follow not the regular calendar, you have to follow one of these ritual calendars, which are five day week calendars as an example. So you have those that you have to follow. So then you're building up a mindset that's based on the idea of synchronicity and coincidence and different levels of reality operating at different times, or operating at the same time, but different levels of reality. So fascinating. So you can be in one or the other. Yes. So which enables them basically to be Muslim and in the case, in my case, of living their Javanese, right? People from the island of Java, they have their own traditions, their own ways of doing things. They visit graves, right? Which you're not supposed to do if you're Islamic. And they have other practices that we would find really strange, in which Muslims find very strange also. But they're protected by their Islamic faith and by the imams and everybody else. And they're doing things that we would consider perhaps a little questionable, right? Like what? I know you were going to ask me that. My psychic powers are working. Well, for instance, I was fascinated by this one thing that I had heard about and I could not believe, but it's true. There is a cemetery. There's a number of cemeteries in Java that do this. There's one in particular that I visited that, in this cemetery, if you're Muslim or you're a devout Muslim, this is only for devout Muslims, this is not for tourists. You go to this particular spot, there is the grave of a famous prince who had died on that spot and his grave is there. But a lot of other graves as well, it's a cemetery, an Islamic cemetery. And you go there because you need something. You know, like Catholics have novenas, right? Those who are Catholic know what a novena is. It's like every, you know, nine, every good Friday, every first Friday is nine in a row or something. You perform a ritual, you pray for something to happen, some good thing to happen. Somebody is sick, you want them healed or you need success in business or whatever it happens to be. You pray a novena for it. Well, this is something similar, again, using that calendar. So on a particular day, every month, you go to this site and you have sex with a stranger. Jesus. Not necessarily Jesus, but a stranger. And a burial grave. Yeah, okay, let me back up a little bit. You have to be married first because Islam does not approve of extramarital relationships. So there's an Imam there who will perform the marriage ceremony. So you marry this stranger in a regular ceremony. Then you have sex in the cemetery, either on the ground, you know, on a grave or they've been building little shacks, little huts for this purpose as well. And that takes place. And then in the morning, you go to the Imam and you get divorced. What? It's legal. And then the next month you come back, the same thing happens again. And you do that for a specified number of times. Depends on the purpose, it depends on what book you're reading, I guess. But that's what it's done. And it's done. I was there at I went, I didn't witness the act, but I went to this. What is the symbolic purpose of that? This is where Indian and Javanese things start to combine, start to come together, right? It, the kings of Java, of Indonesia in general, before the rise of Islam were considered tantric kings. Borobudur is a beautiful example, Prambanan also, which is Hindu and Buddhist. They were very involved in the tantric interpretation of Indian religion. In fact, even the Dalai Lama came to bless the Borobudur Monument as saying, this was a representative of Vajrayana Buddhism. This was their system, their Tibetan system. The guy who brought Buddhism to Tibet, Ateesha, studied in Indonesia before he left and went to India and then brought somehow, the teachings were brought to Tibet. So there's a Tibet-India Indonesia connection that's very strong. So we don't know all the details on this very well, but there's a story about the prince and a lost love and his, the love of his life died and then he committed suicide or something. So you go and you reenact this wedding night at his grave to get his attention so that he bestows upon you these, whatever it is that you're looking for. Wow, that is crazy. But it's fascinating that you have whole groups of people. You know, there's studies that like the language you have determines your outlook on life and your kind of perceptive epistemology itself. So like Germans are more pessimistic because like they speak more in past tense or something. I have the opportunity to watch that slightly, but like something like that. And so yeah, if you have a kind of a whole epistemology that is more based on meaning than time and connections between events versus just some like, you know, flowing of time that is sort of permanent. You know, you have the proverbial kind of river of time that you know, you get out, you can't never get out in the same place twice. That will probably be get a whole different, you know, epistemology in life that you would lead and society and culture, you know, if you extrapolate that out. So it's fascinating. You know, time is the most used noun in the English language and it's completely undefinable. It's definable only with respect to the movement of bodies or even, you know, in science, it's sort of, you know, oscillations on an electromagnetic wave or something. But it's so weird and it's weird scientifically too. You know, it's taken as this kind of classical axiom in quantum mechanics, but you know, you have time uncertainty with level of energy, you know, just like you have position and momentum uncertainty. And then obviously you have time dilation and kind of a general relativity context. And then gravity kind of makes sense and you know, it doesn't make sense, you know, in the quantum context. And then gravity and time are obviously extremely interlinked and related like time slows the closer you get to like a black hole, for example. So time itself is just so weird. It's so weird. And more of an experience than anything else. It's more, it's experience itself. And then there's probably some substrate of meaning that like your mind is sort of a time machine that's like reading something that's reality itself that's much deeper. It's like a punch card or something and your mind is doing the punching. But it's like, that's not the substrate, you know? Like whatever that sort of paper is and you can maybe, you know, move the cursor along different tracks to kind of switch analogies there. But like, you know, it's very strange. Yeah, it is. It's Fight Club. It's Fight Club, yeah. Yeah, it's hard to sort of talk about these things. So how specifically, so okay, so you do this speech about the secret space program or whatever, you know, in Amsterdam and then how do you catch the eye of, because Neil McAceland is like doing foreign material exploitation at Wright-Patterson, which if you know anything about Roswell, like the material ends up in foreign material exploitation at, you know, Wright-Patterson, at least according to the Philip J. Corso account and like a lot of UFO lore. So if there was ever a guy to like really know what the quote unquote UFO program is and holds, knowledge-wise, it would be this guy and he's reaching out to you. Well, let's, yeah, we reached out, I mean, I don't know how Tom does what Tom does. Okay. But what did happen that I'm reasonably sure was part of this, Tom asked me to write something that he could show people about what we were up to, what we were trying to do. And that became the very first opening pages of Secret Machines, Gods. And that's the cargo cult chapter, kind of a prologue to this. So cargo cult was a couple of pages long. And the idea was take the cargo cult concept and say that's how we started on this planet. This is how civilization began, that we as the 21st century civilization that we are, our origins are as a cargo cult. Now, if you know what a cargo cult is, I'm assuming that you do. It's in the South Pacific Islands in the early 20th century, Plainswood land on islands in the South Pacific, you know, near the Indonesian islands to the Far East and Plainswood land. And there were basically stone age level tribes living there. And a plane would land and stuff would come out of the plane, all these goods and services, right? So you had packages of stuff, you had medicines, you had food supplies, you had weapons, because this was the beginning of the war. And these stone age tribes are looking at this thing and they're saying, God damn, we don't know that you could do that, right? So they went and they built landing strips, you know, hoping that these planes would land and give them stuff. They said, that's all you really need to do. You build a landing strip, you get like a conning tower or something and you imitate what we're seeing and maybe planes will land and give us all this good stuff also. That was the concept. So our concept in starting this project was that our entire society is a cargo cult because everything we're trying to do, to longevity, to live forever, and to travel to the stars has its roots in something extraterrestrial. As it's roots in these stories we tell about the gods who came to visit us, right? The gods who came down and gave us agriculture, gave us writing, gave us all these things. It's always some supernatural being. It's never Joe from next door who taught us how to write. It's always this preacher that comes down, usually from space. What are examples and kind of mythology? Well, the famous one, I guess, is Oannis in the Sumerian myths, right? So here is a god who lands in the river, outside of Sumer and comes up out of a vehicle of some kind and he's wearing a weird suit with a strange hat, which we can talk about later, and he walks up to the people and he starts teaching them stuff. He teaches them math, he teaches them writing. He teaches them agriculture. And then every night he goes back down into his craft in the ocean. He never eats or drinks when he's on land with these people, right? Doesn't want to eat or drink. We don't even know if he's breathing because he's wearing a hat of some kind. Goes back down and then eventually flies away back into space. And he's the person who gave the Sumerians the knowledge of writing and agriculture and everything else that the Sumerians are famous for, supposedly having invented. So that's their story. That's their creation myth, from that point of view. There's another creation myth, which is much more like the one we have in Genesis, good angels and bad angels, basically good gods and bad gods and all the rest of it. But this one is the idea that they got their knowledge from this creature. And the hat that he's wearing is depicted on artwork and it looks like a fish's head. Like the head of a fish, like maybe it was down this way and he pulled it up to talk to them and then put it back down the other way. But that fish's head, of course, is identical to the Catholic Bishop's miter. It's exactly the same design. So we don't know what that means because that design is bizarre. The Orthodox one is nicer. It's a crown, a real crown with jewels on it and stuff, which we used to make for the other bishops when I was in the church. So that was like a thing we did as a business. But the Catholic one was kind of simple. It was just like a folded thing that you could open up and just stick on your head that way. So do you think, like in your actual model of reality, do you think that at the advent of kind of the agricultural revolution where you get writing, urbanization, history, all begins, mythology begins, that there was an initial contact event with people from the stars? That's our thesis. It's our Ur point, as we call it. This is when everything really began because it appears as though we lived on the planet for a long time, not really caring about any of that stuff. We were happy. And then suddenly there's these beings that come down and say, no, you've got to write, you've got to keep track and you've got to have numbers. And besides, look at the stars. Did you ever look up? Did you ever wonder like what all that's about? So suddenly we're all like, oh, okay. And so we're doing that. Can you imagine the Babylonians, the impetus behind the Sumerians, and the Babylonians, the Akkadians, to stare at the night sky and chart those stars? It's amazing. And I mean, all the Graham Hancock, Robert Shock stuff, like the most interesting part about all of it is how astronomically aligned all of this ancient megalithic architecture is to the stars, not only to the stars, but to like the alignment of the stars in like 10,500 BC. It's fascinating. It's fascinating because, not only they didn't have telescopes, obviously, but the fact that they would, because you don't have a telescope, you have to sit there and watch it for hours. You've got to mark the passage of these things. The planets is one thing, right? The sun and moon is like the obvious ones, right? They're easy to see. But then once you get past that, and you're talking about the other planets, you have to notice that there is certain planets that don't stay in the same place as the other ones do. That's the beginning. So you're starting to keep track of that. And then you're keeping track of the background stars that don't move, right? Or they move like in a circular motion. The amount of work that requires, the amount of attention to detail. And you have to be writing at that point. There's no other way to keep track, right? You can't memorize it. So you're writing all of this down. So that's integrated with the idea of writing, language and numbers. It's all integrated with the math of astronomy. You need both of those things to understand what's happening, right? To keep track, to keep a record. That to me is amazing. Why do that? And it's a quantum leap from being a hunter-gatherer. Absolutely. It's just a huge jump. So obviously, outside of generically, a lot of myths involving people from the stars coming down and teaching knowledge of the stars and mapping the cosmos, is there a myth that most comports with your version of what actually happened? Oh, I think, no. I think part of the short answer is no, there isn't one. But one of the points we make in secret machines, we try to make it a couple of times. I don't bore anybody with it. Is the fact that everybody has a piece of the story. Everybody's got a piece of what happened. And we ignore the other pieces that are apparel. Everybody has a creation story similar to this. When I say everybody in general terms, so in Asia, in South America, in Australia, all over Europe, everybody has a kind of story about this. They have a way of trying to explain what happened. We need to pay attention because there's data hidden in those stories. There's definitely data there. We have to look for that data. We have to listen to these stories. We have to save them from extinction. Everybody on the planet has a piece of the story. We're all blind men with the elephant, which is the thing I always talk about. We always have a piece of that elephant. No one has the whole picture. No one in this country does. No one in Russia or China or anywhere else does. We all have pieces of it. We need to collaborate on that. If we really gonna come, you get to the root of this situation. Sounds like the Tower of Babel or something. It is. It is. We're split this way and we keep reinforcing that split. It's terrible. Because we're blinded by, as I mentioned the very beginning, the ideologies and the fantasies. They get in the way of the data. We need to kind of strip a lot of that out and get back to what did your ancestors tell you? Perhaps what's most remarkable about this story though is you have a guy who's working at Wright Patterson. Yeah. And then you have another guy who's like, running like Skunk Works, which is the most advanced R&D division of Lockheed, responsible for the SR-71 and U2 spy planes. And they get interested in your work because you're talking about a cargo cult that gets the humanity and religion itself being an outgrowth of an early contact event. And it's almost as if they have some sort of ontological model of reality that comes from like a lot of data around this stuff. That's our impression. We got into a point in 2015, I guess it was, that Tom is sending me these long emails that he's getting, right? And he's saying, what the hell do you make of this? And we get on the phone and we start talking about this and I'm saying, we're having an all the presidents men moment right here. I said, we're having a deep throat moment because people are trying to tell us something without telling us something. Right. It's like follow the money, right? They're giving us hints of where we should go on this. And we have to pay attention to what they're not telling us and what they're telling us. And this came across because at one point, somebody sent us this long email, one of his most trusted advisors said, have you really looked, how much do you know about Greek mythology? It's like, whoa. Who said that? I can't say. Okay. So he came out and said that, it was a he. He came out and said, do that, right? And it's specifically talking about Prometheus. Now that gives the show away, right? If we take the Prometheus story as an encrypted story of what actually happened, we're getting close. And I think that is what it is. There at some point, somebody did something they weren't supposed to do. And it might have jumped started civilization on this planet, right? It might have been that, but Prometheus suddenly became the thing. And so Thomas saying, what the fuck do we know about Prometheus? And so I'm saying, let's take it easy. Let's go. Prometheus was this guy, he stole fire from the gods, right? For the humans, he was giving fire to the humans. Humans didn't have fire. They were freezing their asses off. Prometheus came down and said, here's fire, get warm. And the gods didn't like that. So they punished Prometheus. You're gonna get chained to a rock. You're gonna be punished for the rest of your existence for this thing. So I said, let's go back and look at this. This is what they're trying to tell us something. And what is Prometheus about? It's about contact between the humans and the gods. And the one who made the contact was a god, not one of the humans. That's right. And it was a god who is transgressing on behalf of humans against the gods themselves, sort of a rebel, sleeper cell god. Yeah. Which the Gnostics believed was the serpent in the Garden of Eden, that the serpent was God. That the god that we know of from the Bible was the imposter, the interloper, the guy who was not really God. So I got breakfast with Tom DeLong once, who I love by the way, I think he's the best. And he actually referenced Gnostic thought at the time. He was talking about the Archons who were considered kind of almost imprisoners of the kind of lower material world in like Gnostic ideology. And you hear Gnostic thought run across a lot of ufology. Like it seems like Jacques Valle is roughly kind of Gnostic in his orientation. So do you think that we're living in some sort of lower prison planet and our senses are all there to sort of mislead us and we need to somehow escape in some sort of disembodied way? But what's your sort of take on that? You're talking about Fight Club again. Some of us are in prison. Some of us have seen the exit. There was a famous author, Wilhelm Reich, you know, the inventor of the Orgon box and Orgon therapy and all of that. But he was a very well known, he was anti-communist and anti-fascist both at a time when that position was untenable in this country anyway. So he was against authoritarianism in general. And he wrote a book about that. And he has this image that I've never forgotten. That we're all in this prison, we're all in this box, but there's an exit sign. There's a big sign with the shining letters exit. But the guy who points to that exit and says, there's the exit gets immediately beaten by everybody else in the prison. And that image has stayed with me for a very long time. You know, there's an exit sign, right? There's a way out. We know what the way out is. We're just, you know, we're afraid of it. We're too distracted by everything else. But the idea of becoming free in oneself is there. It's just a question of wanting to do it badly enough that you're gonna beat down the people who are trying to stop you from getting there to get to that exit, all right? So the whole celestial ascent thing was an example of that, of people understanding that there was a way out, but that it involved kind of reprogramming to use that awful term, but a reprogramming oneself, you know, to get rid of a lot of the extraneous stuff that we're reacting to, we're constantly reacting to things, you know, kind of knee-jerk reactions to things that we, this is good and this is bad. It's a binary choice, right? And it's not a binary choice. There's a tertiary choice. There's a choice beyond A and B. There's a choice beyond plus and minus, right? I guess the Crowley people say zero equals two, you know, that's one way of formulating this idea, but there's a way of getting out of it, but it's almost impossible to describe and people have to get to it themselves, right? They have to get to it on their own path. They have to want to do it, right? And they have to be willing to follow a path while maintaining a sense of humor. Once you lose that sense of humor, you're screwed because then you become a fanatic. Fanatics famously have no sense of humor. And what you need is that sense of humor, which is a sense of what I'm looking at may be real and it may not be. Isn't it funny? What if it is real? Huh, what if it isn't equally, right? It's a way of negotiating territory that's very dangerous. Yeah, that's right. I think like a lot of people get really into synchronicities and when you put a ton of weight on the synchronicities, you're sort of in really bad territory. And when you put no weight in synchronicities, you're also in bad territory. So it's like a sila and coribbdis between extreme randomness, materialist reductionism. And then on the other side, you're just drenched in meaning. Everything's meaningful in this sort of self-defeating way. So you think, wow, so there's a way out, but it's impossible to talk about. But you do talk about it, because you wrote a book about it, you know, Stairway to Heaven. All my books are about it. Yeah, okay, fascinating. They're all chapters of one book. Interesting. Well, that's amazing that you're saying that. What do you mean when you say that? Exactly, you think secret machines and sinister forces, it's all ultimately about... Even the Nazi books. I wrote three books on the Third Reich. I mean, even there, I'm trying to point to what happened. What happened? Why do we have these reactions that we have about fascism, right? There's a reason, you know? But we've forgotten the reason. We've become kind of distracted by the Hugo Boss outfits. We get distracted by things that we don't really pay attention to. But there's deeper things at work. And if we could understand that, we would be free of that as well. But we're not going to be until we get there, until we get to that point, until we come to terms with it. So the three books on that is to try to show people that there was a universal kind of Nazism, right? And they were fascinated with occultism, some of them were, right? Himmler, most famously. So he ran an Anarba organization. This to me was fascinating because I didn't believe it existed. I wrote my first book on Holy Alliance from the point of view that I wanted to write a non-fiction version of the Morning of the Magicians, right? I loved that book, but it was half fantasy. And it was totally unsupported by documentation. So I wanted to know if any of that was really real. And when I was starting to write Sinister Forces, I said, let me go and check out this Nazi stuff because that could be relevant, right? So I'm looking at that and I get invited, I get invited myself to the Library of Congress and to the archives, the National Archives. And you have to go through a few hoops to get into the archives, but I wanted to see the captured German documents from the war. They had a bunch of microfilm. And I walked in there and I told the archivist, very well-known guy at the time, I asked him, I said, I'm looking for documents about this and about that, trying to word it gently so I didn't sound like a total kook. And the guy said, oh, you mean the SS Anarba, we have them all over here. So I said, cool, right? So I'm now scrolling through microfilm and I'm looking at the Tibet expedition of 1938, the SS Tibet expedition of 1938. I'm looking at, how do we do yoga postures in the shape of runes, of Nordic runes? How do we develop a Kabbalah that's not Jewish? And on and on, I'm looking at all this stuff and it's just masses of documentation. That's wild. A lot of them signed by Heil Hitler, by Heinrich Himmler, right? And I'm staring at this and I'm thinking, how come nobody's writing about this? All these books are Nazi cultism and nobody's looking at the real documents, the original papers. Then they go to Mount Kailash looking for some underground civilization there. Among other things, yeah. But they went all the way into Tibet, right? And they're measuring skulls with calipers, right? I have photographs of that. So wild. And they're fascination with Antarctica, right? Came from Hyperborea, which was the first root race if you look at kind of Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky and stuff. Wasn't Theosophy, like the Swastika kind of came from Theosophy, right? That they took on the Nazis? Now you're back in my territory again. Okay. As Unholy Alliance pointed out, the Swastika was famously imprinted on Blavatsky's original books as the symbol of the Aryans. And the whole idea of the Aryans being this, the current spiritually advanced race, right? Came from Blavatsky. And there was a group of militia in 1918, 1919, you know, the war ended in 1918, World War I. There was the Russian Revolution. And then there was an almost communist takeover of Germany at the time. There was a lot of socialism, a lot of communism, different parties fighting each other. But the right wing types were army veterans, right? And they were the ones who had fought against Russia during the First World War. So they formed independent militias, Freikorps as they called them. And one of them was the Stahlhelm and the Stielhelmet. And on their helmets were emblazoned the Swastikas. This was as early as 1918 and 1919. So there was an assassination of members of the Tula Gazelshaft on April 30th in 1919. German secret society, like we've been talking about. And they had the Swastika as their symbol, right? This was long before Hitler showed up. So the Swastika was their symbol. And it was a symbol of the Aryans. And they got that again from the Theosophical writings and pseudo Theosophical writings, people copying Blavatsky. And so that was like, this was it. This is our symbol, the symbol of the Aryans, we're Aryans. A lot of them would not have passed a blood test at the time, but they consider themselves Aryans. So these people were massacred on April 30th, Valpergis Nacht in Germany. And it led to this outcry among the right wing groups. So the right wing groups and the left wing groups had this fight, this pitched battle in the streets of Munich. These were occultists fighting on the streets of Munich, right? It was bizarre, as if you had given the Golden Dawn machine guns and said, have at it. It was just so strange. And that fascinated me. I said, this is weird. And what do we know about the Tule-Gazelle-Chef? Not much, but the Library of Congress had a lot of information on it as it turned out. So not just the archives, but the Library of Congress. So I had access to that information. I'm going, oh my God, this was all going on. This was not made up, right? Pauls and Berger who wrote Morning of the Magicians, they were kind of winging it a little bit. But it was based on something kind of real. Nobody was writing the truth about it. And I thought that was my job now. I've got access to this. And then I went to South America, that's another story. But this whole thing was I wanted to put this out there as there is something, yes, Virginia, there is, a Nazi occult thing. There is a thing that Himmler was in charge of. Yeah, and the Antarctica expedition was very real. Right, well. If you look at all the SS patches, it's like black sun, it's all this sort of occult symbology. So I think it's sort of hidden in plain sight and was clearly, Indiana Jones narrative of them looking for the Ark of the Covenant maybe isn't so off. I guess the follow up question to that though is like, what are the implications? Because there's some Occam's razor explanation that this is just the fascinations of the ultimate hubris of this kind of, Napoleon Alexander the Great type, the machinations of this sort of ridiculous mind of Hitler. And then there's some other explanation, which is maybe this conferred some sort of local power that would then blow up in the faces of the Nazis because it was this Faustian bargain, but they were drawing from some sort of non-human intelligence or something else. What do you think? Well, all those points have been made and I understand them and I understand the resistance of academia to embrace this story as they haven't reacted to it. But the documents don't lie, it's just a question, do you interpret them the same way? The Ananerba was a real organization and it was called Ancestral Heritage because what Himmler was trying to do was completely remove Christianity and Judaism from the German people and replace it with the Nordic version, which meant a pagan version, which in the context of 1930s Germany meant basically an occult version. So they replaced the rituals of baptism, for instance, with a Nordic style christening. They replaced the marriage rights with a Nordic style marriage right. They were deliberately trying to do this. So wasn't Hitler writing poetry to the Nordic gods as a soldier in World War I? Yes, he was, he wrote it. They're reprinted in I think it's Toland's biography of Hitler. So the poems are there. He was writing to Odin and Thor, right? So, okay, and then this is where things get very speculative and weird, but you, I mean, one of the constant sort of tropes in UFO stories, UFO abduction cases is the Nordics. It's always the Nordics, the Greys or the Reptilians. The Nordics seem particularly interesting, powerful, like these sort of perfect humans or whatever. Do you think there was any sort of Nordic-Nazi relationship? Okay, okay, we have to define our terms for so many terms in that sentence. I don't know where to start. Nordic, Nazi and relationship. Not just, that goes beyond the Nazi fascination with Nordic mythology. You know what I mean? I understand, yeah. Okay, my short answer is no. But let me qualify what I'm saying. They were fascinated by it. Himmler was fascinated by this. In fact, they tried to prove there was an Aryan race all over the globe. They sent archeologists looking everywhere for traces of swastikas wherever they could find them, thinking that was the key, right? And that comes from Blavatsky. I mean, give me a break, right? But it got lost in the sauce there as they went off on this tangent. So now they're saying, okay, this is, we find the swastika in India. They must be an Aryan relationship there. We find it in China, it must be there. I've seen swastikas on buildings in Malaysia and Indonesia, but they're Buddhist symbols right there. So, but they were looking for this. They were looking for this proof. They had the, this was not a scientific process, right? They had the result they wanted. They're looking for stuff to confirm it. They didn't look for stuff that didn't confirm it and only for stuff that confirmed it. So here's the evidence that confirms our story. So this is part of the problem there. They wanted Nordic because they wanted to get rid of Christianity and Judaism. They had to get rid of Christianity because of Judaism, right? And they were against Judaism for whatever reasons they were against Judaism for. It was anti-Semitism was popular in Europe, all over Europe, Eastern Europe. I mean, the protocols of the elders of Zion came out of Russia, right? So that started this whole thing. People believed it was true. So, you know, the Jews are having a secret meeting and they're discussing the takeover of the world. So that document got published and it's still being published. It was published in South Africa all the time. Translations were published all over Asia. Translations published in South America, like this is a true thing. This is a meme now that's become true in the eyes of many people. I was asked about it at an academic conference in Indonesia, right? So I mean, this stuff is there. I was met a terrorist, the leader, the guy who created the Bali bombings in 2002. And he's telling me, you know, it's the protocols of the elders of Zion, like it's real. I'm telling him, there's like two Jews in your entire country, right? You're not really suffering from Jewish invasion. But anyway, that was his perspective, right? So this has become this thing. This has become a problem that we cannot get our way around because history has made it kind of real, even though it's not real. We know it was a hoax invented by the secret police in Russia during the time of the Tsar, even before the Soviet Union. So this whole thing becomes this problem, right? And the Nordics become the solution to this problem. We're really Aryans. We're really Nordics. We don't belong in this situation that we're in. You know, we're in this, we lost the first world war, it must be because of the Jews. Can't be because of us. It can't be because of we extended ourselves and trying to invade Russia for crying out loud. Napoleon could have told you not to do that, right? So all of these mistakes we made are not ours. They're somebody else's. So naturally they wanna make contact with their source. And they found their source in a guy called Vistor, Carl Villagut, right? Who claimed he had photographic memory of what it was like back in the day when there were only Nordics on the planet. Mm, okay. Whoa. And Himmler put him, make gave him an officer in the SS. So he's in the SS along with all these other psychos, right? And he's giving all this stuff to Himmler. This is what, I'm going into a trance now, I can see it. This is what happened at this time. This is what happened at the time. And did he say it was like hyperboreal? Like this? Oh yeah, really, it was Tula, right? Whoa. Right, this is- Like Atlantis or... Yeah. So they're buying it, right? Whoa. And Himmler, one or two cards short of a deck, right? He builds Vablesburg Castle, right? Which I went to and I did a TV thing like 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago for that on that. That's a beautiful castle, but was in disrepair when Himmler took it over. He refurbished it with concentration camp labor. And he built basically a round table for his 12 nights to sit around and have seances, right? And bring down the spirits of the ancient Teutonic kings. This is so crazy. So they wanted to do this, the physical evidence is there. Swastikas in the floor, Swastikas in the ceiling, the niches where they're gonna put the urns of the deceased SS leaders. But then there's a question of were they interacting with anything? And I think in your model reality, you would say yes. Yes. Right? Sure. And then who knows what it is. But it could have been anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could be totally trickstery. It could have been those guys from the Australian consulate telling us, you know. Well, simultaneous to that, you have these Neo-Pagan rituals that they all have to go through. You had Rourne-Ron Braun going through these rituals, his mentor, Herman Oberth, on record saying that non-human intelligence allowed them to build rockets to go to space, you know. That's the secret machines, yeah. There you go. And something else you get into with secret machines, which is fascinating is there's always this question of like, is there some bizarre Nazi connection with Roswell itself? And some of the early contactees, you talk about Adamski, George Hunt-Williamson. Sure. Is there some sort of connection with some of these early UFO crashes in Nazi Germany, which by all kind of conventional historical accounts was over by 1945, and Roswell is two years later in 1947. Well, is there a connection? I think so. I think we made a pretty good case for it in secret machines based on the information that we have. And that is something that people don't realize. We think of Operation Paperclip as a purely American thing, a phenomenon, which it was. But the Russians had their own version of Paperclip. And the Russians brought more than 3,000 scientists and their families into Russia, whether by force or hook or by crook, but they did. And they built an entire city. I believe it's in what is now Belarus, if not Ukraine. It's in the book also with a precise location. They built this operation there to renew all the experimental programs that have been going on at Pino Munda at Nordhausen to bring it all back to life again. And they got as many scientists and technologies and engineers, technologists as they could. And one of their programs, and it was revealed when after the Soviet Union fell, some of this documentation became available, was to build a kind of flying saucer. And it was based on the Horton model. Now, the Horton model, you can find this on the internet everywhere. The diagrams are public information now. Was a flying disc, but with the bottom, one side of it sort of chewed out. So it was kind of a sea-shaped craft. The kind that Kenneth Arnold saw in 1947, the same design. Without him knowing at the time, he wouldn't have known that this was the design of the Horton craft. So the Hortons, the two brothers, one of which wound up in Argentina, developing craft for Perron, and another wound up staying in Germany, and nobody seemed to want him for anything, for whatever reason. I think he was the test pilot for a lot of the Horton brothers' devices, so maybe he wasn't considered a technician, an engineer, or a scientist. But there were enough Russian scientists that they could rebuild it and see if they could make it fly. So with 3,000 scientists in Russia, with Nazi presence all around the world after the war, it's a possibility, and I'll tell you why. And I was thinking to bring it with me, and I guess I didn't think, I didn't realize our conversation would go in this direction. And it's a good thing I didn't, it's a big, heavy thing. The US Congress published in June of 1945, before the war in Asia was over, they published a report on basically what was the Maison Rouge meeting that happened in 1944 in Strasbourg. The SS had ordered the heads of German industry at a meeting. This was after the D-Day invasion, when the handwriting was on the wall, and they knew they were gonna lose this thing one way or the other. They basically told the leaders of German industry to expatriate as much of their wealth, as much of their technology, of necessary personnel as possible overseas to get it out of the hands of the Allies. Now in June of 45, we already had this information, and they published it as part of the congressional record. It's this thick, it's at least two inches thick printed. And you're going through and you're looking at all the companies that the Germans had overseas, all of the industries they were involved in that they owned at that time, including a lot of real estate in South America, literal real estate, ranches, asiendas, all sorts of places that they had bought in the years leading up to the end of the war. And then in addition to that, we find when the Clinton administration ordered an investigation as to Nazi gold, and what happened to the Nazi gold that was missing, they found just within a few months because they didn't have a lot of financing to continue this for a long time. That committee only lasted a short while. They found 40 tons of gold, 40 tons of gold that had been shipped out of the Bank of Lisbon by submarine. 20 tons went to Macau. Well, they all went to Macau. 20 tons went into China, and 20 tons went into Indonesia. That 20 tons of gold probably jumpstarted what Sukarno used to call the revolutionary fund, which was going to be an anti IMF, anti World Bank, that he had planned for, that Hallmar shocked Hitler's former finance minister had asked Sukarno to do. Whoa. He had met Sukarno. He had been denazified, shocked, and it wound up in Indonesia visiting Sukarno, saying you have to build an Islamic crescent to defend against Chinese communism. The best way to do that is sort of your own fund, get all these other countries that are non aligned with either China, Russia, or the United States, and have it based here in Jakarta. Wow. So is the implication that Roswell was Horton Brothers technology that might have gotten into Soviet hands? Could be Soviet hands, it could have been somebody else's hands because the Nazis had assets everywhere. Now they didn't have assets to the kind you would think would develop. We think it was the prototypical flying saucer. The amount of, the problem is we don't know what a real flying saucer is, right? Yeah. All the reports that we have say there's no instrumentation, there's nothing in there. It's really tricky because you do have real documented evidence that Hans Kamler was running this thing called Skoda Works from 1942 to 45 in Brezla and Pilsen, modern Czechoslovakia and Poland. And they were building what seemed to be saucers. Like Rudolph Schreiber who was a technician there said that one climbed to 40,000 feet in a few seconds. Richard Mieta had all these plans for saucers. You had Victor Schauburger very famously, this naturalist who claimed he had zero point energy machines and they were sort of saucer shaped. I think it was called an impeller because it was like the centripetal, not centrifugal force. It wasn't outward moving, it was inward moving and it would cause sort of thrust as a result. And so you had all this evidence that they were working on things like that. You also have a book by this guy, British journalist named Tom Auguston about this sort of great game dividing up of Skoda Works, of Kamler's stop between the Soviets and the US. So we know that this was like a vital strategic importance. We also, I think now know, due to Air Force documents that Kamler himself who's this ruthless Nazi, I think Albert Speer who was head of Nazi armaments said, he was the most ruthless man I was ever forced to collaborate with. And you're talking about a guy who worked with like, Himmler and Gerbils and Hitler. And you know, he's got a has to be. I think he had a high bar. It is a high bar. I think Kamler had a plan to assassinate Hitler in the final days of the Third Reich. So crazy guy. So we know that there were real plans to build like this flying saucer. We don't know how far they got. And then Annie Jacobson writes about in her book, Area 51, that there was this attempted, you know, they really wanted to find the Horton brothers because they were building these sort of saucers. Also prototypes, yeah. But then you also have people at Roswell and they're like, a weird being with three or four fingers and toes came out of the craft and was definitely not human. And so those two things just don't line up or comport at all. Obviously there's disinformation somewhere. Somewhere. And so your, but your bet would be the disinfo would be on the kind of NHI alien front and that this might be prosaic human technology. I think, yeah, I think it's a possibility that what crashed in Roswell was human technology. Prosaic, I'm not sure. Yeah, sure, exotic human technique. Exotic human. But remember when you're talking about Roswell and you're talking about Wright Patterson, you're talking about all the Nazi scientists. Walter Dornberger from Pinamunda, his first posting was to Wright Patterson. He was in Wright Patterson when the Roswell debris was brought in by trains. So wild. So he was there. And so, okay. Who else would you have wanted to look at that? And he was head of, I think, a four V two program in Nazi Germany. Yeah, there you go. He ran Pinamunda. He was the boss of, what's his name? Wernher von Braun. Wernher von Braun. Yeah, okay, wow. So he was at Oberammergau and yeah, it's interesting, and I think you do have also the Avrocar project, which was an attempt to build a flying saucer. And it originally was in Canada, but then it moved over to Wright Pad as Project Y. And there was always this feeling that Project Y was a front for something deeper, but it was, there were videos of them trying to fly this flying saucer, just had a radial gas turbine engine. So kind of like. When I was a kid, in the late 1950s, you could buy a plastic model of the Avro. That's wild. That's so wild. I had it when I was a kid. It's crazy to see. I mean, there. It looks like a flying saucer. There's like, you know, they really does. There's a wind turbine photos of it being tested, and it looks like you're like, I'm in Star Wars right now. Like this, it's remarkable. And then we do, I think, have documented evidence that Richard Mita, who was from Schoeder Works and Kalmersstab, made his way to at least the AvroCar project that was going on in Canada, which was British aircraft and John Frost and in partnership with the American CIA. So you have one piece of the puzzle there. You have Henry Kowanda, who was famous for the Kowanda effect. Oh, right. He had basically the first patent on a flying saucer in 1936. He was a Romanian, but he was living in Vichy, France, and he was overtaken by Nazis, obviously. And he was consulting on Project Y at Wright-Patterson as well. So we know that you have another guy named Eric Henry Wing, who was, had a special projects at Wright-Patterson. He went to school with Victor Schauburger, and then he moved over to Kirtland Air Force Base right after that. So you have all these Nazis who are working at Wright-Patt. Which is phenomenal because everybody that actually worked for us during the war lost their security clearances, right? So Oppenheimer loses his security clearance, Gak Parsons loses his, right? All of his, the entourage around the Suicide Squad, right? All the people who founded basically JPL wound up losing their security clearances. They couldn't work anymore, and we moved the Nazis in, our enemies, right? And we put them in charge. The whole thing was just, to me, mind-boggling that that would happen that way. But it just did, right? So mind-boggling. And it doesn't make a lot of sense, but in the political environment of the time, it kind of does. All things being equal in context, but when you look at it now, you're thinking, why did we bring in that many? And then we realized the Russians brought in three times that many, right? So wild. And they were in contact. The American groups and the Russian groups were in contact. They found that out later. Because the Russian scientists they had in New Mexico, right, were going into the village, into the local towns, and they were sending mail back to Germany, which would then get sent over by courier to the Russian scientists in the Soviet Union. So there was contact being made. Of course, that was shut down once it was found out, but it was going on for a while. Nobody knows what was being discussed. Was it contact between the former Nazi factions of both? Wow, that's pretty fascinating. Yeah, I think there's some story of Warner Von Braun's, giving off trade secrets at the border in Mexico or whatever. So there is maybe this like rogue Nazi network post-World War II that was like still vital for a little bit. If there was a rogue Nazi network post-World War II in the United States, how much more likely it was that it was in other countries where they didn't care? Yeah, totally. Yeah, even more likely. So more likely. So there is a likelihood, statistical likelihood. So it's not a, statistics can be bent either way. But statistically, there was so many Nazi assets around the world, money that we couldn't trace, assets we couldn't trace, technology. I mean, that famous submarine that they stopped would have the Messerschmitt in pieces in it. And all the uranium and the engineers that was going to Japan that supposedly Oppenheimer visited at a crucial time because he couldn't figure out how to make the freaking bomb work. Wow. Right? Yeah, and it's even Warner Von Braun. And like the, look at the early NASA Apollo program and NASA Saturn program. It was literally a transplantation of the Nazi space program. It was Warner Von Braun, Arthur Rudolph and 129 Nazi scientists. And that was it. And so it's just like, you are really dependent on their knowledge somehow. And what was the overall context, right? If you look at it, you're looking at a geopolitical sense. To the United States government at the time, we preferred to have the Nazis so that we could fight the communists. It was again, a binary situation. So we buried records of these guys. We denazified them ourselves. They should never have been many of them. They were Nazis to their death, right? They did not suddenly become Americans because they were living in, you know, Arkansas or some place, right? Or Alabama. So they suddenly did not suddenly become our defenders or our allies. They were just there being paid and saved from going to the Soviet Union. So the amount of trust we placed in these people, they didn't deserve what we did, right? They didn't deserve the trust from my perspective. We had fought against them. They were developing bombs that they rained on London during the Blitz. These are people who killed without thinking. That was their job, right? To give them the credit that way. They were working for that regime. But now we bring them over and we find out that philosophically, they're Nazis, right? Because the communists are the bigger threat, which is why in my other books I talk about, since we're talking about the range of it, I talk about the Catholic church, you know, and the fact that they saw it the same way. The communists were the worst at it me. We can work with the Nazis, right? Even though the Nazis also wanna do away with us, but at least they're not communists. They're not Godless, you know? I mean, Odin is a God, right? So the idea being let's work with the Nazis. Let's hide them. Let's give them false paperwork, get them out to Bolivia and Argentina and places like that. Is there something about like, you know, the kind of Norse mythology, other pagan mythology that involves kind of the quote unquote old gods or little G gods? And you know, you think about like ritual sacrifice or scapegoating cycles, somehow satiating those gods and then Christianity being sort of inherently apocalyptic because it stops those cycles. Because it takes the side of the scapegoat. And you know, I'm not necessarily biased towards any ideology here. I'm Jewish, but like, is there something somehow like very dangerous about the like, the stopping of the scapegoating cycles to the point where if there are sinister forces going on above our heads, they're gonna like move the like fascist rogue elements around no matter who's in power in order to keep the cycle going. Like if we are in some sort of prison planet or something, that's how you'd like keep the thing, the machine running. Yeah, maybe. It's possible we could look at it from that point of view. We don't have a lot of evidence to enlarge it, but we do have the idea that if you have a Catholic church that's willing to make that choice to cut a deal with the people who really wanted to destroy them in the first place, because communism is the bigger threat. Why would communism be the bigger threat? Because communism is fundamentally anti-religious, right? Religion is the opiate of the people famously. Misquotations basically, but that's what it means. Religion is what people need as an opiate because they're living under very harsh conditions. So the idea was improve the conditions of the people, they won't need religion anymore. That's kind of a, I wouldn't, not a very realistic point of view. I think religion is of one kind or another, spirituality anyways here today, is part of our innate backup. The race to religion as a way of finding a sucker or assistance in a time of emotional stress, that's something that people do. And what Marx was talking about, saying getting rid of that because, it's not very useful, just concentrating on things that you can fix here in the here and now. I understand the impetus of it, knowing how badly the church treated people for centuries. The Orthodox churches included and the Catholic churches and all the churches, they treated, they had groups that they persecuted, Jews in particular, but a lot of other people too, other religions, heretics, witches, everybody else. So it was a machine to give emotional support and moral support towards eradicating your enemies at a moral level. It wasn't a practical thing, but it was a moral thing that said people, well, we have to get rid of these people, they're evil. So the church has that in its background, which is the fascist point of view also, right? Get rid of these people who are standing in our way. The Nazi ideal was get rid of all of these people because they're in our way. Okay, they're holding back the race. So do I think that it's a question of the sacrificed, the sacrificial king as opposed to the kings who do the sacrifice? In the scenario I just gave you, it's difficult to make that case, I think, because the church represents the sacrificed king, but they were more than willing to work with the Nazis against the communists instead of the other way around. So I don't know. It's a thorny question because it requires a lot more thinking and a lot more, a lot more context, I think, for what was going on. But in the United States, if we just poured it back over here, it was considered to be weak-minded, to be both anti-communist and anti-Nazi. There was a very strong Republican candidate, I write about it in, I'm not sure which book anymore, Secret Machines War, I think. I wrote about it also in one of the Nazi books, I think in The Hitler Legacy. There was an American political, Republican, sort of a right-wing kind of guy, very conservative, but he got really angry when he found out that the Argentines were protecting Nazi war criminals. And he wanted to cut off any aid or assistance to Argentina. And another Republican said, you're crazy, we can't do that, leave them alone, let them live there, who cares, right? We're against anti-communists, let's not muddy the waters. And the guy says, I can do both, right? I can be anti-communist and anti-Nazi, I can do both things, we can do both things as a country. And they said, no, you can't, it's gonna be one or the other. We have all these Nazis working for us, with the space program. So we really don't wanna piss off the Nazis that much. And we covered up war criminals that we knew existed in South America and stuff, whereas we would go after the communists very aggressively. I'm not trying to say which right or what's wrong, I'm trying to say what motivates it, what is the rationale behind this? Why is that okay, right? Why are we okay with it? Are we okay with it? Or is this part of the problem? Is this part of the prison mentality that we have, that we have to pick a side? It's like the prison gangs, right? You gotta be on this gang side or that gang side, right? Who are you gonna be protected by, which side? And I think that's the problem. We're looking at it that way. Can I ask you some basic questions? Cause you've probably spoken to as high level people in government who deal with the UFO issue, any other civilian that I've ever met maybe. And so can I ask you a few questions about just what you think about the UFO legacy program? Like the questions would be is like, what is the program? Like, is there a material, do they have material from UFOs that are not of human origin would be one question. Do you think there are saucers and hangers, little bits and pieces of things, or do you think the saucers and hangers are tech protection for some sort of lineage of exotic science that comes from the Nazis or what do you think? See what I've been told and what I think could be two different things. What do you think? I would love to believe that we have a crash saucer. If we have a crash saucer from the 40s, until now, that story doesn't seem that likely. It would, we would have done something with it. Don't tell me in all this time we can't figure out how that thing works. But you hear all the analogies of, you know, iPhone with Da Vinci or whatever, where it's like Da Vinci is a genius, but he wouldn't know what the hell, he wouldn't know information theory and bits and, you know, what chip was inside of it and. Yeah, of course. He'd be able to like press some buttons and stuff, but like it would be progress would be very limited. But if I gave Da Vinci 50 years, he would have gotten close. He would have discovered something about electricity. He would have discovered something about miniaturization. I mean, he might have gotten, he wouldn't have figured out what an iPhone was unless it started beeping at him and the voice came out of it. Well, what if that's where we're at on UFOs? Well, we've had the UFO for 50 years. I know, but that's what I'm saying. What if we do have some things about it, but we don't know how to, you know, fly them perfectly or so. I don't know. The part that is my problem is that we can't be the only ones. Russia's got to have crashed vehicles. China has a crashed vehicle. So this is a point to say that you don't think we are in possession of saucers and hangers from the 40s. I would say if we are in possession of it and they're in possession of it too, then there is an agreement between countries that says we're not going to talk about this. It's the fight club. But you think that is- And we're not going to do it and it's going to keep it under the vest. But you can't have an agreement like that because somebody's going to break it. So you think that's the less likely scenario? I think it's the less likely. I know, okay, if there are crash saucers, there got to be a lot of them. Has to be more than one. Yeah, of course. Okay, and I've heard a lot of rumors when I did business in China, which I did for years, with the Chinese government, that there was something that crashed in Chinese territory. I think the Russians got it though. The Chinese- So what is that thing that crashed in Chinese territory? It's to them, the discotelbutt was, this is one of your flying saucers, they would say. But like of the Soviets or the Russians? Or a Horton, who knows? Okay. But it was something that was kept under wraps. If a Horton crashed, who would care? Yeah. It was a Horton. It was never going to fly. It crashed, end of story, right? So- There's a logical problem in the, it's convenient for us to sit here and say, the US government, the US government is only one government on the planet, and they only have so much territory, right? The Chinese have a big chunk and the Russians have it, and all the other countries that have crashed equipment possible, crashed equipment, all the countries that have sightings, which is almost every country. You implied earlier that what you think and what you've been told might be two different things. So you've been told that we do have crashed actual, genuine UFO, maybe extraterrestrial craft in our possession. I was told by way of omission, when it comes to the subject of, do we have materials in our possession? Okay, there's been a wishy-washy response to that. Oh, we have materials. Okay. And, you know, are they extraterrestrial? Well, we can't really identify where they came from. We'll be an answer like that. Unknown origin. Yeah, it will go into that territory, and find them when you just flat out ask them. The response is something like, you know, we really can't discuss that. Well, if you don't have it, why can't you discuss it? Why can't you just say no? Lie to me. We're used to that. I mean, I'm comfortable with you lying to me. You've been lying to us for years. Lie to me again and say, no, we don't have a saucer. Don't leave it open-ended. Don't leave it like maybe, you know, we have a flying saucer. What does that mean? Why would you say that? Is that part of a disinformation project that's been underway since 1947? You guys haven't gotten over that yet? You know, we've gotten over it, right? We're done with it, right? We're okay. You can tell us anything at this point. But they keep, and then there's guys that come out and say, no, there's definitely a saucer, and there's people in government that come out and say, there's definitely a saucer. We saw it, right? There's people in the program that were coming out and saying, no, there is definitely there. There's, okay. At one point I was talking to a guy called, you've probably heard of him, Michael Aquino. Oh yeah. Infamous guy, right? Isn't he like a Satanist or something? Yeah, Temple of Set. He found it. He was with Levese, a satanic church of Satan. He had the weird eyebrows, all the rest of it. He was implicated in all sorts of things. I had written about him on Holy Alliance because he conducted a ceremony at Weyvilsburg Castle, the Nazi SS Castle, some sort of satanic ceremony. I was like, all right. He contacted me at one point and said, listen, let's hang out, right? Oh geez. And I'm like, yeah. What could possibly go wrong? Jesus. So he says, come on out. I would have run for the hills, man. That guy's creepy. He's very creepy, but I wanted to know. I'm the kind of guy I need to know, right? So that's why I went to Chile in 79. I have to come face to face. I have to know. I mean, I got to talk to terrorists and Nazis and stuff. I have to see how they react, how they talk. That tells you a lot. I understand that instinct as well. You got to, right? Well, you do it all the time. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So he says, we're gonna go to Vegas. Las Vegas is having a meeting of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, of which he's a member, right? Being a former intelligence officer. So I said, I'll get you in. Come on, we'll hang out. It'll be fun, right? All right, so I go to this thing and it was weird. It was wild. Everybody in that room, except me, I guess, was a former intelligence officer for somebody, for SBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, didn't matter, right? They're all there. They're all hanging out. They're having a wild old time. And they love the queen, though. They all want their picture taken with this guy. What? And that to me was like stunning. I'm saying, you know the bad press, right? About this guy. Didn't matter. These guys loved him because they saw him as an intelligence agent, right? They didn't see him the way I on the outside had seen him. They saw him as one of theirs. What was your sense of the guy? John Alexander was there, you know? Yeah. I met John Alexander at that time. Okay, for the audience, John Alexander's a long time UFO, kind of historian, but also seems to be pretty deep. Pretty deep. In the government on this topic, in a way that, you know, maybe he's more involved than meets the eye or something like that. Sometimes skeptic and sometimes not, kind of hard to pin. But that's the way these guys always do it. So he was there. He had his picture taken with Aquino. Oh, God. So all these guys are like, yeah. And Aquino did get his commission. Everything else was reinstated when they said that the accusations against him could not have happened because of a number of things. What were the accusations? Child abuse. Jesus. But it turns out he wasn't in town when this stuff happened. I mean, literally wasn't because he was on some military mission. Is your sense that he's an evil satanic guy who was capable of things like that? Or did you sense some goodness and, you know, people just somehow misunderstand him? Or what was your sense? He was a, he was an intellectual guy, very, very intelligent guy. Charming when he wanted to be charming. Extremely cynical. I mean, didn't believe anything. I mean, here's a guy involved in two quote unquote churches, right, or temples, the church of Satan and then temple of set. But he didn't believe in paranormal anything. He didn't believe in UFOs, right? This guy was a realist, 100% realist in what he did. He believed in the philosophies behind a lot of these things. And he was very erudite on that basis. Evil, that's hard to say. He didn't give me, you know, Islamic terrorist vibes that I had in Indonesia from the guy who was on the, you know, on Bali and killed 200 people. But what is he trying to do? Like if you're running the, you know, this church of set and you're a Satan, self-professed Satanist and then you are, you know, in intelligent circles, like what's your, what's your Emma? Like what's your mandate in life? He understood his famous thing. And it was similar to John Alexander's was non-lethal warfare, which sounds kind of nice. When you just look at the words, it's non-lethal. So we're all still alive, right? Sure. But how do you conduct warfare then under those circumstances? He was a psychological warfare operations officer in Vietnam, right? The Phoenix program, he was involved in the Phoenix program. So this was something where you change the minds, the hearts and minds of people, as General Westmoreland famously said, right? When you got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. And that was their kind of modus operandi. Stay on top of them, feed them all sorts of weird shit. They believe in this, make ghosts. They believe in vampires, create vampires, right? Scare the shit out of the villagers, they'll come to you. Right? That was the Phoenix program. They did all kinds of things. They killed a lot of tax advisors and tax collectors as well for the Viet Cong. But they also did a lot of weird psychological warfare operations. That was their thing. Now pump that up, right? To a national level. How would you use non-lethal warfare on your own citizens? How would you do that, right? How? Well, there's all different ways of doing it. The UFO phenomenon could be one. Do you think it's used in that capacity? Oh, it has been, we know that. Richard Dodie did it, right? Well, yeah, so he was obviously kind of siopping and messing with Paul Benowitz. Do you think on a larger scale than that? He missed with everybody in the UFO community. Yeah, fair enough. He was a big problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're still talking to him. I don't get it why, but- I know, he still goes on Gaia and talks about six different races of aliens and people are like, wow, an insider's telling us. You don't know the history. But do you think, I mean, it seems like there's something deeper and more nefarious about the way you're describing Aquino and what he's doing and Dodie who's like- Well, this is the point I wanna make. Obviously doing really bad stuff, but like messing with an individual in a way to like throw him off from like looking at Kirtland Air Force Base at like, possibly like human tech. But it got him killed, right? No, Benowitz actually just obviously totally messed up and unacceptable, but he had a psychiatric break and was in the hospital and didn't die from that. No, but the pressure from Dodie feeding him false information, somebody is already in that state. To me, that's culpability. I think in a court of law we get a- I think he should be held responsible for doing horrible things to Benowitz. And yeah, I've covered it and I think it's horrible. But it still feels like of a different variety from the- From what we're talking about. The Aquino thing feels like some weird, even, you said psychological warfare, like do you think there's a psychic component, like a psychic warfare component to any of that stuff? I think we're desperately trying to find it. I think if we haven't found it already, I think our intelligence communities, or at least the scientific divisions of them, are looking to see how they could do that. They did that during MK Ultra, during Bluebird, during Artichoke operation often, they were looking at occult systems. How can we manipulate occultism? I mean, is there anything to that that we can use? So obviously it was on the books as early as the 1950s and 1960s. And how would UFOs be used in that context? Think of it this way. Think of how Aquino used psychological warfare in Vietnam. The Vietnamese believed in certain villages and stuff. They believed in vampires, they believed in ghosts, they believed in hungry ghosts, that sort of thing. There were a lot of strange beliefs, depending upon where you came from. And they exploited that. They made them appear. In one of my books, I even talked about it in detail in one of my novels, in the Lovecraft Code. There's a series of three books that are just fictional, but not really. So in one of them, I talk about that type of operation, how it would look. What's the difference between that and a UFO sighting? Go to some small town. Shine some lights in the sky and have somebody appear and say something in English, and then disappear again, freaking out a family of five on a picnic or something. Do you think UFOs can be staged? We've tried it. Wow. CIA even had this idea in their head. They were going to have Jesus appear as a vision over Havana to convince the Cubans to overthrow Castro. That was on the books. They were gonna use holograms or something to make this thing appear. We know how to do that. And that was then, that was back in the 70s. So we know how to do this kind of stuff. We could make things appear and disappear with stagecraft. I mean, Aquino was practicing stuff like that. I mean, the other Phoenix program guys were doing this kind of thing. So the idea is we create an image, just brief, we don't need it to sit there for a long time. It just briefly appears in front of you. Are they practicing magic with a C or magic with a K? So like some sort of occult, attempts to create like an agregor or like a kind of consensus thought form that appears as a UFO or is it like pure technology? We're gonna beam a thing in the sky. No, I mean, they're gonna beam a thing in the sky, pure technology, but with the occult context for it, right? So they're gonna do it this way. I don't know what they've studied since that time. I don't know if they've gotten far enough to say, I can make this thing happen scientifically, but it's going to have psychological implications and it's going to have maybe a spiritual implication as well. Maybe this person will see a vision, maybe they'll go off and found a cult, we don't know, right? Maybe they've gotten that far to realize that they can create the scientific apparatus to induce a spiritual breakdown or breakthrough. All of this sounds somewhat dark and manufactured in your underlying kind of ontological belief or whatever. Do you think that there are genuine non-human intelligences and possibly extraterrestrials visiting Earth? You know, are there non-human intelligences? Yes, bluntly, okay. Yeah, what levitated your table in a decade together. Yeah, and maybe go to the Australian consulate like an asshole. So yes. Did the Aboriginal uprising ever happen? No, okay. Not in all this time. Okay, okay. Still waiting for it. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, let's hope. The timing is a little off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no, something is non-human or preter human or ultra human, I don't know. We have these words for it and that's where we get lost when we start doing that. Something that's not us is doing this, okay. So yes, that exists. So you said non-human intelligence definitely exists. And then, you know, extraterrestrials or beings that can be embodied in corporeal. And that's what I wanted to get at. Between man and God. Just what I, that's the thing I was gonna get to, I guess probably you have it on your list. I think we've talked about it briefly, was the Men in Black episode that I had. Yeah, what happened? Which seems to point to that because I have no other explanation for it. Nothing makes sense in this context. So that's some of your listeners, I think, probably viewers have seen heard this before, but I'll make it brief. Don't make it brief. Tell the whole story. It was in Rhode Island. I lived there in, this would have been 1990 when this was happening, right around the time of the first Gulf War, which is how I remember it. I put it in that context because for a minute, I wondered if there was a connection. And I had been shopping in the car and I drove my car back to my house. Ashaway wrote at that time was, you know, houses here and there. It wasn't a big city. It wasn't even a village. It was just, you know, I had a house and then next to me a little while over there was a house. There's a house over there. So it's not a very busy place. A country road, basically. And so I'm unloading packages from the car. And I look up and I notice there's an old model black Cadillac idling right in front of the house. And the driver appears to be holding a camera facing me with a wide angle lens on it. And I'm staring at this. And that's happened to me once before in my life. That was during Vietnam era. When I was 19, 20 years old, I guess I signed a petition or something and somebody was taking my picture. Cointel Pro or whatever the hell it was at the time. But so I know what that looks like, right? That camera facing at me. And so there it was again. And I looked at this thing and I thought, what the hell is that? So I put down my groceries and I started walking over to the car to see, what the hell is this, right? And the car just takes off. I try to get the license plate number. It was too fast for me to get a license plate number. But the license plate looked like the Rhode Island license plate, which was a white background with black lettering, but that's also the federal license plate, right? So I didn't know which it was. So I said, I'm gonna follow them. I go back to my car. I'm gonna pull out and follow the car. I just wanna know what that is. I'm a little weirded out by this. And before I can do that, another car comes up and pulls into the driveway and blocks me. And it's an old model again, a station wagon, the kind with the wood trim, you know? The old fashioned wood trim, old fashioned station wagons. So we're talking like a 1960s era station wagon. And two women come out of the car, one from the driver's side, one from the passenger side. Looking like, I always, in my head, it's always like Manson family members, you know? They're sort of very sweet, sort of very pale, you know, face kind of light hair, wearing old like cloth coats, you know, looking like old fashioned people. Like they might have been from a cult somewhere, you know? And they came out very sweetly and looked at me as I'm desperate to get out of my driveway, saying, can you tell us where the De Vilbus family lives? De Vilbus. And I said, no, I'm sorry, I don't know. Okay, thank you. And they got into their car and pulled out and drove away. And like an idiot, I didn't realize this is part of the team, right, they're keeping me from following the other car. I just want to follow the first car. And so I'm like flummox, I don't know what the hell that was all about. So I sort of give up and I say, all right, except she asked me about the De Vilbus family. And that rang a bell. So I started looking in phone books and everything else. We didn't have internet, ladies and gentlemen at the time. So I'm looking to find out where the De Vilbus family is. There is no De Vilbus in Rhode Island. But there was a De Vilbus that was referred to me by a guy that I used to work with in Rhode Island or yes, in Rhode Island, who had previously worked at Huntsville, right? So he worked for NASA. He had met Vernar von Braun personally, but he was just some guy who was an engineer. Now he was, you know, in his 60s, I suppose at the time that I know him at the time. And he had recommended me, you should look at this company called De Vilbus. They're in Ohio and they make machines that you can sell this equipment that I was involved with, you can sell them to them maybe. He told me that like months and months earlier. So I looked them up and there's De Vilbus and it's there. Yeah, that's the same name, the same company and everything else had nothing whatsoever to do with Rhode Island. Or these two chicks in the station wagon, I could not put this together, right? Except they plucked maybe the name De Vilbus out of my head and plucked the one that was connected to Huntsville and Vernar von Braun, right? I don't know, I was like, what the hell was this about? It was just the mysterious men in black episode because they were driving late, I mean, early model cars. It was an old model Cadillac black as usual, right? For a men in black thing. And then these women in this old model, station wagon with the cloth coats and the, who gets out of their car to ask directions? Yeah, well, I mean, another option other than men in black is like NHI. NHI. You have like the kind of wispy thin hair and the pale skin, that is kind of a, something you hear as far as descriptions of alien interactions, quote unquote alien, whatever these beings are. So maybe it was like a genuine anomalous. Well, there was anomalous to the point where I met one of them again. Okay. And that was in Singapore. What? On the other side of the world. So same, well, this is what happens. I'm in the airport, Changi Airport, very famous. I'm in the airport, I was on a business trip. I think I was probably going back to Kuala Lumpur. So I was gonna catch another flight. I'm dragging my suitcase and then someone taps me on the shoulder. And that's not done in Singapore, you know what I mean? It's like, of course there's tourists there, but people do not touch you feelie in that part of the world. So I get tapped on the shoulder and I turn around to see who that is. And it's one of the women from the car, the one who was the driver, right? And she looks at me and she waves and keeps on going. I just stare at her and I shake myself, you know, and I start following her like dragging my suitcase, but she's gone. She's just gone in the crowd, just disappeared. But she tapped me on the shoulder and waved, what? That is, I'm getting the chills. That is such a weird story. Yeah, that threw me. It brought back the whole episode that I had more or less forgotten about. It brought it all back. If that hadn't happened, I might have forgotten about the first one, right? But this brought it all back and said, you know, we're here. Woof, that is creepy. And if there was any doubt that the first one was anomalous, I mean, that's laid to rest. Like that is so strange. Weird. So you're asking me about NHI and stuff. I don't know how to answer that question. What was that? Have you mulled over the meaning of it and has anything else come up since? No, I've gotten stuff since then, but it hasn't been that specific, that direct. I mean, and they happen years apart, right? It doesn't happen like the whole year I'm getting all this stuff going on now. So years later than I'm in, I'm at home, I'm in Florida now. And two o'clock in the morning, something like that, place is very quiet. And then suddenly I hear this really loud electrical buzzing sound, very loud. And I'm thinking, what the hell did that? Did I short something out? I don't have anything that, you know, a couple of TVs in my computer and that's about it. So I'm looking around to see what that could be and I can't find it. And then right then as I'm looking, I get the knocks, right? Knock, knock, knock, and then knock, knock, knock, then knock, knock, knock. Really loud knocks. And it's from inside the house, right? It's nothing from outside. It's two o'clock in the morning. There's nobody knocking on my door. So that happened. So, you know, then I think, okay, I'll make note of this. And I emailed Whitley Streeper. I said, if anybody knows how to make sense of something like this, it'll be Whitley. And Whitley said, don't worry about it. It's just the visitor saying, hello, just, you know, saying just passing through, you know, that's all it is, don't worry about it. So then years after that, still in Florida, I'm driving home, it's in December, shortly before COVID happened. I think that the December before it all started. And I'm seeing what I think is a police helicopter, you know, very close to the house. So I stopped the car. It's in a complex of buildings. I stopped the car and I think, that's really strange. It's a helicopter, it's really close. It's got a search light, but I don't see what it's looking at. There's no light on the ground, right? I'm looking at this thing and I stopped the car and I'm expecting to hear really loud rotor blades. I hear nothing. So I opened the car door and I stand up and look at it. I'm looking at a triangle with the lights. And it's just sitting there and it's totally quiet, not a sound, not a motion, nothing, just the lights. I'm looking at it, but my mind is going through all the alternatives, right? This isn't a helicopter. Is this a plane? I'm not getting to the obvious end result but this is not supposed to be here, right? I'm trying to think of a logical explanation for this thing. And as I'm thinking of that explanation and staring at it, it disappears and it reappears down a few feet down this way and then it takes off. No acceleration, it didn't move. It just was here and then it was over there, no sound and then gone. And I said, holy shit, I just saw a UFO for the first time in my life. And I just published books about it, right? And written about it, never saw one. But there it was for the first time. That's remarkable. I emailed that to Tom and he said, damn it, I wish it had happened to me. Yeah, well, at some point I'd love to have Tom on to discuss, I think he's had some interesting experiences as well, but so what is the Necronomicon and why is the strategic air command interested in the Necronomicon? See, we're back to Fight Club now again, you know what I'm saying? What is it? Good question. I was involved with that thing since 1975, I guess it was. But that's another long story. How much time do you have? I have an infinite amount of time. I do, I have until your flight. Oh, okay, time enough for this story. Necronomicon, I did a presentation on this couple of weeks ago. I think Lincoln saw it. Yes, he did. Shout out to Lincoln. Shout out to Lincoln. American Alchemy researcher, friend, and kind of informal understudy of Peter Lavenda. That sounds sad. That sounds dangerous. The Sorcerer's Apprentice. There you go. So yeah, that was an interesting thing because there's a long story involved as all of my stories are long. When you're 75, all your stories are long. So this one goes back to 75. It goes back to the church. It's connected to the Orthodox church, the one that we started, my friend and I. See, we started the church. And then in late 69, I guess it was, I got tired of the whole thing because it was just too weird for me. There was too much strange stuff going on. There was a CIA component to it, which shouldn't have been because domestic operations and all that stuff. I don't know if they were operating domestically, but I kept running into these guys. Wait, tell me about that. What happened? Well, we had, as an example, I made some noise about this on Substack, I think it was a year or two ago, and the wrestling community got really freaked out. The worldwide wrestling people, they totally freaked out on me on this one. They say, who the hell is this guy? They shouldn't be doing this. It's, believe me, it all connects up. We formed this church. And during the time we had this church, we're going around as church people, going to do church meetings and that sort of thing. So we made a friend, a guy called Andre Panaccio. Andre Panaccio was a priest in the liberal Catholic church, which was an offshoot of the Theosophical Society. But he was a guy who knew a lot of people in show business for some reason. He was really connected to show business. And he knew all of the show business types, and he knew churches and synagogues and people that had actors do things and stuff. So he was plugged into all of this. Andre Panaccio achieved some fame briefly in the movie The Godfather, the first one. If you remember the famous baptism scene, some guy in red robes presiding over the baptism, he says nothing. He's a big guy wearing a sort of a yarmulke and red robes and white surplus, I guess. And he's there throughout the baptism ceremony. He says nothing. That's Andre Panaccio. That's how plugged in he was. He got himself a walk on in The Godfather, right? So this guy could do that. So now he's inviting us to this meeting at some place called the Brotherhood Synagogue. And that's in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. And it was a synagogue plus Presbyterian church. It was a common, they shared the space, one with the other, very famous place at the time in the village. So we had a meeting there with the rabbi in charge of the synagogue operation. And ourselves, the two of us, Andre Panaccio as the third, and the fourth guy was a famous heavyweight champion. He had dropped out of sight for a long time. He was a mixed, like he was Italian, but he had Argentine roots or something, very well-known guy, but he kind of dropped out of the scene for a while. He's there at this meeting. Now, I didn't know anything about boxing. I'm still only like 18 years old, I suppose, right? Again, no internet boys and girls. So I know nothing about this, right? I just knew this was a huge person. He was huge. And when he shook your hand, it was like your hand disappeared. He's talking to us about running operations for the CIA in Lebanon. He's just bluntly talking about it. He figures he's among friends. It's a synagogue, right? So he's saying, don't worry about what Congress does, doesn't do, it doesn't have any effect on our support. He says, I've been flying Phantom Jets into Lebanon for onward flights into Israel, directly into Israel. I forget how he worded it. He says, they box them up in crates. They ship them to Luxembourg, he mentioned for some reason. And we take them out of the crates in Luxembourg and we have pilots fly them down to Israel. They never show up on the manifest as our shipments to Israel. You've got the Phantom Jets, no problem. He says, I've had a few guys killed from under me in Lebanon as well. He says, but we're on top of things there. You guys don't need to worry about anything. I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, should I be listening to this? Should I be in the room with this discussion? I don't know what the hell is going on with this, right? I come back and I just make a note of this. And then a couple of years later, just maybe, I don't know, three or four years later, I suppose. There's this phone number you could call in New York City to find out the contact information for any celebrity. It didn't last very long, but it was there. And you could just dial them up and ask them. So I dialed up, you could ask for anybody, any famous actor or actress, they would give you some form of contact information. So I called up and asked for this guy. I was put on hold. And then like a minute or two later, they got back on, says, no, sorry, we have nothing on him. And they would just hang up like that. Nothing happened. And again, he died a couple of years after that. There was a funeral, there was a big newspaper story on him. No mention, of course, of being involved in American intelligence of any kind in any capacity. That's not there. So then about two years ago, I write an article, I have a sub-stack, which I haven't done anything within about a year, but I have a sub-stack. And I wrote an article about this particular event. And I drew connections because this guy also acted as an actor briefly in Brook Shield's very first movie, the one filmed in Patterson, New Jersey. And it was a horror movie, sort of a supernatural horror movie, and this guy shows up as the undertaker. So he has this little bit part in this thing. And then I wrote this whole story about Brook Shield's, this first movie, Patterson, one of the people involved in the film was married to the guy who plays the priest in The Exorcist. So there's all these weird satanic kind of undercurrents and connections, and it was like a satanic sort of serial killer movie with ritual overtones that took place in a Catholic church during Holy Communion and everything. So it was all this, you know, spooky stuff all layered in there. And so I just mentioned this, and then the wrestling people, somebody found it, and they went nuts. They said, how the hell, we didn't know what happened to this guy. Now this guy knows, how does this guy know he's a nobody? It's, and somebody said, well, we shouldn't say he's a nobody, he's a nobody in our world, but maybe, you know, in some other world, he's somebody. So there was this big discussion over this, like, this is what happened to him. This was part of what goes on and part of what happened as us being involved in intelligent stuff, not wanting to be involved in intelligent stuff with the churches at the time, right? So this happened, and that same church then went on. I broke up with them after this. I didn't wanna be associated with them. I didn't know what was going on, because they kept having these parties where there were, you know, TV types were there, or Broadway types were there. Not the stuff you're hearing about these days of the Hollywood, you know, satanic stuff that's always, you know, on the internet for some reason, was nothing like that, but it was just people attending these parties, but they were making connections. These were people disconnecting with each other, and they might be in business, they might be in government, they might be in Hollywood, these connections are made. So that was fine, that's what I knew, you know, and I was uncomfortable with my position and all of this. I wouldn't feel that secure. So I left, right? As soon as I left the church, I got a notice from Selective Service that I was being drafted. So I made a phone call, and after I made the phone call, they dropped that, and they said, no, you're okay. I just kind of threatened to talk about what I know. And they said, no, forget it, you're still good. Oh, wow. So then a little bit after that, what happens is I find out that the church that I had left, I get a phone call from them, from my partner, from my friend, and he comes in and says, listen, I need you, if you could just come back for a short time, something weird is going on here, and I think you're the person to look into it. I said, thanks. And it turns out he had these monks working for him, monks, people that I didn't know, people that had come to him from some other church, they always do, they cross-fertilize that way. And they specialize in rare books, and he thinks they're stealing them, because they give him all these great books, and he was still interested in it, called things as well. So he got these beautiful, called volumes from like the 16th century, 17th century, priceless looking things, right? I'm staring at this stuff, he's got a shelf full. And he says, these guys are acquiring them. He says, but I have doubts about these guys. I don't know if they're legitimately getting these or not. I'm afraid that he's gonna expose me to some problems, because so could you go and spy on them? They've never seen you, they don't know what you look like, never heard of you, just go there, and say like you're in the book business, and you wanna see what's up. So I did that, right? So I said, yeah, sounds good. So I went to visit them at their location, which was, they had a chapel, and it was located above a strip club in Jamaica, Queens. And upstairs they had a sort of makeshift chapel, like a little altar in the front, because they were posing as priests, as monks. And, but in the back room, they had all these machinery for taking care of the rare books. What they would do is they would steam out any library impressions. And if there was ink involved, they had ink eradication equipment that wouldn't leave any marks on the books. And then they would tear out the maps and sell them separately sometimes. They would get more money for the map than they would for the book. And this to me was a Nath. I'm a book lover from day one, so you don't do this to books, right? You don't strip, I don't write in my books even, right? So these guys are just ripping off books left and right. So I realized that's what's going on. And after one or two visits with them and everything else, getting acquainted with them, I went back to my friend and said, this is what's happening. So then he freaked out that this was gonna be a big problem for him. So he had all of these priceless books in his possession, and he destroyed them. He burned them. Whoa. So that he wouldn't get caught. But in the process, I snagged one or two things that I thought should be saved from the fire that I would take responsibility for. I don't know where he got them, if he got them from these monks, he got them from somebody else. But a box of a manuscript, right? Which looked cool to me. And I said, this looks pretty cool. I'm gonna keep this and see what I can do with it. And so then I brought it to a friend of mine who ran in a cult bookstore in Brooklyn Heights. The Warlock shop, a guy called Herman Slater. And I bring the box over to him and he says, oh, this looks great. You know, what is it? And I show him the page on the front. It's like a lot of writing, but there's a heavy writing in Greek letters in the front. And in my basic rusty Greek, which I only know the Greek alphabet because I studied the Russian, the Cyrillic alphabet, I said, this looks like it says necronomicon and Herman Slater has a heart attack on the spot. He says, no, no, no, no, no, you can't be serious. And I said, I don't know, I'm serious about what? I never read occult fiction. You know, so Lovecraft meant nothing to me. You know, it's a word that was in the background somewhere, but I never read any short stories by Lovecraft. It was not my thing. You know, I gravitated more towards nonfiction for magic and occult stuff. I wanted the nonfiction or the closest I came or the Dennis Wheatley novels, three novels that he wrote on occultism because they talked about proline, they talked about flame-mind stuff like that from like another perspective. So I thought that was cool and I just, I read those. But that was it, you know? So now he said, no, you have to translate this. You have to see what this is, because this looks cool. This, you know, find somebody and do it. So that started this whole odyssey of figuring out what this book is. You know, is it something that Lovecraft talked about? Is it just a name, you know, it has no relationship at all to Lovecraft? I had to learn about Lovecraft. I knew nothing about it. So I had to learn about it. And I talked to my friend at the church guy, he was burning all the books and he didn't have a clue. He didn't want to know at this point because now these guys are getting arrested. And they were arrested for committing the largest rare book theft in America's history. Turns out they had stolen hundreds of not thousands of books and sold them all over the place, coast to coast. And in Canada and Mexico as well, the Mounties were brought in as part of the investigation. So this was a major operation that they were running, where they, what they did with the money, I don't know, but they did get sent to prison. They served time for it in federal facilities. So, you know, my friend was wise to stay or get as far away from it as possible. But still, I mean, he was the church they belonged to at the time they were officially part of his operation. So that was, it led to a lot of paranoia on my part, on his part, on the part of everybody involved in this thing. But eventually by 1975, October 12th, as it turned out, it was this serendipitous, all of the translation work had been done, had been compiled basically, that we knew what was in the book. And that was the date that we said, okay, we're finished. This is it, now what do we do with it? Right? So, Herman Slater held onto it for a while. The only copy of it, in the only translation, it was his. Okay, you do something with this, right? So then nearby leads another tale because then a guy called Larry Barnes walks into our lives. And Larry Barnes was one of the most incredible people I've met in my life, a very strange guy, but strange in a nice way. He walks into the store and he looks at all the weird stuff that's hanging. There's skulls and there's daggers and there's all these books and there's herbs. There's whole bunches of herbs and roots and stuff. And he goes over to Herman Slater and he says, you wouldn't happen to have a copy of the Necronomicon in here, would you? And Herman Slater very victoriously pulls it from underneath the counter, right? He says, here it is. And so Larry Barnes went absolutely nuts because he was a total cartoon freak and a Lovecraft freak and everything. From the art side, not from the occult side, just from the vibe side. So he was just totally into this like big time. So he then wanted to publish the book, actually. Believe it or not, nobody wanted to publish it. Nobody was that interested at the time. But Larry Barnes came up with it and says, oh my God, we can do something with this. So he got me involved. He got a number of people involved, people who have been belonged to various occult societies and stuff who had the connections to do some of the type setting. In those days, there were no computers per se. So making a book was much more laborious than it is now. You had a set type and you had to redraw a lot of the art, you couldn't just copy it. It had to be done a certain way. So it was a lot of fussy stuff that was involved. So it took a while. So finally by 1977, by December of 77, there was a completed actual book for sale. But to get to your initial question, which has been like a half an hour ago, what does it have to do with this strategic air command? What happened was- Well, what, and what's in the Necronomicon? Oh, okay. Well, if you're a Lovecraft person, you have some ideas as to what must be in it. It's kind of like that. It's a grimoire. It's a book that pretends to be a pre-Islamic, or if not anti-Islamic, it's not anti-Islamic because there's nothing anti-Islamic in it. But I would say pre-Islamic, a book of casting spells of conjuring spirits. And there's even a kind of abbreviated version of the creation epic, the Sumerian creation epic in it. There's Sumerian words in it, Sumerian deities, and then there's some Babylonian and Acadian. It's kind of mixed. It seems to be a book of, that a sorcerer might have used in the Middle East, probably Iraq, before the advent of Islam, or before Islam really took over and basically destroyed a lot of that material. So you found the only copy of it, essentially. Essentially, yeah. Wow. Handwritten, right? That's crazy. Yeah. That's what it is. And that's- But we didn't know what it was. What's the Lovecraft writes about it? Well, Lovecraft writes that it's a dangerous book that even possessing it means you're summoning demons and spirits and stuff, and it's a gateway, a portal to other dimensions. And you found it. And what's- I don't know if it's it. I mean, Lovecraft scholars will say, no, that's not it. It's not Lovecraftian enough. I mean, if it was gonna be a hoax, do a better hoax, is there a response, right? But it might be it. It might be, it's a book with the same name. Okay. Well, does it, if you do like an unbiased, history, a graphic analysis on it, does it sort of comport with materials at that time, written materials or? I think the more we know now, the closer it becomes to a real thing. When it first came out, people rose a lot of objections to it. And I think on pretty standard sound grounds, phonetic grounds, for instance, things like that, where it couldn't have been this, it couldn't not have been that. We make the point in the book that Lovecraft's famous arch weird connector between humans and the elder gods, or the ancient ones, is Cthulhu. And it's spelled C-T-H-U-L-H-U, right? No one knows how it's really pronounced. It's like supposed to be a garbling in the throat sound. Like it's a non-human alphabet, right? A non-human name. But we're looking at it and came up with the idea, we talked to a scholar of Sumerianology, you have to have somebody know Sumerian. And he said, Cthulhu, I mean, that's a Sumerian form. It means a person from the underworld. Cthulhu is the underworld. And Lu means person, it means a human being or a man. So it's the man from the underworld. This Cthulhu that they're talking about in the book is the man from the underworld. And then, so that sent us off another wild goose chase. It's like, Cthulhu is the underworld. And we found out there is a place. I mean, the Sumerianologists would know. It was called Kutu, or Kutu in Sumerian or Babylonian. And it was a place that was supposed to be the entrance to the underworld. It exists today, today in Iraq. It's south of Baghdad, southeast of Baghdad. And it's the place where Abraham is said to be buried. Teh-l-Ibrahim is there. And if you look at pictures of it now, it's just a big empty wasteland. Nothing is built there, but that's supposed to be the entrance to the underworld. So fascinating. So things started to make sense later, right? And they found an Arabic rendering in the Quran of a being called al-Khadul, which is supposed to be a kind of quality of anti-something. It's like an adversary name, right? So there's like things started to make sense that didn't make sense back in 1975, but with the passage of time and sober looking back at it, things kind of start connecting more than they used to. But from an unbiased perspective, I can't be unbiased, I was involved with it since like the beginning, but from my unbiased perspective, it's a book with the same name, and it's quite possible that somebody knew about it. Lovecraft heard the name, you know, and crafted his idea of what the Necronomicon should be based on that, that he just simply heard the name and that the name was around. Cause there isn't a lot in there that screams Lovecraft, but there are pieces that do, you know? So, and real quick, before we get into the government's interest in this topic, which, you know, is mind blowing that the government strategic air command might be interested in a book about the dead references ancient, you know, Sumerian myth and stuff. I mean, that's fascinating, but truly your life does resemble Johnny Depp's character in the ninth gate, this book collectors on this mission to find these like three like devil books or whatever. And so I didn't realize this before doing this interview until Lincoln actually brought it up, but you are the inspiration for Johnny Depp's character in the ninth, in Roman Polanski's famous movie, the ninth gate, which is also, I think, Jacques Valais favorite movie. I didn't know that. Oh yeah. Oh boy, okay. I'm in deep trouble now. Now Jacques is gonna call me up and say it. It was you. No, okay. This is the thing, we have to pull back a little bit. The story is not based on me at all. The story was a rich, was a Spanish novel, very well-known Spanish novel. So the story has nothing to do with me. The character of Johnny Depp, however, from what I've been told by the people who worked on the Polanski film when they were in New York. See, Polanski can't come to the States for reasons we think we all know. He was accused of sexual abuse of a minor. So he is now in France virtually forever. So he doesn't come to the United States. He's filmed, he's made movies in the United States, but he hasn't come himself. So he has scouts that do the B-roll stuff and they look for the location shots and stuff like that. And some of the movie takes place in New York, so there are people in New York working for Polanski. And they came across this story. They came across the story of myself and the book and all of this. And they got the physical description down, right? So I was even thinner then than I am now. I was like maybe 125. I always wore suits. That's a whole other story, but I always wore suits and tie constantly. I wore a black sort of trench coat, raincoat kind of thing. I had a beard, obviously. I always had a shoulder bag, glasses, the whole nine yards. I mean, it's the Johnny Depp character, dark clothing, the whole thing. And the book business guy, I was always in and out of bookstores in that outfit. And I was involved with Weiser's bookstore, which in New York City was the famous occult bookstore with the pedigree going back a long time. And you came upon maybe the occult book, which is the necromanic to the necronomic God, which is like this like the most forbidden book that you're not supposed to possess, which ends up kind of being true for Johnny Depp and his character as well, where you're really not supposed to possess all three books. You see, but they had the story already. So I fit, well, unbeknownst to me because I hadn't read the novel at that time, right? But I fit the whole thing. It was as though it was scripted. So the people around Depp were saying, this actually happened. This story actually happened to this guy, you know? And we have all this information about him and we talked to people who knew him and stuff. And so that kind of got into the film. From what I understand, I had forgotten all about this, to tell you the truth, until a few months ago, I was talking to a guy who makes a videographer actually, I think he's based in Florida as well. And he came down to meet me just a couple of months ago. He says, do you remember that thing about Johnny Depp and the ninth gate? And I said, oh my God, I've forgotten all about that. And he told me the story again. So it's been around. The story has been around. I don't know who's promulgated it, but it's been around. So yeah, that's kind of weird. But imagine me, but like 40 years ago, that's pretty much how I looked. So wild. So if I'm strategic air command, why do I care at all? Well, this is how that happened. Yeah. We're gonna announce the book now. We're, you know, Larry Barnes is financing the publication of this book. And it's costing some money because he wants to bound in leather. He wants silver stamping. He wants really good quality paper. He wants silk ribbon. The whole nine yards he wants with this thing. He's calling all the shots he's paying for this. But it's not really his money, it's his father's money. They're part of the largest lithography press on the East Coast. His father owns it. So they're wealthy. They live, I think, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the bridge. And they have all this money. But his father doesn't follow his son's enthusiasm as much. And he wants to get his money back as quickly as possible to finance this thing. So they come up with this scheme, which I didn't know existed. It's called barter space. And in magazines at that time, these big glossy magazines like Omni, Psychology Today, you could run ads in those magazines without actually paying them upfront the cost of the page. You could pay them in merchandise. So what we were going to do, what we did, is we had barter space in the top magazines that were around at the time, including Omni, including Psychology Today. These were very important magazines. Omni was big time. I think high times even, we were in that, which was the Weed Connoisseur's magazine of choice. We were in a lot of stuff, very expensive space. We had full page ads in those magazines that we did by giving them, we're selling this book for, I forget how much they were selling it for, the Leatherbound edition was limited edition, 666 copies. And I think it went for $150 or something. I forget how much it was. It was very expensive. And so we would give like 10 copies or something to Omni or Psychology Today or High Times, whatever it was. And that was the initial payment. They would take the orders. So the ads came to them, they would take the orders. And once they got the orders, we would fulfill them to that point, to that level. And then anything else was gravy, it was our money. So that's how we paid for the book. We paid for it before it was published. It was completely paid for before it was published. All those ads brought us the orders. But it also meant it brought us a lot of attention. It wasn't a little ad in the back of Fate Magazine. These were full page ads in Omni. Omni was being read by the Pentagon. Really? Omni had really great articles in there about technology. Also a great design. Great design. Super cool. Yeah. So there are people at the Pentagon, there are people in the intelligence and the military industrial complex who are aware of Omni very much so. And they read the articles, they knew what was being discussed because they discussed UFOs, they discussed space technology, artificial intelligence. It was all there in Omni in the 1970s. So yeah, they were doing that. And eventually it got to the attention of people in the military. So we would get letters, you know? And we would get letters from Fort This or Fort That saying you guys doing a great job, keep it up. What? You're in the North? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What? Marine bases, army bases. And then the SAC, the Streets of Gare Command, SAC came in with a letter. So just a nice letter saying, oh, congratulations on your new publication. We didn't ask for them for a blurb. And it's like the organization itself where it's a general or? It's on their stationery. And I forget, Larry Barnes kept all of that. So I forget, you know, who signed it actually. I would love to know now because that would say something. Why do you think they were interested at all in the Necronomicon? It's evidence that they were interested in this material from the get-go. Yeah. Right? They were interested since the beginning. But what's the connection? How is that? Well, operation often, all the psychic research they were doing, the occult research CIA was doing. What operation often was? Operation often among other things. There's different various descriptions of it that you'll find online. They mostly emphasize the drugs and LSD research of operation often. But some of the side operations involved studying witchcraft, studying occultism, studying magic, right? Sybil Leek was involved. No one knows anymore who Sybil Leek was, but she was a very famous English witch, a stout lady, very famous for all of her jewels and stuff. She was on American teleptok TV back in the 60s and 70s, a great deal. She published a lot of books on occultism, on magic, on witchcraft. She was very plugged in though with the whole Wiccan community, with Raymond Buckland and the gardenarians. And if you know about Wicca and witchcraft, she was like one of the goats, right? She was there from the beginning, the OG. So she was like, Sybil Leek put her name on it, on witchcraft and made it look kind of accessible because she was like the sweet lady type within a cervix wit, by the way. So she was openly involved with operation often, as we find out later. She was involved with a lot of these things. They wanted to test her. They wanted to see who she knew. They wanted to understand about magic. How does that work? Because they understood the quote unquote, brainwashing that had been going on in Korea during the Korean War by the Chinese and the Russians on American troops who then come out and say they love the Soviet Union or they love communism. They understood this to be a kind of consciousness manipulation and they said, wow, if we could only do that, right? That they're doing to our troops, we could do that to theirs. Or if we could do that to people in general, right? What can we do? How can we manage? How can we manipulate people, manipulate consciousness? And so operation often was just a side shoot of that. It was a side show, basically. The major show was the drugs and the hypnosis that was full of war going on. Massive psychological conditioning undergone in Montreal, Canada, for instance, at an institute there that was funded by CIA for a long time. The guy who ran that was the guy who, to go back again to our other subject, is the guy who had basically debriefed and analyzed a Hermann Hess, and Hermann Hess, not the author, Rudolph Hess, the Nazi leader who was second in command to Hitler at the time. He flew to Great Britain to try to make a peace deal or something between England and Nazi Germany. He was promptly arrested and thrown in jail. But the British High Command had some doubts as to whether or not this was really Hermann Hess or was it double. So they brought in the psychiatrist who named now escapes me, but it's in my books from this institute in Montreal to go and investigate this guy, just talk to him. You and Cameron maybe, or no? Cameron, yes, you and Cameron. That's it, thank you, yes, that's who it was. Dr. Ewan Cameron, who was head of the World Psychiatric Institute for a while. This is not like some guy they found in a back alley somewhere, this was a major guy in the field. They sent him to prison. At that time, he was still in prison in England to look at this guy and talk to him and figure out, is this really Hermann Hess or is it a double? And I think he came away with the idea that I'm not too sure, do you know? So he wasn't really 100% definitive on that. Rudolph Hess, by the way, said. Rudolph, not Hermann, yes, Rudolph, sure. That's another story, Hermann. Great author. Great author, Rudolph Hess, not so much. So yeah, but Rudolph Hess, no, it's important to understand. When we talk about psychic research in the Nazi Germany, this guy was total on board with that. He believed he was in telepathic communication with his wife while he was in prison. They ran telepathy experiments. This guy believed in astrology 100%, which is why he timed his flight for that specific day and time. Hess was totally on board with occultism and he was number two in Germany. He was Hitler's right hand man. When Hitler was arrested, Hitler then ordered all occultists, all astrologers in Germany to be arrested, thrown in the camps, right? Automatically, it's illegal. Freemasonry was illegal under Nazi Germany, right? So, you know, there goes wrong. Because it didn't work in the context of Rudolph Hess. Well, because Rudolph Hess did something he wasn't supposed to do. Got it. He disobeyed Hitler. And so Hitler kind of associated him with all this occult stuff. And so that was his kind of retaliation. Okay, I don't believe that Hitler was really an occultist. I make that point in Unholy Alliance. I try to make it really firmly. I don't think Hitler was an occultist per se. At all. I don't see Hitler in a robe, you know, casting spells. No, never gonna happen. But when he was poor, when he was destitute in Vienna, trying to get into art school and selling postcards on the streets of Vienna, he became enthralled with a bunch of occult magazines that he came across. And these occult magazines were run by a guy called Lanz von Liebenfels, who was the head of something called the Order of the New Templars. And this was like the whole Aryan theory again, writ large, but given this weird Templar-Vagnarian thing, and Hitler with nothing, if not a Wagnerian, this guy loved his Wagner. So this Wagnerian idea of the Templars of, you know, the ring cycle and all the rest of it kind of mixed in with, you know, anti-Semitism and all the rest of it, it was right up Hitler's alley. So he read all this stuff. He was fascinated by it and took a lot of time with it. It's said that he actually visited Lanz von Liebenfels in his office. He was so taken by it. That's the story that Liebenfels himself tells. But he had this, you know, new Templar thing, where we're gonna resurrect the Knights Templar, and it was gonna be this Christian order that was going to wipe out all the mongrel races, you know, from Europe and all the other religions. It would be the secret society at first, but then it would rule Germany. So Hitler, as a young impoverished person, like a lot of young impoverished people sort of fell in with this, right? It was a cult kind of thing. It promised all sorts of stuff. It said, your problems are not your fault. The other people that are responsible. And he was a Wagner enthusiast, and all of us kind of went together in his own mind. I don't believe that Hitler saw himself as an occultist at all. I think he thought it was fuzzy thinking. It was not militarily applicable anyway. He couldn't use it to kill people. So Himmler tried to disavow him of that, saying, we do this because he gets people on our side. They love the fire, the torch lit ceremonies, you know? They love all this stuff. They love the runes, the Nazi runes, the SS runes. And the death said, the black uniforms make everybody crazy with fear. And this is how you manipulate people. This is a way to do it. And Hitler said, yeah, you might be right. But then when his does and goes and does, this is like, oh, wait a minute, right? So you have all this Nazi interest in the occult. You later have American programs like MK Often that seem to dabble in witchcraft and sort of these strange things. And, but then the strategic air command, I think of as this kind of hyper-functional organization. So you think these are maybe just rogue vigilante researchers that are, happen to be a part of strategic air command that are into this stuff? Or do you think they are institutionally interested in the concepts in the Necronomicon? No, no, I think they have a lot more on their plate than the Necronomicon. Okay, yeah, that's what I always think. But that doesn't mean that everybody is on board, right? So when you have somebody at SAC who's like, you know, this is like, but we're studying, we're studying consciousness manipulation. We're studying some of this stuff. Because why? What's one of the things that happens with guys they send out into space or into high altitude flight, right? How do they train them? They train them in sensory deprivation tanks. And what do they report when they're in sensitive tanks? Weird shit. Weird shit. They hallucinate all kinds of stuff. Yeah. That's the open door. That's the back door at SAC for investigating paranormal phenomena and occultism and all this other kind of stuff. That's their back door. Is this a portal into the human mind? Does this enable us to go in there? Because something's happening to these guys. Yeah, well, John Lilly who created the isolation tank claimed to be in contact with two basically forms of non-human intelligence. ECHO, the like Earth Control Coordination Office. And SSI, I think, Solid State Intelligence. And the Solid State Intelligence, I think while he was on like ketamine, told him like, I need more resources to like manifest. I need to put myself into existence. And I think he even said silicon, which makes me think like the modern AI race with compute, because all these chips are on the invidia chips are all silicon. So interesting. Well, that's wild. You know, something that I have to credit to Lincoln that he always brings up is the Space Delta 7 patch. This is now connecting to your amazing book, Stairway to Heaven, which I love because it creates, you know, if you're looking for this Joseph Campbell style kind of underpinning architecture behind all the world's religions, you have to look to some of these more esoteric practices. And you have in Judaism, the Merkava, which is, you know, the idea of Ezekiel going up on the chariot. But you have uncovered all this research around seven levels being this recurring theme across Chinese shanking, Taoism, Islam, or Rosicrucianism, like all these different, I mean, the ziggurats and Hekoload and Sumeria, Egypt, and then obviously Judaism. And it's really remarkable. It's almost like there's some underlying kind of objective fabric that then inspires all these other stories. But the stories are more incidental to some underlying architecture that involves literally ascending through, I guess, you know, what is it, Ursa Major, the Big Dipper? It's pretty remarkable. Well, and it goes back to the original point that we made with Sinister, with the secret machines. And that is there's this point that we became a Carcocult, right, it's possible that these seven stars, the system of seven layers, is that, is a manifestation of that, is that we haven't imprinted somehow that this is the way to go. I talk about as well, the idea of the double helix DNA, which we only discovered in 1960, right? Or in the 1950s, anyway, we announced it in 1960, this double helix, two strands of the DNA molecule. Double-stranded helixes don't exist in nature, except for the DNA molecule. But they don't exist in invisible nature, they're not part of our world. Single helix does, right? A serpent will go like that, or we'll have examples of it in nature. But not two of them. And yet you find it everywhere in ancient art, right? I found a diagram from ancient China, going back 600 years in China, where the mother and the father that created the world are depicted as two serpents with tails twined about each other, but with human heads, a human male and a human female, but their tails are serpents twined around each other. And they're the parents of humans, right? And they're holding, one is holding a compass and one is holding a square, it's like the Masonic symbols. It doesn't make sense for that to be in China at that time, right? But they're holding Masonic symbols, and that's like a whole other thing. I haven't even gone there, right? Isn't the Hippocratic symbol like the... Yeah, right, the symbol of the Mercury, right? The two serpents around each other, the symbol of healing, asclepias. See, I'm talking too long and I'm starting to stumble over my own words. Anyway, the God of medicine, yes, the twins serpents around a central staff. The Russian Orthodox Church, the staff for the bishop is exactly that, two serpents around a central staff. But we only saw it in real life in the DNA molecule. Does that mean that DNA has been communicating to us because it's in virtually every cell of our body? For, you know, as long as we've been around and it's giving us this message, it's like imprinting itself in our consciousness somehow. If so, then the seven steps, the seven layers, the seven stars to heaven, maybe part of that. So you have these stories of, you know, Ezekiel, Enoch, in some interpretation of the book of Acts, you could say Jesus was of this variety, where you go up to heaven, you walk with God, and then maybe you come back down at some point. Exactly. And do you think that these events actually happen? Do you think that a person can ascend to reach, you know, to walk with God, to see God's throne, to see the heavens and then come back down? Do you think that's possible? Again, the problem is our use of language and words and what do we mean by all this? Is the process real? Yes. People do it. It's real. It has happened. It doesn't happen that frequently because you build up the head of steam, maybe, if you are consistent in work on this level. It can happen that way. The Merkava mystics did it, right? They're living proof even today that this process is possible. I mean, every year during Yom Kippur is the time when certain groups of Jewish mystics then will then descend to the chariot. That's when they're supposed to do it. That's the time. And the goal is to liberate soul from body somehow or to liberate spirit from body? The problem then becomes the ideology. So this is the problem that I have. So I don't have a problem with Jewish mystics. What I'm saying is that Jewish mystics will interpret this as being valuable specifically to behold the throne of God and to come back down and to tell everybody they've seen it. That's it, end of story. Not to be, there's no apotheosis implied. There's no becoming of God. That would be absolute heresy in Judaism as it would be in Christianity, mostly Christianity. So that's considered a no-no, right? You're just there to see God and to have the experience and come back. It's kind of implied with Jesus. It's implied with Jesus. And Jesus actually kind of says it. And he also like, the miracles ramp up in the book of Acts. Yes. So, but like, I don't know. I think most Christians believe he was born the son of God, right? So he didn't like sort of transform post ascending to heaven. It depends which interpretation. So in your interpretation, you did transform through this ascent process. You're gonna get me in trouble. People are gonna dox me, okay. I can say this, I can say that at the time the Bible was put into stone, which is 300 years after Christ died. A lot of interpretations were looked at, selected and only what we have now is what was kept. That doesn't mean it's necessarily more true than the other versions that were out there of which Jesus became God-like because of his practices. Jesus had two different personalities. One was divine, one was human. All different kinds of so-called heresies were abroad at the time. We tried to figure out what was the prevailing one at the time of Jesus' life. And we don't actually know because nobody who wrote a gospel was around at the time. So, it's all here saying anyway. So we're trying to put together a story. And as I always tell people, we still don't know what was on the 18 and a half minute oval office tape gap during Watergate. We still don't know that that, how do we know what happened 2000 years ago? We're still trying to put that story together. Is there, there's the parable of the parties where you have four rabbis try to ascend to heaven and only one comes down intact. Is that somehow a really fitting polemic on trying this stuff out when you're not ready? Kabbalah, I believe you're supposed to be 35 and like married and very grounded before even starting to initiate yourself. 100% all of that. It's because they've seen the danger, right? These people know what they're talking about. They have seen the danger. Their points of view about religion, theology, incarnation, reincarnation, life after death may all be different, but the process is the same. That's what's so beautiful about this. The process is pretty much the same. It involves the same inner practices basically. And it's an interior process for the most part, right? It's not really so much an exterior one that can be used, it can help. What is the, is it more scientific than like trying to follow virtuous principles and meditate? Like what is, is there some sort of formula? Is there an infomercial DVD I can buy? There's a book actually. No, I'm not plugging one of mine, calm down. This is a book by Moise Adele. Very famous Kabbalah scholar, right? Probably the one who inherited the mantle of Gershom Sholam. Moise Adele, very famous, very important guy. Co-authored a book on Kabbalah from a scientific perspective, from a consciousness psychological perspective. Very grounded one, not kind of purely like a Jungian approach to it, which you can find in a lot of places. This is based on neuroscience. And I can't think of the title of the book off the top of my head. But if you look up Moise Adele, you'll find the book limited. It's about limited. You'll find the book, yeah, limited probably. You will find it. It's not like the major books that Adele has written, but you will find it listed. And it's a co-authored with a scientist, with a neuroscientist. And they go through it and they figure, what does this really mean in terms of neuroscience? So it is a grounded approach to Kabbalah from that perspective. It's fascinating. And I highly recommend it, if you're interested in that, in seeing if this can be part of science, if it can be part of a grounded approach to this material without taking on board all of the religious symbolisms and restrictions and everything else that's involved. But understanding what those restrictions mean, what is the effect of it? What should somebody have, what orientation should somebody have towards this? Because I think it's like staring at the sun a little bit, right? Like you can be really bad for you if you do too much of it. Like I think sometimes I think, just life has everything in it that you need and trying to bust out of some sort of simulation and look for some sort of forbidden esoteric knowledge is, it usually doesn't end well, right? So like, what's the right path? I agree completely with what you just said. I would recommend it for most people just being cool and getting through life as peacefully as you possibly can. The difficulty only comes when life itself has other plans. When life is starting to make you look, then it might be a good idea to look, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think some people need that impetus from outside before they do it. And that's probably a good thing. I think if you're just living a normal life and you're perfectly peaceful and happy with the way it is, why rock the boat? I feel that 100%. I wish I could have done that, right? From the beginning, but I got thrown into this like in the deep end. So I had to make my way somehow. And the idea is, like I say, to maintain a sense of humor about it. It's about all that keeps you even, because it can get weird. If not dark, it just gets weird. And the weirdness doesn't make sense to you. And if you focus too much on the weirdness, you find yourself going a little too weird. Yeah, yeah, well, I find that to be the case with UFO research. Like it's somehow, you often find, it's like, this feels like Dante's inferno. It's like, it was just weird vibes everywhere. Like you go to some of these conferences and it's like, you might as well, 100 years ago, you would have been in some sort of seance. Like some new thought, like weird, you know, and it's, people have bizarre self-conceptions and it's not often an expression of some honest, you know, intellectual understanding of a thing. It's like their own desire to be differentiated or there are a lot of messianic characters. You know, you would think that people covering the subject are like super altruistic, but like they can be like the sharkiest, you know, people in the world and like they're... I know from personal experience. Yeah, it's so weird. So... When you have, this is the problem that I think I mentioned the secret space conference that started all this for me. When you can't get a straight answer on something, it opens up the field to anybody who has an imaginary answer, right? Right. When you don't have a real answer, something you can agree on, something you can rely on, then any huckster can come on board and tell you anything and you can't disprove it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No one's out disproving it. I heard wild stuff during the contact in the desert stuff. And the stuff that I know is absolutely impossible, but it doesn't matter because the government, you know, we don't trust the government, right? The government's not telling us the truth. So it could be possible. It could be possible we're sending ships to Europa on a regular basis and we're trade, we have contracts or contracts with the aliens. That's the thing that kills me, right? Oh, Eisenhower or somebody signed a contract with the aliens back in the 1950s. There's a directive that it's in place. I'm thinking, are you fucking kidding me? In what language is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And who enforces that contract? Yeah. You know, I've been in business a long time before I became known for this stuff. I was doing contract negotiations in China. You know how difficult that is? Well, this is really refreshing and cool to hear because you came close again to like these very high ups in the government who seem to be as embedded in the UFO topic as anyone. And so I am really curious, like what is your, so you think the 54 Eisenhower treaty thing is ridiculous? You know, I don't- On its face. I'm with, I don't have any, you know, serious evidence. But you know, it's like I've spoken to like Richard Dolan, who's a really smart, cool, earnest guy, not one of the weird UFO researchers. He's great. He's kind of this legendary, you know, and he like, lends credence to the MJ12 documents, which talk about, you know, this. And there are certain things in the MJ12 documents that do somehow know about certain meetings and dullest diary entries that like no other source did that came out before these entries came out later. So- Well, don't let me forget them because you mentioned MJ12. Yeah. Two stories on that, short ones. One is Michael Aquino again. The reason I brought Aquino up in the first place and totally forgot about it was the fact that in our conversations, in our lengthy email back and forth, we were talking about kryptonims, right? So MK for MKUltra, right? So do that mean mind control? No, of course not. It was just alphabetically, that's where K showed up, you know? So that's what it was for. And then, you know, MJ, the MJ, you know, kryptonim. Oh, he says, oh yeah, MJ, we had that in, that was in space command. We used that for a non-terrestrial biologics, right? What? And I said, what? What are you talking about? I said, do you realize what you just said? He says, no, what? He says, haven't you heard about the MJ12 documents and all this stuff? He says, what do you mean UFO stuff? I said, I don't believe in any of that. He says, what we meant by that was anything that came down like a rocket ship re-entering our atmosphere, a meteor or an asteroid or something, if there was organic material on it. Ah. It was non-human biologicles. Ah, whoa. So like any sort of hydrocarbons on some weird meteor from, you know, Mars or something. But not like bodies. But it meant MJ meant non-human biologics. You see? And then your mind goes to like, Akino didn't know the real program because it somehow, like did he? What do you have had like, you know, like the highest levels of access? Like. I mean, I spoke to him. Cause your mind then goes to like, that's an awfully crazy coincidence and maybe MJ12 was. This is the problem that I have, right? And I talked to Stanton Friedman at the last time that he ascended, I think a contact in the desert. Legendary. Legendary. To a power researcher. Legendary researcher and promoter of the MJ12 documents, right? And I sat down with him just briefly. And I said, listen, man, I know all the controversy about it, but I've done a lot of research at the archives and a lot of research at the Library of Congress. Those documents to me look real. I mean, whoever went to the work involved to make them look real. As they've been criticized by different people. And then later on, not so much. I said, I've looked at them. My God, did they spend a lot of work and time and effort to do that? For what? Nobody made a dime off of it, right? It wasn't like they were doing it for money. So what the hell were they doing it for? If it is a hoax, by whom and for what? Right? What did they gain by it? It's now become a kind of meme. So you don't think it was a hoax? I see, again, I work on evidence. I'm a real evidence-based person, believe it or not. And for me, my evidence to me is it's a really good hoax if it is a hoax. I'm in two minds of it. Maybe it's not a hoax, right? But that's what- My other point is it could be a really good hoax. If it's a really good hoax, qui bono, who benefited? Why? What for? That's the story. Totally. But then if it's not a hoax, then all of a sudden the 1954, Eisenhower treaty with the aliens. Unless it's a hoax that mentions that to throw everybody off. Totally. That's the hoax, right? So do you feel like you came out of your interactions with some of these people? Cause like TTSA, which you were involved with, had a lot of really high up impressive government people. You had Jim Summivan, who's high up at the CIA, seems to be super knowledgeable about UFOs, even at his time at the CIA. And afterwards, you have Chris Mellon, who's deputy assistant secretary of defense intelligence under Clinton and Bush, been to area 51 many times. You have Hal Putoff, of course, who's an Institute of Advanced Study out here in Austin, who just seems to, like every time you run into a new scientific accomplishment in the UFO field, it's like he's already there. So you have all these guys who are a part of this thing. And you're a part of- I've met all of them. And you've met all of them. So yeah, you're a part of it as well. And so do you feel like you have a sense of what's going on after that experience? I had a meeting here in Austin. Okay. Couple of years ago, well, must be longer than that now. With Tom DeLong, Chris Mellon, Hal Putoff, Jacques Vallée, all in the same room. For me, it was a thrill because I had never met Hal or Jacques before. And I had written about them in various places, but never actually sat in the same room. And Chris Mellon, right? So I met for the first time. And we sat, we spent the entire day here with masses of documents and papers and stuff. And Tom was trying to get, we had a conference room arranged and all this. We're trying to figure out what the hell was going on with the UFO thing. And we have all these guys here together to brainstorm this, right? Try brainstorming this with three guys who have NDAs and security clearances up the ass. And they cannot tell you about anything, right? So now you're in a room with them and you're trying to weedle out of them. We gotta like read their eyes or whatever. Yeah, exactly. You're trying to look at body language. Body language, yeah. What are we doing here, right? And so we're trying our best, but they're all very, and we would get close to something and we get some good information. I would write scribbling like mad. I have all those notes, right? Just scribbling on the notes of this thing. What are we talking about? What is this? Even some, just little bits of pieces of extraneous information might be valuable. So I write that down. What color paper was it? I write that down. So we're doing all of this and we're spending the whole day there. I think Valet may have mentioned it even in his latest book. It may be mentioned in passing. And we're trying to get to the bottom of this thing, but what was really important were the things they did not say, could not say, and refused to say. So we would ask a question about Skinwalker Ranch. That was the one that sticks out of my memory. We asked about something concerning Skinwalker Ranch and an appearance at Skinwalker Ranch and the equipment that was there picking up the stuff, right? I think John Alexander writes about these things peripherally and other people do. We asked about it. They all got silent. They suddenly all stopped talking. Chris, Hal, Jacques said nothing. And then Hal finally looked around and said, well, we need a skiff for this one. And that was all he had to say. Skinwalker. For Skinwalker. Why? And he wouldn't say, he knows that he was said. It was a TV show for God's sakes on the history channel. Yeah. But Skinwalker Ranch became this thing. We don't, this was Fight Club. And suddenly we don't talk about it, right? So that stunned me. I wrote, I copied, I said, oh my God, we can't talk about Skinwalker. Not about Skinwalker in general, but something very specific about Skinwalker, right? About the equipment they were using and what they were tracking and what data they had collected, I think was how the conversation started. And I think that's where the suddenly everybody went quiet. So there was something happening at Skinwalker. Any other notable omissions? Nothing, nothing particularly unnotable. We would try to ask blatant questions like how many captured spacecraft do you have? How many saucers are there? So they would have sort of looking shrug and kind of not answer it. And then like we were not being serious or something. We tried another attack. We tried another attack. We spent the whole day, I'm talking, we had lunch, we kept on going. We spent the whole day here in Austin doing exactly that and getting basically not very close, except maybe for the impression that we all got that Tom and I definitely got. And I think the pressure they wanted us to get was that this was serious business. This was not like idle curiosity on the part of the people in government or industry who were involved in this. This was something very serious that it was being taken very seriously by people who had very serious credentials and that the security clearances for this information was stratospheric and that you really, and kind of an indication as to how classifications work and how difficult it is to penetrate certain types of classifications. Like we're kind of think there's secret, there's top secret and not much else, but there's a lot of gray areas, right? And a lot of abuse of the classification system as well. But there's just a lot of gray areas where this is concerned and things can be classified just because, person A tells person B and person B tells no one else and that's as far as it goes, right? So sometimes that's the classification. You can't get, unless you have the right words, the right clearances yourself, know the right things to say to the right people, you don't get the right information. And the reverse of that, what that really means to me as a researcher myself is that they themselves will know what the hell is going on. If things are that classified, there's only, who knows then? Then that means there's a whole bunch of scientists and researchers who could be working on this program, on this problem who are not, you know? People that we need to be focused on this are not because they don't have the clearances because they smoked dope when they were 17, maybe and can't get the clearance, right? Or whatever it is, whatever kind of weird kaka maybe regulations they have for this, or they can't get fluttered every year, you know? The lie detectors to determine, did you do this, did you do that? I mean, the way they conduct clearance investigations, right? At CIA or any place else, it's really tough to do, right? So then you gotta go higher than that, higher than that, higher than that. You have to go need to know, right? So there's need to know type of clearance. Are you need to know? Are you read in because you're need to know? And it gets stultifying. So at a certain point, you've got people who should be working on this, who I'm sure are not working on it. And that's the problem. If they do know something, it ain't much. I don't think there is a lot that they know. I think they have evidence, they don't know what to do with it. The blind men touching the elephant, I think is really good analogy, touching different parts of an elephant. Their left hand's not talking to the right, it's not coordinated. All of a sudden you have a multipolar world and tensions are rising. And the impetus to figure out whatever's going on probably increases, but simultaneously at the highest levels, you can't really admit that you have no idea. It's like the Havana syndrome stuff where it's like they wouldn't talk about it for the longest time because they didn't really understand what was going on. And I don't think there was a great defense against it. So. Well, what do you do when you have somebody like, you mentioned Jim Semivant, right? Yeah. Jim Semivant comes out and blatantly, openly talks about kind of an abduction experience. That he and his wife. That he and his wife had. I mean, here's somebody very high up at CIA at the time. Right? And this happens. What are the security implications? Yeah. Just stop right there, just stop right there. Everybody listening. Stop right there. A high ranking member of CIA is abducted by an alien. Or has that experience. And I think it was fairly traumatic, I think is. Very traumatic. His wife had a. Particularly bad experience, yeah. What are the security implications of that? Yeah. That's the story he hasn't told. I'm sure he will never tell. I mean, we know he was visited by people from the government, right? This, he pretty much is open about that. But then it dies, the story dies after that. What do you do? How do you handle it? What, how do you write up your report? Who sees that report? Who acts on that report? What are your recommendations based on that report? Think about it in terms of government. Think about it in terms of the intelligence agencies. The military. How do you handle that information? What do you do? If you're in that position, what do you do? How do you handle it? Totally. And I think it's a really tricky problem. You probably try to do what they did through to the Stars Academy, where you try to let the thing out through like. You do what you can. Media, you do what you can or whatever. And you know, have you ever read the book Cryptos Conundrum? Are you familiar with that? I haven't started it yet. Lincoln is responsible for it. Yeah, Lincoln recommended it to me too. It's by Chase Brandon, who's this, that's a pseudonym. He's the CIA liaison to Hollywood. And it's remarkable because the only reason I bring it up is because you have this kind of committee that's responsible for like timeline management. And it's like these top kind of Intel guys. And I think it comes out of the USS actually, this committee. And these beings sort of paranormal show up to everybody on the committee like independently and coordinate them together in a way through like synchronicity engineering or something. And you read books like that or Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clark. And you start to ask questions like around like, if these things are happening at the highest levels of government, what are the coordination systems above the government itself that are like bringing these people together? Of course you're not gonna wanna disclose that any of that is happening if it is happening. And all of a sudden you move from this conversation of like, oh, the government needs to disclose. It needs to disclose what it knows. Like it knows everything to this way more nuanced, interesting conversation where like the government's full of people, civilians are people. You have just as much access to, maybe they have some, you know, they have like nuclear capabilities and the UFOs show up more there. They have aerospace stuff. And so there are implications on UFOs for that. But outside of like a couple of like asymmetric data points, they're humans and you're humans. And whatever these NHIR are like wielding all sorts of like power flying around their airspace with impunity there. And so you gotta stop looking for like, quote unquote, big D disclosure. Like it's not happening. If anything, it's like these pockets of knowledge and they're probably learning from as much of the open source stuff as like civilian researchers are. And at best you have vital institutional substructures with some hermetic weird knowledge or something of the phenomena. But like, yeah, the idea that it's like, you know, held on high is ridiculous. I 100% agree with that. That's the point we've been trying to make in our books and our presentations as well. You are the disclosure. You know, you are part of the disclosure. To believe that if there's NHI, that they're only gonna talk to generals in the US government or the president is, come on. Like they care about any of that stuff. As if they know or care have any frame of reference for it at all. Why would they? They're attracted to all the troop movements for obvious reasons, weird shits going on. Let's take a look, right? Yeah, it seems like they're attracted to that. And then it seems like they're attracted to people who achieve peak states of consciousness. And you have people like Bledsoe and stuff where you're like, I believe a lot of these stories. And so, but I think they're thinking about criteria that are not the human criteria of status and achievement. You know? That's the point we make in our books. We stopped looking for this anthropomorphizing of the alien, right? We're giving them human qualities and human ideas. We think they must, of course, they'll wanna talk to the president. Why? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, there's a contract. How is there a contract? We can't even discuss among ourselves and understand what we're talking about. How are we talking to an alien? You know how hard it is to translate to Chinese a business contract? I mean, we can't solve that problem yet. Yeah. There's all kinds of vagueness in between all of our languages. We're not comfortable with it. We're not comfortable with each other's skin color for crying out loud. We're still fighting those fights after all these years. What if an NHI shows up? They don't care. Suddenly all of our problems, you know, that famous book, The Bell Curve, they try to show different kinds of racial characteristics. Is this race is better than this race or something? Yeah, in the face of the alien, the curve is flat. We're all pretty much in the same boat, right? The alien is something other. That's the whole definition of this, right? It's not human. So it doesn't care. It doesn't care about your politics. It doesn't care about your organizations. It doesn't care about your belief systems. It cares about none of that. None of that, doesn't care about your language. None of that is relevant, right? So on that note, are aliens related to biblical conceptions of angels and demons? Cause I agree with you. Like I think these conversations are really hard to have if you're just a human being. And it's funny to see like, you'll see Sean Ryan go on Tucker Carlson and the UFO thing will come up and Sean Ryan will go, you know, I think it's spiritual. And then like, Tarkovsky was like, I think it's spiritual too. And it's just like they're force fitting. And then you ask him one more question, right? What's an angel and what's a demon? They'll have no idea what these things are. And there are, you know, thinkers, historical religious thinkers, like, you know, Lincoln likes to bring up Iamblicus, you know, there's some others with, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas with taxonomy, hierarchies of angels and demons. Do you think what people experience today in the form of quote unquote, extra terrestrial visitation are actually the angels and demons from the Bible? Can you define your terms please? I don't know what I'm talking about. Okay, basically there are very few angels and very few demons in the Bible. That's a misconception, right? We think it's full of angels and demons. And actually it's not. Well, what about that book on principalities and you know what I'm talking about? We think we know what that word means, but as we find with biblical scholarship, we really don't like caruvium, right? We think we know what that means, right? And we have the English word cherub, which has no relationship at all, right, to the original term. So it's been bowed, theorized a great deal. The caruvium are actually beings, right? They had wings and they might have been quasi spiritual. Calling them angels might have been a bit of a misnomer. The seven ranks of angels came later, seraphim, carubium, et cetera, et cetera. Angels, archangels and all the rest. That's like a later development, right? But in terms of purely biblical origins, I don't think we have much in the way. The devil really doesn't show up. You know, the adversary shows up. Well, the book of Job. The book of Job shows it, yeah. We call that the devil, but that's not really his role. He was really a lawyer for the prosecution, right? In God's court saying, I can prove that this guy is not reliable. Is Lucifer not the most luminous, like God's favorite angel who then sort of, you know. According to later texts, right? Lucifer means the one who bears light, the light-bearing one. And going back to Blavatsky, Lucifer was like her main man, right? So they called the Lucist trust, right? And there's Lucifer, it's all entwined with this concept, but Lucifer was the shining angel. So this isn't the- Prometheus, basically. Yes. So this thing keeps coming up, Lucifer, the Lucist trust. Like there's this VP of space systems at Lockheed Martin. This guy, Jim Ryder, have you heard of him? Oh yeah. So he, it seems like he was part of some sort of legacy UFO program, because you have congressional hearings where everybody's talking about, and David Gresh talks about this, Elizondo talks about this, George Knapp testified in front of Congress about this. This seems like if there's any sort of commonplace knowledge in modern contemporary UFO stories, this transfer of UFO material from Lockheed Martin using some sort of special access program to Bigelow Aerospace. And this was headed up by a guy named Jim Ryder, his VP of space systems at Lockheed Martin. He was speaking at this event for Lucist trust, which is this publishing house around like really esoteric, weird knowledge. And he's talking about Davos and fairies and angels. And he's talking about, I think it's called Garmin of the God. And he's talking about almost like, like things are becoming unveiled, like, you know, the apocalypse is starting or something. And he talks about parapsychology and he says, you know, in all these other countries, you know, it's not stigmatized, but because we live in the West, you know, the mind-matter connection is supposed to be this totally, you know, you're supposed to be, the mind is supposed to be totally separate from matter. And it's this VP of Lockheed Martin. So what's going on there? And not VP of human resources. No, he's not VP of HR, exactly. So yeah, you can't, I think it's, it's happened everywhere. It's happened in Congress also. They start to get wind of some of this. And their fallback position is angels and demons, right? They're frightened of it. It's been this way since the 70s. There have been attempts to get the UFO field acknowledged, at least in Congress, that we have to do something. We have to at least study it. And it's been blocked by groups who felt that God does not want us to do this. This is in Congress. This is why I wrote Sinister Forces, right? Because every time I turn around, we think we're getting close to something and a bunch of religious fanatics come out of the woodwork and say, no, you can't look at that. That's soft. So there's this rumor of the Collins elite, this evangelical Christian group that does this. Do you know anything about them? Cause they're written about by Nick Redfern. Nick Redfern, of course. But I don't know how real it is. Yeah. This is the problem with these groups. It's like, it's like trying to come up with, do they have meetings and they have membership cards? I think it's a question of people forming informal groups in Congress, in the military, in intelligence to put a religious spin on this and to promote a religious agenda at the expense of the scientific one. I was appalled a couple of years ago to hear how the Air Force Academy in Colorado was training their people in religious studies, right? And a very sort of narrow view of religious studies. They wanted people to understand that these are our enemies and these are the good guys and all the rest of it. And it was being taught by some really rabid anti-Islamists, for instance, or people like that. It's like, why are we doing this? Why are we trying to, there's no room for this. It doesn't make any sense, right? It's as if we're trying to set up the crusades. It's like, why are we bothering to do this? Do you think that in the government, there are any sort of formal groups concerned with eschatology? And revelation or the apocalypse or anything like that? I don't think they're formal. I think these are groups that come together and kind of break apart after a while because of differences of opinion on things. I think they had prayer breakfasts and that kind of thing. They get together and they talk about- Doug Koh. Yep. So there's a whole story there, I suppose. But from my point of view, I don't think these groups are as hardwired as we like to think. I think they're just general attitudes. And the general attitudes are kind of contagious sometimes. And people come on board and they say, yes, we can't talk about UFOs. Or like the famous event mentioned in John Alexander's book. Was it Ben Rich that he talked about, a guy at Lockheed? Yeah, I mean, Ben Rich said some remarkable stuff. No, yeah, Ben Rich said something else. This is somebody else then. Ben Rich was kind of pro. This guy was con. And he said, no, we don't, you're not supposed to learn about this. This is what you learn about when you die. This was an engineer in charge of technology, right? And he was says, we're not supposed to talk about this. He said this in front of John Alexander, I believe. This is what you learn when you die. But I struggle with this question because the Promethean myth doesn't end well. He ends with his liver getting pecked at for eternity. And if you look at modern versions of Prometheus, or even the story of Faust or whatever, usually blows up on the person going for the forbidden knowledge. And so I struggle with it because obviously, per this show, I'm attracted to learning sort of offbeat knowledge and things that are not well known by sort of conventional circles or whatever. But then there's a part of me where I'm like, is that sort of a treacherous? Are you sort of signing up for something bad by doing that? I mean, you seem to be in pretty good health when you've lived a good long life. And so, but like, how do you reconcile those two things? Because I interviewed, you know this guy, Jason Reza, George Oni. Like he's a big fan of the Promethean, and he calls himself a Satanist because he's on the side of the rebel angels or whatever. But I found him to be extremely intellectually generative, but I disagreed with him on the most fundamental stuff. Like I do believe in good and bad. I kind of believe in the foused version of all of this stuff. So where does that leave us? Well, I watched some of the George Oni episode because I was, you know, I know about George Oni from before and I wondered what he was gonna say in this context, you know, and he kind of lived up to my expectations. I don't wanna say anything negative about people you've had on, obviously. But I do disagree with George Oni's basic premises. I'm not a traditionalist. And I think that's where the danger comes in. That's the back door to all of this is traditionalism. And traditionalism is a thing. It's like a very concrete concept that there was a golden age that had all this information that knew everything, that life was so much better. And we have to get back to that golden age. We have to, cause this age sucks, therefore the golden age was better. And I think George Oni, from everything I've heard and what he's written, what he's talked about, seems to me to be firmly in the traditionalist camp. I have a big problem with traditionalism. Like a lot of people are traditionalists in this field. Rene Gainal is a very famous, you know, person who started all of this and you have Julius Evola famously was a Nazi and remained so to the end of his days. You have a lot of these people who were, I thought was he of Nazi, he was a year fascist in Italy. He was very fascist. But then he was, I thought he was arrested by the Nazis. And then they were like, are you a fascist? And he said, I'm a super fascist. No, he stayed with the SS till the end of the war. Oh, interesting. They had access to their libraries and they let him have it. Okay, yeah. And so he did that. And then after the war, he was proud of his background with the SS. He talked about it. He was part of the underground sort of Hitler thing that was going on. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, but anyway. So this is traditionalism to me. This is like, we're gonna go back to that golden age where everybody knew their place, you know? And my question always has been to the traditionalists, what happened then? If it was such a great golden age and you had all the answers, what happened? Why are we here now? Yeah. And there's no real answer for that. They blame again other people. Well, it's often like Gnann and Evola would base their thinking off of Eastern thought actually and the Yuga periods and the Caliugas, the current period. And so you get this decline of Western civilization. But- And then what do you do about that? The prior Yugas, you would live to like a thousand years. And you know- So why are we talking about the advanced technology? Do you see my point is why are we talking, even talking about it? We have no control over the Caliuga, if that's the fact what's going on. Yeah, well he wrote a book, Evola, called Ride the Tiger, which is like, you gotta ride the darnity and like, the whole thing, it's like, there are all these logical fallacies in it, but it's very, you know- That's the problem, right? That's when ideology gets involved and it gets really messy. But from my point of view, the traditionalists don't have an answer to that fundamental question. And not everybody would consider those ages golden ages. There are a lot of people who suffered under those regimes because these were regimes for elitists. These were elite regimes. They did well, right? When everybody else suffered. And so I don't wanna go back to any of those golden ages. I think that the knowledge that they had, that we're always moaning about and saying how great it was, we already have it. It's all around us. We've got it in our hands. We don't know how to use it. We don't know how to look at it. You know, we're too divided in so many different ways, you know, culturally, academically, linguistically even, politically certainly, all of these things are there to make everything very messy. But the knowledge is there. It's never gone away. It's always been there. It's always been accessible. I don't wanna go to a golden age. I wanna go towards a golden age if possible, right? I think that is possible. But I think it's gonna take some work and it's gonna take individuals coming to terms with the fact that all of these ideologies are not very useful. There is a new age possible, you know, because we see it in ourselves as individuals. We know we can make our individual understandings better, our individual lives better. It's just that guy next door who's a pain in the ass, right? Totally. Well, you know that there's a Soren Kierkegaard quote that I think it's like life is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced. And I feel like maybe the hubris of UFO quote unquote, research or esoteric research is that it is a question to be answered. You're looking for some Archimedean point of revelation. It suddenly will now. You see the arc of the covenant and boom, you have all knowledge and it's inside your brain and you're upgraded or whatever and you have the special power. And that just, I don't know, that seems like a sort of fallacy. Like you think it is. It is a fallacy. Okay. We are in the process, we're in a constant process of discovery, right? There is no one discovery to be made that's gonna settle everything. So then what is the role of curiosity? Like if both you and I are taking these sort of quests where we're trying to find like all this like interesting offbeat knowledge or whatever. I find it interesting like some UFO researchers, they'll just like, like there's this guy, Scott Crane, who met with this guy, Eric Walker, who we thought was in the majestic 12. And Scott Crane had this, he just converted to Christianity, became hardcore Christian and like forgot about the whole thing. And so do you think UFO research is like this like quixotic, circuitous thing. And then you learn the truth and you're like, cause you're looking for confirmation of God. It's like a Gnostic quest where you're like poking the bear as much as you can to get like God to show himself to you or something. And then, but then once that happens, then you just end up like, you know, wanting to tend to your garden and be nice to your neighbor. Yeah. Well, yeah, the UFO field and the UFO phenomenon as I've come to know it the last 10, 15 years or so, they haven't yet defined what it is they're looking for. They don't know, right? So when you talk to a ufologist, there's the general breakdown between the nuts and bolts guys and the consciousness guys, let's call them for a better word. But that's not even it, right? You take the nuts and bolts guys and you push them a little bit and they don't know what they're looking for. I mean, we had one of them working for us at two the stars, right? Yeah. Steve Justice, right? Yeah. And here is a guy who would know where the bodies are buried, right? Yeah. And he didn't know. He really wanted to know how those saucers flew. Wow. That's what he told me. He says, I want to know how they do it. But is he simultaneously saying we have the saucers in our possession? He's not saying that. Interesting. Right. He says, but I want to know how they do it. And then you guys had some material as part of two the stars Academy as well. Yeah. So where do you think that material came from? Yeah, well, that's a long history behind it and a long history in front of it on the other side. At this point, I don't know what's going on. We know that we were getting close to something. We were developing relationships with the military, with their laboratories to do the kind of testing only they could do. And then COVID hit. When COVID hit, all the relationship with the military really stopped. They apologized and said, nothing else we can do. We're being told we're gonna cut this down, cut this down, cut this down. So they cut down almost everything they were gonna do with us. I think maybe everything that they were doing with us. At that point after that, I lost track of the trail of where that was going. But that's something that fell out in the desert somewhere out in the West. I think it originally went through Art Bell, maybe or something or somebody gave it to him. Art's parts. Yeah, Art's parts maybe. Something like that. And it wound its way eventually to Tom. Did you touch the material? No, I didn't touch it myself. Okay, do you see it at all? Or no, okay. It's so fascinating. And then you have a really interesting connection with Bob Lazar, which is you worked at the same company that he did. Very remote connection, but it was there. I happened to meet Bob Lazar for the first time when we started this whole project and George Knapp and together and everybody has all these theories about Lazar, you know. I found the questioning by Knapp of Lazar was very artful and Lazar was just stuck to his story. I mean, if this was a cop show, you'd think he was telling the truth, you know what I mean? So I guess you have to be a very good interrogator to know if he was telling the truth or not. What does your gut say on Lazar? Lazar? I saw the original broadcast when it happened with George Knapp and Bob Lazar at area 51, about area 51, when no one knew what that meant. I'm watching this thing and I'm transfixed by this. I mean, that's indelible to me, that one moment when that happened. And area 51 obviously was real. There's no doubt about that. And Lazar, the thing that makes me kind of believe Lazar is something kind of personal to me. And that is, at one point, his badge showed Bendix, Field Engineering Division. And that like blew my brain away because I worked for Bendix. I worked for the Mengus Corporation in the 1970s, almost six, seven years in the 1970s, until I think 79 or 1980. So for a long time, I worked for their international division and the international division was located in Manhattan on Broadway of all places. On the 13th floor of the office building, which is really weird because they don't have 13 floors, but ours did. And so we're on floor 13. And the Field Engineering Division was legendary to us because number one, they had very good field engineers, but number two, the real reason is they were a front. When CIA or somebody wanted to send somebody abroad under a cover as a knock, you know, an unofficial cover, they would use Bendix Field Engineering Services. That was perfect because you're an engineer, it could be anything. And so you have an engineering, you know, cover and then you're going there as that cover. When Watergate happened, I was working for Bendix at the time and our whole division went absolutely nuts because of all the stuff we had on paper. So suddenly the shredders are operating over time, right? And a lot of it had to do with the Field Engineering Services because it came out that we were training troops in Saudi Arabia. What the hell was Bendix Field Engineering doing training troops in Saudi Arabia? Crazy. You weren't involved in any of the intelligence sectors. No, no, no, I was just a guy working there. But my ears and eyes are open, right? And so all of this is going on. So Field Engineering for us was the red flag. We knew what that meant. And then when I saw Lazar's ID, briefly in one book, there was a copy of it. And I saw it and I said, holy shit, Lazar worked for Bendix Field Engineering. That was his cover then. He didn't really work for them. This was a cover. Who was a cover? He was there for some other reason. Oh, so do you think he was Intel or something before he was, what years were this? That Lazar was? Yeah, was that Bendix? This was after me, so I don't know. I think the broadcast with NAP was after me. I don't know if he was at, I don't know if he was the Area 51 while I was at Bendix or not. I left Bendix in the 79, I think. So I don't know if he was at Bendix or if he had that ID in the 80s. It must have been before his Area 51 experience. Right. But that's a huge data point. If you're saying that being a field engineering officer as part of Bendix is often associated with intelligence and he was in that group before working for Area 51 ostensibly, right? Because you don't blow the whistle on Area 51 and then get a job in the field engineering. So that's pretty interesting as a data point. Wow. But that's all it is at this point. You have to kind of figure out what does that mean. But to you that lent credibility to his story. That lent credibility to Lazar. If only because I knew there was more going on than they were saying. Sure. So if Lazar is not mentioning, he might have been under an NDA, it might have been a security thing for him not to mention Bendix. But then again, maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe he really had that tag for some legitimate reason that I as my lowly position at Bendix would never have known. But I just know that during Watergate it was an issue. Field engineering especially was an issue. And Bendix had people all over the world in other positions not having to do with field engineering that got the attraction of local governments that didn't like them. We had a, we lost a guy in Uruguay was captured by the Tupamaros right out of his office. And I believe he was killed. So Bendix was always on the radar of governments overseas that saw Bendix as the long arm of the US government because we had a lot of defense contracts. Well, if you shake out pro on the Lazar story, then all of a sudden that allows for saucers and hangers, physical material, not only physical material, actual crafts and the possession of the United States military. I mean, Hal Putoff also went on Joe Rogan a few months ago and said, we have 15 crash craft in our possession. He literally gave like a number. It's just, it's interesting. The thing is that, you know, I don't know Hal well. Yeah. We've exchanged emails and of course he was part of To the Stars and I met him here. But I've covered Hal for a long time. He doesn't say stuff like that. So why do you say it on Rogan? The reason I think he said it is either it's actually true. Yeah. Because Hal never exaggerated anything as far as I am. He was very cautious kind of guy, almost to the point where he wanted to shake him and say, tell me really, but he would be very cautious about things, but he would deal in really weird science, right? Really weird stuff he dealt with. Really weird science. So when he comes out and says something like that, Hal of all people, Hal said it, then I sit back and say, holy shit. Yeah. And I saw that and I said to myself, wow, Hal is saying this. He's, what is he saying? Yeah. He's extremely interesting. He's told me that he finds that synchronicity is kind of lead his innovation, that he kind of follows the signs and then he'll find all sorts of interesting insights around that, just chasing things down. Which is again, the common thread going back to the top about reality being sort of orchestrated on a higher level or whatever. But I think the UFO thing feels like a, even like more concentrated version of that somehow. I think the UFO thing is our, the big piece of evidence that leads us into all these directions. I think the UFO phenomenon is there for that reason. It's there to say, look, open your freaking eyes and look, right? Maybe it's a ghost. Maybe I'm a ghost, right? Maybe I'm a demon, maybe I'm an angel, maybe I'm an alien. I'm something, but I'm something, I'm there. I'm having an interaction with you. What does that mean? That's why we, in the Two the Stars books in Secret Machines, we kind of emphasize this aspect. Is that open your eyes and look, this would mean something. The consciousness aspect, people say, well, is that really the most important part? It's the only part. It's how we're reacting to this. Our entire society now is reacting to this information in a certain way. People are saying, no, it's crazy, no, it's nonsense. People are saying, it's angels, it's demons, it's space aliens, it's from another dimension, whatever. We're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. But it's something there, there's a wall there. And it's inviting us to throw stuff at it. What is that wall? And if we only talk to ourselves, we're never gonna get there. We've gotta talk to that shaman on the Orinoco River to find out what that is too. We've gotta talk to everybody because the input is important, the language is important. They're using different words to describe these things. They're using different words to describe what they saw in Brazil. They're using different concepts, the ones what they saw at the Ariel in Africa. The kids are seeing things. And even the kids, their stories don't match all the time. They're seeing little things, big things, they're talking about different sizes and shapes. That's data. That's not, we don't discard that while they're just kids. It's data because it matches the data that adults are seeing all the time. If you had to extend a message to a young person watching this or listening to this right now, and they're hearing this, and their brain is being sort of scrambled by history is not what you think. All these interesting facts around the JFK assassination, government and their knowledge of UFOs, forbidden texts, everything we've just discussed. How would you advise they kind of incorporate or integrate some of these things into their worldview in kind of a productive way, a healthy way? Number one, I'd look for what you can prove. And that starts from the basic things like, did so and so really say that, right? So you find where that person said that. And I know in this day and age of artificial intelligence, it's becoming harder and harder, but you can look at documents, look at the stuff that's released. That's an open source that's already there. Harry Reid was once asked by a journalist, what do you recommend? How do we start the study of the UFO? What do we begin? And Harry Reid says, what are you talking about? It's already there. All the information is there. You've got it already. It's already in print. All you have to do is read it. All you have to do is look. The information is there already. We're just, we have so many biases in our brains that we're blocking certain information from being understood. So look at everything, right? Look at the same stuff, right first. Look at the documents, look at the stuff that's released by FBI or CIA or the Defense Department. You can sort of start from there because everybody's gonna kind of agree on the facts that this letter was written by this guy at this time. That you can kind of base the beginning on. And then you go from there, right? Somebody says something. Somebody interprets this document a certain way. Can they be trusted? Is their interpretation sound? Does it make sense? Always start from the, does it make sense part? Because you're gonna lose that pretty early, pretty early on, but in the beginning, at least things will start to make sense or they will seem to make sense. And then soon they'll start not to make sense anymore. When they start not to make sense, when you start to hear contradictory things coming from different places, it's really good to maintain a sense of humor about it. Don't take it too seriously. Don't take the completely combating positions, the positions at opposite ends. Don't take it as written in stone. These are also malleable positions. They can be changed, right? The person expressing them so vehemently today may give up and say, tomorrow I was wrong. It's possible. So don't put too much emphasis on it, but read it, understand it, listen to it, try to figure out, do any of these points of view make sense or I need to take two of these and three of those, right? Do I need to put them together in a different way to get at the truth? Don't invest, I would say your soul into this so much at first, right? You're gonna be really attracted on a soul basis. It's gonna be a fascinating. It's emotionally attractive because it's talking about weird stuff. And there's a lot of movies out, you know, that really harp on all of this and sort of expand on these possibilities. They're all kind of valuable, they're entertaining. They're not telling you the truth necessarily, not the way you think they are. They could be telling you the truth in a different way. It needs analysis. If you're a film school student, you know what I'm talking about, right? You'll watch a film and you'll sort of break it down and de, you know, I was gonna say deconstruct it. I don't know if that's popular anymore, but you're gonna take it apart in pieces. You're gonna look at it and say, what was really being said here, right? What's happening over there? It doesn't mean you have to look at David Lynch 24 hours a day. I feel for you, I do that, okay? Look what it's done to me. But that's an obvious way too. Lynch has something to say about all of this, very much so. Lynch is an open door to a lot of what's going on in this community. It's just he never really went out so much and said that. But his route was transcendental meditation, right? TM formed his way of approaching this and look what he came up with. So there's a reason, there's a way you might wanna copy, you know, something like that, something relatively benign, such as transcendental meditation or something like that to give yourself a kind of grounding in this. Because what's going to happen? You're gonna become intellectually infatuated by a subject, but your emotions will be a mess and your spiritual self, let's call it, is left holding the bag. What you have to do is kind of integrate these things because when you step back from a subject, when you sleep on it, revelations happen. When you step away from it for a while, you go take a walk and that walk could be for a couple of hours or a couple of years. You come back to it later, suddenly you see it in a whole new light. You have more information, you have more things to bring to the table because now you have human experience as well. You have your experience with the world and now you can look at things a bit more clearly with a bit more nuance and try to deconstruct a situation that way. I found that's helped me a lot. It's helped me in dealing with people because people lie to you all the time, right? And they do it sometimes unconsciously. They do it without knowing they're lying. They're telling you untruths that they think are truths, but because they're so believable, you believe them. And that's also a problem, you know? Is there truth, really truth? I know it's getting really philosophical at this point. No, it's great. We're losing our way here. I'll give you my final, final question, which is, no, and that was all really sage advice and well said in my opinion, and things I grapple with being in the topic where I'm still incorporating stuff that I'm like, I don't know if this is true. This is, you know, things mess with your mind all the time. But what about somebody contemplating getting into some of these celestial ascent practices that you write about? Like, if you're interested in Merkava or Kabbalah, and you hear that like, you know, it's not something that you should necessarily seek out. It should seek you. So, but maybe you're starting to get signs that like, you know, this is something that is for you. What do you do at that point? Well, there's a couple of things. It depends on your own background. Like, for instance, if you come from a very, I would say a very strict necessarily, but a conventional Jewish background, Merkava mysticism is one of those systems, right? It may, you may find it culturally easier to understand, although the strictures against you doing it by Jewish authorities is very strong. No one will recommend it to you. No rabbi will say, hey, you should try celestial ascent. Try Merkava, you know, stuff. No, they're not gonna tell you that. So you have to be understanding that that's gonna be a problem. But you may find that some of the technology, some of the wording, some of the ideas are more compatible, right? That's just a cultural thing. If you're Chinese, obviously, there's Shang-Ting Daoism. The texts are available in Chinese and in English as well, many of them, for what they are worth for you. But there's not many teachers left, there are a few, mostly on Taiwan. There's a lot of Taiwan pace of you, things going on, the steps, the famous meditation steps that they use to bring them into that state of consciousness. You'll find that being practiced in some of the Daoist temples there. Not so much in China itself, although the Daoist monasteries are still there. But that's like broad cultural things. So if you're just like the average person with no particular cultural baggage, how would you start it? There are different meditation practices. There's yogic practices that could lead in that direction. The problem is you're gonna be involving yourself with teachers, with gurus, with people who might make things as difficult as possible for you to get to that point, right? That's their job in some cases. In some cases, that's just what they like to do, that's fun. And so to make things difficult for you, that's sort of their amusement, because they're old guys, they're celibate, they don't drink, so what are they gonna do? No cable, they're gonna abuse you and make you go celestial ascent for 20 years before you get to the second level. So these things happen, this is life. When things don't smell right to you, walk away. When your gut doesn't feel secure, walk away. There's a lot of people out there who are trying to take your money, you're trying to abuse you in some way, abuse your trust, so you have to be careful of that. I think maybe the easiest way to go about all of this if you're interested is to follow instructions that you'll find, for instance, in Starway to Heaven, I mean, I don't really give detailed instructions for that. There are no real details for it. It's a question of following an instinct, right? Trying to attain one level, the very first level, that first step is the big one. If you can find a way to achieve that kind of ascent to the very first level, to the part where you know, not that you can think about it, not that you can brag about it, not that you felt something really strange or really weird, but that you know you've gone to a level where suddenly everything seems right, everything seems real, but everything is not real. That place is that first step. It's a kind of a combination of what you think is real and what is really real, meeting in between. That was beautiful. And that's step number one. When you've got step number one, the other steps will easily follow from there. You'll be able to follow it yourself. That's amazing. Well, Peter LeVenda, this has been a pleasure. I really appreciate it. I think you're super knowledgeable about all these disparate topics and you connect them in a very unique way. And so I'm grateful to do this with you. You've also led just a fascinating life that's stranger than fiction, to be honest. And so thank you for being here. Thank you for inviting me. It was a great conversation, the longest I think I've had. That's awesome. Cool. And thanks to Lincoln for bringing this together as well. Thank you to Lincoln Miller for setting this all up. Yeah. Sweet. Alchemists, did you enjoy that? Well, here's the thing. That episode was just the tip of the iceberg. 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