American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - CIA Historian: “Aliens Control Our Government” (ft. Peter Levenda)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Choice Hotels gets you more of what you value. Comfort in. It's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Book direct at storesotails.com. So I'm here with Peter Levenda, the author of Sinister Forces, Secret Machines, the Unholy Alliance, and many other books.

Starting point is 00:00:23 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 Brahms of American society, old-money people, were at a sands, a freaking sands in the woods in Maine on New Year's Eve.

Starting point is 00:00:58 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 jumpstarted civilization on this planet. Today's episode is sponsored by Incognit. If you think the government keeps secrets, wait until you meet data brokers. They know where you live, who you voted for, which furniture you bought for your house,

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Starting point is 00:02:33 the cleanest form of digital hygiene you can practice. So if you care about privacy, autonomy, or just don't want to be the training data for the next AI overlord, get Incogny. Use code American Alchemy or go to Incogny.com slash American Alchemy for 60% off. an annual plan. Again, that's incogny.com slash American Alchemy and code American Alchemy for 60% off your annual plan. So I'm here with Peter Levenda, 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

Starting point is 00:03:27 ups in the government. And you've also just led just a fascinating life. And so I'm really excited for you to be here today. You're 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, you know, really in the

Starting point is 00:04:14 very beginning of the sinister forces research, which goes all the way back to what. Watergate, right? So I started during Watergate, for those of you, too young to know what I'm talking about. This was this, you know, break-in of the Democratic Party National Headquarters, ordered by Nixon and the whole thing that happened in the 1970s, in 1970s. And 22, and then it lasted until 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, you know, people are showing up and they're talking about their backgrounds.

Starting point is 00:04:54 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, and what kind of trouble

Starting point is 00:05:39 could you possibly get into doing that? So I started, you know, 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, you know, the eye in the pyramid, you know, on top of the triangle of the pyramid. You know, this Illuminati symbol was like hanging there, you know, 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.

Starting point is 00:06:22 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.

Starting point is 00:06:48 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, whoa, wait a minute here, right? Let me read the novels. Maybe there's something there.

Starting point is 00:07:01 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 worshippers, thinly veiled, kind of. of a story about that, you know. The vitriol that he had for the Kennedy's over Bay of Pigs was palpable in this, and he made them, you know, Satan worshippers and stuff. It was really cool.

Starting point is 00:07:18 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, you know. So I get hijab in this strange company in Queens, New York, within walking distance of where I was living, which made it, you know, nice. I could just walk to work.

Starting point is 00:07:42 In New York, nobody walks to work. So I'm walking to this place and, you know, 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. Okay. 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.

Starting point is 00:08:11 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.

Starting point is 00:08:35 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, is 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, you know, 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?

Starting point is 00:09:26 A lot of the officers who were actually in the field got fired. It's a big scandal. And, you know, so this guy lost his job. Uh-huh. Right. So I'm working with next door next to him for like three months. You know, he's telling me stories and stuff. I'm thinking, holy. And here I am researching this. Yeah. Right. This is not possible. Like 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. Yeah. And we're parked in front and he's talking about AFIO, right, the association of former intelligence officers. And then later I get invited to an AFIO thing like 10 years later. Yes. 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. Exactly. 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 a la some future that's already sort of set or something. But it's so fascinating. And I was just thinking, you know, E. Howard Hunt, his lawyer, Douglas Caddy.

Starting point is 00:10:32 told dark journalist, you know, recent, somewhat recently, that JFK was assassinated, because E. Howard Hunt is obviously implicated as, as much as any agent and the JFK assassination itself. And this guy Douglas Katty said that E. Howard Hunt told him essentially on his, I think, as he was dying, that JFK was assassinated over, quote, unquote,

Starting point is 00:10:55 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, you know, 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 brand.

Starting point is 00:11:32 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, right? 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.

Starting point is 00:11:59 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, you know, 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, you know, he wanted to do domestically. And then on top of that, you had this other separation layer where Nixon would task how. 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 Mungoose had something to do with this. And so he created that originally to take out Castro and Che Guevara. But that sort of, you know, didn't end up happening, obviously.

Starting point is 00:12:59 You had the Bay of Pigs. JFK takes over from Eisenhower. And the narrative I've heard is that JFK, you know, fires Dulles. Dulles is sort of licking his wounds and really angry at JFK and the Brown Brothers Harriman 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's longtime lawyer or I think like, you know, know, general counsel or, you know, 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, and it's because you have to ask, like,

Starting point is 00:13:45 if you're Nixon, why would you ever break into the DNC when you're way ahead of McGovern in the polls? 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 know, do something like that, but he was probably afraid that it would get pinned on him. So it's pretty nuts.

Starting point is 00:14:21 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, right? 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 a, in 1952 to 1953, there's this

Starting point is 00:14:53 famous guy, not famous yet at the time, Andrea Pujaro, 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 late 40s, early 50s, there were seances and there was like psychic phenomena, research and stuff going on. J.B. Ryan was doing his thing, studying ESP. And so you have a guy like Pujarich who finds himself up in the woods in Maine.

Starting point is 00:15:31 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, you know, your neighbors or something, right? This was a DuPont and an Astor and a Forbes.

Starting point is 00:16:01 I mean, everybody that represents the blue-blooded Brahmans 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 champagne and there's God knows what. in this case, they're all sitting around a seance table with Andrea Paharich. And one of them is the guy who was the inventor of the Bell helicopter. Right. Is that Arthur Young?

Starting point is 00:16:32 Arthur Young is there with his wife. His wife is Ruth Forbes Payne Young, right? She had a lot of names. She was excessively nomenclatured. And so you have, you know, Ruth Forbes Payne Young. She's a Forbes. She was married to a George Payne, Lyman Payne, and also married to Arthur Young.

Starting point is 00:16:51 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.

Starting point is 00:17:23 So they were, 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 sands. And he's solving mathematical equations that Andrea Poharaj puts to him to see if he's really talking to a spiritual force. And this guy is answering correctly solving mathematical equations. Whoa.

Starting point is 00:18:03 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 Brahman's, like actual Brahms. 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

Starting point is 00:18:28 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 Buharaj brought to the United States to be tested. It just gets incestuous.

Starting point is 00:18:44 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.

Starting point is 00:19:02 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. Whoa. So they're living with Ruth Payne in this house in Texas. She gets him the job at the Texas School Book Depository.

Starting point is 00:19:26 So wild. So you have this kind of blue-blooded elite adjacent person whose mother engaged in the seance with Pujarich. And they think of themselves as sort of guardians of the world via this like council of nine, you know, non-heav. humans or whatever. Yeah. And she is somehow housing Lee Harvey Oswald where if you were to think of like an actor

Starting point is 00:19:53 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. So 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?

Starting point is 00:20:21 Yeah. 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, ick-nay on the Oswald gay, right? Do not talk about this anybody. Do not, you know, get involved in this thing. You don't know how bad that's going to be for you. You know, distance yourself as much as possible.

Starting point is 00:20:45 of interviews, et cetera, et cetera, right? So we know that there was a big discussion about this going on. So how is it that this happens? How is it, right? 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, you know, kind of people who are interested in UFOs or 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 that? Well, that's what happened. That's when going back to the original question you asked me, I realize I go around in circles. But, you know, 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. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:45 Because I really wasn't, you know, from the beginning. I mean, I was kind of like interested, like anybody would be interested, but not, you know, to the extent that I would study it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going through the Warren Commission reports, all this, I mean, the entire thing, not the, not the summary, but all of the volumes. Wow. And I'm going through the Ruth Payne, the lady in Texas, the Quaker. studying Russian. And she's talking to the commission, you know, and she's going how she met Lee Oswald and Marina and everything else. And then she starts talking about how, you know, just before the assassination, she goes up to visit, you know, Arthur Young and et cetera. At that point, Alan 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, right, up there in Pennsylvania and was going to, you know, talk about this.

Starting point is 00:22:46 And he cuts her off. You just read it and you say, what happened? You know, it's like Kevin Costner reading the thing saying, ask the next question. Yeah. Right. Ask the question. Nobody had ever asked the question. They don't follow up with her at all.

Starting point is 00:22:59 This would have been a major story, right? Yeah. But there's also, don't you connect like the Mori Island incident? I'm getting there. Okay, cool. So that's what happened. I read that and I'm thinking, what the hell was that all about, right?

Starting point is 00:23:13 So I pull on that thread. Yeah. So I pull in the thread of Ruth Payne, and I get to, you know, Arthur Young, and I get to the nine, I'm thinking, what the hell is this? And then, you know, and then I'm looking at the report

Starting point is 00:23:24 of Jim Garrison in New Orleans, right? And all that he's doing and he's investigating these people. And one of the people he's investigates is Fred Chrisman. I'm thinking, wait a minute, I've heard that name before, right?

Starting point is 00:23:36 What the hell is Fred Chrisman? And so I pull on that thread. It's Fred Crisman from Moray Island from 1947. And 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. Yeah. Right? So it was all in this one office.

Starting point is 00:23:55 David Ferry, Jack Martin, all these psychos were in this one building with Guy Bannister. And Guy Bannister was the guy. Yeah. He was the guy in the Pacific Northwest during 1947. during the whole UFO flap with Kenneth Arnold and Mori Island and all the rest of it. So 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.

Starting point is 00:24:26 Right. And they were mentioned, the designation was a special operation or special mission dash X. It was the X files, right? The actual X files. And 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.

Starting point is 00:24:47 And I believe people think that Fred Chrisman was one of, you know, there were these three, quote, unquote, hobos that were arrested. And they think Fred Chrisman was one of those hobos. I don't know if you corroborated that at all. I can't 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.

Starting point is 00:25:07 And Fred Crispin, what is the Moray 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.

Starting point is 00:25:30 And he sees a flight of weird craft going at Impost. possible speeds. And he describes them like saucers flying, you know, was dipping over the, skimming over the water, which gave Rice 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. Yeah. 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 Moray Island, which is in the same part of the world, in the upper,

Starting point is 00:26:04 Pacific Northwest, you had this very strange concept. There's a guy sitting in a boat in Puget Sound and would appear to be UFOs of some kind flying overhead, and one of them appears to be in distress. And it rains like shards of metal or 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.

Starting point is 00:26:40 Now, Fred Chrisman, 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, okay, 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 seemed 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 Clayshaw? Oh, Clayshaw.

Starting point is 00:27:09 Clayshaw 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.

Starting point is 00:27:42 He did not get acquitted. He did not get convicted. He was acquitted. But he knew Lee Harvey Oswald. 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, Clayshaw calls Fred Crisman.

Starting point is 00:28:02 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 Chrisman 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.

Starting point is 00:28:30 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.

Starting point is 00:28:56 He just kind of showed up because Chrisman 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 inn until finally they get to the most expensive hotel in town and they had a reservation already made for him and 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?

Starting point is 00:29:30 This is UFO slag. Yeah. Wow. So they get back on their plane and they're going to fly back to their base. Their plane explodes in Minair. No way. So they die. The material is gone with them.

Starting point is 00:29:43 There were survivors, but not the two guys who actually were there and took the information. Wow. Not the guys who wrote the report, right? Whatever report existed. And everything was gone with them. And that was the first fatality that we know of in the UFO, the 20th century UFO phenomenon era, were these two Air Force officers. Alchemists, did you enjoy that?

Starting point is 00:30:05 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 Chrisman who's reporting to Guy Bannister. They're running the X files and doing all UFO investigations.

Starting point is 00:30:42 And then seems like Fred Chrisman has something to do with the, you know, 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. Right. It's just so strange. And then like you said, you have, I think the address was like 544 Camp Street. to New Orleans.

Starting point is 00:30:59 We had all these guys kind of 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. All right. So there's a crazy church.

Starting point is 00:31:11 Uh-huh. David Ferry and Jack Martin belonged to this crazy church. Okay. Jim Garrison could not figure out what the hell was the purpose of this church. Like, how did it fit into this whole thing? He knew that they were, you know, ex-agents, they were running ops. You know, they were white supremacists. in many cases, David Ferry certainly was.

Starting point is 00:31:31 Guy Bannister certainly was. There was this whole white supremacist thing that was going through the assassination, starting with an attempt of the assassination in Florida by white supremacist group. And then there was this group in New Orleans, right? And Guy Bannister was like this rabbit anti-communist, as was David Ferry.

Starting point is 00:31:48 And so the rabbit anti-communism got mixed up with all kinds of other stuff, right? So there was a church who said, 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, right? It was just priests, priests and bishops, for the most part, mostly bishops, only a handful of priests. So it was

Starting point is 00:32:21 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've got to look at David Ferry and very important name, Jack Martin, although it's probably not his real name, as we'd turned out eventually.

Starting point is 00:32:44 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 F. Look at these two guys in New Orleans. They're involved in the assassination.

Starting point is 00:33:03 So the FBI then it gets alerted. And they kind of look at these guys. They talk to them. These people are really crazy. We can't make heads or tails of this. We're dropping it. And then later, it gets picked up in New Orleans by the DA, right? So the district attorney Jim Garrison says, we're going to now investigate these guys because there is something fishy.

Starting point is 00:33:22 Because Guy Bannister. And Guy Bannister was very fishy. Former FBI guy, long history in the FBI. in the FBI, retires 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

Starting point is 00:33:53 before Garrison could interview him. But Bannister and Jack Martin got into a fist fight 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.

Starting point is 00:34:21 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, it was an homage to David Ferry.

Starting point is 00:34:46 So, but anyway, so David Ferry is, you know, 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

Starting point is 00:35:23 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 19th, 70s, years after the Kennedy assassination stuff that was going on in New Orleans. And he's in the whole outfit, right? Wow. So you're saying that the Orthodox Catholic Church in the U.S. at the time was acting as some sort of front, possibly coordinating or helping with the JFK

Starting point is 00:36:11 assassination. 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. And 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,

Starting point is 00:36:36 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.

Starting point is 00:36:53 So weird. And a lot of people just said, no, screw this, we're not going to do it. Yeah. Carl Stanley, the guy who blurted out this thing that, you know, David Ferry was, you know, involved in the assassination,

Starting point is 00:37:04 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.

Starting point is 00:37:18 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.

Starting point is 00:37:34 And you know what they say, you know, the first rule of flight 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.

Starting point is 00:37:51 And to get back to that question, reality isn't. Reality is really, really strange. 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,

Starting point is 00:38:23 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 U.S. government would not force you to join the military if you were a priest in a church, if you were a minister. That was the 4D 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 you're not really actually part of a monastic order.

Starting point is 00:39:32 It's somewhere in between. But he loved all that stuff. So he had chalises, 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?

Starting point is 00:39:49 So he had chasibles. He had cossacks. 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.

Starting point is 00:40:07 Then we're priests and screw it, right? So we said, well, 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.

Starting point is 00:40:23 And we incorporated the autocephalous, Slavonic Orthodox Church of North and South America, incorporated, which was just him and me. And one guy that we knew, an older guy that we claimed was our archbishop, right?

Starting point is 00:40:37 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,

Starting point is 00:40:48 orthodox stuff. See, Catholic stuff, the Catholics had a stranglehold on being Catholic. But in the Orthodox world, there's just hundreds of Orthodox Church because they're national churches.

Starting point is 00:40:59 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:13 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.

Starting point is 00:41:24 Yeah, you know, which is like the Halloween costume, right? But we kind of pulled it off. Yeah. And then we decided we were going to gate crash the funeral for Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy 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.

Starting point is 00:41:46 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 gate crash it, you know?

Starting point is 00:42:06 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.

Starting point is 00:42:24 So we got on the subway the night before, And we go down and we talk to some guy in there and, you know, we're in our full regalia. And he says, oh, okay, I don't know. You're not on the list, but, you know, 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.

Starting point is 00:42:47 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 Saturday night. So we go up to it and, you know, do appropriately religious things.

Starting point is 00:43:04 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, you know, and they're looking at us like, with all these people, right? So we do this, you know, 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. You know, we rent a limo.

Starting point is 00:43:30 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.

Starting point is 00:44:03 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,

Starting point is 00:44:36 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 claspers and clitorialialists and clobiles, 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.

Starting point is 00:44:59 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 was in that room, not just the religious leadership. It's an incredible failure of security that this was allowed to happen. I mean, it's incredibly wrong.

Starting point is 00:45:23 And yet we just brass 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.

Starting point is 00:45:42 Their Klegalites are all over us. No one knows 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 Forrest Gump moment, if I've ever.

Starting point is 00:46:01 Absolutely. A zealig. Yeah, zealic. 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.

Starting point is 00:46:18 It's blurry, but it's us. And 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 Him of the Republic, I had Leonard Bernstein conducting the hallelujah

Starting point is 00:46:33 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, you know. But we also

Starting point is 00:46:50 know we're in deep shit. If somebody stops us, you know, 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 decided to go out that way. And as we're going out that way, of course, we run into Rose Kennedy and Jackie again, who we're also trying to go out that same way. So we get out, but 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, you know, saying, nah, can't be, right? So we manage 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.

Starting point is 00:47:39 They're outside. They couldn't get in. We did. That's wild. They couldn't. Yeah. They're handing us this sort of brochure. They're saying, come and see us, right?

Starting point is 00:47:48 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, right? 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 was a really strange guy. I'll never forget him. He wore these, you know, elbow patches,

Starting point is 00:48:35 tweet jacket kind of guy, looking like an intelligence guy, looking like Alan Dulles kind of, you know. And he said, okay, no problem, you know, 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, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very funny. Yeah. He says, this is the thing, though. He says, the Russians have been moving agents into the United States through the Orthodox churches.

Starting point is 00:49:00 Keep an eye out. Mm. You let us know when you see one coming through because you know who's real and who isn't, right? 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, like. Well, the church itself, as I found out later, I found out years.

Starting point is 00:49:20 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 through his correspondence and I finally saw it, I found church stationary that I had typed on back in the day. Wild. Where the leader of the church, guy called Profetta,

Starting point is 00:49:45 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.

Starting point is 00:50:13 It doesn't make any sense. I was 17. How the hell did we wind up in that position? What's up, guys? One of today's sponsors is us, American Alchemy. We just launched 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.

Starting point is 00:50:37 We have our cowboy UFOT. 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 tea here.

Starting point is 00:50:58 Pretty cool vibe. You got a robot serving this guy, a little martini, and then a UFO off to the side. Go to American Alchemymerch.com. American Alchemy, M-E-R-C-H dot com to check out all of this amazing new apparel. The cowboy tea that I'm wearing is 100% copy. We went for quality on these. So check them out. So they say when you're, you know, getting briefed, like, hey, just look out for Russian spies.

Starting point is 00:51:33 How much more involvement do you have with the church itself and do you see them, you know, do anything else that's kind of 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 Lee Oswald and Marina, all the people he was being introduced to, 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.

Starting point is 00:52:24 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. Javago territory. It was pure Russia. I mean, you were in Russia when you're on those premises, right? So there was a high school there.

Starting point is 00:52:46 We befriended the principal of the high school. So we would, you know, we would know a lot of, 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.

Starting point is 00:53:02 We visited him in the hospital and he says, don't come back again. 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. We would go there once in a while, just hang out and watch them because they had a whole different way of doing the liturgy.

Starting point is 00:53:24 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 the whole transubstantiation thing that we learn about in Catholic school. Well, in the Orthodox Church, it's almost the same, kind of similar.

Starting point is 00:53:53 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

Starting point is 00:54:24 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 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. Wow.

Starting point is 00:54:56 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, an important aspect of all of this was the fact that all of this was going on.

Starting point is 00:55:11 Now, this is all happening in 1968, right? I'm still 18. By that time, I'm 18 years old. So now I mean, I'm in the middle of all of this stuff. But I don't know it's related to the Kennedy assassination at all. I have no clue. But I know there's intelligence operations going. I know this guy is running ops because the only people who ever showed up were FBI, CIA types.

Starting point is 00:55:32 And he bragged about it, the bishop who ran the church, propheta. He was very, you know, proud of the fact. And he constantly said that his people were vetted by J. 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 would be for an intelligence operation.

Starting point is 00:56:01 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.

Starting point is 00:56:29 Also in the 60s, there was a civil war going on in Nigeria. So you had the Biafrans 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. H.P.

Starting point is 00:56:57 Aluia. Holy Prophet, H.P. 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, you know, how happy he is and all the rest of it to be, you know, a member of this organization.

Starting point is 00:57:21 And we consecrate him a bishop. He's now Bishop Holy Prophetelieu. And the Nigerian embassy is there. The Nigerian consulate, rather, in New York, is there. It's the Nigerian side. Not the Biafran side, not the Christian side. It's the other side, the nationalist side, the federal side, that want him as a bishop, as a Christian bishop,

Starting point is 00:57:42 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.

Starting point is 00:58:00 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. Through pure serendipity, I want to make that, clear to any conspiratorial audience members, because I think that is emblematic actually of your life is, uh, it seems like you kind of try to, you seek kind of sacred truth. And I think, uh, at times that sacred truth is, you know, incidental to knowledge that might be held by,

Starting point is 00:58:30 you know, government organizations. And then they get very interested in, and you, um, uh, you started this story off by saying first rule of fight club. Yeah. 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,

Starting point is 00:59:19 which was not much. And so Ouija board stuff, seances, that kind of thing. So I was like totally into it. And it was a source of paranormal phenomenon. We actually had paranormal phenomenon. We were kids. I was 15 years old. I had a brother and sister who were younger. What would happen? You know, table levitation, that kind of, the table rising, table tapping phenomenon that the Victorians were so proud up. 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, you know, taking science classes.

Starting point is 00:59:56 And I know that I can't talk about this to anybody, right? Because this is against the, you know, they would tell me I was crazy or imagining it and, you know, 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

Starting point is 01:00:26 because it's just your family. They don't have, believe me, the wherewithal to carry on a hoax like that. It was a little too, you know, elaborate. And that happens, and what happened after that was members of my family became sort of entranced with this process

Starting point is 01:00:44 to the point where the phenomena 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.

Starting point is 01:01:02 At one point, we were told there was going to 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 going to die. So my mother and I You were told by the spirits. In detail.

Starting point is 01:01:18 And sort of a download or auditory, did you hear it there? Ouija board. Weech 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,

Starting point is 01:01:36 to warn them of this. That's how off the charts insane it becomes because 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?

Starting point is 01:02:00 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. Yes. But pay attention to it anyway.

Starting point is 01:02:19 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, that 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.

Starting point is 01:02:38 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.

Starting point is 01:03:03 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

Starting point is 01:03:27 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 ideosalien, of people insisting certain things are true when they're not. You know, so, 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,

Starting point is 01:03:59 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, you know, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, you know, Mickey Mouse with the mops and the buckets, if you remember the first opening scene of Fantasia, which, why would you?

Starting point is 01:04:40 But anyway, this is a famous trope, right? The sorcerer's apprentice. The sorcerer's apprentice is out of touch, really, thinks 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.

Starting point is 01:04:55 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, 60s, 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.

Starting point is 01:05:36 That's where the sort of matrix is, talking about reality to go back to your, again. again, original question. The idea of reality, what is it? As Robin Williams said, reality, what a concept. Yeah. 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

Starting point is 01:05:53 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 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 and something higher. I think of control, you know, there's obviously the proverbial kind of left-hand path and occultism. Right. Or the idea of sort of storming heaven or something, you know, with, you know, and you write about this and, you know, your book about celestial ascent traditions, you know,

Starting point is 01:06:33 stairway to heaven. And so, yeah, it's like, it feels like this like 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.

Starting point is 01:06:50 Alastair 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?

Starting point is 01:07:15 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.

Starting point is 01:07:38 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,

Starting point is 01:07:54 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 know, you have that a few times.

Starting point is 01:08:03 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.

Starting point is 01:08:18 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. Yeah. Exactly. You have to be willing to understand that your experience is possibly non-repeatable, under scientific laboratory conditions.

Starting point is 01:08:41 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,

Starting point is 01:09:03 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, you know, infighting dynamics of the participants. You know, 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.

Starting point is 01:09:27 There's always almost this Faustian kind of like blow up moment at the end where like it all goes to shit. And, you know, there's a biblical story of Simon of Magis who uses like black. magic to levitate and then he sees Peter and Paul, you know, levitating much higher. And I think the word simony comes from the fact that he tried to like buy their ability, which came from God, right, to levitate, you know, super super high. And so there are all these, it feels like, you know, what you're talking about navigating this terrain is, uh, you're, you're walking of very straight and narrow path. There's, there are a bunch of landmines everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah. And so

Starting point is 01:10:06 where's 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, like it sounds like an ideology, right? 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.

Starting point is 01:10:38 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. Okay, so we're talking in a language,

Starting point is 01:10:58 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.

Starting point is 01:11:13 They're providing roadblocks. Yeah, or like 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. You know, it's like the Jesus saying you need ears to hear. Or I have to calibrate to yours.

Starting point is 01:11:29 Sure. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this is the problem that we face, and that's just in English. Yeah. When you're talking about understanding it from, you know, a Jewish Kabbalaf,

Starting point is 01:11:38 for instance, I've done a lot of study in that direction, are we talking about other Chinese alchemy, for instance? I mean, they're using language. We translated into English, so we think we know what they're talking about. But there's always that point at which, you know, we don't know. There's always that point where they're saying something, they mean something else than what is really being translated, right?

Starting point is 01:12:00 Yeah. 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,

Starting point is 01:12:23 not through words but through images. Yeah, it feels like a memetic 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. Right. And, you know, 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 hermetically hermetically sealed layer that like even certain participants in it wouldn't even know they were a part of it.

Starting point is 01:13:01 Right. So, yeah, it's so fascinating. 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 McCaslin and Rob Weiss, who I guess isn't government, he was skunk-werex. works Lockheed, but, you know, adjacent.

Starting point is 01:13:37 Do you want to talk about that process of how, you know, similar to your experience in the, you know, 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 he first contacted me. And I didn't believe it was Tom DeLong because I get 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.

Starting point is 01:14:27 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:14:54 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, I don't remember, 2007, eight, nine, something like that, early 2000s. The secret space program was the name of this thing. I was invited to come there and talk on the secret space program.

Starting point is 01:15:39 I had no clue what he meant. This guy, right? In Amsterdam, this Dutch guy contacted me. He 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, 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.

Starting point is 01:16:12 Timothy Good 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, you know, I showed them who they were. Like in the movie JFK, you know, here's Jack Martin. Here he is in real life.

Starting point is 01:16:47 We're in the real stuff. And there's, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:17:06 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.

Starting point is 01:17:34 They said, can you draw 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 it out to that statement. And suddenly he 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.

Starting point is 01:17:52 I'm talking about the Kennedy assassination, Hoover and, you know, E. Howard Hunt and all these guys and Fred Krasman and Guy Bannister, and the part they liked was the classified part, right? So anyway, that was, 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

Starting point is 01:18:23 Secret Machines. Yeah. Excuse me. Sinister Forces. Yeah. Too many books getting confused. But in Sinister Forces, there's just one chapter on, there's one chapter on the assassination with all these weird guys. Yeah. And then in a later volume called Communion, there's a chapter on the UFO phenomenon per se. And conversations I had with Whitley Streber,

Starting point is 01:18:44 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. Yeah. And is often associated with the network Gaia and Corey Good.

Starting point is 01:19:09 And, you know, this idea of 20 and back or whatever. Oh, yeah. You know, all that sort of stuff, which seems like, honestly, BS to me. And yet, you write about celestial ascent. And, you know, the idea that, you know, you can ascend through seven levels and that there's sort of this map and that, you know, maps to, you know, 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, Kabbalistic. That would be so cool, wouldn't it?

Starting point is 01:19:45 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.

Starting point is 01:20:06 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 could drop other names. Same.

Starting point is 01:20:19 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. Right. And so, you know, 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've been to a lot of contact in the desert stuff over the years, right? Yeah. 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. He 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.

Starting point is 01:21:23 And so they drew all of these correspondences together and were promoting these weird combinations of things, right? 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, right? That is not how it works. What do you mean? Of course, no, it's not how it works, right? Did you listen to me the last half hour? No, it doesn't work. So there's been that pushback.

Starting point is 01:21:45 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 you're 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. And that does have to do with the occult. Like I think of, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:22:27 You have stuff with James Jesus Angleton and Hugh Angleton being involved in the Knights of Malta and certain secret societies. 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, you know, 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?

Starting point is 01:23:00 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. 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. These are documented individuals that had documented histories, right?

Starting point is 01:23:30 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, because that's too public again, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:23:47 That's too, that's not how this works. So there is a, again, we're talking about Fight Club. Yeah. There is a mechanism 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.

Starting point is 01:24:21 Okay, they made movies out of it. Maiterling, Maurice Maiterlink, 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 we really don't have time.

Starting point is 01:24:40 Well, Operation Bluebird was pre-MKL. Yes, it was. It was the first M.K. Olden. Was it named after Metterling? 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 a discrepancy. And the guy who fired the shots might have worked for Russia, according to the plot of the play. It's Lee Harvey Oswald. And his name was Alec, which was. which was Lee Harvey Oswald's name in Minsk. And he lived there. That's wild. That is wild.

Starting point is 01:25:18 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 Valet called it, a control mechanism. Yeah. Right? It feels like that. It feels like things are sort of, you know, like the, I think the new agey, dumb word we used to describe it, your term is, like quantum entangled or something, but it feels like that. Like, that's one example where

Starting point is 01:25:46 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 Rec of the Titan or Futility, Rec of the Titan. And the Ship is called the Titan and it crashes. in the middle of the Atlantic at night. It's an iceberg, and it's the largest, you know, liner of its time. And it's in April.

Starting point is 01:26:20 And it's the same size as the Titanic. And so 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. And you have a lot of these examples. There's a sci-fi author, Dean Kuntz, who predicted COVID, the Wuhan lab.

Starting point is 01:26:42 You have this kind of modern, you know, self-proclaimed profit talking about Trump getting shot in the year in the year that he was shot in. Right. 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. 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,

Starting point is 01:27:22 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? Texas A&M? That was A&M, yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And so is this like you're glitching into a future that already, you know, in a block universe, like, pre-exists and you're sort of like, you know, figuring that out, 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.

Starting point is 01:28:11 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, archaeological sites going back hundreds and hundreds of years, right?

Starting point is 01:29:01 Which are maintained and kept. And sometimes you'll find incense burning. and flowers brought and all the rest of it, right, in this impossible place. They have a series of calendars, right? They don't use just one calendar, right? So they use our calendar, like, for business purposes and general international purposes. Then there's the Muslim calendar, which is a lunar calendar. Okay, all Muslim countries do that.

Starting point is 01:29:24 But then they have a bunch of other calendars, right? 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, right? So they don't measure time the same way. They're measuring it by solar and lunar and a bunch of other systems, right?

Starting point is 01:30:04 And they interlock, kind of. And so they publish books called a primbon, which is like an almanac, right, to tell the future or to decide when you're born, you know, 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, right? 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, right?

Starting point is 01:30:41 Or operating at the same time, but different levels of reality. So fascinating. So you can be in one or the other. Yes. Right. So which enables them basically to be Muslim and, in my case, of living there, 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.

Starting point is 01:31:04 And they have other practices that we would find really strange than 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.

Starting point is 01:31:32 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 a Muslim or you're a devout Muslim, so it's only for devout Muslims. It's not for tourists. You go to this particular spot. There is the grave of a famous prince who had died on that spot,

Starting point is 01:31:55 and his grave is there. But a lot of other graves as well. It's a cemetery in Islam. Cemetery. And you go there because you need something. You know, like Catholics have novenas, right? Those who are Catholic no-a-novena is, it's like every, you know, nine, every good Friday, every first Friday's 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

Starting point is 01:32:29 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

Starting point is 01:32:44 a stranger. At a burial, grave? Yeah, okay. Let me back up a little bit. Okay. 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.

Starting point is 01:33:03 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,

Starting point is 01:33:29 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's done. And it's done. I was there and I didn't witness the act. What's the symbolic purpose of that? This is where Indian and Javanese things start to combine, start to come together, right?

Starting point is 01:33:55 The kings of Java, of Indonesia in general, before the rise of Islam, were considered tantric kings. Borobudur is a beautiful example, Pramban 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 Azrayana Buddhism. This was their system, their Tibetan system. The guy who brought Buddhism to Tibet, Atisha, 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.

Starting point is 01:34:46 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, you know, his, 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.

Starting point is 01:35:22 Sure. So like Germans are more pessimistic. is like they speak more in past tense or something. I've probably botching that slightly, but like something like that. And so, yeah, if you have a, you know, kind of a whole epistemology that is more based on meaning than time.

Starting point is 01:35:40 Right. And connections between events versus just some like, you know, flowing of time that is sort of permanent. You know, you have the, you know, the proverbial kind of river of time that, you know, you get out, you can't, you never get out in the same place twice. that will probably beget a whole different, you know, epistemology in life that you would lead and society and culture, you know, if you extrapolate that out.

Starting point is 01:36:06 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. Sure. But it's, 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

Starting point is 01:36:36 positioned in momentum uncertainty. And then obviously you have time dilation in kind of a general relativity context. And then gravity kind of makes sense and, you know, doesn't make sense, you know, in the quantum context. And then gravity and time are obviously extremely interleaders. linked 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. It's more of an experience than anything else.

Starting point is 01:37:04 It's more, it's experience itself. Yeah. And then there's probably some, some substrate of meaning that like, like your, your, your, your mind is sort of a time machine that's, like, reading something that's, that's, that's reality itself, that's much deeper. It's like a punch card or something and your, your mind is doing the punching. Right. But it's like that's not the substrate, you know, like whatever that that sort of paper is.

Starting point is 01:37:29 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. 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 up?

Starting point is 01:37:55 Because Neil McCastland 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:38:32 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.

Starting point is 01:38:57 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,

Starting point is 01:39:27 planes would land on islands in the South Pacific, you know, near the Indonesian islands to the far east, and planes would 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,

Starting point is 01:40:02 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.

Starting point is 01:40:24 Because everything we're trying to do, to longevity, to live forever, and to travel to the stars, has its roots in something extraterrestrial. Has its 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, you know. It's always this creature that comes down usually from space. What are examples and kind of mythology? Well, the famous one, I guess, is Oana in the Sumerian myths, right?

Starting point is 01:41:02 So here is a god who lands in the river, you know, 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.

Starting point is 01:41:26 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 Samarians are famous for supposedly having invented.

Starting point is 01:41:49 So that's their story. That's their creation myth, you know, 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 their,

Starting point is 01:42:05 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. head. You know, 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 mitre. It's exactly the same design. You know,

Starting point is 01:42:29 so we don't know what that means because that design is bizarre. You know, the Orthodox one is nicer. It's a crown, a real crown, you know, with jewels on it and stuff, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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? Right. That's our thesis.

Starting point is 01:43:13 Yeah. It's our Ure 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, right? 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

Starting point is 01:43:29 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, you know, and suddenly we're all like, oh, okay. And so we're doing that. Can you imagine the Babylonians, the... the impetus behind the Sumerians and the Babylonians, the Acadians,

Starting point is 01:43:48 to stare at the night sky and chart those stars. It's amazing. And I mean, all the Graham Hancock, Robert Schock 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. You know, it's fascinating. It's fascinating because not only they didn't have telescopes, obviously,

Starting point is 01:44:18 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, you're talking about the other planets. You have to notice that there is certain planets that don't stay in the same place

Starting point is 01:44:40 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. You have to be writing at that point. There's no other way to keep track, right?

Starting point is 01:45:01 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? 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 a, you know, just a huge jump. Do you, so obviously, outside of generically, a lot of myths involving people from the stars coming down and, you know,

Starting point is 01:45:31 teaching knowledge of the stars and, you know, 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 this story. Everybody's got a piece of what happened. You know, and we ignore the other pieces at our peril. Everybody has a creation story similar to this.

Starting point is 01:46:09 When I say everybody, in general terms, so, in the way. in Asia, in South America, Australia, all over Europe. Everybody has a kind of story about this. They have a way of they're 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.

Starting point is 01:46:30 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. You know, no one has the whole picture. No one in this country does, right? No one in Russia or China or anywhere else does. We all have pieces of it.

Starting point is 01:46:50 We need to collaborate on that if we're really going to get to the root of this situation. Sounds like the Tower of Babel or something. It is. Yeah. It is. We're split this way and we keep reinforcing that split. And it's terrible. Because we're blinded by, as I mentioned in the very beginning,

Starting point is 01:47:09 the ideologies and the fantasies, right? They get in the way of the data, right? We need to kind of strip a lot of that out and get back to what did your ancestors tell you, you know? Perhaps what's most remarkable about this story, though, is you have a guy who's working at Wright Patterson, you know, and then you have another guy who's like, you know, running like Skunk Works,

Starting point is 01:47:29 which is the most advanced R&D division of, you know, Lockheed responsible for the SR71 and U2 spy planes. Yeah. And they get interested in your work because you're talking about a cargo cult that gets, that 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

Starting point is 01:48:08 these long emails that he's getting, right? And he's saying, what 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, we're having an all the president's 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. You know, it's like follow the money, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:48:33 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 thought about, 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.

Starting point is 01:49:01 It was a he. He came out and said, do that. 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 been, it might have jumped started civilization on this planet, right?

Starting point is 01:49:37 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.

Starting point is 01:49:51 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, punish Prometheus. You're going to get chained to a rock. You're going to be punished for the rest of your existence for this thing.

Starting point is 01:50:07 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 was transgressing on behalf of humans against the gods themselves, sort of a rebel, you know, sleeper cell God.

Starting point is 01:50:33 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 impostors. the interloper, the, you know, 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 a great guy. He's the best. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:50:54 And he actually referenced Gnostic thought at the time. He was talking about the archons who were considered kind of almost impriseners of the kind of lower material world in like Gnostic ideology. And you hear Gnostic thought, you know, run across a lot of UFOology. Like, it seems like Jacques Valet is roughly kind of gnaustic in his orientation. So do you think that we're living in some sort of lower prison planet and, you know, our senses are all there to sort of mislead us and we need to somehow escape in some sort of disembodied way? What's your sort of, you know, take on that? You're talking about Fight Club again.

Starting point is 01:51:37 Some of us are in prison, right? some of us are, some of us have seen the exit. There was a famous author Wilhelm Reich, you know, the venter of the Oregon Box and Oregon 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.

Starting point is 01:52:08 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.

Starting point is 01:52:28 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 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

Starting point is 01:52:52 that you're going to beat down the people who are trying to stop you from getting there to get to that exit. 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.

Starting point is 01:53:08 but are 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.

Starting point is 01:53:36 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.

Starting point is 01:53:59 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?

Starting point is 01:54:14 Ha. 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 synchronities and when you put a ton of weight on the synchronities, you're sort of in really bad territory. And when you put no weight in synchronities, you're also in bad territory.

Starting point is 01:54:35 So it's like a cilla and charybdis between extreme randomness, materialist, reduction. And then on the other side, you're just drenched in meaning. Everything's meaningful in this sort of, you know, self-defeating way. So, so you think, wow, so there's a, 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, you think secret machine. Sure. And sinister forces. It's all, it's all ultimately about... Even the Nazi books. Uh-huh.

Starting point is 01:55:17 I wrote three books on the Third Reich. I mean, even there, I'm trying to point to what happened, right? 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, you know? We get distracted by things that we don't really pay attention to.

Starting point is 01:55:40 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 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 was, he ran an Anerba organization.

Starting point is 01:56:08 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 nonfiction version of the Morning of the Magicians. I love 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, if I 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,

Starting point is 01:56:49 but I wanted to see the captured German documents from the war. They had this bunch of microfilm. And I walked in there, and I told the archivist, a 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 cuck. and the guy said, oh, you mean the SS Ananerba? We have them all over here. So I said, cool, right?

Starting point is 01:57:15 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, you know, how do we do yoga postures in the shape of runes, of Nordic runes? You know, how do we develop a Kabbalah that's not Jewish, you know? And on and on, I'm looking at all this stuff,

Starting point is 01:57:38 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, you know, how come nobody's writing about this? All these books on Nazi cultism and nobody's looking at the real documents, the original papers. Didn't they go to Mount Kailash looking for some underground civilization there? Among other things, yeah. But they went all the way into Tibet, right?

Starting point is 01:58:03 And they're measuring skulls with calipers, right? I have photographs of that. So wild. And their 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. Didn't the, 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.

Starting point is 01:58:30 The, as I'm called Unholy Alliance pointed out, you know, the swastika was famously imprinted on Blavatsky's original books as the symbol of the Ariens. 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

Starting point is 01:58:53 in 1918, 1919, you know, the war ended in 1918, World War I. There was the Russian Revolution. And then there was a communist, an almost communist takeover of Germany at the time. There was a lot of socialism, a lot of communism, different parties fighting each other.

Starting point is 01:59:10 But the right-wing types were army veterans, right, who had fought against Russia during the First World War. So they formed independent militias, Frycor, as they call them. And one of them was the stall helm and the steel helmet, 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 Gazelcheft. on April 30th in 1919. Now, the Tula Gazelschap was a German secret society, like we've been talking about.

Starting point is 01:59:46 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 Ariens, and they got that, again, from the theosophical writings and pseudo-theosophical writings, people copying Blaviski. And so that was like, this was it. This is our symbol, the symbol of the Ariens.

Starting point is 02:00:04 We're Aryans, you know. A lot of them would not have passed. the blood test at the time, but they consider themselves Aryans. So these people were massacred on April 30th, Valpergis Nocht 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?

Starting point is 02:00:32 It was bizarre, as if you had given the Golden Dawn machine guns and said, have at it, you know. It was just so strange, and that fascinated me. I said, this is weird. And what do we know about the Tula Gazelle shaft? 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.

Starting point is 02:00:52 So I had access to that information. And I'm going, oh, my God, this was all going on. This was not made up, right? Paul Zambergier, who wrote Morning of the Magicians, they were kind of winging it a little bit. But it was based on something kind of real. You know, and this is, nobody was writing the truth about it. And I thought that was my job now.

Starting point is 02:01:11 I've got access to this. And then I went to South America. That's another story. But I, you know, this whole thing was I wanted to put this out there as there is something. Yes, Virginia, there is, you know, a Nazi occult thing. There is a thing that Himmler was in charge of. Yeah. And the Antarctic expedition was very real.

Starting point is 02:01:30 Right. And, you know, there's, I mean, the whole, if you look at like all the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. patches. They're all, you know, 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, you know, I mean, the Indiana Jones narrative of, you know, them looking for the Ark of the Covenant maybe isn't, 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, you know, the fascinations of, you know, the ultimate hubris of this kind of, you know, Napoleon Alexander the Great type, the machinations of this sort of ridiculous,

Starting point is 02:02:10 you know, 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, you know, 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 have reacted to it. But the documents don't lie.

Starting point is 02:02:45 It's just a question, do you interpret them the same way? The Annenerba 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 a Nordic version, which meant a pagan version, which in the context of 1930s, Germany, meant basically an occult version, right? So they replaced the rituals of a 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. And wasn't Hitler writing poetry to the Nordic gods as a soldier in World War I?

Starting point is 02:03:23 Yes, he was. He wrote it. They're reprinted in, I think, it's Tolan's biography of Hitler. So the poems are there. He was writing to Odin and Thor, right? So, and then this is where things get very speculative and weird. But you, I mean, one of the constant sort of tropes in UFO, the stories, UFO abduction cases is the Nordics. It's always the Nordics, the Greys, or the reptilians.

Starting point is 02:03:48 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. We have to define our terms. There's 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.

Starting point is 02:04:17 You know what I mean? I understand. Yeah. Okay, my short answer is no. Okay. But let me qualify what I'm saying. They were fascinated by it. Himmler was fascinated by this.

Starting point is 02:04:29 In fact, they tried to prove there was an Aryan race all over the globe. They sent archaeologists 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, you know, we find the swastika in India. They must be an Aryan relationship there.

Starting point is 02:04:52 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.

Starting point is 02:05:11 They didn't look for stuff that didn't confirm it, 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?

Starting point is 02:05:38 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's 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.

Starting point is 02:06:02 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. You're not really suffering from a Jewish invasion. But anyway, that was his perspective, right? So this has become this thing.

Starting point is 02:06:32 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.

Starting point is 02:07:01 You know, we're in this, we lost the First World War. It must be because of the Jews. It 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. There's somebody else's. So naturally, they want to make contact with their source. and they found their source in a guy called Vicer, 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. Okay?

Starting point is 02:07:38 Whoa. And Himmler put him, made 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 Himler. 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. Did he say it was like Hyperborea?

Starting point is 02:07:56 Oh, yeah, really. It was Tula, right? Whoa. Right. Like Atlantis or, yeah. So they're buying it. Whoa. And Himmler, one or two cards short of a deck, right?

Starting point is 02:08:09 He builds Vavelsberg 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. Himmler took it over. He refurbished it with concentration camp labor. And he built basically a roundtable for his 12 nights to sit around and have seances, right? And, you know, 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, you know, the niches where they're going to put the urns of the deceased SS leaders, you know. But that's, you know. But

Starting point is 02:08:52 And then there's a question of were they interacting with anything? And I think in your model reality, you would say yes. Yes. You're right. Sure. And then who knows what it is? But it could be totally trickstery. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:09:02 It could be totally trickstery. It could have been those guys from the Australian consular telling us, you know. Well, simultaneous to that, you have these neo-pagan rituals that they all have to go through. Right. You had Warner von 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.

Starting point is 02:09:39 Sure. Is there? Is there some sort of connection with some of these early UFO crashes in Nazi Germany, which, you know, by all kind of conventional historical accounts was over by 1945? and Roswell was 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

Starting point is 02:10:08 as a purely American thing, phenomenon, which it was. But the Russians had their own version of Paperclip. And the Russians brought more than 3,000 scientists in their families into Russia, whether by force or, you know, 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 Pina 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 the, I after the Soviet Union fell, some of this documentation became available, was to build a kind of flying saucer.

Starting point is 02:10:58 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 us sort of chewed out, so it was kind of a sea-shaped craft. The kind that Kenneth Arnold saw, you know, in 1940s, the same design without him knowing

Starting point is 02:11:24 at the time he wouldn't have known that this was the design of the Horton craft. So the Horton's, the two brothers, one of which wound up in Argentina,

Starting point is 02:11:34 developing craft for Peron, 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

Starting point is 02:11:45 devices, so maybe he wasn't considered a technician or 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,

Starting point is 02:12:00 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 realize our conversation would go in this direction. And it's a good thing I didn't. It's a big, heavy thing. The U.S. Congress published

Starting point is 02:12:18 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 going to 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.

Starting point is 02:13:06 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, you know, asciendas, 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

Starting point is 02:13:48 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

Starting point is 02:14:04 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 Halmar shocked,

Starting point is 02:14:28 Hitler's former finance minister, had asked Sukarno to do. Whoa. Okay, he had met Sukarno. He had been denosified, shocked, and it wound up in Indonesia visiting Sukarno, saying you have to build an Islamic crescent to defend against Chinese communism. Right? And the best way to do that is sort of your own fund, you know, get all these other countries that are non-aligned with either China, Russia, or the United States, and have it 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.

Starting point is 02:15:11 Now, they didn't have assets to the kind that you would think would develop, you know, what we think it was a prototypical flying saucer. 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 1940. 42 to 45 in, you know, Breslau and Pilsen, you know, 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.

Starting point is 02:15:59 You know, Richard Mehta had all these plans for saucers. You had Victor Schauber very famously, this naturalist who claimed he had zero point energy machines. And, you know, they were sort of saucer shaped. I think it was called an impeller because it was like. The centripetal, not centrifugal for us. 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.

Starting point is 02:16:21 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 Stobb between the Soviets and the U.S. So we know that this was like of vital strategic importance. We also, I think now know due to Air Force documents that Kamler himself, who was this ruthless Nazi. I think Albert Spear, who was head of Nazi armament, said, you know, he was the most ruthless man I was ever forced to collaborate with. And you're talking about a guy who worked with like, you know, Himmler and Goebbels and Hitler. It's like, he's got, it has to be.

Starting point is 02:16:57 That's 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. 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.

Starting point is 02:17:42 Yeah. 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 technology. Exotic human, maybe. But remember, when you're talking about Roswell and you're talking about Wright Patterson,

Starting point is 02:18:05 you're talking about all the Nazi scientists, Walter Darnberger, from Pina Munda, 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 had, I think, a, A4 V2 program in Nazi Germany.

Starting point is 02:18:28 Yeah. He ran Pinaumundo. He was the boss of, what's his name? Wernivon Brown. Renovon Brown. Yeah. Okay. Wow.

Starting point is 02:18:36 So he was at Oberammergau. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, you know. 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 right pad as Project Y. Yeah. And there was always this feeling that Project Y was a front for something deeper. But it was, there were, there are videos of them trying to, like, fly this flying saucer just had a, you know, radial gas turbine engine.

Starting point is 02:19:02 So kind of like. When I was a kid. Yeah. When I was a kid in the, in the, in the, late 1950, you could buy a plastic model of the Avro. That's wild. That's so wild. I had it when I was a kid.

Starting point is 02:19:14 It's crazy to see. I mean, it looks like a flying's lesser. There's like, you know, it 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 Skoda Works and Khammerstab, made his way to at least the Avrocar project that was going on in Canada, which was British aircraft and John Frost

Starting point is 02:19:43 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 Wyatt, Wright Patterson, as well. well. So we know that. You have another guy named Eric Henry Weng, who was, had a special projects at Wright Patterson. He went to school with Victor Schauberger. And then he moved over to Kirtland Air Force Base right after that. So you have all these Nazis who are working at Wright

Starting point is 02:20:25 Pat. Which is phenomenal because everybody that actually worked for us during the war lost their security clearances, right? So Oppenheimer loses his security clearance. Jack 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? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:20:49 And we put them in charge. The whole thing was just, to me, mind-boggling that that would happen that way, you know. 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, you know, all things being equal in context. But when you look at it now, you're not. thinking, why did we bring in that many?

Starting point is 02:21:09 Yeah. And then we realized the Russians brought in three times that many. Right? So wild. And they were in contact. American groups and the Russian groups were in contact. They found that out later. Wow.

Starting point is 02:21:21 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?

Starting point is 02:21:45 Wow, that's pretty fascinating. Yeah, I think there's some story of Warner von Braun's, you know, 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 were. They didn't care. Yeah, totally. Yeah, even more likely. So more likely.

Starting point is 02:22:11 So there is a likelihood, statistical likelihood. It's not a, you know, statistics can be bent either way. But statistically, there was so many Nazi assets around the world, money that we couldn't trace. Yeah. Assets we couldn't trace. Technology. I mean, that famous submarine that they stopped would have the measure smit, you know, in pieces in it and all the uranium, you know, and the engineers that was going to Japan

Starting point is 02:22:33 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 Werner von Braun and, you know, like the, look at the early, you know, NASA Apollo program and NASA Saturn program, it was literally a transplantation of the Nazi program, space program.

Starting point is 02:22:55 It was it was Werner 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.

Starting point is 02:23:25 So we buried records of these guys. We denotify 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 someplace or Alabama so they suddenly

Starting point is 02:23:44 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?

Starting point is 02:24:01 They didn't deserve the trust from my perspective. We had fought against them. They were developing bombs that they reigned on London during the Blitz. These were people who killed without thinking. That was their job, right, to give them the credit that way. They were working for that regime.

Starting point is 02:24:15 But now we bring them over, 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,

Starting point is 02:24:26 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 enemy. We can work with the Nazis. right, even though the Nazis also want to do away with us, but at least they're not communist, they're not godless.

Starting point is 02:24:44 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 get them, let's give them false paperwork, get them out to, you know, 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. Right.

Starting point is 02:25:23 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 going to, 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.

Starting point is 02:25:59 Yeah, maybe. It's possible we could look at it from that point of view. We don't have a lot of evidence to, to, to, to, 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. people famously, misquotations, basically, but that's what it means.

Starting point is 02:26:43 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, I wouldn't, not a very realistic point of view. I think religion is of one kind or another, spirituality anyways here to stay. It's part of our innate background makeup. The race to religion as a way. of finding a sucker or assistance in a time of emotional stress, you know, that's something

Starting point is 02:27:17 that people do. And what Marx was talking about saying, getting rid of that because, you know, it's not very useful, just concentrate on things that you can fix here and the here and now. I understand the impetus of it, knowing how badly the church treated people for centuries. You know, 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 in 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.

Starting point is 02:28:02 So the church has that in its background, which is the fascist point of it. you also, right? Get rid of these people who are standing in our way. You know, 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 that, 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 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.

Starting point is 02:29:12 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, a Republican, very 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, you know. Leave them alone. Let them live there.

Starting point is 02:29:48 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.

Starting point is 02:29:59 It's going to be one or the other. We have all these Nazis working for us, you know, with the space program. So we really don't want to piss off the Nazis that much, you know. 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 what's right or what's wrong. I'm trying to say what motivates it.

Starting point is 02:30:21 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.

Starting point is 02:30:32 It's like the prison gangs, right? You've got to be on this gang side or that gang side, right? Who are you going to 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? Because you've probably spoken to as high level people in government who deal with the UFO issue vis-a-vis 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?

Starting point is 02:31:02 Like the questions would be is like, what is the program? Like, 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 hangars, little bits and pieces of things? Or do you think the saucers and hangars 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.

Starting point is 02:31:36 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 DaVinci is a genius, but he wouldn't know what the hell. You wouldn't know information theory and bits and, you know, what the chip was inside of it.

Starting point is 02:32:16 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.

Starting point is 02:32:41 Well, what if that's where we're at on UFOs? Well, we've had the UFOs for 50 years. I know, but that's what I'm saying. What if we do know something? 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.

Starting point is 02:33:02 China's got, China has a crashed vehicle. So, 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.

Starting point is 02:33:29 And... 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's got to be a lot of them. Yep. It has to be more than one. Yeah, of course.

Starting point is 02:33:42 Okay. And I've heard a lot of rumors when I did business in China, which I did for years. Yeah. With the Chinese government, that there was something that crashed in Chinese territory. I think the Russians got it, though. So what is that thing that crashed in Chinese territory? It's to them, the scuttlebutt was, this is one of your flying saucers, they would say. But like of the Soviets or the Russians?

Starting point is 02:34:05 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.

Starting point is 02:34:14 End of story. Right? Mm. There's a logical problem. It's convenient for us to sit here and say the U.S. government. The U.S. 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.

Starting point is 02:34:39 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, are they extraterrestrial?

Starting point is 02:35:13 Are they, well, we can't really identify where they came from. will be an answer like that. Unknown origin. Yeah, it will go into like that territory. And finally, we just flat out ask them, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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?

Starting point is 02:35:34 Why can't you just say no? Lie to me. Sure. We're used to that. Yeah. I mean, I'm comfortable with you lying to me. You've been lying to us for years. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:35:42 Lie to me again and say, no, we don't have a saucer. Don't leave it open-ended. Yeah. 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?

Starting point is 02:36:00 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 who come out and say there's definitely a saucer. We saw it, right?

Starting point is 02:36:15 There's people in the program. they 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.

Starting point is 02:36:31 He was with LeVe's 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 Vablesburg Castle. you know, 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.

Starting point is 02:36:56 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, yeah, very creepy. But I wanted to know. I'm the kind of guy I need to know, right?

Starting point is 02:37:08 So that's why I went to Chile in 79. I have to come face to face. I have to know. Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 02:37:20 You got to, right? Well, you do it all the time. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So he says, we're going to 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.

Starting point is 02:37:35 Come on. We'll hang out. It'll be fun, right? All right. So I go to this thing. It was weird. It was wild. Everybody in that room, except me, I guess, was a form.

Starting point is 02:37:45 former intelligence officer for somebody, for FBI, 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 Aquino. 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?

Starting point is 02:38:16 John Alexander was there, you know? Yeah. I met John Alexander at that time. Okay. I mean, for the audience, John Alexander's a long time UFO kind of historian, but also seems to be 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. And sometimes skeptic and sometimes not, kind of hard to end up. But that's the way these guys always do it. So he was there.

Starting point is 02:38:41 He had his picture taken with Aquino. Oh, gosh. 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.

Starting point is 02:38:57 Yeah. 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 an intellectual guy, very, very intelligent guy. Charming when he wanted to be charming.

Starting point is 02:39:34 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 upset. 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.

Starting point is 02:39:58 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 bombed the, you know, bombed Bali and killed 200 people. But what is you trying to do? Like if you're running the, you know, this church of said and you're Satan, self-professed Satanist, and then you are, you know, in intelligence circles, like, what's your, what's your M.O.? 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?

Starting point is 02:40:42 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 him by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

Starting point is 02:41:04 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.

Starting point is 02:41:22 They did all kinds of things. They killed a lot of tax advisors and tax collectors as well for the Via Kong. But they also did a lot of weird psychological warfare operations. That was their thing. Now, pump that up, right, to a national level. You know, 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

Starting point is 02:41:54 Doty did it. 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, and insiders telling him. 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 Akino and what he's doing. And Doty, who's like, 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.

Starting point is 02:42:39 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 Doty feeding him false information, somebody is already in that state. To me, that's culpability. You know, I think in a court of law, we could have made a case. I think he should be held responsible for doing horrible things to Benowitz. Yeah, I've covered it and I think it's horrible. But it still feels like of a different variety from the,

Starting point is 02:43:10 From what we're talking about. The Aquino thing feels like some weird, even, you know, 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. They did that, you know, during Bloomberg, during Artichoke, Operation Often, they were looking at occult systems. How can we manipulate occult?

Starting point is 02:43:40 I mean, is there anything to that that we can use? Yeah. You know, so obviously it was on the books as early as the 1950s and 1960s. So. 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.

Starting point is 02:44:10 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

Starting point is 02:44:23 I even talked about it in detail in one of my novels in the Lovecraft Code as a series of three books that are just that are fictional but not really so in one of them I talk about that type of operation how it would look right

Starting point is 02:44:36 what's the difference between that and a UFO sighting go to some small town right shine some lights in the sky and then have somebody appear and say something in English and then disappear again

Starting point is 02:44:52 freaking out a family of five on a picnic or something. Do you think UFOs can be staged? We've tried it. Wow. Right? CIA even had this idea in their head. They were going to have

Starting point is 02:45:04 Jesus appear as a vision over Havana to convince the Cubans to overthrow Castro. That was on the books. They were going to use holograms something to make this thing appear. We know how to do that.

Starting point is 02:45:17 Whoa. Right? So, and that was then, that was back in the 70s, right? So we know how to do this kind of stuff. We could make things appear and disappear with stagecraft, right? I mean, Aquino was practicing stuff like that. I mean, the other Phoenix program guys were doing this kind of thing.

Starting point is 02:45:35 So the idea is we create, you know, 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 sea? magic with a K. So like some sort of occult, you know, attempts to create like an egregore or like a kind of consensus thought form

Starting point is 02:45:53 that appears as a UFO. Or is it like pure technology we're going to beam a thing in the sky? No, I mean, they're going to beam a thing in the sky, pure technology, but with the occult context for it, right? So they're going to do it this way. You know, I don't know what they've studied.

Starting point is 02:46:11 Yeah, sure, sure, sure. 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 onto a lot of, logical belief or whatever. Do you think that there are genuine non-human intelligences and, you know, possibly extraterrestrials visiting Earth? You know, it's, are there non-human intelligences? Yes. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:46:58 Bluntly. Okay. Yeah, what levitated your table in decades ago? Right. Yeah. And maybe go to the Australian consulate like an asshole. So, yes. Did the Aboriginal uprising ever happened?

Starting point is 02:47:08 No. Okay. Not in all this time. Okay, okay. still waiting for it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's hope. The timing is a little off.

Starting point is 02:47:15 Yeah, yeah. So, no, something is non-human or preterhuman 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.

Starting point is 02:47:33 Right. And then, you know, extraterrestrials or beings that can be embodied and corporeal. And that's what I wanted to be. And God. Just what I, that's the thing I was going to 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.

Starting point is 02:47:52 What happened? It 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, have probably, viewers have heard this before, but I'll make it brief. Don't make it brief. Tell the whole story. It was in Rhode Island. I live 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.

Starting point is 02:48:22 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. Aschway 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 next to me a little while over there was a house, there's a house over there.

Starting point is 02:48:44 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.

Starting point is 02:49:11 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. So I know what that looks like, right, that camera facing at me. And so there was again. And I looked at this thing and I thought,

Starting point is 02:49:33 the hell is that? So I put down my groceries and I started walking over to the car to see, like, 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,

Starting point is 02:49:51 which was white, 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 going to follow them. I go back to my car. I'm going to pull out and follow the car. I just want to know what that is. I'm a little weirded out by this.

Starting point is 02:50:06 And before I can do that, another car comes up 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, in my head it's always like Manson family members, you know. They're sort of very sweet, sort of very pale.

Starting point is 02:50:38 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 DeVilbus family lives? DeVilbus. 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.

Starting point is 02:51:16 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 DeVilbus 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 DeVibis family is. There is no DeVibis in Roebbis.

Starting point is 02:51:38 Island. But there was a DeVilbus 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 Werner von Braun personally. But it was just some guy. He 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 DeVilbus. They're in Ohio, and they make machines that you can sell this equipment that I was involved with. You could sell them to them maybe, you know. He told me that like months and months earlier.

Starting point is 02:52:20 So I looked them up and there's DeVilbus 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 DeVilbus out of my head. and plucked the one that was connected to Huntsville and Werner von Braun, right? I don't know. It was like, what the hell was this about, right?

Starting point is 02:52:42 It was just the mysterious men-in-black episode because they were driving late, I mean, early model cars, you know, is an old model Cadillac, black as usual, right, for a men-in-black thing. And then these women in this old model, you know, 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. Like you have like, you know, the kind of wispy thin hair and the pale skin. That is kind of a, you know, something you hear.

Starting point is 02:53:16 Right. As far as descriptions of alien interactions, quote unquote alien, whatever these beings are. So maybe it was like a genuine anomalous. Well, it 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.

Starting point is 02:53:31 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 going to catch another flight.

Starting point is 02:53:46 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? Of course there's tourists there, but people don't, they're not touchy-feely in that part of the world. So I get tapped on the shoulder

Starting point is 02:53:59 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.

Starting point is 02:54:20 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. That is creepy. And if there was any doubt that the first one was anomalous, I mean, that's laid

Starting point is 02:54:46 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 it happens years apart, right? It doesn't happen like a whole year I'm getting all this stuff going on, no. So years later, then

Starting point is 02:55:11 I'm at home, I'm in Florida now. And 2 o'clock in the morning, something like that. Place is very quiet. And then suddenly I hear this really loud electrical buzzing sound. Zzz, very loud. And I'm thinking, what the hell did that? Did I

Starting point is 02:55:27 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, I can't find it. And then right then as I'm looking, I get the knocks, right? Knock, knock, knock, knock, and then knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. Really round 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,

Starting point is 02:56:01 this, it'll be Whitley. And Whitley said, don't worry about us. Just the visitors 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 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.

Starting point is 02:56:36 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 stop the car and I'm expecting to hear, you know, the 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.

Starting point is 02:56:56 Whoa. 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 that this is not supposed to be here, right? I'm trying to think of a logical explanation for this thing.

Starting point is 02:57:18 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've just published books about it, right? And written about it. Never saw one. Yeah. But there it was for the first time. That's remarkable. I emailed that to Tom and he said, damn it. He says, 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?

Starting point is 02:58:04 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.

Starting point is 02:58:28 How much time do you have? I have an infinite amount of time. I do. I have until your flight. Oh, okay. Okay, time enough for this story. Necronomicon. I did a presentation on this a couple of weeks ago.

Starting point is 02:58:43 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 LeVenda. That sounds sad. That sounds dangerous.

Starting point is 02:58:58 The sorcerer's apprentice. There you go. So, yeah, that was an interesting thing because I, there's a long story involved as all 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.

Starting point is 02:59:25 And then in 19, 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.

Starting point is 02:59:54 and the wrestling community got really freaked out. You know, the worldwide wrestling people, they totally freaked out on me on this one. They say, who the hell is this guy? These shouldn't be doing this. Believe me, it connects. It all connects up. We formed this church. And during the time we had this church, we're going around, you know, as church people, going to do church meetings and that sort of thing.

Starting point is 03:00:20 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 like actors do things and stuff. So he was, like, plugged into all of this.

Starting point is 03:00:52 Andre Panaccio achieves 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 sort of a yarmulka and red robes and white surplus, I guess. And he's there throughout the baptism ceremony. He says nothing. That's Andre Panachio. That's how plugged in he was. He got himself a walk on in the Godfather, right?

Starting point is 03:01:24 So this guy could do that. So now he's inviting us to this meeting at some place called a 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.

Starting point is 03:01:46 So we had a meeting there with the rabbi in charge of the synagogue operation, and ourselves, the two of us, Andre Panaccio is the third, and the fourth guy was a famous heavyweight champion. He had dropped out of sight for a long time. He was a mix, like he was Italian, but he had Argentine roots or something,

Starting point is 03:02:10 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?

Starting point is 03:02:26 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.

Starting point is 03:02:47 about what Congress does, it 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, you know, I've had a few guys killed from out 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?

Starting point is 03:03:30 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 no to 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 know, you could ask for anybody, any famous actor, actress, it would give you some form of contact information.

Starting point is 03:03:59 So I called up and asked for this guy. And I was put on hold. And then like a minute or two later they got back on and says, no, sorry, we have nothing on him and they would just hang up like that. You know, 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, is being involved in American intelligence of any kind, in any capacity. That's not there.

Starting point is 03:04:27 So then about two years ago, I wrote an article. I have a substack, which I haven't done anything within about a year, but I have a substack, and I wrote an article about this particular event. And I drew connections because this guy also acted as an actor, briefly, in Brooks Shields' 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, right? So he has this little bit part in this thing. And then I wrote this whole story about Brooke Shields, this first movie, Patterson.

Starting point is 03:04:59 One of the people involved in the film was married to the guy who plays the priest and the exorcist, right? 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 who 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?

Starting point is 03:05:25 We didn't know what happened to this guy. Now this guy knows. How does this guy know? He's a nobody. 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.

Starting point is 03:05:39 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.

Starting point is 03:05:58 I broke with them after this. I didn't want to 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

Starting point is 03:06:14 you know, satanic stuff that's always, you know, on the internet for some reason. It was nothing like that. But it was just people attending these parties. But they were making connections. These are people disconnecting with each other. And they might be in business. They might be in government. They might be in Hollywood.

Starting point is 03:06:28 These connections are made. So that was fine. That's what I knew. You know, and I was uncomfortable with my position in all of us. I didn't feel that secure. So I left, right? As soon as I left the church, I got a notice from Selective Service that was being drafted. So I made a phone call.

Starting point is 03:06:49 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 knew. 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,

Starting point is 03:07:05 and I get a phone call from them, from my partner, from my friend. And he comes 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.

Starting point is 03:07:20 Monks, people that I didn't know, people that had come to him from some other church, they always do. They cross-fertilized 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 occult things as well. So he got these beautiful occult volumes from like the 16th century, 17th century, priceless looking things, right? I'm staring at this stuff.

Starting point is 03:07:46 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 going to expose me to some problems. So could you go and spy on them? They've never seen you. They don't know what you look.

Starting point is 03:08:04 I'd never heard of you. Just go there, you know, and say like you're in the book business and you want to 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, you know, a sort of makeshift chapel, like a little altar in the front because they were posing as priests, as monks.

Starting point is 03:08:31 And, but in the back room, they had all these, this 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 net. I'm a book lover from day one. So you don't do this to books, right?

Starting point is 03:09:02 You don't strip. I don't write in my books even, right? So these guys are just, you know, ripping off books left and right. So I realized that's what's going on. And, you know, after one or two visits with them and everything else, getting acquainted with them, I went back to my friend and said, you know, this is what's happening. So then he freaked out that this was going to be a big problem for him.

Starting point is 03:09:25 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, or got them from somebody else. but a box of a manuscript, right, which looked cool to me. And I said, this looks pretty cool.

Starting point is 03:09:51 I'm going to keep this and see what I can do with it. And so then I brought it to a friend of mine who ran an occult 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 is like a lot of writing, but there's a heavy writing in Greek letters,

Starting point is 03:10:16 the front. And in my basic rusty Greek, which I only know the Greek alphabet because I studied the Russian, the Kyrillic 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 a cult 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.

Starting point is 03:10:49 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 were the Dennis Wheatley novels, three novels that he wrote on occultism because they talked about proly and they talked about phlema and stuff like that

Starting point is 03:11:04 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's sort of this whole odyssey of figuring out what this book is.

Starting point is 03:11:24 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 of 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

Starting point is 03:12:02 they were running. 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 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 just 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.

Starting point is 03:12:48 The only copy of it, and the only translation was his. Okay, you do something with this, right? So then thereby 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, you know, 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?

Starting point is 03:13:32 He says, here it is. And so Larry Barnes went absolutely nuts because he was a total cartoon freak and Lovecraft freak and everything. from the art side, not from the occult side, just from the, you know, the vibe side. So he was just totally into this big time. So he then wanted to publish the book, actually. Believe it or not, nobody wanted to publish it. Nobody was that interested in it at the time. But Larry Bards came up with it and says, oh, my God, we can do something with this.

Starting point is 03:13:59 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, 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 to set type, and you had to redraw a lot of the art. You couldn't just copy it.

Starting point is 03:14:22 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 is it after this with the strategic air command what happened was And what's in the Necronomicon?

Starting point is 03:14:47 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,

Starting point is 03:15:02 it's not anti-Islamic because there's nothing anti-Islamic in it. But I would say pre-Islamic 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.

Starting point is 03:15:22 It's kind of mixed. It seems to be a book of, you know, 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.

Starting point is 03:15:46 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, you're summoning demons and spirits and stuff. And it's a gateway, a portal to other dimensions. And you found it. I don't know if it's it.

Starting point is 03:16:04 I mean, Lovecraft scholars will say, no, that's not it. It's not Lovecraftian enough. I mean, if it was going to be a hoax, do a better hoax is their response, right? But it might be it? It's a book with the same name. Okay. Well, does it, if you do like an unbiased, you know, historiographic kind of analysis on it, does it sort of comport with, you know, materials at that time written materials?

Starting point is 03:16:30 I think the more we know now, the closer it becomes to a real thing. When they first came out, people rose a lot. 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 meant, it couldn't have been this, it could 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 Kutulu. 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?

Starting point is 03:17:10 A non-human name. But we're looking at it and came up with the idea we talked to a scholar of Sumeriology. You have to have somebody know Sumerian. And he said, Kutulu, I mean, that's a Sumerian form. It means a person from the underworld. Kutu is the underworld. And Liu means person. It means a human being or a man.

Starting point is 03:17:31 So it's the man from the underworld. This Kutulu that they're talking about in the book is the man from the underworld. And then, so that sent us off in other wild goose chases like, Kutu is the underworlds, and we found out there is a place. I mean, the Sumerologists would know. It was called Kuta, 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, south, east of Baghdad, and it's the place where Abraham is said to be buried. Tel Ibrahim is there. And if you look at Pictures of it now, it's just a big empty wasteland.

Starting point is 03:18:10 Nothing is built there, but that's supposed to be the entrance to the underworld. So fascinating. So things started to make sense later. Yeah. Right? And they found an Arabic rendering in the Quran of a being called Al-Hadul, which is supposed to be a kind of quality of anti-something. It's like an adversary name, right?

Starting point is 03:18:33 So things started to make sense that didn't make sense back in 1975. but with the passage of time and, you know, 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. But he just simply heard the name. and that the name was around, because there isn't a lot in there that says,

Starting point is 03:19:10 that screams Lovecraft. But there are pieces that do, you know? 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 collector is on this mission to find these, like, three, like, devil books or whatever.

Starting point is 03:19:48 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 Valet's favorite movie. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Oh, boy. Okay. I'm in deep trouble now. Now, Jacques's going to call me up and say,

Starting point is 03:20:09 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 Spanish novel, very well-known Spanish novel. So the story has nothing to do with me.

Starting point is 03:20:25 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, Polansky 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.

Starting point is 03:20:46 He's filmed, he's made movies in the United States, but he hasn't come himself. So he has scouts that do the, you know, the B-roll stuff and they look for the, you know, 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 than than I am now. It 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.

Starting point is 03:21:27 I had a beard, obviously. I always had a shoulder bag, glasses. The whole nine years, arts. 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, right, in that outfit. And I was involved with Weiser's bookstore, which in New York City was the famous occult bookstore with a pedigree going back a long time. And you came upon maybe the occult book, which is the Necronomicon to the Necronomicon. Right. 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 You're really not supposed to possess all three books.

Starting point is 03:22:03 See, but they had the story already. So I fit, 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 are saying, this actually happened. This story actually happened to this guy, you know? And we have all this information about him, and we talk to people who knew him and stuff. And so that kind of got into the film.

Starting point is 03:22:26 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 months ago, and he says, do you remember that thing about Johnny Depp and the Ninth Gate? And I said, oh, my God, I'd forgotten all about that. And he told me the story again. So it's been around.

Starting point is 03:22:50 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, you know, 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.

Starting point is 03:23:07 Yeah. We're going to announce the book. Larry Barnes is financing the publication of this book, and it's costing some money, because he wants a 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.

Starting point is 03:23:27 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 enthusiasms as much, and he wants to get his money back as quickly as possible to finance this thing.

Starting point is 03:23:53 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 up front the cost of the page, you could pay them in merchandise.

Starting point is 03:24:15 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 connoisseurs magazine of choice. We were in a lot of stuff.

Starting point is 03:24:34 Very expensive space. We had full page ads in those magazines that we did by giving them, you know, 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, you know, like 10 copies or something to Omni or Psychology Today or High Times, whatever it was.

Starting point is 03:25:02 And that was the initial payment, you know. 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.

Starting point is 03:25:17 We paid for it before it was published. It was completely paid for it 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

Starting point is 03:25:34 by the Pentagon. Really? Omni had really great articles in there about technology. Also had great design. Great design. Super cool. Yeah. Yeah. So there are people at the Pentagon. There are people in the intelligence and the military industrial complex who were aware of Omni very much so. And they read the articles. They knew what was being

Starting point is 03:25:52 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 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

Starting point is 03:26:10 saying, you guys doing a great job, keep it up, you know? What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What? Marine bases, Army bases. And then the Strait of Air Command, SAC, came in with a letter. You know, just a nice letter saying,

Starting point is 03:26:24 Congratulations on your new publication. We didn't ask for them for a blur. And it's like the organization itself where it's a general. It's on their stationary. 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?

Starting point is 03:26:47 It's evidence that they were interested in this material from the get-go. Yeah. Right. I think they were interested since the beginning. But what's the connection? How is that at any sort of... Often, all the psychic research they were doing, the occult research CIA was doing. What it tells us what operation often was.

Starting point is 03:27:02 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? Sybilik was involved. No one knows anymore who Sybilik 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 Tele-Talk TV back in the 60s and 70s a great deal. She published a lot of books on occultism, on magic, on witchcraft.

Starting point is 03:27:36 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, simply put her name on it. on witchcraft and made it look kind of accessible because she was like this sweet lady type with an acerbic wit, by the way. So she was being, she was openly involved

Starting point is 03:28:05 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 have been going on in Korea

Starting point is 03:28:21 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?

Starting point is 03:28:47 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 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 Herman Hess. And Herman Hess, not the author, Rudolph Hess. the Nazi leader, who was second in command to Hitler at the time,

Starting point is 03:29:25 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 Herman Hess or was a 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. Ewan Cameron, maybe, or no?

Starting point is 03:29:56 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, you know, in a back alley somewhere. This was a major guy in the field.

Starting point is 03:30:09 They sent him to prison. At that time, he was still in prison in England, to look at this guy and talk to him. I figure out, is this really Herman has, or is it a double? Right. 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, by the way. Rudolph, not Herman. Yes, Rudolph, sure.

Starting point is 03:30:36 Herman, that's another story. Herman. Great author. Great author. Rudolph Hess, not so much. So, but he, but Rudolph Hess now, it's important to understand. 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,

Starting point is 03:30:51 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 in 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, Because it didn't work in the context of Rudolf Hess. Well, because Rudolph Hess did something he wasn't supposed to do. Got it.

Starting point is 03:31:30 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 casting spells.

Starting point is 03:31:47 No, never going to 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.

Starting point is 03:32:01 And these occult magazines were run by a guy called Lance 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,

Starting point is 03:32:12 but given this weird Templar, Vagnarian thing, and Hitler was nothing, if not a Vagnerian, this guy loved his Wagner. So this Vagnerian 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

Starting point is 03:32:28 and all the rest of 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 said that he actually visited Lansfan-Leven-Lebenfels in his office. He was so taken by it. That's the story that Lebenfels himself tells. But he had this, you know, new Templar thing, where we're going to resurrect the Knights Templar and it was going to be this Christian order that was going to wipe out

Starting point is 03:32:51 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. It's, you know, the other people that are responsible. And he was a Wagner enthusiast, and all of us kind of went together in his own mind.

Starting point is 03:33:17 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? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:33:35 They love all this stuff. They love the runes, the Nazi 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 Miller said, yeah, you might be right. But then when Hess does and goes and does this, It's like, oh, wait a minute, right?

Starting point is 03:33:51 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, you know, these strange things. But then the Strategic Air Command, I think of as this kind of hyperfunctional organization. So you think these are maybe just rogue vigilante researchers that 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 and the necronomical? I think they have a lot more on their plate than the necronomicon. Okay. Yeah, that's what I always think.

Starting point is 03:34:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 what we're studied. 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?

Starting point is 03:34:44 They train them in sensory deprivation tanks. And what do they report when they? they're incensed up tanks. Weird shit. Weird shit. They hallucinate all kinds of stuff. Yeah. That's the open door.

Starting point is 03:34:56 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

Starting point is 03:35:16 forms of non-human intelligence echo, the like, Right. Earth control coordination office. Right. 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 myself into existence. And I think he even said silicon, which makes me think like the modern AI race with compute

Starting point is 03:35:40 because all these chips are, invidia chips are all silicon. So, interesting. Well, that's wild. Yeah. You know, something that I have to credit to. Lincoln that he always brings up is the space delta seven patch this is this is now connecting to your amazing book stairway to heaven which i love because it it create you know if you're looking for this joseph campbell style kind of underpinning architecture behind all the world's religions

Starting point is 03:36:08 you have to look to some of these more esoteric practices and you have in judaism the mercava which is you know the idea of ezekiel going up on the chariot um But you have uncovered all this research around seven levels being this recurring theme across Chinese Shanking Taoism, Islam, Rosicrucianism, like all these different. I mean, Ziggurots and Hecoload and Sumeria, Egypt, and then obviously Judaism. And it's really remarkable. It's almost like there's some underlying kind of objective fabric. brick 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,

Starting point is 03:37:00 Ursa Major, the big dipper? It's pretty remarkable. Well, and it goes back to the original point that we made with Sinister, with Secret Machines. And that is, there's this point that we became a cargo cult. It's possible that these seven stars, the system of seven layers, is that that is a manifestation of that. It's that we have it imprinted somehow that this is the way to go. I talk about as well the idea

Starting point is 03:37:29 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

Starting point is 03:37:45 for the DNA molecule. But they don't exist in visible nature. They're not part of our world. Single helix does, a serpent will go like that or will 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. But their tails are serpents twined around each other.

Starting point is 03:38:20 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 the whole other thing. I have even gone there. Isn't the Hippocratic symbol like the...

Starting point is 03:38:39 Yeah, right. Right, the symbol of the mercury, right? The two serpents around each other, the symbol of healing. Asclepius. See, I'm talking too long, and I'm starting to stumble over my own words. Anyway, the god of medicine. Yes, the twin serpents around a central staff. The Russian Orthodox Church, the staff for the bishop, is exactly that.

Starting point is 03:39:01 Two serpents around a central staff. But we only saw it in real life in the DNA molecule. Does that mean that DNA's 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.

Starting point is 03:39:20 If so, then the seven steps, the seven layers, the seven stars to heaven may be 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. Right.

Starting point is 03:39:36 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 happened? 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

Starting point is 03:39:53 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 head of steam, maybe, if you are consistent in work on this level, it can happen that way. The Merkava mystics

Starting point is 03:40:20 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 the chariot. That's when they're supposed to do it.

Starting point is 03:40:35 That's, you know, 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.

Starting point is 03:41:01 That's it. End of story. 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 that experience and come back.

Starting point is 03:41:19 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. 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 have.

Starting point is 03:41:39 It depends which... Interpretation. So in your interpretation, he did transform through this ascent process. You're going to get me in trouble. People are going to ask 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.

Starting point is 03:41:59 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 Godlike 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.

Starting point is 03:42:30 So, you know, it's all hearsay anyway. So we're trying to put together a story. And as I always tell people, we still don't know. was on the 18 and a half minute Oval Office tape gap during Watergate. We still don't know that how do we know what happened, you know, two thousand years ago. We're still trying to put that story together. Is there, you know, there's the parable of the parties where you have four rabbis try to ascend to heaven and only one comes down, you know, intact.

Starting point is 03:42:58 Right. 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.

Starting point is 03:43:22 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.

Starting point is 03:43:44 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 Mojahedel, very famous Kabbalah scholar, right?

Starting point is 03:44:09 Probably the one who inherited the mantle of Gershim Sholem. Moesh, Adel, very famous, very important guy. Co-authored a book on Kabbalah from a scientific perspective, from a consciousness psychological perspective. A 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.

Starting point is 03:44:37 But if you look up Mojie Adel, 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 Eidel has written, but you will find it listed. And it's a co-authored with the scientists, with the 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 Kavala from that perspective.

Starting point is 03:45:00 It's fascinating. And I recommend it if you're interested in that and 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,

Starting point is 03:45:17 what is the effect of it? What should somebody have, what orientation should somebody have towards this? Because I, you know, 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

Starting point is 03:45:33 sometimes I think you know 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?

Starting point is 03:45:47 So like what's the right? I agree completely with what you just said. I would recommend 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,

Starting point is 03:46:08 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%.

Starting point is 03:46:23 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 You know, because it can get weird If not dark, it just gets weird And the weirdness, you know, doesn't make sense to you

Starting point is 03:46:44 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 vire vibes everywhere. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:47:00 Like you'd go to some of these conferences and it's like you might as well a hundred years ago, you would have been in some sort of seance, like some new thought, like weird, you know, and it's, you know, 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. 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 experiences. Yeah, it's so weird. So...

Starting point is 03:47:40 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.

Starting point is 03:48:10 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. Yeah. 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 betrayed. we have contracts or contracts with the aliens,

Starting point is 03:48:29 that's the thing that kills me, right? Oh, you know, Eisenhower or somebody signed a, you know, a contract with the aliens back in the 1950s. There's a, 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, yeah. You know, and who enforces that contract?

Starting point is 03:48:48 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 seemed to be as embedded in the UFO topic as 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.

Starting point is 03:49:19 I don't have any, you know, serious. 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 research. 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 Dulles diary entries that, like, no other source did that came out before

Starting point is 03:49:47 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

Starting point is 03:50:00 was the fact that in our conversations, in our lengthy email back and forth, we were talking about kryptonims, right? So MK for MK Ultra, 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.

Starting point is 03:50:15 And then, you know, MJ, the MJ, you know, kryptonym. Oh, he says, oh, yeah, MJ, we had that in, that was in space command. We use that for non-terrestrial biologics, right? What? And I said, what are you talking about? I said, do you realize what you just said?

Starting point is 03:50:31 He says, no, what? Haven't you heard about the MJ12 documents and all this stuff? He says, what you mean UFO stuff? I said, no, I don't believe in any of that. He says, what we meant by that was anything that came down, like a rocket ship reentering our atmosphere, a meteor or an asteroid or something, if there was organic material on it. Ah. It was non-human biologicals.

Starting point is 03:50:51 Oh, whoa. So like any sort of hydrocarbons on some weird meteor from, you know, Mars or something. Right. But not like bodies. But it meant MJ meant non-human biologics. You see? And then your mind goes to like Aquino didn't know the real program. No.

Starting point is 03:51:10 Because it's somehow, like did he? What do he have had like, you know, like the highest levels of access? I mean, I spoke to him. Because 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. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:51:26 At the last time that he has tended, I think, a contact in the desert. Legendary researcher. Legendary researcher and promoter of the MJ12 documents, right? And I sat down with them 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,

Starting point is 03:51:50 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.

Starting point is 03:52:06 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 mean in 2012. 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

Starting point is 03:52:30 I'm in two minds of it maybe it's not a hoax right but that other point is it could be a really good hoax if it's a really good hoax quibono who benefited why what for it that's the story totally but then if it's not a hoax then all of a sudden the 1954 you know Eisenhower Treaty with aliens. Unless it's a hoax that mentions that to throw everybody off. Totally. That's the hoax. So do you feel like you came out of your interactions with some of these people?

Starting point is 03:52:57 Because like TTSA, which you were involved with, had a lot of really high up impressive government people. You know, you had Jim Semi Van, who's high up at the CIA, seems to be super knowledgeable about UFOs, you know, even at his time at the CIA. And afterwards, you have Chris Mellon, who's deputy assistant. Assistant Secretary of Defense Intelligence under Clinton and Bush, been to Area 51 many times. You have Hal Putoff, of course, who's, you know, Institute of Advanced Study out here in Austin, who just seems to know, like every time you run into a new scientific accomplishment in the UFO field, it's like he's already there. Right. So you have all these guys who are a part of this thing. And you're apart.

Starting point is 03:53:38 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 to be? going on after that experience? I had a meeting here in Austin. Okay. A couple of years ago.

Starting point is 03:53:54 Well, it must be longer than that now. With Tom DeLon. Yeah. Chris Mellon, Hal Putoff, Jacques Valet, 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? Who I met for the first time.

Starting point is 03:54:14 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 of us were trying to figure out what the hell was going on with the UFO thing. And we have all these guys here together

Starting point is 03:54:28 to brainstorm this, right? Try brainstorming this with three guys who have NDAs and security clearances up the ass and they cannot tell to you about anything. Yeah. So now you're in a room with them and you're trying to wheedle out of them.

Starting point is 03:54:44 Yeah. Something. We got to read their eyes. or whatever. Yeah, exactly. You're trying to look at body language. I mean, it's like, you know, what are we doing here, right?

Starting point is 03:54:51 And so we're trying our best, you know, but they're all very, you know, 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? I'm just scribbling on the notes of this thing. What are we talking about?

Starting point is 03:55:04 What is this? Even some, you know, just little bits of pieces of extraneous information might be valuable, so I write that down. What color paper was that I write that there? So we're doing all of this, and we're spending the whole day there. Valet may have mentioned it even in his last, latest book, maybe mentioned it in passing.

Starting point is 03:55:21 And, you know, 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 Skin Walker 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.

Starting point is 03:55:53 We ask 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'd need a skiff for this one. And that was all he had to say.

Starting point is 03:56:10 Skinwalker. For Skinwalker. Why? And he wouldn't say. It was a TV show, for God's sakes, on the history channel. But Skinwalker Ranch became this thing.

Starting point is 03:56:21 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

Starting point is 03:56:37 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, you know, how many captured, you know, space crap do you have? How many saucers are there?

Starting point is 03:57:01 You know, so they would just sort of look and shrug and kind of, you know, not answer it. And then like we were not being serious or something. We tried to get 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, they're 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, it was being taken very seriously by people who had very serious

Starting point is 03:57:44 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, you know, and how difficult it is to penetrate certain types of classifications. Like, we're kind of think there's secret, there's top secret, not much else, where 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, you know, 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 know, you can't get, unless you have the right words, the right clearances yourself, know the right things to say to the right

Starting point is 03:58:34 people, you don't get the right information. And the reverse of that, what that really means to me, 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 problem, 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 smoke dope when they were 17, maybe, and can't get the clearance, right? Or whatever it is, whatever kind of weird, kaka-mabee regulations they have for this, or they can't get fluttered every year. You know, the lie detectors to determine, you know, did you do this?

Starting point is 03:59:16 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've got to go higher than that, 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.

Starting point is 03:59:45 I think they have evidence. They don't know what to do with it. The blind men touching the elephant, I think, is a 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,

Starting point is 04:00:01 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. Well, what do you do when you have somebody like, you mentioned Jim Semivan, right? Yeah. Jim SemiVan comes out and blatantly openly talks about a kind of an abduction experience.

Starting point is 04:00:31 That he and his wife had. 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.

Starting point is 04:00:48 Stop right there. A high-ranking member of CIA is abducted by an alien. Yeah. Or has that experience. And I think it was fairly traumatic. I think his wife had a... And his wife had a traumatic... Particularly bad experience, yeah.

Starting point is 04:01:01 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.

Starting point is 04:01:15 What do you do? How do you handle that? 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? What do you do? How do you handle it?

Starting point is 04:01:34 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. You do what you can or whatever. Have you ever read the book Crypto's Conundrum? Are you familiar with that? I haven't started it yet. Lincoln is responsible for it.

Starting point is 04:01:55 Yeah, he 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, responsible for like timeline management. Right. And it's like these top kind of intel guys. And I think it comes out of the OSS, actually, this committee.

Starting point is 04:02:18 And these beings sort of abnormally 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 childhoods end by Arthur C. Clark. And you start to ask questions like, or. 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 going to want to disclose that any of that is happening if it is happening. And it all of a sudden you you move from this conversation of like, oh, the government needs to disclose.

Starting point is 04:03:02 It needs to disclose what it knows. Like it knows everything to this way more nuanced, interesting conversation. conversation where, like, the government's full of people. Civilians are people. You have just as much access to, you know, 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 your humans.

Starting point is 04:03:30 And whatever these NHI are like wielding all sorts of like power flying around their airspace with impelings. punity there. And so you got to 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.

Starting point is 04:04:11 That's the point we were 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 NIH, that they're only going to talk to generals in the U.S. government or the president is, come on. Like they care about any of that stuff. As if they know or care how any frame of reference for it at all, right? Why would they? They're attracted to all the troop movements for obvious reasons.

Starting point is 04:04:38 weird shit's 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 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. That's the point we make in our books. You know, 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 want to talk to the president.

Starting point is 04:05:11 Why? 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, you know, we can't solve that problem yet. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:05:27 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, you know, skin collar 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 Belker, they try to show,

Starting point is 04:05:49 you know, different kinds of racial characteristics. 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.

Starting point is 04:06:05 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? Because I agree with you.

Starting point is 04:06:23 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 Rattle will go, you know, I think it's spiritual. And then like, Tarcos was like, I think it's spiritual too. And it's just like they're force fitting. And then you ask them 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 Eamblicus. You know, there's some others with, you know, St. Thomas Quinas with taxonomies, hierarchies of angels and demons. Do you think what people experience today,

Starting point is 04:07:03 the form of, quote-unquote, extraterrestrial 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.

Starting point is 04:07:22 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 it 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 baldurized a great deal.

Starting point is 04:07:43 The Caruvium were 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, caribum, etc., etc., angels, 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.

Starting point is 04:08:05 You know, the adversary shows up. On the book of Job, the devil. 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, you know, 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 light, the one who bears light, the light-bearing one. And going back to Blaviski, Lucifer was like her main man, right? All right.

Starting point is 04:08:38 So they called the Lucis Trust, right? 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 Lucis Trust. Like, there's this VP of space systems at Lockheed Martin.

Starting point is 04:08:57 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, you know, stories, this transfer of UFO material from Lockheed Martin using some sort of, you know, special access program to Bigelow Aerospace. And this was headed up by a guy named Jim Ryder, his VP of space systems at Lockheed

Starting point is 04:09:36 Martin. He was speaking at this event for Lucis Trust, which is this publishing house around like really esoteric, weird knowledge. And he's talking about devas 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 things are becoming unveiled. like, you know, the apocalypse is starting or something. And, you know, he talks about parapsychology.

Starting point is 04:10:03 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. Right. And it's this VP at Blockied Martin. Yeah. So what's going on there? And not VP of human resources.

Starting point is 04:10:25 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 it, at least in Congress,

Starting point is 04:10:52 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. 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, no, you can't look at that. That's soft, you know. So there's this, there's this rumor of the Collins elite, this like evangelical Christian group that does this. Do you know anything about them? Because they're written about by Nick Redfern. But I don't know how real it is. Yeah. This is the problem with these groups. It's like, it's like, it's

Starting point is 04:11:27 trying to come up with, you know, do they have meetings and they have membership guards? 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.

Starting point is 04:12:07 And it was being taught by some really rabid sort of 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. You know, 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?

Starting point is 04:12:31 I don't think they're formal. 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 Co. Yep.

Starting point is 04:12:48 Yeah. So there's a whole story there, I suppose. But from my point of view, I don't think these groups are as, as. you know, 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.

Starting point is 04:13:10 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 was 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. And this was a, this was a, an engineer in charge of

Starting point is 04:13:29 technology, right? And he 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. Right. For eternity. And if you look at, you know, 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, you know, things that are, you know, not well known by, you know, sort of conventional circles or whatever. But then there's a part of me where I'm like,

Starting point is 04:14:11 is that sort of a treacherous, are you sort of signing up for, you know, something bad by doing that? I mean, you seem to like, you know, be in pretty good health and you've lived a good long life. And so so but like how do you reconcile those two things? Because I, you know, I interview, you know this guy Jason Reza Georgiani? Yeah. Like he's a big fan of the Promethean, you know, 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

Starting point is 04:14:45 most fundamental stuff. Like I do believe in good and bad. And I do, I kind of believe in the Faust version of all of this stuff. So where does that leave us? Well, I watched some of the Georgiani episode because I was, you know, I know about Georgiani from before. And I wondered what he was going to say in this context, you know, and he kind of lived up to my expectations.

Starting point is 04:15:05 I don't want to say anything negative about people you've had on, obviously. But I do disagree with Georgiani'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.

Starting point is 04:15:33 We have to, because this age sucks, therefore the golden age was better. And I think Georgiani, from everything I've heard and what he's read about, 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. René Gainan is a very famous, you know, person who started all of this, and you have Julius Ivo, who 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.

Starting point is 04:16:07 He was very fascist. But then he was arrested by the Nazis. 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. He had access to their libraries and they let him have it. Okay, yeah.

Starting point is 04:16:20 And so he did that. And then after the war, he was proud of his background with the SS. Oh, wow. 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.

Starting point is 04:16:33 This is like, we're going to 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 Gannon and Evola would base their thinking off of Eastern thought, actually, in the Yuga periods.

Starting point is 04:16:58 And the Caliuga is the current period. And so you get this decline of, you know, Western civilization. But then what do you do about that? The prior yugas you would live to like, you know, a thousand years. So why are we talking about advanced technology? Do you see, my point is why are we talking, even talking about it? We have no control over the Kali Yuga, if that's, in fact, what's going on. Yeah, well, he wrote a book, Evola, Klo.

Starting point is 04:17:19 called Ride the Tiger, which is like all, you know, you got to like ride modernity and like, I mean, 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 what's when ideology gets involved and it gets really messy. But for my point of view, the traditionalists don't have an answer to that fundamental question. Yeah. 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 want to 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

Starting point is 04:17:58 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 want to go to a golden age. I want to go towards a golden age if possible, right? I think that is possible. But I think it's going to take some work and it's going to 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

Starting point is 04:18:40 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 Sorin-Kirkegaard quote that I think it's like life is not a question to be answered, but a reality to be experienced. Right. 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. You see the arc of the covenant, and boom, you have all null. and it's inside your brain and you're upgraded or whatever, and you have the special power.

Starting point is 04:19:16 And that just, I don't know, that seems like a sort of fallacy. Like it's, you think it isn't. It is a fallacy. Okay. I think we are in the process. We're in a constant process of discovery, right? There is no one discovery to be made that's going to settle everything. So then what is the role of curiosity?

Starting point is 04:19:33 Like if both you and I are taking these sort of quests where we're trying to find like all this like interesting off. beat 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 he thought was in the Majestic 12. Right. And Scott Crane had this, he just converted to Christianity, became hardcore Christian and, like, forgot about the whole thing.

Starting point is 04:19:58 Right. And so, do you think UFO research is, like, this, like, quixotic, circuitous thing? And then you, and then you learn the truth. And you're, like, because 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, you know, 10, 15 years or so, they haven't yet defined what it is they're looking for.

Starting point is 04:20:40 They don't know, right? So when you talk to a uphologist, 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?

Starting point is 04:21:05 Yeah. And here was 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.

Starting point is 04:21:17 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 To the Stars Academy as well. Yeah. So where do you think that material came from?

Starting point is 04:21:31 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, they said, nothing else we can do. We're being told, we're going to cut this down, cut this down, cut this down. So they cut down almost everything they were going to do with us.

Starting point is 04:21:58 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, you know. 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. Arts parts. Yeah, arts parts, maybe. Something like that. And it wound its way eventually to Tom. Do you touch the material? No, I didn't touch it myself. Okay. Do you see it at all? No. No. Okay. It's so fascinating. And then you have a really interesting connection with Bob Luzar, 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.

Starting point is 04:22:43 And everybody has all these theories about Lazar, you know. I found the questioning by NAP of Lazar was very artful. And Lizar 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 Lizar? Lazzar.

Starting point is 04:23:04 I saw the original broadcast when it happened. with George Knapp and Bob Lazar about Area 51. But 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.

Starting point is 04:23:19 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.

Starting point is 04:23:37 and that blew my brain away because I worked for Bendix. I worked with the Mendix 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 a 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

Starting point is 04:24:12 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,

Starting point is 04:24:34 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 overtime, right? And a lot of it had to do with the field engineering services. Whoa. Because it came out that we were training troops in Saudi Arabia.

Starting point is 04:24:58 What the hell was Bendix Field Engineering doing training troops in Saudi Arabia? Crazy. Wait, but you weren't involved in any of the intelligence activity. No, no, no, I was just some, I was just a guy working there. Okay, okay. But I, my ears and eyes are open, right? Yeah. And so all of this is going on. So field engineering for us was the red flag.

Starting point is 04:25:13 We knew what that meant. And then when I saw Lazar's ID, briefly in one book, there was a photo, there was a copy of it. And I saw it and I said, holy shit, Lizar worked for Bendix field engineering. That was his cover then. He didn't really work for them. This was a cover. If it was a cover, he was there for some other reason. Oh, so do you think he was Intel or something before he was?

Starting point is 04:25:34 What years were this? That Lazar was? Yeah, was at Bendix? This was after me, so I don't know. I think the broadcast with Knapp was after me. I don't know if he was at, I don't know if he was Area 51 while I was at Bendix or not. I left Bendix in 79, I think. So I don't know if he was at Bendix or if he had that ID in the 80s.

Starting point is 04:25:57 If he did that after. 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, is a data point.

Starting point is 04:26:27 Yeah. Wow. But that's all it is at this point. You know, you have to kind of figure out what does that mean. But to you, that lent credibility to his. That led credibility to Lazar, if only because I knew there was more going on than, you know, they were saying. Sure. You know, so if Lazar is not mentioning, he didn't, he might have been under an NDA.

Starting point is 04:26:45 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, you know, had that tag for some legitimate reason that I, as my lowly position of Bendix would never have known, you know. 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 traction of local governments

Starting point is 04:27:13 that didn't like them. We lost a guy in Uruguay was captured by the Tupamarros 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 far arm of the U.S. government

Starting point is 04:27:31 because we had a lot of defense country. 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. Like, he literally gave like a number. It's just, it's interesting. The thing is that, you know, I don't know how well. Yeah. We've exchanged emails and, of course, he was part of Two 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 he say it on Rogan? The reason I think he said it is either it's actually true. Yeah. Because hell never exaggerated anything.

Starting point is 04:28:19 As far as I am, he was a very cautious kind of guy, almost to the point where you 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 that he dealt with. science. So when he comes out and says something like that, 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, hell is saying this. He's, what is he saying? Yeah. He's extremely interesting. He's told me

Starting point is 04:28:50 that like he finds that synchronicities kind of lead his, you know, innovation, that like he kind of follows the signs and then like he'll find, you know, all sorts of interesting insights around around that, just like, you know, 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. Just, you know, 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, you know, it's there to say, look, open your freaking eyes and look, right? Maybe it's a ghost.

Starting point is 04:29:36 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.

Starting point is 04:29:44 What does that mean? That's why we, in the two of the stars books in secret machines, we kind of emphasize this aspect is that open your eyes and look. This means something. The consciousness aspect, people say, well, is that really the most important part? It's the only part. Yeah. It's how we're reacting to this.

Starting point is 04:30:00 Yeah. 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.

Starting point is 04:30:16 There's a wall there. And it's inviting us to throw stuff at it. What is that wall, you know? And if we only talk to ourselves, we're never going to get there. We've got to talk to that shaman on the Orinoco River to find out what that is, too. We've got to talk to everybody because the... The input is important. The language is important.

Starting point is 04:30:33 They're using different words to describe these things, right? 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, right? The kids are seeing things. And even the kids, their stories don't match all the time, right? They're seeing little things, big things. They're talking about different sizes and shapes. That's data.

Starting point is 04:30:54 That's not, we don't discard that. Well, they're just kids. It's data because it matches the data that adults are seeing all the time, right? 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, you know, being sort of scrambled by, you know, the, like, yeah, history is not what you think, you know, all these interesting facts around the JFK assassination, government and their knowledge of UFOs, you know, forbidden texts, you know, everything we've just discussed. How would you advise? How would you advise?

Starting point is 04:31:30 they kind of incorporate or integrate some of these things into their worldview in kind of a, you know, 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 open source. That's already there. Harry Reid was once asked by a journalist, you know, 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 all already there. All the information is there.

Starting point is 04:32:14 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. Yeah. We're just, we have so many biases in our brains that were blocking certain information from being understood. So look at everything, right?

Starting point is 04:32:28 Look at the sane 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 going to 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 doesn't make sense part because you're going to 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

Starting point is 04:33:03 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.

Starting point is 04:33:39 It's possible. So don't put too much worth 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 do 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?

Starting point is 04:34:00 you're going to be really attracted on a sole basis. It's going to be 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.

Starting point is 04:34:23 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 do it. I was going to say deconstruct it. I don't know if that's popular anymore. But you're going to take it apart in pieces. You're going to look at it and say, what was really being said here, right? What's happening over there?

Starting point is 04:34:41 It doesn't mean you have to look at David Lynch for 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.

Starting point is 04:34:54 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 root was transcendental meditation, right? TM formed his way of approaching this and look what he came up with. So there's a way you might want to 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.

Starting point is 04:35:20 Because what's going to happen? You're going to 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,

Starting point is 04:35:46 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?

Starting point is 04:36:09 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 their truth really truth? I know it's getting really philosophical at this point. No, it's great. We're losing our way here a little bit.

Starting point is 04:36:28 Well, I'll give you my final, final question. Okay. Which is, no, and that was all really sage advice and well said, in my opinion. And things I grapple with, you know, 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 practice? that you write about, like, you know, 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, not strict necessarily, but a conventional Jewish background. Merkava mysticism is one of those systems, right? You may find it culturally

Starting point is 04:37:28 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 going to tell you that. So you have to be understand that that's going to 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 Qing Taoism. 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.

Starting point is 04:38:05 There are a few, mostly on Taiwan. There's a lot of Taiwan pace of view, 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 Taoist temples there, not so much in. China itself, although the Taoist 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? Very different meditation practices. There's, you know, yogic practices that could lead in that direction. The problem is you're going to 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?

Starting point is 04:38:50 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, you know, they're old guys, they're celibate, and they don't drink. So what are they going to do? No cable. They're going to abuse you and make you go celestial ascend for 20 years before you get to the second level.

Starting point is 04:39:08 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 be. trying to take your money, or trying to, you know, 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 Stereway

Starting point is 04:39:37 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 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've 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. Okay? It's a kind of a combination of what you think is real and what is really real meeting in between.

Starting point is 04:40:24 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.

Starting point is 04:40:43 And so I'm grateful to do this with you. You've also led just a fascinating life that a 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.

Starting point is 04:41:01 Thank you to Lincoln Miller for setting this all up. Sweet. Alchemists, did you enjoy that? Well, here's the thing. That episode was just the tip of the iceberg. 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

Starting point is 04:41:21 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.

American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - CIA Historian: “Aliens Control Our Government” (ft. Peter Levenda)

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