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

So, I'm here with Peter Levenda, the author of Sinister Forces, Secret Machines, The Unholy Alliance, and and and many other books. If we have a crash saucer from the ' 40s, I would say if we are in possession of it, and they're in possession of it, too, then there is an agreement between countries that says we're not going to talk about this. It's the Fight Club. JFK was assassinated over quote unquote the alien presence. Eh 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 the blue-blooded brahinss of American society, old money people were at a se a freaking seance in the woods in Maine on New Year's Eve. What is the Necronomicon and why is the Strategic Air Command interested in the Necronomicon? How much time do you have? At some point, somebody did something they weren't supposed to do. It might have jump started civilization on this planet. Different parts of the brain have different activities. But you know that, don't you? Maybe you should interview me. Today's episode is sponsored by Incogn. 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, and which UFO videos you've rewatched three times at 2:00 a.m. last night. That's because every click, form, and purchase builds a quiet dossier on you, then gets sold, repackaged, and sold again. It's like there's a shadow version of you living inside a server farm somewhere in New Jersey. That's why I personally use Incogn. It automatically hunts down those data brokers, over 250 of them, and forces them to delete your information. Then it keeps checking back until they actually do. And the new custom removals feature, if you find your data on any site, you just paste the link into your dashboard and Incognipes for you. You get unlimited takedowns. It's not a VPN. It's not going incognito. This is a fullscale data exfiltration in reverse. 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 Incogn. Use code Americanalchemy at checkout or go to incogn.com/ameanalchemy for 60% off an annual plan. Again, that's incogn.com/ameanalchemy and code American alchemy for 60% off your annual plan. So, I'm here with Peter Lenda, who I couldn't be more honored to be with. I think you are, uh, an amazing big picture thinker, uh, who 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 in a super unique way and in a way that's caught the attention of higherups in the government. and you've also just led a just a fascinating life. And so I'm I'm really excited uh for you to be here today. You're the author of Sinister Forces, Secret Machines, uh Man Gods, and War, and uh The Unholy Alliance, and and 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 I want to start with this idea that reality itself might be somewhat choreographed or scripted. Uh an idea you explore in Sinister Forces. You talk about all these kind of uh uh 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 very beginning of the sinister forces research which goes all the way back to Watergate, right? So I started during Watergate for those of you too young to know what I'm talking about. This was this, you know, breakin of the Democratic Party national headquarters ordered by Nixon and the a whole thing that happened in n in the 1970s in 1970 uh two and then it lasted till 1975 the investigations and all of this and I was following all of this. I was reading three newspapers a day and I was living in New York which is where I'm from and so you're getting a lot of media attention. You're getting a lot of analysis. a lot of, you know, people are showing up and they're talking about their backgrounds. And as I'm look 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 uh I think one of the 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 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 could you possibly get into doing that so I started you know looking at that and I wound up at the national archives in DC and I rented you know a room in in a lowcost 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, you know, the the the eye in the 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, you know. So, one thing led to another and um it it made me realize that there was something else going on that the what we were learning about Watergate was only really the tip of the iceberg. If you start pulling at the people who were involved like eh Howard Hunt, right? Famous guy, former CIA officer, the action officer, basically in charge of the the Bay of Pigs operation, right? So, he was down in Miami when all that was going on trying to organize this 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. Eh Howard Hunt wrote at least three occult novels. Really? Yeah. And he lived on a place called Witches Island. What? So I'm thinking, well, well, whoa, wait, wait a minute here. Right. Let me read the novels. Maybe there's something there. Who does that? Right. I just said, I want to read these novels. And oh my god, it's an attack on the Kennedys. The Kennedys as Satan worshippers. thinly veiled kind of of a story about that. You know, the vitrial that he had for the Kennedys over Bay of Pigs was palpable in this and he made them, you know, Satan worshippers and stuff. It was really cool. So, I said, I got to pay attention to Howard Hunt a little bit more closely. Okay, years go by. It's now 1979, 1980, and I get a job. I'm working for a living as a regular human being, you know. So, I get a job in this strange company in Queens, New York. uh within walking distance of where I was living, which made it, you know, nice. I could just walk to work. 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-h Howard Hunt's colleague at the the front that they worked for in Washington DC. Okay. So, this guy is working there. What was the front? Well, the front was Robert Mullen Corporation. It was like a a kind of a Mormon operation in DC that was supposedly a publicity public relations firm, but Eh Howard Hun 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 Ly, everybody was one big happy family. This guy had the office next to him also CIA also operating as a front except this guy was based either in Brazil for a long time or in Singapore right so all these things I mean I'm right there right next to the guy who knows personally e-h Howard Hunt and I'm researching eh Howard Hunt and he tells me his name uh Arthur Hawkberg I guess I can tell his name now because I've talked about it I printed it and I I went home after he he started telling me his whole life story he's going into CIA Hey, he's going into this, he's going into that, the languages because we both spoke a little Mandarin, he spoke better than I did. And so there was this immediate connection on the on that basis. And then slowly he just reveals that this was his position. And 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? Had having lost his job at CIA. That's amazing. because of the admiral when the admiral came in after Watergate and all this stuff they fired a lot of action agents right a lot of the the officers who were actually in the field got fired it's a big scandal and you know so this guy lost his job right so I'm 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 right this is not possible like if if you had been a 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 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. Right. So this would happen to me all the time. There's something that happens I think when you set your attention on something that is somehow entropy reducing and it attracts more and more of that thing into your life. And it's hard to say whether that is some sort of retrocausal relationship all some future that's already sort of set exactly or something. But uh it's it's that's so fascinating. And and I was just thinking you know eh Howard Hunt his lawyer uh Douglas Caddy um told dark journalist you know recent somewhat recently that uh JFK was assassinate because Eard Hunt is obviously implicated as as as much as any agent in the JFK assassination itself. Sure. And this guy Douglas Catty said that E Howard Hunt told him essentially on his I think as he was dying that uh JFK was assassinated over quote unquote the alien presence. And so do do you think that eh Howard Hunt knew about you know NHI and aliens and that JFK's assassination had something to do with that? Well, I mean I 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. Uh I believe I I don't really know if I 100% trust it or believe it. Um I know that Eh Howard Hunt on his deathbed did claim that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that he knew about it. Uh and that CIA was somehow involved or at least a branch or a rogue element of CIA. I will I will pretty much accept that as a distinct possibility right 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 burglaring you know burglarizing the Democratic National Committee so yeah there's a connection I'm sure there is right who you can take to court over this I'm not sure can I weave something together and I 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 inter agency kind of coordination body that would give the president plausible deniability on sort of bad things that you know he wanted to domestically and um and then on top of that you had this other separation layer where Nixon would task Howard Hughes with doing the really dirty Mh. And so there's this idea that um you had uh these kind of Cuban assassins um they called them the S force uh or you know they went by different names Alpha 66 and you know Operation Mongoose had something to do with this um and uh uh so he created that originally to take out Castro and Shavara um but that sort of you know didn't end up happening. obviously had the Bay of Pigs. JFK takes over from Eisenhower and the narrative I've heard is that JFK, you know, uh, fires Dulles. Dulles is sort of licking his wounds and really angry at JFK and the Brown Brothers Haramman and reoperationalizes this S force to then take out uh uh JFK himself. Mhm. And what's really crazy is this connects to Watergate because Howard Hughes's longtime lawyer or I think like you know general counsel or you know kind of right-hand guy um 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 that it's this crazy and it's because you have to ask like why if you're Nixon, why would you 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 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. It's this crazy story, but but but 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 disperate individuals. You think they have nothing in common, nothing to do with each other. And then you pull at a certain thread and they they all come together. Right. So tell us who the who who are the nine. Well, this it actually connects to this whole story too in its in its own way. So you have um the nine of course this was a in 1952 to 1953 there's this famous guy not famous yet at the time Andrea Puharic um guy with medical training and technical training. uh he's involved in, you know, technology, you know, uh for medical purposes and stuff, but he also gets involved with um a bunch of sort of borderline psychic people, right? Back in the 19 late 40s, early 50s, there were seances and there was like psychic phenomena research and stuff going on. JB Ryan was doing his thing, studying ESP. And so, you have a guy like Puharic who finds himself up in the in the woods in Maine. He was supposed to be back in uh the city. He was going to go to take up a position in California, I think. But he gets involved with these people and um to make a long story short, there's a seance that's held in uh 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 Dupant and an Aster and a Forbes. I mean, everybody that represents the the blue-blooded brahinss of American society, old money people were at a seance, 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 Paraharage. And one of them uh is the guy who was the inventor of the Bell helicopter, right? So, is that Arthur Young? Arthur Young. So, 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. M she was married to a George uh Payne, Lyman Payne, and also married to Arthur Young. So, she had all of these pedigrees all mixed in together. And she was the best friend of um I think her name was Mary Douglas, if I'm not mistaken, who was the the paramore of um 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. M so already there's this weird connection right and when I say best friends I mean they told each other everything that kind of it wasn't like a casual you know thing so they were they were best friends and then you had a dupant 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 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 uh all of this kind of stuff that was going on at the time. And so he's conducting this seance and he's solving mathematical equations that Andrea Parharage puts him puts to him to see if he's really talking to a spiritual force and this guy is answering correctly solving mathematical equations. Whoa. So then uh 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 brahinss like actual brahinss uh in the Indian sense but they're brahinss assigned to this exalted rank this elite status by these nine forces that are spinning somehow above them which later become identified as residents of a UFO in low earth orbit the same one that is later then being contacted by Uri Geller who was then discovered by Bharaj brought to the United States to be tested it just it gets incestuous But Ruth and Arthur, they have a daughter uh who's also Ruth. Her name is Ruth Payne. She lives in Texas, by the way. And uh she's studying Russian. She's fascinated by the Russian language. She's a Quaker who wants to study Russian. Don't think she ever managed it in her life, but at that moment, she wanted to study Russian. And in her home, she opens her door to some refugees, you know, people who are recent immigrants from Russia. Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina and their kids. Whoa. So they're living with Ruth Payne in this house in Texas. So she gets him the job at the Texas School Book Depository. So wild. So you have this kind of uh blueblooded elite adjacent person who's uh whose mother engaged in the seance with Puharic and you know they they think of themselves as sort of guardians of the world via this like council of nine you know nonhumans or whatever and she is somehow housing Lee Harvey Oswald where if you were to think of like an actor in history or agent who fundamentally shifts timelines in this dramatic way. I mean, he's got to be it. He's got to be it. Yeah. So, it's so wild. So, and 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. Yeah. Uh, 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, xnay 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. Don't give interviews, etc., etc., right? So, we know that there was a big discussion about this going on. M. 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. Um, another example of of that possibly is you talk about some of, you know, kind of people who are interested in UFOs or 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 in circles, but you know, as Matthew McConey says, time is a spiral. Um, so what we have is what got me involved in this really involved in the UFO thing 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 to the extent that I would study it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going through the the Warren Commission reports, the all the I mean, the entire thing, not the not the uh summary, but all of the volumes. Wow. And I'm going through the uh Ruth Payne uh the lady in Texas, the Quaker. Yeah. studying Russian and she's 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 etc. At that point, um, Alan Dulles is part of that committee hearing. He stops her. M he totally derails that story and he he 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 talk about this and he cuts her off. He I mean you just read it and you say what happened? You know it's like Kevin Cosner reading the the thing saying ask the next question. Yeah, right. Ask the question. Nobody ever asked the question. They don't follow up with her at all. This would have been a major story, right? Yeah. But there's also, don't you connect like the Mory Island incident? Oh, 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. So, I pull on that thread. So, I pull in the thread of Ruth Payne and I get to, you know, Arthur Young and I get to the the nine. I'm thinking, what the hell is this? And then, you know, and then I'm looking at the report of of Jim Garrison in New Orleans. Mh. 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? Who the hell is Fred Chrisman? And so I pull on that thread. It's Fred Chrisman from Mory Island from 1947. And I pull on that and I come up with Guy Banister, the same guy Banister who had an office in New Orleans that Lee Harvey Oswald worked out of passing out those, you know, Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. Yeah. Right. So it was all in this one office. David Ferry, Jack Martin, all these psychos were in this one building with Guy Banister. And Guy Banister was the guy. Yeah, he was the guy in the Pacific Northwest during 1947 during the the whole UFO flap with Kenneth Arnold and Mory Island and all the rest of it. So, he's up there, Guy Banister. He's member of the FBI, special agent. He's reporting back directly to Hoover by TLEX which was a form of telegram which was a form of email uh in those days right and they were mentioned the the designation was a special operation or special mission-x it was the X Files right the actual XFiles and he's reporting on UFO sightings that's his job guy Banister's job is reporting on UFO sightings back to Hoover that's so fascinating Yeah. And I believe people think that Fred Chrisman was one of, you know, there were these three quote unquote hobos that were arrested, right? And they think Fred Chrisman was one of those hobos. I don't know if you corroborated that at all, but I can corroborate. In fact, he wasn't the only one. I mean, Eh Howard Hunt might have been one of them as well. That was also a rumor that he was there in Dallas that day. And so and Fred Chrisman is what is the Mory Island incident for for people that aren't aware that there was actually more than one UFO incident uh in 1947, right? We always think of Roswell when we think of 47, but Roswell happened just slightly later. Uh initially it was Kenneth Arnold. uh he was a a pilot uh I think he was with the Civil Air Patrol at the time and he was flying some mission out in the Pacific Northwest uh in the Rockies and he sees a flight of weird craft going at impossible speeds and he describes them like like saucers flying you know dipping over the the skimming over the water which gave rise to the flying saucer scenario but his description of it was sort of a 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's he was the person who started the terminology inadvertently. So at the same time in Mory Island, which is in the same part of the world in the upper Pacific Northwest, um you had this very strange concept. There's a guy sitting in a boat in Puet Sound and what appear to be UFOs of some kind are flying overhead and one of them appears to be in distress and it rains like shards of metal or slag or something all over his his boat, a small boat. Uh killing his dog, uh wounding his kid, his son is in the is in the is in the ship and putting a hole in the ship. So he gets back and he talks to his supposedly his boss. uh they're doing something in in in Pujet Sound and his boss is Fred Chrisman. Now Fred Krman, 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 he seems to have known Klay Shaw, which was one of the reasons why Jim Garrison went after him. Klay Shaw and Fred Chrisman seem to have known each other well enough that Klay Shaw phoned him at the time that all of this was going on with the Jim Garrison and the Kennedy assassination. Klay Shaw. Oh, who's Klay Shaw? Oh, Klay Shaw was the one guy that Jim Garrison brought to trial uh for the Kennedy assassination. Okay. If you know the movie um JFK, uh Tommy Lee Jones plays Klay Shaw in that film. Uh so he was the guy that was at the center of it. Kind of a CIA uh 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, uh, he he beat the rap. He did not get acquitted. I mean, he did not get convicted. He was acquitted. Um, but he knew Lee Harvey Oswald. He knew David Ferry. He knew all the players in New Orleans. So he is arrested um by Jim Garrison on his orders uh for having been involved in the Kennedy assassination and evidently Klay Shaw calls Fred Chrisman. So why right? So you think you're asking yourself this is the guy that was involved in this seinal incident and this is not over. Right? So Fred Chrisman then makes a few phone calls after his friend uh 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 Chrisman uh and his partner and um Kenneth Arnold shows up, right? He's invited to this meeting which is weird. Mhm. 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. Uh Kenneth Arnold was did not have a reservation in any hotel. 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 end until finally they get to the most expensive hotel in town and they had a reservation already made for him. He didn't know about it. Turns out the place was bugged. Turns out a local journalist got a tape of the entire meeting and he dies shortly thereafter. Right. I mean, just too much weirdness around us. Yes. But in the end, they give Fred Chrisman gives the army guys a box of the slag to take back for analysis. This is like tremendous, right? This is UFO slag. Yeah. You know. Wow. So, they get back on their plane and they're going to fly back to their base. Their plane explodes in midair. No way. So they die. The material is gone with them. 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. Alchemist. Did you enjoy that? If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substack. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video with weekly articles exploring all of the strange, forgotten, and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness. So, join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack. I am including the full link in the description of this video. such a wild story and then such a weird connection that you have Fred Chrisman who's reporting to Guy Banister. They're running the X-Files and doing all UFO investigations and then uh 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 you, like you said, you have, I think the address was like 544 Camp Street in New Orleans where you had all these guys kind of working together. And they were bishops in a crazy church. Well, so tell me about that. Do you have time? Oh, yeah. We got all the time in the world. All right. So, there's there's a crazy church. Uhhuh. David Ferry and Jack Martin belong to this crazy church. Okay. Jim Garrison could not figure out what the hell was the purpose of this church. Like, how 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 uh white supremacists in many cases. David Ferry certainly was. Uh Guy Banister certainly was. There was this whole white supremacist thing that was going through the assassination starting with an attempt at the assassination in Florida by white supremacist group. And then there was this this group in New Orleans, right? And Guy Banister was like this rabbid anti-communist as was David Ferry. And so the rabbid anti-communism got mixed up with all kinds of other stuff, right? So there was a church um whose head was headquartered in the Bronx of all places, the American Orthodox Catholic Church, which was 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 a front. It was a front for something. And uh when the assassination took place, another bishop in Kentucky, a guy called Carl Stanley calls the FBI directly and says, "You got to look at David Ferry and and um um very important name, Jack Martin, although it's probably not his real name, as we'd find out eventually." So you have these two guys, right? And they were both bishops under Carl Stanley, who was a renegade bishop who has a rap sheet a mile long and everything else, but he's running a church out of Kentucky. So Carl Stanley tells the FBI, "Look at these two guys in New Orleans. They're involved in the assassination." So the FBI then gets alerted and they kind of look at these guys, they talk to them, these people are really crazy. We don't we can't make heads or tails of this. We're we're dropping it. And then later um it's get gets picked up in New Orleans by the DA. Right. So the district attorney Jim Garrison says we're going to investigate these guys because there is something fishy because Guy Banister and Guy Banister was very fishy. Former FBI guy, long history in the FBI. Uh 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 out of this building. and the 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 Banister died in ' 64. So, he died before Garrison could interview him. But Bannister and Jack Martin got into a a fist fight over the assassination. Jack Martin threatened to tell the feds all the weird stuff that was going on and in his office and so Banister pistol whipped him. So he wound up in the hospital over it. So he gets interviewed by Garrison's people and David Ferry gets interviewed by Garrison's people. And David Ferry is a trip. This is a guy with alopecia. So he has no hair on his head. So he puts fake eyebrows and fake wigs. What? So he had a fake red hair wig. he red hair for some reason. And the funny thing is that um Eh 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's an homage to David Ferry. So but anyway, so David Ferry is a 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 uh a friend of Jack Martin. And so I wanted to talk to him about Jack Martin. And he he gives me photographs of Jack Martin dressed as a priest, right? And he says, "Jack Martin was the guy you went to when you wanted to find out anything about anybody." He said, "Martin traveled over the c all over the country." This guy was everywhere. This guy, his his resume was he was unemployed. He was an alcoholic. He was possibly mentally unstable. He was in hospital various times for this. And yet, he's the go-to guy to get background information on anybody. Right? Martin was incredible that way. and he stayed in his persona as a priest and bishop the rest of his life. So the photographs I have of him in the 1970s years after the Kennedy assassination stuff that was going on in New Orleans and he's in the in the the whole outfit, right? So you wow. So you're saying that the Orthodox Catholic Church in the US at the time was acting as some sort of front possibly coordinating or helping with the JFK. It absolutely the American Orthodox Catholic Church legally came into being in 1965. So it's 2 years after the assassination legally in New York. However, it pre-existed in different places around the country. Uh and it got coalesed into one group in ' 65. And this is where it gets even stranger because in 1965 when all this is done, the leader of that church in the Bronx in New York of all places is a Ukrainian priest. He forms his own church as the American Orthodox Catholic Church in the Bronx. And then he starts demanding the other churches submit to a background check by the FBI to make sure that they're acceptable to him in the Bronx in New York. Like so weird. Yeah. 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, this weird bishop in Connecticut. He agrees, right? He goes from Connecticut to the Bronx to be anointed by this bishop, this Ukrainian bishop. He goes back to Kentucky and he's dead within a month. Jesus. So, I did more digging from a very personal reason because I knew this church intimately. I was involved with that church in 1968 to 69. How were you involved? Yeah. Well, that's a story. I want to hear it. And you know what they say, you know, the first rule of Fight Club. Well, this is the story that opens up everything for me. That makes me suddenly find out that reality is not what we think it is. Okay. To get back to again your original question, this is how long we go on one original question. And to get back to that question, it reality isn't. Reality is really really strange. Yeah. And in 1968, I was still in high school. Um I was a 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 uh decided you know one way to get out of this and I have to admit I came up with this idea is that of all the deferments there are and there weren't many in 1968 Vietnam was at its height the Ted 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 uh 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 and after that what are you going to do? And the other option is just go in the army right say screw it I'm you know I'm in the army. So those are the three options. But there was a fourth and the fourth was the US government uh would not um force you to join the military if you were a priest in a church of some kind. If you were a minister, that was the the 4 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. It's somewhere in between. And but he he loved all that stuff. So he had, you know, chalicees, he had saboria, he had all the the the fancy implements and stuff. His parents were divorced. So he played one parent off the other. So he would get money from one, money from the other. He would buy all this stuff, right? So he had chazibles, he had uh cassics, he had all the stuff that you really needed as a Catholic priest. He could have opened a Catholic church with all the stuff he had without exaggeration. So I said, "You have all this stuff. All we have to do is incorporate as a church and we're home free. That's all we have to do. Then we're priests and screw it, right?" So we said, "What? That sounds doable, right? The problem was we were under 18 at the time. We couldn't sign legal documents and we couldn't sign a corporation document. I think in New York you had to be 21. So we had to find people to sign for us. But we eventually did and we incorporated the Ottophilus Savonic Orthodox Church of North and South America incorporated which was just him and me. Mhm. And one guy that we knew, an older guy that we uh we claimed was our archbishop. Right. So we became like priests in this church and that was going to be our function. So we decided in order to make this even realer, if that's a word, we would get dressed in all this weird stuff, Orthodox stuff. See, Catholic stuff, the Catholics had a strangle hold on being Catholic. But in the Orthodox world, there's just hundreds of Orthodox churches because they're national churches. So you have Greek Orthodox churches, Russian Orthodox, Serbian, etc., etc. There was no Czechoslovak Orthodox church. So, and that was our background. So, I said, "This is cool. We'll make a Czechoslovak orthodox." It just fell into place. Yeah. Yeah. 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, you know, and we look genuine, right? I mean, for two 17 year olds, we did, you know, which is like a Halloween costume, right? But we kind of pulled it off. Yeah. And uh then we decided we were going to gate crash the funeral for Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated. It was June 68. Uh was a big blow to me. I thought Bobby was going to be our way of getting out of Vietnam, the end of some of the racial stuff that was going on. So, this was like a 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? And I said, that doesn't 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 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 let's let's just try it." So, we got on the subway the night before and we go down and we talk to some guy in there and you know what? We're in our full regalia and he says, "Oh, uh, okay. Um, I don't know. Uh, 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. At all? Yeah. No. So, they say, "Okay." Okay. So, we say fine, we're doing it, right? So, we go into the church proper. The casket is already there. Bobby is in St. Patrick's Saturday night. So, we go up to it and, you know, do appropriately religious things. And in the pew, the only people in the church at the time is Rose Kennedy and uh u Jackie Onasses. So, they're there praying and we're looking at them and 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, uh my friend says, "We're going to do this, right?" I said, "We can give it a shot." You know, we rent a limo. And we rent this limo and we take it from the Bronx to St. Patrick's. It's really weird what you can get away with in a limo, right? The limo pulls up to the side entrance of the church where all the celebrities are getting out. And we're in the limo, so we must belong, right? The driver opens up the door. We get out and all this stuff that we're wearing. Um, 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 person and I would do all the talking cuz 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, Sloanic Orthodox representatives." And he says, "Oh, okay. Follow me." And he leads us into the church. Leads us into the sanctuary where all the other religious dignitaries are sitting on the other side of the communion rail. If you're Catholics, any of you listening, you know, you don't go on the other side of the communion rail unless you're a priest or an alter boy or something. You have some particular religious sassal reason to be there. But we're we're stuck right in the right in the front, right? My friend on one side and me on the other. We're just staring at each other. We're in there and all these bishops and clergy, other Orthodox bishops are there, so it's freaking us out, right? But we're brassing it out. We think, well, we're here, you know, no one's going to believe this story. And if I had been anybody else, if I had been a different person, I could have walked in there with a device. You know what I mean? I would have taken out the American leadership was in that room, not just the religious leadership. It's an incredible failure of security that this was allowed to happen. I It's incredibly wrong. And yet we just brass it out like we belong there. So we did do that. You know, we we were there for the whole service. Um 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 pointed at us. Their cleites are all over us. No one knows who to how to identify us. So, there's probably video of you leading a funeral procession for Bobby Kennedy. I've been looking at this for it for a long time. There's a very bad, very blurry video. That's wild. You would think there would be some perfect video of that, but there isn't. That's a Forest Gump moment. If I've ever zelig moment wild, but there is. And I just got uh just a couple of days ago a still that somebody got of the procession and the two of us are there. So we I know now you know this tangible evidence that exists. It's blurry but it's us. I mean you could look and you can see these guys don't belong where they are. So we led the procession out. It's another story. But how great was that because I had Andy Williams behind me singing the battle hymn of the republic. I had Leonard Bernstein conducting the Hallelujah Chorus from the from Handle's Messiah, right? As the doors open on Rockefeller's 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 know we're in deep 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 know, you won't know it. So, we decide to go out that way. And as we're going out that way, of course, we run into Rose Kennedy and Jackie again, who are also trying to go out that same way. Um, so we get out, but we take the subway back. We didn't keep the limo too expensive. And, uh, then we got back to the Bronx and went back to school the next day, you know, with teachers and students looking at us and, you know, saying, "Nah, can't be." Right? So, so we managed this. But the thing is, the reason I'm telling you this story is because on our way out, we bump into guys from the American Orthodox Catholic Church. The intelligence front. The intelligence front. They're outside. They couldn't get in. We did. That's wild. They couldn't. Yeah. They're handing us this sort of brochure. They're saying, "Come and come and see us." Right. 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 we wound up joining, right? Because we needed we were two 17 year olds, you know, 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 the um there was a a quid proquo for this. So I I turned 18 at a different time than my friend did. So he he got his clearance before I did. So, I was brought to the um selective service board, the headquarters in New York City to talk to the head of selective service. He's a really strange guy. I'll never forget him. Um he wore these, you know, elbow patches, 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, uh we're going to give you the thing unless you want to be a a chaplain in Vietnam. We can arrange that. Making a little joke, you know. 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. Keep an eye out." You let us know when you see one coming through because you you know who's who's real and who isn't, right? You keep an eye out and just let us know, that's all. And you're 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 and years later I mean I always suspected because I know I saw weird going on in that church from the beginning but I found out years later going through Jim Garrison's files he had finally they had finally released his his correspondence and when I got to 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 Propheta, 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. Doesn't make any freaking sense. 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. We have our cowboy UFO tee. Pretty epic. You see there's a rancher. He's witnessing a UFO. A little cow is getting abducted by the UFO in the background. And then you know that I love mid-century history, specifically spooky science atomic era stuff. And so we have our atomic age tea here. Uh pretty cool vibe. Uh you got a robot serving this guy. A little martini and then a UFO off to the side. Go to American Alchemymerch.com, americanalchemymec.com to check out all of this amazing new apparel. The cowboy tea that I'm wearing is 100% cotton, super relaxed fit. We went for quality on these. Uh so check them out. So they say when you're, you know, getting briefed like, "Hey, just look out for Russian spies." Um how 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 the 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 all the people he was being introduced to. Mhm. Okay. Were members of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. These were the Russian Orthodox who were anti-communist. They fled uh Moscow during the revolution uh the Russian revolution in se 1917. They fled to Paris first and then they opened up this operation in New York. So these are Romanovs, right? And they brought all their treasure with them and they brought a lot of priests and bishops and stuff and they 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. Jivago territory. It was pure Russia. I mean, you were in Russia when you're on in those premises, right? So there was a high school there. We befriended the principal of the high school. So we would, you know, we would know a lot of background stuff of what was going on until the other Russians found out that he was talking to us. Uh, in which case they pushed him down an elevator shaft and broke his legs. We visited him in the hospital and he says, "Don't come back again." You know, that was Brother Victor, another whole story. The other church was the one on 97th Street and Fifth and that was the Russian church that owed allegiance to Moscow. That's the one they were running agents through. Okay. We would go there once in a while just to hang out and watch them because they had a whole different way of doing the the liturgy. It was a 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 uh there's one particular thing you're taught during ordination. That's a kind of a secret prayer that is 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, but there's a prayer and a gesture that you do to make this change official to call down the forces to make this happen. They don't know it because they didn't go through the actual real training. They went through training to be spies and they got enough training to pass as Orthodox priests, but they didn't get everything quite often. Sometimes the people in Moscow cleverly kept that back a little bit and that was a signal to the guys back in the states or abroad wherever that the person they were sending over was not to be trusted. Right? He was KGB. So you had priests who were KGB. Now if you ever watched there was American television series called the Americans. It was about a husband and wife deep uh 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 K who are KGB agents operating as priests. Wow. And they were running, you know, 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. Now this is all happening in 1968, right? I'm still 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 on. I know this guy is running ops because the only people who ever showed up uh were FBI CIA types, right? 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 Jay or 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 be for an intelligence operation so we had strange guys coming in from all over the world to become bishops. People didn't even know how to genulect 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 Bafrea crisis in Nigeria. Also in the 60s there was a civil war going on in Nigeria. So you had the Baffron who were like the the the Christian element fighting against a a Muslim uh group in Nigeria. So they were looking for uh independence from Nigeria. So the Nigerians 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 Aluya. That was his name. HP Aluya. Holy prophet HP. I pick him up at the airport in 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 the the limo, I guess, back to the uh 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. And we consecrate him a bishop. He's now bishop Holy Prophet Aluya. And the Nigerian embassy is there. Nigerian consulate rather in New York is there. It's the Nigerian side, not the Baffron 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 to convince other Nigerians in the Christian side to stay with Nigeria as against Bafra. This was a a ploy in the civil war. The civil war was raging when we did this. And we put him back on the plane the next day. He goes back to Nigeria. God knows what happened to him after that. We don't know. Never heard from him again. This is fascinating and it's just touching off a whole life for you of catching the attention of intelligence agencies by accident. by accident through pure serendipity and I want to make that clear to any conspiratorial audience members because I think that is emblematic actually of your life is 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 you know government organizations and then they get very interested in in you right um uh you started this story off by saying first rule of Fight Club. And then you also said that this story was sort of indicative for you of just how trippy reality is, how there's something else going on. Why is that for you? And why how do you think the fight club analogy relates to this? Yeah, good question because I'm glad you picked up on that. Um, I barely graduated high school. Uh, 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 uh here and there strange things happened to us and for for a while in 1965-66 um I was fascinated with occultism in general at least what we knew of it at the time which was not much and so uh Ouija board stuff seances that kind of thing so I was like totally into it and it it was a source of paranormal phenomenon we actually had paranormal phenomenon we were kids uh I was 15 years old I had a brother and sister were younger what would happen, you know, table levitation, that kind of the table rising, table tapping phenomenon that the Victorians were so proud of. But 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. 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 uh you know questioning my sanity or whatever and but I I know what I saw right so these things would happen but only in the beginning and this is like a 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 um there's nobody playing a hoax in that room because it's just your family they don't have believe me the wherewithal to carry on a hoax like that. It was a little little too, you know, elaborate. And that happens and what happened after that was uh members of my family became sort of entranced with this process 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. At one point, we were told there was going to be an Aboriginal uprising in Australia outside of Perth. It was very specific. Mhm. 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 by the spirits in detail in sort of a download or auditory. Did you hear it then? Ouija board. Ouija board. Whoa. Letter by letter. This is how draining. This this is right. So, we have all this information, my mother and I, and we go to the consulate, the Australian consulate in New York to warn them of this. That's how off the charts insane it becomes because they're looking at us like, don't think so. I really don't think so, but thanks for coming in. Uh-huh. So I knew pretty much at that moment if not before really because I was hesitant to do all this that there was something totally wrong that was taking place here, right? That the phenomenon in the beginning is is the is the hook, right? And the hook is real. But then you make a lot of assumptions about what's behind the the curtain, right? And so you follow that and wherever they lead, you follow. And that's a serious mistake. Yes. Right. But pay attention to it anyway if you're there. Pay attention to it. Make note because this may come in handy later. If nothing else, to reassure you that you're not going crazy, 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 you're putting a lot of attention. You're giving it information. You're feeding it and you're getting a feedback from what you're feeding it. Right? M this is a dangerous field for some people. Um you can go off the deep end for if you're already weak. If you're already kind of you don't have critical thinking ability. Um you don't have a lot of you know psychological strength let's say. Yeah. From that point of view this can lead you astray easily and it leads people astray a lot. The these are fanties, 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 you're involved in this thing that I became fascinated with when I started writing Sinister Forces. How do these fantasies influence our actual everyday lives even if we don't believe in the fantastic? But we're in we swim in a sea of fantasies of ideologies of people insisting certain things are true when they're not, you know? So, and you and you believe and trust these people, right, for whatever reason. And this is what is is really dangerous. So I when I started to to shift my studies away from um sort of Ouija board style occultism, I wanted to know there was something darker. There's something deeper. Is there a way to exert control and not be controlled? Because being controlled to me was 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 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 what you think it means. You know, like the sorcerers apprentice, you know, Mickey Mouse with the the the the mops and the buckets. If you remember the first opening scene of Fantasia, which why would you? But anyway, this is a famous it's 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. So the sorcerer has to come in and fix it. Right? So this is this is the problem that 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 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. Um, 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 um the way you interact with the outside world, that point of tangence between yourself and the outside world, that's where the the sort of matrix is. talking about reality to go back to your again original question the idea of reality what is it as Robin Williams said reality what a concept it is a malible concept for sure and we all have different versions of it you have to figure out what your version of it is and and and kind of go from there slowly step by step I almost think control is almost a misnomer too like having some sort of deliberate intention feels like of utmost importance but there are all these paradox boxes like probably in order to quote unquote control you need to like be okay losing control at the same time having faith in something higher. I think of control, you know, there's obviously the proverbial kind of lefthand path and occultism, right? Or the idea of sort of storming heaven or something, you know, with with, you know, you write about this in, you know, your book about celestial ascent traditions, you know, a stairway to heaven. And so, um, yeah, it's a it's like it feels like this like really hard art form that is, uh, you know, you've touched on it. Exactly. It's an art form. Yeah. It's not a science. Not exactly. Not yet. Um Alistister 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. Um it is an art. You begin to realize it is an art. That which motivates art, that which creates art, that feeling, that artistic expression, that's closer to what this is than science. But science has an input to it, right? The more we understand about the artistic impulse, the more we can kind of isolate the scientific parts of it, understand how they work. If we're talking about consciousness, we are now in that murky territory where art and science kind of mix. And it may be that art will have us have more to tell us about how consciousness works than science right now, right? Because we're kind of limited into repeatability with science. Science depends upon repeatability of an experiment. And this is what's destroyed a lot of people in the occult field. Um, broadly speaking, especially the mediums, the the clairvoyants, 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, people want you to repeat it. And you can't under those circumstances quite often. It's really difficult to do, right? So, you make up, you fake it. And that's the part where you lose your soul to this whole process where you try to keep people interested. You try to keep the the public on your side. You try to prove that your initial experience was real. So, you fake another experience hoping nobody will notice. Right. And that's that's where you cross the line. Yeah. Exactly. You have to be willing to understand that your experience is possibly non-re repeatable. not under scientific laboratory conditions. difficult to do right you get like some statistical anomalies with the remote viewers and with you all those guys at the SRRI and all you know all those guys who were testing all of this you'll get statistical you know improvements you got Ingo Swan who did tremendous work uh in that area right but it's still when you force somebody to do something unless they're really masters of it already it's not going to happen yeah it feels like unless something's truly kind of heart-c 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. There's always almost this Foustian kind of like blowup moment at the end where like it all goes to And um you know there's a a biblical story of Simon of Maggus 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 to 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 you're walking a very straight and narrow path. There's there are a bunch of landmines everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah. And so 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. um when you're asked to define it. Let's let's use the term magic because it's kind of universal. When you're asked to define it, you can't you fall apart. You can't define fight club. You can't talk about it. If you try to talk about it, the problem is the language that I'm using relies upon a a set of 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 we think we both understand what we're saying, but there's a point at which I know we're not. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And we're trying. We're honestly We can honestly try. We sincerely want to, but our language itself is in the way. The tools that we're using are are difficult. 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. Sure. Right. The other way, right? So I mean this is 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 cabala for instance, I've done a lot of study in that direction. are we talking about um other you know Chinese uh alchemy for instance I mean they're using language we translate it into English so we think we know what they're talking about but there's always that point at which you know we don't know there's always that point where where they're saying something they mean something else than what is really being translated right so this is 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 Which is how to go back to all the way back to the beginning of this conversation which is how the abductees and contactees feel that they're communicating with alien intelligences not through words but through images. Yeah. It feels like a mimetic layer that is sort of sublinguistic or something. You know, one of my favorite uh 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 this sort of fake garb or whatever, then uh it would be sort of inherently impenetrable and it would like sort of act on some hermet like truly hermetically sealed layer that like even certain participants in it wouldn't even know they were a part of it. Right. So So yeah, it's so fascinating. Um, where do we go from here? Well, I What does all of this have to do with UFOs? Because you and Tom Dong, who I think is extremely knowledgeable on this topic and and both both of you guys in your own ways caught the attention of some extremely impressive people in the government. People like Neil McCasslin and Rob Weiss, uh, who I guess isn't government. and he was skunk works locked but you know adjacent. Um do do you want to talk about that process of how you know similar to your your your experience in the um 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 you know um just out of the clear blue sky and it was the end of 2014 um November I think when I first he first contacted me and I didn't believe it was Tom Dong um because I get a lot of weird emails as you might expect and some very strange some strange phone calls also and so I uh you know okay but then I I did a little background and got back to him I think the same day day later or and he said, "Okay, let's talk." And we spoke on the phone first. We had a lot of very long conversations uh from 2014 to the beginning of 2015. Went on for hours. And but basically his pitch was, I want to knock on doors. I want to go to their offices. I want to find out what's going on with the UFO phenomenon once and for all. I think this is the time we're going to go and we're just going to do what we can to do it. Whatever resources I have, due to my celebrity, uh, due to whatever other resources I might have, contacts in in in government and, uh, 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 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 uh around 200 I don't remember 2007 8 n something like that early 2000s um on the secret space program was the name of this of this thing I was invited to come there and talk on the secret space program I had no clue what he meant this guy right um in Amsterdam this this Dutch guy contacted me says we want you to you know whatever you want to talk about but this is the name this is the the theme, the overall theme. Um, and so I said, "Okay, I'll talk about, you know, I'll talk about what we've just talked about about the UFO situation, the connection to the Kennedy assassination. We'll do that." Right? So, I did that. Um, and it it was at that symposium that I met like everybody. Uh, I met Richard Dolan was there. Um, Timothy Good was there. In fact, we split a bottle of scotch. Wow. uh 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. Um I met um a lot of 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 a you know, 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 wearing the real stuff. And here'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 this is the problem. You know, there's a lot of weird stuff here. You're not being told the weird stuff. I only happen to know it from an accident. I happen to have been there and seen some of the weird stuff. I said, "The weird stuff is there, but it's all considered classified." However, I said, "Our information is not considered classified. My personal information is not classified." I said, "We need to spin that around where we can tell the government, you know, our information is classified. You can't have it." Right? For some reason, I was just riffing because they told me to keep it going because I my speech had been too short. Right? The other guy wasn't coming on for like 15 minutes. They said, "Can you throw it out?" So, I said, "Okay, I'll talk. I'll keep on going." you know what 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 this was the point I'm talking about the Kennedy assassination you know Hoover and you know eh Howard Hunt and all these guys and Fred Chrisman and Guy Banister 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 in Secret Machines. Yeah, excuse me. Sinister Forces. Yeah. Too many books getting confused. But in uh Sinister Forces, there's just one chapter on Well, there's one chapter on the assassination with all these weird guys. Yeah. Okay. And then in a later volume called communion, there's a chapter on the UFO phenomenon per se and conversations I had with Whitley Strieber who had contacted me years earlier uh for something kind of unrelated. But you know, we began this long conversation on email uh by on on this subject also. What do you think they meant when they said, "Hey, come speak about the secret space program because that uh term carries a lot of baggage." Yeah. and is often associated with the network Gaia and Corey good and you know this idea of 20 and back or whatever and this sort of you know all that sort of stuff which seems like honestly BS to me and yet you write about celestial ascent and you know the idea that um you know you can you can ascend through seven levels and that there's sort of this map and that you know maps to you know um the Big Dipper and and and uh and the North Star. And so um does that somehow have to do with some sort of secret space program? That concept the like cobblestone that would be so cool, wouldn't it? Con that would be interesting. It would be really cool. I don't think so. No. But what you're talking about the 20 and back and all this other stuff that's 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 a panel with guys I mean who insisted that we have trade agreements with other planets and stuff and we're we're trading back and forth. Do you believe any of that or absolutely not? Okay. Not not any of it. Yeah. I don't really either. I'm not part of the Corey good crowd or the Steven Wilcox if I drop other names. Same. They just But then sometimes I think about those guys and I'm like if you were 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 it is there anything there from my way of thinking? Everything I've heard them say and everything they've put forward, I have to 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 uh then I was invited to replace Jim Mars who was sick that year and who who passed away that year. It was a good friend. Um so I 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 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. Right? When they started doing that, then they really lost me because they were obviously talking about things they did not know or understand. Yeah. Stuff that they had read on a website somewhere or something. And so they drew all of these correspondences together and were promoting these weird combinations of things. Right. And I I kept strenuously trying to point that out even publicly on on the dis with everybody else saying, "No, that's not how this works." Right? That is not how it works. What do you mean? Of course it 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 push back. They want to believe in this. It gives them a format. It gives them it gives them freedom to make up is what it is. And when you throw a cult in there, you can make 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 things and and and and that does have to do with the occult. Like I think of you know the Borderlands 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. Y you have stuff with James Jesus Angleton and Hugh Angel being involved in the Knights of Malta and certain secret societies. And so and then obviously a lot of the early CIA was sort of skull and bones. And so you wonder is there some hermetic substructure like we think of 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 the whole point of sinister forces was that there are sinister forces. Yeah. Right. But these sinister forces are such that to um to equate them with how shall I put it 20 and back. Yeah. No. Come on. No. Yeah. So I mean this this is the the thing is is there an occult concept here? Obviously, we've shown I think I've shown through documentation the connection with the UFO phenomenon and the Kennedy assassination as an example. That's these are documented individuals that had documented histories, right? So, that we know and the churches that's again documented, right? So, all of this is is there. But does that mean there's a cabal of high ranking Freemasons or something pulling the strings? No. No. Because that that's too public again, right? Yeah. That's not how this works. So there is a again we're talking about fight club. Yeah. There is a mechanism. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Um well there was a mystic who wrote uh the famous play The Bluebird. Okay. Made movies out of it. Materlink. Maurice Matlink. Belgian mystic. Mh. And he was a mystic. He was an astrologer. He was a mystic. He also won the Nobel Prize for literature. And he wrote the Bluebird which they made into various versions. And if we get into Bluebird that's pulling on a whole bunch of threads that you don't we really don't have time. Well, Operation Bluebird was prem Ultra. Yes. Yes, it was. It was the first MK. Was it named after Metallink? 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 null. We don't know how many shots were fired. There's discrepancy. And the guy who fired the shots um might have worked for Russia according to the plot of the play Lee Harvey Oswald and his name was Alec which was Lee Harvey Oswald's name in Minsk and he lived there. That is wild. This was all written before Kennedy was born. So if there's somebody pulling the strings, is it a somebody the way we think of a somebody or is it a mechanism of some kind as Valet called it a control mechanism? Yeah. Right. It it feels like that. It feels like things are sort of you know like the I think the newagy dumb word we use to describe it your term is like quantum entangled or something but it feels like that like that's one example where the probability of that sort of prediction at that level of specificity so goes beyond like any sort of prosaic explanation around survivorship bias or you know like selectivity bias or whatever. And there are tons of other examples if you look for this sort of thing. There's this book written by Morgan Robertson in 1898 called Wreck of the Titan or Futility Wreck of the Titan. And this ship is called the Titan and it crashes in the middle of the Atlantic at night. Uh hits an iceberg and it's the largest, you know, uh uh liner of its time and it's in April and it's the same size as the Titanic. And so it's you get down to like levels of specificity that are insane. And it's like basically a decade before the Titanic. I think some blue-blooded elites were on board. The Astros were on board the the actual Titanic. Um so and you have a lot of these examples. There's a sci-fi author Dean Counz who predicted COVID the Wuhan lab. Um you have this kind of modern, you know, self-proclaimed prophet talking about Trump getting shot in the ear in the ear that he was shot in, right? Like four months before it happened or whatever. You have the adventures of Dawn and Baron Trump and their timetraveling 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 there was a book that uh 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. Uh even to the name of the police chief who was the police chief eventually, the one who who solved the case, who 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 completely described in advance. Was that Texas A&M or where Texas&M? That was&M. Yeah. 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. Um kind of time is a spiral. Um the glitch is the proof. The glitch is the proof that this is a malible reality that we live in. Mhm. Um I'll give you an example in 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 the a majority Muslim country, over 250 million people, Muslims, the fourth largest country in the world. And you think of it as an as a Muslim. It is a Muslim primarily country but it's replete with Hindu and Buddhist statuary uh archaeological sites going back hundreds and hundreds of years right 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. But then they have a bunch of other calendars, right? There's a five week a five day week calendar for instance and they they calculate special days, special uh ritual days based on these on these things. And the whole point is it's a a civilization very aware, very conscious of coincidence. M 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 that we're they're measuring it by solar and lunar and a bunch of other systems, right? And they interlock kind of and so they they publish books called a primon, which is like a like um an almanac, right? to tell the future, 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. 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 in the case in my case of living they're Javanese. Right. People from the island of Java. have their own traditions, their own ways of doing things. They visit graves, right, which you're not supposed to do if you're Islamic. And they have other practices that we would find really strange and 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. Um well, for instance, I I was fascinated by this one thing that I had heard about and I could not believe um but it's true. There is a cemetery there's a number of cemeteries in Java that that do this. There's one in particular u that I visited that um in this cemetery if you're a Muslim or you're devout Muslims is only for devout Muslims is not for tourists. Um you go to this particular spot, there is a grave of a famous prince who had died on that spot and his his grave is there but a lot of other graves as well. It's a cemetery uh an Islamic cemetery and you go there um because you need something you know like Catholics have novenas right uh those who are Catholic know what a novena is it's like every you know um nine every good Friday every first Friday is nine in a row or something you you perform a a ritual you pray for something to happen some good thing to happen uh somebody is sick you want them healed or you need success in business or whatever it happens to be you pray a novena for Well, this is something similar again using that calendar. So on the on a particular day every month, you go to this site and you have sex with a stranger. Jesus, not necessarily Jesus, but a stranger and at a at a burial at a grave. Yeah. Okay. Let me let me back up a little bit. Okay. You have to be married first because Islam does not approve of extrammarital relationships. Mhm. So there's an imam there who will perform the marriage ceremony. So you marry this stranger in a regular ceremony. Then you have sex in the cemetery either on the ground, you know, on a grave or they've been building little shacks, little huts for this purpose as well. And that takes place and then in the morning you go to the imam and you get divorced. what it's legal and then the next month you come back the same thing happens again and you do that for a spec specified number of times depends on the on the purpose it depends on what what book you're reading I guess but that's that's what it's done and it's it's done it's I I was there and I w I didn't witness the act but I what is the symbolic purpose of that ah this is where Indian and Javan these things start to to combine, start to come together, right? It the the the kings of Java of Indonesia in general before the rise of Islam were considered tantric kings. Um, Borau Buda is a beautiful example. Prammanan also is Hindu and Buddhist. The they were very involved in the tantric interpretation of Indian religion. In fact, even the Dalai Lama came to bless the Bora Budor monument as saying this was a representative of Azriana Buddhism. This was this was their um 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 the teachings were brought to Tibet. So there's a Tibet India Indonesia connection that's very strong. So we don't know all the details on this very well, but there's a story about the prince and a lost love and uh you know his his his the love of his life died and then he committed suicide or something. So you go and you reenact this 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 it's 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 and your kind of perceptive epistemology itself. Sure. So like Germans are more pessimistic because like they speak more in past tense or something botching that slightly, but like something like that. And so yeah, if if you have a a you know kind of a whole epistemology that is more based on meaning than time, right? And connections between events versus just some like you know um flowing of time that is sort of permanent. Um you know you have the you know the 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 be get a whole different you know epistemology in life that you would lead and and society and culture you know if you extrapolate that out so it's fascinating you know time is the most used noun in the English language and it's completely undefinable it's definable only with respect to the movement of bodies or even you know in in science it's sort of you know oscillations on an electromagnetic wave or something but it's uh it's so weird and it's weird scientifically too. You know, it's taken as this kind of um classical axiom in quantum mechanics. Uh but you know, you have time uncertainty with level of energy, you know, just like you have position and momentum uncertainty. Um and uh and then obviously you have time dilation and kind of a general relativity context. And then gravity kind of makes sense in, you know, doesn't make sense, you know, in in the quantum context. And um and then gravity and time are obviously extremely interlin 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. It's more it's experience itself. Yeah. And then there's probably some some substrate of meaning that like like your uh 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. Mhm. It's like a punch card or something and your your mind is doing the punching, right? But it's like your that's not the substrate, you know, like whatever that that sort of paper is and you can you can maybe you know move the cursor along different tracks to kind of switch analogies there, but like you know it's very strange. Yeah, it is. It's fight club. It's fight club. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to sort of talk about these things. So, so how specifically, so okay, so you do this this speech about the secret space program or whatever, uh, you know, in Amsterdam and then how do how do you catch the eye of because Neil McCassland is like doing foreign material exploitation at Wright Patterson, which if you know anything about Roswell, like the material ends up in foreign material exploitation at, you know, Wright Patterson, at least according to the Philip J. Corso account and like a lot of UFO lore. So, if there was ever a guy to like really know what the quote unquote UFO program is and holds knowledgewise, it would be this guy. And he's reaching out to you. Well, let's Yeah, it we reached out. I mean, I don't know how Tom does what Tom does. Okay. But what what did happen that I that I'm reasonably sure was was part of this. Tom asked me to write something that he could show people, okay, 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. Yeah. Kind of of a prologue to to this. So Cargo Cult was a couple of pages long. And the the idea was take the cargo cult uh concept and say that's how we started on this planet. This 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 you do. It's it's um in the South Pacific Islands in the 20th early 20th century, uh planes would land on islands in the South Pacific. uh you know near near um 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 these stone age tribes are looking at this thing and they're saying god damn we don't know that this that you could do that right so they went and they built landing strips, you know, hoping that these planes would land and give them stuff. They said, "That's all you really need to do. You build a landing strip, you get a like a conning tower or something and and you and you you imitate what we're seeing and maybe planes will land and give us all this good stuff also." That was the concept. So our concept in starting this project was that our entire society is a cargo cult because everything we're trying to do to longevity to live forever and to travel to the stars has its roots in something extraterrestrial 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 in kind of mythology? Well, the famous one I guess is uh in the Samrian myths, right? 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. 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 Samrians the knowledge of writing and agriculture and everything else that Samrians are famous for supposedly having invented. So that's their 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. Um, but this one is their the idea that they got their knowledge from this creature. And the hat that he's wearing is depicted on artwork and it looks like a fish's head. 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 miter. It's exactly the same design, you know. 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 a an initial contact event with people from the stars, right? That's that's our thesis. Yeah. It's our 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 got to write and you got to keep track and you got to have numbers and you know and and besides look at the stars. Did you ever look up? Did you ever wonder like what all that's about?" So, you know, suddenly we're like okay. Yeah. And so we're we're doing that. Can you imagine the Babylonians the the the impetus behind the Samrians and the Babylonians, the Acadians to stare at the night sky and chart those stars. It's amazing. And I mean, all the Graham Hancock, Robert Shock stuff, like the most interesting part about all of it is how astronomically aligned all of this ancient megalithic architecture is to the stars. Not only to the stars, but to like the alignment of the stars in like 10,500 BC, you know? It's fascinating. It's fascinating because not only they didn't have telescopes obviously, but the fact that they would because you don't have a telescope, you have to sit there and watch it for hours. You've got to mark the passage of these things. The planets is one thing, right? The sun and moon is like the obvious ones, right? They're easy to see. But then once you get past that, you're talking about the other planets. You have to notice that there is certain planets that don't stay in the same place as the other ones do. That's the beginning. So, you're starting to keep track of that and then you're keeping track of the background stars that don't move, right? Or they move like in a circular motion. Um, the amount of work that requires, the amount of attention to detail, and you have to be writing at that point. There's no other way to keep track, right? You can't memorize it. So, you're writing all of this down. So, that's integrated with the idea of writing, language, and numbers. It's all integrated with the math of astronomy. You need both of those things to understand what's happening, right? To keep track, to keep a record. That to me is amazing. Why do that? And it's a quantum leap from being a hunter gatherer. Absolutely. It's a it's a you know, just a huge jump. Yeah. Do you So obviously out outside of generically a lot of myths involving people from the stars coming down and, you know, teaching knowledge of the stars and, you know, ma 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 the the short answer is no. There isn't one, but one of the points we make in in secret machines, we try to make it a couple of times. I hope I don't bore anybody with it, is the fact that everybody has a piece of the story. Everybody's got a piece of what happened, you know, and we ignore the other pieces at our peril. Everybody has a creation story similar to this. When I say everybody in general terms, so in Asia, in South America, in Australia, all over Europe, um, 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 there's data hidden in those stories. There's definitely data there. We have to look for that data. We have to listen to these stories. We have to save them from being from extinction. Um, 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. Uh, no one in this country does, right? No one in Russia or China or anywhere else does. We all have pieces of it. We need to collaborate on that if we're really going to come get to the to the root of this situation. Sounds like the Tower of Babel or something. It is. Yeah, it is. we're we're split this way and we keep reinforcing that split and it's uh it's it's terrible. Uh because we're we're blinded by as I mentioned in the very beginning 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 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. Yeah. you know, and then you have another guy who's like, you know, running like skunk works, which is the most advanced R&D division of, right? 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 onlogical model of reality that comes from like a lot of data around this stuff. That's our impression. We we we got into a point in 2015, I guess it was, that um Tom is sending me these these long emails that he's getting, right? And he's saying, "What the hell do you make of this?" Uh-huh. And um we 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 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? They're 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 adviserss said, "Have you thought about have you really looked how much do you know about Greek mythology?" Like whoa. Who said that? Uh I can't say. Okay. So he came out and said that. It was a he. He came out and said do that. Right. And it's specifically talking about Prometheus. Now that gives the show away, right? If we take the Prometheus story as an encrypted story of what actually happened, we're getting close. And I think that is what what it is there. At some point, somebody did something they weren't supposed to do. And it might have been it might have jump started civilization on this planet, right? It might have been that. But Prometheus suddenly became the thing. And so Tom is saying, "What the do we know about Prometheus, you know?" And so I'm saying, "Let's let's let's take it easy. Let's go." You know, Prometheus was this guy. He stole fire from the gods, right, for the humans. He was giving fire to the humans. Humans didn't have fire. They were freezing their asses off. Prometheus came down and said, "Here's fire. Get warm, you know, and the gods didn't like that. So they punished punish Prometheus, you know, you're going to get chained to a rock. You know, you're going to be punished for the rest of your existence for this for this thing." So I said, ' Let's go back and look at this. This is what they're trying to tell. 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. Yes. Against the gods themselves. Sort of a rebel, right? You know, sleeper cell god. Yeah. which the the Gnostics believe 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 the impostor, the interloper, the you know, the guy who was not really God. So, I got breakfast with Tom Dong once, who I love, by the way. I think is he's he's a great guy. He's the best. Yeah. And he actually referenced Gnostic thought at the time. He was talking about the archons who are considered kind of almost uh imprisoners of the kind of lower material world and like gnostic ideology and you hear gnostic thought you know run across a lot of ufology like it seems like Jacqu Valet is roughly kind of gnostic in his orientation. So, do you think that we're living in some sort of lower prison planet and, you know, our our senses are all there to sort of mislead us and we need to somehow escape in some sort of disembodied way or what's your sort of, you know, take on that? You're talking about Fight Club again. Um, some of us are in prison, right? Uh, some of us are, some of us have seen the exit. There was a famous um author Wilhelm Reich uh you know vventor 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 he was against authoritarianism in general and he wrote a book about that and he has this image that I've never forgotten that we're all in this prison. We're all in this box, but there's an exit sign. There's a big sign with the shining letters, exit, but the guy who points to that exit and says there's the exit gets immediately beaten by everybody else in the prison. And that image has stayed with me for a very long time. You know, uh there's an exit sign, right? There's a way out. We we know what the ways out. The way out is we we're just, you know, we're afraid of it. we're um we're too distracted by everything else. But the idea of becoming uh free in oneself is there. It's it's just a question of wanting to do it badly enough that you're going to beat down the people who are trying to stop you from getting there to get to that exit. Right? So the whole celestial ascent thing um was an example of that of people understanding that there was a way out but that it involved kind of reprogramming to use that awful term but a reprogramming oneself you know uh to to get rid of a lot of the extraneous stuff that we're we're we're reacting to. We're constantly reacting to things you know uh 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 there's a choice beyond A and B. There's a choice beyond plus and minus, right? Um I guess the the the Crowley people say zero equals to, you know, that's one way of of formulating this idea. But there's a way of of getting out of it. Um but it's not it's 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 to follow uh a path while maintaining a sense of humor. Once you lose that sense of humor, you're screwed because then you become a fanatic. Fanatics famously have no sense of humor. And what you need is that sense of humor, which is a sense of what I'm looking at may be real and it may not be. Isn't it funny? What if it is real? 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 synchronicities and when you put a ton of weight on the synchronicities, you're sort of in really bad territory. And when you put no weight in synchronicities, you're also in bad territory. So it's like a sila and caribbdus between extreme y randomness, materialist reductionism, 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 there's a way out, but it's impossible to talk about, but you do talk about it because you write you wrote a book about it. You know, Stairway to Heaven. All my books are about it. Yeah. All Okay. Fascinating. They're all chapters of one book. Interesting. Well, that's amazing that you're saying that. Um, what do you mean when you say that exactly? You think you think secret machines? Sure. And sinister forces. It's all It's all ultimately about even the Nazi books. Uhhuh. 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 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. Um, 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? Uh, Himmler most famously. So, he was he ran an anerba organization. This to me was fascinating because I didn't believe it existed. I wrote my first book on Holy Alliance from the point of view that I wanted to write a non-fiction version of The Morning of the Magicians, right? I loved that book, but it was 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 uh I get invited I invited invited myself to the Library of Congress and to the um to the archives, the National Archives, and you have to go through a few hoops to get into the archives, but I wanted to see the captured German documents from the war. They had this bunch of microfilm. And I walked in there and I told uh the archivist, very well-known guy at the time. I asked him, I said, "I'm looking for documents about this and about that." Trying to word it gently so I didn't sound like a total cook. And the guy said, "Oh, you mean the the SS Ana? We have them all over here." So I said, "Cool." Right. So I'm 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 cabala that's not Jewish, you know, and on and on. I'm looking at all this stuff and it's just masses of documentation. That's a wild a lot of them signed by Hy Hitler, by Hinrich Himmler, right? And I'm I'm staring at this and I'm thinking, you know, how come nobody's writing about this? All these books on Nazi occultism and nobody's looking at the real documents, the the the the original papers. Didn't they go to Mount Kyash looking for some underground civilization there among other things? Yeah. But they they went all the way into Tibet, right? And they're measuring skulls with calipers, right? I have photographs of that. So wild. And their their fascination with Antarctica, right? Came from Hyperoreia, which was the first root race. If you look at kind of theosophyki and stuff, didn't the wasn't uh 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. the um as unholy um unholy alliance pointed out you know the the swastika was famously imprinted on Blovask's original books as the symbol of the arans and the whole idea of the arans being this the current spiritually advanced race right uh came from Bllovaskki uh and there was a group of um militia in 1918 1919 you know the the war ended in 1918 world war one uh 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 but the right-wing types were army veterans right who had fought against uh Russia during the first world war so they formed independent militias fry as they called them and one of them was the stall helm and the steel helmet and on their helmets were emblased the swastikas this was as early as 1918 and 1919. So there was a um an assassination of members of the Tula Gazelle shaft uh on April 30th in 1919. Now the Tula Gazelle shaft was a German secret society like we've been talking about. Uh and they had the swastika as their symbol, right? This is long before Hitler showed up. So the swastika was their symbol and it was a symbol of the arians and they got that again from the theosophical writings and pseudo theosophical writings people copying blosski and so that was like this was it this is our symbol the symbol of the arians were arians you know um a lot of them would not have passed the blood test at the time but they consider themselves arans so these people were massacred on April 30th varus knocked in Germany uh and it led to this outcry among the right-wing groups or the right-wing groups and the and the leftwing groups had this fight, this pitched battle in the streets of Munich. These were occultists fighting on the streets of Munich, right? It was bizarre. As if you had given the Golden Dawn machine guns and said, "Have at it." You know, it was just so strange. And that that 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. 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 Zerier, 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, 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 a thing that Himmler was in charge of. Yeah. And the the anti the Antarctica expedition was very real, right? And uh, you know, there's I mean, the whole, if you look at like all the the the SS 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 the the the follow-up question to that, though, is like what are the implications? because there's some aams razor explanation that this is just you know the fascinations of of you know the the ultimate hubris of this kind of you know uh Napoleon Alexander the great type the machinations of this sort of ridiculous you know mind of of of Hitler um 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 of the Nazis because it was this Foustian bargain but you know they were drawing from some sort of non-human intelligence or or or something else. What do you think? Well, you know, all all those points have been made and I understand them and I understand the resistance of of academia to to embrace this story as they have re reacted to it. Um, but the documents don't lie. It's just a question. Do you interpret them the same way? The Ananba 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 baptism for instance with a a Nordic style christening. They replaced the marriage rights with a Nordic style marriage right. They were deliberately trying to do this. So, and wasn't Hitler writing poetry to the Nordic gods and as a soldier in World War I? Yes, he was. He wrote it. They're reprinted in I think it's Tolen's biography of Hitler. So, the poems are there. He was writing to Odin and Thor, right? So, and Okay. And then this is where things get very speculative and weird, but you I mean, one of the constant sort of tropes in UFO stories, UFO abduction cases, is the Nordics. It's always the Nordics, the grays, or the reptilians. Um, the Nordics seem particularly interesting, powerful, like these sort of perfect humans or whatever. Do you think there was any sort of Nordic Nazi relationship? Okay. Okay. We have to define our terms. There's so many terms in that sentence. I don't know where to start. Um, Nordic, Nazi, and relationship. Um, not just that goes beyond the Nazi fascination with Nordic mythology. You know what I mean? I understand. Yeah. Um, okay. My short answer is no. Okay. But let me qualify what I'm saying. They were fascinated by it. Um, Himmler was fascinated by this. In fact, they tried to prove there was an Arian race all over the globe. They sent archaeologists looking everywhere for traces of swastikas wherever they could find them, thinking that was the the key, right? And that comes from Bllovaskki. I mean, give me a break. Right? But it got lost in the in the sauce there as they, you know, 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 Arian relationship there. We find it in China. It must be there." You know, 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 they had the this was not a scientific process, right? They had the result they wanted. They're looking for stuff to confirm it. They didn't look for stuff that didn't confirm it, only for stuff that confirmed it. So, here's the evidence that confirms our story. So, this is part of the problem there. They wanted Nordic because they wanted to get rid of Christianity and Judaism. They had to get rid of Christianity because of Judaism, right? And they were against Judaism for whatever reasons they were against Judaism for. It was anti-semitism was popular in Europe, all over Europe, Eastern Europe. I mean, the protocols of the elders of Zion came out of Russia, right? So that started this whole thing. People believed it was true. So you know the Jews are having a secret meeting and they're discussing the takeover of the world. Um 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 in the eyes of many people. I was asked about it at a at a an academic conference in Indonesia. Right. M so I mean this stuff is there. Uh I was met a terrorist the leader the guy who created the Bali bombings in 2002. Uh and he's telling me you know it's the protocols of the elders of Zion. Like it's real. I'm telling him there's like two Jews in your entire country, right? You're not really suffering from Jewish invasion. But anyway, that was his his perspective, right? So this has become this thing. This has become a problem that we cannot get our way around because history has made it kind of real even though it's not real. We know it was a hoax invented by the secret police in Russia during the time of Thesar even before the Soviet Union. So this whole thing becomes this this problem, right? And the Nordics become the solution to this problem. We're really Arians. We're really Nordics. We don't belong in this situation that we're in. you know, we're in this. We lost the First World War. It's must be because of the Jews. Can't be because of us. It can't be because of we extended ourselves in trying to invade Russia for crying out loud. Napoleon could have told you not to do that, right? So all of these mistakes we made are not ours. They're somebody else's. So naturally, they want to make contact with their source. And they found their source in a guy called Vistor, Carl Villigut, 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. Whoa. And Himmler put him make gave him an 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 him. 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 that time. And did he say it was like hyperoreia? Like Oh, yeah. Really? It was Tula, right? Whoa. Right. This is like Atlantis or Yeah. So, they're buying it. Whoa. And Himmler, one or two cards short of a deck, right? He builds Vevilsburg Castle. Mhm. Right. Which I went to and I did a a TV thing like 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago for that on that. That's a a beautiful castle, but was in disrepair when Himmler took it over. He refurbished it with concentration camp labor and he built basically uh a round table for his 12 knights to sit around and have seances, right? And you know bring down the spirits of the ancient Tutonic kings. This is so crazy. So they 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 then and then there's a question of were they interacting with anything? And I think in your model reality, you you would say yes, right? Sure. And then who knows what it is, but it could have been anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It could be totally trickster. It could have been those guys from the Australian consulate telling us, you know. Well, simultaneous to that, you have these neopagan rituals that they all have to go through. 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 secret machines. Y there you go. And something else you 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 contactes you talk about Adamsky, George Hunt Williamson. Sure. Um, 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 is two years later in 1947. Well, is there a connection? I think so. I think I think we made a pretty good case for it in Secret Machines based on the information that we have. Um, and that is something that people don't realize. We think of operation paperclipip as a purely American uh thing phenomenon which it was but the Russians had their own version of paperclipip and the Russians brought more than 3,000 scientists and their families into Russia whether by force or you know hook or by crook but they did and they built an entire city um I believe it's in what is now Barus if not Ukraine I it's in the book also with a precise location they built this operation there to renew all the the experimental programs that have been going on at Pinamunda 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 after the Soviet Union fell some of this documentation became available was to build a kind of flying saucer and it was based on the Horton model. Now the Horton model uh you can find this on the internet everywhere. the the diagrams are uh public information now. Um was a flying disc, but but the the bottom one one side of it sort of chewed out. So it was kind of a a C-shaped craft. Uh the kind that that Kenneth uh um Arnold saw, you know, in 1947, the same design. Without him knowing at the time, he wouldn't have known that this was the design of the Horton craft. So the Hortons, the two brothers, um, one of which wound up in Argentina developing craft for Peron and another wound up staying in Germany and nobody seemed to want him for anything um, for whatever reason. I think he was the test pilot for a lot of the Horton brothers um, uh, devices. So maybe he wasn't considered a technician or an engineer or a scientist, but there were enough Russian scientists they could rebuild it and see if they could make it fly. So, with 3,000 scientists in Russia, with Nazi um presence all around the world after the war, it's a possibility. And I'll tell you why. And I was thinking to bring it with me, and I guess I didn't think I didn't realize our conversation would go in this direction. And it's a good thing I didn't. It's a big heavy thing. The US Congress published in June of 1945 before the war in Asia was over. They published a report on basically what was the Maison Rouge meeting that happened in 1944 uh in Straborg. 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. 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 2 in 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, asiendas, all sorts of places that they had bought in the in the years leading up to the end of the war. And then in addition to that, we find when the Clinton administration ordered an investigation as to Nazi gold and what happened to the Nazi gold that was that was missing, they found just within a few months because they didn't have a lot of financing to continue this for a long time. That committee only lasted a short while. They found 40 tons of gold. 40 tons of gold that had been shipped out of the Bank of Lisbon by submarine. 20 tons went to Macau. Well, they all went to Macau. 20 tons went into China and 20 tons went into Indonesia. That 20 tons of gold probably jumpst started 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 Hitler's former finance minister had asked Sukarno to do. Whoa. Okay. He had met Sucarno. He had been denoxified, shocked and had wound up in Indonesia visiting Sucarno saying you have to build an Islamic crescent to defend against Chinese communism. Right? The best way to do that is start up 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 the is the implication that Roswell was Horton brothers technology that might have gotten into Soviet hands. Could be Soviet hands. It could have been somebody else's hands because the Nazis had assets everywhere. Now they didn't have assets to the kind you would think would develop, you know, what we think was the prototypical flying saucer. The amount of I don't The problem is we don't know what a 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 sim you do have real documented evidence that Hans Conler was running this thing called Scottoworks and from 1942 to 45 uh in you know uh uh breastlaw and pills in you know modern Czechoslovakia in Poland and they were building what seemed to be saucers like Rudolph Shriber who was a technician there said that one climbed to 40,000 ft in a few seconds you know Richard Meita had all these plans for saucers. You had Victor Shawberger 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 centripal not centrifugal force. So it wasn't outward moving it was inward moving and it would it would cause sort of thrust as a result. And so you had all this evidence that they were working on things like that. You also have a book by this guy British journalist named Tom Aguguston about this sort of great game dividing up of scotto works of commtop uh between the Soviets and the US. So we know that this was like of vital strategic importance. We also I think now know due to air force documents that calm himself who is this ruthless Nazi I think Albert Spear who was head of Nazi armament said you know he was uh 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 Gerbles and and Hitler and, you know, it's like he's got has to be I think he that's a high bar. It is a high bar. I think Commer had a plan to assassinate uh Hitler in in the in the final days of the Third Reich. So crazy guy. Um 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 they really wanted to find the Horton brothers because they were building these sort of sauces prototypes. Yeah. But then you also have people at Roswell and they're like a weird being with three or four fingers and toes came out of the craft and was definitely not human. And so those two things just don't line up or comport at all. Obviously, there's disinformation somewhere. Somewhere. 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 was human technology. Proaic. I'm not sure. Yeah. Sure. Exotic human technology. Exotic human. But remember when you're talking about Roswell and you're talking about Wright Patterson, you're talking about all the Nazi scientists. Uh Walter Dornberger from Pinamunda his first posting was to Wright Patterson. He was in Wright Patterson when the Roswell debris was brought was brought in by train. So wild. So he was there and so okay who else would you have wanted to look at that and he was head of I think a A4 V2 program in in he ran Nazi Germany. Yeah. He ran he was uh the boss of uh what's his name? Warner von Brown. Warn. Yeah. Okay. Wow. So he was at Oberamal and yeah it's interesting you know and and I think you you do have also the Avro car 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 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 so it kind of like when I was a kid yeah when I was a kid in the in the 19 late 1950s, you could buy a plastic model of the Avro. That's wild. That's so wild. I had it when I was a kid. It's crazy to see. I mean, there it looks like a flying lesser. There's like, you know, um there it really does. There's wind turbine photos of it being tested and it looks like you're like I I'm in Star Wars right now. Like this. It's remarkable. And then we we do I think have documented evidence that Richard Mita who was from SCOD works and commerce stop made his way to at least the Avro car project that was going on in Canada which was British aircraft and John Frost and in partnership with the American CIA. So you have one piece of the puzzle there. Um you have Henry Henry Kanda who was famous for the Kanda effect. Oh right. He had basically the first patent on a flying saucer in 1936. Um he was a Romanian but he was living in Vichy France and he was overtaken by you know Nazis obviously and he was consulting on project Y at Wright Patterson as well. So we know that um you have uh another guy named Eric Henry Wing who was um head of special projects at Wright Patterson. He went to school with Victor Shawberger and then he moved over to Kirtland Air Force Base right after that. So you have all these Nazis who are working at right Pat um which is phenomenal because everybody that actually worked for us during the war lost their security clearances right so Oenheimer loses his security clearance Jack Parsons loses his right um all of his the entourage around the suicide squad right all the people who founded basically JPL wound up losing their security clearances they couldn't work anymore and we moved the Nazis in our enemies right and we put them in charge the whole thing It was just to me mindboggling that that would happen that way, you know, but it just did, right? So mindboggling 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 thinking some why did we bring in that many? Yeah. And then we realized the Russians brought in three times that many, right? So wild. So and they were in contact. The American groups and the Russian groups were in contact. They found that out later. Wow. Because the the the Russian scientists they had in New Mexico, right, were going into the village into the local towns and they were sending mail back to Germany which would then get sent over by courier to the Russian scientists in the Soviet Union. So there was contact being made. Of course, that was shut down once it was found out, but it was going on for a while. Nobody knows what was being discussed. Was it contact between the former Nazi factions of both? Wow, that's pretty fascinating. Yeah, I think there's some story of Warner von Braun, you know, um, giving off trade secrets at the border in Mexico or whatever. So, there is maybe it's this like rogue Nazi network post World War II that was like still vital for a little bit. If there was a rogue Nazi network post World War II in the United States, how much more likely it was that it was in other countries where they didn't care? Yeah, totally. Yeah, even more likely. So, more likely. So, there is a likelihood, statistical likeliness. That'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 that had the measurement you know in pieces in it and all the uranium you know and the engineers that was going to Japan that supposedly Oppenheimer visited at a crucial time because he couldn't figure out how to make the freaking bomb work. Wow. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's even Warner von Braonn and you know like the look at the early you know NASA Apollo program um and NASA Saturn program. It was literally a transplantation of the Nazi program space program. It was it was word von Braonn Arthur Rudolph and 129 Nazi scientists and that was it. And so it's just like you are really dependent on their knowledge somehow. And what was the overall context? Right? If you look at it, you're looking at a geopolitical sense. To the United States government at the time, we preferred to have the Nazis so that we could fight the communists. It was again a binary situation. So we buried records of these guys. We denazified them ourselves. They should never have been many of them. They were Nazis to their death, right? They did not suddenly become Americans because they were living in, you know, Arkansas or someplace, right? Or Alabama. So they they suddenly did not suddenly become our defenders or our allies. They were just there being paid and saved from going to the Soviet Union. So the amount of trust we placed in these people, they didn't deserve what we did, right? They didn't deserve the trust from my perspective. We had fought against them. They were developing bombs that they reigned on London during the Blitz. These were people who killed without thinking. Uh that was their job, right? To give them the credit that way. They were working for that regime. But now we bring them over, we find out that philosophically they're Nazis, right? Because the the communists are the bigger threat. Which is why in my other books I talk about since we're talking about the range of it um 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 communists. They're not godless, you know? I mean, Odin is a god, right? So, the idea being let's let's work with the Nazis. Let's hide them. Let's get them let's 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 of the scapegoat, right? And uh you know I'm not necessarily biased towards any ideology here. I'm I'm I'm Jewish. But like is there 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 the cycle going. Like if we are in some sort of prison planet or something, that's how you'd like keep the thing the machine running. Yeah, maybe. Um I it's it's 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 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. Um because communism is the bigger threat. Why would communism be the bigger threat? Because communism is fundamentally anti-religious, right? Religion is the opiate of the people, famously uh mis quotations basically, but that's what it means. Religion is what people need as an opiate because they're living under very harsh conditions. So the idea was improve the conditions of the people. They won't need religion anymore. That's kind of a I wouldn't not a very realistic point of view. I think religion is of one kind or another. Spirituality anyway is here to stay. It's part of our innate back and makeup. The run the race to religion as a as a way of finding a sucker or or or assistance in a time of emotional stress, you know, that's something that people do. And what Markx was talking about saying getting rid of that because, you know, it's not it's not very useful. Just concentrate on things that you can fix here in the here and now. I understand the the impetus of it knowing how badly the church treated people for centuries. You know, the Orthodox churches included and the and the 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 you know eradicating your enemies. M on a moral level. It wasn't a practical thing, but it was a moral thing that said people, well, we have to get rid of these people. They're evil. So, the church has that in its background, which is the fascist point of view also, right? Get rid of these people who are standing in our way. You know, the Nazi ideal was get rid of all of these people because they're in our way. Okay? They're they're holding they're holding back the race. Um, 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 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. Um, so I don't know. I I it's it's a it's a thorny question because it requires a lot more thinking and a lot more a lot more context, I think, for what was going on. But in the United States, if we just port it back over here, um, it was considered to be, you know, weak-minded, to be both anti-communist and anti-Nazi. There was a very strong Republican candidate. I write about it in I'm not sure which book anymore. Uh, Secret Machines. Um, God. Um, no, Secret Machines War. I think I wrote about it also in one of the Nazi books. I think in um in the Hitler legacy, there was a an American political 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 assistance to to Argentina. And another Republican said, "You're crazy. We can't do that. You know, leave them alone. Let the art let them let them live there. Who cares?" Right? We're we're against anti-communist. Let's not muddy the waters. And the guy says, "I can do both, right? I can be anti-communist and anti-Nazi. I can do both things. We can do both things as a country." And they said, "No, you can't. It's going to be one or the other. We have all these Nazis working for us, you know, um with with the 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. What is the rationale behind this? Why is that okay, right? Why are we okay with it? Are we okay with it? Or is this part of the problem? Is this part of the prison mentality that we have that we have to pick a side? It's like the prison gangs, right? you got to be on this gang side or that gang side, right? Who 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 qu because you've probably spoken to as highlevel people in government who deal with the UFO issue visav 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? Hm. Like like the qu the questions would be is like what is the program like like like is there a material do they have material from UFOs that are not of human origin? Um would be one question. Do you think there are saucers and hangers, little bits and pieces of things, or do you think the saucers and hangers are tech protection for some sort of lineage of exotic science that comes from the Nazis? Or what do you think? See, what I've been told and what I think could be two different things. What do you think? Um, 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 but you hear all the analogies of, you know, iPhone with Da Vinci or whatever where it's like Da Vinci is a genius, but he wouldn't know what the hell. you wouldn't know information theory and bits and you know what the chip was inside of it and yeah of course you'd be able to like press some buttons and stuff but like it would be the 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 miniaturaturization I mean he might have gotten he wouldn't have figured out what an iPhone was unless it started beeping at him and the voice came out of it. Well, what if that's where we're at on UFOs? Well, we've had the UFOs for 50 years. I know, but that that's what I'm saying. What if we do know some things about it, but we don't know how to, you know, fly them perfectly or so. I don't know. I'm the the part that that's that's my problem. Yeah. Is that we can't be the only ones. Russia's got to have crashed vehicles. China's got China has a crashed vehicle. Do you so 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 um 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 we're going to keep it under the vest 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 got to be a lot of them. Yep. Has to be more than one. Yeah, of course. Okay. And I've heard a lot of rumors when I did business in China, which I did for years. Yeah. With the Chinese government that there was something that crashed in Chinese territory. I think the Russians got it though. Um the So, what is that thing that crashed in Chinese territory? It's to them the the scuttlebutt was this is one of your flying saucers, they would say. But but like of the of the Soviets or the Russians or or Horton, who knows? Okay. But it was something that was kept under wraps. If a Horton crashed, who would care? Yeah. It was a Horton. It was never going to fly. It crashed. End of story, right? So So there there's a logical problem in the in the like it's it's convenient for us to sit here and say the US government. The US government is only one government on the planet and they only have so much territory, right? The Chinese have a big chunk and the Russians have it and all the other countries that have crashed equipment, possible crashed equipment. All the countries that have sightings, which is almost every country. You implied earlier that what you think and what you've been told might be two different things. So, you've been told that we do have crashed actual genuine UFO maybe extraterrestrial craft in our possession. I was told by way of omission when it comes to the subject of do we have materials in our possession. Okay. There's been a wishy-washy response to that. Oh, we have materials. Okay. And are they extraterrestrial? Are they well they 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? 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. Lie to me again and say, no, we don't have a saucer. Don't leave it open-ended. Don't leave it like maybe, you know, we have a flying saucer. What does that mean? Why would you say that? Is that part of a disinformation project that's been underway since 1947? You guys haven't gotten over that yet. You know, we've gotten over it, right? We're 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? 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 um a guy called, you've probably heard of him, Michael Aquino." Oh, yeah. Infamous guy, right? Isn't he like a Satanist or something? Yeah. Temple of Set. He found it. He was with Le's Satanic Church of Satan. Uh he had the weird eyebrows. Um all the rest of it. He was implicated in all sorts of things. I had written about him in um on Holy Alliance because he conducted a ceremony at Vvilsburg 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. 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 I wanted to know. I'm the kind of guy I need to know, right? So that's why I have to face terrorists and Nazis and stuff. I have to see how they react, how they talk. That tells you a lot. I understand that instinct as well. You got to, right? Well, you do it all the time. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. 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. Come on, we'll hang out. It'll be fun, right? All right. So, I go to this thing and it it was weird. It was wild. Everybody in that room except me, I guess, was a 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, you know, 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 John Alexander was there, you know? Yeah. I met John Alexander at that time. Okay. I mean, for the audience, John Alexander is a longtime 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. Sometimes skeptic and sometimes not. Kind of hard, but that's the way these guys always do it. So, he was there. He had his picture taken with with with Aquino. Oh gosh. So, all these guys are like, "Yeah." And Aquino did get his his commission. and everything else was reinstated when they said that the the accusations against him could not have happened because of a number of things. What were the accusations? Uh child abuse. Jesus. Yeah. But uh it turns out he wasn't in town when this stuff happened. I mean literally wasn't because he was on some military mission somewhere. Is is your sense that he's an evil satanic guy who was he capable of things like that or did you sense some goodness and you know people just somehow misunderstand him or what was your what was your sense? He was a he was int he was an intellectual guy. Very very intelligent guy. Um charming when he wanted to be charming. Um 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. Um, and he was very ariodite 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 Mali and killed 200 people. But what is he trying to do? Like if you're you're running the you know this church of said and you're Satan self-p profofessed Satanist and then you are you know in intelligence circles like what's your what's your MO like what's your mandate in life he understood his his famous thing and it was similar to John Alexander's was non-lethal warfare which sounds kind of nice when you just look look at the words it's non-lethal so we're all still alive right sure but how do you conduct warfare then under those circum irstances. 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 Wes Morland famously said, right? When you got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. And that was their kind of modus operandi. Stay on top of them. Feed them all sorts of weird They believe in this. Make ghosts. They believe in vampires. Create vampires, right? Scare the out of the villagers and they'll come to you, right? That was the Phoenix program. They did all kinds of things. They killed a lot of tax advisers and tax collectors as well for the Vietkong. 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 Dodie did it. Well, yeah. So, he was obviously kind of scoping and messing with Paul Benowitz. Do you think on a larger scale than that? He messed with with everybody in the UFO community. Yeah, fair enough. He was it 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 six different races of aliens and people are like, "Wow, an insider's telling us. You don't know the history." But um but do do you think I mean there's there's it seems like there's something deeper and more nefarious about the way you're describing Aino and what he's doing and Dodie who's like this is the point obviously doing really bad stuff but like messing with an individual in a way to like throw him off from like looking at Kirtland Air Force Base at like possibly like human tech. But it got him killed, right? No, Benowitz actually just obviously totally messed up and unacceptable, but he had a psychiatric break and was in the hospital and die from that. No, but the pressure from Dodie feeding him false information. Somebody is already in that state. To me, that's that's culpability. I you know, I think in a court of law, he I think he should be held responsible for for doing horrible things to Bowett. Yeah, I've covered it and I think it's it's horrible. But I it still feels like of a different variety from the Aino 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? Well, I think we're 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 for to see how they could do that. They did it during MK Ultra. They did, you know, during Blueberg, during artichoke, uh, operation often, they were looking at occult systems. How can we manipulate occultism? I mean, is there anything to that that we can use? Yeah. You know, so obviously it was on it was on the 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 in certain villages and stuff. They believed in vampires. They believed in in ghosts. They believed in hungry ghosts. That sort of thing. There were a lot of strange beliefs depending upon where you you came from. And they exploited that. They made them appear. Um, in one of my books, I even talked about it in detail in one of my novels. in uh the Lovecraft code there's a series of three books that are just they're fictional but not really. So, in one of them I talk about that type of operation, how it would look, right? 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, right? And then disappear again, freaking out, you know, 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 um 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 or something to make this thing appear. We know how to do that. Wow. Right. So, and that was then. That was that was back in the 70s, right? So, we know how to do this kind of stuff. We can make things appear and disappear with stage craft, right? M I mean Aquino was practicing stuff like that. I mean the other Phoenix program guys were doing this this kind of thing. 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 C or magic with a K. So like some sort of a cult, you know, attempt to create like an egregor or like a kind of consensus thought form that appears as a UFO. Or is it like pure technology? We're gonna beam a thing in the sky. No, I mean they're gonna they're gonna beam a thing in the sky, pure technology, but with an 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 since 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. Yeah. 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 onlogical belief or whatever. Do do you think that there are genuine non-human intelligences and and you know, possibly extraterrestrials visiting Earth? You know, it it's Are there non-human intelligences? Yes. Yeah. Bluntly. Okay. Yeah. What levitated your table decades ago? Yeah. And maybe go to the Australian consulate like an So, yes. You know, did did the Aboriginal uprising ever happen or No. Okay. Okay. Not in all this time. Okay. Still waiting for it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's hope the timing is a little off. Yeah. Yeah. So, no. Something something is non-human or preterhuman or ultrahuman. 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, so you said non-human intelligence definitely exists, right? And then, you know, extraterrestrials or beings that can be embodied and corporeal and that's what I wanted to get in God. That's what I that's the the 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 uh the Men in Black episode that I had. Yeah. What happened which seems to point to that because I have no other explanation for it. Nothing makes sense in this in this context. So that's some of your listeners I think have probably viewers have seen heard this before but I'll make it brief. Um don't make it brief, tell the whole story. It was in it was in um Rhode Island. Uh I lived there in this would have been 1990 when this was happening right around the time of the first Gulf War which is how I I remember it. I I put it in that context because for a minute I I wondered if there was a connection and I had been shopping in the car and I drove my car back to my house. Ashaway road at that time was you know houses here and there. It wasn't a a big city. It wasn't even a a village. It was just, you know, I had a house and then next to me a little while over there was a house. There's a house over there. So, it's not a very busy place, a country road basically. Um, and so I'm unloading packages from the car and I look up and I notice there's an old model black Cadillac uh 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. Uh, and I'm staring at this and that's happened to me once before in my life. That was during Vietnam era. Uh, when I was 19, 20 years old was I guess I signed a petition or something and somebody was taking my picture co-intelpro or whatever the hell it was at the time. But so I know what that looks like, right? That camera facing at me. And so there it was again. And um, I looked at this thing and I thought, "The hell is that?" So, I put down my groceries and I start walking over to the car to see like what the hell is this, right? And the car just takes off. Um, I try to get the license plate number. It was too fast for me to get a license plate number. But the license plate looked like the Rhode Island license plate, which was 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 him. 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. 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 oldfashioned wood trim cat, oldfashioned station wagons. So, we're talking like a 1960s a station wagon, and two women come out of the car, one from the driver's side, one from the passenger side, looking like I always in my head, it's always like Manson family members, you know, they're sort of very sweet, sort of very pale, you know, face, kind of light hair, wearing old like cloth coats, you know, looking like old-fashioned people, like they might have been from a cult somewhere. you know, and they came out very sweetly and looked at me as I'm desperate to get out of my driveway saying, "Can you tell us where the Devilis family lives?" Devil Vilbus. And I I said, "I know. I'm sorry. I I don't know." Okay, thank you. And they got into their car and pulled out and drove away. And like an idiot, I didn't realize this is part of the team, right? They're keeping me from following the other car. I just want to follow the first car. And so I'm like flumx. 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 Devilis 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 Devilus family is. There is no devilis in Rhode Island, but there was a devil 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 Verer von Brown personally, but he was just some guy. He was an engineer. Now he was, you know, uh, 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 Devil Vilbus. They're in Ohio and they make machines that you can sell this these 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. So I looked them up and there's Dilbus 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 in the station wagon. I could not put this together, right? Except they plucked maybe the name to Vilbus out of my head and plucked the one that was connected to Huntsville and Verer von Braun, right? I don't know. I was like, "What the hell was this about?" Right? It was just a mysterious Men in Black episode because they were driving late, I mean, early model cars, you know? Uh, it was 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 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 NH, you know, the kind of wispy thin hair and the pale skin that that is kind of a, you know, something you hear as far as descriptions of alien interactions, quote unquote alien, whatever these beings are. So maybe it was like a genuine anomalous. Well, 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. So same. Well, this is what happens. I'm in the airport, Changi Airport. Very famous. I'm in the airport. Uh I'm I was on a business trip. I think I was probably going back to Koala Lumpur. So I was, you know, going to catch another flight. I'm dragging my suitcase and then someone taps me on the shoulder and that's not done in Singapore. You know what I mean? It's like, of course there's tourists there, but people don't they're not touchy feely in that part of the world. So, I get tapped on the shoulder and I 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 I shake myself, you know, and I start following her like with dragging my suitcase, but she's gone. She's just gone in the crowd. Just disappeared. But she tapped me on the shoulder and waved. What? That is I'm getting the chills. That is such a weird story. Yeah, that threw me. That that 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 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 mowled over the meaning of it? And has anything else come up since? No, I've gotten I've gotten stuff since then, but it hasn't been that specific, that direct. I mean, and that 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 I'm in I'm at home. I'm in Florida now. And uh 2:00 in the morning, something like that. Place is very quiet. And then suddenly I hear this really loud electrical buzzing sound. Very loud. And I'm I'm thinking, what the hell did that? Did I short something out? I don't have anything that, you know, a couple of TVs in my computer and that's about it. So, I'm looking around to see what that could be and I can't I can't find it. And then right then as I'm looking I get the knocks, right? Knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock and then knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock then knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock really loud knocks and it's from inside the house right it's nothing from outside there's it's 2 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 I emailed uh Whitley Streer I said if anybody knows how to make sense of something like 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 stop the car. It's in a complex of buildings. I stop the car and I think that's really strange. The It's a helicopter. It's really close. It's got a search light, but I don't see what it's looking at. There's no light on the ground, right? I'm looking at this thing and I stop the car and I'm expecting to hear, you know, the really loud rotor blades. I hear nothing. So, I open the car door and I stand up and look at it and I'm looking at a triangle with the lights. Whoa. And it's just sitting there and it's totally quiet. Not a sound, not 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? Like, I'm 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. 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 just it didn't move. It just was here and then it was over there. No sound and then gone. And I said, "Holy I just saw a UFO for the first time in my life." And I just published books about it. Right. Yeah. And written about it. Never saw one. Yeah. But there it was for the first time. That's remarkable. I I emailed that to Tom and he said, "Damn it." I wish it had happened to me. Yeah. Well, at some point I'd love to have Tom on to discuss, you know, I think he's had some interesting experiences as well. But um um so what is the Necronomicon and why is the Strategic Air Command interested in the Necronomicon? See, we're back to Fight Club now again. You know what I'm saying? Um what is it? Good question. Um I was involved with that thing since 19 75 I guess it was. But that's a that's another long story. How much time do you have? Uh I have an infinite amount of time here. 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. I think Lincoln saw it. Yes, he did. Um shout out to Lincoln. Shout out to Lincoln. American alchemy researcher, friend and kind of informal understudy of Peter Lenda. That sounds sad. The dangerous the sorcerers apprentice. There you go. So yeah, uh that was an interesting thing because I there's a long story involved that as all my stories are long. When you're 75, all your stories are long. Um so this one goes back to 75. Um, it goes back to the church. It's connected to the the Orthodox church, the one that we started, my friend and I. See, we started the church and then in 19 um late '69, I guess it was. I I got tired of the whole thing because it just too weird for me. Um, 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, what? Tell me about that. What What happened? Well, we we had, as an example, I made some noise about this on Substack. I think it was a year or two ago, and the wrestling community got really freaked out. You know, the worldwide wrestling people, they totally freaked out on me on this one. They say, "Who the hell is this guy? This shouldn't be doing this." Um, it's it, believe me, it it connects. It all connects up. We formed this church. Okay. Uh 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. So we made a a friend, a guy called Andre Pinacio. Andre Pinacio 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. Andre Pacio achieved some fame briefly in the movie The Godfather, the first one. If you remember the famous baptism scene, some guy in red robes um presiding over the baptism. He says nothing. He's a big guy wearing a sort of a yamaka and uh red robes and white surplus, I guess. And he's there throughout the baptism ceremony. He says nothing. That's Andre Pacio. That's how in plugged in he was. He got himself a walk-on in the Godfather, right? So, this is this guy could do that. So, now he's inviting us to this meeting at some place called the Brotherhood Synagogue, and that's in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. And it was a synagogue plus Presbyterian church was a common they shared the space one with the other very famous place at the time in in the village. So we had a meeting there with the rabbi in charge of the synagogue operation and ourselves the two of us Andre Pacio as the third and the fourth guy was a famous heavyweight champion. He had dropped out of sight for a long time. He was a mixed like he was Italian um but he had Argentine roots or something. Um 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 knew nothing about this, right? I just knew this was a huge person. He was huge. I mean, when he shook your hand, it was like your hand disappeared. He's talking to us about running operations for the CIA in Lebanon. He's just bluntly talking about it. He figures he's among friends. It's a synagogue, right? So, he's saying, "Don't worry about what Congress does or doesn't do. It doesn't have any effect on our support." He says, "I've been flying phantom jets into into Lebanon for onward flights into Israel, directly into Israel. I forget how he worded it." He says, "They box them up in c in crates. They ship them to Luxembourg," he mentioned, for some reason, "and we take them out of the crates in Luxmbourg 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." And 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?" You know, should I be in the room with this discussion? I don't know what the hell is going on with this, right? I come back and I just make a note of this. And then 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. So I called up and asked for this guy and um I was put on hold and then like a minute or two later they got back and says no sorry nothing 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 uh there was a funeral there was a big newspaper story on him no mention of course of being involved in American intelligence of any kind of in any capacity that's not there so then about two years ago I read an article. I have a Substack, which I haven't done anything with in about a year, but I have a Substack. And I wrote an article about this particular event. And I I drew connections because this guy also acted as an actor briefly in Brook Shield's very first movie, the one filmed in Patterson, New Jersey. Uh, 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 Brook Shields. This first movie, Patterson, uh, one of the people involved in the film was married to the guy who plays the priest in 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. It 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 uh the wrestling people, somebody found it and they went nuts. They said, "How the hell? We didn't know what happened to this guy. Now this guy knows. How does this guy know? He's a nobody." And somebody said, "Well, we shouldn't say he's a nobody. He's a nobody in our world, but maybe, you know, in some other world he's somebody." So, there was this big discussion over this, like this is what happened to him. This was part of what goes on and part of what happened as us being involved in intelligence stuff, not being wanted, not wanting to be involved in intelligence stuff with the churches at the time. Right? So this happened uh and that same church then went on. 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 they kept having these parties where there were, you know, TV types were there or Broadway types were there. Um not the not the stuff you're hearing about these days of the Hollywood, you know, satanic stuff that's always, you know, on the internet for some reason. 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. These connections are made. So that was fine. That's what I knew. You know, I was uncomfortable with my position in all of this. I wouldn't feel that secure. So I I left. Right. As soon as I left the church, I got a notice from selective service that I was being drafted. So I made a phone call. And after I made the phone call, they dropped that and they said, "No, you're okay. I just kind of threatened to talk about what I knew and they said, "No, forget it. You're you're still good." Oh, wow. So then a little bit after that, what happens is I find out that the church that I had left, I get a phone call from them, from my partner, from my friend, and he comes in and says, "Listen, uh, I need you if you could just come back for a short time. Something weird is going on here, and I think you're the person to look into it." I said, "Thanks." And it turns out he had these monks working for him. Monks, people that I didn't know, uh, people that had come to him from some other church. They always do. They they cross fertilized that way. And, uh, 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. 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 if they're legitimately getting these or not. I'm afraid that he's going to expose me to some problems cuz so could you go and spy on them. They've never seen you. They don't know what you look like. Never heard of you. Just go there, 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, it 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. And uh but in the back room they had all these this machinery for taking care of the rare books. that 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 an I'm a book lover from day one. So you don't do this to books, right? You don't strip I don't write in my books even, right? So these guys are just, 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 this is what's happening. Uh, so then he freaked out that you this was going to be a big problem for him. So he had all of these priceless books in his possession and he destroyed them. He burned them. Whoa. so that he wouldn't get caught. But in the process, I I snagged one or two things that I thought should be saved from the fire that I would take responsibility for. I don't know where he got them, if he got them from these monks, he got them from somebody else, but a box of a manuscript, right, which looked cool to me. And I said, "This looks pretty cool. I'm going to keep this and see what I can do with it." And so then I brought it to a friend of mine who run ran an oult bookstore in Brooklyn Heights, the Warlock shop, a guy called Herman Slater. And uh I bring the box over to him and he says, "Oh, this looks great. You know, what is it?" And I I show him the the the page on the front is like a lot of writing, but there's a heavy writing in Greek letters in the front. And uh in my basic rusty Greek, which I only know the Greek alphabet because I studied the Russian this the curillic alphabet. I said, "This looks like it says necronomicon." And and Herman Slater has a heart attack on the spot. He says, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't be serious." I said, "I don't know. Am I serious about what?" I never read a cult fiction, you know. So Lovecraft meant nothing to me. You know, it's a it's a word that was in the background somewhere, but I never read any short stories by Lovecraft. It was not my thing. You know, I gravitated more towards non-fiction for magic and occult stuff. I wanted the non-fiction 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 the stuff like that from like another perspective. So, I thought that was cool and I just I read those. Um, but that was it, you know. So, now he said, "No, you have to translate this. you have to see what this is cuz this looks cool. This, you know, find somebody and and do it. So that started this whole um odyssey of figuring out what this book is, you know, is it something that Lovecraft talked about? Is it just a a name? You know, it has no relationship at all to Lovecraft. I I had to learn about Lovecraft. I knew nothing about it. So I had to learn about it. And I talked to my friend at the the church guy who was burning all the books. And he didn't have a clue. They 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 if not thousands of books and sold them all over the place coast to coast and in Canada and Mexico as well. The Mounties were brought in as part of the investigation. So this was a major operation that they were running. Where they what they did with the money, I don't know, but they did get sent to prison. They served time for it uh in federal facilities. So you know my friend was wise to stay get as far away from it as possible but still I mean he was the church they belonged to at the time they were officially part of his operation. So that was it led to a lot of paranoia on my part on his part on the part of everybody involved in this thing. But eventually by 1975 October 12th as it turned out it was 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 on to it for a while um 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 um he walks into the the store and he looks at all the weird stuff that's hanging. There's 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, "Um, you wouldn't happen to have a copy of the Necronomicon in here, would you?" And Herman Slater very victoriously pulls it from underneath the counter, right? He says, "Here it is." And so Larry Barnes went absolutely nuts because he was a total cartoon freak and a Lovecraft freak and everything. Uh from the art side, not from the occult side, just from the, you know, the vibe side. So he was just totally into this like big time. So he then wanted to publish the book actually. Uh believe it or not, nobody wanted to publish it. Nobody was that interested in it at the time, but Larry Barnes came up with it and says, "Oh my god, we can do something with this." So he uh he got me involved. He got um a number of people involved, people who had been belonged to various occult societies and stuff who had the connections to do some of the the uh the type setting. In those days, there were no computers per se. So making a book was much more laborious than it is now. Uh you had to set type and you had to redraw a lot of the art. You couldn't just copy it. it had to be done a certain way. So it was a lot of fussy stuff that was involved. So it took a while. So by finally by 1977 uh 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. Um what is it after this with the strategic air command? What happened was well what and what's in the Necronomicon? Oh okay. Well, if you're a Lovecraft person, you have some ideas as to what must be in it. It's kind of like that. It's a grimoire. It's a It's a book um that pretends to be a pre-Islamic or if not anti-Islamic. It's not anti-Islamic because there's nothing anti-Islamic in it, but I would say pre-Islamic uh book of casting spells of of of conjuring spirits. Uh, and there's even a kind of of abbreviated version of the creation epic, the Samrian creation epic in it. There's Samrian words in it, Samrian deities, and then there's some Babylonian and Aadian. It's kind of mixed. Um, it seems to be a book of, you know, that a sorcerer might have used uh in the Middle East, probably Iraq, uh, before the advent of Islam or before Islam really took over and basically destroyed a lot of that material. So you found the only copy of it essentially. Essentially. Yeah. Wow. Handwritten, right? That's crazy. Yeah. That's what it is. And that's And what's the But we didn't know what it was. What the Lovecraft writes about it or Oh, 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. And it and what I don't know if it's it. I mean, Lovecraft scholars will say, "No, that's not it. Okay. It's not Lovecraftian enough. Okay. I mean, if it was going to be a hoax, do a better hoax. Is there their there response? Right. But might be it. Do it might it's a book with the same name. Okay. Does it Well, does it if you do like a an unbiased, you know, historiographic kind of analysis on it. Does it sort of comport with, you know, uh, materials at that time, written materials or I think the more we know now, yeah, the closer it becomes to a real thing. When they first came out, people rose a lot of objections to it. And I think on pretty standard sound grounds, phonetic grounds for instance, things like that where it couldn't have meant, it couldn't have been this, it could not have been that. Uh uh we make the point in the book that uh Lovecraft's famous arch weird connector between humans and the the elder gods or the ancient ones is Culu and it's spelled C T H U L Hu, right? No one knows how it's really pronounced. It's like supposed to be a garbling in the throat sound. Like it's it's a nonhuman alphabet, right? A nonhuman 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 who knows Samrian. And he said kulu, I mean that's a Samrian form. It means a person from the underworld. Kutu is the underworld and lu means person. It means a human being or a man. So it's the man from the underworld. This coutulu that they're talking about in the book is the man from the underworld. And then so that sent us off another wild goose chase. It's like kutu is the underworld. And we found out there is a place. It's I mean the Samriologists would know it was called Couta or Cutu 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. Tell Ibrahim is there. And if you look at pictures of it now, it's just a big empty wasteland. Nothing is built there. But that's supposed to be the entrance to the underworld. So fascinating. So things started to make sense later. Yeah. Right. And they found an Arabic rendering in the Quran of a being called Al Kadul, which is supposed to be a kind of quality of anti- something. It's like a an adversary name, right? Right. So there's like things started to make sense that didn't make sense back in 1975, but with the passage of time and, 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 that he just simply heard the name and that the name was around because there isn't a lot in there that says that screams Lovecraft, but there are pieces that do, you know. So, and real 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 I mean that's fascinating. But, um, truly your life does resemble Johnny Depp's character in the Ninth Gate. book collectors on this mission to find these like three like devil books or whatever. And so I didn't realize this before doing this interview until Lincoln actually brought it up, but you are the inspiration for Johnny Depp's character in the ninth in Roman Palansk's famous movie, The Ninth Gate, which is also I think Jacqu 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 it was you. Um, 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 was a Spanish novel, very well-known Spanish novel. So, the story has nothing to do with me. The character of Johnny Depp. However, from what I've been told by the people who worked on the Palansky film when they were in New York, see, Palansky can't come to the States for reasons we think we all know. uh he was accused of of of sexual abuse of a minor. So he is now in France virtually forever. Um so he doesn't come to the United States. He's filmed he's made movies in the United States, but he hasn't come himself. So he has scouts that do the you know the B-roll stuff and they look for the you know uh uh 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 Palansky and they came across this story. They came across the story of myself and the book and all of this and they got the physical description down, right? So, I was even thinner then than I am now. I was like maybe 125. Um, I always wore suits. That's a whole other story, but I always wore suits and tie constantly. Uh, I wore a black sort of uh trench coat, raincoat kind of thing. Uh, I had a beard obviously. I always had a shoulder bag, uh, glasses, the whole nine yards. I mean, it's the Johnny Depp character. dark clothing, the whole thing. And the book business guy. I was always in and out of bookstores right in that outfit. And I was uh involved with Wiser's bookstore, which in New York City was the famous occult bookstore with the a pedigree going back a long time. And you came upon maybe the occult book, which is the ne the necronomic, 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 really not supposed to possess all three books. You 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 the whole thing. It was as though it was scripted. So, the people around Depp were saying this actually happened. this story actually happened to this guy, you know, and we have all this information about him and we talked to people who knew him and stuff. And so that kind of got into the film from what I understand. I had forgotten all about this to tell you the truth until a few months ago. I was talking to um uh a guy who makes a videographer uh actually I think he's based in 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 and you know 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. The story has been around. I don't know who's promulgated it, but it's been around. So yeah, that that's kind of weird, but imagine me, but you know, like 40 years ago. Uh that's pretty much how I looked. So wild. So if I'm strategic air command, why do I care at all? Well, this is how that happened. Yeah. We're going to announce the book now. We're, you know, Larry Barnes is financing the publication of this book and it's costing some money because he wants it 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. Um, but it's not really his money. It's his father's money. They are part of the largest lithography press on the East Coast. His father owns it. So, they're they're wealthy. They live I think in Fort Lee, New Jersey across the bridge and they have all this money and but his father is 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. So they come up with this scheme which I didn't know existed. It's called Barter Space. And in magazines at that time, these big glossy magazines like Omni, Psychology Today, you could run ads in those magazines without actually paying them upfront the cost of the of the page. You could pay them in merchandise. So what we were going to do, what we did is we had barter space in the the top magazines that were around at the time, including Omni, including Psychology Today. These were very important magazines. Omni was big time. Uh I think uh High Times even we were in that which was the weed connoisseurs magazine of choice. We were in a lot of stuff very expensive space. We had full page ads in those magazines that we did by giving them 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 to Omni or Psychology Today or High Times, whatever it was. And that was the initial payment, you know, they would take the orders. So the the ads came to them. They would take the orders and once they got the orders, they would we would fulfill them to that point, to that level, and then anything else was gravy. It was our money. So that's how we paid for the book. We paid for it before it was published. It was completely paid for before it was published. All those ads brought us the orders, but it also meant it brought us a lot of attention. It wasn't a little ad in the back of Fate magazine. These were full page ads in Omni. Omni was being read by the Pentagon. Really? Omni had really great articles in there about technology. It 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, you know, military-industrial complex who are aware of Omni very much so. And they read the articles. they knew what was being discussed because they discussed UFOs, they discussed space technology, artificial intelligence, it was all there in Omni in the 1970s. So yeah, they were doing that and eventually it got to the attention of people in the military. So we would get letters, you know, and we would get letters from uh Fort this or Fort that saying, "You guys doing a great job. Keep it up." You know what? You're in the you're what? You know, marine bases, army bases. And then the SA the strategic air command SACE came in with a letter you know just a nice letter saying congratulations on your new publication. We didn't ask for them for and it's like the organization itself where it's a general or it's on 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. What do why do you think they were interested at all in the Necronomicon? It's evidence that they were interested in this material from the get-go. Yeah. Right. I think they were interested since the beginning. But what's the connection? How is that? Well, operation often all the psychic research they were doing, the research. That's what operation often was. Yeah. Operation often among other things, there's different various descriptions of it that you'll find online. uh 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 was involved nobody knows anymore who Sibilik was but she was a very famous English witch uh stout lady very famous for all of her jewels and 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 Uh she was very plugged in though with the whole Wiccan community with um Raymond Buckland and the Gardenarians and if if you know about Wikah and witchcraft she was like one of the the goats, right? She was there from the beginning uh the OG. So she was like so put her name on it on witchcraft and made it look kind of accessible because she was like this sweet lady type um with an asserbic wit by the way. So she was being she was openly involved with operation of as we find out later. She was involved with a lot of these things. They wanted to test her. They wanted to see who she knew. They wanted to understand about magic. How does that work? Because they understood the quote unquote brainwashing that had been going on in Korea during the Korean War by the Chinese and the Russians on American troops who then come out and say they love the Soviet Union or they love communism. They understood this to be a kind of consciousness manipulation and they said, "Wow, if we could only do that, right, that they're doing to our troops, we could do that to theirs. Or if we could do that to people in general, right? What can we do? How can we manage? How can we manipulate people, manipulate consciousness?" And so, Operation often was just a side sideshoot of that. It was a sideshow. Basically, the major show was the drugs and the hypnosis that was full bore going on. massive psychological conditioning on undergone in Montreal, Canada for instance, um at an institute there that was funded by CIA for a long time. The guy who ran that uh was the guy who to go back again um to our other subject is the guy who had basically debriefed and analyzed um Herman Hess and Herman Hess, not the author, Rudolfph Hess, uh the Nazi leader who was second in command to Hitler at the time. He flew to Great Britain to try to make a peace deal or something between England and Nazi Germany. He was promptly arrested and thrown in jail. Uh 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 um the psychiatrist who named now escapes me but it's in my books uh from this institute in Montreal to go and investigate this guy. Just talk to him. Euan Cameron maybe or no Cameron. Yes, Euan Cameron. That's it. Thank you. Yes, that's who it was. Dr. Euan 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. They sent him to uh prison at that time. He was still in prison in England uh to look at this guy and talk to him and figure out is this really Herman Hesser? Is it a double? Right. And I think he came away with the idea that I'm not too sure, you know. Um, so he wasn't really 100% definitive on that. Rudolph H, by the way. Rudolph, not Herman. Yes, Rudolph. Sure. Herman, that's another story. Herman, great author. Great author. Rudolph Hess, not so much. So, but he uh but Rudolph Hessn, it's important to understand, talk about psychic research in the in the Nazi Germany. This guy was total on board with that. M he believed he was in telepathic communication with his wife while he was in prison. They ran telepathy experiments. This guy believed in astrology 100% which is why he timed his flight for that specific day and time. Hess was totally on board with occultism and he was number two in Germany. He was Hitler's right-hand man. When Hitler was arrested, Hitler then ordered all cultists, all astrologers in Germany to be arrested, thrown in the camps, right? Automatically it's illegal. Freemasonry was illegal under under not in Nazi Germany, right? Uh so you know there there goes because it didn't work in the context of Rudolph Hess. Well because Rudolfph Hess did something he wasn't supposed to do. Got it. He disobeyed Hitler and so Hitler kind of associated him with all this occult stuff and so he 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 oultist per se at all. I don't see Hitler in a robe, you know, casting spells. It 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. And these occult magazines were run by a guy called Lance Fan Libfels, who was the head of something called the Order of the New Templars. And this was like the whole Arian theory again writ large but given this weird Templar vagarian thing and Hitler was nothing if not a Vagnarian. This guy loved his Vagner. So this Vagnarian idea of the Templars of you know um the ring cycle and all the rest of it kind of mixed in with you know anti-semitism 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's said that he actually visited Lance van Leebenfeld in his office. He was so taken by it. That's that's the story that Liebenfeld 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 uh all the 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 your problems are not your fault. It's, you know, the other people that are responsible. And he was a Vagner enthusiast. And all of this kind of went together in his own mind. I don't believe that Hitler saw himself as an oultist 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 it gets people on our side. They love the fire, the torch lit ceremonies, you know." Yeah. They love all this stuff. They love the the runes, the Nazi runes, the SS runes and the death said, the black uniforms make everybody crazy with fear and this is how you manipulate people. This is a way to do it. And said, "Yeah, you might be right." But then when Hes and does goes and does this, it's like, "Oh, wait a minute." Right. So, you have all this Nazi interest in the occult. You later have American programs like MK of that seem to dabble in witchcraft and sort of, you know, these these strange things. And but then strategic air command I think of as this kind of hyperfunctional organization. So you think that these are maybe just rogue vigilante researchers that are happen to be a part of strategic air command that are into this stuff or do you think they are institutionally interested in the concepts in the Necronomicon? No no I think they have a lot more on their plate than the Necronomicon. Okay. Okay. That's what I always think. Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that everybody is on board. Right. So when you have somebody at SACE who's like, you know, this is like what we're studying. We're studying consciousness manipulation. We're studying some of this stuff because why? What's one of the things that happens with the guys they send out into space or into high altitude flight, right? How do they train them? They train them in sensory deprivation tanks. And what do they report when they're in sensep tanks? Weird Weird They see they hallucinate all kinds of stuff. Yeah. That's the open door. That's the back door at sack for in for investigating paranormal phenomena and occultism and all this other kind of stuff. That's their back door. Is this is this a a portal into the human mind? Is this does this enable us to go in there because something's happening to these guys? Yeah. Well, John Lily, who created the isolation tank, claimed to be in contact with two basically forms of non-human intelligence. Echo, the like right Earth Control Coordination Office and SSI, I think um solid state intelligence and the solid state intelligence I think while he was on like ketamine. Yeah. Told him like I need more resources to like manifest myself into existence. And he I think he even said silicon which makes me think like the modern AI race with compute because all these chips are Nvidia chips are all silicon. So um interesting. Well that's wild. Yeah. You know, um, something that I I have to credit to Lincoln that he always brings up is the space delta 7 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, you have to look to some of these more esoteric practices. And you have in Judaism the meabah 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 shank king daoism Islam um roacianism. Yeah. Like all these different I mean the ziggurats and heckalode and yeah Sumeriia Egypt and then obviously Judaism and it's it's really remarkable. It's almost like there's some underlying kind of objective fabric right 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 uh uh what is it? Ursa Major the the Big Dipper. It's it's pretty remarkable. Well, and it goes back to the original point that we made with with sinister with secret machines and that is there's this there's this point that we we became a cargo cult, right? It's possible that these seven stars the system of seven layers is that is is a manifestation of that. It's that we we have it imprinted somehow that this is the way to go. Um I talk about in as well um the idea of the double helix DNA which we only discovered in the in 1960, right? Or in the 1950s anyway, we announced it 1960. This double helix, the two strands of the DNA molecule, doublestranded helixes don't exist in nature except for the DNA molecule, but they don't exist invisible nature. They're not part of our world. Single helix, a helix does, right? A serpent will go like that or we'll have examples of it in nature, but not two of them. And yet, you find it everywhere in ancient art, right? I found a diagram from ancient China going back 600 years in China where the mother and the father that created the world are depicted as two serpents with tails twined about each other but with human heads, a human male and a human female, but their tails are serpents twined around each other. Um, and they're the 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 that's that's a whole other thing. I haven't even gone there. Right. Isn't Isn't the hypocratic symbol like the Yeah. Right. But this right the uh the symbol of the of Mercury, right? The two serpents around each other. The symbol of healing. Essipius. Es see I'm talking too long and I'm starting to stumble over my own words. Anyway, the god of medicine. Yes. The the the twins serpents around a central staff. The Russian Orthodox Church, the staff for the bishop is exactly that. Two serpents around a central staff, but we only saw it in real life in the DNA molecule. Does that mean that DNA has been communicating to us because it's in virtually every cell of our body for, you know, as long as we've been around and it's giving us this message? It's like imprinting itself in our consciousness somehow. If so, then the seven steps, the seven layers, the seven stars to heaven may be part of that. So you have these stories of, you know, Ezekiel, Enoch, you in some interpretation of the book of Acts, you could say Jesus was of this variety, right? Where you go up to heaven, you walk with God, and then maybe you come back down at some point. Exactly. And do do you think that these events actually happen? Do you think that a person can ascend to reach, you know, to walk with God to to to to see God's throne, to see the heavens, and then come back down? Do you think that's possible? Again, the problem is our use of language and words. And what do we mean by all this? Is is the process real? Yes, people do it. It's real. It has happened. It doesn't happen that frequently because you build up a head of steam maybe if you are consistent in work on this level. It can happen that way. The the the Merkava mystics did it right. They they're living proof even today that this process is possible. I mean every every year during Yam Kapor is the time when certain groups of Jewish mystics then will then descend the chariot. That's when they're supposed to do it. That's the, you know, that's the time. And the goal is to liberate soul from body somehow or to to 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 to behold the throne of God and to come back down and to tell everybody they've seen it. That's it. End of story. not to be there's no apotheiois 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. It's kind of implied with Jesus. I mean, it's implied with Jesus and Jesus actually kind of says it. Um and he also like the miracles ramp up in the book of Acts. Yes. So, but like I don't know. I think most Christians believe he was born the the son of God, right? So he didn't like sort of transform post ascending to heaven. It depends which which interpretation because so in your interpretation he did transform through this ascent process. You're going to get me in trouble and people are going to send they're going to dox me. Okay. Um I can say this. I can say that at the time the Bible was put into stone, which is 300 years after Christ died. Um, 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. Um, Jesus had two different personalities. One was divine, one was human. All different kinds of so-called heresies were abroad at the time. uh we try to we try to figure out what was the prevailing one at the time of Jesus' life and we don't actually know uh because nobody was nobody who wrote a gospel was around at the time so you know it's all hearsay anyway um so we're trying to put together a story and as I always tell people we still don't know what was on the 18 and a half minute Oval Office tape gap during Watergate we still don't know that that how do we know what happened you know 2,000 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 is that somehow a really fitting pmic on trying this stuff out when you're not ready cabala I believe you're supposed to be 35 and like married and very grounded before even starting to initiate yourself 100% all of that it's because they've seen the danger right these People know what they're talking about. They have seen the danger. Their their 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 use be used. It can help. What is the pro? Is it is it more scientific than like trying to follow virtuous principles and meditate? Like what is is there some sort of formula? Is there is there an infomercial DVD I can buy? There's a book actually. No, I'm not plugging one of mine. Calm down. Uh this is a book by Mo Adele, very famous Kabala scholar, right? Probably the one who inherited the mantle of Gerson Scholam. Moadell, very famous, very important guy, co-authored a book on Cabala from a scientific perspective, from a consciousness, psychological perspective. Uh, a very grounded one, not kind of a purely like a Yungian approach to it, which you know, you can find in a lot of places. This is based on neuroscience and I can't think of the title of the book off the top of my head, but if you look up Moji Adele, you'll find the book uh 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 EDL has written, but you will find it listed. Uh, and it's it's a co-authored with the scientists with the neuroscientists. And they go through it and they figure what does this really mean in terms of neuroscience. So, it is a grounded approach to kabala from that perspective. It's fascinating and I highly 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. What what is the effect of it? What should should should somebody have what 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 it can be really bad for you if you if you do too much of it. Like I think uh 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's usually doesn't end well right so like what's the right I agree completely with what you just said. Um, 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, 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 I feel that 100%. Um 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. Um 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. 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 just weird vibes everywhere. Like you go to some of these conferences and it's like you might as well 100 years ago you would have been in some sort of seance like some new thought like weird vi you know and it's you 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 or there are a lot of messianic characters. Uh, you know, you would think that people covering the subject are like super altruistic, but like they're 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, when you have this is the problem that I 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 hustster 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 in the desert stuff, you know, stuff that I know is absolutely impossible. But it doesn't matter because the government, you know, we don't trust the government, right? The government's not telling us the truth. So, it could be possible. It could be possible we're sending ships to Europa on a regular basis and we're we're trade. We had contracts or contracts with the aliens. 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 there's a directive that it's in place. I'm thinking, are you kidding me? In what language is it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and who enforces that contract? Yeah. You know, I've been in business a long time before I became known for this stuff. I was doing contract negotiations in China. You know how difficult that is? Well, th this is really refreshing and cool to hear because you you came close again to like these very high ups in the government who seem to be as embedded in the UFO topic as as as anyone. And so I I am really curious like what is your so so you think the the 54 Eisenhower treaty thing is ridiculous you know face I I'm with I don't have any you know serious evidence but you know it's like I've spoken to like Richard Dolan who's a really smart cool earnest guy not one of the weird UFO 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 talk documents that do somehow know about certain meetings and dullest diary entries that like no other source did that came out before these entries came out later. So, well, don't let me forget then because you mentioned MJ12. Yeah. Uh, 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. Yeah. Was the fact that in our conversations in our lengthy email back and forth, we were talking about cryptonyms, right? M so MK for MK Ultra, right? So did 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. Um and then you know MJ, the MJ, you know, krypton. Uh oh, he says, "Oh yeah, MJ, we had that in um that was in Space Command. We use that for non-aterrestrial biologics, right?" What? And I said, "What? What are you talking about?" I said, "Do you realize what you just said?" He says, "No, what?" He says, "Haven't you heard about the MJ12 documents and all this stuff?" He says, "What do you mean UFO stuff?" I said, "I don't believe in any of that." He says, "What we meant by that was anything that came down like if a rocket ship re-entering our atmosphere, a meteor or an asteroid or something if there was organic material on it." Ah, it was non-human biologicals. Ah, 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 nonhuman biologics. still and then your mind goes to like Aino didn't know the real program because it's somehow like did he would he have had like you know like the highest levels of access like I mean I spoke to him cuz your mind then goes to like that's an awfully crazy coincidence and maybe MJ12 was this this is the problem that I have right and I talked to Stanton Freriedman yeah at the last time that he attended I think contact in the desert legendary legendary researcher legendary researcher and promoter of the MJ12 documents And I sat down with him just briefly uh and I said, "Listen, man. I I know all the controversy about it, but I've done a lot of research at the archives and a lot of research at the Library of Congress. Those documents to me look real. I mean, whoever went to the work involved to make them look real as as this they've been criticized by different people and then later on not not so much." I said, "I've looked at them. My god, did they spend a lot of work and time and effort to do that for what? Nobody made a dime off of it, right? It wasn't like they were doing it for money. So, what the hell were they doing it for? If it is a hoax, by whom and for what, right? What What did they gain by it? It's It's now becoming kind of meme. So, you don't think it was a hoax? I see. Again, I I work on evidence. I'm a real evidence-based person, believe it or not. And for me, my evidence to me is it's a really good hoax. If it is a hoax, I'm in two minds of it. Maybe it's not a hoax, right? My other point is it could be a really good hoax. If it's a really good hoax, Quibono, who benefited, why? What for? That's the story. Totally. But then if it's not a hoax, then all of a sudden the 1954, you know, Eisenhower treaty with aliens. Unless it's a hoax that mentions that to throw everybody off. Totally. It's hard to That's the hoax, right? So So do you do you feel like you came out of your interactions with some of these people? cuz like TTSA which you were involved with had a lot of really high up impressive government people you know you had Jim Semian 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 uh Chris Melon who's deputy assistant secretary for of defense intelligence under Clinton and Bush been to Area 51 many times uh 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 I've met all of them. You've met all of them. So, yeah, you're a part of it as well. And so, do you feel like you have a sense of what's going on after that experience? I had a meeting here in Austin. Okay. Um, a couple of years ago. Well, must be longer than that now. uh with Tom Dong. Yeah. Chris Melon, 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. Yeah. In various places, but never actually sat in the same room. And Chris Melon, right, who I met for the first time. And we sat we were we spent the entire day here with masses of documents and papers and stuff. and Tom was trying to get we had a 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 to brainstorm this, right? Try brainstorming this with three guys who have NDAs and security clearances up the ass and they cannot talk to you about anything. Right. So now you're in a room with them and you're trying to weedle out of them something. You got to like 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? 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? Just scribbling on the the notes of this thing. What are we talking about? What is this? Even some, you know, just little bits and pieces of extraneous information might be valuable. So, I write that down. What color paper was it? I write that. So, we're doing all of this and we're spending the whole day there. I think Valet may have mentioned it even in his last latest latest book. Maybe he mentioned it in passing. And you know, we're we're trying to get to 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 in my memory. We asked about something concerning Skinwalker Ranch and an appearance at Skinwalker Ranch and the equipment that was there picking up the the stuff, right? I think John Alexander writes about these things peripherally and other people do. 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 need a skiff for this one." And that was all he had to say. Skinwalker. For skinwalker. Why? And he wouldn't say nobody would say TV show for God's sakes on the History Channel. Yeah. But Skinwalker Ranch became this thing. We don't It was Fight Club and suddenly we don't talk about it. Right. So that stunned me. I wrote I copied this said, "Oh my god, we can't talk about Skinwalker." Not about Skinwalker in general, but something very specific about Skinwalker, right? about the the the equipment they were using and what they were what they were tracking and what they were what in what data they had collected I think was how the conversation started and I think that's where the the suddenly this everybody went quiet so there was something happening at skinwalker any other notable omissions nothing nothing particularly unnotable we would try to act ask blatant questions like you know how many how many captured you know spacecraft do you have how many saucers are there you know so they would just sort of look and shrug and kind of you know not answer And then like we were not being serious or something. We tried another attack. We tried another attack. We spent the whole day. I'm talking we had lunch. We kept on going. We spent the whole day here in Austin doing exactly that and getting basically not very close except maybe for the impression that we all got that Tom and I definitely got and I think the impression they wanted us to get was that this was serious business. This was not like idle curiosity on the part of the people in government or industry who were involved in this. This was something very serious that we were they were they were it was being taken very seriously by people who had very serious credentials and that the the security clearances for this information was stratospheric and that you you really and and kind of an indication as to how classifications work, you know, and how how difficult it is to penetrate certain types of classifications. like we're we're kind of think there's secret, there's top secret, not much else. But there's a lot of of gray areas, right? And a lot of abuse of the classification system as well, but there's just a lot of 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 is 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 people, you don't get the right information. And the re the reverse of that, what that really means to me as a researcher myself is that they themselves don't 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 cocka regulations they have for this or they can't get fluttered every year you know with the lie detectors to determine you know did you do this did you do 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 got to go higher than that higher than that higher than that you have to go need to know right so there's need to know type of clearance are you need to know are you read in because you're need to know and it gets stolifying so at a certain point you've got people who should be working on this who I'm sure are not working on it and that's the problem if they do know something it ain't much I don't think there is a lot that they know I I think they have evidence. They don't know what to do with it. The the the blind men touching the elephant, I think, is a really good analogy. Touching different parts of an elephant. They're the left hand's not talking to the right. It's not coordinated. All of a sudden, you have a multipolar world and tensions are rising and the impetus to figure out whatever is going on probably increases. But simultaneously, at the highest levels, you can't really admit, right, 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. Um, so, well, what do you do when you have somebody like you mentioned Jim Seivan, right? Yeah. Jim Seivan comes out and blatantly openly talks about a kind of an abduction experience that he and his wife he and his wife had. Yeah. I mean, here's somebody very high up at CIA at the time, right? and this happens. What are the security implications? Yeah, just stop right there. Just stop right there. Everybody listening, stop right there. A high ranking member of CIA is abducted by an alien. Yeah. Or has that experience and I think it was fairly traumatic. I think his very traumatic his wife had a and his wife had a traumatic particularly bad experience. Yeah. What are the security implications of that? Yeah, that's the story he hasn't told. I'm sure he will never tell. I mean, we know he was visited by people from the government, right? This he he pretty much is open about that. But then it dies. The story dies after that. What do you do? How do you handle that? What how do you write up your report? Who sees that report? Who acts on that report? What are your recommendations based on that report? Think about it in terms of government. Think about it in terms of the intelligence agencies, the military. How do you handle that information? What do you do if you're in that position? What do you do? How do you handle it? Well, 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 media. You do what you can or whatever. And you know, have you ever read the book Crypto's Conundrum? Are you familiar with that? I I haven't started it yet. Lincoln is responsible. Yeah, he recommended it to me too. It's uh by Chase Brandon, who's this that's a pseudonym. He's the CIA liaison to Hollywood. And it's remarkable because the only reason I bring it up is because you have this kind of committee that's responsible for like timeline management, right? And it's like these top kind of intel guys and I think it comes out of the OSS actually this committee and um these beings sort of paranormally show up to everybody on the committee like independently and coordinate them together in a way through like synchronicity engineering or something. And you read books like that or childhood's end by Arthur C. Clark and you you start to ask questions like around like if these things are happening at the highest levels of government, what are the coordination systems above the government itself that are like bringing these people together? Of course, you're not going to want to disclose that any of that is happening if it is happening. And it all of a sudden you you you move from this conversation of like oh the government needs to disclose it needs to disclose what it know like it knows everything to this way more nuanced interesting conversation where like the government's full of people civilians are people you have just as much access to they 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 you're humans and that uh the whatever these NHI are are like wielding all sorts of like power flying around their airspace with impunity there. And so you got to stop looking for like quote unquote big D disclosure. Like it's not happening. Um, if anything, it's like these pockets of knowledge and they're probably learning from as much of the open- source stuff as like civilian researchers are. And at best, you have vital institutional substructures with some hermetic weird knowledge or something of the phenomena. But like, yeah, the idea that it's like, you know, held on high is ridiculous. I 100% agree with that. That's that's the point we were trying to make in our our books and our presentations as well. you are the disclosure. You know, you are part of the disclosure. To believe that if there's NHI that they're only going to talk to generals in the US government, right, or the president is, come on, like they care about any of that. As if they know or care have any frame of reference for it at all, right? Why would they? They're attracted to all the troop movements for obvious reasons. Weird shit's going on. Let's take a look. Right. Yeah. 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 you have people like Bledsoe and stuff where like I I believe a lot of these stories and so but I think they're thinking about criteria that are not the human criteria of status and achievement, you know, that's the point we make in our books. You know, we stop 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. Why? Yeah. Yeah. And of course there's a contract. How is there a contract? Yeah. 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, right? There there's there's all kinds of of vagueness in between all all of our languages. We're not comfortable with it. We're not comfortable with each other's, you know, skin color for crying out loud. We're still fighting those fights after all these years. What if an NHI shows up? It's they don't care. Suddenly all of our problems, you know, that famous book, The Bell curve, they try to show, 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. 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 I I I agree with you. Like I think these conversations are really hard to have if you're just a human being. And it's funny to see like you'll see Shawn Ryan going Tucker Carlson and the UFO thing will come up and Shawn Ryan will go you know I think it's spiritual and then like Tucker Carlson was like I think it's spiritual too and it's just like they're forcefitting and then you 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 um like you know Lincoln likes to bring up you know there's some others with you know St. Thomas Quinus with taxonomies, hierarchies of angels and demons. Do you think what people experience today in 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. Yeah. And very few demons in the Bible. That's a misconception, right? We think it's full of angels and demons, and actually it's not. Well, what about that book on principalities and you know what I'm talking about? We think we know what that word means, but as we find with biblical scholarship, we really don't like keruvium, right? We think we know what that means, right? And we have this the English word cherub, which has no relationship at all, right, to the original term. So, it's been bowlerized a great deal. The keruvian were actually beings, right? They were 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. Saraphim, carobim, etc., etc. Angels, archangels, and all the rest. That's like a later development, right? But in in terms of purely biblical origins, I don't think we have much in the way. The devil really doesn't show up. You know, the adversary shows up shows up. Yeah. But we we call that the devil, but that's not really his role. He is really a lawyer for the for the prosecution right in in God's court saying I can prove that this guy is you know not reliable. Is Lucifer not the most luminous like go God go 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 lightbearing one and going back to Blovasi Lucifer was like her main man right so they called the l the lucistus trust right and there's Lucifer it's all entwined with this concept but Lucifer was the shining angel do so this isn't the Prometheus basically yes so and this this thing keeps coming up Lucifer Lucus Trust like like there's this VP of um space systems at Loheed Martin. This guy Jim Ryder. Have you heard of him? Oh yeah. So he it seems like he was part of some sort of legacy UFO program because you have congressional hearings where everybody's talking about and David Gush talks about this, Alzando 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 Loheed Martin using some sort of uh special access program to Bigalow Aerospace, right? And this was headed up by a guy named Jim Ryder, who's VP of space systems at Loy Martin. He was speaking at this event for Lucus Trust, which is this publishing house around like really esoteric weird knowledge and he's talking about davas and fairies and angels and he's talking about I think it's called garment of the god and he's talking about almost like um like things are becoming unveiled like you know the apocalypse is starting or something and you know he talks about parasychology and he says you know and 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 of at le Martin so what's going on there and not VP of human resources no he's not VP of HR exactly so yeah you can't I I think I think it's it's it's happened everywhere where 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 they're frightened of it. It's been this way since the 70s. There have been attempts to get the UFO field acknowledged at least in Congress that we have to do something. We have to at least study it. And it's been blocked by groups who felt that that God does not want us to do this. This is in Congress. This is why I wrote Sinister Forces, right? Because every time I turn around, we think we're getting close to something and a bunch of religious fanatics come out of the woodwork and say, "No, no, you can't look at that. That's that's soft." You know, so there's there's this rumor of the Collins Elite, this like evangelical Christian group that does this. Do do you know anything about them? Because they're written about by Nick Redford. Nick Redford, of course, but I don't know how real it is. Yeah. I This is the problem with these groups. It's like you you It's like trying to come up with, you know, do they have meetings and they have membership cards? I think it's it's a question of people forming uh informal groups in Congress uh in the military in intelligence um to put a religious spin on this and to to promote a a religious agenda at the expense of the scientific one. Um I was appalled a couple of years ago to hear how the Air Force Academy uh in Colorado was training, you know, their people in in religious studies, right? and a very sort of narrow view of religious studies. They wanted people to understand that these are our enemies and these are the good guys and all the rest of it. And it was being taught by some really rabid sort of um rabid anti-Islamists for instance or people like that. It's like why are we doing this? Why are we trying to this this 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 why are we bothering to do this? Do you think that in the government there are any sort of formal groups concerned with esquetology and I don't think they're formal revelation or the apocalypse or anything like that? I don't think they're formal. I think they're 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 they get together and they talk about Doug Co. Yep. 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 um event mentioned in John Alexander's book. Um 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 Khan 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 technology, right? And he was says, "We're not supposed to talk about this." He said this in front of John Alexander, I believe. This is what you learn when you die. But I I struggle with this question because the Prometheian myth doesn't end well. He ends with the his liver getting pecked at right for eternity. And if you look at, you know, modern versions of Prometheus or even the story of Foust 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 uh you know, not not well known by you know, sort of conventional circles or whatever. But then there's a part of me where I'm like, is is that sort of a treacherous are you sort of signing up for, you know, something bad? by by by doing that. I mean, you you seem to like, you know, be in pretty good health and you've lived a good long life and so so but but like how do you reconcile those two things? Cuz I, you know, I interview, you know, this guy Jason Resa Georgiani. Yeah. Like he's a big fan of the Prometheian, you know, and he calls himself a Satanist because he's on the side of the rebel angels or whatever. But and I I I found him to be extremely intellectually generative, but I disagreed with him on the most fundamental stuff. Like I do believe in good and bad and I do I kind of believe in the FA version of all of this stuff. So where does that leave us? Well, I I I watched some of the Georgian Johnny episode because I was, you know, I know about Georgian Johnny from before and I wondered what he was going to say in this context. You know, he kind of lived up to my expectations. Um, I don't want to say anything negative about people you've had on obviously, but I do disagree with with Georgian's basic premises. I'm not a traditionalist. And I think that's where the that's where the danger comes in. That's the back door to all of this is traditionalism. And traditionalism is a thing. It's like a very concrete concept that there was a golden age that had all this information that knew everything that life was so much better. And we have to get back to that golden age. we have to because this age sucks. Therefore, the golden age was better. And I think Georgian Johnny, 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 in the traditionalist camp. Um, I have a big problem with traditionalism. Like a lot of people are traditionalists in this field. Renee Gol is a very famous uh, you know, uh, person who started all of this. And you have Julius Civola who famously was a Nazi um, and remained so to the end of his days. Uh you have a lot of these people who were I thought was he of Nazi? He was a you're fascist in um Italy. He was fascist but then he was I thought he was arrested by the Nazis and then they were like are you a fascist and he said I'm a superfascist or something. 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. And so he did that and then after the war he was he was proud of his background with the SS. He talked about he was part of the the underground sort of Hitler thing that was going on. So I didn't know that. Yeah. But anyway, so this is this is traditionalism to me. This is like we're going to go back to that golden age where everybody knew their place, you know, and my 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 Ginan and Evil would base their thinking off of Eastern thought actually in the the Yuga periods and the Kalugas 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 and you know so why are we talking about 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, 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 all these logical fallacies in it, but it's very, you know, that's the problem. That's when ideology gets involved and it gets really messy. But from my point of view, the the traditionalists don't have an answer to that fundamental question. Yeah. And not everybody would consider those ages golden ages. There were 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 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 we're too divided in so many different ways. You know, culturally, academically, uh linguistically, even politically, certainly. All of these things are are there to make everything very messy. But, um the knowledge is there. It's never gone away. It's 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 uh coming to terms with the fact that all of these ideologies are not very useful. There is a new age possible, you know, because we see it in ourselves as individuals. We know we can make our individual understandings better, our individual lives better. It's just that guy next door who's a pain in the ass. Right. Totally. Well, you know that there's a Saurin Kirkagard 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 Archimedian point of revelation. see the ark of the covenant and boom, you have all knowledge and it's inside your brain and you're you're upgraded or whatever and you have this the special power and that just uh I don't know that seems like a sort of fallacy like it's you think it is a 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? Like if if both you and I are taking these sort of quests where we're trying to find like all this like interesting offbeat knowledge or whatever. I find it interesting like some some UFO researchers, they'll just like like there's this guy Scott Crane who met with this guy Eric Walker who we thought was in the Majestic 12, right? And Scott Crane had this he just converted to Christianity, became hardcore Christian and like forgot about the whole thing. And so do you think UFO research is is like this like quicksodic ciruitous 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 once that happens then you just end up like you know wanting to tend tend to your garden and be be nice to your neighbor. Yeah. Well, yeah, the UFO field and the UFO phenomenon as I've come to know it uh the last, you know, 10, 15 years or so, they haven't yet defined what it is they're looking for. They don't know, right? So, when you talk to a euphologist, there's the general breakdown between the the nuts andbolts 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 um uh one of them working for us at at To the Stars, right? Yeah. Steve Justice, right? Yeah. And here was a guy who who would know where the bodies are buried, right? Yeah. And um he didn't know. He he really wanted to know how those saucers flew. Wow. That's what he told me. He says, "I want to know how they do it." But is he simultaneously saying we have the saucers in our possession? He's not saying that. Interesting. Right. 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. Do you So where where do you think that material came from? Yeah. Well, that's there'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. M 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. I think maybe everything that they were doing with us at that point after that. I don't I lost track of the of the trail of where that was going, you know. Um but that's that's something that fell out in the desert somewhere out in the west. I think I think it 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. Did you touch the material? No, I didn't touch it myself. Okay. Do you see it at all or No. Okay. It's so fascinating. And then you have a really interesting connection with Bob Lazar, which is you worked at the same company that he did. Very remote connection, but it was there. I happened to meet Bob Lazar for the first time when we started this whole project and George Knapp and together. And everybody has all these theories about Lazar, you know. Uh, I found the questioning by Knap of Lazar was very artful and Lazar was just stuck to his story. I mean, if this was a cop show, you'd think he was telling the truth. You know what I mean? So, I guess you have to be a very good interrogator to know if he was telling the truth or not. What does your gut say on Lazar? Lazar. I saw the original broadcast when it happened with George Knapp and Bob Lazar of Area about Area 51, but no one knew what that meant. And I'm watching this thing and I'm transfixed by this. I mean, that's indelible to me, that one moment when that happened. And Area 51 obviously was real. There's no doubt about that. And Lazar, the thing that makes me kind of believe Lazar is something kind of personal to me. And that is at one point his badge showed Bendix, field engineering division, and that like blew my brain away because I worked for Bendix. I worked with the menus corporation in the 1970s uh almost six seven years in the 1970s until I think 79 or or 1980. Um, 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 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, nonofficial 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, uh, cover. And now you're going there as that cover. When Watergate happened, I was working for Bendix at the time. And, um, our whole division went absolutely nuts because of all the stuff we had on paper. So suddenly the the the shredders are operating overtime, right? Wow. And a lot of it had to do with the field engineering services because it came out that we were training troops in Saudi Arabia. What the hell was Bendix Field Engineering doing? Training troops in Saudi Arabia. Crazy. Wait, but you you weren't involved in any of the intelligence activities. No, no, I was just some I was just a guy working there, right? Okay. Okay. But I my ears and eyes are open, right? And so all of this is going on. So field engineering for us was was the red flag. 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, I said, "Holy Lazar 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 What years were this that Lazar was was Yeah, this was after me. So, I don't know. I think the I think the broadcast uh with NAP was after me. I don't know if he was at I don't know if he was at 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. If he did after it must have been before his Area 51 experience. Right. But that's a huge data point. If you're saying that uh being a field int a field engineering officer as part of bendix is often often not always associated with intelligence, right? And he was in that group before working for Area 51 ostensibly, right? Because you don't blow the whistle in Area 51 and then get a job in the field engineering. No. So that's pretty interesting is a data point. 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 to Lazar if only because I knew there was more going on than you know they were saying. Sure. You know so if if Lazar is not mentioning he he didn't he might have been under an NDA. It might have been a security thing for him not to mention Bendix but then again maybe it was just a fluke. Maybe he really, you know, had that tag for some legitimate reason that I as in my lowly position at 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 uh governments that didn't like them. We had a guy, we lost a guy in Uruguay, uh was captured by the Tupamaros um right out of his office and I believe he was killed. So Bendix was always on the radar of of governments overseas that saw Bendix as the far the the long arm of the US government because we had a lot of defense contracts. Well, if you shake out pro on the Lazar story, then all of a sudden that allows for saucers and hangers, physical material, not only physical material, actual crafts in the possession of the United States military. I mean, Hal Putov also went on Joe Rogan a few months ago and said we have 15 crash craft in our possession. Like he's 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 To the Stars and I met him here, but I've covered Hal for a long time. He doesn't say stuff like that. So why'd he say it on Rogan? The reason I think he said it is either it's actually true. Yeah, because Hal's Hal never exaggerated anything as far as I know. He was very cautious kind of guy almost to the point where you wanted to shake him and say Tommy really. But he would be very cautious about things. But he would deal in really weird science, right? Really weird stuff to be dealt with. Weird science. So when he comes out and says something like that, Hal of all people, Hal said it, then I sit back and say, "Holy you know." Yeah. And I saw that and I said to myself, "Wow, Hal is saying this. He's what is he saying?" Yeah. He's extremely interesting. He's told me that like he he finds that synchronicities kind of lead his, you know, innovation that like he 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 it the UFO thing feels like a even like more concentr ated version of that somehow. I think the UFO thing is our the 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. Maybe I'm a ghost, right? Maybe I'm a demon. Maybe I'm an angel. Maybe I'm an alien. I'm something. But I'm something. I'm there. I'm having an interaction with you. What does that mean? M that's why we we at at 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 it's how we're reacting to this our entire society now is reacting to this information in a certain way people are saying no it's crazy no it's nonsense people are saying it's angels it's demons it's space aliens it's from another dimension whatever we're we're we're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks But it's something there. There's a wall there and it's inviting us to throw stuff at it. What is that wall, 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 Oronoko River to find out what that is, too. We've got to talk to everybody because the input is important. The language is important. 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 in at the aerial and 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. That's not We don't discard that. Well, they're just kids. That'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, uh, you know, um, uh, forbidden texts, you know, all everything we've just discussed. Yeah. How how would you advise they kind of incorporate or integrate some of these things into their 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 stage 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 um Harry Reid was once asked by a journalist uh you know what do you what do you recommend how do we start this study of the of the UFO where do we begin and Harry Reid says what are you talking about it's already there. All the information is there. You've got it already. It's already in print. All you have to do is read it. All you have to do is look. The information is there already. 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? Look at the 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 does it 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 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 the the completely combating positions the the positions at at uh opposite ends. Don't take it as um written in stone. These are also malible positions. They can be changed, right? The person expressing them so vehemently today may give up and say, "Tomorrow I was wrong." It's possible. So don't put too much 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 I need to take two of these and three of those, right? Do I need to put them together in a different way to get at the truth? Don't invest, I would say, your soul into this so much at first, right? You're going to be really attracted on a soul 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. It needs analysis. If you're a film stu school student, you know what I'm talking about, right? You'll watch a film and you'll sort of break it down and de, you know, uh I was going to say deconstruct it, but 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 did what was really being said here, right? What's what's happening over there?" It doesn't mean you have to look at David Lynch 24 hours a day. I I feel for you. I do that. Okay? Look what it's done to me. But that's and that's an obvious way, too. Lynch has something to say about all of this very much so. Lynch is an open door to a lot of what's going on in this community. It's just he never really went out so much and said that. But his route was transcendental meditation, right? TM formed his way of approaching this and look what he came up with. So there's a reason there's a way you might 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 because what's going to happen? and 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, you come back to it later. Suddenly, you see it in a whole new light. You have more information. You have more things to bring to the table because now you have human experience as well. You have your experience with the world and now you can look at things a bit more clearly with a bit more nuance and try to deconstruct a situation that way. I found that's helped me a lot. It's helped me in dealing with people because people lie to you all the time, right? And they do it sometimes unconsciously. They do it without knowing they're lying. They're telling you on truths that they think are truths, but because they're so believable, you believe them. And that's also a problem. You know, is there truth really truth? I know it's getting really philosophical at this point. No, it's great. We're losing our our way here. Well, I'll give you my my final final question, okay? Which is no. And that was all really sage advice and well said in my opinion and and things I grapple with, you know, being 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 um what about somebody contemplating getting into some of these celestial ascent practices that you write about like um you know if you're interested in me kava or or kabala 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 what do you what do you do at that point? Well there's a couple of things. It depends on your own background. like um for instance if you come from a very I would say a very not strict necessarily but a conventional Jewish background meava mysticism is one of those systems right it may you may find it culturally easier to understand um 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 merkaba 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. Um, if you're Chinese, obviously there's Shanqing Daoism. The texts are available uh in Chinese and and in English as well, many of them uh for what for what they are worth for you. Um, but there's not many teachers left. There are a few uh mostly on Taiwan. Uh, there's a lot of Taiwan um pace of view things going on. on the the the steps the famous uh meditation steps that they use to bring them into that state of consciousness. You'll find that being practiced in some of the dowist temples there not so much in China itself although the daist monasteries are still there but that's like broad cultural things. So if you're just like the average person with no particular cultural baggage how would you start it? There are different meditation practices there's you know yogic practices that could lead in that direction. Um, 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? That's their job in some cases. In some cases, that's just what they like to do. That's fun. And to make things difficult for you, that's sort of their amusement because, you know, they're old guys. They're celibate. They don't drink. So, what are they going to do? No cable. They're going to abuse you and make you go celestial ascent for 20 years before you get to the second level. So, these things happen. This is life. When things don't smell right to you, walk away. When things when your gut doesn't feel secure, walk away. There's a lot of people out there who are trying to take your money or trying to uh, 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 Stairway to Heaven. I mean I I don't really give detailed instructions for that. There are no real details for it. It's a question of following an instinct, right? Trying to attain one level, the very first level, that first step is the big one. If you can find a way to achieve that kind of ascent to the very first level to the part where you know not that you can think about it, not that you can brag about it, not that you felt something really strange or really weird, but that you know you've gone to a level where suddenly everything seems right, everything seems real, but everything is not real. That st that 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 be in in between. That was beautiful. And that's step number one. When you've got step number one, the other steps will easily follow from there. You'll be able to follow it yourself. That's amazing. Well, Peter Lenda, this has been a pleasure. I really appreciate it. Um, I think you're super knowledgeable about all these disperate topics and you connect them in a very unique way and so I'm grateful to do this with you. You've also led just a fascinating life that uh 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. So this is awesome. Cool. And thanks to Lincoln for bringing this together as well. Thank you to Lincoln Miller for setting this all up. Sweet. Alchemist. 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 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.