But it seems to me that we haven’t quite digested what was revealed and discussed in the first three volumes of Sinister Forces. If we had, we would have been more than prepared for what would follow and for what is happening now, not only in the United States but all around the world.

I came to this project as a child of the 1960s: Vietnam, the assassinations, Watergate, Irangate, Koreagate, all those political scandals and fractured timelines. Now look at us. We have people in Congress talking about UFOs and demons, UFOs and angels, about a massive epidemic of child abuse and human trafficking, Epstein’s island, cover-ups that would make Nixon blush, graft and grift on an epic scale … and the sneaking suspicion among a growing segment of the population that all of these seemingly disparate events are somehow linked in one grand – if not Satanic – design.

I had already examined these links, as early as volume one of Sinister Forces, the volume subtitled “The Nine.” I demonstrated weird but undeniable, documented links between the Kennedy assassination and a group of mystics around a séance table in Maine in 1953 … between the Kennedy assassination and the 1947 UFO phenomenon … between the Kennedy assassination and a strange underground church to which, even more strangely, I belonged in 1968-1970.

I brought a lot to the table by the time I completed Sinister Forces, a project I had begun during Watergate in 1972-1975 and only managed to finish during my time in Kuala Lumpur in 2002. I had traveled the world, literally, from Europe and South America to China, Southeast Asia, and Australia. I had seen up close and personal how American multinational corporations functioned in all of these arenas. I rubbed shoulders with military and intelligence types everywhere (as happens when you are in international trade for any length of time). I began to understand Clay Shaw’s world, a bit better than I had ever wished for, actually. And then, shortly before Sinister Forces was published in 2006-2007, I managed to get my master’s degree in religious studies and found myself in Solo, Indonesia at the pesantren (religious boarding school) where the mastermind behind the Bali bombing of October 12, 2002, was living while on parole. I sat at a desk in that school – with a number of other scholars, mostly Australians (whose countrymen suffered disproportionately from the bombing) – and faced him directly, listening as he spoke of an international Jewish conspiracy. This, in a country that does not even have enough Jewish males for a minyan.

Later, I listened as Indonesian scholars tried to lecture me on the significance of the Seeing-Eye on the back of the US dollar bill. I bit my tongue and tried to engage in the discussion with some level-headed background clarification, but that didn’t work. The idea that the world was being manipulated, if not actually controlled, by an Illuminati-like organization was as popular in Southeast Asian circles as it was in the States. For many people, it was the only explanation that made any sense of the data.

Again, I get it. But … see … the world is actually more complex than that, and if modern science has taught us anything it is that there are influences on human behavior, on politics, on consciousness itself, that cabals of secret masters cannot hope to imitate, much less duplicate. I have always said that the real conspiracy is not a bunch of Boomers in a back room, smoking cigars around a map of the world and cutting off pieces of it. The real conspiracy is deeper, less intuitive, and far more powerful than we give it credit. It manifests in ways that transcend any conscious manipulation by politicians or business tycoons, AI billionaires or greedy dictators, who are themselves pawns in a much deeper game than even they could imagine.

Readers have complained that Sinister Forces does not offer a theory to account for everything. That, for instance, I do not come out with a position on the Kennedy assassination. That is because no mundane explanation could take into account the plethora of coincidence, synchronicity, and just plain weirdness that surrounds the events of November 1963. There is no single explanation that covers all the bases. Did Oswald act alone? That very question misses the point I was trying to make in Sinister Forces.

The assassination was prefigured years before Jack Kennedy was even born. It came from the same bizarre source (a Belgian mystic and Nobel Prize winner) that would give us Bluebird as the name of the first CIA mind control project in 1950. The people in the periphery of the assassination had used a séance to contact mysterious forces aboard a UFO in low Earth orbit in 1953. Other people believed to be involved in the assassination were part of the original 1947 UFO flap in the Pacific Northwest. Fred Crisman – central figure in the Maury Island Affair of 1947 – was interviewed by the Jim Garrison office in New Orleans for his role in the assassination, since he was the first person called by Clay Shaw after Shaw was arrested. And this is only the beginning. There’s much more.

At this point, whether Oswald acted alone or not, or even if he acted at all, is not the issue. We have to accept that we will never know with any certainty the real story behind Oswald and the assassination. What we can discern – if we persist in our endeavors – is an outline of the dark forces behind the assassination and how it caused ripples to flow outward from that event into both the past and the future. AJ Hartley and Tom DeLonge addressed that possibility in a fictionalized account of the assassination in their novel, Time Rider, which creates a narrative based on the data found in Sinister Forces.

Now fast forward to today. The UFO angle – which was ignored, not known, or more likely suppressed back in 1963 – suddenly comes forward in mainstream media and even in the halls of Congress. A cabal of wealthy pedophiles, bored billionaires, psychotic politicians, and other disreputable types frolicking on a remote Caribbean island is front and center in the news. Topics that were considered fringe and frankly insane fifty years ago are now mainstream. What was described in detail and with delicate care in Sinister Forces has now become matter of fact and government disclosures.

One might say that Sinister Forces is your Michelin Guide to the modern, admittedly fucked-up, world we now live in.

But it’s a big book. Massive. All three volumes are now printed as a single tome. You could open it up anywhere and start reading, but where’s the fun in that? (Well, okay … maybe it is fun …!)

Instead, a friend of mine – Marco Visconti – came up with the idea of doing a series of classes on the book, as a way of focusing on some of the more startling aspects of the case and to have me on hand to help explain, discuss, dissect, and contextualize the information. This would be a way for me to guide the reader into the material with a kind of compass and topographical map approach. I want people to see what I see, to become as stunned and speechless as I was once I got involved in this analysis and what I thought were boring government documents that slowly morphed into the pages of an eldritch grimoire.

I want readers to understand that our country – the United States – has an esoteric history that lies buried beneath the strip malls and super highways and that this esoteric history has sent waves of coincidence rippling through our everyday political and cultural events with no regard for our tender, patriotic sentiments or what we thought we knew and understood about our shared experience. We have all heard people talk about America as a land without culture, comparing our towns to European cities such as Paris or Milan or Madrid. But America has a culture; we are just too close to it to see it for what it is. We also don’t have the training to recognize it; or we’re too busy trying to survive what seems sometimes like an ongoing food fight in the cafeteria of an insane asylum.

More than anything else, see, America is a haunted house. It was built over an ancient civilization, bulldozed and flattened by waves of pioneers, settlers and immigrants, slaves and indentured servants, refugees and criminals, visionaries and tradesmen, over the past five hundred years or more. All of these various strains – ethnic, cultural, religious, political, economic – have left their marks, to be sure, but even more importantly for our case the clash of these various forces over the ruins of an ancient pre-Columbian civilization have shattered open the gates to a complex spirituality far stronger and more potent than any one culture’s contribution, and greater than the sum of all their many parts. And through those gates some pretty weird ghosts have wandered into our bedrooms, board rooms, and basements.

I call Sinister Forces a “grimoire of American political witchcraft” because that description is as close as I could get to the reality. It is a kind of book of spirits, a Key of Solomon reinterpreted for a secular sorcery; a Malleus Maleficarum of American politics. We think we have a separation of church and state in America, but there is something in that separation that we never considered or recognized: a corpus callosum between the two political hemispheres and this is where the ghosts congregate, the demons proliferate, and the angels fear to tread.

Come along with me as I describe that no-man’s land of our collective experience. You can ask questions and generally take part in what will probably be the only interactive, personal exchange of ideas and background on this important text that I will ever give. We will cover it all, from UFOs to assassinations, serial murder to Salem witchcraft, Jonestown to the Son of Sam to Charlie Manson and beyond.

Then you’ll be like me. Instead of every time I see a news story I can’t help myself but say “Hey, I wrote about that in Sinister Forces,” you’ll be able to say, “Hey, I read about that in Sinister Forces … and then I asked the author about it, and he said …”

Bragging rights! What a country!

See you in June.

It was the summer of 1972.  I had been working for Stardust since 1970 and was about to leave that company for a short stint with a Belgian metal import firm as a telex operator before finally getting a more long-term position with the Bendix Corporation in 1973. I was finally earning enough to pay rent, take the subway to work, and eat regularly and occasionally buy a book or a magazine.

As the Watergate story unfolded, I began reading multiple newspapers every day.  I did not own a television set and did not miss it.  Television had been the bane of my existence when I lived at home where the set was on continually day and night. Living alone in a small apartment with only my thoughts, my books, and my writing was a soothing, salutary experience.  I had no intention of selling what I wrote, and I wrote a lot:  short stories, mostly, as well as poetry and one novella. I wrote “for the drawer” and was happiest that way.  Writing was, for me, a kind of necessity like breathing and the idea that I would have to make my work conform to a market’s expectations was anathema. It was not an elitist position, at least not as elitist as it might sound, but simply the mode in which I was happiest and most fulfilled. I wrote for myself; I went to work for other people, to earn money to survive and to continue writing.  That seemed like the most natural arrangement of one’s life and the line of least resistance.

At the same time, I was engaged in a kind of ad hoc spiritual enterprise.  My study of arcana was ongoing.  I haunted Weiser’s bookstore below 14^th Street, and Zoltan Mason’s bookstore on the East Side, near Bloomingdale’s.  I read alchemy with considerable concentration, erected horoscope charts by hand (no personal computers in those days, so all calculations were done with a calculator and an ephemeris and table of houses), and studied the various methods of ceremonial evocations, already begun in the Bronx and continuing now in Brooklyn.

And then, finally, the Warlock Shop opened.

I like to think I was the first customer, but that was probably not true even though I passed by the storefront every day since the posted announcement.  The Shop in those days was a cramped and dusty place, but that somehow seemed appropriate.  There were rows of glass jars containing a wide and deep variety of herbs; sets of Tarot cards; a human skull in the window and an articulated skeleton inside. There were robes and instruments such as knives and swords, and various types of pentacles and talismans. And, of course, books.

The proprietor was a strange man that seemed to perfectly fit the interior design.  He had a cast eye and a limp.  He had a melodramatic air and sported a bemused expression, and somehow we bonded almost immediately.  That was my introduction to Herman Slater.

I thought my life had changed when I walked down the center aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the funeral of Bobby Kennedy.  I thought it changed again with the weird political scene at the American Orthodox Catholic Church.  That seemed enough for any one life, stories to dine out on forever.  That, and the séances in the Bronx. And conjurations in Pelham Bay Park.  But it would change once again with the Warlock Shop, the monks and their stolen books, and the notoriety of what would become an occult renaissance in New York City that began that summer in 1972 with “Horrible” Herman Slater and the Wiccan movement.

My early days in Brooklyn Heights involved my eking out a living in various office jobs during the day and writing at night and on weekends.  But I did make a few friends in the neighborhood, and these involved people who were part of Spencer Memorial Church or of the Unitarian Universalist Church about a block away.  We spent most of our free time at the Piccadeli, which was a warm, two-story restaurant on Montague Street that had outdoor seating.  We would meet there, and drink copious amounts of coffee and discuss current events or, at times, local gossip.  One of our regular partners in this was the organist at the Unitarian church who was also a music reviewer for several publications.  Another was the woman from whom I originally sublet the apartment on Columbia Heights.  And another was Judith McNally, who had worked for David Susskind on his television show as a production assistant and, later, for a publishing company in Manhattan, and after that for Filmmakers Newsletter for which she conducted interviews, wrote articles, and met some of the more famous movie directors as well as scored tickets for movie premiers in New York (such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Omen). Judith would later go on to even greater glory, working for Norman Mailer for decades up until the last days of her life.

At the time, however, Judith was going through a lot of changes.  She had attended Swarthmore but dropped out due to an unsuccessful relationship there.  Her parents were both teachers in New Jersey, and stoutly Roman Catholic.  She had rebelled against the Church and at university wrote a play about nuns – A Few Roses – that was considered scandalous. 

She felt that women should be ordained into the Catholic priesthood, and her argument was that the Sacrament of Holy Orders left a mark on the soul, and not the body, and that the soul has no gender, thus there was no theological reason why women should not be ordained.

The Warlock Shop, however, inadvertently became the answer to her spiritual dilemma.

I introduced Judith to the Warlock Shop and to Herman Slater.  This was during her Filmmakers Newsletter period, while she was interviewing such worthies as Dick Smith who had done the makeup for Linda Blair in her role as Regan in The Exorcist.  Judith loved science fiction and had a large library of paperbacks as well as hundreds of science fiction magazines in her studio apartment, piled next to the rejection letters for her poetry and articles and stories that she dutifully tacked up on the walls. I thought introducing her to the world of occultism would be a perfect fit, as occultism is technically non-fiction (at least, in the bookstores and libraries of the world) but borders dangerously onto the type of fiction of which Judith was most enamored.

And Herman Slater was a priest in a witchcraft coven being run by Eddie Buczynski: a Welsh Traditionalist high priest.

In those days, there were Gardnerians and Alexandrians, mostly, and Welsh Trads with a scattering of other denominations.  The Gardnerians hailed from the tradition started by Gerald Gardner (an initiate of Aleister Crowley from whom he adapted some rituals) and they conducted their rites “sky clad”, i.e., nude.  The Alexandrians were more oriented towards ceremonial magic.  The Welsh Trads, though, were “just right”, at least for someone of Judith’s mental and emotional composition, a kind of clothed version of the Gardnerians.  And Eddie was charming and charismatic, and made Judith feel quite welcome.

In the meantime, we had interviewed Raymond Buckland, who had introduced Gardnerian Witchcraft to the United States and who lived close by, on Long Island.  Judith had the idea of interviewing Ray for a proposed article for the New Yorker, which we did but the New Yorker never bought the article, alas.  The damage, however, had been done.  Judith decided that being a witch was the next best thing to being a Catholic priest(ess), so she threw her lot in with Eddie and the Welsh Trads (after some soul searching) and became initiated.

Shortly thereafter, she ran across an ad in the Village Voice for an author’s assistant.  I pressured her to apply for the job, and walked her and her resume to the local mailbox to send it in.  She got a call back for an interview and met me at the Piccadeli that night with the news that the “author” was none other than Norman Mailer.  She took the job, and never looked back.

As for me, Herman had the idea that he could create more revenue if there were classes on the overstock.  In other words, if someone could give classes in subjects for which he had books that were not moving, he could generate income for the store and the lecturer could generate income for himself. 

The first classes I gave were in a hotel room in the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights.  It attracted fewer than half a dozen students, and the subject was ceremonial magic with a focus on the four Platonic elements of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.  This was the beginning of what would become an important adjunct to Herman’s marketing plan as we saw the classes grow exponentially in size after that.  Once Herman moved his store to Manhattan, to a much larger venue, classes were held in the spacious back room as well as a free Sunday lecture series that attracted fifty to sixty persons at a time, and often – especially near Halloween – double that number, not counting television remotes. From 1972 to about 1980, I conducted a broad series of classes and lectures, some of which were held off-site in rural areas, and which were very popular and well-attended.

The Warlock Shop and, later, Magickal Childe attracted a wide variety of celebrities.  John Lennon and Yoko Ono were frequent customers, with John buying books on Egyptology mostly.  We had Scientologists and Satanists, and during one rather dark period we seemed to attract members of groups that were not as well-known, and which gave Herman some pause.  This included members of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, and – a few years before his murder in California – Roy Radin, the film producer, who approached me to ask if he could film a demonic conjuration. Roy Radin, of course, would be the connective tissue for journalist Maury Terry who believed that Radin’s murder in 1983 was somehow tied to the Son of Sam killings in New York City that took place from July 1976 to July 1977.  According to Terry, all of these murders were the work of a single cult that included Charles Manson as well as an assassin Terry called “Manson II”.  Terry also included the Process Church as part of this vast satanic underground and while a lot of his journalism on this subject is conjecture and speculation, there were odd bits of synchronicity and coincidence that seemed to point to the activity of some kind of “sinister force.” 

This was the era of the Watergate scandals and the revelations concerning CIA, MK-ULTRA, and all sorts of other strange programs and operations.  The Watergate break-in had taken place in 1972 and became a national obsession in the years that followed, leading into the Rockefeller Commission on the CIA, and the Senate Sub-Committee investigations into the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. It would eventually come to light that the Process Church – implicated by Maury Terry in the RFK assassination as well as the Manson murders – was incorporated in the United States by one of Jim Garrison’s suspects in the Jack Kennedy assassination, Tommy Jude Baumler who was himself a “bishop” in one of the “front” churches I have written about so extensively.

One thing led to another, and as all this news was breaking out all around me, I began work on a project that would eventually take decades out of my life.  When the 18-1/2-minute gap in Nixon’s Oval Office tapes was revealed, his chief of staff Alexander Haig claimed that the erasure was due to “sinister forces.”  That seemed like a suitably eerie and bizarre claim and could be applied to any number of unexplained and seemingly inexplicable political and cultural events that were taking place all over the country and the world. 

I began collecting newspaper and magazine clippings, like some deranged character in a serial killer movie, and accumulated boxes of data, all of which would be analyzed, organized and applied towards my pet project, a study of American history as seen through the lens of its most unusual yet documented synchronicities, putative conspiracies, and weird religions, to be entitled Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft.

That could only have taken place that quickly if someone in my inner circle had contacted Colonel Kirschenbaum to inform him that I had quit the Church.  There were only a handful of people who knew, and that included Prazsky, Pennachio, Harry Kay, and pretty much no one else.

Aside from the sheer vindictiveness, there was also an intent to get me out of the way entirely.  Sending me into the Army would have effectively silenced me.  This was 1969, so no Internet, no personal computers, no social media.  My story would have died with me.  I knew that Prazsky had no business pretending to be a bishop; he had barely graduated high school and was spending his college money from his father on antiques and ceremonial robes and had not spent a day in lectures or classes.  I knew some of Pennachio’s background, which was a trifle shady.  But more than anything else, I had been present at Delta Metal Industries and I’m not saying it was as much of a front as the American Orthodox Catholic Church, but they were fellow travelers.

And then there was the AOCC itself, which was a front.  I was there long enough and had seen enough to make an interesting witness. There were strange characters coming through there day and night, from Nigeria (which at the time was in the midst of a brutal civil war), from Italy … and from Washington, D.C.   Propheta always bragged that there was one FBI agent and one CIA agent on his board of directors; and we were told more than once that he had a direct line to J. Edgar Hoover (which later turned out to be true).  We were visited often by dour men in black wingtips and jacket bulges who would go into the church’s office for a private chat with the Archbishop.

And then there was the Count.  This was the Serbian Count Michel Lorenzo etc etc de Valitch, who was also a bishop in the AOCC, who ran a knighthood operation (creating orders of knighthood that he sold, complete with documents and medals) and who became implicated in espionage activities during the Yugoslav conflicts.  DeValitch created something called the Federation of Autonomous Priories of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta, known in its abbreviation as KMFAP, the incorporation of which in the State of New York received the blessing of Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz in 1977.  (I was present in the apartment of DeValitch in 1969 when a messenger from Lefkowitz arrived to pick up a package containing diplomas and medals for the AG for another Order of Knighthood.  As DeValitch explained, Americans do not have a system of royals and nobles and their Constitution forbids them from receiving such titles from foreign governments, so there is a brisk underground trade in these “honorary” titles and degrees, some even involving elaborate ceremonies of investiture.)

KMFAP became something of a monster in international circles, however, as they began issuing their own passports as if they were a sovereign nation.  DeValitch’s military and intelligence connections went back to World War II, when it was claimed he served in the Resistance against the Nazis, and continued throughout the Cold War as he became as embroiled in the anti-Communist crusades as Propheta.  According to Italian military intelligence (SISMI), DeValitch and his AOCC had been providing unusual services, including money laundering, to the notorious Serbian war criminal known as Arkan (for “Archangel”), one Željko Ražnatović (1952-2000), who commanded a paramilitary unit known popularly as Arkan’s Tigers, until his assassination.  The Tigers were responsible for a laundry list of war crimes, including the murder and rape of civilians, both Croat and Bosnian.

KMFAP exists to this day, long after the death of DeValitch, and still shows up in surprising places.

There had been a lot of purely financial scams taking place at AOCC as well, as Archbishop Propheta kept raising money for a non-existent orphanage (for instance).  We were initiated into this scam by having us walk the streets of select towns in Connecticut or Upstate New York, in our clerical robes, going into shops and asking for donations.  We would drive out in the church’s panel van with Bishop Christian and Bishop Hill, and hand out flyers bragging about the “orphanage.”  We brought in hundreds of dollars a day that way, which made my cemetery act with Prazsky pale by comparison.

Thus, a phone call from either Prazsky or Pennachio to Propheta would have been enough to seal my fate.  Propheta could not afford any publicity he could not control, and I have no idea as to the depth of his relationship to the intelligence community except to say that in those days of the Cold War those people had no sense of humor.

My reaction, though, was calm.  I knew what I knew and could guess a lot of the rest.  There were episodes I had witnessed and not understood at the time, of course, but I remembered enough to be a problem. 

So I sent a letter to Kirschenbaum.  Put me back on 4D status, or I start talking. (Not stated quite so bluntly, but I made my position clear.)

Remember that it was Col. Kirschenbaum who told me I could have my 4D status if I reported back to him on any Eastern European clergymen coming through New York who did not appear to be real clergy.  Thus, he wanted me to act as a confidential informant.  The Selective Service System most likely would not have wanted that arrangement made public at the time.  Perhaps they had nothing to do with it and Kirschenbaum was really working for someone else at another, spookier, government agency, most likely (but not certainly) the FBI.

My gambit worked.  My status was restored. And while that was going on, I began to be approached by some strange characters, one of whom worked for ROCOR: that is, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.  The Church run by Czarist émigrés, based on Park Avenue in New York.  I was asked if I wanted to join their denomination.

The gentleman making the approach – over lunch in a Chinese restaurant – was a priest of the Western Rite operation of ROCOR.  To tell you the truth, I had no idea such an operation existed.

Western Rite means, essentially, the Roman Catholic Mass instead of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (or St. Basil, depending on the day). The priest I was talking to was not a Russian and didn’t speak Russian, but he worked for the Russians.  The anti-Communist Russians.  The whole thing seemed too shady, so I declined.

The next offer was an indirect one from the Syrian Orthodox Church, made through an intermediary who had ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization.  Again, a little too shady.

But … what was I thinking?  I was a citizen of Shady Town, a priest of Shady Church.  Who else would approach me anyway, and for what possible motive?

Regardless, I demurred.

Instead, I went looking for a job.

I found it in the back pages of the Village Voice.

It was for a part-time position as a church secretary for the Spencer Memorial Presbyterian Church, in Brooklyn Heights.  I answered the ad, got an appointment, and took the subway down from the Bronx to Brooklyn, to a neighborhood I had never seen before, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.  This was August 1969.

The Tate/LaBianca murders had just taken place, on the other side of the country in Los Angeles.  Anti-war sentiment in New York City was at fever pitch, with constant marches and protests.  The Weathermen were organizing in the City, as were the Black Panthers. Besides the Village Voice, there was the East Village Other (EVO, or “the EVO Eye” as it was known) and a host of other, more temporary, alternative print media. I was living at home in the Bronx in a rented apartment on Revere Avenue with my mother, brother, and sister.  My father had left the family to live by himself in Queens.

I didn’t mind the hour-long commute to Brooklyn and, in fact, fell in love with the neighborhood.  It was full of stately brownstones, tall trees, and the promenade that looked out over the East River and the harbor.  It was still a Bohemian sort of place, with famous actors and writers living there, a large LGBTQ+ community, and wannabe actors and musicians working as waiters and waitresses in all the restaurants and coffee shops along Montague Street.  A few blocks further south and you have Atlantic Avenue, with a host of Arab restaurants and shops selling colorful and fragrant spices out of large baskets and blaring recordings of Lebanese music, such as those by the singer Fairuz, a personal favorite. 

Just as importantly, Spencer Memorial Church was a hotbed of anti-establishment activity.  Run by Reverend William Glenesk, it was famous for hosting “sermons” by the likes of director Milos Forman, folk singer Oscar Brand, and parapsychologist Stanley Krippner, as well as civil rights and anti-war activists.  It was Bill Glenesk who provided the eulogy for comedian Lenny Bruce at the end of the Fred Baker documentary Lenny Bruce Without Tears.  Glenesk would even make Life magazine (Oct. 21, 1966), due to his use of modern forms of drama as part of his religious services.

And in November 1968, Glenesk presented a two-hour discussion of homosexuality and religion that included a scene from The Boys in the Band, the famous Broadway play about homosexuality, that scandalized some of his congregation. (The Gay Alliance of Brooklyn would meet there during the early 1970s.)

My resume was a little thin, but then I name-dropped Rabbi Block of the Brotherhood Synagogue, and that seemed to work.  (That, or no one else was willing to take the job for fifty dollars a week.) I began work immediately.

During the next twelve months I was initiated into the New York City demimonde of the arts, politics, theater, and revolution.  I was instrumental in getting Tiny Tim married on the Tonight Show to Miss Vicky, with Reverend Glenesk as the minister, on December 17, 1969. I met Black Panthers and Weathermen in the middle of the night at the church, as Glenesk had approved the church as their clandestine meeting place.  I assisted women in obtaining safe abortions in those pre-Roe vs Wade days through an underground network of physicians operating through Spencer Memorial Church in Brooklyn and Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan.  I also helped some young men escape the Draft by arranging travel to Montreal and the Yellow Door Café. I served wine to the congregation for a special “sermon” by folk singer Oscar Brand, whose work I was familiar with largely through his album of Air Force songs, Wild Blue Yonder, as my mother had been in the Civil Air Patrol and this album was popular among those weekend warriors.

And, on one memorable afternoon, on March 6, 1970, I listened as a brownstone building in the Village blew up.

I had been on the phone with the First Presbyterian Church offices in the Village on some mundane call when I heard the explosion in the receiver.  The office worker I was speaking with shouted, “There’s been an explosion! I have to hang up!” and he did.  I learned later that the Weathermen had been building a bomb in the West 11^th Street brownstone and it had exploded.  Three of the Weathermen had been killed in the blast, and two had escaped. The blast had shattered windows across the street at the church.

This was the kind of thing that went on in those days.  It was the Sixties, it was Vietnam, it was the Cold War, and after all it was New York City.  The fact that I found myself like Zelig at the fringes of all sorts of weirdness seems suspicious to those who were not around then when it was easy to bump into some of the most notorious celebrities, rock stars, spies, psychos, and revolutionaries of the time.

But it was also my “Sophie’s Choice” period.  Like Stingo, the narrator of that famous novel (later made into a film) by William Styron, I would move into an apartment in Brooklyn and befriend a European woman who had been a displaced person in World War II.  From her, I was able to learn first-hand about the war and to be witness to the degree of barely controlled despair her memories held.  Like Sophie, she was not Jewish but Christian.  A Latvian, she had experienced both Nazi and Soviet oppression. As a child she had been a member of Hitler Youth, by force, as well as a member of Young Pioneers. She spent her early years in displaced person camps; her mother doing whatever she could to keep them all alive.  Then, just days before the Berlin Wall went up, she crossed to the other side of Berlin to find freedom. She lived in Canada for a while, and then emigrated to the United States. When I met her, she was fluent in at least six languages.

When she left Brooklyn in the summer of 1970 to go to Europe to see her relatives I sublet her tiny studio apartment on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights, the same street where Norman Mailer had his brownstone.  It was my first apartment, and with a profound sense of relief I moved out of my mother’s place in the Bronx, carrying shopping bags with my personal effects (mostly books) on the subway, and collapsed that very afternoon, falling into a deep sleep on the single bed. Upon waking, I was startled to see what appeared to be a ghost walking across my apartment and through the rear wall into a garden.

I mentioned this to the building’s supers, who assured me that it was a local legend, and that the studio apartment I was in had been the pantry of the brownstone in earlier times, with a door to the garden outside. Thus I had seen one of the early owners of the building, and not to worry. 

I had experience with the paranormal going back a few years, to séances in the Bronx with my family, replete with table-tipping and weird messages in a spirit language, so this development was nothing that frightened or concerned me. It was actually kind of cool.

But I needed a real job to pay the rent (sixty-five dollars a month), so like a lot of people in those days I found my job in the New York Times.  I finessed my way into a role as a comptometer operator (don’t ask) for a Madison Avenue lingerie company known as Stardust.  This was in August 1970. 

I did not know it at the time, but about nine months earlier on November 30, 1969, the son of the owner of Stardust committed suicide in a room of the Chelsea Hotel.  That was Steven Brandt, who had been the best man at the wedding of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. 

To be continued.

Let’s start with the movies.

Brooke Shields attained fame and notoriety as a child star in Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby.  She was only twelve years old at the time, but she appeared nude in that film as the daughter of a prostitute in a New Orleans brothel. It raised all sorts of questions concerning the exploitation of children in cinema, with some critics claiming it was “child pornography” while others defended the film’s merits.  That the Brooke Shields character was sexually involved with an older character – the photographer Bellocq, played by Keith Carradine – made the situation worse even though there was no explicit sex between the actors.  The controversy sealed the fate of Ms. Shields, however, and she became a much sought-after actress even in spite of, or perhaps due to, her notoriety.

What some film buffs may not realize, however, is that Pretty Baby was not Brooke Shields’s first film.  That honor goes to a rather mysterious production known as Communion but also as The Mask Murders, as well as Alice, Sweet Alice and Holy Terror.  That film premiered in Chicago on November 12, 1976, when Shields was only ten years old.  And thereby hangs a tale.

This time, there is a pornography tie-in, albeit not with Ms. Shields but with the director of Communion, Alfred Sole, whose first film – the low-budget porno Deep Sleep (1972), an allusion to the famous porn flick Deep Throat – was pulled from theaters for obscenity, due to pressure from the Roman Catholic Church when it was discovered that the exterior of the local bishop’s house appeared in one scene. 

The film became a cause célèbre in Sole’s hometown of Paterson, New Jersey when a local prosecutor decided to make a name for himself by prosecuting the director (and the actors) to the fullest extent of whatever law he could find.  The case made headlines for months, before finally dwindling out, but Alfred Sole found himself ostracized … and literally excommunicated from the Catholic Church, not a common occurrence. But he still had the movie bug and wanted desperately to direct another film.

Moving from pornography to a kind of detective-thriller-horror genre known to cineastes as giallo, Sole decided to produce and direct a feature film about Catholic school girls and a series of bloody murders in the local parish.  The action takes place in 1961 in Paterson: one of the most dangerous cities in America at the time. There were those who claimed the ornately Catholic plot built around the familiar ritual of First Communion was Sole’s retaliation for the Church having Deep Sleep pulled from the theatres and all its prints destroyed.  (Setting it in 1961 might also have been a reference to the first Catholic President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, who took office that year.)

Sole had studied art and architecture in Italy at the University of Florence and had developed an eye for production design which would later provide him with a decent living, working on such television shows as Castle, Veronica Mars, and MacGyver as well as a number of feature films. But in 1976 he was raising his own money, including mortgaging his house, to finance Communion.  He wrote the script with an English professor at Montclair State University, Rosemary Ritvo, who was his neighbor in Paterson and who shared some of his animus against the Church.

Most accounts leave Rosemary Ritvo right there, a virtual cypher, but that does not do justice to Sole’s co-author.  Rosemary Puglia Ritvo – to give her full name – was known for her academic studies of the Nobel Prize-winning poet (and initiate of the secret society known as the Golden Dawn) W. B. Yeats, and the relation of his work to Neo-Platonism.  She also co-authored another screenplay, much later on, for the TV movie Traitor in My House (1990) which starred Mary Kay Place and Charles Dutton: a true story about the Civil War spy Elizabeth van Lew who ran a Union spy ring out of her home in Richmond, Virginia and who, coincidentally, was once considered to be a witch. 

There was a lot more to Rosemary Ritvo than the cavalier reference to her professorship and her screenplay for Communion.  She obviously had a deeper understanding of the weird occult waters they were treading in and might have pulled off an even better screenplay than Communion if she had the chance.  She and Sole would collaborate on other projects, but financial and other difficulties in getting Communion made and distributed put the dream of a fruitful career in Hollywood script writing out of reach for both.  Sole would go on to make a few more films, each weirder than the last, but always had difficulty reaching a wider audience, so he had to settle for work as a production designer in Hollywood. 

Spies, witches, the Church, murdered children, and feature films.  Okay.  But what you’re really expecting of me is a deeper, perhaps slightly off-center, gaze into the tight little web of coincidence and conspiracy that this film represents.  Those who are familiar with my work and bio will suspect that there is some sort of personal connection to all of this as well, some weird happenstance that casts more shadow, if not more light, onto what seems at first is just an intriguing tale of how a strange little film was made and then somehow forgotten, only to be rediscovered later and praised for its creativity and directorial vision after an appropriate passage of time.

Well.  You’re not wrong.

Let’s start with one of Communion’s co-stars, a young woman in her thirties named Linda Miller.

At the time of filming, Linda Miller had just broken up with her husband, Jason Miller.  That’s the same Jason Miller who played Father Karras in The Exorcist (1973) and later in The Exorcist III (1990).  That Jason Miller.  She was so distraught over the divorce that she attempted suicide on the set of Communion by slitting her wrist.  Considering that this was, basically, a slasher film … well, I could make a joke about typecasting but that would be cruel.

Linda Miller is the daughter of actor and TV comedian Jackie Gleason, for those keeping score at home. And Jason and Linda Miller are the parents of actor Jason Patric.  Patric starred in the vampire flick The Lost Boys (1987) and, more recently, in MK Ultra (2022).

(No, I’m not making this up.)

But it’s the other, lesser known, characters we’re interested in.  Let’s start with Alphonso DeNoble.

DeNoble was discovered by Alfred Sole when the latter went to visit his father’s grave in a New Jersey cemetery.  DeNoble was masquerading as a priest and dispensing blessings and advice to those who came to visit their dearly departed, in exchange for donations. 

This resonated with me, since I used to do the same thing with my high school classmate, William Prazsky.  We would go to St. Michael’s Cemetery in Queens, dressed in black cassocks and clerical collars, heavy crosses around our necks, and wander among the graves, blessing random headstones, until visitors would approach us and ask us to bless their relatives’ resting places.  We would do so, and then the visitors would give us a few dollars.  We might make anywhere from twenty to thirty dollars (in 1968 dollars) per afternoon. It was that money that paid for our limousine to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for Senator Kennedy’s funeral, but that’s another story.

Alfred Sole struck up a conversation with DeNoble at the cemetery and wound up offering him a part in his film, that of a “Mr. Alphonso,” a sleazy pedophile landlord who becomes one of the victims.

DeNoble was morbidly obese, almost impossibly round, with a bald head and devilish beard, which only contributed to his sinister appearance in the film. As it turned out, he appeared in two other movies around the same time, both of them horror films.

But the unfortunate DeNoble committed suicide almost exactly a year after Communion was released into general distribution in the United States, retitled as Alice, Sweet Alice (November 17, 1977), shooting himself in the head with a shotgun on November 18, 1978.  This seems to have been due to his getting stuck in a subway turnstile because of his size, an episode which received some unwanted attention in the New York press.  He could not survive the very public humiliation and took his own life in despair.

The other character is a truly minor one, practically a cameo.  It was the role of the undertaker and is played by professional wrestling champion Antonino Rocca.

This is where I come in.

You remember the aforementioned William Prazsky?  We were both students at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, the same institution of learning that gave us Christine Jorgensen and David Berkowitz.  It was 1968, and we were both in danger of getting drafted and being sent to Vietnam.  So we formed our own church, incorporated it in the State of New York, and proclaimed ourselves clergymen.  We had a feeling this ruse might not work as smoothly as we hoped, so we made contact with an actual church – the American Orthodox Catholic Church, also in the Bronx – and were taken under its wing.

As it turns out, the AOCC was a front for American intelligence, specifically anti-communist activities in the United States and abroad.  It was created by a Ukrainian Orthodox priest with impeccable credentials who ran anti-communist crusades in the States in the 1940s-1960s.  Suspected Kennedy assassination conspirators David Ferrie and Jack Martin were members.  And, in 1968-1969, so were William Prazsky and I, although we were not yet aware of the Church’s notoriety in political circles.

Thus it transpired that, shortly after becoming involved with the AOCC, I attended a meeting at the Brotherhood Synagogue in New York City with Rabbi Alan Block, William Prazsky, Andre Pennachio, and Antonino Rocca.  Just the five of us.  The topic of the conversation was Rocca’s involvement with the CIA.

The Brotherhood Synagogue was the brainchild of a Rabbi and a Presbyterian minister. Based in Greenwich Village, it was well-known for its liberal attitude towards ecumenism.  It was also, at that time, very pro-Israel which would become a problem later.

I am not sure why we were at that meeting, except that it was probably the idea of Andre Pennachio.  Pennachio was a Liberal Catholic priest.  The Liberal Catholic Church is a branch of the Theosophical Society, and not part of the Roman Catholic Church.  Pennachio was angling for consecration as a bishop with the American Orthodox Catholic Church with which Prazsky and I – as “priests” of our very own Slavonic Orthodox Church – were in communion.  In other words, Pennachio was working with the AOCC for much the same reason we were: to get “normalized” as a clergyman and raise his profile as a bishop. 

Pennachio had contacts throughout the entertainment industry and among other Italian-American personalities, of which Antonino Rocca was one.  Born in Italy, Rocca moved to Argentina just before World War II broke out and became a soccer and rugby player before becoming a professional wrestler and moving to the United States.

Now here we were, listening to Rocca tell war stories of how he had agents killed from under him in Lebanon, and how he smuggled Phantom jets into Israel from Europe.  He tried very hard to reassure Rabbi Block that whatever it seemed the US government was doing where Israel was concerned, they were actually working behind the scenes – with Rocca, obviously – to ensure that Israel survived and received the aid she needed.

It was a bizarre episode, to be sure.  Prazsky and I were only 18 years old at the time but were somehow managing to carry off our clerical personae.  Rabbi Block had no idea who we were but knew Pennachio (who knew just about everybody in New York). I am not sure why this meeting was necessary in the first place unless it was to convince someone of something.  And as for me, I had never heard of Antonino Rocca before.

Fast forward to 1977.  That was the year, remember, that Communion officially opened in theaters as Alice, Sweet Alice.  Antonino Rocca died on March 15 at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan of a urinary tract infection.  He was only 55 years old.  His funeral was attended by thousands.  But there was never any mention anywhere of his supposed involvement with CIA in the Middle East, and no confirmation that he smuggled Phantom jets into Israel from Europe.  He was, however, quite particular as to how it was done.

In order to avoid Congressional limits on aid to Israel, he said, the jets were sold to a third party in Luxembourg.  They were crated up, according to Rocca, and assembled in Luxembourg after which they were flown to Israel. This seemed like a lot of detail to me. He also insisted he had two men who worked for him as agents killed in Lebanon by Palestinian spies.  It was all very cloak-and-dagger, of course, and could have been put down to bragging, but that still does not explain what we were all doing there that morning.

Rocca maintained his involvement in the wrestling world for years after our meeting in 1969.  He worked as a referee in Japan, among other things, and eventually retired officially in 1976.  He was a world traveler, and fluent in several languages including Italian and Spanish as well as English, so he would have made a useful intelligence agent.  It is unsure how he got the part in Communion, except that he evidently had the same agent as actress Lilian Roth who also appeared in the film.

Little did I know, however, that at that meeting at the Brotherhood Synagogue I was seated with not one but two movie actors.

Andre Pennachio, as mentioned, knew a lot of people in the industry.  What is not so well known is that he had his own bit part in a film.  He had a non-speaking role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).  If you remember the famous baptism scene, where the infant Sofia Coppola (playing Michael Corleone’s godson) is being baptized as Al Pacino (Michael Corleone) is holding her over the baptismal font, there is a high-ranking clergyman standing off to the side, resplendent in what appear to be a monsignor’s black cassock with red buttons.  He also appears again, briefly, on the steps of the church after the ceremony.  That is Andre Pennachio.

But in 1969, Pennachio had formed an official committee to finance and celebrate his consecration as a bishop in the AOCC.  He had a lot of well-known names on his letterhead, including Joseph Konowe of the Teamsters Union and Harry Hirschfield, the famous cartoonist, both of whom I met at the time. The Committee was run out of an office building on lower Fifth Avenue, near the Flatiron Building.  It was the headquarters of something called Delta Metal Industries.

Delta Metal Industries had a warehouse in Brooklyn, and to this day you will find some of their furnishings for sale on eBay and similar sites, mostly stools and small chairs made of brass in a “boudoir style”, replete with red or purple velvet pompoms.  Their showroom on Fifth Avenue was large and located on the third floor above street level and in all the time I spent there I never saw any customers.  We had the use of our own office on site, but there was never any work for me to do.  We mostly just hung out.

Gradually, it became obvious that there was no actual business being done out of that office.  But there were parties.  Most of the guests were theater people known to Pennachio, and government people known to Harry Kay. (I remember the actress Thelma Carpenter at one such affair.) Why would Harry Kay loan an office in his showroom to Andre Pennachio?  How did Kay even know Pennachio?

And how was it possible for Pennachio to escort me to the office of the head of the Selective Service System in New York City when it became time for me to register for the Draft? 

All of these things are connected, and the links are subterranean and strange.  Colonel Kirschenbaum was a tweedy type with a big desk and a private office in the Federal Building. I sat down with him and Pennachio, and he deftly provided me with the 4-D Clergy deferment on the spot … with the proviso that I keep him abreast of any suspicious Eastern European types coming in from abroad and passing themselves off as priests.  This was not only the Vietnam Era, it was also the Cold War, and the Soviet Union was moving spies into the United States masquerading as Russian Orthodox priests.  The AOCC was an anti-Soviet front organization run by a Ukrainian. It was all starting to come together.

Thus a few months later I was sitting at a desk in Delta Metal Industries and wondering what I had gotten myself into.  I began hearing rumors that I was going to be sidelined from the Committee and from the churches generally.  Prazsky had developed a closer relationship to Pennachio than was … seemly, and he began to indulge delusions of grandeur.  Prazsky was not satisfied being a mere priest or archimandrite.  He wanted to be a bishop, too. 

Remember, we both were still only eighteen and had only just graduated high school the year before. Prazsky would turn nineteen that June, yet by October he managed to befriend another cleric, this time it was Archbishop Hryhorij Osijchuk of the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, and he would eventually manage to take over that denomination years later, a bizarre fact that would contribute to his mysterious death after the fall of the Soviet Union, but that’s another story for another time.

As for me, I left the whole operation abruptly once I learned of the plot against me.  My sudden disappearance caused a lot of consternation among the others who were afraid of what I might say to the authorities about what I had seen or heard at Delta Metal Industries.  They began phoning my mother’s apartment at all hours, looking for me and trying to find out what my plans were.  Once they were satisfied I was not going to make any trouble for them, they stopped calling … but I immediately received notice from the Draft board that I had been reclassified as 1A. 

I was going into the Army.

(To be continued.)

I have had discussions for a number of years with people connected to the UFO/UAP Phenomenon in a variety of ways, from experiencers and contactees to government and industry insiders to researchers and journalists.  One thing everyone agrees upon is that the need for government secrecy concerning the Phenomenon is long past its sell-by date … up to a point, that is. 

Most people I know just want the Powers-That-Be to throw open the doors and dump all those classified files on the carpet like it’s any given Saturday night at Mar-A-Lago. So why isn’t it happening?

In fact, virtually everyone else I have spoken to on this claims that there are a handful of UFO secrets that are classified so stratospherically high that an actual classification doesn’t even exist.  These are not legacy programs in any traditional sense of the word.  You don’t get “read in” to these secrets.  There is only a scattering of individuals in the whole country that are entrusted with this data, and they don’t share.  In fact, you could be working on one aspect of one of these programs and never even know it.  Never suspect it.  Because the data you are working on has been so isolated from the main program that there is no way to tie it to anything remotely identifiable.

And, so they say, much of this research has already and effectively been terminated long ago with no prospects of starting it up again anytime soon.

The reasons for this are depressingly simple.

In the first place, it has to do with the technology in our possession.  Technology that resists any and all attempts to analyze it, duplicate it, or reverse engineer it.  Technology we have had for decades, but to no avail.  Basically, at least from an outsider’s perspective, we’ve given up.

In the second place, and more importantly, we can’t be trusted with it.  We can’t be trusted knowing about it.  We can’t be trusted with any of the details concerning it.  We are, quite simply, all of us, you, me, and that psycho next to you, security risks.

And it’s all because of some guy called Klaus Fuchs.

It was World War Two.  We had learned that the Germans had already solved the fission problem and were well on their way to having the atomic bomb.  There was a mad scramble to beat them to it, and in order to do that we had to do something inconceivable at the time: create a completely hidden, secret-above-top-secret, program that would bring together scientists and engineers from a variety of disciplines to solve all the theoretical and practical problems in the development of the world’s first atomic bomb.

In other words, it is not only the infamous Manhattan Project we are talking about but also what could very well have been the dress rehearsal for a multi-disciplinary UFO research and development program.

All the moving parts were already there: we had facilities at various locations in the United States; we had the personnel; we had the budget; we had a deadline.  There were other countries working on the same problem (notably Germany and Japan, as well as the Soviet Union), so the pressure was on.  How easy it would have been to fine-tune the Manhattan Project so that we could apply the same system (and perhaps many of the same personnel, as well as the security apparatus) to deconstructing any kind of alien technology in our possession.

We know what happened with the Manhattan Project.  It stayed secret until the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan.  A project that involved thousands of people and the most advanced scientific knowledge at the time. And it worked.  The United States was the first country and for a while the only country in the world with that capability. 

There was only one problem.  Karl Fuchs.

Karl Fuchs was a German and a Communist.  He fled Germany, wound up in the UK, was interned, released, and in 1943 brought to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project.  He was a brilliant physicist who had first started working for Great Britain’s atomic bomb project, known innocently enough as “Tube Alloys”.  He became a British citizen and signed the Official Secrets Act, which forbade him from sharing his research with foreign governments. However, he almost immediately began passing England’s atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

After winding up at the Manhattan Project, Fuchs began passing secrets to the infamous Harry Gold, an agent for the Soviet KGB who later was implicated in the Rosenberg spy case as their handler and the courier for the documents they sent to Russia. 

In 1949, due to intercepts of Soviet cable traffic by the US government’s Venona Project, Karl Fuchs was identified as a Soviet spy and arrested in 1950.  He spent nine years in prison, and later defected to East Germany where he continued his research on behalf of that government.  (He died in 1988.)

It is believed that Fuchs had accelerated the Soviet Union’s atomic research program by at least 2 years. This is not counting the participation of the Rosenbergs and others who were passing secrets to the Soviets.  And then, things got even messier as the United States entered the McCarthy Era where anyone and everyone was considered to be a Communist or an agent of the Soviets.  Thus, we have the spectacle of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who performed crucial work in developing the atomic bomb for the United States, accused of being a Communist and losing his security clearance while at the same time we brought over Nazi scientists – who had been actual enemies of the State – to run our space program when that program was still a purely military affair.  We arrested rocket scientist Qian Xue Sen who had been involved in our rocket program during World War Two and who helped debrief Nazi scientists in Germany in March 1945, and accused him of being a Communist loyal to China.  He wasn’t, but we pushed him into the arms of Chairman Mao anyway so that, after years of house arrest, he was finally released and defected to Beijing where he jump-started their missile program.

And don’t get me started on Jack Parsons.

The whole point of this brief summary of Cold War US history is that the Manhattan Project, while quite successful, also gave us the template for secret government programs of which the general public knows nothing, and of which even high-ranking members of the government and the military know nothing.  A UFO program would share many of those same characteristics.  But … Karl Fuchs. 

It could be argued (and it has been) that a UFO program would be several factors more critical than the Manhattan Project.  UFO technology – that which we can actually observe and have recorded so far – is so different and potentially so much more powerful and advanced than the atomic bomb project that there is no acceptable level of risk.  We simply cannot allow anyone to have access to the raw material – or the data derived therefrom – whom we cannot trust.  We trusted Karl Fuchs, and he gave whatever he had to our ideological and existential enemy, the Soviet Union.  In fact, there were other spies at Los Alamos; Fuchs was not alone.  Can you imagine what might happen if a Karl Fuchs had penetrated the American UFO program and was sending data to the Russians, or the Chinese, or in fact to anyone outside the US military-intelligence community where it would eventually wind up in the hands of people who wish us harm?

Now we are in Joseph Heller territory.  What we need, and what I have argued in postings, on podcasts, and in the Sekret Machines books, is a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the Phenomenon, because to apply only the science we already know and understand to a deconstruction of the UFO/UAP Phenomenon is (obviously) insufficient.  We need to think outside of the box.  In fact, we need to take that box apart and stack the pieces to the side.  But … Catch-22.

In order to do that, we have to bring people in.  And people are notoriously unreliable from a national security standpoint.  They brag.  They lie.  They steal.  They have other allegiances and loyalties.  They feel guilty.  They feel obligated.  Overwhelmed. Grandiose.  They get drunk or stoned.  Have sex outside the lines. Get blackmailed.  Need cash in a hurry.  Want cash in a hurry. 

I ran this by Jim Semivan, a board member of To The Stars and a retired career CIA officer, and he presented a similar scenario, from the perspective of a military-intelligence weltanschauung developed over decades of hot and cold wars:

“I would only add that while we all want disclosure I can't think of a way to do it without spilling all the beans all over the floor.  If the USG says we are being visited, then they also have to say how they know this, when they knew this, etc.  Thousands of questions will be asked, and answers will be demanded.  So how much can they say w/o causing chaos?  How do you hide the fact that we have alien craft and we're working on them secretly if you say we have proof aliens are here?  What if we also know that aliens are not our friends, that they can control us whenever they want to do so, that we are indeed property and that we have absolutely no defenses against this?  That is, I think, the ultimate dilemma for the USG and other nations. You can't disclose just part of the story ... the spin of it all would be unrelenting ... journalists would be digging into everything to find out more answers.  We want disclosure but we don't want chaos, too.  How would you do a partial disclosure?  What would it look like? Would science jump on the UFO bandwagon with universities, devoting schools for its study?  Where would it all end?  Chris and I talked about the potential dangers of opening up Pandora's Box.  Yet, the Phenomenon is here and smacking us in the head all the time so how can we continue to deny it?  I am quite frustrated with it all.  As I said before, 14 Presidents and many other senior officials knew/know about this, but all have refused to let the secret out.  What do they know?  Are they scared or do they just realize that there may not be any upside to disclosure?”

So … like … Is it any wonder that there are religious fanatics in the US Air Force, indoctrinated at Colorado Springs in the dangers of spiritual pollution? What better way to keep mere humans in line than the threat of eternal damnation?  It’s worked before.

There are people right now with knowledge of the UAP situation who are congratulating themselves, slapping each other on the back, knowing they dodged a bullet: because if a former President of the United States could not be trusted with national security intelligence, then no one can. 

And that means us.  And not just us:  Russian citizens, Chinese citizens, Brazilians, the French, the Brits.  All of us.  There is political upheaval all over the world at this very moment. There is a growing tendency towards authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and even fascism.  The forces of democracy just barely defeated an authoritarian government’s attempt to build the first atomic bomb in 1945; can we be sure the same will happen again with the technology salvaged from a crashed – or intact – UFO?

No, we can’t.  To paraphrase Robert Owen: “I don’t trust anyone except me and thee, and I’m not too sure about thee.”

Does this mean we give up on UFO secrecy?  Of course, not.  We keep pressing, we keep agitating, and eventually something will give. We have to challenge – intelligently – the position that chaos will ensue if the USG ever acknowledges the whole truth. That’s up to us, those of us who do not work in government.  The Powers-That-Be will recognize that this has gone on far too long. That there is nothing to gain.  That if another government, another nation, decides to spill the beans then we will look not only stupid but borderline criminal.  That there is another Karl Fuchs out there, and another Harry Gold. 

Me, personally, I think Disclosure/Confirmation is happening now (if we are paying attention) and that the “ship” has already sailed (or, at least, is out of drydock) but I have to acknowledge the possibilities provided by Jim Semivan and others like him who may not be so optimistic.

People in the UFO “community” complain about a “limited hangout” or “slow drip disclosure” and the like.  Give me a slow drip rather than none at all.  If the government wants to gauge our reaction to whatever they slow drip, that’s fine with me.  We’ve all handled it pretty well so far, I think. We haven’t had the vapors, or fainted, or rioted in the streets over UFO disclosures.  We’re taking it in stride.  The social engineering aspect of all of this is going smoothly.  Now it’s time for a little exposure on the scientific end.  We’ve actually had some of that, it’s just that few people are paying attention.  We’ve been made aware of genetic testing, of exotic materials testing, and the reactions of scientists and military observers to the aerodynamics of the UAPs.

It’s up to us now to take that slow drip, that scattered dispersal of mind-bending data across several disciplines, and do something with it.  Let’s work with what we have so far.  We just may, as regular citizens, jump-start disclosure ourselves.  What we lack in scientific training and exposure to an actual craft we make up for in creative analysis of the available data.  Ninety-nine percent of that will be useless word salad and psychotic ravings, of course, but we’re okay with that. We have been for decades.  It’s entertainment.  It’s UFO conferences and podcasts. 

But that one percent … that one percent will change the world.

But I neglected to talk about another aspect of E. Howard Hunt, one that would have made the previous article too long, but I am taking the liberty of including it here.

Hunt was a published author, with over 70 published books to his credit, most of which were fiction.  That alone is an astonishing record, regardless of the quality or general acceptance of his work by the literary world.  In fact, various literary lights – such as Gore Vidal, in a lengthy article in the New York Review of Books and Sol Yurick in The New York Times – analyzed Hunt’s work in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate affair, sometimes as an opportunity for snark or at best motivated by a desire to understand the most enigmatic character in the events that brought down a President.

I won’t go into any kind of literary analysis here, for which the reader may consider themselves grateful, but I do want to pick out a few titles in particular because they prefigure everything from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s to today’s Pizzagate and QAnon: Hunt’s occult novels.

Yes, the Watergate Plumber and CIA action officer involved in the Bay of Pigs operation, in assassination plots against Castro, and who possibly haunted Dealey Plaza in November 1963, also published three occult novels from 1969 to 1972.  Previously, most of his fiction consisted of either detective yarns or spy novels that were obviously inspired by the works of Ian Fleming: the British spy-turned-novelist who created the James Bond character (and who was, himself, no stranger to occultism).  In fact, Hunt claimed that Richard Helms (then Director of CIA) tasked him with creating an American version of James Bond to improve CIA’s reputation at home and abroad, and Hunt happily complied.  But at the end of that creative writing spree there were those three last novels published under a pseudonym (after Watergate, his novels all bore his real name) that focused on occultism (or as Hunt imagined occultism to be).  In each case, the occultists were “Satanic” in the popular understanding of the term: there were the inevitable orgies, naked rituals involving some form of blood sacrifice, incantations to alien gods, hypnotic drums, drugs, oh …and the cultists were either Democrats or Communists. Or both.  Usually both.  And, by the way, there was a distinct racial component to Hunt’s depiction of them as enemies of the State.

The first of Hunt’s three occult novels, The Sorcerers, was published in 1969 and begins as a normal spy novel with the Soviets as enemies, and a plot involving a diplomat’s missing daughter.  The hero – Peter Ward – knows that the daughter is being used to blackmail the diplomat into working with the Russians, so he has to find the daughter and rescue her from the opposition. So far, so good.  But then Ward discovers that the daughter has been in Paris (for Hunt, the capital city of devil worshipers, as we shall see) and was mixed up with Satanists and ritual magic.  Evidently, this particular cult was actually created by the KGB as a magnet for disaffected youth, who could be turned against Christianity and the West by replacing both with Satan. 

Remember that those times were critical; the previous year in the United States saw the fallout from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, etc., while Europe was a tinderbox with massive anti-war protests and demonstrations in … Paris. In order to thwart this fiendish plot, Peter Ward infiltrates the cult during a Black Mass (shades of J-K. Huysmans and Là Bas, which by the way also is invoked in the novel) as well as a Communist training facility off the coast of Africa which also just happens to be part of the cult’s network, and which features an attack by spear-wielding “natives.”  I kid you not.

The second occult novel, Diabolus, published in 1971, centers on Voudon and the murder of Ward’s housekeeper.  In this case Peter Ward is vacationing on an estate somewhere in the Caribbean.  (Another nod to Ian Fleming.) This island is also home to a number of mysterious Chinese, which becomes relevant later.  Once again, our hero travels to Paris where yet another cult is operating, but this time it isn’t the KGB behind it but a radical French Maoist working for the Chinese (the “Chicoms” to be exact). As before, a damsel is rescued from the clutches of the devil-worshiping, Communist, interracial cult.  Sexual intercourse ensues.

In Hunt’s occult novels, people of color are depicted in a sadly predictable way, as are women in general.  And all are assumed to be weak reeds, easily manipulated by the Communists and the Demonolaters for ulterior motives.  The anti-war movement is part of the devil-worshipers’ enterprise.  There is a global effort to unseat Western white male Christian hegemony, as far as Hunt is concerned, and in that effort occultists and Communists join forces and include the youth movement, Black Power, Latin American and African revolutionary movements, and women’s liberation as well. Hunt has it in for everybody.  And we can see how his ideas evolved in the late ‘Sixties to include occultism and esoterica.  It almost had to. 

Let’s face it: leftist political meetings in the 1960s were dreary, boring, contentious affairs that focused on the minutiae of Marxist thought and Robert’s Rules of Order.  One three-hour long after-school SDS meeting was enough to turn anybody into a radical terrorist and not in a good way.  Occultism was interesting, gaudy, sinister; replete with symbol systems that could be manipulated to mean anything you wanted them to.  There was ritual, incense, candles, occasional nudity … and sex.  Communism was red flags, posters of Che or Mao, endless political discussions where everyone forgot the point, and the printing of countless, countless flyers. Okay, and sex:  but, of course, only as a means of cementing loyalty to the Revolution. (!)

Satan, on the other hand, was sexy.  Virile.  Inordinately powerful. A Bond villain.  Indeed, Le Chiffre – Ian Fleming’s very first Bond villain – was patterned after Aleister Crowley himself. Fleming had met Crowley during World War II when British intelligence toyed with the idea of using Crowley’s contacts in Europe against the Nazis. So, the idea of mixing occultism with politics and intelligence operations was nothing new.

Let’s take a closer look at The Coven as an example. It was the last of Hunt’s three occult novels, published in 1972, under one of Hunt’s several noms-de-plume: David St. John.  (St. John, it will be remembered from White House Plumbers, is the given name of Hunt’s eldest son.  For what it’s worth, it was also the name of Kim Philby’s father. You remember: Kim Philby was the Soviet mole inside MI5, British intelligence. David is the name of Hunt’s youngest son.) 

The Coven centers on the first-person narrative of Jonathan Gault, a lawyer who is investigating the murder of a beautiful young Black singer.  The main suspects are Senator Vane and his sophisticated wife, both characters loosely but unmistakably based on the Kennedys.  In 1972 both Jack and Bobby had already been assassinated and brother Ted’s presidential ambitions sank with his car when it went over the Chappaquiddick bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne still in it. But the Kennedy family remained a bugaboo for Hunt, a symbol of all that is evil about America. To reinforce that symbol, he throws in a cult that is something of a mixture of Afro-Caribbean religion and, again, popular ideas about Satanism. 

“Jonathan Gault” is an obvious reference to John Galt, of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, surely a tome whose message of libertarian individuality and disdain for the (socialistic, communistic) masses would have been attractive to Hunt. But there are even more sly references. 

The police officer conducting the homicide investigation is Ray Untermeyer. 

Aficionados of the Son of Sam mystery will recognize the name as suggestive of Samuel Untermeyer, after whom a park in Yonkers is named.  Sam Untermeyer was a fervent anti-Nazi and a Democrat politico, yet his park is where members of the purported Sam cult would meet and sacrifice dogs to Satan.  Maury Terry, in his The Ultimate Evil, the book connecting the Son of Sam to Charles Manson and a string of other murders from coast to coast, linked Untermeyer with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: that venerable British occult lodge that would eventually give birth to Aleister Crowley. I could not find proof of this connection, although the Golden Dawn did have two or three lodges in the United States around the time of the First World War.  It should be noted that the Son of Sam murders would not take place for another five years after the publication of The Coven, although the stories of weird scenes at Untermeyer were around before then.  Had Hunt any knowledge of Untermeyer’s involvement in occultism that might explain including a reference to the unusual name in this particular novel.

However, the Manson murders had taken place in 1969 (when Hunt’s first occult novel, The Sorcerers, was published) and the connection of the Manson Family to various occult and esoteric groups in and around San Francisco and Southern California at the time was well-known, as well as rumors that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were friends of Bobby Kennedy.  Bobby actually had his last meal at the home of Hollywood producer John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate … I know, I know: a little on the nose, but true nonetheless) at which Polanski and Tate were guests.  He was assassinated later that evening. The LAPD cell where accused Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan was held became Charles Manson’s new home after his own arrest for the Tate/LaBianca killings a year later.  Sirhan’s notebook revealed that he had attended meetings of the Theosophical Society and the Rosicrucians.  Manson himself was sentenced for his murders in March 1971: the year before The Coven was published, and ignoring the fact that President Nixon had famously declared that Manson was guilty while the trial was still ongoing (which could have caused a mistrial but didn’t). There is every reason to believe that these events inspired some of the paranoia concerning murderous cults that inform Hunt’s novel, but the political angle – Democrats in league with cultists and Devil worshipers – is purely Hunt’s own.

Hunt was an anti-communist crusader with impeccable credentials. Where Gordon Liddy was all talk – and a lot of it – wrapped in Teutonic bluster and Nazi aesthetic, Hunt had been running operations all over Latin America in the days when CIA was “Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean”, to quote Lyndon Johnson.  Hunt had helped overthrow Arbenz in Guatemala as part of the CIA operation known as PBSUCCESS and was instrumental in setting up the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  When that invasion failed spectacularly, Hunt – along with many Cubans – blamed President Kennedy directly, especially as the political fallout from the invasion impacted his own career.  Kennedy – and, by extension, the Democratic Party – became the target of Hunt’s hatred.  Thus, his identification with both Richard Nixon – who hated the Kennedys as much as Hunt did – and the conservative Republican cause. 

Hunt’s particular contribution to this “demonization” of the Democrats, however, was to go full Dennis Wheatley on their ass, and put them center-stage in a cult that mixed Voudon with European-style magic and even Wicca.  At one point in The Coven, during an orgiastic ritual, the high priestess of the cult screams out “Agrippa! … Sasa, Xilka, Iyouel, Legba, Nahema, Obatala, Malia, Damkina, Biscar!...”  Now, no ritual magician would ever shout “Agrippa” which is just the name of the author of the famous Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Cornelius Agrippa.  But Legba and Obatala are familiar names to those who study Afro-Caribbean religions, except they would not be invoked that way in a ritual.  Interestingly, “Sasa” (i.e., Sasha) and “Malia” are the names of President Obama’s daughters …!  (Steady … steady … Malia would be born in 1998 and Sasha in 2001.  In 1972, when The Coven was published, Barack Obama himself was only 11 years old and, obviously, his daughters had not yet been born.)

“Xilka” is interesting, as it appears in the Necronomicon (the Simon version) as the incantation “Xilka Xilka Besa Besa” from the section entitled “Maqlu Text”, but the Necronomicon wasn’t published until 1977: five years after The Coven.  (Did Hunt have access to an earlier copy?  Nah, sorry to disappoint but it was a well-known incantation that had appeared in a number of other published sources since at least the nineteenth century.)

“Iyouel” appears in several places as a banishing spell, connected to King Solomon. 

“Nahema” appears as a demon of impurity and is possibly identical to the Naahma mentioned in the Zohar and other places as a female demon.

“Damkina” is a venerable Assyrian or Babylonian goddess, a consort of Enki.

“Biskar” is anyone’s guess.

Now all of this is intriguing and may be suggestive of some kind of “sinister force” operating just behind and below conscious appreciation, but there is a problem with this association of magic and occultism with the Democrats and by extension with some fantasy of Satanic socialists and communists, and that is – generally speaking – one doesn’t find many occultists operating within a socialist or communist milieu.  One remembers that Marx and Engels famously declared that “religion is the opiate of the people” and that the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China were both famously based on Marxist dialectical materialism and the rejection of religion in all its forms.  If religion is the opiate of the people, then – from a Marxist perspective – occultism is crystal meth.

As Theodor Adorno famously pointed out in the immediate postwar period, it is fascism that is fascinated (ahem) with occultism.  We saw that with Nazism, certainly, but also with the military junta in Greece, with the right-wing Argentine government under Isabel Peron, and with the Nazi occultist and diplomat Miguel Serrano in Chile. You don’t find much occultism in leftist movements as they tend to be much more pragmatic.  Even with the Putin regime in Russia, you have the spectacle of occultist philosophers like Aleksandr Dugin praising selected Nazis, such as Reinhard Heydrich.  And, anyway, can you imagine Che Guevara conducting occult ceremonies in the Sierra Maestra?  Or Lenin invoking Satan in 1917?  But there were occultists in Munich in 1919, such as the Thule Gesellschaft, that gave rise to the Nazi Party. And then there was the SS and the Ahnenerbe program. Archaeological digs in the Middle East.  Expeditions to Tibet. The friggin’ swastika.

So, for Hunt to accuse the Democrats of being occultists was a little like the cauldron calling the kettle black.  But, barring invoking Jewish bankers or international Freemasons, characterizing Democrats as devil worshiping human sacrificers was the next best thing.  The emotional impact of the characterization is hard to ignore.  Hunt knew he didn’t like communists or socialists or any group smacking of leftist sentiments, but he didn’t have the capacity (or most likely the desire) for arguing for his position in a poli-sci kinda way that would be appetizing to the kind of reader who favors espionage pot-boilers. Associating his ideological enemy with devil worship and human sacrifice was a short-hand, dog-whistle way of avoiding a direct anti-Semitic smear but also profiting from the “guilt by association” technique.  People were ready to associate the political party they hated with something else that seemed weird and ugly and dangerous.  The communists in Russia and China were anti-religion; the Democrats in the United States worshiped the Devil.  Same thing, right?

And then …

The Exorcist was published in 1971, and the film version released in 1973, making the Devil a reality in the minds of many people, even those who had previously been agnostic.  According to the proponents of what would become the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare, there were Satanic cults everywhere, and they were murdering infants in unholy rituals to that same Devil.  There was no immediate political association being made, however, but there was the assumption that some of these rites were being carried out under the auspices of US government programs.  This was also the period of the Congressional committees – such as the Rockefeller Commission (1975) – that were investigating CIA’s “mind control” operations, investigations that were being carried out in the wake of the Watergate revelations.  It was easy to blend the US government’s interest in drugs, hypnosis, “depatterning” and “psychic driving”, with ritual magic and devil worship to create this overarching narrative of government agents performing experiments on children in order to create robot assassins: a theme that was picked up and amplified by a number of popular books, films, and television series and which reached its apotheosis in the Netflix series Stranger Things but which was prefigured in Dark Angel, a series that starred a young Jessica Alba (2000-2002) and in Hanna (2011) starring Soairse Ronan, and many others.  And, indeed, in Hunt’s occult novels drugs are used as mind control tools by both sides in the Cold War conflict – both CIA and KGB and Chinese PSB – as well as by the cultists themselves.

Saigon fell in 1975.  One of the Manson Family members – Squeaky Fromme – attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford a few months later. In the late 1970s, there was the Son of Sam murder spree and the persistent hint of satanic cults behind them, including references to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, an offshoot of Scientology that was incorporated in New Orleans by Tommy Jude Baumler, who had worked in Guy Banister’s office back in the day when Lee Oswald haunted its halls with his old CAP squadron leader and occult aficionado, David Ferrie.  (Charles Manson also had been interviewed by the Process in the 1960s, so there was that.)

Then there was Jonestown, and the Cult Awareness Network was born in its wake and later taken over by … Scientology: a system that was created by a man who had conjured spirits in the desert with rocket scientist Jack Parsons, and who once claimed to have known Aleister Crowley himself. (Not true, but …)

December 1980 saw the assassination of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman, who claimed he was possessed by the Devil.  Or by J.D. Salinger.  Or both.

And then, in the 1980s, the Satanic Ritual Abuse Scare reached full flower.  There was the infamous Geraldo Rivera television episode.  The McMartin School scandal. “Cult cops.”  And the insistence that there were generational satanic cults operating in the United States, responsible for hundreds … no thousands … no millions of sacrificed infants every year.  The enormous impossibility of all of that became apparent after a long, long while and the scare seemed to die down, at least for a few years.  And then …

By 2016, the theme had reached fever pitch.  The “US government” had become “the Deep State”, and its operatives were George Soros-type world government gurus as well as the Democratic Party (since Soros – a Jewish financier, wink wink – donated to liberal causes).  Democrats – notably Hillary Clinton and John Podesta – were conducting satanic rituals in the basements of Washington DC pizzerias (!) in order to harvest adrenochrome and thus gain immortality.  Or something. (Thank you, Hunter S. Thompson, you beautiful lunatic.) This would have been vintage E. Howard Hunt had he lived long enough to appreciate it. (He didn’t; he died in 2007.)  No one stopped to wonder why people like Clinton and Podesta with the considerable resources at their disposal would have risked performing murderous satanic rites in a pizzeria in downtown DC when they easily could have conducted elaborate rituals in any of the other properties in the States and around the world that they either owned or had access to.

And, of course, there was no basement at Comet Ping-Pong anyway.  So, the infant sacrifices would have had to take place on the astral plane.  Or something.

And let’s not forget that infant sacrifice was a key element in the blood libel that had been used for centuries to vilify the Jews, the story being that Jews needed the blood of Christian babies for their Seders. It was one of those hideous inventions that were so intense and insane that many people thought they had to be true.  Like Hitler’s “Big Lie” theory: people were more likely to believe an outlandish lie than a small one.  After all, small lies are easily disproven; big ones, not so much.

Oddly, the QAnon/Pizzagate/child sacrifice scare never seemed to involve Republicans. As weird as the story is, it is divided cleanly along party lines.  It’s only Democrats who are believed to conduct dark rituals and murder innocents. The CIA’s mind control efforts – beginning with Bluebird in 1950 and extending through MK-ULTRA in the 1970s – were conducted under both types of administrations, Democrat and Republican.  Richard Helms, a hero to E. Howard Hunt, was a firm supporter of MK-ULTRA until it was better not to be, and he ordered the files shredded before the Rockefeller Commission could get their hands on them.  (Some files escaped the destruction, which is how we know about it today.) 

But is it possible that one political party would have the monopoly on Devil worship? What is it about Democrats and the Democratic Party that allows some people to assume the worst?

The much-vaunted Democrat support for diversity may be at the heart of the problem.  If one celebrates diversity then one cannot remain ideologically “pure”. To be agreeable and “inclusive” is to be wishy-washy and morally corrupt.  There is simply no room for nuance in today’s political climate.  Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer, leaves no room for diversity.  It’s all Hatfields and McCoys.  Or Übermenschen and Untermenschen. With demons.

The QAnon crowd is basically Traditionalist.  They despise modernity.  They don’t trust science because something, something, evolution and something, something vaccines. They believe in a Golden Age (somewhere in the early 1950s) when the races knew their place, gays were closeted, and there was no kissing on television.  It was, after all, the last era in which the United States had actually won a shooting war. 

We saw what happened when Germany lost World War One:  they had to find someone to blame. And they blamed all the usual suspects:  Jews, bankers, international conspiracies, Berlin nightclubs, Freemasons.  When occultist Rudolf Hess flew to England to negotiate a peace deal on his own so that Germany could invade Russia without worrying about fighting on another front, Hitler went and banned all the occult lodges. 

Today one doesn’t have to talk about “Jewish bankers” the way Hitler did; one only has to invoke the name of George Soros. We still hear invocations of Democrats as Socialists or Communists, equating both with Devil worship, even though the Soviet Union fell 30 years ago, and Communism in China is barely recognizable today, to the extent that evoking Communism as a viable threat seems somewhat antique. (But hey, Archbishop Vigano, right-wing demagogue of the Catholic Church, still blames Freemasonry for everything, so there’s that.)  That there is no logic to the equation of Communism = Occultism is immaterial.  Both are presumed evil, so the polemical shorthand says they must be identical.  Even though the first is stridently materialistic and anti-religion and the latter is concerned with spirits and demons.  It doesn’t have to make sense.  It just has to sound cool.  It’s a live action role playing game, and we are all players.

+

On June 19^th, 1972, two days after the Watergate break-in, as Hunt, Liddy and the Cubans are all arrested along with Jim McCord and Frank Sturgis, Time magazine’s cover that week was of a black hood-wearing cultist with an inverted pentagram and the title “The Occult Revival,” and the sub-title “Satan Returns.” 

You can’t make this stuff up. 

+

Bonus round:

Towards the end of The Coven there is a session in which Madame Zilka (named after the Xilka of the incantation) performs a banishing ritual.  She shouts, in French, “Sasa, Lilith, Obayife, allez, allez! Delonge toi de la!”  Yes, it was a little disconcerting to come across the name of Ufology’s most prominent rock star in this context.  Delonge toi de la means “Get far from here.”  I know there’s a lyric there, somewhere.

A few pages later on, in a description of yet another ritual, there is the sacrifice of a “black pullet” by the indefatigable Madame Zilka.  I had forgotten this reference long before I wrote my own translation of Le poule noire (a grimoire or magician’s workbook, called The Black Pullet in English) in the 1990s and published it on amazon only a few weeks ago. I imagine this was Hunt’s way of including another occult reference, since “pullet” is itself a rather rare word in common parlance and Hunt was man of rare words.

And so it goes.

I admit I was obsessive about it, since there are so few programs/movies about Watergate other than All The President’s Men and Oliver Stone’s Nixon, and I am especially interested in the E. Howard Hunt - G. Gordon Liddy axis for a variety of reasons.

I’m not sure the dark comedy aspect of White House Plumbers really did it for me, though.  I admit the reality of the Watergate affair was closer to a dark comedy in some respects than to high drama, so I can’t really fault the direction they wanted to take with this, except that it sorta kinda belittled the affair as just some goofy stuff a couple of has-been government employees tried to get away with.  It was more than that, as numerous studies since then have shown, with tentacles reaching into a lot of strange places, and the series could have made more of that instead of reaching for exaggerated effect and the occasional uncomfortable laugh, but that’s just me, I guess.  (I mean, wouldn’t a reference to “Deep Throat” have been good for a chuckle, too, since Mark Felt – the putative Deep Throat source for Woodward and Bernstein – did make an appearance?)

But my problem might be the casting of Woody Harrelson as a kind of neanderthal version of E. Howard Hunt (do you really see Woody Harrelson as a spy novelist? Or as an intellectual elitist?  He got the anti-Kennedy, Bay of Pigs veteran schtick down pat, sure, but he is upstaged as a spy by his wife who in the series seemed more like the real thing compared to his characterization as a stridently political but ultimately naïve operative), but I have to admit Harrelson as Hunt resonates on so many other levels that my “sinister forces” radar kept pinging back and forth.

This was due, of course, to the fact that Harrelson’s father Charles Harrelson was a convicted political assassin who once claimed that he was the shooter at Dallas who killed President Kennedy. In the series, Hunt is teased as having himself been at Dallas on that day and we know he had a motive: Hunt was involved with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which ended in a disaster that he and many others blamed on President Kennedy’s refusal to provide air cover for the invasion when he was advised that it was already underway.  Thus, Harrelson the actor was the son of a man who claimed responsibility for the JFK assassination, playing another man – Hunt – who (on his deathbed) also claimed responsibility for the JFK assassination, or so it was reported at the time.

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I admit my proximity to some of these things seems eerie in retrospect.  I once worked at a weird little office in Queens where a colleague, Arthur Hochberg, worked at the same office – Mullen and Company – where E. Howard Hunt was employed at the time of the Watergate affair.  In the series, not much is made of Mullen except that it was some kind of PR firm.  Oddly, this was not precisely true.

Mullen was a CIA front.  It provided cover for a number of overseas Agency operations, including one in Singapore.  Hochberg ran the Singapore office in the 1970s, and when I was in Singapore 20 years later I looked up the corporate particulars in Companies House (which is their equivalent of a County Clerk’s office in the States).  Mullen was still listed, but when I tried to get the names of the corporate officers I was told to come back the next day as it was near closing time.  I left the office, went to my hotel, and got a phone call about an hour later from Companies House regretting that they had no further information on Mullen. 

That was about what I expected, as I knew Mullen in Singapore was a CIA front operation for debriefing Chinese defectors, which was what Hochberg did there.  (He was fluent in Mandarin.) What I had not expected was the phone call since I had not told them where I was staying!

I did not own a television set for the entire decade of the 1970s.  I was though, and remain, an avid reader of books and a passionate viewer of film.  During Watergate, I did not watch the hearings or any kind of news, but I read three newspapers daily with an emphasis on the New York Times and the Washington Post.  I also worked for Bendix, a Fortune 100 company at the time, that was heavily involved in US government and Defense Department contracts both in the States and everywhere overseas. So, I had a kind of privileged perch to listen and learn a great deal about how government worked and about the interface between government and business. Many of my coworkers had security clearances.  Others were “consultants” or “business agents” abroad.  Some of our company offices had been used as fronts as well, something that was known to us rank and file since we had to field phone calls and other communications from concerned wives and family members from time to time.  One of our district managers in Uruguay, for instance, was kidnapped by the Tupamaros.  Another escaped Beirut just as his office was being bombed in the civil war.

It was during my employment with that company that I made my infamous visit to Chile, to investigate Colonia Dignidad.  A month after my return Stateside, and my reception at Miami International Airport by two members of the US intelligence community, I was let go from Bendix and wound up working for the small automotive firm in Queens where I met Arthur Hochberg, former CIA agent and the colleague of E. Howard Hunt at Mullen.

That was in 1979.

But in 1969 I was involved with a strange religious operation in the Bronx that numbered David Ferrie and Jack Martin among its members. Ferrie and Martin were believed to have known about the Kennedy assassination and Oswald’s role in it and were both investigated by District Attorney Jim Garrison’s office in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Thus, I was a few handshakes away from Oswald and the JFK assassination in 1969, and then working alongside Arthur Hochberg 10 years later I was a few handshakes away from not only Watergate but the Bay of Pigs and possibly the JFK assassination again. 

--

Those familiar with my published work know that I picked the term “sinister forces” from Alexander Haig’s reference to the suspicious 18-1/2-minute gap in Nixon’s Oval Office tapes as being due to those “sinister forces.”  The ambiguity and dread of the term is delicious, and we live after all in deadly ambiguous times where there are connections between people and events, and we have no friggin’ clue what it all means so that paranoia seems like the only reasonable reaction.

But that’s not true, is it?  In order to understand how these things are related, and why, we have to step outside our comfort zone a little and realize that there are other influences at work in the world that we usually ignore;  that conspiracies are ubiquitous, but not omniscient, and are constantly in flux, and if you don’t know that you will be led easily and fatally astray; that consciousness factors are the missing piece in much that passes for political analysis; and that America is a haunted house, a land where civilizations disappeared unseen and unrecognized as we pushed further and further west, whipping our slaves, trampling on the evidence – the bones and the blood spatter and the vast earthen temples to unknown gods – like rookie cops at a crime scene, and that eventually these ghosts rise from their graves and tap us on the shoulders and whisper “boo!” into our fever-addled brains as we turn and stare at our neighbors in our mohawks and shoulder holsters and spit “Are you talking to me?”. 

Why do I reference Taxi Driver in this discussion of Watergate?  Because Robert DeNiro played Travis Bickle, who was modeled on a real-life assassin, Arthur Bremer, who tried to kill Governor George Wallace (who was running for president at the time).  And then John Hinckley – who tried to assassinate President Reagan – was inspired by Taxi Driver and his obsession with DeNiro’s co-star in the film, Jodie Foster.  Thus, we have this tight little circle of attempted political assassinations and a feature film, but you can’t claim “conspiracy” as a working theory here at all.  You have to find another explanation. And “sinister forces” is as good as any right now.  And, you know, just for shits and giggles, there’s Jodie Foster in the new season of True Detective: a series whose first season featured Woody Harrelson as a detective trying to solve a murder mystery in Louisiana with occult references and overtones.

(Of course, you can go one step further and discover that, at a press conference for the new film Killers of the Flower Moon during the Cannes Film Festival this year, the same Robert DeNiro referenced a book called Ratline about the underground post-war SS network … a book written by … well, me.)

And the circle gets tighter and tighter and … and … and so it goes.

Boo.

I attended a presentation he gave at Temple Emanu-El in Miami, Florida on October 26, 2010, which was prefaced by one of my old professors who remarked that the Dalai Lama was practicing a form of yoga that would ensure his postmortem survival.  One might call it “death yoga” but that would be a little on-the-nose. 

Known as phowa it is a practice whereby one identifies one’s spiritual essence (one might say “consciousness”, but it is both more and less than that) as residing in the body along the central pillar, or suṣumna, familiar to those who practice any form of yoga. One then practices raising that ball of consciousness up the suṣumna to a spot on the crown of the head, controlling its egress from an indentation that forms on the skull.  In fact, that indentation becomes palpable to the extent that one should be able to insert a stalk of grass in it so that it stands upright from one’s cranium.

This practice is not unique to Tibet or to South Asian Buddhism but is also known in China where it is a familiar motif in Chinese alchemical literature.  In the Chinese context, this ball of consciousness takes the form of an infant and is a kind of homunculus: an artificially created human being into which one shifts one’s consciousness.  It is perhaps the kind of idea that would attract men (rather than women for whom the creation of a human being comes naturally) and may be heir to “men’s mysteries” traditions all over the world that mimic menstruation and giving birth. 

The creation of a homunculus is a thread that winds its way through many popular and esoteric traditions.  Frankenstein’s monster was a kind of homunculus.  So was the Golem of Prague. In the twentieth century, the notorious magician Aleister Crowley wrote a small treatise on the homunculus.  Centuries earlier, the alchemist Paracelsus did the same.  The animation of lifeless matter was a dream of alchemists and magicians alike.  Even the iconic “voodoo doll” is a type of homunculus: a stand-in for a human being that nonetheless is connected to that human being through organic material, such as a hair or fingernail clipping, so that manipulation of the doll equals manipulation of the human.  Even poor Geppetto’s marionette, Pinocchio, was a kind of homunculus.  Today it’s robots, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

Putting some of the obvious criticisms aside for a moment, it is important to understand the implications of the practice of phowa in a more general context.  It lives at the intersection of religion and politics, of gender and spirituality, for what the Dalai Lama is doing is ensuring his reincarnation – his spiritual, political, hierarchical, and cultural continuity – outside of the control of the People’s Republic of China.  This is where religion, politics … and surrealism … meet.

And the Chinese government takes all of this quite seriously.

The Chinese government has said that it alone has the power to recognize the next Dalai Lama.  After all, they have done this already with the Panchen Lama: a leader second in authority and prestige only to the Dalai Lama himself.  The person of the Panchen Lama who was recognized as such by the Tibetan leadership was kidnapped and hidden away somewhere in China while a candidate selected by the Chinese government was placed in his stead.  The Chinese intend to do the same thing once the current Dalai Lama has died.

But the Dalai Lama has found a way to de-legitimize any attempt by the Chinese to do so. He has stated that he may reincarnate in a person born outside of Asia, and thus out of China’s control; perhaps (gasp!) in a female child; or maybe not at all until some far future year to be selected by him and identified to the world before he dies.  He will make that announcement, he says, when he reaches the age of ninety-five (he is now, as of this writing, eighty-seven). 

The Dalai Lama, known as Gyalwa Rinpoche to his followers, is the fourteenth in line to hold that title.  This lineage goes back to the fifteenth century, with the Dalai Lama considered to be the human incarnation of Avalokiteṣvara: the Bodhisattva of Compassion. In China, this bodhisattva is characterized as the female goddess Guan Yin. It would therefore not be completely inappropriate for the Dalai Lama to be reincarnated as female.  But then there is not only the question of sex, but of gender.

The Dalai Lama is celibate and has remained so for his entire life so far.  Thus, a casual observer would have no grounds for assuming his sexual preferences as he has not acted on them in any way, as far as we know.  He may be straight, gay, bisexual, asexual, or even harbor transsexual desires. We have no way of knowing any of this.  The two most widely-recognized spiritual leaders on the planet – the Dalai Lama and the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church – are both life-long celibates.  (Judaism and Islam have no such “popes” and neither embrace celibacy nor have monastic orders.)  The Pope is the successor of the Chair of Saint Peter and represents Peter (the first Pope) in much the same way the Dalai Lama represents both Avalokiteṣvara as well as the previous thirteen Dalai Lamas. This idea of preserving a succession of individuals has its resonance with the lineages of monarchs.  But whereas the successions of Popes and Dalai Lamas are spiritual ones, those of the monarchs are based on bloodlines. Neither Pope nor Dalai Lama can generate bloodline successions, regardless of their sexuality or absence of same. Legitimacy in their case is determined by conclave and spiritual signs.

Yet … the Dalai Lama is presently involved in deliberately fashioning his own spiritual successor using the ancient phowa technique.  He is reproducing himself by himself.  It will not be a successor of blood, nor of ethnicity or even gender.  But whoever is chosen (or ‘recognized’) as the next and fifteenth Dalai Lama will be expected to live the way the previous Lamas did.  They will spend their life in spiritual training, in celibacy, and in the perpetuation of the ancient Tibetan rites, and they will do so at some peril from the attentions of the Chinese government who view such a person as a political threat to the regime.

He will have to keep the identity and location of his future incarnation secret, known only to a handful of ministers, for if the Chinese find out they will go to any lengths to seize the Incarnation before the Tibetans do.  Imagine the scenario:  eight teams of Seekers sent out into the world with instructions on where to find the fifteenth Dalai Lama, but only one team has the real address.  The others are all decoys.  The Chinese would have to track all of them and manage to kidnap the little kids before the Tibetans do, or maybe snatch them en route as they make their way to India.

But there’s another problem.  What if the kids don’t want to go?  Let’s assume they may not be born into Tibetan Buddhist families. If we credit Buddhist ideology on the subject, race and ethnicity would be immaterial to the vessel chosen by the super-human soul.  It could conceivably reincarnate anywhere, in any country, in any person. Such an incarnation has already taken place, according to the Tibetans, in Minnesota to a young man named Jalue Dorje, identified as the reincarnation of an important Tibetan lama.  And it occurred again more recently, a few months ago, with the identification (by the Dalai Lama) of a young Mongolian boy born in the US as the reincarnation of Mongolia’s spiritual leader.  So far, the incarnations have been ethnically consistent with their predecessors (which is, itself, rather curious, considering; one might expect a little more diversity from the Compassionate).

Perhaps that’s just as well.  After all, how do you tell the parents of a little Ethiopian girl – for instance – that their daughter is the next Dalai Lama, the former leader of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and present incarnation of a bodhisattva … and will spend the rest of her life in a monastery, meditating, learning Tibetan and Sanskrit, and remaining celibate forever, dodging Chinese assassins and spies, and initiating people all over the world into Kalachakra Tantra?

(It gives a whole new meaning to the term “cultural appropriation.”)

This is discussed here in order to underline the political relevance of spiritual processes using a modern example with which we are all familiar. No matter what we think about the Dalai Lama, or Tibetan Buddhism, or Chinese history and politics, or about esotericism, the fact that an international incident can take place in the near future over a claim involving the reincarnation of a celibate monk, with implications for peace in the Asia-Pacific region as well as global repercussions, gives us pause.  The Dalai Lama will soon surrender his present body to the elements, replacing it with another body yet to be born, and this scenario begs a response from philosophers and occultists alike, particularly from philosophers who consider themselves heirs of the post-modern tradition, as well as occultists who consider themselves heirs of Thelema: the system of theory and practice developed by Aleister Crowley.  Why Thelema?

In 1917, Crowley penned an occult novel that deals with some of the same issues that are facing the Dalai Lama.  Entitled Moonchild, it deals with the efforts of a lodge of magicians to invoke a spiritual force into a woman so that she would give birth to a savior of sorts.  As Crowley writes:

While the true soul reincarnates as a renunciation, a sacrifice of its divine life and ecstasy for the sake of redeeming those who are not yet freed from mortal longings, the demon seeks incarnation as a means of gratifying unslaked lusts.[1]

Crowley’s reference to the “true soul” reincarnating to “redeem those who are not yet freed from mortal longings” is a precise summary of the Boddhisattva Vow, taken by the Dalai Lama (among others) as a promise not to attain the supreme stage of union until every sentient being has already done so.

In Crowley’s lifetime, he believed that one of his followers was attempting to duplicate the rituals described in Moonchild in an effort to incarnate the Thelemic goddess Babalon.  This follower was the rocket scientist Jack Parsons, a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he was assisted in this by L. Ron Hubbard, who would go on to write Dianetics and establish Scientology. 

So, you see, there is a cross-over between weird ideas about sacred sexuality and esoteric means of human reproduction and the world of science, armies, and politics.

Many sober-minded individuals will object that such nonsense doesn’t deserve consideration as this is nothing but superstition and mumbo-jumbo.  But if we have learned nothing else in the years since postmodernism reared its crazed and anxious head from the battlefields of World Wars One and Two, it’s that there is a method to the madness. A kind of Stanislavsky Method, to be sure: an invocation of the Zeitgeist into one’s own body, an animation of the limbs in shuddering response to muscle memories long suppressed, a rummaging around in the body-without-organs, or weird organic responses to the stimuli of Greek and Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, Sumerian and Sanskrit chants ejected into the middle of the midnight darkness of the barroom bardo: that intermediate realm between the living and the dead, the drunk and the sober, the spirit and the body, and between consciousness and matter.

The Dalai Lama is preparing his soul to leave his body under conscious control, and to re-insert it somewhere else.  Probably not in Tibet.  Maybe not even in Asia.  Maybe in the house next door to you, gentle and unsuspecting Reader.

Consider a maternity ward in Gary, Indiana or Ashland, Kentucky, or Bogota, Colombia, or Kinshasa, Congo replete with the sounds of mewling infants and one, cautious, deadly serious little child. Someone whose first word will not be MA but OM.

Because in a makeshift temple somewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe, or Midwestern America, or on an island in the Caribbean, there had been a pre-gestational Gnostic Mass – that cisgendered celebration of unfettered fecundity crafted by Crowley himself – performed in private as the Priest and Priestess decided to consecrate the Elements the old-fashioned way and maybe the Dalai Lama decided that’s as good a place as any and a strand of that viscous substance escaped the voracious maw of the Priest and remained safely within the humid Vessel of the Priestess and nine months later the Dalai Lama is born as a result of this union of Thelemic ecclesiastics even though the Priest has long since left the Order to become a Libertarian and the Priestess, an out-of-work Wiccan.  She leaves the infant creature in her mobile home or maybe it’s a Brooklyn Heights basement or a cardboard box on a street in Los Angeles or a tiny room with a tin roof in Leogane and goes out to scrounge for incense money and cigarettes and the infant creature rests peacefully in its swaddling clothes and waits for the Magi that will never come.

When the creature is four or five years old, though, a delegation from the East – following the sidereal signs and geolocating the most likely point of incarnation on the planet according to lunatic equations and mathematical formulae found in Tantric manuscripts and an old Witches Almanac – will show up, bald-headed, sweaty, dressed in badly-fitting western suits over their eastern paunches and will array an assortment of knick-knacks, gewgaws, and notions in front of the creature to see which ones will be chosen.  A skull cup.  A trumpet made from a human femur.  A bone necklace.  An old box camera from the 1940s.  Heinrich Harrer’s SS tattoo.  Bruno Beger’s calipers.  No gold. No frankincense. No myrrh. They have come not to worship but to seize. To kidnap.

And the creature, a sick smile twisting its lips in a contortion of resignation, of existential despair, of pre-pubescent but nonetheless teenaged angst, will select the right knick-knack, the right gewgaw, the appropriate notion, and the monks will know they have found their Dalai Lama.  They will leave some banknotes behind, a short letter, a picture of the Buddha for the mother to cherish, as they abscond with the creature on a plane bound for Dharamsala and begin training their young charge in the ways of ancient Tibet, of the Kalachakra Tantra, of Vajrayana Buddhism, of spirit mediums, Chinese spies, and the politics – oh, the politics! – of experience.

Leaving the methods of identification aside, though, let us focus on the core issue of Thelema (or, at least, of their fellow travelers, Chaos magicians, Satanic edge-lords and, by extension, of many New Age groups and crystal-loving Yoga teachers some of which have adopted distinctly right-wing Q-ish political positions such as antisemitism and white supremacy) which is the interpretation and application of human sexual reproduction within a spiritual or esoteric context.  This was Crowley’s main contribution to the popular idea of what Thelema is all about, at least as referenced by its heavy-handed heterosexual metaphors and allusions and rituals, and yet is the least understood and the most abused by its cadres.

The idea of human sexual reproduction with its attendant spiritual analogues as an avenue to spiritual growth is a much more complex and much more intensely articulated concept than one grasps at first touch.  One cannot discuss sexual reproduction intelligently or esoterically without a firm understanding of the processes of the human body, and one cannot understand those without realizing that the human body is as much a mystery as the human soul or spirit.  There is a long and distinguished literature on the subject of the body seen as a mystical venue, as a machinery of joy and of the obliteration of the Self, as a construction by venal old gods for their own amusement, as slaves of non-terrestrial beings, as nodes on an invisible matrix of matter and mind.

The Gnostics believed that our bodies are the prisons of our souls. The post-moderns suggest that our souls are the prisons of our bodies. 

If we are truly living in a New Age – a New Aeon – then we must measure up to the requirements of an environment that by its very nature should confront every preconceived idea not only of spirituality and sexuality, but of the human organizations that are based on those ideas.  “Thelema” is used here as a placeholder for a field of concepts and attitudes represented not only by the personality of Aleister Crowley and his writings and actions, but also those of his followers and interpreters, and buttressed by studies and scholarship and a variety of artistic productions.  Crowley’s ideas about sexuality and spirituality were not new, but their novelty lay in their method of expression and their condensation into a handful of rituals and esoteric works. A new religion, created for a New Age. Yes, it was about sex; but when we invoke sexuality, can ideas, polemics, and anxieties about race be far behind?

There is little evidence that Crowley was intellectually engaged with much that was taking place in the world of ideas outside of esotericism in the immediate post-World War One period. Had his work been better known on the Continent, and had he been better acquainted with the artistic, political, and philosophical movements taking place there, he might have realized that his path through the wilderness might well have been embraced by them and he likewise would have celebrated their advances into his own territory.  His central scripture, the Book of the Law, reads in some places like a Surrealist tract, and in others like an esoteric version of the Communist Manifesto. The infamous third chapter is a Cri de Coeur that could have been written by a Congolese slave in Carolina or by Boukman in Haiti, by a Bedouin in the Rub al ’Khali before the arrival of Islam, or by an aboriginal shaman in Australia. Most Americans and Europeans read it as nothing more than a blasphemous tirade against organized religion; its anti-colonialist message is often overlooked by those for whom colonialism is second nature as they focus instead on what they consider the “demonic” or “anti-Christian” aspect, thereby automatically equating freedom with satanism:

Throw away the image of the God of the whites who thirsts for our tears. Listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts.[2]

These are sentiments that an Antonin Artaud or a Charles Baudelaire or even a Nietzsche could get behind. They could have appeared in Crowley’s Book of the Law, but they were uttered by Dutty Boukman (c. 1767-1791), priest or houngan of Vodou and a leader of the Haitian slave revolt against France, more than a hundred years before Crowley was born. 

As it stands, however, with a few exceptions, these two areas – New Age occultism and postmodern philosophy – exist in separate worlds.  There is a distinct drive towards Traditionalism in western occultism and New Age thought, a yearning for a Golden Age, a looking-backward through time with the wisdom of the Ancients identified with antique social and political structures where everyone knew their place.  It is a yearning for pre-modernism, because modernism (not to mention postmodernism) is scary and threatening and hard to understand. Sadly, this implies that our modern magicians are wimps.

There have been occultists who embraced postmodernism, very few, but most couldn’t handle the visions or the voices and retreated to the comparative safety of armed militias and edgy, gnomic statements, shouted loud enough to drown out the nervous, speed-frenzied whispers in their anxious, shrunken heads. Strangely, those who survived and even thrived on their engagement with postmodern ideas became artists as well as magicians, knowing that words alone could not reproduce an experience that is, basically and almost by definition, ineffable. Predictably, these are the very individuals who are shunned by New Age types and doctrinaire Thelemites.

Thus, it might be through an investigation of sexuality, human reproduction, the human body, and their role in esotericism that the worlds of religion and politics will come together and interpenetrate, so we can transcend “Traditionalist” ideas and their Neo-platonic silos of race, ethnicity, tribalism, political and economic structure, and violence. This will happen not only through discovering common ground in ideas, but through language, image, science, math, and ritual. Through what they used to call “magic”: engaging with the mad and their hallucinations, taking the gibbering dictation of unseen ghouls in the dark and mapping the logical structures of the rats in the walls, running numbers and numerology on the streets of the City of the Pyramids, translating the messages of alien visitors who might be extraterrestrials, ultra-terrestrials, or sub-terrestrials, angels or demons, gods or ghosts running machines sekret and secrete, as we weather threats of heresy and perversion, demonism and atheism, capitalism and schizophrenia.

You know.  The good stuff.

In the words of David Lynch’s Little Man from Another World: “Let’s rock.”

[1] Aleister Crowley, Moonchild, Samuel Weiser, NY, (1929) 2002, p. 272.

[2] Dutty Boukman, in Tickner, Arlene B. and Blaney, David L. (2013). Claiming the International, Routledge p. 147.

First of all, it seems that one of the major criticisms of Tom’s position is that he is somehow a shill for the Pentagon or the CIA or some military group or cabal.  I have seen the term “war monger” used, as well.  If one takes the position that the Phenomenon is dangerous to humans, it stands to reason – according to this critique – that the person taking that position is a government stooge.  What is the purpose of being a government stooge, then?  Why, it’s to increase US government defense spending, of course.

There are a few things wrong with that theory when it comes to the Phenomenon, however.

In the first place, US spending on defense far outstrips those of the next nine countries combined (and that includes China and Russia).  No one needs Tom talking about UFOs to have any appreciable effect on the defense budget. The amount of money spent so far by the US government on UFO research is minuscule.  If it were to double or triple, it would still be minuscule and not approach the cost of, for instance, the cheapest single line item in the 2017 Defense Budget of $89 million for rolling airframe missile systems (a surface-to-air system for defending ships against missile attacks). If we are not talking about UFO research, though, but defense systems against possible UFO attacks, then we have another problem:

In the second place, everyone is assuming that what the Pentagon would need to defend the United States from the Phenomenon is more or better guns and that is why Tom is said to be shilling for the defense establishment.  That all we need is more guns is a dangerous assumption to make.  It implies that the UFO/UAP is nothing more than a weapons platform that can be neutralized if we had more or better missiles. It is entirely possible that conventional weapons – up to and including chemical and biological weapons and nuclear weapons – would have no effect at all on the Phenomenon. If the Tic-Tac and other footage has shown us anything, it’s that the Phenomenon can control our communications systems and even predict what our complex computer algorithms will display in advance, thus effectively neutralizing our capacity for attack.  There are reports from both the United States and the then Soviet Union that they have the capacity of turning on and off our missile launch systems, and even of appearing as incoming missiles thereby eliciting a military response, only to have the incoming “missiles” disappear off radar screens at the last moment and thus averting disaster.

So, in what military academy on Earth do they teach that one must declare war on an enemy whose location is unknown, whose weapons are unknown, whose intentions are unknown, whose supply lines are unknown, whose allies are unknown, whose agenda is unknown?  To fear such an enemy is not to be a war monger or a shill for the Pentagon; this goes far beyond any normal experience of potential conflict, with a battlefield that stretches from our homes to the skies, from our bodies to our minds.

Thus, to come up with a means of defending the Earth from an outside or alien force (or even just to begin to understand what that force is) will require the cooperation of everyone, in every field of human endeavor, as I have been saying for a long time (both in person and in print). We need to re-examine our ideas about vulnerability, defense, survival, and the entire field of human conflict before we can begin to understand what type of threat we might face from the “alien.” In fact, there is no downside to that approach.  That type of cooperation among nations, races, ethnicities, cultures, and occupations can only result in increased stability and peace on this planet as a happy side-effect.  The entire planet has to be defended, not just one country.  Our national borders are not visible from space and would be irrelevant to an invading extraterrestrial force. And, depending on the type and nature of the “attack”, an assault on one nation may very well have disastrous effects on nations living on the other side of the globe, in ways we cannot predict.

Further, what if our ideas of “private property” are incomprehensible to the “alien”?  If we are to believe the contactees and abductees, they appear unannounced in our homes, kidnap us, and probe our bodies. They may not understand our objections to this treatment.  After all, they show up in our air space unannounced, and play with our weapons systems.  Maybe that’s how they say “hi” in their culture.  We would interpret this is as hostility or evil intention. In any case, it scares the crap out of us.

If people insist on projecting their ideas about humans and human incentives onto the “alien” and claiming (a) that the “alien” has no designs on us and only comes in peace, or (b) that since the “alien” has not attacked us so far even though they could have, easily, then their intentions must be peaceful … etc etc; these are all points of view that are inconsistent with what we do know.  By definition, the “alien” should not be considered “human” in the sense we understand that term.  We have no idea what environment gave rise to the “alien”, what its values are, how it views us.  We don’t know what is important to them, and we don’t know what or how they think about what is important to us. We keep projecting our (21^st century North American) ideas, concepts, and conceits onto a Phenomenon about which we know virtually nothing.  Ironically, the less we know about It the easier that projection becomes. We accept that their technology is somehow superior to ours, without being able to define “superior” in that context, instead of just “other”.  Some of us assume that if the “alien” has superior technology then it must be spiritually or morally superior as well.  When has that ever been the case on this planet in all of our recorded history?  Technologically advanced civilizations routinely invade, colonize, and brutalize less advanced ones. Thus, we have no expectation – based purely on our own experience as human beings of planet Earth – that another race would be benign. In fact, we would have to anticipate the worst.

Now to the question of “evil.”  Is the “alien” evil?  There are individuals in the US government who seem to think so, and who characterize the UFO/UAP Phenomenon in Biblical terms. Then there are those optimists who insist that the “alien” is angelic. Again, these are ideas and concepts (angels and demons, gods and devils) that are peculiar to a specific Earth-bound culture and most likely have no specific relevance at all to the “alien.”  They are, most likely, filters through which we experience the “alien” as we have written in Sekret Machines. 

A better approach might be to ascertain whether the “alien” is hostile rather than “evil”: hostile to all humans, hostile to some humans, hostile to other life forms on our planet, etc.  There are those who insist that this cannot be the case, that if they are hostile they would have wiped us out already.  We have already addressed that argument above, but briefly: we can’t assume that they would act the way we have acted in our history.  Their life expectancy, timelines and schedules might be extremely long compared to ours. Or extremely short.  We simply don’t know and should not assume anything.

Hostility implies intent: that they “intend” to destroy us somehow.  They have not done so, the argument goes, so they must not be hostile.  The problem with this argument is that we are assuming they would manifest their hostility by blowing something up, or attacking us the way we attack and invade our enemies.  They might have been attacking us for centuries already, in ways that make sense to them and which further an agenda we can’t begin to imagine or understand.

What if they are attacking us through the manipulation of consciousness?  That sounds far-fetched, but we have been doing that ourselves for a long time.  It’s called psychological warfare, and includes propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, etc. including – again ironically – using the UFO Phenomenon as a means of distracting us from our own secret weapons systems.  The Nazis called it “world-view warfare” which is as good a description as any.  It’s a cost-effective means of reducing an adversary’s ability or desire to fight by simply changing their perspective, their point of view.  No bullets, no missiles, no scorched earth, no destruction of property or other assets, no damage to the ecosystem.  Many contactees report communication with the “alien” by means of telepathy.  That automatically presents us with the possibility that human consciousness may be vulnerable to direct outside interference or manipulation by the “alien.”

What if they are attacking us using genetics?  A slight modification of some “junk” DNA here and there would have remarkable effects down the line, and they seem to have a lot of time on their hands to wait for the evolutionary process to run its course.  Science-fiction?  But we have gene-editing ourselves.  We have CRISPR and other systems.  We can even use DNA to carry a digital virus that infects computers.  If we can do that, then what the contactees report as biological interference – although crude, even by our standards – may have an ulterior motive or may even mask a more delicate operation.

And what of the contactees themselves?  We don’t have to believe every story we hear, or take their reports at face value, but we can trace common themes through the accounts that might point us in valuable directions, especially if they are supported in other ways.  As I have said elsewhere: eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable in criminal cases with different eyewitnesses reporting variations in race, height, weight, etc. but they all tend to agree on one thing: that a crime was committed in front of them. The variations in testimonies between contactees as well as the similarities may not be a bug, but a feature.

And if you think that there is no evidence to suggest that the “alien” is dangerous to us, just listen to the taped sessions with Barney Hill, one of the very first recorded contactees of modern times.  Listen to his screams as he describes the forces that he said abducted himself and his wife, Betty, on that lonely New Hampshire road in 1961. It’s difficult to hear. Listen to him describe the “alien” as looking like a “Nazi.”  What did that mean to Barney Hill?  What information does that characterization carry? Why wasn’t his initial reaction one of bliss and joy?

But then, our gods are also described as “terrible” and as eliciting horror and despair. It could be that the experience of the divine triggers all sorts of deep insecurities in the human consciousness.  Moses was not allowed to look at God’s face on Mount Sinai. Perhaps we, as a race, have so much repressed guilt and insecurity that the presence of a being that can read our minds and reveal our most personal, most repressed or suppressed memories and emotions, is a threat to our sanity.  Our homes are considered personal and private property.  In some states one can kill an intruder with impunity.  What then of our minds?  What if a being could intrude on our consciousness?  At that point, ideas like personal, private, borders, doors, walls, nations become … laughable.

We are simply not trying hard enough to understand the “alien”.  Admittedly, we don’t have a lot to work with.  But what we do have at our disposal is enough circumstantial evidence to begin to build a picture if we can just get our preconceived notions of “good/bad”, “angels/demons”, “war/peace” out of the way.  Tom is right to be worried about our ability to defend ourselves against the Phenomenon.  We don’t have to assume that It hates us or wants us dead, no more than a passing hurricane or tornado hates us, and no more than we “hate” the ants we unknowingly crush with our shoes. But we still have to defend ourselves against the hurricanes and tornadoes of the world.  That doesn’t mean we are paranoid or fear-mongers or shills for the Pentagon.

What’s necessary is a shift in our approach to understanding the Phenomenon.  The “alien” seems to be fascinated with our energy plants, our missile silos, our nuclear facilities, and our military bases. I propose creating systems designed to communicate with the “alien” should it show up at any of those.  I propose being pro-active, designing an encoded colored light system (a la Close Encounters of the Third Kind) to signal the Phenomenon when it approaches. The Soviets tried hand signals at one point and claimed they got a response.  They knew that if they started moving equipment around as if they were preparing to go to battle that the Phenomenon would show up, as if curious.

But that’s just one proposal.  I am sure there are many other, better, approaches to take.

We are in the air now, for the first time in the thousands and thousands of years of human existence on this planet.  And we are also deep in the oceans.  We’ve got their attention.  Time to turn it to our advantage. If the best of our analysts, scientists, and “seers” tells us it’s too dangerous to communicate with Them, that we open ourselves up to manipulation – or worse – then okay, let’s find another way. We must be cautious; that only makes sense.  We must proceed on the assumption that the Phenomenon is dangerous to us (perhaps in ways we can’t imagine, and I can’t stress that enough) and proceed slowly and carefully. 

But there is no going back now. 

They’re here.