Sinister Forces

Twenty Years Later

I am often asked if I should write a sequel to Sinister Forces, seeing as it first came out 20 years ago and a lot has happened since then. I get it. Sinister Forces ended before the economic crisis of 2008, the election of America’s first Black president, ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pizzagate fantasy, Hillary’s emails, the election of Donald Trump, the New York Times article in December, 2017 telling the world that UFOs are real, and so on.

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.