So, when looking at the JFK assassination case I was startled to see bizarre religious and occult connections where there should not have been. After all, it was a political event caused. We are told by an angry ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union, and who had a wife who was the niece of a GRU officer, and what country on earth was more anti-religion and anti-occult than the USSR?

Some of those religious and occult connections were to persons and organizations that I knew personally, and that was a shocker. I was 13 when the JFK assassination took place, and now I learn that when I was 17 and 18 I had been involved with a church that had been investigated by Jim Garrison in New Orleans in connection with Lee Oswald’s time in that city.

I peeled back the layers even more, and discovered that Oswald’s friend in Dallas, Ruth Paine was related by marriage to engineer and occultist Arthur Young who once was present at a 1953 seance in Maine with Andrija Puharich: the weird inventor who would eventually ‘discover’ Uri Geller.

I peeled back the layers even more, and discovered that one of the persons interviewed by Garrison’s office in connection with Oswald and the Kennedy assassination was Fred Crisman: a man who was a central figure in the Maury Island Affair involving a UFO, and two dead Army Air Force officers who had been sent to investigate it.

And one more layer: Guy Banister, the former FBI SAC of Chicago, who ran a detective agency in New Orleans out of which Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee supposedly operated was himself an investigator in 1947 for the FBI in the Pacific Northwest, investigating UFOs and reporting directly back to J. Edgar Hoover. His airtels on UFOs are still extant, and they bear the rubric ‘Secret Matter X.’ So , Kennedy assassination, Fred Crisman, Guy Banister, UFOs., both Crisman and Banister were investigated by the Garrison probe in New Orleans. That is how my studies of history and occultism led me to the UFO phenomenon. Prior to that, I had published ‘Unholy Alliance,’ which is a study of how occult ideas informed much of the evolution of Nazi Party ideology, and particularly of the SS under Himmler. In connection with that book, author and alien abductee Whitley Strieber contacted me to see if I knew anything about Nazi scientists operating out of Randolph Air Force Base in Texas in the 1940s and 1950s, and of course I did and that made another connection between my work and the UFO phenomenon.

So, I came to Ufology through a kind of side door and it was because of history, politics, assassinations, and even religion. I wrote about this at length in ‘Sinister Forces’ and devoted a whole chapter to the phenomenon in volume three.”

Q: In the first “Sekret Machines” book you take a critical eye to the work of Zecharia Sitchin/Erich Von Daniken. How does the approach of weeding out some of their more “out there” claims (“it’s aliens”/ slave races) help strengthen the stronger points of the ancient astronaut theory ?

LEVENDA: “The instincts of Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Daniken should be considered apart from the evidence they provide and the extreme claims they make. Their instincts that there was some kind of contact in ancient times between homo sapiens and some other race or beings should be considered seriously and calmly, but when every anomaly is associated with ‘aliens’ then we are on very shaky ground. To claim that ancient peoples could not have built the pyramids, for instance, is a tad racist and a little chauvinistic, at the very least, but it also ignores scientific evidence. Every time a claim is made that the ancient peoples could not have built something or designed something, there is always the possibility that more evidence will prove the claim wrong, and if it does it will serve to delegitimize the whole field. I believe it is better to focus on the fact that homo sapiens was around for hundreds of thousands of years and then just started to develop what we think of as civilization in the last twenty thousand years or less, all over the world, and with remarkably similar ideas concerning the gods, the heavens, life after death, etc. I write about this contact as a kind of traumatic event that imprinted itself on human beings: an event that we re-live in every culture in an effort to find some sense to it, some positive way of dealing with the knowledge that we are not alone and indeed may not be the smartest kids on the block.

Hence the ‘cargo cult’ theory. In my case, I have expanded the theory to include not only religion but science as well, and the organizing principle behind societies that focus on the heavens. In ancient times those for which we have written records, such as Egypt and Sumer religion and science were inseparable. They were part of a single worldview, a unitary approach to understanding reality. In modern times, we tend to put religion and science in separate boxes, and suspect that science disproves religion. but the goal of our most advanced scientific enterprises is the same as the goal of ancient Egyptian religion. For example: to travel to the stars. In Siberia, shamans climbed trees and then disappeared into space to travel to the heavens and speak with spiritual forces that live there. Humans built ziggurats in Sumer and in Mexico and Asia with the same purpose in mind. While religion and science became estranged from each other in the last millennium they are working back towards each other again with some of the most advanced scientific concepts looking suspiciously similar to the understanding of mystics from India, Tibet, China, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. We are all still trying to get to the stars; that goal has not changed in ten thousand years. All we can ask is: why?”

Q: What made you want to work with Tom DeLonge on this project, and can you offer any updates on the second installment of “Sekret Machines” - “Man?”