As Margaret Thatcher once said, “being powerful is like being a lady. It you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

When Maggie frikking Thatcher takes you to school, you have to seriously question whether you are doing occultism wrong.

The relationship between magic and temporal power has been so close as to be nearly indistinguishable for thousands of years.

Is that still the case, or are the presumptive inheritors of this all-together unseemly relationship now just having annual meetings in carpeted function rooms of low-cost hotels out by the airport?

Is Magic still the bag-man-of-last-resort for Power?

I would say it is. But you aren’t going to like it. You aren’t going to like it for two reasons.

It has nothing to do with you or me. We are playing dress-up in the garden while the big people talk inside.

It has a lot to do with people that have a lot to do with you. They probably gave you some of your beliefs. They certainly did me.

That last point doesn’t invalidate those beliefs, per se, but it does make them rather more murky. John Dee was the spy that invented the Empire. But Enochian seems to work, doesn’t it? It is a dangerous thing to dissociate these two identities. Because I think they coincide.

I think we can go so far as to say that the most important twentieth century western magical current is one that none of us are in. In terms of scale, in terms of results, in terms of terrestrial impact. The wizard’s place has always been beside the throne. Merlin, Morgana, Gandalf, Obi Wan.

So let’s take a peek at who is standing in our spot.

Beginning in the middle

The last 130 years appear to mark a shift in how occult organisations have been used. Or, at least, where in the architecture of power they have been positioned. In the preceding centuries, magic was either the plaything of an elite who could reasonably escape punishment or something poor people did on the fringes of woodland because they couldn’t afford the expert medical opinion of an educated man who would prescribe bloodletting, mercury, and opium.

Intellectually curious empires relaxed the enforcement of many of these laws. Previously, magical innovation may have emanated from the elite. Now, the parts that worked were snatched up. (“Her Imperial Majesty does not attend séances… But if the Countess might have a recommendation?”)

To some extent, this marked a change from secret societies’ previous function as a social technology to enable political discourse free from the prying eyes of the church and state to incubators of new social technologies. Channeling, hypnotism, yoga, etc.

Whilst there was a shift in the primary observable function of secret societies, we may nevertheless make some qualified assumptions as to the non-magical political beliefs and discussions held by these people… just as we may by observing magical groups today.

Proceeding chronologically

I want to go decade by decade and close with some macro observations. Because we are reconstructing a century-old chess game between spooks on the one hand and spectres on the other. These are but a few pieces. We can say they were in play, we can’t say with confidence which moves they made.

1900 – 1920

We have already covered the reception of the Book of The Law and its subsequent implications in the post-war space programme. But as we all know, Uncle Al was a very busy boy. So we will try not to jump around too much. This is rather difficult. As Peter Levenda has it in Unholy Alliance:

‘German sex-magic occult lodge’ may be a little lurid, sure, but let’s zero in on Theodore Reuss. A freemason and rosicrucian, prior to meeting Crowley in 1910, he had also worked for the Prussian secret police in the 1880s. It was on their orders that he travelled to London to infiltrate the Socialist League. So you can see that the spook/right wing/magic roots run deeper and older than factions inside the CIA and the space programme.

Reuss then went on to spy in the Middle East and the Balkans for the Germans, before initiating Crowley in 1912 and making him OTO head for Britain and then America. It is tempting to view Crowley’s behaviour here as spying, but my suspicion is that he retroactively spied by offering up pertinent information after later taking the king’s secret shilling.

Because there can be no doubt that Uncle Al was a spook:

Spence […] began his study by securing documents from the now defunct U.S. Army Military Intelligence Division. The file revealed an American investigation into Crowley’s activities in 1918, which led to the discovery that he was an employee of the British government.

Later in his life, Crowley claimed that he came to the U.S. as a British undercover agent with a mission to infiltrate and undermine the German propaganda effort. “He did undermine that effort,” said Spence. “His writing was an over-the-top parody of saber-rattling German militarism.”

He actively encouraged German aggressiveness, such as the attack on the Lusitania, with the ultimate aim of bringing America into the war. In doing so, “Crowley followed precisely the wishes of Admiral Hall, chief of British Naval Intelligence,” said Spence.

“Crowley was an adept amateur psychologist, had an uncanny ability to influence people and probably utilized hypnotic suggestion in his undercover work,” Spence added. “The other thing he made good use of was drugs. In New York, he carried out very detailed studies on the effects of mescaline (peyote). He would invite various friends over for dinner, fix them curry and dose the food with mescaline. Then he observed and took notes on their behavior.”

Mescaline, Spence noted, was later used by intelligence agencies for experiments in behavior modification and mind control.

We’ll obviously come back to that last bit. Because of reasons. But first, back to Germany.

Listen. Anyone who tells you that the Nazi party didn’t emerge from a swamp of occultism is wrong. That being said, anyone that tells you that Nazism was an organised attempt by a shadowy cabal of occultists to rule the entire planet is also wrong. (Looking at you, History Channel.)

Above is a picture of the Thule Society. From the wikipediaz:

The Society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which was later reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party). According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the organization’s “membership list…reads like a Who’s Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich”, including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer.

This ‘no evidence’ line is perpetuated by neckbeard academics who just don’t like the idea that their beloved subjects were wizards. (There may also be an element of sheepishness, given Operation Paperclip.) But Himmler paid people to look for holy relics, channel and he had a frikking grail castle.

There is ‘no evidence’ that the Nazi Party was riddled with occultists in the same way there is ‘no evidence’ for psi. Ie – there’s fuckloads of it, it’s just people don’t like it.

In a 1977 document titled “Parapsychology in Intelligence,” Kenneth A. Kress, an engineer with the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, wrote: “Anecdotal reports of extrasensory perception (ESP) capabilities have reached U.S. national security agencies at least since World War II, when Hitler was said to rely on astrologers and seers. ” And if anyone knew what Hitler was really up to, it was the CIA’s Office of Technical Services.

Himmler, like many early Wiccans, subscribed to Margaret Murray’s beliefs to do with the survival of Paganism, and bemoaned the “terrible loss of fine German blood” that occurred during the witch trials -perpetrated by the followers of a foreign god. The majority of modern occult beliefs emerge from the late imperial European soup that also gave us Nazism. You can literally build Hitler or Wicca from the same beliefs. But hey… the space programme and psychiatry also emerged from this soup, so maybe we’re in ‘good’ company?

Some of that entanglement may have been more direct, like the potential incorporation of the Golden Dawn grade structure into pre-Nazi secret societies. Once more from Unholy Alliance:

At the foundation of major organisations that laid the foundations for today’s western esoteric currents are some really, really shady dealings. This does not mean that the OTO is a Nazi plot or that Crowley’s oeuvre is wartime propaganda. The well isn’t poisoned… but someone may have slightly pissed in it.

Rather than arguing about whether or not Crowley was anti-Semitic or who was the proper king of whatever little hill you favour, a greater degree of sophistication is required in analysing your sources. There are some unsavoury entanglements here.

And there are going to be more.

1920 – 1946

Sybil Leek, who we will return to, tells us that Crowley; a friend of her father; used to read his poetry to her as a child. (Poor kid!)

More interestingly, she said that she and her father used to go for long walks with HG Wells -creator of the best alien invasion prank yet- where they would discuss occultism and metaphysics. This will be pertinent later on.

In 1926, Israel Regardie was initiated into a Rosicrucian group in Washington, D.C. in 1926… a group that leads us right to David Ferrie… meaning he was, at most, three steps removed from the assassination of JFK. Obviously he wasn’t involved, but it points, once again, to that particular entanglement.

Then, of course, we have the war. And Crowley. Again.

In World War II Crowley allegedly offered his services again to the NID. In the 1930s he became friendly with Maxwell Knight, the assistant director of the Security Service (MI5), Ian Fleming, the assistant-director of Naval Intelligence who later penned the James Bond spy novels, and Dennis Wheatley, the occult thriller writer who served on Winston Churchill’s top-secret planning committee for total warfare.

When war broke out in 1939, Spence says that Crowley was interviewed by the NID and in his diary he recorded that the meeting went “as satisfactory as could be expected.”

Crowley was first introduced to Dennis Wheatley by a member of the Labour Party and MI5 mole inside Britain’s communist movement, Tom Drieberg. Wheatley, one of the twentieth century’s most famous occult novelists, went on to introduce Crowley to Maxwell Knight…. who was the actual spymaster that Ian Fleming used as the template for ‘M’… who was, himself, fascinated with the occult and kept in regular contact with Crowley, often asking him questions about the field.

Peter Levenda stitches it together for us:

Himmler was obsessed by the idea that British Intelligence was being run by the Rosicrucian Order and that occult adepts were in charge of MI5… How would he have reacted had he known that the formidable Maxwell Knight, head of Department B5(b), the countersubversion section of MI5, was a disciple of Aleister Crowley himself? And that Dennis Wheatley -he of the occult novels favored by Göring- was also a student of Crowley’s and simultaneously working for Churchill’s Joint Planning Staff? […]

Particularly if Himmler had also been told that yet another British secret agent -this time James Bond novelist Ian Fleming of the Department of Naval Intelligence- was plotting to bring Reichsleiter Rudolf Hess to England on an occult pretext involving… Aleister Crowley.

Both Crowley and Sybil Leek would subsequently claim that they were the ones who were hired to create false astrological charts to convince the astrology-obsessed Hess to fly to Scotland in an attempt to secure peace between the Nazis and Britain. This doesn’t strike me as an either/or situation. If you’re an astrology fan, you tend to check more than one interpretation. Leek may seem a really random choice, at first, but she has always claimed a connection with this world… and later in the piece you will see she resurfaces again in spook land… which makes it more likely that she had some prior experience working with intelligence agencies. (Crowley may have recommended her given their alleged shared past, but she was already notorious in her own right by this point in time.)

Fleming claimed it was his idea to use false astrological predictions… and he certainly had a head for wacky ideas, which we’ll come back to. But the Crowley/Hess angle gets a bit weirder:

When a combined NID/SIS sting operation managed to lure the top Nazi Rudolf Hess to Britain on his ill-fated ‘peace mission’ in 1941, Commander Ian Fleming of NID suggested to his superiors that he should be interviewed by Crowley. It is claimed in this book that Crowley did in fact interview Hess several times at a secret MI5 interrogation centre at Ham Common in south London.

Coincidentally this was not far from where Crowley was living at the time in Kew after leaving Central London to escape the Blitz.

I Didn’t know this. He lived two stops from me. Anyone have an exact address?

These connections have always been speculative, in that no official documentation has been forthcoming from MI5. Don’t hold your breath. What has previously prevented me from taking Crowley and Leek (and Fleming) at their words is Churchill’s fleshly pragmatism.

But in the last few years, it’s emerged that he was receiving reports that his planes were encountering UFOs off the north east coast of England. (UFOs like the ones described by HG Wells, friend of Leek’s father? Keep that in mind.) Had some of these incidents occurred prior to the Hess mission, it may certainly have influenced his opinion of whether there was something to all of this. It also begs the question of whose opinions he would ask for given he had a bunch of wizards and freaks on staff. (Somebody’s spinning somewhere.) Following a meeting with Eisenhower after the war, Churchill would request a full scientific report into the phenomena. It is therefore not unreasonable to suggest that the British originally had a more Magonian interpretation of UFOs and only moved into a more ‘nuts and bolts’ interpretation afterward. That may be relevant.

The Hess incident is important and hasn’t been properly told. Fake horoscopes put together by a wizard spy who used hallucinogens as truth sera in New York while in the employ of the British military… a wizard who may have interviewed Hess… Hess, who had this to say about truth sera. From Sinister Forces:

Rudolf Hess, at his trial at Nuremberg for war crimes, began speaking of this phenomenon in his one and only statement to the court before he was cut off by the judges. He made reference to Soviet show trials of the late 1930s, in which accused prisoners freely confessed to their guilt even though it meant their deaths at the hands of Stalin’s executioners.

He referred to doctors who had visited him in prison—including one with a Scottish accent who might have been Cameron—and what seemed to be their efforts to hypnotize him. (In an intriguing sidebar, Dulles, who asked Cameron to examine Hess, was actually worried that the prisoner claiming to be Rudolf Hess was a double; he asked Cameron to get Hess to remove his clothing so that he could locate a specific scar that the real Hess would have. This was a strange request, since it should have been easy to have Hess physically examined at any time during his incarceration, but evidently Dulles did not entirely trust the British. Unfortunately, Cameron was unable to examine Hess physically, since he was in shackles and the guards did not have authorization to remove them.)

That would be Dr Ewan Cameron. We will certainly return to him. And that would be Allen Dulles… whom we have met repeatedly. The man who absorbed the Nazi spy network into the creation of the CIA, approved MKULTRA, and was fired by JFK but nevertheless found himself sitting on the Warren Commission.

Whatever went on here… it was a cornerstone moment in the hijacking of the twentieth century. And it is covered in wizards and spooks.

Curiously, Fleming later resurfaces in that strange axis of Castro/JFK/Dulles/NASA and the spy games of the next decade. He was part of the swirl of vacationing American blue bloods, including the Kennedy’s, by virtue of being a reasonably permanent fixture in the Caribbean from this point onwards. In fact, he apparently gave some bizarre advice to the President on how to kill the Cuban leader with some kind of exploding cigar. Whether he was still on Her Majesty’s Secret Service is not known. (Yes.)

Also, you know Allen Dulles had a huge man-crush on him, right? He was obsessed with Bond. What might they have discussed over brandy and cigars, given their shared involvement in the Hess/possible-truth-serum incident? Is it unreasonable to claim that Crowley is the grandfather of MKULTRA?

And, of course, there is that whole fake moon landing bit in Diamonds are Forever. An interesting scene to write for someone with this kind of back story and these kinds of connections. (Fleming had quite the thing for the moon, didn’t he?)

Whatever the real story is, some very strange stuff tumbled through those last years of the war; astrology, UFOs, hallucinogens and a menagerie of occultists.

Perhaps that’s why the next year get’s its own section?

The 1947 pivot

This year gets its own section. Because of reasons. These ones:

Creation of the CIA

Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting

The Roswell crash

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech

The House Un-American Activities Committee begins investigating Hollywood

Arthur Young leaves Bell Labs to devote his life full time to the paranormal. (He was at this séance.)

US Navy begins Project CHATTER, the quest for a truth serum

The Corporal Missle, using Jack Parson’s solid state fuel, is launched. (At least one is destroyed in the upper atmostsphere by a UFO.)

Crowley dies at Netherwood

As Levenda points out, this is also the year Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play: “Twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught us to play.” That would make it June 1947. (The Kenneth Arnold sighting happened June 24.)

Weird, right? Jim Marrs refers to this period of 20th century history as a power vacuum. He may have been more ectoplasmically correct than he realised.

1948 – 1960

We might otherwise describe these as the years the Anglo-American power elite tried to make sense of a post-Nazi-science, post-Crowley, post-Roswell, post-hallucinogen, post-atomic world. Musta been weird.

So let’s start with Jack Parsons. Who, according to FBI file 65-1753, was being investigated by the Army’s CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) in May of 1948. This investigation was conducted by a Major Sam Bruno (a delightfully magical name!). He was chief of security at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, shown below:

Wright-Patterson?! The home of Project Blue Book and the rumoured destination of the Roswell debris from a crash that had happened less and than a year before Bruno’s investigation? Whatever could that have to do with a Thelemic swinger from California?

Maybe it was because Wright-Patterson was also the home of fellow rocket scientist, Walter Dornberger, brought over as part of Operation Paperclip. In 1950 he would go on to work for Bell Labs (where Arthur Young had invented the Bell helicopter and then left to become a fulltime wizard three years before). Bell Labs, you will recall, is one of the ratlines I think were used to, pun intended, ‘channel’ the Roswell tech safely into the private black world.

According to Nick Redfern’s information, Bruno actually met with Parsons in person after the Kenneth Arnold encounter. So this wasn’t a remote investigation, it was a direct connection between UFOs and an interpretation more familiar to magicians. That meeting had to have happened around the same time handsome Jack was out in the desert with the future founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard (himself possessed of a military intelligence background), trying to invoke Babalon to earth.

In fact, Parsons would write to Crowley while he was still alive and say that Hubbard is the “most Thelemic person” he’s ever met, and that he was definitely in touch with some higher intelligences.

This is from ‘Duke’, Nick Redfern’s main point of contact in Final Events:

“The second thing that the available FOIA material on Parsons does not tell us, Duke explained, is that the Air Force “also had reports on Parsons knowing [Robert] Goddard out at Roswell. We all knew something happened at Roswell with the crash in ‘47 that wasn’t a weather balloon. We knew that; grapevine things, rumors you hear. But, there were some of those guys in OSI who said it had to mean something that Jackie-boy was linked with Arnold and with people like Goddard at Roswell.”

Given that Parsons had loudly proclaimed UFOs would ultimately “play a part in converting the world to Crowleyanity,” this makes the official interest in Parsons’ activities of a flying- and saucer-shaped variety all the more understandable. The next phase was very simple, but of deep significance, said Duke: “They [the AFOSI] planned a meeting with Parsons and asked him—this was sometime in ‘48, I think—if, with his things with Crowley and Hubbard and trying to bring in equivalent things like the Crowley Lam [sic], there was something he wanted to tell them about what he knew on all this.”

Swinging back to Hubbard -who always maintained his involvement with Parsons was an op- he had this to say (on my birthday) in 1951: that he exposed “a carefully guarded secret of certain military and intelligence organizations.” This was in a book that he released that year, called Science of Survival:

“It required Dianetic processing to uncover pain-drug-hypnosis. Otherwise, pain-drug-hypnosis was out of sight, unsuspected, and unknown.” Hubbard denounces its use as a “vicious war weapon” that may be “of considerably more use in conquering a society than the atom bomb.”

The next year, as we all know, Jack Parsons, a man with many years of experience in both explosives and alchemy, managed to accidentally blow himself up. (*Eyebrow raise.*) A working group known as the Collins Elite forms immediately after. According to Redfern, these two events appear to be related.

The Collins Elite had developed a theory that Parsons, and to a lesser extent Hubbard, opened some kind of portal to ‘dark forces’. They viewed this particular subset of The Neighbours in entirely demonic terms, but that is what you’d expect an all-male, all-white, hetero-protestant, conservative, military group to conclude. It’s a buzzcut version of Vallée’s hypothesis. More from Final Events:

As a result, Duke further expanded, a small project—“probably just two or three [people]”—was established at Wright-Patterson that made subtle and secret approaches to experts within the fields of demonology, ancient religions, and occult practices who could hopefully provide some answers with respect to what it was that Parsons might have set in motion, wittingly or not, and which the military was now struggling to comprehend. And they were successful, asserted Duke, in that copious amounts of background data were obtained on the work of Crowley, as well as on Parsons himself, some of which came from Britain: “They had used [Crowley] at some point with intelligence, and shared it with us.”

…

“We were asked—this was people like me, a couple of G-2 [Army Intelligence] boys, two fellows from Naval Intelligence, several of the Air Force fellows in on the early Parsons thing at Wright, and a few more—if we would look at running an op to continue where the old Parsons project stopped. We were ready for it because of the interest that had come with watching [Parsons]—but a bit amazed the Pentagon was ready to fund what was, really, a study on if the disks had devil beginnings. “And this is exactly why it was all kept so secret in the beginning. Everyone—particular the Pentagon boys—knew the hammer was going to come down on all this if Congress found out good U.S. dollars were being used to pay for [a study of] demonology and flying saucers. Maybe a little more mundane than you might want to hear. But that really was the first reason for the secrecy with us: not a big conspiracy about what we were doing, but a lot of anger and probably a hell of a lot of ridicule that would come tumbling out if anyone else found out. “We all got an offer to relocate, with our families, to the D.C. area. The funding, we were told, was going to start coming through in a few months, after everyone was settled in D.C. The money and resources wasn’t [sic] going to come exactly to us, but onto us through the [CIA’s] Directorate of Plans [which was created a few months later, on August 1, 1952] to keep it all out of everyone’s eyes—Congress. This wasn’t really the Directorate’s area at all though. It was more along the approach of flowing the money through them to us, a group no one would think to look at to find us.”

Moving the money through the CIA? Allen fucking Dulles’s CIA?! With its MKULTRA and hallucinogens and Nazi spies and truth sera? This is critically, critically important, because, according to Richard Duke’s recounting of the story to Nick Redfern, the Collins Elite had worked out that most of Crowley and Parson’s experiences had occurred in an altered state of consciousness. Much like the ones that gave us magic in the first place. The group had reached the conclusion that it was a manipulation of consciousness that opens the portal, so to speak, to the realm of ‘UFO’ intelligences.

So let’s turn to Bond-fan and Nazi collaborator, Allen Dulles, and see what he was up to around this time. From Sinister Forces:

Buried in the voluminous files of the Ahnenerbe-SS are also references to the use of mescaline and cannabis as “truth serums,” programs that—according to John Marks in his ground-breaking study of CIA mind control projects—have been kept classified by US intelligence since 1945. Here and there we come across the names of Paperclip scientists involved with military and CIA mind control programs, such as Friedrich Hoffmann, a Nazi chemist who advised the CIA on matters relating to psychotropic substances for use in interroga­tion and “brainwashing.” Hoffmann has been linked to Edgewood Arsenal, where CIA maintained TSS (Technical Service Staff) personnel involved in various aspects of chemical and biological warfare, including—according to John Marks—the implantation of new memories in amnesiac patients.”

Edgewood? That’s an interesting location. Welcome back to the blog, Andrija Puharch. More Sinister Forces:

The story of Puharich is central to any study of the US government’s postwar interest in how psychology and parapsychology could benefit the intelligence agencies. It was arguably Puharich who was the first to bring the potential uses of paranormal abilities in military applications to the atten­tion of the United States Navy; it was Puharich who introduced the Israeli psychic, Uri Geller, to American audiences… and to American intelligence. Further, it was Puharich who formed a mysterious cabal that numbered many important and influential Americans among its members, a cabal that would deliberately attempt to make contact with alien beings and—according to some commentators—actually succeed. This cabal included a man with shadowy connections both to Operation Paperclip on the one side… and to the Kennedy assassination on the other. Thus when we speak of the Doors of Perception, we must turn our attention to one of their most unique, if somewhat eccentric, Doormen.

In his own words, he was giving a presentation on ESP and hallucinogens in the Pentagon in November of 1952, titled “An Evaluation of the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological War­fare.” He was redrafted the day after, which may imply he was given a specific agenda.

Guess where he was assigned in Feb of the following year? Edgewood. The home of Nazi chemical boffins.

In other words, he was at Edgewood, working for the Army at the same time as Frank Olson was at Fort Detrick, and in and out of Edgewood, working for the Army. And as Olson was involved in research and develop­ment of biological weapons at Detrick, Puharich was involved in paranormal communication and ESP experiments at Edgewood. It is tempting to speculate whether Olson and Puharich had ever met; it is doubtful they would have been colleagues, as Puharich was involved with biophysics and cybernetics, with a little spiritualism on the side. Olson’s work was purely in the biological warfare arena (Gordon: except when he was chosen as a guinea pig in an LSD experi­ment that would ultimately lead to his ‘suicide’ in a New York hotel.)

His role at Edgewood was to develop chemical substances that would stimulate psi abilities, which couldn’t possibly sound more MKULTRA if it tried. Building on Nazi experiments, he was looking for a molecular key to unlock the doors of perception.

As is well-known by now and referenced in many studies of the LSD problem, the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency was the nation’s first “LSD connection,” providing the drug to researchers all over the country, including to young professors such as Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, and others who would popularize use of the drug among their stu­dents and, by extension, among the rest of the nation’s youth. The purpose behind this unprecedented largesse was not altruistic: it was to further the research into what Richard Helms and others involved in scientific R&D at the Agency believed was a super-drug for behavior modification and mind control tasking. In other words, the Agency needed a much larger base of test subjects than was available to them from within the Agency’s own personnel pool. They began by farming the drug out to hospitals—for instance, to Dr. Abramson at Mount Sinai in New York—and to prisons, such as Dr. Harris Isbell’s program at the Addiction Research Center at Lexington, Kentucky. Isbell’s operation was part of the Federal Penitentiary system and although his subjects were referred to as “patients,” they were, in reality, inmates of the prison system.

In charge of this LSD dispensation was none other than Sidney Gottlieb, best considered as Allen Dulles’s Darth Vader. For a while, he was top dog for the MKULTRA programme.

Let’s jump back across the pond and meet the William Sargant, the psychiatrist running what we might consider the British wing of MKULTRA. It was while visiting Porton Down to view some of these experiments that CIA scientist Frank Olson first became so disturbed.

You’ll find the story in this documentary about Frank Olson’s murder:

http://youtu.be/prQpG1k9UcY

Bringing it back to wizards, William Sargant was a personal friend of none other than Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess. According to Levenda, it was while visiting Graves on the isle of Majorca in the mid-1950s (presumably after Olson’s murder) that Sargant was encour­aged by him to complete Battle for the Mind, and indeed that textbook of brainwashing, behaviour modification and mental science actually includes a chapter written by Graves himself.

Sinister Forces:

That this paragon of paganism—whose White Goddess was warmly embraced by a generation or more of New Agers as a kind of Wiccan bible—should have been on intimate terms with the man who was at the center of the West’s mind control experiments (a man who was experimenting on living human beings, a man who also numbered poor, murdered Frank Olson as one of his colleagues, and who possibly ratted him out to the Agency) is yet another disturbing nexus point in this study, for these forces that occupy our attention call to themselves whatever they need, from whatever industry or field, without regard to social niceties, class ties or appropriate acquaintance.

What rich material for a novel! The Poet-Pagan and the Psychiatrist-Spy. Like Arthur Koestler’s The Yogi and the Commissar, such a novel could offer a wealth of contradictions to be resolved in an uneasy truth. The trinity of Olson, Sargant and Graves can be mirrored in Parsons, Hubbard and McMurtry, or McMurtry, Crowley and MI5… or Crisman, Arnold and Shaw… While traditional historians tend to focus on single themes (military personalities seen from the perspective of military matters, for instance, as if generals are as single-minded as their biographers), our view must be at once broader and deeper if the history of the twentieth century is to mean anything to us at all.

You begin to discern the need to lay this out chronologically, yeah? It’s an arbitrary organisational method with subjects such as these, but it does appear to be the best way to discern inter-related objects tumbling through the background.

Once again, it’s important to be realistic with what we are looking at here. Certainly from 1948 onwards, we can see responsibility for whatever was happening split into multiple pieces, tumbling through the military, the private sector and various working groups.

A working group does not constitute official government policy, it is not the secret, all-pervading conspiracy. It is, however, a strong indication that Jacques Vallée is correct when he says that the real thing ‘the government’ is trying to hide is not how much they know about these phenomena, but how little.

So it’s not surprising to see Dr Vallée show up in the tale of the Collins Elite very soon. But first, a little departure into the private sector, courtesy of this lengthy article on Scientology’s involvement in remote viewing, found via Chris Knowles’s face-meltingly good post about Star Trek and Heaven’s Gate.

Circa July 1958

U.S. corporations, including Westinghouse, General Electric, and Bell Telephone have begun telepathy research.

Saturday, 8 November 1958

The Herald Tribune in New York reports that Westinghouse Electric Corporation has begun to study ESP using specially designed apparatus.

L. Ron Hubbard discovers measurable sentience in plants, first using an E-meter with geraniums in his greenhouse at St. Hill, England, later with tomatoes.

Saturday, 25 July 1959

Westinghouse Corporation’s Friendship Laboratory undertakes an experiment in ESP with the U.S.S. Nautilus, linking one person on land (the sender) with another person in the submarine (the receiver),while the vessel is submerged. Representatives of the U.S. Navy and Air Force are present during the experiments, which run for sixteen days under Air Force Colonel William H. Bowers. The experiments result in a 70% success rate.

Back to Vallée and the Collins Elite:

According to a classified report prepared by Project Blue Book’s Major Robert Friend —which Air Force consultant J. Allen Hynek showed astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee—a secret meeting was held on July 9, 1959 at a CIA office in Washington under the direction of Arthur Lundahl of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center.

Present at the meeting was a representative of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and seven CIA officers—three of whom, Richard Duke maintained, were attached to the Collins Elite. Three days prior to the July 9 meeting, a Naval Intelligence officer, one Commander Larsen, discussed with Lundahl the failed Frances Swan/Naval Intelligence contact experiment of the summer of 1954. Larsen was encouraged to repeat the experiment, which involved him “going into a trance,” Friend later told writer and filmmaker Robert Emenegger. This time it was successful: a flying saucer suddenly appeared on the scene. According to an official report on this incident, what was seen in 1959 was an aerial craft described as being “round with the perimeter brighter than the center.” But when checks were made with radar operatives in Washington, “for some unknown reason radar return from the direction in which the ship was supposedly seen had blocked out at the time of the sighting.” The report also noted that, “The Navy indicates that through these contacts Mrs. Swan has been able to answer technical questions beyond the level of her education or background.”

Before we leave the fifties, there are two more pieces to look at.

In 1954, the CIA published a 27-page document titled “A History of Ouija and Intelligence Applications” that indicated the agency was attempting to uncover whether the planchette could be a tool in their spy games.

Redfern quotes Unmasking The Enemy, written by two ex-USAF personnel: “The CIA began infiltrating séances and occult gatherings during the 50s… A memo dated April 9, 1953, refers to a domestic—and therefore illegal—operation that required the planting of a very specialized observer at a séance in order to obtain a broad surveillance of all individuals attending the meetings.”

1954 is a suspiciously-timed date for the publication of a CIA document on séances. April comes before June, obviously, but I would bet you real money they were referring to Puharich. From Sinister Forces:

[O]n June 27, 1953, the night of the full moon, Puhar­ich gathered around him what was to be a core group of the Round Table Foundation for another session with Vinod. The membership of this group of nine members—á la The Nine—is illuminating. Henry Jackson, Georgia Jackson, Alice Bouverie, Marcella Du Pont, Carl Betz, Vonnie Beck, Arthur Young, Ruth Young, and Andrija Puharich. Dr. Vinod acted as the medium. Imagine the Fellowship of the Ring, with government funding and a security classification that was, well, “cosmic.”

More here.

And, of course, on the eve of the new decade, Doubleday published Puharich’s little book.

1960 – 1980

The 1960s were the heyday for NICAP. At the time, its board director was Rear Admiral Herbert B. Knowles, who had served in the submarine command during the war. In one of those synchronicities that accompany these phenomena, he just happened to live down the road from Frances Swan.

Frances Swan was an automatic writer, medium and channel, who had been receiving messages from alien beings in orbit since the early fifties. (Lot of that going around, it seems.) She even served as a consultant to Wilbert Smith when he was heading up Canada’s official investigation into UFO phenomena.

They both lived just down the road from Betty and Barney Hill. The Hills even lunched with the Admiral’s wife at least once. From Final Events:

The Collins Elite believed Swan was specifically chosen by demonic forces who carefully anticipated she would contact Knowles about her encounters, which she believed had alien origins, thus deceiving Knowles, and eventually NICAP, about what was really afoot, namely a Trojan Horse-like demonic invasion. In a near-identical fashion, Robert Manners opined that Betty and Barney were similarly selected because of their very close physical proximity to Knowles, who would surely interpret their encounter in a UFO context—and that, again, would help to further sow seeds of erroneous belief in aliens within the UFO research movement and steer people away from the demonic truth of the matter. Despite living near Swan and Knowles, the Hills never actually personally crossed paths with Swan. But about Swan, Betty Hill wrote: “A few miles from Portsmouth [New Hampshire, where the Hill’s lived] is a woman who claims she is in contact with the occupants of UFOs, through automatic writing. Almost daily she sits and receives messages. Although she and I share some of the same friends, we have never met. She refuses to meet me, for she believes that Barney and I are the wrong ones—the evil ones, the ones of wrong vibrations…”

Wow. Be more wizardly, ufology. That argument could be between Edwardian magical orders. And again, I return to my conjecture that the perspective of the Collins Elite is more sophisticated than it first appears… sure, they’re calling them demons, but at least they’ve worked out that they aren’t spacemen and synchronicity and symbolic communication are involved. Not bad for some retired fly boys, eh?

At around this point, Puharich goes to Mexico. Despite having precisely zero experience in archaeology, he claims he was on an archaeological expedition. What makes it weirder is that he took retired-helicopter-designer and séance attendee, Arthur Young, with him.

Tell me they weren’t combing the desert for mushrooms and cacti on the CIA’s dime. I dare you. Levenda:

What we do know, based on Young’s own statement, is that he wrote his two books, The Reflexive Universe and The Geometry of Meaning—in “the early 1960s,” even though they were not published until 1976. These books give a description of his theory of process, and address an “added parameter” to physics beyond mass, length and time. This added parameter he quantifies as process, or drive, or force, or consciousness as manifested in the photon, what he terms the “quanta of action.” His writings and lectures have had a great effect on an entire generation of thinkers, scientists, researchers, academics, and even novelists and artists. He was deeply concerned about what he called science’s “cleavage of our culture,” and sought to redress that disunity through a concentration on the physics of consciousness. His work has been picked up and elaborated—in spirit if nothing else—by quantum physicists such as Jack Sarfatti, who himself managed to walk the line be­tween pure physics and culture. As an original member of the Round Table Foundation, and a member of the original Nine, Young, along with the other Brahmins, would try to bring about a kind of transformation on the earth—perhaps under the guidance of the very space beings who so fascinated him throughout his life.

Does it strain credulity to think the CIA would pay for a mushroom hunt? Well, let’s check back in with our man Hubbard, and what he was doing in the sixties. (I’m starting to think there is something behind Scientology’s extreme paranoia.)

Tuesday, 28 December 1965

L. Ron Hubbard issues a Scientology policy letter that forbids anyone connected to a “Suppressive Group” from being allowed onto the confidential Scientology upper levels unless and until the group is permanently disbanded. “Suppressive Groups” are defined as those that “seek to destroy Scientology” or specialize in “injuring or killing people or damaging their cases,” or that “advocate the suppression of Mankind.” They include “police spy organizations and government spy organizations” such as the CIA, IRS, FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Justice (DOJ), “or any other federal agency in any country.”

1967

Ingo Swann begins to take Scientology services. At about the same time, Swann tenders his two-year notice for resignation from his permanent contract with the United Nations Secretariat in New York.

NSA’s Hal Puthoff enrolls in Scientology services.

Beside my darling Dr Targ, Puthoff and Swann are the cornerstones in the Stargate Project. Two of them are Scientologists and one is NSA. What’s this post titled, again?

It gets weirder. According to former CIA officer, Victor Marchetti, in the late sixties, the CIA was attempting to contact and possibly debrief former agents. Dead ones. From Final Events:

During the late 1960s, the CIA experimented with mediums in an attempt to contact and possibly debrief dead CIA agents. These attempts, according to Victor Marchetti, a former high-ranking CIA official, were part of a larger effort to harness psychic powers for various intelligence-related missions that included utilizing clairvoyants to divine the intentions of the Kremlin leadership,” wrote Dr. Nelson Pacheco and Tommy Blann in their book Unmasking the Enemy.

This sounds very much like it would be part of the alleged MKULTRA subproject known as Operation Often. From Wikipedia:

Project MKOFTEN was a covert Department of Defense program developed in conjunction with the CIA. A partner program to MKSEARCH, the goal of MKOFTEN was to “test the behavioral and toxicological effects of certain drugs on animals and humans”.

According to author Gordon Thomas’ 2007 book, Secrets and Lies, the CIA’s Operation Often was also initiated by the chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Branch, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to “explore the world of black magic” and “harness the forces of darkness and challenge the concept that the inner reaches of the mind are beyond reach”. As part of Operation Often, Dr. Gottlieb and other CIA employees visited with and recruited fortune-tellers, palm-readers, clairvoyants, astrologers, mediums, psychics, specialists in demonology, witches and wizards, Satanists, other occult practitioners, and more.

It begins to look less and less ‘alleged’ in view of Redfern’s discovery of the Collins Elite, doesn’t it? Note it fell under the purview of Dulles’s Darth Vader, Sidney Gottlieb. So the guy dispensing LSD to the youth of America in the sixties was using CIA money to summon demons in an attempt to discern if they have any meaningful intelligence applications in the seventies.

But it was this next bit that blew the top off my head. Final Events again:

On January 31, 1970, a man attached to the Collins Elite, who Robert Manners described only as “Mr. Manza,” visited the offices of Operation Often. It appears from what Manners’ said, however, that the Collins Elite had heard of Operation Often’s very early work in the field of espionage and the occult, and wished to determine if some sort of liaison might prove profitable and significant for both parties. The date of the meeting certainly seems to have been significant as this occurred just six weeks after the U.S. Air Force closed its publicly acknowledged UFO investigative operation, Project Blue Book, on December 17, 1969. However, UFO investigator Brad Sparks has said that the last day of Blue Book activity was actually January 30, 1970, just one day before Mr. Manza’s little visit.

One day. Before. Keep Operation Often in the back of your mind. Because we need to jump back up to its umbrella project, MKULTRA, and see what’s going on there in the mid-sixties.

A Course In Spook Miracles

One day, a New York-based academic, Helen Schucman, was on the subway….

[Schucman] became a good deal more fascinating to him when she announced in 1969 that she was taking dictation from a disembodied voice she knew only as the “Son of God.”

It had all started one day when she was riding the subway uptown and experienced a vision, Schucman explained: A beautiful light suddenly filled the car and shone on the faces of the people all around her. A short time later, she felt compelled to begin writing page after page of blank verse that eventually grew into A Course in Miracles.

I took a large dose of hallucinogens a few weeks ago. This exactly describes the experience. And this was in mid-sixties New York, which was the very epicentre of MKULTRA and CIA drug experiments. So is there anyone near Helen Schucman that looks a bit suspicious?

Yeah. This guy with his arm around her, William Thetford. Her boss.

Prior to him moving to Columbia University and more or less immediately hiring Schucman, William Thetford was the director of the rather-creepily named Institute Of Living.

Whilst he was there, a celebrated starlet of her day, Gene Tierney, went in for treatment for depression. Under Thetford’s direction, this treatment comprised repeatedly frying her brain with high levels of electroshock treatment… to the point that she began to lose great chunks of her long term memory.

If this sounds at all familiar, it is because it is the first third of a process pioneered by Dr Ewan Cameron in Montreal at the behest of his CIA paymaster, Allen Dulles. (Recall that Dulles wanted Cameron himself to check on Rudolf Hess.)

Tierney abandoned the treatment because of the memory loss and never went back. Good for her. History has shown that Hollywood stars make fantastic intelligence assets and it’s not unreasonable to say that she was very fortunate to get off the train before it reached its final destination in Manchuria.

Hollywood stars make great assets because of cultural network effects. Influence one person and watch the ripples of that behaviour spread out into wider society. Which pretty much exactly describes the global impact of A Course In Miracles, yeah? Just look at all these lovely translations:

Let’s dig a bit further in:

From 1965 through 1972 Thetford directly assisted Schucman with the transcription of the first three sections of the work, which was in fact the great bulk of the material. Then in 1972, somewhat to both of their reliefs (yet on some levels to their dismay) it appeared that the writing was complete, which for the most part it was.

In 1972 Thetford and Schucman were introduced to Kenneth Wapnick through their mutual friend Father Groeshel. Wapnick was intrigued by the manuscript although he soon realized it needed considerable editing to render it into a publishable format. Wapnick urged Helen to go over the manuscript once again with his assistance, which they did, bringing the final editing to a completion in the Spring of 1975. Thetford, Wapnick and Schucman, the three principle transcriber-editors of ACIM were to remain friends for the rest of their lives, throughout the arduous process of seeing this manuscript through to first successful publication, and beyond to witness the initial spreading of its teachings.

After the completion of the bulk of the initial scribing/ transcribing process, for brief periods during 1973, 1975, and 1977 the short transcriptions of Psychotherapy, of Clarification of Terms, and of the Song of Prayer, which are the remainder of the standard material of ACIM, were transcribed in similar fashion.

From 1971 to 1978 Thetford, along with David Saunders, headed the CIA mind control Project MKULTRA Subproject 130: Personality Theory.

So, a CIA doctor who ran an institute that erased starlets’ memories then ‘just happened’ to be working with a woman who has a psychedelic event on the subway and began transcribing ‘messages’, which he assisted with, was actually working for the MKULTRA Programme at the same time.

If you’ve been around long enough, you will know that ACIM as the foundational text of the contemporary New Age, which means much of its praxis has bled into contemporary western occultism.

But does that mean it’s a trick? Does that mean it doesn’t work? Of particular interest to me are the implications of the text for my wildly unpopular (but no less wrong for being so) contention that entanglement with The Neighbours often has an imperial agenda. Read on:

What Groeschel found to be at once most thrilling and confusing about Helen Schucman’s process was that, during the time she wrote A Course in Miracles (a book that any number of fundamentalist Christian ministers have called the most dangerous ever published), she became intensely attracted to the Catholic Church, attended Mass regularly, and was devoted to the Virgin Mary. Only under close questioning did Schucman admit that, many years earlier, she had briefly been a Christian. This had resulted from an “accidental”childhood visit to Lourdes, where she had been so moved that she received baptism upon her return to the U.S. She also had prayed the Rosary for years afterwards, Schucman claimed, until she adopted scientific skepticism as her creed, and lived by it for most of her adult life.

When he suggested she apply for membership in the Catholic Church, Schucman replied that this was unnecessary because, as a Jew, she had been Catholic before “you Gentiles came along and made all these rules.” No less fascinating to the priest was the sharp distinction between Schucman’s own stated convictions and the content of A Course in Miracles. “I hate that damn book,” she often told him, and regularly disavowed its teachings.

Groeschel continued to try to “open the doors of the Church” to Schucman, but his influence was subverted by her husband. William Thetford, also a Columbia professor, was a mysterious character, and “probably the most sinister person I ever met,” the priest recalled. Only after he retired from teaching did Thetford’s Columbia colleagues (who knew him best as a rare-books expert) discover that all during the years they worked with him, the man had been employed as an agent of the CIA–one who was, among other things, present at the first fission experiment conducted by physicists assigned to the Manhattan Project.

The Scientological Stargate

We need to return to what my beloved remote viewers were doing in the seventies, by way of that extremely lengthy article Chris Knowles pointed out. Here are some relevant dates:

January 1971

NSA’s Harold “Hal” Puthoff, one of fewer than 3,000 Scientology “Clears” in the world in 1971, has joined the ranks of a much smaller number of OT VIIs.

NSA’s Hal Puthoff somehow has gotten past L. Ron Hubbard’s prohibitions against government spy agency personnel being allowed access to upper-level Scientology, and has progressed up the Scientology levels to the recently-released OT VII—the highest level available. He writes a success story for a Scientology publication about having completed OT VII, saying that on a weekend he had stood outside a locked building and remotely viewed information he wanted from a building directory that he couldn’t physically read from the doorway, then verified later, when the building was open, that what he had viewed remotely had been accurate.

Thursday, 9 September 1971

OT VII Ingo Swann meets CIA’s Cleve Backster, purportedly “at a party” in New York. Backster has an “extensive network of contacts in law enforcement agencies and within the CIA.”

Sunday, 12 September 1971

OT VII Ingo Swann visits Cleve Backster’s lab and polygraph school in New York city where Swann is asked to think thoughts of harming a plant that Backster has connected up to what Swann says was “a polygraph.” Swann thinks of lighting a match with the intent of burning one of the plant’s leaves, and there is an immediate and violent reaction. With repetitions, the reaction diminishes, and the conclusion is drawn that not only is the plant capable of detecting harmful thought, but can “learn” to differentiate between true and artificial intent. The thought directed at the plant is changed to one of putting acid in its pot, with the same curve of results.

The device Backster attached to the plant is very similar to one Hubbard invented more than a decade before.

Friday, 15 October 1971

E. Howard Hunt meets with CIA Director Richard Helms.

Late October 1971

Scientology OT VII Ingo Swann is in Washington, D.C. with “a colleague” meeting “in bars and pizza parlours” with unnamed intelligence personnel. At one of the meetings with “six spooks,” Swan is asked: “If you were going to set up a threat analysis program to match what the Soviets are up to, what would you do?'”

Saturday, 30 October 1971

Ingo Swann is working with CIA’s Cleve Backster, testing “psi probes” on gasses in pressurized containers. He and Backster move on to experiments with biologicals, including one-celled biological specimens, blood, and seminal fluid. When Swann has some success in affecting biologicals with psychic probing, Backster says, “Well, you’ve just done something the Soviets have been working on for a long time.”

Late February 1972

OT VII Ingo Swann, connected with ASPR, meets Robert D. Ericsson, Executive Director of Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship (SFF). (NOTE: Chicago’s W. Clement Stone is a member and major contributor to both the SFF and ASPR. About two months later, E. Howard Hunt will deliver an undisclosed amount of cash in a sealed envelope to the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation in Chicago.)

Friday, 3 March 1972

Gary O. Morris, psychiatrist of E. Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, vanishes while on vacation on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. No trace is ever found of the pleasure boat he had left on for a cruise with his wife and a local captain, Mervin Augustin.

Monday, 20 March 1972

OT VII Ingo Swann is at Cleve Backster’s lab in New York. Backster hands some papers to Swann on Hal Puthoff and purportedly says, “You two might get along. He’s into Scientology, too.”

Tuesday, 6 June 1972

Ingo Swann mentally affects a supercooled magnetometer encased in solid concrete five feet beneath the foundation of the Varian Hall of Physics, Stanford University, witnessed by Dr. Arthur Hebbard, Dr. Marshal Lee, and representatives of CIA.

Wednesday, 7 June 1972

Willis Harmon meets OT VI Ingo Swann at SRI and takes Swann to a meeting where there are 16 people. Harmon is Director of his own Educational Policy Research Center at SRI, a center for “Futurology.” At the time, futurology constitutes one of the most important and biggest efforts in the world, and Harmon is well connected in Washington, D.C., with offices there. Harmon explains to Swann at the meeting that part of their ongoing project is to see if parapsychology and/or psychic abilities can or should be factored into “future scenarios.” Harmon explains that all was known about the ASPR goings-on, and that the attempt to expel Swann “gives you more credentials than you realize, and also makes it easier for various people.”

Saturday, 24 June 1972

According to Ingo Swann, he arrives in Washington, D.C. from Minnesota, ostensibly to “do book research at the Library of Congress”—but Swann says elsewhere that his trip to D.C. in 1972 was “to discuss psi phenomena with a variety of officials.”

Tuesday, 27 June 1972

Hal Puthoff contacts K. Green, Office of Strategic Intelligence (OSI) at CIA, informing Green of the results of the Varian Hall magnetometer experiment with Ingo Swann. There are also subsequent conversations between Puthoff and CIA personnel regarding this event.

Wednesday, 28 June 1972

L. Patrick Gray gets a call from CIA Director Richard Helms, who asks Gray “not to interview active CIA men Karl Wagner and John Caswell.” Gray immediately orders “that the interviews of John Caswell and Karl Wagner be held in abeyance.” Caswell and Wagner’s names have been found in a telephone-address notebook belonging to E. Howard Hunt.

In the evening, John Dean turns over some of the items from the White House safe of E. Howard Hunt to Gray. Gray is provided with a large brown envelopes to carry the items away in. Dean tells Gray that included papers have “national security implications,” saying they should “never see the light of day.” Gray purportedly never looks at the papers, but takes them to his apartment in Washington D.C. and puts them on a closet shelf under his shirts.

Gray has a meeting with Mark Felt and SA Bates on “the CIA ramifications.”

Monday, 3 July 1972

According to one of several conflicting accounts told by L. Patrick Gray, he burns the papers given to him by John Dean that had been taken from the safe of E. Howard Hunt in a wastebasket in his office at the FBI. (NOTE: Gray later retracts this story, saying that he kept the papers first in his apartment, then moved them to his office, then to his home, where he burned them on or around 27 December 1972.)

Gray has another meeting with Mark Felt, Bates, and also “Mr. Kunkel, the Special Agent in charge of the Washington Field Office” on “the CIA ramifications.”

Wednesday, 23 August 1972

A CIA project officer contracts Hal Puthoff for a demonstration with OT VII Ingo Swann. Swann is asked to describe objects hidden out of sight by CIA personnel. The descriptions are so “startlingly accurate” that Swann purportedly is asked if he will complete the necessary forms “for a security clearance.” [NOTE: Swann is already on record as having a top secret clearance.] He agrees to do it once he gets back to New York “where his papers are.” The CIA rep suggests to CIA that the work be continued and expanded. CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb reviews the data, approves another work order, and encourages the development of “a more complete research plan.”

This strikes me as particularly important, given the information Swann would subsequently release in his books to do with the UFO phenomena and bases on the far side of the moon. And we’ve met Sidney Gottlieb before, haven’t we? A number of times, in fact.

Sidebar: If you think Tom Cruise’s public attacks on psychiatry are weird, consider the decades of experience Hubbard and his followers had with psychiatrists who would fry starlets’ brains with electricity and use Nazi mind control drugs on the wider population. Yes, I appear to be defending Tom Cruise. In writing. I’m as surprised as you.

Tuesday, 19 September 1972

Anthony Ulasewicz flies to Washington, D.C. and delivers $53,000 cash to Dorothy Hunt—wife of E. Howard Hunt—and $29,000 to Fred LaRue by leaving unmarked envelopes in a locker at Washington International Airport and in the lobby of a motel near LaRue’s residence.

Sunday, 1 October 1972

On a Sunday, CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD) awards OT VII Hal Puthoff a top-secret research contract to develop “remote viewing” for military espionage purposes. [NOTE: TSD is the CIA division formerly known as “Technical Services Staff.” TSD is also the division running MK-ULTRA. The head of TSD is Sidney Gottlieb.]

Sunday 3 December 1972

L. Ron Hubbard purportedly “goes into hiding” in New York in the company of Green Beret Paul Preston.

Scientology OT VIIs Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann, now under contract with CIA, “run into” Scientology OT III Pat Price, who purportedly is selling Christmas trees at a lot in Mountain View, California—close to SRI. Puthoff is reported to “have met” Price “several years earlier” at a lecture in Los Angeles. [NOTE: Los Angeles is the location of Scientology’s Advance Organization Los Angeles (AOLA), the only place in the U.S. at the time where the OT Levels are delivered.]

Friday, 8 December 1972

E. Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy Hunt, is killed in the United Airlines airplane crash of Flight 533 as it approaches Chicago. Dorothy Hunt’s purse contains $10,585 cash, most of it in hundred dollar bills.

You remember Dorothy, right? She was the one whose psychiatrist vanished without a trace in St Lucia. And had large sums of money left in envelopes for her at airports. Her death comes only a few months after this.

Saturday, 17 August 1974

Ingo Swann gives a lecture to about 250 Scientologists at Laurel Springs Ranch in Santa Barbara, California: “What has Scientology got to do with Psychic Research?” Its topics include, “What is a Spirit? Its Potentials, and How Scientology provides a workable way for anyone to know the answers for himself.” Swann has flown in from New York for the lecture—where Swann secretly has been training CIA personnel in Scientology-based remote viewing.

January 1975

Secret internal CIA reports are issued:

“AC/SE/DDO; Memorandum for C/D&E; Subject: Perceptual Augmentation Testing; 14 January 1975 (SECRET)”

“Chief/Division D/DDO; Memorandum for C/D&E; Subject: Perceptual Augmentation Techniques; 24 January 1975

“J. A. Ball; “An Overview of Extrasensory Perception”; Report to CIA, 27 January 1975.

“C/Libya/EL/NE/DDO; Memorandum for OTS/CB; Subject: Libyan Desk Requirement for Psychic Experiments Relating to Libya; 31 January 1975 (SECRET)”

“C/EA/DDO; Memorandum for Director of Technical Service; Subject: Exploration of Operational Potential of ‘Paranormals’; 5 February 1975 (SECRET)”[19]

An internal CIA report is issued regarding the results of remote viewing experiments performed by CIA “insiders”—all members of CIA’s Office of Technical Services (OTS): “OTS/SDB; Notes on Interviews with F. P., E. L., C. J., K. G., and V. C., January 1975 (SECRET).” [NOTE: This is the first confirmation that CIA has their own in-house personnel as remote viewers. Later timeline entries indicate that Ingo Swann has been training CIA in-house remote viewers.]

Around this time, Ingo Swann purportedly leaves Scientology: “I exited Scientology of my free will in 1975 and under reasonably amicable circumstances.” [NOTE: Unfortunately, Swann’s claim is simply a lie. In August 1977 he is one of the speakers listed for Scientology’s “International Prayer Day,” and in April 1979 he is listed in a Scientology publication as having completed a service called “New Era Dianetics for OTs”.]

A couple of pieces worth careful analysis here. Firstly, there is the use of psychics in foreign theatres, specifically Libya. What intrigues me is the use of the term ‘paranormals’. Are they referring to people or something else? Because you can see the CIA already uses terms like ‘psychic’ and ‘remote viewer’. Given the implications of Nick Redfern’s investigation of the Collins Elite, we can’t actually be sure.

And who did that memo go to? The Director of Technical Services. Pop quiz! Who is the Director of Technical Services at this point in time?

Early March 1975

Around the same time, all CIA funding of remote viewing and paranormal research purportedly comes to a sudden halt. “To achieve better security,” the “operations-oriented testing” of remote viewing with Scientology OTs Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann purportedly is stopped.

Around the same time, CIA “personal services” contract with Scientology OT III Pat Price is started.

Pat Price departs SRI. He claims he is going to “work for a coal company” in Huntington, West Virginia, and intends to return in a year. He is working directly for CIA as a contractor.

Friday, 11 July 1975

OT III Pat Price, on a “personal services contract” with CIA, is given a “second requirements list” for a Libyan installation Price had earlier identified with remote viewing as a guerilla training site. Price dies “a few days later.”

Wednesday, 16 July 1975

OT III Pat Price arrives in Las Vegas, en route first to SRI, then to Los Angeles. In Vegas, Price is met by an old friend named Bill Alvarez and his wife, Judy. The three check into the Stardust Hotel and go into the restaurant for dinner. Price begins to complain that he doesn’t feel well, and tells the Alvarezes that someone “had seemed to slip something into his coffee” at dinner in Washington the night before. Price soon feels so bad that he goes up to his room to lie down. He feels even worse and calls the Alvarezes. They come to his room and find him on the bed apparently in cardiac arrest. Bill Alvarez calls paramedics, who try without success to resuscitate Price. He is declared dead in the local hospital’s emergency room. A mysterious “friend” of Price’s turns up at the emergency room with “a briefcase full of his medical records,” which, along with the statements of the emergency room’s physician, are enough to waive an autopsy—which would normally be performed on an out-of-towner who had died outside the hospital.

Wednesday, 8 October 1975

A CIA report is done regarding experiments being done at SRI: “G. Burow; OJCS/AD/BD; Memorandum for Dr. Kress; Subject: Analysis of the Subject-Machine Relationship; 8 October 1975 (CONFIDENTIAL).”[19]

A CIA report is issued that’s somehow related to the “requirements list” for a Libyan remote viewing target that was allegedly passed to Pat Price just days before he died: “DDO/NE; Memorandum for OTS/BAB; Subject: Experimental Collection Activity Relating to Libya; 8 October 1975 (SECRET).”

Tuesday, 9 August 1977

CIA Director Stansfield Turner reveals publicly, but obliquely, that CIA has had “operational interest in parapsychology.”

September 1979

The GRILL FLAME remote viewing headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland is an outgrowth of the Scientology-based CIA-initiated remote viewing studies conducted at SRI by Scientology OT VIIs Hal Puthoff—who is Director of the SRI facility—and Ingo Swann. The Fort Meade unit is housed in two single-story wooden structures numbered 2560 and 2561. Fort Meade is a base for the National Security Agency (NSA) and part of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), under which GRILL FLAME is officially established. GRILL FLAME takes its orders from the Pentagon’s Office of the Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and its tasking originates from CIA, DIA, and the President’s National Security Council (NSC). Only a few dozen officials in the intelligence community have been briefed on the existence of GRILL FLAME. “Access is limited,” an Army memorandum of the time notes, “to those personnel approved on a ‘by name’ basis.”

Joseph McMoneagle is a consultant for the SRI remote viewing labs OT VII Hal Puthoff is Director, and where OT VII Ingo Swann trains government remote viewers. McMoneagle is being assigned numerous remote viewing tasks, for which he will later be granted a Legion of Merit award for excellence in intelligence service. U.S. Intelligence agencies have become aware that the Russians have built the largest building under a single roof in the world. No one in the agencies, however, knows what is going on inside. The President’s National Security Council staff orders INSCOM to have remote viewers see what they can determine about it. One of INSCOM’s better remote-viewers, Joseph McMoneagle (a consultant with OT VII Hal Puthoff) reports, after his remote viewing of the facility, that a very large, new submarine with 18-20 missile launch tubes and a “large flat area” at the aft end will be launched in 100 days. Two Soviet subs, one with 24 launch tubes, and the other with 20 launch tubes and a large flat aft deck, are sighted 120 days later. These are new Soviet “Typhoon”-class submarines—the largest in the world.

An embarrassment of witches

Let’s return to Operation Often, which was the CIA programme -contemporaneous with everything that is going on with remote viewers and A Course in Miracles– to do with investigating sorcerers, witches, astrologers, demonologists and ceremonial magicians, to see which parts of this world can potentially be weaponised.

Let’s specifically return to the mysterious Sibyl Leek. Who, once again, found herself consulting in the world of spooks. From Final Events:

When approached by Operation Often, Leek was thrilled and happy to help. She related all she could about sorcery, black-magic, the number of witches and warlocks active in the United States, where the most active covens could be found, and much more. As to why Leek was specifically chosen by Operation Often, it may very well have had something to do with the fact that during the Second World War, she was secretly recruited by elements of the British Government to provide phony horoscopes to the astrology-obsessed Nazis. In other words, Leek had already been exposed to the clandestine operations, had seemingly proved her worth to British authorities, and thirty years later was still perceived as being a valuable and profitable asset….

What has remained largely unknown until now—outside of official circles, at least—is that, according to Robert Manners, during the second or third meeting with Operation Often staff, Leek, quite out of the blue, expressed her firm opinion that the flying saucer mystery was probably somehow linked to the occult. Of course, this rang loud bells with the men from Operation Often, and the Collins Elite was duly informed. On several occasions during the summer of 1972, members of the group flew to Leek’s home to meet with her and to learn whatever they could about the darkness they saw closing in all around them. For a relatively intense-but-brief period midway through 1972, Manners claimed, Leek was consulted by the Collins Elite, who asked for her help and advice regarding how they might best utilize her skills as they sought to better understand with what it was they were dealing. Of course, admitted Manners, there were some within the Collins Elite who were overwhelmingly appalled by the idea of consulting with a woman to whom Aleister Crowley read his poetry, and who was a self-admitted, practicing witch. None of this, however, prevented the Collins Elite from pressing ahead.

What Leek specifically said to the Collins Elite -when she wasn’t ratting out the names and locations of other occultists- was that the flying saucers were a manifestation of a demon called Caxuulikom, who was harvesting the souls and energy of every living thing on earth, had always done so, and presenting itself as aliens was simply the latest trick with which it conceals its activities.

An ambitious story, perhaps worthy of the man she and her father used to go for long walks with in the woods, HG Wells. This must have been absolute catnip to the Collins Elite.

Going private: the second pivot

Where did all this madness go, then? Well, the same place all taxpayer-funded projects and infrastructure inevitably goes… the private sector. Returning to Ingo Swann, and his bizarre, poorly-written, but entirely-fascinating book, Penetration, it strikes me that we may discern this privatisation really starting to scale in the late seventies. (It wasn’t a great time for the intelligence world… what with senate hearings and the such. So it makes sense.)

Here’s the pertinent section in Penetration, which is just after Axelrod and Ingo have returned from Alaska, where they witnessed some kind of craft hoovering up water from a lake before firing on them.

Axelrod laughed, and changed the subject. “Well, I got your point. It was probably a dangerous risk to expose you to this, ah, appearance, and we really had no right to do it.”

I laughed, and relaxed. “Jesus, Axel, I’m ready to go for it again! Who wouldn’t be?”

“Well, probably that will not be possible. I shouldn’t tell you, but our mission will be disbanded shortly and the work picked up by others, because of strategic security reasons involved.”

“Others who will not mix in with psychics, I take it,” I giggled.

“You got it. Next week you will be summoned for a complete physical examination, ostensibly in line with overseeing the health status of the people on your project. “We just want to be sure you experienced no physical damage. The physicians performing the examination will be ordinary doctors who have no knowledge of our existence.”

With A Course In Miracles, the other component of the mid-to-late-seventies New Age was, of course, Ancient Alien Theory. And it is here that, to my mind, we see the grubbiest fingerprints of a powerful, private, elite. We have already briefly touched on the dodgy background that informs Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery and its tendrils stretching back into weird, CIA séances. The remaining foundational text in the ideology of seventies AAT is most notably expressed in the work of this man, the one and only Zecharia Sitchin. (And to a lesser extent, Von Daniken, although Sitchin’s book sales absolutely creamed Von Daniken’s.)

Here’s a Richard Hoagland story by way of Chris Knowles, which I couldn’t find on the blog. Basically, as I recall it, Hoagland was grilled by Sitchin about what he knew and what he’d found during his investigation of lunar and martian anomalies. The grilling happened in an office on the 47th floor of the Rockefeller Center. Hoagland maintains -via a Coast to Coast interview- that Sitchin would always cancel events that they were both scheduled to speak at, despite Hoagland’s many attempts to have an Annunaki dialogue whilst Sitchin was still alive.

I did find this on Secret Sun, which is also pertinent:

We discussed Zechariah Sitchin recently, who provides us with yet another link to the clandestine studies of the Rockefeller family, since they seemed to subsidize his work. The question then becomes did Sitchin share all of his research with the public or did he develop two separate exegeses, one for the masses and the other for his patrons?

I wouldn’t be the first to point out that his post-12th Planet oeuvre is distinctly inferior to the original work and I shared my concerns that his later works were characterized by a demoralizing and disempowering view of the Sumerian texts (which, again, I believe to be contaminated by tribal history, myth, and political gossip).

Well… yeah. Nail head, meet hammer. Here we have a reinforcement of the ‘physical aliens are our gods’ angle -which aligns with some of the extradimensional trolling of UFO experiencers- with the specific implication that certain bloodlines are better than others and we are literally built as slaves for them. And there was always his persistent refusal to update his understanding with findings that varied too far from ‘alien gods arrived in nuclear powered rocket ships and built us as slaves‘.

The Rockefeller family is also involved in the founding of Esalen. And, for whatever it’s worth, some of the people swirling around Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura are saying that younger members of the family want assistance in making public some really, really weird shit, including physical tech, they’ve accrued over the previous sixty years. Like I said, for whatever that’s worth.

There is another part of the Sitchin story that is worth noting, and it is his rumoured continued involvement with the Mars missions over the years. On a podcast earlier this year (which I fucking cannot find as my computer died and took all my saved podcasts with it!), some actual journalist (but I don’t think George Gnapp) said that Sitchin was getting the Russian Mars data live in the late seventies.

If true, then exactly how he may have accomplished this without extremely high level assistance is… interesting. But he was in London, “visiting friends” at the time. This may have made it operationally easier than doing so in the US. And he always maintained that one of the probes was destroyed by some kind of craft. I’m inclined to go with Hoagland that it was taken dark, which Sitchin would have been aware of. (Making his story all the more suspicious.)

Whatever the case, there is a through-line between Sitchin through the enigmatic Laurence Rockefeller (and thus out to Esalen) emerging into a literal vision of AAT that may or may not have political implications. What little our shadowy elites know is being fed to us in highly packaged form… for whatever reason.

As you know, I have a lot of time for the notion that human civilisation emerged as a result of extradimensional entanglement, so I retain a certain level of nostalgic affection for Sitchin.

But there’s no other way to put this -and it is indeed the whole point of the post- just because you like the taste doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a lot of dicks in our champagne. Don’t forget that.

Before we leave Sitichin, I will leave you with this very strange anecdote from David Icke. He was sharing a green room in the US with Sitchin in the late nineties and suggested they may want to compare notes over possible similarities between the Annunaki and his reptilians. Sitchin told him he’s doing good stuff but specifically warned him off the reptilian agenda.

Friendly advice for someone just starting out on the ‘weird show’ circuit? Or “stop calling my boss a lizard”?

Back to the future

What happened between the alleged end of MKULTRA (ha!) and today? What is still going on and what isn’t? Invisible death rays, brain entrainment, the total medicalisation of the western world, a whole bunch of mysterious data from our latest Mars robot (which is equipped with headlights… figure that one out), a private space programme, the unfurling of a highly specific cultural agenda (Star Trek, BSG, anything at the cinema in 2013,) to do with a skewed, overly literal interpretation of the western mystery tradition’s immortality tech, the return of a Sitchinfeller belief in our literal spaceman masters who may or may not have descendants on earth who definitely aren’t us (because we’re built as their slaves).

Much of the public stuff appears to be the inertia of the previous ten decades. Check out this chilling description:

According to The Miracle Times website, in January, Marianne Williams will begin teaching the 365 day Course on Oprah and Friends XM Satellite Radio. The site states, “A Course In Miracles is a masterpiece of mind training, impeccably crafted to catalyze within the individual an experience of thought not bound by the constraints of time, space, or human organizational principles. Through our practical application of lessons in the art of forgiveness and in the psychology of self-responsibility, we are awakened to the memory of our Divine Inheritance.”

From the early seventies to the early nineties, Bush Snr -son of a Nazi collaborator- moved from the UN to the head of the CIA to vice president to president, whilst many of these programmes went private. (He personally enabled with widening of top secret clearances to people employed in private companies and gave the office of the vice president full oversight of intelligence agencies.) It was a fantastic era to be a military contractor -much as it is today. This programme of sending previously-taxpayer-funded projects deep private culminated -rather than ended- with that strange speech Ben Rich, CEO of Skunkworks- gave about the “error in the equations” and their “ability to take ET back home“.

In the recent BBC documentary on Uri Geller, Scott Jones, senior aide to Senator Pell, said the remote viewing programme was shut down in 1995 because the head scientist at the DIA was an evangelical christian. Remote viewing was all together too blasphemous and dangerous a behaviour for the US government to be undertaking. (Did he have the Collins Elite in his ear, perhaps?)

He then went on to say that there is no way the programme was actually stopped. It just moved. Moved private black. Uri then went on to say that the remote viewers had been reactivated after 9/11. Dr Targ said he had heard the same thing. Scientologist and former NSA employee, Hal Putoff, also agreed but said he actively dissuaded people from RVing 9/11 at remote viewing conferences because “it was dangerous to remote viewers because they might become targets of domestic terrorists.” Which is very interesting phrasing, especially given the unfortunate end of Pat Price.

And now we have billionaires embarking on their own space programmes, all but giving the game away because they simply don’t care about our opinions anymore.

None of this makes what these occult players are saying false or ‘mere’ propaganda (with the probably exception of the New Age), but it certainly serves to recontextualise some of the positions they held. For example… Sybil Leek was vehemently anti-drug-use. Given what she encountered during her experience with Operation Often, that’s an entirely reasonable, almost Lovecraftian position to take.

Tumbling through the background of the Anglo-American intelligence world is the largest, most successful, most impactful and most dangerous manifestation of the western esoteric tradition in the history of all mankind. We have ignored it for far too long, although it is pleasing to see it being literally dragged into the light (and turned to dust?) by practitioners such as Jack and Ryan. (Chaos reprezent!1!!)

Are we being strummed like pork harps? Who’s playing for the human side in this game of spectral chess, and who is playing on the other side?

“We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe…. Of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times. And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars.”

— Speech of General Douglas MacArthur to West Point cadets, May 12, 1962

The ‘C’ in CIA stands for Choronzon. Don’t forget that.