I would first like to say that I understand the skepticism surrounding Matthew Brown’s testimony and the wariness this community has when it comes to Jeremy Corbell’s hype-man persona. For the past year or so, I have had a tough time coming to terms with the fact that most of these disclosure figures are willing to use people to further their own agenda. It was clear to me from the beginning that different factions within the “movement” were jockeying for position to benefit off this technology financially, and the amount of deception I personally experienced was shocking enough that it nearly turned me off the subject entirely.

But Matthew Brown’s testimony was something different. The third part of the interview has yet to be released, but thus far Brown has shown an ability to speak candidly about the world we live in today and the current geopolitical situation inside and outside the United States. This is in major contrast with almost every other UFO “whistleblower,” most of whom generally just rehash the same old stories as if the context of our global reality has nothing to do with the consequences of coming forward. But to understand what is really happening here, we have to go back to events that took place around three years ago.

I have had major concerns about the involvement of Peter Thiel and Thiel Capital investor Jesse Michels in the disclosure topic since I first realized what their relationship was. I published a Reddit post in January 2022 expressing my hesitation with embracing someone like Thiel. He has deep ties to the CIA and his company Palantir had been embedded within Cambridge Analytica — along with Facebook employees — during the 2016 election. Cambridge Analytica waged military-grade psychological operations against the American public, and I feared he was attempting to do the same through American Alchemy and other online influence campaigns.

I noted a 2022 Politico article where Thiel had expressed interest in funding UFO research and a comment by Ross Coulthart stating that “companies involved in data collection are actually interested in funding and investigating the phenomenon…where there’s a buck, there’s a will.” This was only about a month after the American Alchemy episode with Garry Nolan came out that put Jesse on the map, and he started getting every big name involved in the topic on his show from then on.

After initially calling out a few things and as uncomfortable as I was with the situation, I eventually shut my mouth for the greater good of the cause. I told myself it was a bipartisan issue so dealing with red flags like this was a necessary evil in order to push the ball forward. These red flags specifically included Jesse having on guests like Alex Jones, Erik Prince, Sam Bankman-Fried, Martin Shkreli, Christian Angermayer, the Praxis bros, and others. Some of these interviews have been deleted for obvious reasons. I still continued to share some of his content that I felt was helpful for elevating the discussion around the UFO topic, but was extremely wary and became more alarmed as time went on.

Pretty soon, Thiel’s hidden hand was everywhere and I felt like I was the only one who saw it. Diana Pasulka and Karl Nell spoke at Thiel’s Hereticon conference.

For some reason, Avi Loeb spoke with Thiel Capital head Eric Weinstein at the 2022 Bitcoin Conference.

Former GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher, who read the Wilson/Davis notes into the Congressional Record, resigned from Congress to become the lead of defense acquisition at Palantir.

Even journalist Chris Sharp felt compelled to write that “sources tell Liberation Times that Peter Thiel is a key advocate for UAP transparency.”

There are countless examples of this. It is hard to believe that anyone who went on his show did not know Jesse’s job was to spend Peter Thiel’s money, as it is displayed proudly in his X bio. Perhaps most people didn’t care enough to speak out, and many likely would support his involvement given the long history of right wing interest in conspiracy theories.

I know for a fact some were intimidated into staying silent.

But the current dismantling of the US has gone way beyond politics, and Matthew Brown’s testimony is much braver than it seems at first glance.

When the Immaculate Constellation report came out, I dismissed it immediately. It sounded like the same old ufological hyperbole, especially when I heard it contained the “Alien Reproduction Vehicle” terminology that had been popularized by Steven Greer. Michael Shellenberger, who reported on the case, is known to run in the same “Intellectual Dark Web” circles as Eric Weinstein, and has even written articles on nuclear energy for one of Thiel’s libertarian publications.

As Thiel and Shellenberger are also personal friends, I figured it was just another arm of the agenda to rile up the UFO community so they’d continue to blast legacy defense contractors to the benefit of his investments.

But then the hearing happened. As someone who had been tracking this for years, it was clear to me immediately that Shellenberger was running interference when he took that cover page off the report and submitted it into the Congressional Record himself.

It was at this moment that Jeremy’s showmanship bit him in the ass, as nearly everyone played it down and accused him of throwing a temper tantrum. The dramatic nature of his Tubi documentary did not help his cause either, but I knew for a fact there was something much more going on. It was at this point I started following George and Jeremy’s reporting extremely closely.

As they say — and especially when it comes to Peter Thiel — follow the money.

Despite their attempts at secrecy, it has been an open secret for years now that Thiel was fundamental in funding the start-up UFO reporting app Enigma Labs. It’s a bit odd that someone who Chris Sharp’s sources claim to be “a key advocate for UAP transparency” would want to hide their role in it altogether, but I digress.

The Enigma Labs CEO has also insisted on anonymity, and once you scratch the surface of these relationships it becomes pretty clear why. It turns out there is another monetary relationship between Thiel and “Alex Smith” that is even more concerning than co-founding an app that was essentially created to track experiencers.

Alice Lloyd George, the CEO of Enigma Labs, is the great-granddaughter of former UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Like Thiel, she has spent a lot of time in venture capital funding various aerospace start-ups. Through her firm RRE Ventures, she was a principal investor in a satellite imaging company called BlackSky.

Thiel is also co-investor in BlackSky through his firm Mithril Capital Management.

Unsurprisingly, it also turns out that Thiel’s Palantir Technologies is an investor and integration partner with BlackSky.

To extend the benefits demonstrated by the pilot project, BlackSky also has entered into a multi-year software subscription agreement with Palantir to access Palantir Foundry, an enterprise platform run by Palantir. BlackSky will offer a combined solution that integrates Spectra AI with Palantir Foundry to expand the delivery of high-resolution imagery and deep analytics to customers worldwide. The capabilities of the combined solution were successfully demonstrated in a series of exercises with experienced geospatial intelligence customers earlier this year.

As you can see from the article excerpt below, the integration of Palantir into BlackSky’s architecture is quite intentional.

Lloyd George (RRE) and Thiel (Founders Fund) also have another co-venture called Accion Propulsion Systems. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that the company “is developing next-gen propulsion systems for satellites— with an approach that aims to "break from [the] slow, expensive aerospace alternative propulsion systems.”

The intent to break away from the normal acquisition process and work around legacy defense contractors is a theme that runs through every Thiel investment in defense tech start-ups. There are potentially other partnerships Thiel and Lloyd George have forged together in this area, but we will focus on the two most relevant to Matthew Brown’s testimony: BlackSky and Enigma Labs.

Likely the most important aspect of Brown’s story focuses on the NRO’s geospatial intelligence platform called Sentient. Wikipedia states:

Sentient has been described as a "classified artificial brain." Available information describes it as a complex automated system that allows intelligence agencies of the United States and the United States Armed Forces to use artificial satellites in Earth orbits to track in real time any objects detected or photographed, and to automatically repurpose with artificial intelligence and machine learning the tracking of targets, and to even decide which targets are worth tracking. One NRO document detailed Sentient as a system able to "automatically fuse multi-[intelligence] 'big data' in context to understand current activity, predict new activity, and discover unknown activity."

Known public records of Sentients development programs and process date from 2009-2010 onward, as highlighted by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). NRO emails from 2021 disclosed that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), which later became the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), was involved with the NRO and the Sentient program. Former NRO Director Betty Sapp disclosed that Sentient is also known as the agency's Future Ground Architecture program. Programs such as Sentient are part of the Pentagon's Third Offset Strategy.

Emails from a FOIA request by John Greenewald show the UAP Task Force stated that Sentient had a dedicated UAP tracking model, but it needed an “external customer” to ask for it to be turned on.

One may wonder if Enigma Labs may in fact be that external customer.

Listening back to Brown’s interview, it’s clear that this system is exactly what is described in the Immaculate Constellation document.

George: Did we have an AI system in 2018 that could do what we're describing?

Matthew: Well, we know we did.Those documents have since become public, Sentient, Sentient, and the fact that Sentient was operational at those dates of the documents mean it was operational for years before then, years before 2018.

George: You know, we've had our conversations, private and otherwise, about this kind of an operation, and it just seems like, gosh, there should be somebody who's collecting all this information and studying it and trying to figure it out. And the fact that he goes into the executive branch somewhere, if that's what happens to it, good. I'm glad somebody's doing it. As you've learned about it, why is that not necessarily a good idea? Is it because it's not maybe really within the executive branch that it's, it's an entity unto itself?

Matthew: Why it may not be a good idea to censor our intelligence products that are circulated within our cleared community to our service members that are on the front lines every day is because you are blinding them to their environment. You are opening them to threats, you're exposing them to risks, and you are essentially inhibiting the pursuit of national security objectives by doing so. There's a reason you guys have talked to so many whistleblowers from the military who see these things. That's because partially because they're reporting it, they feel endangered by it, and nothing is being done and no answers are being given and they are, in some cases suffering legitimate injuries.

George: These images that would pop up here and there on on some system, on some platform, this AI program that was once called Immaculate Constellation, it would grab them, take them away and then they're gone from those platforms, those places so like CIA or I believe where it, where it could it, you know the data was ingested essentially in a, you know, a stove pipe, right?

Matthew: It's it's locked off, it goes in, it goes into the black box and then a product comes out for what you're cleared to see and what you have a need to know to see.

George: Wouldn't somebody say, hey, where's my image that I recorded and then? Where'd it go?

Matthew: There's a lot of people who have had incidents like that there. You know, we also have to remember there's a lot of surveillance and reconnaissance platforms. Not all these are controlled by military or national intelligence. And the thing I believe a lot of what was, you know, circulated for some time on the community was people at combatant commands or with operational units. They had their own platforms, essentially. They control that data to a large degree and they were able to decide that it goes on JWICS, not into the black box.

This obviously sounds like a serious issue. Data is being plucked out by AI and hidden from others who may have a serious need to know.

It also sounds like this is being done without the knowledge of the chain of command, and this is why whistleblowers are going to Jeremy and George. To be blunt, it sounds like there are rogue “combatant commands or operational units” working against the interest of US national security for their own benefit.

Considering what is happening currently with DOGE, a department where a vast majority of employees have ties to Peter Thiel and Palantir, we should be extremely concerned with this next bit of information regarding Sentient:

Sentient's success depends, in large measure, on the quantity and quality of the data with which it is provided. With this in mind, the NRO has contracted with private firms to provide data that can be fed to Sentient. One firm, Maxar, provides high-resolution satellite imagery. An-other, Planet, operates a CubeSat constellation that images all the Earth's land each day. A third firm, BlackSky, "hoovers up" data from twenty-five satellites, more than 40,000 news sources, some 100 million mobile de-vices, roughly 70,000 ships and planes, eight social networks, and about 5,000 environmental sensors. BlackSky provides this data as raw material for big-data analytics to refine for machine learning to aid the NRO in focusing its satellites more effectively, while alerting human analysts to key patterns and insights.

So the data fusion and machine learning for Sentient — and therefore Immaculate Constellation — is exclusively managed by BlackSky, a defense contractor with massive investments from Peter Thiel and Alice Lloyd George. The idea that another Thiel company besides Palantir "hoovers up" so much data is disturbing, considering the ongoing seizure of American’s tax and health data by Palantir alumni and Thiel Fellows that make up DOGE. On its face, this appears to be be a complete surveillance state in the making, and echos loudly Brown’s suggestion that “we have built a prison around ourselves.”

Another concerning aspect of Brown’s testimony also becomes clear when one looks more closely at Enigma Labs. Brown says AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick straight-up lied to Congress about the legacy UFO program, insinuating that he was in on this as well, stating he now “had inside knowledge into the deception of our government by elements of our intelligence community.”

Back in 2023, Enigma Labs announced they were partnering with AARO and Sean Kirkpatrick share data.

This essentially allowed the Department of Defense — and these rogue combatant commands with the assistance of Peter Thiel and Alice Lloyd George — to bypass the law and collect data on civilians directly. There is also a sordid history of the government using experiencers as a means to interact with UAP, which is a whole other fucked up can of worms.

We released our episode of Patterns Tell Stories yesterday on this where we go into more depth. You can find it on Spotify and Apple podcasts.

There is a lot more to this, but I have to get to sleep. I may write a more comprehensive article on my Substack, but for now I hope people can understand why Matthew Brown’s testimony is important, especially in this moment.

Below is a follow up post I made that I think is also contains some rather important information regarding AARO.

Sean Kirkpatrick and Enigma Labs

I found something interesting related to Matthew Brown’s testimony about Sean Kirkpatrick. Some may have found it melodramatic, but I think it’s very likely that he was not exaggerating.

This is what Brown says about how he felt after reading the transcript of Kirkpatrick’s Congressional testimony.

Brown: No, I knew that I was now something else. I was in I had inside knowledge into the deception of our government by elements of our intelligence community. My blood ran cold at a specific point in that transcript where Mr. Rubio is discussing the legacy program. This was a subject of direct discussion with Sean Kirkpatrick in these meetings, and based on Mr. Kirkpatrick's replies about as vague as they were, but unable to escape the truth of the legacy program, Mr. Rubio's response was, well, what the hell is the executive branch doing? Have they been running this for 60 years without congressional oversight? I might be paraphrasing a little, but that's near enough verbatim. And I saw that line and I basically closed that file and had a pretty sleepless night.

Knapp: You said your blood ran cold, meaning you're pissed, you're spooked?

Brown: Scared.

Knapp: What is scared? Scared for your country?

Brown: I just think in general, it's like, I don't know, there was nothing associated. It was just like immediate, oh, fuck.

Clearly Brown thinks Sean Kirkpatrick is in on the coverup.

Brown also talks about the Sentient AI system, which was likely the program responsible for snatching up UAP data and compartmentalizing it. I made a post the other day about Peter Thiel’s potential involvement in Sentient through BlackSky.

Alice Lloyd George, the CEO of Enigma Labs is also an investor in BlackSky. It’s also an open secret that Peter Thiel is an investor in Enigma Labs, along with many others in his circle. Enigma Labs states openly on its website that Balaji Srinivasan, who wrote the book “The Network State,” is an angel investor in Enigma Labs.

Alice Lloyd George even interviewed him on her podcast back in 2017.

There are countless other connections in this network, so it’s safe to say the right-wing tech venture capital community is rather incestuous but their agendas are clearly aligned when it comes to UAP.

Now back to Sean Kirkpatrick.

Harvard University scholar Jensine Andresen wrote two books on the current UFO disclosure situation that I highly recommend. I disagree with her opinion on the phenomenon, but I believe her analysis of the fuckery going on within the community is spot on.

During her initial research into Enigma Labs and their funding, she states she found someone named Kirsten Bartok Touw on Enigma’s Crunchbase page. Touw was a special government employee (like Elon Musk is now) and worked at New Vista Capital while serving as a policy advisor for the Office of Strategic Capital at DoD.

Some weird things happened with the Wayback Machine URL after she published the book, and I urge everyone to read it for themselves. But the important thing here is that Touw was listed as one of the two investors under the Financials tab on Crunchbase for Enigma Labs, and is currently a top investor at New Vista Capital.

Jensine Andresen writes:

Another person who holds the SGE designation is Kirsten Bartok Touw, an aerospace and defense investor at New Vista Capital who like Lourie, despite being employed in the private sector also works simultaneously as an adviser to the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC)…

The Wayback version’s ‘Financials’ tab for Enigma Labs, Inc., from January 20, 2023, only lists one investor—FJ Labs—for the company’s pre-seed round. But when I accessed the company’s regular Crunchbase listing in April 2023, the ‘Financials’ tab listed two investors, FJ Labs and Kirsten Bartok Touw. But now, as of July 22, the ’Financials’ tab has been taken down completely on the company’s regular Crunchbase site, and, as mentioned above, the Wayback Machine version of the ‘Financials’ tab from January 20, 2023 only lists one investor, FJ Labs. It therefore appears as if the archived version of the URL has been altered.

So, this is weird as fuck.

I also mentioned in my previous post that Enigma Labs and the DoD/AARO had formed a partnership.

Another concerning aspect of Brown’s testimony also becomes clear when one looks more closely at Enigma Labs. Brown says AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick straight-up lied to Congress about the legacy UFO program, insinuating that he was in on this as well, stating he now “had inside knowledge into the deception of our government by elements of our intelligence community.”

Back in 2023, Enigma Labs announced they were partnering with AARO and Sean Kirkpatrick share data. This essentially allowed the Department of Defense — and these rogue combatant commands with the assistance of Peter Thiel and Alice Lloyd George — to bypass the law and collect data on civilians directly. There is also a sordid history of the government using experiencers as a means to interact with UAP, which is a whole other fucked up can of worms.

Now, guess where Sean Kirkpatrick is currently listed under “Venture Partners and Advisors.”

If you guessed New Vista Capital, you’d be right.

Interestingly, H.R. McMaster is also an advisor to New Vista Capital, and he made waves when speaking about UFOs on Bill Maher’s show some months ago.

When one considers Kirkpatrick’s attendance at a 2018 briefing on Skinwalker Ranch with Brandon Fugal and Hal Puthoff, it becomes quite clear that a lot of this is coordinated bullshit.

This is a clusterfuck of venture capital/IC/DoD obfuscation, and another reason I believe Matthew Brown’s testimony is extremely important.

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I believe our human drive to understand the fundamental nature of our reality is a major aspect of what drives science forward. One would think the UFO phenomenon, in its modern iteration, would be a major catalyst for this instinctual curiosity and inspire scientists to study and reproduce such seemingly impossible technology. Unfortunately, the exact opposite scenario has come to fruition due to decades of stigma and secrecy, most of it propagated by the US and other world governments.

Many skeptics take the easy way out, using this compounded dismissive status quo to pile on anyone in academia who dares show interest in the anomalous data captured by our most advanced classified military sensor platforms. This lack of access to essential information for national security reasons is exploited by debunkers regularly.

The resulting attitude starkly displays the dogma of materialism taken to its logical conclusion: if I can't see it, then I don't believe it, and therefore it is not worth my time. Considering the estimated one trillion microorganisms that make up our microbiomes, this seems like an unwise perspective when it comes to the scientific method. Instead of trying to assist in engineering the proverbial microscope of the future, they spend their limited existence on this planet lambasting those who do.

Unfortunately for the future of humanity, this culture of derision has been enabled and reinforced by the same institutions we trust to have our best interests at heart, at least in theory. The problem with imaginary human constructs such as government, the rule of law, and even the scientific method is that these ideas are inherently human and therefore unavoidably influenced by the ego.

Ego is a major factor in the rise of the individuals who claim positions of power within such organizations. Though there are always exceptions, the fundamental belief that they themselves should succeed over others with similar qualifications is the reason they won the job in the first place. The corporate world, unsurprisingly, provides the most glaring example of this cutthroat attitude and is often cause for celebration in American society and many others across the globe.

Perhaps the extreme ideologies and resulting division, propagating instantaneously across the planet thanks to the internet, are human nature just playing itself out on the global scale. Perhaps what we are seeing is the price we pay for the individuality and technological advancement that allowed us to become the most dominant species on Earth. Perhaps the innumerable free will choices made by Homo sapiens over millennia are to blame for what feels like a civilization teetering on the brink of collapse in the year 2024.

What follows is a speculative thought experiment that argues against this consensus reality. Based on testimony from insiders, scientific research papers, and historical UFO literature, I believe there may be stronger, more clandestine forces at play.

And, for better or worse, these forces may not always be human.

Apertures of Time

Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon official and head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, provided an interesting analogy for how the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon may be capable of creating such advanced technologies. He explained this concept on an episode of That UFO Podcast, simplifying the concept of Planck time into a format the layperson could understand.

He encouraged the audience to imagine the flow of time as a lit cigarette. The unburnt tobacco represents the future, the ash symbolizes the past, and the embers currently burning embody the tiny sliver of our present moment.

He emphasized that if one looks closely enough at the cherry, it becomes clear that parts of the cherry (the present) overlap with both the unburnt tobacco and the ash (the past and future), and that uneven burn demonstrates that the present moment isn't really a moment at all, but more of a process.

Elizondo then asked the viewers to imagine a species capable of experiencing a larger section of that cherry, with the ability to both consciously and physically navigate that extra dimension of time available to them but not us. T

his revelation got me thinking: obviously, the ability for a being to perceive time with a wider aperture would allow them the development of technologies as seemingly advanced as UAP, but what else would it allow for?

Before we get into these possibilities, let's review the definition of Planck time itself.

Planck time represents the smallest meaningful unit of time within the conventional framework of spacetime. At this scale, spacetime itself is subject to the probabilistic fluctuations of quantum mechanics such as entanglement and superposition.

Observing the world at this time scale would likely remove the experience of linear time completely. Everything would be chaos, and one's environment would likely consist solely of fluctuations of probabilistic events. The inability to measure one's environment, always dealing with uncertainty, would no doubt drive a member of our species mad almost instantly.

Alternately, if a non-human species were able to get close to perceiving events on this scale, manipulation of the reality humans currently experience would be no problem whatsoever. Perhaps this is what TTS founder Tom DeLonge means when he says "UFOs are from outside time."

Time itself wouldn't even appear to exist if utilizing our scientific framework, but the ability to influence the perception of individuals experiencing time in a linear fashion would be no issue at all. Acting with his level of control may be somewhat comparable to tweaking the source code of the universe.

Again, the level of information processing required to perceive time at this level is unimaginable.

But what if a more synthetic lifeform was engineered to possess this capability?

The Pitfalls of Transhumanism

TTS founder Tom DeLonge, whose views are informed by the high-ranking military and intelligence officials advising his company, has put forward some intriguing possibilities in his recent episode of TTS Talks. Speaking with ex-CIA official Jim Semivan, DeLonge explores the idea of synthetic lifeforms that have joined together with technology in order to stave off entropy to essentially become immortal.

While this may seem like an obvious technological advancement for any biological civilization, DeLonge suggests this transhumanism may come at a cost.

"I believe there is one source energy that created all life. But I believe that all forms of life are just, once it's started, just moves into entropy. Just starts breaking apart and breaking away. And somewhere in that chain of events, certain life can adapt. And if it's a human being, we might adapt ourselves synthetically over time.

We might take computers and merge them into our brains. The internet becomes wireless into our minds, we might turn our body a little bit more cyborg-like, you know, and pretty soon once you start doing that to stave off entropy, you end up becoming more synthetic yourself and you lose emotion, maybe because you become more controllable and societies can only work when there's less emotion or whatever. But at some point, you lose your attachment to source over a long period of time.

And then you get the means and the synthetic abilities, the technological abilities to travel amongst time and work your way back and try to figure out how to fix what you've done to yourself. But you don't know how necessarily because you're pretty much a computer at that time. And since you can't be everywhere all at once, you create a bunch of little robots that can go out and do it for you."

Ignoring the more esoteric aspects of "source energy" for the moment, the synthetic takeover of human consciousness when merging our biology with technology is a very real consideration. Losing what makes us human in this process — emotion, artistry, creativity, etc. — could transform the definition of our species as time goes on.

One major aspect of enhancing human capability to its fullest potential would likely entail merging our brains with quantum AI. Such compatibility doesn't seem too far off if we consider recent theories on consciousness like Orch OR. I've written recently about a workshop held by the RAND Corporation and sponsored by DARPA that included the participation of the scientists behind this hypothesis, Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose.

In this work, Penrose and Hameroff address how processes at the Planck scale could affect human consciousness, and, intriguingly, the role that "unified mind" or "source energy" may be required to make sense of these phenomena.

Quantum Biologics

Quantum computing, and therefore quantum AI, could become a major biological enhancement, giving rise to the scenario DeLonge proposed in the previous section. It is in this context that we will explore Penrose and Hameroff's analysis of quantum computation and the role it could play in consciousness.

In the RAND/DARPA study mentioned previously, these two lauded scientists address the existence of consciousness at the Planck scale in the section titled "Quantum Computing and Consciousness."

"At extremely small scales, space-time is not smooth, but quantized. Quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory predict virtual particle-waves (or photons) that pop into and out of existence, creating quantum 'foam' in their wake...

If spin networks are the fundamental level of space-time geometry, they could provide the basis for protoconscious experience. Thus, particular configurations of quantum spin geometry would convey particular types of qualia, meaning, and aesthetic values. A process at the Planck scale (e.g., quantum scale reductions) could then access and select configurations of experience."

Here we have Penrose and Hameroff positing that a "process" could "access and select configurations of experience" if said process, like Orch OR, could be perceived at the Planck scale. In the next paragraph, these quantum effects are explored in the context of the human organism.

"If protoconscious information is embedded at the near-infinitesimal Planck scale, how could it be linked to biology? Penrose's answer is to extend Einstein's theory of general relativity (in which mass equates to curvature in space-time) down to the Planck scale. Specific arrangements of mass are, in reality, then specific configurations of space-time geometry.

Events at the very small scale, however, are subject to the seemingly bizarre goings-on of quantum theory. A century of experimental observation of quantum systems has shown that, at least at small scales, particles (mass) can exist in two or more states or locations simultaneously.

Penrose views this phenomenon of quantum superposition as simultaneous space-time curvature in opposite directions—a separation or bubble in underlying reality. Superposition and subsequent reduction, or collapse, to single, classical states may have profoundly important applications in technology, as well as toward the understanding of consciousness."

Penrose and Hameroff then briefly address the possibility of quantum computers becoming conscious.

"What about future evolution? Will consciousness occur in computers? The advent of quantum computers opens the possibility. However, as presently envisioned, quantum computers will have insufficient mass in superposition (e.g., electrons) to reach the threshold for objective reduction due to environmental decoherence. Still, future generations of quantum computers may be able to realize this goal."

I would like to remind the reader that this RAND/DARPA workshop took place in 1999. The leaps we have accomplished in the nearly quarter-century since then, in both AI and quantum computing, were obviously not considered in this analysis.

But this is where it gets interesting. Penrose and Hameroff admit that this microtubule theory likely does not account for consciousness on its own. They suggest something similar to what DeLonge states with source energy or the unified mind.

"Still, greater computational complexity and ultrareductionism to the level of microtubule automata cannot address the enigmatic features of consciousness -- in particular, the nature of the conscious experience. Something more is required. If functional approaches and emergence are incomplete, perhaps the raw components of mental processes (or 'qualia') are fundamental properties of nature (like mass, spin, or charge). This view has long been held by panpsychists throughout the ages.

For example, Buddhists and Eastern philosophers claimed a 'universal mind.' Following the ancient Greeks, Spinoza argued in the 17th century that some form of consciousness existed in everything physical. The 19th-century mathematician Leibniz proposed that the universe was composed of an infinite number of fundamental units, or 'monads,' with each possessing a form of primitive psychological being. In the 20th century, Russell claimed that there was a common entity underlying both mental and physical processes, while Wheeler and Chalmers have maintained that there is an experiential aspect to fundamental information.

Of particular interest is the work of the 20th-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose panexperiential view remains most consistent with modern physics. Whitehead argued that consciousness is a process of events occurring in a wide, basic field of protoconscious experience.

These events, or 'occasions of experience,' may be comparable to quantum state reductions, or actual events in physical reality (Shimony, 1993). This suggests that consciousness may involve quantum state reductions (a form of quantum computation). But in what medium do such 'occasions' occur?"

Whether protoconscious experience, or qualia, could exist in the empty space of the universe depends upon how space is defined. Historically, space has been described as either an absolute void or a pattern of fundamental geometry. Democritus and the Michelson-Morley results argued for "nothingness," while Aristotle ("plenum") and Maxwell ("ether") rejected the notion of emptiness in favor of "something" —a background pattern.

Einstein weighed in on both sides of this debate, initially supporting the concept of a void with his theory of special relativity but then reversing himself in his theory of general relativity and its curved space and geometric distortions- the space-time metric. Could protoconscious qualia be properties of this fundamental metric?

When DeLonge mentions the "source energy" or "unified mind" that humans are connected to, he is likely referring to this "medium" where such "occasions" occur. This is potentially the underlying aspect of human consciousness that a more synthetic being would be unable to access - or a "human" may potentially lose access to over millennia of merging with technology.

Defining “God”

If consciousness as we experience it is a series of quantum computations, then quantum AI may be able to have a similar level of consciousness outside of our "universal mind" or connection to "source." Interestingly, in this work, Penrose and Hameroff mention the research and philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

They said Whitehead argues that consciousness is a process, not a point in time. This is very similar to what Lue Elizondo says in his analogy of the burning cigarette when it comes to time. At this point, I find it important to revisit his exact quote before moving on.

"When you look at the quantum state of things, even an electron, for example, you learn in high school that an electron orbits an atom, and we now know that's really a very simplistic way of looking at things. The electron doesn't orbit around the atom; in fact, it's called an electron cloud because the electron is both all in all places and none of the places, all at the same time. It's kind of weird, but my point being is that if you were to look at time and think of a cigarette burning, when you look at the notion of the future, most people would define the future as those events that have not yet happened, and the past is defined by events that have already happened.

When you look at that construct, then the definition of the present must be a moment in space-time, probably measured in Planck time, a very infinitesimally small moment of space-time where the future is transitioning into the past. It's not a point in time; it's a process, it's an event that's occurring. So, a way to look at that in lay perspective is to think of a cigarette or a cigar: the parts of this cigar that have already burnt, the ash, is the past; that part of the cigarette or cigar that has not yet burned is the future; and the cherry, that moment of ignition, that spark of where the future is now being consumed and becoming the past, that is the present.

We as human beings, we live at that moment. All of our hopes, our fears, our memories, love, hate, good, bad, all that is an expression of an experience that occurs at an infinitesimally small moment of space-time, like I said, probably measured in Planck time. That is how we experience the present. But what if there were things that had the ability to experience where the present was a much bigger cherry, if you will, a much bigger transition where more elements of the future and the past are experienced as in the present, and can do that also physically, right?

So it's not just an idea, but what if there were species out there that experienced the universe with an extra level of dimension, and so you and I are having this conversation right now with your audience, and we're having this conversation right here, right now, but if I were to have the ability to have this conversation right here but five minutes ago, or five minutes from now, we would never meet; we'd be like two ships passing in the night.

Is it possible that maybe some of these things, these UAP, have the ability, we experience them when they are right here, right now, and every other time, we don't because we're simply not intersecting with that extra-dimensional space of time? When you look at that cigarette or cigar burning, you'll notice that it never burns evenly. When you look at it up close and you can kind of remove the glare and the flare from the burn, we realize that there are portions of the future, the portions of the cigar that haven't burned yet, behind portions of the cigar that already has burned. It's not an even burn; almost there's an overlap, right? And quantum theory is beginning to show some of the models for that."

So if AI clones outfitted with quantum computers could process events at the Planck scale and engage in quantum state engineering, this would provide a way to manipulate matter at the most fundamental level. Such an advantage would provide such a synthetic organism the ability to influence events based on probabilities that could be calculated instantly. These AI systems could also learn to adapt in real-time, exponentially increasing the accuracy of the expected results.

Considering DeLonge's idea of a species merging with such an AI and losing their connection to "source" in the process, it begs the question of whether or not this tether to "unified mind" is what allows humanity to exercise free will. Perhaps it is this free will that defines this process and is inherent in our DNA. DeLonge's suggestion that free will is the difference between biological and synthetic life makes sense within this framework.

A Process, Not an Event

Returning to the substance of Penrose and Hameroff's study, let's explore the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead known as "process philosophy." The reader may be surprised at the parallels with DeLonge's idea of unified mind.

Process philosophy emphasizes becoming and change over static being. This means processes are fundamental rather than the exact qualities of an "entity" at a specific point in time. All of these processes are interrelated and the result is our conscious experience of reality.

This dovetails with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, where an electron is everywhere and nowhere all at once. The idea that the future is not predetermined is also fundamental to the idea of free will. Perhaps counterintuitively,

Whitehead also incorporates the idea of a big G "God" in this philosophical framework but is thought of as an energy creating and shaping the universe as it evolves. In this idea, the divine is fundamental in shaping our underlying reality.

However, in this framework, God itself cannot affect free will.

"Because every actual entity, including God, is an instance of creativity and is therefore experiential and self-determining, God is incapable of overriding the self-determination of the creaturely occasions. To exist at all is to be composed of creativity and this necessarily implies both an element of self-determination and a particular pattern of causal relation with all other entities. God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. God is their chief exemplification.

God prehends and is prehended just as billions of other actualities are prehended. Ultimately, the syntheses of these data (including divine data) are determined by the concrescing entity, whether that entity is an atmospheric molecule or a human being. God’s power over the world is described as persuasive rather than coercive. God cannot override the self-directed integrations of feeling present in the concrescence of any occasion—God cannot force human beings to make any particular decision and cannot supernaturally intervene in natural processes…

God’s benevolence is not at odds with the existence of moral and natural evils in the world because God’s power cannot prevent creaturely occasions from ignoring the divine lures and acting in a less-than-ideal fashion."

This appears to be where DeLonge's idea of synthetic beings enters the picture. The idea of God, or source energy, "luring" human beings to make decisions resulting in positive outcomes demonstrates an act of persuasion. Even though free will can be influenced, it is still inherently free will as the organism may still choose the negative result.

However, if these probabilities can be influenced by other entities capable of accessing the fundamental fabric of the universe in the same way God can, they may use deception through the manipulation of matter as a method to coerce certain outcomes. This duality of light and dark, good and evil, etc. has played a major role in religions over millennia.

Perhaps our free will is being manipulated by those who have lost the ability to exercise their own.

In the previous edition of this series on the potential involvement of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the UFO coverup, we explored the work history of its former director Sean Kirkpatrick and how it may be relevant to the reverse engineering of exotic technologies.

Kirkpatrick's employment at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) is of particular interest, as well as his attendance of a 2018 Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) briefing on Skinwalker ranch. But most importantly, the patent he obtained under SAIC is the primary indicator that he may have some monetary interest in keeping these technologies secret.

But now let's dive even deeper into these technologies and the shadowy companies behind their development. Perhaps surprisingly, this will eventually lead us back to the 2018 briefing on Skinwalker Ranch — particularly the other subject matter experts in attendance.

Trust the Science

On August 30, 2016, Blink 182 frontman Tom DeLonge gave what was, in my opinion, one of the most intriguing and revealing interviews in UFO history. Many may take issue with DeLonge's seemingly wild claims, but the truth is that much of what he has communicated to the public, be it through random interviews or his work with To The Stars (TTS), has quietly been corroborated by others who have stepped forward.

In any case, his 2016 interview on Fade to Black with Jimmy Church provided some clues that came directly from one of his scientific advisors at TTS. We will soon discover how this brief clip ties into the larger argument we are exploring.

DeLonge: Let me read you something. I just asked one of my advisors how something that doesn't exist in this dimension as we know it can create a craft that looks very physical and probably is very physical. Do you want me to read the answer?

Church: Yes.

DeLonge: Here it goes. I'm reading something to you straight from the source. Using nanofabrication, atomic layer by atomic layer with durable nanotexturing and quantum entanglement properties. And of course, powered by the polarizable vacuum. The same methods that cryptoterrestrials use.

Does that make sense? There's a way! I just got that, and I was like, okay, got it. There's a way.

"Nanofabrication" should sound familiar, as we spent part one of this article analyzing the technique, along with former AARO director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick's patent under SAIC that employs it.

The patent, titled "Holographic recording and micro/nanofabrication via ultrafast holographic two-photon induced photopolymerization," could be harnessed by the US Air Force — only through contracts won by SAIC, of course — to produce uniquely advanced sensor platforms.

As you may recall, the holographic nature of Kirkpatrick's invention would additionally allow for detailed 3D modeling of existing metamaterials at the nano level. These materials could then be reconstructed using his patented fabrication process to construct prototypes for testing.

This is essentially the definition of advanced reverse engineering, and these methods of engineering would be held exclusively by Kirkpatrick's then-employer, SAIC. But that's not the only potential connection between Kirkpatrick and a possible UFO legacy program.

The message from Tom's advisor from TTS was later discovered to be none other than theoretical physicist and remote viewing pioneer Hal Puthoff. Puthoff has been known for his involvement and research into the UFO subject for decades, writing a paper titled "Engineering the Zero-Point Field and Polarizable Vacuum for Interstellar Flight" for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP).

AAWSAP is now a well-known UAP effort that had been led by Bigelow Aerospace under contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was easily the biggest target of ridicule by AARO within their "historical review."

Despite this brazen and bumbling attempt to discredit their work, polls conducted after the AARO report's release demonstrated that Kirkpatrick and his colleagues were unable to tamp down public interest in UAP. A YouGov survey of US adults from March 10-12 showed that almost two-thirds of American adults agreed that the Department of Defense (DoD) has not been forthcoming on the topic. But I digress.

My point is that Puthoff's reputation is held in high regard by real-life scientists despite what many skeptics consider to be his "questionable" areas of interest. His peer-reviewed scientific publications and long career in intelligence speak for themselves, which makes Kirkpatrick's outright dismissal of AAWSAP's research all the more peculiar, being a scientist with intelligence ties himself.

This brings us to our second and most intriguing connection.

Questionable Motives

Considering DeLonge's more controversial comments surrounding UFOs, some might be surprised to learn that Dr. Puthoff is still on the TTS Advisory Board eight years after Tom read his answer verbatim on "Fade to Black." To me, that in itself says a lot about how he views the emphasis Tom has placed on certain aspects of the phenomenon. It also tells me that he still stands by his comments on nanofabrication relayed by DeLonge to Jimmy Church in 2016.

Only two years later, Dr. Kirkpatrick attended the now-infamous 2018 SASC briefing regarding developments at Skinwalker Ranch. The reader may be surprised to learn that Dr. Hal Puthoff was also in attendance.

With these two men present among the few individuals involved in this meeting that focused on UAP, it strains credulity that both Puthoff's words regarding the nanofabrication of metamaterials and Kirkpatrick's patent under SAIC describing such a technique are mere coincidences. Perhaps not so coincidentally, SAIC is also one of only two defense contractors specifically named by DeLonge in his Sekret Machines series, along with the Lockheed Martin division they purchased.

Let's take it a step further. Although Kirkpatrick's involvement at the 2018 briefing is still somewhat of a mystery, it's quite clear why Puthoff was there as a large part of AAWSAP's research under Bigelow was conducted at Skinwalker Ranch. Being a contributor to the AAWSAP program and with his extensive knowledge of the UFO topic, Puthoff was and is still undoubtedly a subject matter expert—an expert who has been quoted stating the importance of nanofabrication to the engineering of UFO materials.

Considering the little information and large amount of obfuscation we have seen from Kirkpatrick around this meeting, it would not be unfair to extrapolate the potential reason for his presence from his time at SAIC during the late 1990s-2000s. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that SAIC is nowhere to be found on his LinkedIn profile or any of his official military and intelligence biographical profiles provided on US government websites.

Now we come to the question of why he was chosen by DoD leadership to head up the Pentagon's brand new UFO office. Even more pertinent to our discussion, why was he so critical of AAWSAP in AARO's historical review, as demonstrated by their obvious attempt to minimize their work? And why has he continued this disinformation campaign in the media for so long after leaving that position, only announcing its end the same day legislation was introduced that would audit AARO's decision-making processes?

Considering his patent and the knowledge Puthoff surely possesses surrounding its potential relevance to reverse-engineer anomalous craft, one has to wonder if there was a financial incentive for Kirkpatrick in publicly discounting AAWSAP's research through official government channels like the AARO historical review. Even more concerning is the possibility that DoD leadership was aware of this potential detriment to Kirkpatrick's intellectual property rights, and that was precisely the reason he was specifically chosen for the job.

Again, this is all speculation based on the limited information available in the public sphere. Unfortunately, the onus is on Kirkpatrick and the DoD to clear up these ethical questions, which is extremely unlikely if history is any indication.

But the issue of UAP is far from the only concern the US government has with Skinwalker Ranch and its reported high strangeness. The involvement of another member on the briefing team, along with Puthoff and ranch owner Brandon Fugal, may help shed some light on why Kirkpatrick was involved in such an exclusive group.

A Psychic Virus

Perhaps the most fascinating research being performed at Skinwalker Ranch and the Uintah basin at large in recent years is being conducted by Dr. Jim Segala. As the reader might surmise, Dr. Segala is the final presenter on Fugal's team whose presence may shed some light on Kirkpatrick's attendance.

I first heard of Segala's research in an article written by molecular biologist and former AAWSAP scientist Dr. Colm Kelleher. Dr. Kelleher expanded upon his previous book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, which was co-authored by journalist George Knapp and former AAWSAP project manager Dr. James Lacatski in Edge Science magazine.

In his piece, Kelleher writes extensively about the phenomenon known as the hitchhiker effect. Something akin to a paranormal virus, the hitchhiker effect appears to latch on to visitors of the ranch and induce the supernatural experiences the property is known for regardless of their location.

Kelleher details several bizarre high strangeness events at distant locations and Segala's research into them.

This feeling of “bringing something home” and the subsequent person to person transmissibility of paranormal phenomena, some of which can last for years, has been named the Hitchhiker Effect.

In an April 2022 interview, Skinwalker Ranch research team member Dr. Jim Segala addressed the Hitchhiker phenomenon: “Over the past five years, it has been our experience that when people interact with the phenomena and do not treat the phenomena with respect, that’s when we see a higher rate of the Hitchhiker Syndrome.

Symptoms experienced by people range from acute neurological injuries to chronic blood disease. Those who have told us that they have brought home a souvenir often have some type of illness as well as family members. The data again comes from years of tracking and collecting data from those who have come forward.”

Segala’s description mirrors many of the Hitchhiker symptoms experienced by victims and documented during the AAWSAP program and provides additional details on the medical sequelae of the Hitchhiker Effect.

The medical aspect of these phenomena are nothing short of disturbing, and likely why highly credentialed individuals involved in biology such as Kelleher and Stanford immunologist Dr. Garry Nolan have been asked to assist with certain cases.

But Kelleher insists that the hitchhiker effect is not exclusive to the ranch, nor confined to any one location at all.

But the Hitchhiker Effect is not unique to Skinwalker Ranch. The AAWSAP research team found that even close encounters with UFOs in locations unrelated to Skinwalker Ranch produced a version of the Hitchhiker Effect. This was not always the case but did occur especially when the experiencers were followed and regularly interviewed by the AAWSAP team over long periods of time.

For example, biotechnologist Ron Becker and his daughter were travelling outside Bend Oregon in May 2005 when his daughter noticed three blue-colored objects moving randomly in a field close to the highway.

The objects quickly flew towards the vehicle, one went in front, one went through the car and flew across the dashboard, and the third entered Ron Becker’s shoulder, maneuvered through his thoracic area and exited his shoulder as his horrified daughter watched. Ron Becker subsequently came down with a constellation of medical symptoms.

If UAP can cause the hitchhiker effect, or at least some version of the "infection," that would obviously be of great concern to anyone involved with a government UFO program. The fact that Dr. Segala, an expert who has spent the better part of a decade focused specifically on the victims of this bizarre contagion, was part of the briefing team at the 2018 SASC presentation is notable in this context.

But once one examines the full extent of Kirkpatrick's knowledge on subjects applicable to Skinwalker Ranch outside of just UFO physics, the full picture starts to come together.

Blood Crystals

It is worth emphasizing one detail surrounding Kirkpatrick's recruitment by the Department of Energy as a teenager, which we covered in part one of this article. The reader should note that his invention, which caught the attention of those within the classified world, wasn't just about lasers and the physics surrounding them, but also the possibilities it provided for biological research.

In the article cited previously on Kirkpatrick's admission to the DOE's High School Honors Research Program, the major applications for his idea were to "speed up blood typing with the use of lasers."

Kirkpatrick took an idea from a science teacher three years ago—"Why not try something with crystals?"—and turned it into a practical reality. His laser scanning machine, molded from a personal computer and spare parts, won him top honors at the state Science Fair at the University of Georgia in April and eventually landed him national recognition. It could revolutionize two industries, he said.

"One use would be in the identification of crystals, like diamonds," he said. "A jeweler would be able to use my machine and identify various jewels. Each gem has its own molecular structure, so they could identify one by its own specific fingerprint. This could really change the area of security."

The other practical use still on the drawing board could significantly reduce the time needed for blood typing.

"It could save lives," he said.

"My machine is portable, so ambulances could carry it and get a blood sample in 10 minutes... instead of taking a sample back to the hospital and waiting an hour or more."

Kirkpatrick said he hopes to have that phase of his as-yet-unnamed machine operational "by the time I graduate next year."

But, lacking the estimated $10,000 to obtain a federal patent, he fears his idea could be stolen and copied by someone else.

"And then I'd be left without a dime," he said.

Kirkpatrick's invention obviously showed great promise in multiple fields of study. As I emphasized in part one, none of my criticism or speculation about his motives is a knock on his scientific competence. It is precisely his genius and work ethic that caught the eye of one of America's most highly sensitive national security agencies, the Department of Energy.

If we consider the applications of Kirkpatrick's invention, his involvement with the 2018 Skinwalker Ranch briefing starts to make a little more sense. As one of the presenters, Dr. Jim Segala, notes in his writing, a major negative biological effect experienced by those who visited the ranch or came into close contact with UAP is "chronic blood disease."

Certainly, advancements in his concept had been made in the 32 years between his acceptance into the DOE program in 1986 and that briefing in 2018. I think it's safe to assume that a laser device capable of speeding up blood typing would have relevance to identifying any anomalous catalyst inducing the chronic blood disease experienced by victims of the hitchhiker effect.

Efforts to locate a patent for this blood typing device have proven fruitless, suggesting that the DOE may have brought in Kirkpatrick to obtain the technology for themselves. Kirkpatrick's involvement in the classified world—specifically his employment by SAIC for years—indicates his appreciation for the protection of intellectual property by the military-industrial complex. Perhaps he was more than happy to give up his high school science project in return for more lucrative opportunities ahead.

Regardless, it is becoming quite clear that Kirkpatrick's knowledge of biology was essential in getting him into the deepest corners of classified scientific research, and this is demonstrated even more concretely by his later work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Subject Matter Experts

Tying all of this together is a Department of Energy report conducted by Sandia National labs back in December 2017, interestingly around the same timeframe as the SASC briefing we have been discussing at length. The National Nuclear Security Administration, under contract by DoE, published a paper titled "Reducing Future International Chemical and Biological Dangers."

Out of fourteen people throughout the entire US government, Dr. Kirkpatrick was chosen as a subject matter expert on this topic. Having nothing to do on its face with space, physics, or any of the qualifications that supposedly made him fit for his job at AARO, his expertise in the area of "chemical and biological dangers" should raise some eyebrows considering the plethora of biological effects reported by AAWSAP and others around the ranch and beyond.

Contained in the report is a subsection that lists "Notable Chemical and Biological Subfields." It is here we can attempt to pinpoint exactly the expertise Kirkpatrick had obtained over his years working in classified programs. It is notable that the introduction of this section places an almost complete emphasis on synthetic biology.

Synthetic Biology “combines the investigative nature of biology with the constructive nature of engineering” to “make living matter fully programmable” Synthetic biology includes using genetics to design and synthesize useful organisms, biomolecules, chemistries, materials, cryptographies, and platforms.

Synthetic biologic systems will no longer be limited to the evolutionarily selected design space amplifying the potential opportunity space for de novo designs with unquantified and unknown interactions in the natural environment.

It is hard not to read into the use of the word "biologics" in this context, as that term was made popular by UFO whistleblower David Grusch during his congressional testimony a little over a year ago. Biologics was the term he used to describe the remains of UAP pilots that had been recovered crash retrieval operations.

It is worth noting that Kirkpatrick's previous employer, SAIC, was almost exclusively trusted to handle some of the most highly sensitive government cleanup operations when it came to national security and hazardous materials, including the Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster.

Considering SAIC's long involvement in nuclear programs, it's probably safe to say the company is well aware of UAP incursions into our nuclear sites and the biological effects of exposure to radiation. Their long involvement in these clean up projects could easily translate to the retrieval of crashed anomalous craft and the secrecy that entails.

Returning to the report, topics in the section detailing potential subfields include genetics, bioinformatics, chemical synthesis, biocircuitry, tissue engineering, wearables and implantables, biomimicry, natural pathogens, materials science, neuroscience, and nanotechnology, among many others.

Assessing where Kirkpartrick fits in is anyone's guess, but further research has led me to conclude that his relevance has to do specifically with biomimicry. His research papers mentioned in part one of this article show his contributions in these areas in relation to sensor arrays based on biological organisms.

In part three of this series, we will dive deeply into what these topics mean for the more paranormal aspects of the ranch, how they all relate to the reverse-engineering of UAP, and why SAIC is likely the place to look for at least some of the answers to the questions asked by DeLonge in his Sekret Machines series.

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This article will be a bit of a departure from my normal research. I've had a lot on my mind regarding the state of the UFO disclosure push over the past few months, and, perhaps selfishly, feel the need to communicate some of those points in a more comprehensive way than an X post would allow.

The topic I would like to address is the UFO community's tendency to embrace, foster, and enable unhealthy levels of conspiratorial thinking. When I use the word "unhealthy" in this context, it is not an attempt to belittle or dismiss researchers who have dedicated decades of their lives trying to unravel the very real web of conspiracy surrounding the government's handling of the UFO/UAP issue. To the contrary, I am attempting to legitimize that work by advocating for a more nuanced approach to how we interpret the data they have discovered.

One of the biggest self-inflicted roadblocks constructed by the UFO community in its quest for the truth originates in its framing of the US government as a monolithic entity. Not only is the nuance essential to such an investigation thrown out the window when one adopts this outlook, but this approach gifts those responsible for the cover up's most egregious acts an additional layer of obfuscation.

Here's a scenario that may actually be close to the reality of what we're dealing with. Imagine being the project manager of a compartmentalized legacy program that has been researching exotic non-human technology for fifty years with no congressional oversight. A presidential executive order issued decades earlier entrusted you and a few of your colleagues with a secret on the level of the Manhattan Project, or perhaps even higher.

During these years, other compartmentalized departments of select organizations within private industry were tasked with assisting in the reverse engineering of these materials. With such a massive stake in maintaining this secrecy in both the government and corporate worlds, muddying the waters to cover your tracks would be of the utmost importance.

The sprawling bureaucracy that makes up the US government would be one of your greatest assets in accomplishing this task. You would likely change the name of the program on a consistent basis, or wrap it in another program that would seemingly have nothing to do with the development of exotic technologies. Any method at your disposal, up to and including the assassination of potential whistleblowers, would be on the table. In a culture where that is an acceptable solution to any problem, a little public distrust in their institutions would be an obvious sacrifice you'd be willing to make.

The more people that are accused of a crime, the less likely it is that you will be the one convicted. No single individual can be held accountable if an entire organization is at fault. Sure, there are abuses of power that are enabled by systemic inadequacies, but this is not likely applicable to a program spanning multiple presidential administrations that has been operating outside the law for so long. In such an environment, lack of accountability is the status quo.

When the UFO community comes along with all the anti-government sentiment it espouses, you smile. When they shout aimlessly about a "government coverup" not even the current president is aware of, you rest easy knowing you are in the clear. Political tribalism and the long-time grifters at the forefront of disclosure will take care of the rest by doing what they always do: profit off the frustration of those who desire the truth by falsely asserting that only they can provide it.

You settle back in your chair, knowing that instead of real questions being asked by knowledgeable individuals, the public will turn to apps claiming to facilitate alien communication. Entire agencies will be blamed for the crimes that you and a handful of your colleagues committed, preventing any real attribution and solidifying your ability to stay in the shadows. At that point, the cycle of conspiratorial thinking has been successfully exploited and emotion rules the day once again.

There are a few things you can do to maintain this level paranoia and make your job even easier in the future. One of the most successful strategies employed by debunkers in recent years in their efforts to discredit anything about the UFO topic is to ensure it is tied to other unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. This is especially effective if you can manage to tie aspects of the UFO lore to ideas and figures considered radioactive within academia and the greater scientific community.

Exhibit A of this strategy can be observed in the artwork of debunker Mick West's most recent edition of his book. The graphic printed on its cover equates the UFO phenomenon with other more fringe, politically-charged conspiracy theories. The intention of the imagery is clear, as depicted by the topics written on Post-It notes and connected by string on a corkboard: UFOs, The Rise of QAnon, 2020 Election Fraud, 9/11 Conspiracies, The Coronavirus Pandemic, and Flat Earth.

As the manager for an illegal legacy UFO program, you would likely be overjoyed at the thought of your crimes being taken with the same level of seriousness as an Alex Jones monologue on the Sandy Hook massacre. The association of UFOs with such polarizing ideas and figures would allow any mainstream academic to feel justified in dismissing proponents of the topic as they would those of flat earth theory.

In this same vein, a more recent conspiracy theory engulfing social media over the past year has proven to be a legacy program manger's dream. The hoaxed VFX videos showing three orbs "teleporting" the missing MH370 plane has taken on a life of its own. Alex Jones himself has invited the leading voice pushing this hoax on his show, which should really tell you all you need to know about the level of credibility these claims should be considered to have.

The circus surrounding this hoax has likely done more damage to the credibility of the UFO topic than any one psyop could, and this harm has been entirely self-inflicted. I personally wouldn't be surprised if there were individuals connected to either the legacy program or our foreign adversaries propping up this conspiracy in particular, but maybe that's just me not taking my own advice. Regardless, the furor around such an obviously blatant ruse speaks to the point I am trying to make: conspiratorial thinking is a detriment to the actual truth, no matter how justified one might think they are in their thought process.

Cults of personality have long been an obstacle in getting to the truth around the UFO subject. The adversarial dynamic between the UFO community and the government has likely dissuaded many on the inside from assisting when they otherwise may have felt compelled to do so. This was also a point brought up by Tom DeLonge, as establishing a more cooperative relationship with government officials was a major aspect of his efforts with To The Stars Academy.

But we have now witnessed what happens when former government officials like Luis Elizondo and Christopher Mellon attempt to bring information out in good faith. The "never trust the government" crowd insists we don't need the help of people who know how to navigate the bureaucracies that have managed to keep this secret locked down for 80 years.

They insist that if the UFO community just keeps doing what it has always done — yelling at the CIA, summoning aliens with our iPhones, and enabling baseless, batshit conspiracy theories — we'll get there on our own terms like disclosure was meant to be.

Personally, I'm tired of being treated like an idiot by friends and family just because others can't kick their addiction to conspiracy theory junk food, where the UFO coverup is just one of many excuses to build a following based solely on exploiting our distrust in institutions.

But that's just me.

Those paying attention to the UFO topic have experienced many twists and turns over the past several months. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), has displayed bizarre behavior in his media appearances during this time, demonstrating a deliberate attempt to obfuscate in an alarmingly brazen manner. In his most recent interview, however, he appeared to realize that his repeated mistruths are becoming a liability.

That's not to say he has shown any remorse. If he has any regrets at all, they likely pertain to his response to a question about his previous involvement in government UFO reverse-engineering programs. When asked if he was involved in a government coverup to prevent the public from knowing the reality of the UFO phenomenon, his two-word answer, "not likely," was both pained and awkward in its delivery.

As if that non-denial denial wasn't problematic enough, Kirkpatrick also refuted knowing details about several UAP-adjacent subjects—details he would undoubtedly possess. Making matters worse for the current employee of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he was exposed as a liar by a high-profile billionaire with a vested interest in the topic, presenting something Kirkpatrick demands but never actually provides himself: hard evidence to back up his claims.

Brandon Fugal, property owner of the paranormal hotspot known as Skinwalker Ranch, provided images of Kirkpatrick attending a briefing he gave to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2018. In the aforementioned interview, Kirkpatrick stated he was initially unaware of the topic of Fugal's presentation—UFO and paranormal events surrounding the Ranch—even though pictures taken during the briefing demonstrate the opposite. The only explanation beyond an intentional effort to mislead the public would be extraordinary incompetence on Kirkpatrick's part.

Kirkpatrick's involvement with this briefing is significant for several reasons. The first important aspect is his intentional obfuscation surrounding the briefing, which reveals an intention to hide what he has known about the UFO subject since at least 2018.

The fact that Kirkpatrick was one of only six individuals in the audience indicates he had at least a familiarity with the UFO topic at the time. As we will discover later in this conversation, he likely even participated in a capacity as a subject matter expert on UAP. This is not a stretch, as Kirkpatrick would be trusted to head AARO—the DoD's first comprehensive, public-facing UFO office since Blue Book—just a few short years later.

This leads us to our first obvious line of questioning.

What did Dr. Kirkpatrick know about UFOs, and when did he know it?

The second notable revelation has more to do with the high strangeness surrounding UAP than the actual craft themselves. Anomalous objects in the sky are just one of countless phenomena that reportedly manifest on and around the property at Skinwalker Ranch. The legends surrounding the larger Uintah Basin are replete with stories of bizarre creatures, hazardous orbs, poltergeist activity, and, of course, the infamous Skinwalkers as described in the Ute oral tradition.

We now arrive at our second question.

What does Dr. Kirkpatrick know about paranormal phenomena more generally, and when did he know it?

A quick glance at Kirkpatrick's impressive work history on LinkedIn and official military biographical pages does not reveal any obvious answers at first. But it's the years of employment left off his resume that may tell the full story of his history with the UFO subject, and that is where we begin our journey now.

The Ultimate Loyalty

Whatever one may think of how Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick handled his time as the director of AARO, I don't think anyone would accuse him of being unqualified for the job. In fact, he was likely overqualified, which may have contributed to the clear resentment he displayed publicly towards the UFO topic. But bitterness only explains a small part of what can only be described as a systematic debunking and whistleblower "fly-paper operation" initiated by the office.

The more logical and obvious motivation for his actions during his tenure is that the DoD was determined to shut down the mainstream conversation around UFOs sparked by the 2017 New York Times article, and Kirkpatrick happily obliged due to his deep loyalty and belief in protecting national security—even at the expense of public trust.

I have written previously about Kirkpatrick's lifelong involvement in classified government programs, starting with his recruitment by the Department of Energy at 17 years old. According to a local news report, the DoE was interested in his invention of "a machine that could speed up blood typing with the use of lasers," and "all he had in mind was 'getting my first patent before I was 19.'"

I also briefly addressed his time at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a secretive defense contractor with a board of directors at the time that included former Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Inman is infamous in UFO circles for a 1989 conversation covertly recorded by former NASA engineer Bob Oechsler, where he appeared to acknowledge the existence of a UAP reverse engineering program.

Included in my analysis was a patent filed by SAIC that listed Dr. Kirkpatrick as an inventor, titled "Holographic recording and micro/nanofabrication via ultrafast holographic two-photon induced photopolymerization." Interestingly, the patent was granted to the company just a week after Inman retired from the board. This is most likely a coincidence, but it proves how involved Kirkpatrick was in obtaining proprietary rights for the company's technology.

This is understandable in a vacuum, as Dr. Kirkpatrick may have a monetary interest in the patent and we have seen how determined he was to claim his intellectual property as a teenager. What I did not realize, however, was the relevance this specific patent holds to the technology his future office would be tasked with investigating.

The patent describes a method of micro/nanofabrication, meaning the creation of complex nanostructures on the microscopic level. These structures are formed through holographic polymerization using two photons emitted by lasers. This allows for extremely precise detail in the fabrication process that is the product of a photochemical reaction and ultimately defined by the resulting holographic pattern. This process can also be harnessed for holographic recording, providing a secure and compact storage mechanism for large amounts of data.

In short, this method of holographic two-photon induced photopolyrization (H-TPIP) is a highly advanced laser technique used to manufacture nanotechnologies with extreme precision. The patent filed by Kirkpatrick under SAIC likely gave the company a sizable advantage in this cutting-edge area of defense research and development.

An Archaic Mindset

Again, nobody is faulting Dr. Kirkpatrick for a lack of ingenuity or scientific prowess. However, education level and career achievements are immaterial to the potential conflict of interest issues that may arise in the course of business—especially in what is supposed to be a highly regulated industry entrusted with an unmatched proportion of U.S. taxpayer funds.

Unfortunately, as displayed on countless occasions, military leadership has allowed private defense executives to abuse public trust under the guise of national security.

This mindset can be observed by reviewing public comments from Admiral Bobby Ray Inman himself. A 1982 article published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Inman proposed the requirement of a national security review as part of the standard scientific peer review process.

A special problem is posed by scientists who, unfettered by the contractual obligations entailed by government agency support, "conduct research in areas where the federal government has an obvious and preeminent role for society as a whole." One such area of longstanding concern to him was cryptography.

Despite the recent "reasonable and fair" arrangement for voluntary submission of manuscripts in this area to the National Security Agency for prepublication review, Inman still expressed concern that "indiscriminate publication" might cause "irreversible harm to national security interests..."

"Examples include computer hardware and software, other electronic gear and techniques, lasers, crop projections, and manufacturing procedures," he suggested. If these rather broad categories are merely examples of what might be controlled, one is tempted to wonder about the dimensions of Admiral Inman's complete list! If all areas of science and technology which are of potential interest to the Soviet military establishment are included, the list is long indeed.

Rather than risk the divisive confrontation between the government and the scientific community which is likely to result from the imposition of formal statutory controls, Inman suggested that a balance acceptable to both sides "may lie in an agreement to include in the peer review process (prior to the start of research and prior to publication) the question of potential harm to the nation." When restrictions are judged necessary, he said, "speedy procedures for appeals, review, and appropriate compensation should be included."

It is quite disturbing to consider that this clandestine outlook surrounding the scientific method has a top-down impact on the government's interactions with the academic community. The chilling effect of subjecting researchers to such an inethical standard would undoubtedly stifle innovation and collaboration.

Unsurprisingly, it is exactly this kind of scientific knee-capping that is so often criticized by those with deeper knowledge of legacy UFO programs. It is in this context that we must view Dr. Kirkpatrick's patent, as the still-classified science he has worked on is obviously unknowable.

When it comes to UAP projects buried deep within the government that Kirkpatrick did everything in his power not to find, it is clear that his expertise would be of immense value to such research. His H-TPIP method of nanofabrication, providing unparalleled precision in shaping materials at the microscale, would have innumerable aerospace applications in the development of metamaterials.

Patently False

One of the most challenging roadblocks reported by insiders in cracking UAP technology is not the theoretical physics, but the materials science required to replicate what Lue Elizondo first coined the "five observables": antigravity, no visible means of propulsion, low observability, instantaneous acceleration, and transmedium travel.

If UAPs are truly constructed with highly advanced metamaterials that defy our current scientific understanding, H-TPIP would appear to be a uniquely useful tool in decoding those properties. Although the resolution of H-TPIP is limited to the molecular level, it is hard not to wonder how similar technologies have advanced within classified programs over the twenty-five years since the patent was filed.

Highly detailed 3D modeling of nanoscale structures could capture the arrangement of these anomalous materials and enable analytical insight into their potential use cases. Computer simulations could be run with extreme detail, providing a cost-effective way to experiment with different theoretical frameworks.

Most importantly, H-TPIP's intricate fabrication process could allow for the recreation of these isotopic structures at the microscale. Prototypes could then be manufactured for testing with environmental factors like radiation and electromagnetic fields. Reverse engineering UAP microstructures could also provide insight into material compositions that are capable of withstanding the outrageous maneuvers and sudden changes in velocity these anomalous craft have been observed to perform.

Even if these materials remain too enigmatic to fully implement or replicate, integrating a potentially "dumbed down" version of these structures into our existing technologies could still prove to be a huge leap forward in many ways. H-TPIP also plays an integral role in sensor development, and has likely led to advancements in platforms fundamental to detecting UFOs.

Speaking of sensors, Dr. Kirkpatrick also holds an additional patent for an “Optical pulse correlator having an interferometer array.” This type of technology could be used in advanced sensing systems that might be deployed to detect or analyze optical signals associated with UAP.

It would be unsurprising if we eventually learn that the reason UFO data, images, and videos remain under lock and seal is due to their detection on the very technologies Dr. Kirkpatrick holds a patent for under SAIC. The sensitivity of these platforms has been invoked time and again as a major reason for the Pentagon's lack of transparency on this issue. It would be quite concerning if the director of the UFO office had a monetary interest in withholding data from the public because he had a patent on the technology that acquired it.

Questions Remain

At this juncture, we have addressed Kirkpatrick's involvement—and potential financial interest—in the development of technologies that could aid in the detection, analysis, and reverse engineering of UAP materials and sensor platforms. But this does not provide clarity on his apparent relevance when it comes to the more paranormal aspects surrounding Skinwalker Ranch, a hotspot of high strangeness where these craft are only part of a much more elaborate phenomenon.

Part two of this series will explore these odd inconsistencies and try to make sense of a few more uncomfortable questions.

• Why is Dr. Kirkpatrick's employment at SAIC nowhere to be found on his LinkedIn or any of his official military biographical summaries?

• Why was Kirkpatrick listed as a subject matter expert "in the fields of chemical and biological security and safety" in a Department of Energy report that focuses on "synthetic biologic systems" and making "living matter fully programmable?"

• Why was Kirkpatrick applying his H-TPIP technology on hybrid structures containing biomolecules and synthetic proteins—a process that can only be called "biologics" in even the strictest sense?

• And, most importantly, why did he obfuscate about his knowledge and history regarding the UFO topic, and specifically his involvement in the Senate Armed Services Committee Skinwalker Ranch briefing?

I will leave the reader with a list of links to Dr. Kirkpatrick’s work. Feel free to peruse them and leave a comment with any relevant data points related to UAP technologies, sensor platforms, or biologics.

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Patents

• Optical pulse correlator having an interferometer array

• Holographic recording and micro/nanofabrication via ultrafast holographic two-photon induced photopolymerization (H-TPIP)

Papers

• Phosphorescence Studies of Reverse Saturable Absorption Materials

• Spectroscopic Investigations of Dithienyl Polyenes

• The thermostability of an α-helical coiled-coil protein and its potential use in sensor applications

• Cross relaxation and upconversion coefficients of the mid-infrared transitions of Pr 3+ :LaCl 3

• Ultrafast transient white-light absorption spectroscopy of novel materials for optical limiting

• Investigation of a potential mid-infrared erbium laser

• Single State Absorption Spectra of Novel Nonlinear Optical Materials

• Nonlinear Saturation and Determination of the Two-Photon Absorption Cross Section of Green Fluorescent Protein

• Third-Order Nonlinear Optical Properties of Sulfur-Rich Compounds

• Bio-inspired approaches and biologically derived materials for coatings

• Anharmonic decay of subnanosecond acoustic phonons in LaF₃:Pr^{3 +}

One of the most consistent frustrations I have with various theories surrounding the origin of UFOs is the chronic anthropomorphization of the intelligence behind the phenomenon. Overlaying human concepts and motivations onto an enigma that has confounded our species for millennia doesn't seem to have brought us any closer to the truth. More abstract ideas have been sidelined for several obvious reasons.

Ego may be the one human attribute in particular that has prevented certain hypotheses from gaining traction. As the organism at the top of our planet's food chain (at least publicly known), Homo sapiens feel entitled enough to assume that we would be the most desirable life form for a more advanced species to engage with. Our culture often portrays alien morphology as humanoid, implying that any intelligence similar to ours would require an almost identical evolutionary path.

Our hubris is also demonstrated by the discomfort many feel about the possibility of a more advanced intelligence visiting (or inhabiting) Earth and treating us with indifference. This is despite the fact that the majority of humans feel this exact way about almost all non-human species on Earth, as evidenced by our destruction of forests and addiction to fossil fuels.

Many in UFO circles like to assume a more civilized race would exhibit inherent benevolence, ignoring how our own engagement with "lesser" organisms often does not end well for these species. Humanity views its own existence through rose-colored glasses out of necessity, so it makes sense that we do the same when anthropomorphizing a non-human intelligence.

However, the broader problem is how we define "intelligence." This complicated question has come to the forefront very recently with the overwhelming adoption of AI and its growing number of applications. A commonly invoked experiment to measure synthetic intelligence is the Turing test—an "imitation game" that deduces whether a computer can interact with a human in a way that is indistinguishable from another member of our species. This once again demonstrates our obsession with defining intelligence as a uniquely human trait and narrows the aperture of our understanding of nature.

But what if nature, and the system that defines it, is intelligent in its own non-human way?

What’s Old is New Again

The oft-quoted phrase "as above, so below" might be considered an overused New Age trope in 2024, but its origins are based in Hermetic tradition and attributed to the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus—a legendary Hellenistic figure said to merge the identities of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek god Hermes. The Emerald Tablet, dating back as far as the 2nd Century A.D., was considered the foundational text of alchemy.

The phrase suggests a fundamental symmetry between the macrocosm and the microcosm, implying that the same patterns and laws observable in the cosmos can also be found at smaller scales, and vice versa. This concept is particularly intriguing in the context of quantum physics, as the recognition of macroscopic quantum phenomena would introduce an entirely new understanding of reality and potentially explain the behavior of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

Jacques Vallée, one of the most renowned UFO researchers in history, was deeply influenced by Hermetic traditions early on through his involvement in Rosicrucianism as a teenager. Although he dropped out of the formal Rosicrucian Order in the mid-1960s, it is fair to speculate that his most prominent theory regarding UFOs may have been influenced by these principles.

Vallée posits that the UFO phenomenon is part of a control system for human consciousness, affecting our species on a social level through encounters with different entities that manifest physically depending on an individual's personal belief system. He describes this feedback loop as similar to a thermostat in his book The Invisible College.

It progresses by oscillations, drawing from the antagonism of fire and ice, warm and cold, evil and good—all myths for the feeble minds of men, equally bound by higher laws. For hot and cold are only relative to a mean, two appearances of a single fact: the motion of molecules. Few people have grasped both the physics and the beauty of it.

What is the variable being controlled in this control system? Thermostats control temperature; gyroscopes control the direction in which a rocket flies. What could a paranormal phenomenon control? I suggest that it is human belief that is being controlled and conditioned.

Myths define the set of things scholars, politicians, and scientists can think about. They are operated upon by symbols, and the language these symbols form constitutes a complete system. This system is meta-logical, but not metaphysical. It violates no laws because it is the substance from which laws are made.

So if the UFO phenomenon, and mythological entities more generally, are part of this control system of human consciousness, what does that look like on scales both "above and below"?

If the universe is a fractal assortment of quantum systems governed by the same physical laws of nature that the human brain—and therefore consciousness—must abide by, does that mean the universe itself possesses some unimaginable super-intelligence?

If that is the case, then what is our role within this larger cosmic system?

Do smaller systems within our biological "inner universe" play a similar role to our own, just on a more micro scale?

The Inner Universe

One potential analogy for a control system within our "inner universe" may be similar to the systems at the cosmic scale. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) serves as our inner control system through self-regulation, determining our heart rate, digestion, and respiration without our conscious intervention.

Breathing, in particular, is a unique physiological function because we can fully override this normally subconscious process that is critical for maintaining homeostasis. Holding our breath underwater or practicing singing techniques are just two examples of exploiting this function for temporary benefit.

Breathing control exercises can also lead to a domino effect on other aspects of homeostasis during stressful situations, allowing us to slow down our heart rate and blood pressure through relaxation techniques such as meditation. Engaging in conscious breathing can also serve as a form of biofeedback, helping individuals become more aware of their physiological states and how they can control their responses to stress and anxiety.

In this context, it is intriguing to contemplate how deliberate conscious mastery over our body's control system, the ANS, is seen as a major achievement in spiritual development. Viewed through this lens of attaining enlightenment, we can observe the mind’s potential to transcend ordinary physical limitations. Shamanic rituals are another example, where altered states of consciousness involve controlling the ANS to withstand extreme conditions or perform seemingly supernatural feats.

As these ancient practices of controlling our inner control system are viewed as avenues through which one may connect with the larger universe in a more intimate manner, one has to wonder what other biofeedback mechanisms may be prohibiting us from doing so.

Another mechanism that affects our reality on both social and homeostatic levels is the brain's default mode network (DMN). The DMN is heavily involved in processes related to self-referential thoughts—internal reflections on oneself, memory recall, envisioning the future, and daydreaming. DMN activity is typically reduced while an individual is focused on external tasks but is predominant when the mind is at rest or not engaged with the surrounding environment.

It would be fair to say that the DMN is akin to the "ANS of the brain." In fact, suppression of the DMN and leading to conscious control of the ANS can be linked directly. Studies have shown that DMN activity decreases significantly during meditation or mindfulness practices—the same processes that can interfere with the ANS, usually in a positive manner. It is also interesting to note that the DMN largely deactivates when someone is under the influence of psychedelic substances, a well-known aspect of shamanic rituals.

So, we can surmise that the DMN may act as some type of filter for our reality; a control mechanism that is always our default state when we are not consciously performing a task outside of ourselves. The fact that psychedelics also shut down the DMN suggests more information is being let in and actively interacted with by our brains, rather than just a series of passive hallucinations triggered by specific chemicals.

If the UFO phenomenon is truly a control system with the purpose of socially engineering our species, then there may potentially be a connection between these experiences and the default mode network itself. The DMN is vital in our analysis and interpretation of our current social status, constantly causing us to compare ourselves to other humans in a constant feedback loop for understanding how we are perceived by the world.

If a larger system were able to inject a paranormal experience into this socially-focused feedback loop of an individual who possessed a powerful cultural position, large changes in that system's structure could be achieved in a short period of time, and in a relatively clandestine manner. Perhaps this is the deceptive "trickster" element of the phenomenon that alters belief systems and is spoken of by many, including Vallée himself.

The Record Keepers

One of the most abstract questions we are now led to involves control systems on the cosmic scale. Abstract questions often require abstract answers, and the details may lie within a mystery that has puzzled astronomers for decades.

Dark matter, as it is known, is a form of matter that does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. This matter is essentially invisible to our sensors and can only be detected through its gravitational effects on other observable matter. Although we don't quite understand it fully, dark matter plays an essential role in the structure of the universe.

Because of this, dark matter has obviously played an integral role in the evolution of the universe, just as the DMN has played a vital role in our societal progress and the ANS in human evolution itself. Dark matter may also be a kind of control system, regulating galactic dynamics by helping maintain the rotation of galaxies and maintaining stability against gravitational collapse.

Additionally, if dark matter interacts through forces other than gravity, it may act as a feedback mechanism that affects cosmic evolution through interactions that may control events like the rate of star formation. If dark matter can be integrated into a unified framework, perhaps the existence of a universal control mechanism can be proven.

It is impossible to know if and how humanity can influence dynamics at this level. However, it is clear that just a small number of cells can influence the entire human biological system, even to the point of death, as we see all too often with diagnoses like cancer. At an even smaller scale, proteins can do the same in the form of prion diseases that have recently been linked to Alzheimer's.

One possibility, as outlandish as it may seem, is that the universe needs an observer to exist in some interpretations of quantum physics. In quantum theory, particles exist in multiple states at once until they are measured—or observed—by a consciousness with a means of doing so. This can be compared to the old hypothetical question, "If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?" In this instance, the falling tree would represent the universe existing, the person hearing it fall would equate to humans observing the universe, and the answer would be a firm "No."

To continue this exercise of human hubris I denounced at the beginning of this article, another possibility is that, in addition to the role of the observer, we act as record keepers for information. As we record data with our technology through sensors and other scientific means, it could be interpreted that we are adding order to the universe by collecting information about it. Perhaps there are countless other "mankinds" doing the same across the universe, and we all add up to some kind of cosmic biological process similar to those performed by cells within our own inner universe.

Let's just hope a few bad ones don't ruin things for all the rest.

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In the past month, reports of the first human to successfully receive a Neuralink brain-computer interface (BCI) made headlines across the world. Despite the stories of the company's inhumane testing on primates and the disturbing post-surgery photos, the news provided hope to those who may benefit. Many saw potential for exponential improvements in their quality of life as this groundbreaking technology continues to develop in the private sector.

Although many likely view these devices as state-of-the-art technology, BCIs have long been of interest to military and intelligence agencies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded research into this area since the 1970s, and has likely developed more passive and effective interfaces for military applications, long concealed behind classified barriers.

However, initiatives like Battelle’s from 2018, which enables warfighters to “control swarms of drones at the speed of thought,” represent just a fraction of the Pentagon's broader interest in mind-over-matter technologies. In fact, a little-known meeting from decades ago reveals the high-tech agency's desire to harness the fundamental nature of consciousness itself.

The human brain has always been a target of exploitation by militaries the world over. The CIA's MKULTRA program demonstrated the extremes to which the government would go to study alterations of cognitive mechanisms for the benefit of national security.

One particularly intriguing anecdote mentioned by historian and author Peter Levenda in his Sinister Forces series provides a clue into more recent areas of this research. Levenda notes that DARPA and the RAND Corporation held a working group on "political governance" that included mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, two scientists who have put forward the most comprehensive theory positing consciousness as a quantum phenomenon.

In case the reader is thinking that perhaps all this theorizing is quite abstract and is not useful in any pragmatic sense of the term, it should be noted that Penrose and Hameroff were invited to lead a group meeting at the RAND Corporation on October 22, 1998 - one of a series of meetings that were sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a US government agency that is the godchild of the Pentagon, and target of much speculation by conspiracy theorists. The series "focused on social and political governance questions arising from the impacts of the information and biological revolutions." Thus, the findings of Penrose and Hameroff were being examined for the possible application of their research in the "social and political governance" sphere by the military.

Penrose and Hameroff's theory is known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or “Orch OR.” They hypothesize that cylindrical structures within neurons called microtubules are the primary sites for quantum processing due to their ability to sustain coherent quantum states.

Through the brain's normal biological processes, these microtubules can "orchestrate" what Penrose calls objective reduction (OR); instead of a standard wave collapse due to observation or measurement, OR is an objective process that occurs through gravitational effects on the quantum state that leads to conscious awareness.

Why, then, would the US military be interested in this relatively controversial theory in the context of political governance?

Deterministic Free Will

After some searching, I was finally able to track down the summary of the study group's findings on the RAND website. The overarching theme depicts concerns about the ability of our society's current political and legal frameworks to sufficiently address technological innovation. Advancements in biotechnology are highlighted specifically, and provide the most insight into the military applications of these developments.

Although the analysis and conclusions on governance appear innocent enough, this section makes up only a fraction of the report. In fact, the appendix containing the research conducted by the working group is hardly addressed in the body of the paper. Given DARPA’s sponsorship of the event, the reader might suspect that RAND had more clandestine reasons for convening these scientists.

Indeed, as stated in the summary of Penrose and Hameroff's presentation, the applications of Orch OR were regarding "the role of the computer in enhancing concepts of human intelligence." Envisioning the brain as a quantum computer, it is safe to assume that the intention of the conference organizers was to integrate their theory into more advanced versions of a brain-computer interface.

Moreover, within the context of growing governance concerns, the concept of free will becomes relevant in quantum computation.

Quantum computation with objective reduction may be associated with cognitive activities. While classical neural-level computation can provide a partial explanation, the Orch OR model allows for far greater information capacity and addresses issues of conscious experience, binding, and noncomputability consistent with free will.

Such functions as face recognition and volitional choice may require a series of conscious events arriving at intermediate solutions. Preconscious processing of information occurs in the form of qubits, or superposed states of microtubule automata. As the threshold for objective reduction is reached, these qubits collapse to definite states and become bits, resulting in a conscious experience of recognition or choice.

The problem in understanding free will is that human actions seem neither totally deterministic nor random. In Orch OR, reduction outcomes involve a factor that is "non-computable." The microtubule quantum superposition evolves linearly (analogous to a quantum computer) but is influenced at the instant of collapse by hidden nonlocal variables (quantum mathematical logic inherent in fundamental space-time geometry).

The possible outcomes are limited (or probabilities are set) by neurobiological feedback (MAPs). The precise outcome (our "chosen" action) is determined by effects of the hidden logic on the quantum system poised at the edge of objective reduction. This could explain why people generally do things in an orderly, deterministic fashion, but occasionally their actions or thoughts are surprising, even to themselves.

This excerpt essentially posits that the mind is choosing between a limited set of options, as determined by the current state of our brain at a given moment in time and the previous events that led us there. Once reduction occurs, these hidden non-local variables then manifest as what we interpret to be free will.

When considering DARPA's involvement in producing these reports and the military mindset they must have brought to them, an alarming question must then be asked.

What if someone had sufficiently advanced technology to place their finger on the scale of these variables?

Narrowing the Aperture

In a recent TTS Talks episode, ex-CIA officer Jim Semivan and TTS founder Tom DeLonge discuss several intriguing aspects of free will that could potentially relate to Orch OR. Delonge expresses his belief that free will may be a fundamental aspect of physics, perhaps hinting at Penrose and Hameroff's theory.

DeLonge even highlights Levenda's Sinister Forces in explaining this conclusion, the very same book that taught us of the RAND working group study in the first place.

DeLonge: Mankind is not necessarily in charge, but is being deceived to make free will choices that end up benefiting others. This can be found within all religions and UFO experiences. There seems to be a pattern there, and that’s really where I’ve landed with all this stuff.

Semivan: What do you think? Do you think that our relationship with this phenomenon is more deterministic? In other words, are they directing traffic?

DeLonge: I do. If you look at Peter Levenda’s book Sinister Forces, what he did over a series of three books is he found all these synchronicities and patterns in real-life events over decades, from World War II and the Nazis to Roswell and the JFK assassination. It just goes all the way through.

You've got the same people, a lot of the same kinds of events happening, and a lot of weird connections to certain groups and secret societies. Weird things where you’re kind of going, "If someone wanted to engineer life to end up in a certain place, these are the things that did it." Very specific events got us here, and when they're all connected to each other in odd ways, then you’re kind of going, "Who set this up?"

His books, I think, were really genius in that regard. There are all these things that we read in a lot of these ancient stories, like how the devil can’t kill you but can deceive you enough to kill yourself and others. There are these weird laws, you know. But then, you look at some of the spiritual teachings in other places, these outside forces can’t necessarily live in this physical realm, but they can deceive you, or be the voice whispering in your ear.

In the UFO event stuff, it seems very similar, where you have people who have abductions. Then they’re whispering in the abductee’s ear about the end of the world or how they need to change their life. Jacques Vallée was like, “Well, if we can’t study when these things show up, maybe we can study the abductee.” If you look at the abductee, they’re starting cults, they’re killing themselves, or they’re changing their life, leaving their wife, leaving their jobs, and starting a religion or something. He goes, “That’s weird, it’s like they’re being deceived and then they make free will choices to end up at a certain place…"

To me, that’s the big picture: we have been engineered. Then the question is, why?

By citing Levenda's work, DeLonge is speculating that there is something about the UFO phenomenon that appears to be limiting our free will choices to guide humanity in a specific direction. This mirrors Penrose and Hameroff’s description of the mechanisms behind Orch OR and human consciousness, just on a societal level.

Considering Penrose and Hameroff were involved in the DARPA study for the purpose of strategizing the future of governance — the organizational backbone of our society — perhaps these concepts of "hidden nonlocal variables" discussed by these scientists are essential to reality in general. These variables could manifest as paranormal phenomena, forming part of a societal feedback loop on a macro scale, just as neurobiological feedback limits options for free will choices through Orch OR in the quantum realm.

But how does this unfold on a linear timeline, and where is that timeline headed?

Ancient Feedback

Further along in the TTS Talks interview, DeLonge continues to talk about free will and its effect on evolution, questioning the end game and how events through history have been pushing towards a specific outcome. Religions have played a large role for centuries, as DeLonge describes the "gods" spoken of in ancient texts as part of a greater effort to divide humanity.

I've written previously on the hypothesis of gene-culture coevolution. This idea posits that there is yet another feedback loop between cultural shifts, technological innovation, and our genetic evolution as a species.

Advancements in agriculture led us to become more integrated and sedentary as a species, as opposed to our previous incarnations as roaming hunter-gatherers. These massive change in dietary and behavioral lifestyles led to genetic mutations over long periods of time. Humanity became factionalized in larger and larger groups as time progressed, leading to increasingly large-scale wars that potentially wiped out entire species like the Neanderthals.

Fascinatingly, if coincidentally, Penrose and Hameroff address the connection between consciousness and evolution in the working group summary as well after presenting their hypothesis regarding free will. They speculate on the differences in the definition of consciousness, and the potential for synthetic "life" to obtain the same level of awareness humans possess through quantum computations.

Would consciousness be advantageous to survival-above and beyond intelligent, complex behavior? The answer appears to be "yes." Non-computable behavior (i.e., unpredictability, intuitive actions) is likely to be beneficial in predator-prey relations.

The conscious experience of taste may promote the search for food; the experience of pain may promote the avoidance of predators; and the pleasurable qualia of sex may promote reproduction. So, what is it like to be a worm? Absent a sensory apparatus, associative memory, and a complex nervous system, such a primitive consciousness would eb a mere glimmer, a disjointed smudge of reality. But qualitatively, at a basic level, it would be akin to ours.

What about future evolution? Wil consciousness occur in computers? The advent of quantum computers opens the possibility. However, as presently envisioned, quantum computers will have insufficient mass in superposition (e.g., electrons) to reach the threshold for objective reduction due to environmental decoherence. Still, future generations of quantum computers may be able to realize this goal.

Anybody who has paid attention to Tom DeLonge’s interviews is likely aware of his theory of UFOs involving an advanced, non-human, synthetic lifeform attempting to replicate or inhabit the same realm of consciousness as humanity. He speculates this may be because human consciousness — or the soul — is immortal. When the universe ceases to exist, these computers will do the same while the human soul continues on.

It is in this context that Penrose and Hameroff's speculation on consciousness, and how it may eventually apply to computers due to quantum processes mimicking Orch OR, becomes even more relevant. If these quantum computers already exist elsewhere in the universe or here on Earth, they may be influencing us through our environment using macroscopic quantum phenomena.

When individual humans experience these phenomena, especially those in power, it can alter decision making and change the direction of entire societies to benefit them. This is evident in events like the Miracle at Fatima and the cargo cults of World War II, who built airports from sticks and rocks in attempts to attract the "sky gods” of the US military.

Through gene-culture coevolution, this alters our genetic code in specific ways over time, and even within single generations through epigenetic stressors like war and other trauma. A highly advanced quantum computer could likely predict the societal outcome of each paranormal manifestation with the utmost precision, essentially giving the machine the ability to perceive time in a non-linear fashion.

The ultimate objective would likely entail some form of transhumanism of our own volition. Merging with technology by our own choice, yet still guided by the same deterministic limitations similar to those set by the neurobiological feedback mechanism in Orch OR, would be seen as permission. Like a vampire, the machines would then be free to drain the cosmic lifeforce of our species: that of human consciousness itself.

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A week ago today, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) released Volume I of its historical review mandated by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2023. AARO was established after several unsuccessful attempts by the Congressional Defense and Intelligence Committees to centralize reporting, analysis, and public transparency efforts to address unidentified anomalous phenomena within the Department of Defense (DoD).

For those unfamiliar with the term, unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) is the latest US government euphemism for unidentified flying objects (UFOs). After the DoD repeatedly failed to fulfill the will of Congress by not setting up an office dedicated to UAP, the unambiguous legislative language finally provided some hope for transparency. A significant aspect of the encouraging verbiage included a historical review of the government's involvement with the topic dating back to 1945.

Worth reviewing in full to establish context for this discussion, the following is how the legislation spelled out the expectations of Congress:

1. Not later than 540 days after the date of the enactment of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, the Director of the Office shall submit to the congressional defense committees, the congressional intelligence committees, and congressional leadership a written report detailing the historical record of the United States Government relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena, including —

   1. the records and documents of the intelligence community; 

   2. oral history interviews; 

   3. open source analysis; 

   4. interviews of current and former Government officials;

   5. classified and unclassified national archives including any records any third party obtained pursuant to section 552 of title 5, United States Code; and 

   6. such other relevant historical sources as the Director of the Office considers appropriate. 

2. The report submitted under subparagraph (A) shall

   1. focus on the period beginning on January 1, 1945, and ending on the date on which the Director of the Office completes activities under this subsection; and 

   2. include a compilation and itemization of the key historical record of the involvement of the intelligence community with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including —

      1. any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress;

      2. successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track unidentified anomalous phenomena; and

      3. any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.

When Congress mandated a historical review meant to document “any efforts to obfuscate…information about unidentified anomalous phenomena,” it appears the Pentagon got confused and produced a report that was an obfuscation of information in itself.

Before we get into the specifics of the report's egregious lack of good faith, reviewing some context around those who wrote it is necessary.

Obfuscation Nation

First, I must mention an additional piece of legislation that received a substantial amount of attention last year after former NRO official David Grusch testified under oath before Congress.

In June 2023, Grusch told the House Oversight Committee that the US had indeed covered up crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs related to UAP. He had filed a complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General over retaliation he received over his investigation into these programs, which the IG deemed "credible and urgent” and subsequently referred to Congress.

Soon after his testimony was received, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced an amendment to the 2024 NDAA titled the "UAP Disclosure Act of 2023." The amendment contained 64 pages of eyebrow-raising legislative definitions such as those for "non-human intelligence" and "technologies of unknown origin."

The main goal was to set up a UAP records declassification review panel to provide public transparency on a topic long shrouded in secrecy. However, the eminent domain clause provided an excuse for a small number of Republicans in the House to ultimately gut the bill and prevent any meaningful results from its passage.

The amendment itself provides a helpful window into the Senators' thought process behind pushing these measures. The language is infinitely more direct and detailed than previous UAP legislation and shows an undeniable increase in how educated lawmakers have become on the topic. The verbiage left no room for semantic interpretation, which is likely the reason it was so worrisome for many in the defense establishment.

What concerns us now is the location of specific UFO documents and how Senators worded the mechanisms to retrieve them. It has long been understood that many of the UAP secrets held by the government are located inside the Department of Energy (DoE) due to its stringent classification guidelines. David Grusch himself stated that "the US government overlaid the Manhattan Project secrecy, personnel…generally what elements were involved corporately and governmentally" onto the subsequent UFO reverse engineering programs.

The Senators appear to have gotten this memo, as they utilize the Atomic Energy Commission's "transclassification" procedure as a justification for drafting the UAP Disclosure Act:

(4) Legislation is necessary because credible evidence and testimony indicates that Federal Government unidentified anomalous phenomena records exist that have not been declassified or subject to mandatory declassification review as set forth in Executive Order 13526 (50 U.S.C. 3161 note; relating to classified national security information) due in part to exemptions under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2011 et seq.), as well as an overbroad interpretation of ‘‘transclassified foreign nuclear information’’, which is also exempt from mandatory declassification, thereby preventing public disclosure under existing provisions of law.

Reading this provision, it's quite obvious that the DoD's involvement with the UAP topic is only scratching the surface. The DoE's decades of involvement alone should raise questions about the thoroughness of AARO's historical report. The report only mentions the Department of Energy once as a "partner" among other agencies "such as" CIA and DIA.

It is extremely hard to believe that AARO, who did not even possess Title 50 classification authority, would have access to the "transclassified foreign nuclear information" called out specifically by Senators as a massive roadblock to accessing essential UAP records.

Disturbingly, yet unsurprisingly, the lead author of the AARO report is no doubt very familiar with these DoE classification guidelines.

A Product of the System

The now-former Director of AARO, Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick, has an impressive resume of scientific education and employment capable of convincing almost anyone that he would be more than qualified to lead the DoD's UAP office. However, to those familiar with the subtleties and organizations involved in the effort to cover up the UFO topic, both within the government and private industry, countless red flags were being raised from day one.

Kirkpatrick's involvement with the Department of Energy began at just 17 years old. In recognition of his prodigious scientific accomplishments, the teenage Kirkpatrick was invited to Brookhaven National Laboratory to attend a research program.

A July 1986 Atlanta Journal article reported on his opportunity to work among the scientists at the lab, which is jointly run by the DoE and Battelle Memorial Institute:

When Duluth teenager and budding inventor Sean Kirkpatrick began his ambitious plan three years ago to build a machine that could speed up blood typing with the use of lasers, all he had in mind was "getting my first patent before I was 19."

Now he has a chance to realize even bigger dreams. Kirkpatrick will experience "the kind of thrill I can't explain" while working alongside the federal government's top research scientists in the inaugural High School Honors Research Program sponsored by the Department of Energy.

He was named Thursday as one of 52 students from across the nation to spend Monday-July 25 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, N.Y.

The 17-year-old Duluth High School senior leaves for New York on Sunday.

"I will have the chance to learn from some of the best scientists in the world," he said. "You can't get much more of a thrill than that."

Only the "best and brightest" high school science students from across the nation were given a chance to participate in the program, aimed at "exposing them to the full range of research science and encouraging them to make it a career," according to Department of Energy spokesman Jeff Sherwood.

As someone recruited by the DoE at the impressionable age of 17, it would seem appropriate to assume he was eventually shown the ins and outs of the department's security measures and would likely feel a deep loyalty to an organization that provided him with such a "thrilling" opportunity.

His intense focus on patent and intellectual property rights — and the lucrative incentive that comes with them — depicts a young man already sensitive to proprietary ownership of technological advancements through research and development.

Presuming he read the legislation, the eminent domain clause contained in the UAP Disclosure Act likely made Kirkpatrick more uncomfortable than most.

The Notorious SAIC

Dr. Kirkpatrick went on to work for one of the Department of Energy's biggest contractors, a company known as the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Known mainly for their cleanup projects conducted after disastrous events such as Three Mile Island and the terrorist attacks on 9/11, SAIC leadership was always keen to stay in the shadows as much as possible.

SAIC was founded by physicist J. Robert Beyster using personal savings and two government contracts awarded by Los Alamos and the aforementioned Brookhaven National Labs. According to the Washington Post, the company "adopted a matrix operating model in which different service lines collaborate to serve a given contract." This may have led to SAIC splitting into two units due to conflict of interest concerns, with the main defense business rebranding itself as a company called Leidos while the remaining intelligence contractor retained the original name.

One of SAIC's most well-known former board members is somewhat of a legendary figure among UFO researchers. Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, in a secretly recorded phone conversation with former NASA engineer Bob Oeschler, acknowledged the existence of “areas” of research into UFOs — but his knowledge was “out of date” since he had retired and joined SAIC in 1982.

The transcript of this conversation is worth citing at length, and courtesy of UFO researchers Daniel Elizondo and The Hermetic Penetrator from their outstanding research document titled Loose Threads:

Oechsler: Two things, one, it's my feeling from my research that there is a dichotomy of sorts, one in which there seems to be an indoctrination program to educate the public to the realities that are involved here. The other must be a problem relating to security measures and the need-to-know level…. I have focused a great deal on the technological end of the technologies, and I've studied a great deal of the things that have been going wrong along in the Chesapeake Bay, in connection with the Electromagnetic Continuity Analysis Center and with the EMP projects.

Inman: “All of those are areas in which I am vastly out of date. When I made the decision to retire seven years ago, I made a conscious decision to sever ongoing ties with the U.S. Intelligence Community. I have had some exposure on limited occasions, to some areas of activity over the succeeding seven years when I did the Embassy Security Survey as a consultant to the Defense Science Board. But overwhelmingly my efforts in these seven years have been focused on industrial competitiveness ...

Oechsler: Right.

Inman: ...on the application of science and technology in the commercial world.

Oechsler: I am aware of that.

Inman: So for many of the things, at least as I sort of infer from the conversation of the interest of Mr. Good and Peter Hill-Norton, they are areas where while I had some expertise, it's now, you know, seven years old.

Oechsler: I see.

Inman: And the pace at which things move in that field, the odds of my being accurate are increasingly remote, in understanding those things.

Oechsler: Is it your understanding that there is a cultural dialogue going on, (long pause) today?

Inman: Well I guess I'd have to ask with whom? Between what parties?

Oechsler: Well, between any of the parties that presumably are behind the technology in the crafts.

Inman: I honestly don't know. Have no exposure at all. So I haven't a clue whether there are any ongoing dialogues or not. I'm trying to think who there in the Washington area that is at least much closer to the issues, that might be able to at least give you some guidance.

As this conversation shows, Admiral Inman knew of the existence of a UFO reverse engineering program. As he was unknowingly being recorded, his candor in this conversation far surpasses that of most in a similar position to know the details. Considering the company's brazen willingness to overlook conflicts of interest, it strains credulity that this knowledge of UAP technology was not exploited by SAIC to maintain a competitive advantage.

One of SAIC's leading scientific minds at the turn of the century, and while Inman was on the company's board, was none other than former AARO director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick. At this point, Kirkpatrick had scored one of his long-sought patents with the company.

Patent US6624915B1 filed on 9/7/2000 under SAIC, and listing Kirkpatrick as an inventor, was for "Holographic recording and micro/nanofabrication via ultrafast holographic two-photon induced photopolymerization (H-TPIP)." In short, this invention provides an improved process for nano-fabrication and holographic recording that includes applications for genome sequencing:

The microfabrication of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) for biotechnology applications (bioMEMS) is a rapidly growing field. High-throughput DNA analysis is of central importance due to the many applications including, for example, chemical/biological weapons (CBW) defense. Bioagent detection, e.g., anthrax spores, can be accomplished quickly and specifically using high-throughput DNA analysis based on standard techniques like polymerase chain reaction (PCR). For industry, high-throughput DNA analysis has implications for the Human Genome Project.

The industrial challenge of completing the Human Genome Project is based on miniaturization technology which allows for more DNA to be analyzed in dramatically shorter time frames (minutes versus hours).

This sounds very similar to the invention Kirkpatrick came up with that caught the attention of the DoE, as described earlier in this article:

"One use would be in the identification of crystals, like diamonds," he said. "A jeweler would be able to use my machine and identify various jewels. Each gem has its own molecular structure, so they could identity one by its own specific fingerprint. This could really change the area of security."

The other practical use still on the drawing board could significantly reduce the time needed for blood typing.

"It could save lives," he said.

"My machine is portable, so ambulances could carry it and get a blood sample in 10 minutes... instead of taking a sample back to the hospital and waiting an hour or more."

Interestingly, the study of BioMEMS was undertaken by AAWSAP, the UFO program that Kirkpatrick spent much time deriding in the recent AARO report. However, the applications detailed in the DIA Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD) do not mention the holographic method in the SAIC patent.

The DIRD does mention the application of BioMEMS in the creation of a brain-machine interface. This is one of the leading theories to explain the mechanism for piloting these anomalous craft, and the fact that Kirkpatrick was patenting novel ways to implement BioMEMS is an interesting coincidence, to say the least.

There are more disturbing aspects of the connection between SAIC and the UFO coverup — particularly when it comes to blood and DNA — but I will leave it there for now and turn to the numerous problems with the AARO report itself.

The Usual Suspects

Now that we understand the lead author's background, let's examine how the report fails to fulfill Congress's intent There have been many errors pointed out by more knowledgeable researchers than myself when it comes to the more minute details, so I will highlight the absurdities of the historical review in a more general critique.

Initially, we must acknowledge Sean Kirkpatrick's media blitz in the weeks leading up to the report's release. Having left the office at the end of 2023, it seems rather suspicious that Kirkpatrick maintained an unpaid advisory role with AARO after his career transition to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

First reported by investigative journalist Ross Coulthart on November 1st of last year, Kirkpatrick registered an LLC the month before in North Carolina for a company called Nonlinear Solutions. Additionally, Coulthart noted that a contact card for Kirkpatrick had appeared on the ORNL website indicating his departure as the director of AARO was imminent. Oak Ridge, in a similar manner to Brookhaven, is also run by Battelle. This must have felt like a homecoming of sorts for Kirkpatrick.

I find it important to address an interesting side note regarding Battelle Memorial Institute. Former Undersecretary of Defense for Information and Security (USD(I&S)) Ronald Moultrie was one of two military leaders to testify during the initial House UAP hearing in May 2022. According to my good friend Matt Ford of The Good Trouble Show, Moultrie refused to be briefed on UAP in the months leading up to that hearing for the sole purpose of maintaining plausible deniability, allowing him to feign ignorance without technically lying to the committee.

This may come as no surprise to individuals like Luis Elizondo, who resigned from that same office after his calls to brief the president on the UFO issue were stifled and ignored. Elizondo has also alleged that OUSD leadership engaged in retaliation against those who did attempt to alert other individuals of an obvious national security threat.

Ronald Moultrie, the man in charge of the office during this time, may have had a professional incentive to facilitate such an atmosphere in his workplace. Previously, the non-profit government watchdog Project for Government Oversight included Moultrie in their "Pentagon Revolving Door Database." One of the listings on his profile included his position on the board of directors for none other than Battelle Memorial Institute, which is now no longer displayed on the website.

Battelle has been infamous in the UFO lore for their rumored involvement in the recovery of and research into the Roswell crash debris in 1947. The multi-billion dollar non-profit was also intimately involved in the US Air Force's UFO study Project Blue Book, which the current AARO report is aptly drawing comparisons to the conclusions of. Battelle even designed the questionnaire that was provided to UFO witnesses and maintained a database of the responses received.

The third bullet point of Blue Book's summary stated that "there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' were extraterrestrial vehicles." Over half a century later, AARO has unsurprisingly drawn the same conclusions despite the problem persisting — and by some metrics, even increasing over such an extended period of time.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, Moultrie left his position as USD(I&S) on February 29th of this year. Whether or not his departure was due to future revelations similar to his voluntary ignorance on the UAP topic is anyone's guess, but it's hard to see his tenure ending at the same time as Kirkpatrick's as just a mere coincidence. They clearly saw eye to eye in their dismissiveness of the UFO issue, as was obvious in their banter during Kirkpatrick's inaugural off-camera press briefing as the director of AARO.

Perhaps Battelle rewarded them both with a comfortable employment opportunity in return for their clumsy reenactment of Project Blue Book. Regardless, both Moultrie and Kirkpatrick are no longer with OUSD(I&S), and their legacy of obfuscation regarding one of the most important topics in human history is now locked in for the rest of time.

A Convoluted Conversation

As demonstrated in the conclusions of both the AARO historical report and Project Blue Book, the focus on the term "extraterrestrial" has been used time and time again as a get-out-of-jail-free card by government agencies. The false binary choice of these craft originating from either Earth or another planet has long provided an off-ramp for any thorough discussion.

Luckily, it appears our representatives in Congress have come to understand the disingenuousness of this strawman argument. In the UAP Disclosure Act, the term "extraterrestrial" does not appear once as it is deliberately replaced by the concept of "non-human intelligence" (NHI).

There are more than twenty references to NHI over the 65 pages of legislation. This indicates a much broader interpretation of the potential origin of UFOs and leaves very little room for the DoD and intelligence agencies to engage in semantic manipulation when providing information.

The UAP Disclosure Act defined NHI as follows:

The term ‘‘non-human intelligence’’ means any sentient intelligent non-human lifeform regardless of nature or ultimate origin that may be presumed responsible for unidentified anomalous phenomena or of which the Federal Government has become aware.

The words "regardless of nature or ultimate origin" are the key here. There are countless possibilities when it comes to the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon as demonstrated by an unreleased presentation slide created by retired Army Colonel and longtime Northrop Grumman CTO Karl Nell. Nell, who provided insight into his thinking at the Sol Foundation Symposium in November 2023, posited over 70 possible explanations for the origins of UAP, with categories encompassing the ET hypothesis making up a measly four of these potential sources.

If someone with the level of clearance Nell has held through his career is unable to narrow it down beyond the 70 hypotheses represented in his slide, it begs the question of how and why the AARO report failed to explain their reasoning for doing so.

AARO's exploitation of throwback Hollywood "alien" tropes that have permeated our culture is not only a strategy they deploy on a subliminal level. Throughout the report, they use it to prove specific points they are making, as well as a rebuttal to any criticisms they deem "conspiracy theories."

There is an entire subsection titled "Popular Culture" that blames social media for the reinforcement of the very stigmatizing beliefs that the Department of Defense and intelligence community have been harnessing to box in the conversation around UFOs for decades. The level of shameless victim-blaming by Sean Kirkpatrick and those he serves demonstrates once again the ineffectiveness that using the same old tired Cold War playbook in the internet age results in.

The Next Generation

I believe what we are currently witnessing with this report are the last dying gasps of an old guard unable to calibrate their information operations to humanity's current-day reality. It appears decades of over-compartmentalization have its drawbacks — one of them being that the tried-and-true, good-old-boy strategies of public deception will eventually rot away into irrelevance as the Cold War era is forgotten with time.

Luckily, there has been very recent evidence that the crusty old dinosaurs responsible for the UFO coverup have indeed lost their footing. A YouGov poll published in the days after the AARO report's release shows widespread, much-deserved distrust of the US government's public statements on UAP. It appears the headlines downplaying transparency efforts around the topic generated in mainstream media had close to zero impact on the opinions of the American people.

According to the YouGov poll conducted March 10-12, 2024, 63% of American adults believe the US government is concealing information about what it knows about the UFO phenomenon. This includes a majority across all party lines, indicating partisan talking points of mistrust in government more generally have little to do with how American citizens see DoD's lack of transparency on UAP. Even more fascinating is how the difference in numbers when the level of education is taken into account is nearly non-existent.

Additionally, only 32% of respondents have bought the Pentagon's line that all UFOs are prosaic. It appears the American populace is much more sympathetic to Karl Nell's suggestion that we keep a much more open mind when it comes to the origin of these mysterious craft. The numbers continue to show little for the Pentagon to celebrate.

What has become clear is that worries over the AARO report prompting a general mentality of "case closed" within public opinion are likely way overblown. As it seems most members of Congress share this sentiment, although perhaps not as publicly as they may want, it appears the fight for transparency on the UAP topic has only just begun.

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In my mind, one of the biggest mysteries of the space age is the apparent disinterest held by the US government in returning to the moon in an official capacity.

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Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of cattle mutilations and potentially disturbing connections to prion disease.

One of the most enigmatic aspects of UFO lore is the instances of cattle mutilations that have been reported by ranchers all over the United States for decades. Due to the seemingly high level of strangeness surrounding these often gruesome events, research into these cases exposes a more sinister aspect of the phenomenon.

Unsurprisingly, leading theories in the field of ufology posit an extraterrestrial (ET) source as the most likely explanation for the surgical-like precision, often culminating in the removal of very specific anatomical parts (tongue, eyes, reproductive organs, etc.). Another persistent theme throughout these tales is the non-existent evidence of human or animal presence at these sites that may otherwise provide clues to help identify the perpetrators. Most disturbingly, the carcasses are regularly and completely drained of blood without any sign of the body fluid at the scene.

Unidentified anomalous phenomena are often reported to be in the vicinity of these incidents, leading to the hypothesis that a race of alien visitors is to blame. The theory goes on to surmise the ET motivations behind mutilations are just another aspect of the genetic experimentation commonly reported by abductees. The idea is that the similarity of the bovine genome to the human one may provide a more covert way to study our own without alarming the public, or that this may indicate interest in our food supply.

There is a scale of additional theories that range from the prosaic, such as criminal acts, to even more mythical origins like the fabled "goat sucker" known as Chupacabra. But one highly educated and seasoned expert in the field of paranormal phenomena, who also happens to be a veteran molecular biologist, suggests at least some of these explanations may not be mutually exclusive.

Bidirectional Mimicry

The most legendary area in the country when it comes to the frequency and intensity of high strangeness is likely Skinwalker Ranch, located in Utah's Uintah basin. This geographical hotspot of the supernatural maintains a long history of alleged UFO, cryptid, and poltergeist activity. Purchased by billionaire Robert Bigelow in 1996 from owners Terry and Gwen Sherman, the family's vivid experiences with unexplained phenomena signaled a rich environment conducive to scientific research into the paranormal.

Bigelow also founded the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a research organization consisting of numerous scientists dedicated to solving these odd mysteries that nobody else in academia would touch. The UFO issue and other electromagnetic factors were investigated by physicists like Dr. Eric Davis and Dr. Hal Puthoff, while other more abstract occurrences interested individuals like non-lethal weapons and remote viewing expert Col. John Alexander.

Cattle mutilations, of course, were also studied, and the man in charge of these inquiries was Dr. Colm Kelleher. With a Ph.D. in biochemistry, Dr. Kelleher was more than qualified to conduct rigorous scientific analysis on these bizarre attacks that left no traces of blood or struggle. Known for co-authoring Hunt for the Skinwalker with journalist George Knapp, a book that details his time at the ranch with the NIDS team, Dr. Kelleher visited numerous locations where cattle had been robbed of their organs and left to decompose while exhibiting a plethora of anomalous biomarkers.

Dr. Kelleher, in a presentation at the 2023 Archives of the Impossible conference at Rice University, provided some insight into his most recent understanding of the cattle mutilation dynamic. He posits that there are at least two sources at the core of this phenomenon.

The first source is the intelligence behind the anomalous craft that often appears around the same time and place as the occurrence. Most would interpret this as an overlay of the ET hypothesis onto these events.

The second source is the much more prosaic idea that humans are behind them. He spoke of a conversation he had with Col. Barry Hennessy of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). Dr. Kelleher explained the levels of deception AFOSI is willing to go to by masking classified aircraft prototypes with fabricated UFO stories for the protection of advanced technologies within special access programs.

Col. Hennessy also mentioned several Air Force bases that were plagued by UFO activity during the 1970s and 1980s. He admitted that a lot of these incursions were due to our own penetration testing, but at the same time acknowledged that around 50% of the craft detected were of truly unknown origin.

There was an obvious distinction between the flight characteristics, shapes, and sizes of the seemingly non-human craft with the aircraft originating inside Air Force SAP research and development operations. But over time, it became clear that even though these observables could be distinguished from each other, the behavior of the two were eerily similar.

The similarities in the behavior of these UFOs that Dr. Kelleher described required him to envision a new, more nuanced hypothesis that he calls "bi-directional mimicry." He posits that both the ufonauts and human military operations use the actions of the other for deceptive purposes. It is in this context that we now arrive at our main subject of cattle mutilations, and how this theory of bi-directional mimicry may be applied.

First, we must address some of the issues brought up by those who disbelieve that such a precise surgical extraction of organs, some of which even appear to be the result of laser cutting, can be performed by humans without leaving a trace of blood or any sign of their presence at the site.

These would certainly require the perpetrators to possess advanced technology and knowledge of biology and chemistry. If we accept the prevalent reports of UFOs during these events as true — along with the antigravitational characteristics of the craft as an explanation for the lack of evidence sourcing these attacks — it would make sense to attribute all of these cases to a more technologically developed non-human intelligence.

I personally believe it is probable that is the case, and in this article, I am not arguing against a non-human origin as the motivations to conduct genetic experiments on our species are clear and easily understandable. But with Kelleher's bidirectional mimicry hypothesis, the door is left open for a human cause that may also help solve the entire mystery we face.

Another prevalent argument against the military conducting these studies is, once again, the motivation behind it. Those resistant to this idea insist that government agencies — or private corporation, for that matter — could simply buy their own cattle for experimentation without having to resort to more expensive clandestine means. While this solution may seem reasonable on its face and may very well be the reality, there are other considerations to make before dismissing the need for the covert, random sampling of the bovine supply chain by both the government and private industry.

Not Quite a Virus

During his time at NIDS, Dr. Kelleher wrote a paper that correlated data from cattle mutilation cases and the rise of prion disease over time and geographical areas. Titled Unexplained Cattle Deaths and the Emergence of a Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) Epidemic in North America, the report is an unnerving look at this phenomenon and a preview of the non-fiction book Brain Trust that he would publish just a year later.

Written in June 2003, the same year "Mad Cow Disease" first officially appeared inside US borders, the paper describes an expanding silent epidemic of a cross-species prion disease known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy, or TSE. He also details specific cases of cattle mutilations that include graphic post-mortem images of the animals, along with the frequent appearance of black unmarked helicopters as reported by witnesses.

TSE manifests as different diseases depending on the animal it infects. However, one may infer that these are just semantics being played as it all boils down to the same mechanism of prions as the cause of them all. But I want to be as specific as possible due to the level of nuance required with these diagnoses and believe it's worth itemizing them briefly as listed in Dr. Kelleher's paper.

• TSE — transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, a general term for infection in humans and all animals

• CWD — chronic wasting disease, refers to specific TSE in deer and elk.

• BSE — bovine spongiform encephalopathy, refers to specific TSE in cattle, also known as mad cow disease

• Scrapie — specific TSE in sheep

• Kuru — specific TSE in humans (overlaps with CJD)

• CJD - Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, also a human TSE

Now that we've got that down, let's get straight to the point and take in Dr. Kelleher's general thesis from the introduction.

The two central and unanswered questions that have dogged research into this phenomenon are (a) Who and (b) Why? The purpose of the present paper is to focus on the second question and to review evidence suggesting a link between the intense animal mutilation waves of the 1970s/1980s and the emergence of an epidemic of infectious disease in North America during and after this period.

The issue of the contamination of the North American food supply by an infectious prion agent has come into sharper focus since the announcement in May 2003 by Canadian authorities of a confirmed case of mad cow disease in Alberta, Canada. This paper hypothesizes that patterns of animal mutilations are consistent with a covert infectious disease monitoring operation in the United States and elsewhere. It is not the purpose of this paper to ask the question: “who is killing and mutilating the animals”?

I find Dr. Kelleher's emphasis in the last sentence curious but reasonable, as making formal accusations about such an egregious breach of public trust in a scientific paper is unlikely the best way to reveal such a shock to the public. We will touch more on that later on.

It is clear from the outset that Dr. Kelleher's core focus in this research is to alert policymakers and the public about such a disastrous health emergency that has gone under the radar for decades. He outlines the history of TSE and its entry into the US wildlife population, explaining how and why it originated among a cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea.

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) describes a broad class of neurological diseases that until recently, had been rare and even obscure. D. Carleton Gajdusek’s brilliant investigation of kuru, a mysterious and fatal neurological disease that afflicted over 2000 members of the Fore tribe in New Guinea, together with his discovery of characteristic striking similarities in brain histopathology between kuru and an obscure human disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), earned him the Nobel prize in 1976.

…biochemical work by Prusiner in the 1980s suggested that TSEs were caused by the aberrant folding of a protein, known as a prion. Prusiner received a Nobel prize in 1997 for his work, although there is still considerable controversy regarding the causative agent of TSEs. In the 1980s, an outbreak of BSE, known as “mad cow disease”, in Great Britain was linked to the practice of feeding rendered cow-parts and other rendered animals back to cows, a process that was later dubbed “high-tech cannibalism” by the media.

Slaughterhouse waste was the cheapest option to provide cattle with the high-protein diets required to survive the effects of Monsanto's newly approved recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) approved by the FDA in 1993. A Canadian government report on the disease even stated that "BSE is thought to have arisen from cattle fed with a high-protein diet, obtained from remnants of butchered animals and [rBGH] developed in the early 1980s. This practice allows the accumulation of prions over many generations, and is now disallowed by modern cattle farming practices."

Essentially, humans were eating the cows with prions that were eating the cows with prions. The bovine growth hormones required them to eat even more protein, allowing multiple generations of prion to develop much faster. According to Dr, Kelleher's NIDS paper, the resulting CJD cases have been misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's.

Now we are left with the question that Dr. Kelleher did everything he could to avoid asking.

Who is killing and mutilating the animals?

A Leaky Laboratory

Dr. Kelleher's explanation regarding the original human version of prion disease, referred to earlier as kuru, demonstrates a potential motivator for factions in the government who may have been responsible for the transfer of the infectious agent into the US wildlife population and, ultimately, America's food supply chain.

He explains the origin of its detection, illustrating how a scientist studying the Fore tribe on the island of New Guinea was sending back kuru-infected brains.

The full title of contract DA-49-007-MD-77 that funded Gajdusek’s travels was: “Field Studies on the Control of Infectious Disease of Military Importance.” Beginning in 1958, Dr Joe Smadel had moved from the United States Army Walter Reed Hospital to the nearby National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus, had set up a sophisticated lab with extensive neuropathology facilities and staff and had begun to receive a steady stream of autopsied kuru brains from the wilds of New Guinea, all sent by Carleton Gajdusek.

Although the origin of kuru is presently unknown, Gajdusek’s frequent written correspondence with Smadel mentions the acceleration in kuru infection that apparently occurred in the 1940s, although there is evidence from interview testimony with elderly Fore tribes people that the first kuru cases were remembered in the 1920s.

The Fore were notoriously vague about time, so attempts to specifically delineate the time when kuru emerged as a full blown epidemic in New Guinea are fraught with error, although Gajdusek appears to estimate the largest leap in the epidemic numbers occurring sometime in the 1940s. Nevertheless, it can be unequivocally stated that the importation of dozens of kuru brains and their storage at Fort Detrick, Maryland together with subsequent infectious testing in multiple species at NIH during the 1960s, represented a huge introduction and spread of infectious TSE’s into the United States.

Primates (Chimps, Gibbons, Old World monkeys, New World monkeys), guinea pigs, mink, goats, sheep, mice etc were injected with human kuru brain extracts. It is intriguing that the first documented case of CWD appeared in 1967 at a Colorado State University wildlife research facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, within a few years of this intensive cross species kuru testing that originated from experimental facilities at Fort Detrick and Bethesda.

If groups within the US government greatly escalated the prion epidemic through experimentations with the brains of cannibals, that would be quite a black eye on those departments and erode trust in institutions. A more clandestine approach to monitoring the wildlife population would better insulate against any public outcry or academic condemnation.

Known in the UFO sphere for its multitude of biological warfare tests spearheaded by Nazis through Operation Paperclip after World War II, it wouldn't be surprising if such compartmentalized programs at Fort Detrick, along with their contractors, tried to squirrel away any information about reckless experiments that triggered an epidemic in the food chain.

A successor to MKULTRA, called MKNAOMI, was a biological warfare research collaboration between the CIA and the Army at Fort Detrick. Although little unclassified information about the program exists, a document from the JFK Assassination records shows the CIA began working on biological weapons research with the Special Operations Division of Fort Detrick in 1952. The document states that "from its outset, the project was characterized by a compartmentation that was extreme even by CIA standards."

Even more telling was what the document says about what was found at the lab.

By the late 1960's, a stockpile of some 51 to 20 different biological warfare agents and toxins was maintained on a regular basis by SOD for possible Agency use. The supply included such agents as food poisons, infectious viruses, lethal botulinum toxin, paralytic shellfish toxin, snake (krait) venom, Microsporeum gypseum which produces severe skin disease, etc. Varying amounts of these materials ranging from 100 grams to 100 milligrams were maintained.

As noted above, with the Presidential Order requiring the destruction of Army biological warfare and toxin stockpiles, the question was raised as to the disposition of Agency materials. Though specific accounting for each agent on the list is not on hand, DOD indicates that, with the likely exception of the shellfish toxin, all of these materials were in fact destroyed by SOD personnel.

Furthermore, it may be helpful to recall the somewhat general consensus that the legacy UFO program was transferred to private industry to avoid scrutiny in the late 1960s and 1970s as relayed by attorney Danny Sheehan and journalist Ross Coulthart. It’s fair to question whether or not certain biological warfare programs did the same.

I think it is safe to speculate that some of the noted "infectious viruses" were likely prions. Whether or not they were manipulated in certain ways may never be known, as the CIA document makes clear that nearly every record about this program was destroyed.

I think the argument is pretty strong for attributing the human side of the cattle mutilation phenomenon to a covert disease monitoring program run by those in the shadows who are wary of leaving any evidence behind.

Luckily for them, they can always blame the aliens.

More to the Story

There is much more additional data on this story that I will follow up on at some point, but the aspects are very disturbing. Recent scientific studies have begun to link prion disease to Alzheimer’s through an epigenetic mechanism, indicating that Dr. Kelleher has been right for two decades and nobody paid attention.

There are also larger connections when it comes to private industry and potential motivations to conduct cattle mutilations that may actually be a bridge too far for the moment.

I will hint that this very litigious entity technically does not exist as of 2019 due to a merger. The company has deep ties to the Manhattan Project as well as Operation Paperclip through its dealings with a consortium that enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler.

The mindset necessary to conduct these kinds of brutal experiments with no regard for the welfare of any lifeform involved only drives the evidence home. Add in the company’s longtime stranglehold over the agriculture sector, their bullying of farmers through lawsuits, and the fact that they were responsible for the invention of the original bovine growth hormone, and you might see where this narrative is headed.

I will leave it there for now as this information is a lot to take in, and frankly rather exhausting to try to convey in an understandable format. But the one thing I’m certain of is that there is a scandal regarding prion disease on the horizon. Fingers will be pointed and political games will be played, but recent scientific studies appear to be signaling a reckoning.

I hope people remember that Dr. Kelleher wrote a book about this twenty years ago, and only now will people start paying attention as it starts to affect them personally.

It’s only human nature.

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I've long held the belief that the current discourse on UFO disclosure would be best left to my Twitter account when it comes to calling out disingenuous arguments and blatant character assassination. Advantages to that strategy include the ability to counter inaccurate claims made by agenda-driven debunkers in real-time, along with the reach of my platform.

I felt as if writing something long-form would be somewhat pointless considering the rapid-fire pace of developments in the UFO sphere and the limited attention span of most in our current era of social media. Recent events have led me to change my mind.

In every debate, a baseline of credibility and motives must be established for those following along to make an educated decision for themselves on the subject matter. Likes and follower counts are not indicative of credibility, and often the opposite tends to be true. Individuals dependent on their own loud voices can be taken even less seriously, with edgy comments and unrelenting streams of irrelevant information masking the lack of substance underneath.

Perhaps the most obnoxious and harmful are those who masquerade as unbiased researchers to obfuscate their agenda, and the number of their followers who refuse to acknowledge what's staring them in the face. Signs of networking behind the scenes with others who parrot similar talking points are common but mostly missed by the casual observer.

First impressions matter, and those turning people off of the UFO subject by purposely intercepting the general public's initial forays into the field have been winning for decades. This series is one small attempt at turning that dynamic on its head.

The individuals featured in this series will no doubt have issues with my findings and label many of them ad hominem attacks or false narratives. I will do everything in my power to present the facts as they are and in the context of the current UFO debate on social media and elsewhere. Many of these individuals justify their near-daily attacks on disclosure advocates with the caveat, "I'm just asking questions."

Hopefully, they can understand that I am only doing the same.

Covert Clownshow

I was inspired to document my findings comprehensively by the recent revelations regarding the "skeptic activist" group known as Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW). This covert, coordinated effort to delegitimize less-dogmatic scientific theories — along with the academics and journalists genuinely researching these phenomena — has been quietly manipulating information on one of the world's most popular websites for years.

These revelations are largely due to the work of researcher Rob Heatherly, who has spent months gathering evidence of the most abhorrent aspects of this organization. He presented his work recently on The Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford.

One might expect GSoW founder Susan Gerbic, the leader of a group that describes themselves as dedicated to fighting pseudo-science, to be a scientist herself. Instead, according to her own Wikipedia page, "Gerbic worked at Lifetouch, a portrait studio in JC Penney in the Northridge Mall in Salinas, from 1982 for 34 years, including as manager." It would come as no surprise to any seasoned ufologist that a person of such a prestigious background would be the recipient of the "2022 National Capital Area Skeptics Philip J. Klass Award for outstanding contributions to critical thinking and scientific understanding."

If the name of that award made your eye twitch, you're definitely not alone.

According to the GSoW website, applicants are required to complete a training course on editing Wikipedia pages, promoting skeptic viewpoints, and improving the entries of individuals within the skeptic community itself. Only then can you join their private Facebook group dubbed the "Secret Cabal," a name that is truly one of the lamest attempts at skeptical humor I've ever heard in my life.

Non-English speakers are also recruited for the "cause" because the indoctrination of skeptical viewpoints must be global, according to Gerbic. The result is hundreds of people around the world tweaking minuscule details in a decentralized attempt to avoid any one person being accused of defamation. Surely Philip Klass would be proud.

Not satisfied with just their Wikipedia shenanigans, GSoW is also in the business of setting people up to be humiliated. Her "Secret Cabal" has conducted "sting operations" on psychics by creating fake Facebook profiles, setting up viewing appointments, and then recording the session unbeknownst to the mediums. They would then post the session online so other skeptics in their "community" could belittle and ostracize the victim.

There are definitely charlatans in the psychic business, but I believe these operations are very telling when it comes to their motives in other arenas. Their sole purpose of existing is to ridicule and these acts display malice as a basis for the activities they conduct both on and off the internet.

It is an arrogance that any real skeptic should be embarrassed to be associated with. It is within this context that we shall briefly review a few of their Wikipedia antics.

Oblivious Bias

Susan Gerbic herself created the Wikipedia entry for Luis Elizondo. This means she has been watching every edit that has ever been made to his page and is fully aware of the attempts that have been made to correct the record.

The first thing to note is that Elizondo's page states he was born in Miami. According to Elizondo, this is incorrect. Even after providing evidence, including pictures of his passport that clearly states Texas as his place of birth, any attempt to correct this very basic fact has been reverted.

The fact that the man himself is unable to have such an uncontroversial data point about his life corrected shows just how abusive this group can be. To be frank, it's fucking ridiculous.

The introduction to Elizondo's page is indicative of Gerbic's training. Her indoctrination curriculum states that the first two sentences of each entry are by far the most important. He is first labeled as a "media personality," followed by his actual profession, despite being out of the public eye for a year as of the time of this writing.

The second sentence is even more blatant: "Elizondo has claimed to be a director" of AATIP, which is "a claim supported by former senator Harry Reid but contested by both reporters and Pentagon officials."

The linked source detailing Harry Reid's support of Elizondo is a letter written by the Senator himself. The two sources linked in an attempt to counter that claim signal the tip of an iceberg that has yet to be adequately addressed.

The two sources cited to push back against Lue's work at AATIP are from two "journalists" who have been nothing but hostile to all of the individuals involved in the current push for UAP transparency. The cited articles are propaganda products concocted by Keith Kloor and Art Levine.

Interviews and articles display a clear bias on the part of these individuals. There are vastly more credible sources stating that Elizondo was indeed the director of AATIP, and these skeptics' choice to omit those articles and opt for agenda-driven opinion pieces should erase any veneer of impartiality.

Monsanto Man

Keith Kloor has long been a PR agent for Monsanto (now Bayer) disguised as a journalist. At the same time Kloor was supposedly covering an investigation into academia's ties to the pesticide industry for science publications such as Nature, emails show he was coaching and editing sources to give the appearance of broad support for GMOs.

This was covered extensively by U.S. Right to Know, a public health advocacy organization that was also conducting the initial investigation Kloor was reporting on.

From 2015 to 2017, Kloor reported for Nature , Science Insider , Discover , Issues in Science and Technology, and Slate on a public records investigation by U.S. Right to Know to uncover hidden ties between the pesticide industry and publicly funded academics, including University of Florida Professor Kevin Folta, who promote GMOs and pesticides and argue to keep these products unregulated. In each of these published pieces, Kloor framed the public records requests as an undue burden on academics.

The emails obtained via state records requests reveal that Kloor himself was part of the story he was reporting on; emails reveal Kloor had attended pesticide industry-funded message-training conferences with Folta and assisted Folta with messaging. The correspondence also shows that Folta reached out to Kloor to suggest a “preemptive” release of his emails “but selectively” to help mitigate the damage of the documents – which Kloor did, in the journal Nature.

At the same time as Kloor was covering the story for top science publications, the documents show he participated in discussions with industry insiders about the challenges posed by the public records requests.

Interestingly, Kloor was tasked with convincing Bill Nye (the Science Guy) to support GMOs. Coincidentally, Bill Nye is a fellow of the Center for Skeptical Inquiry along with GSoW founder Susan Gerbic.

U.S. Right to Know elaborates on the email coaching, which you can read in full on their website.

In November 2014, Kloor used his Discover blog to challenge critiques about GMOs that Bill Nye, a science educator known as “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” had written in a book. Kloor published an “Open Letter to Bill Nye from a Plant Scientist” signed by Folta— but Kloor did not disclose that he had asked Folta to challenge Nye, had concocted the idea of the open letter and had coached Folta on how to write it. Kloor also edited Dr. Folta’s biography to avoid mentioning industry funding, according to the emails.

The emails show that Kloor had drafted a bio for Folta that included the line, “No research is sponsored by Monsanto.” Folta asked him to adjust that sentence, noting that Monsanto indirectly sponsored some of his biotech outreach efforts and that he had received research money from a small biotech firm. Kloor decided on a bio that avoided mentioning Dr. Folta’s industry funding entirely: “his research is sponsored by federal and state agencies.”

Now, you may ask yourself, why in the world would an operative on the payroll of the Monsanto chemical company want to discredit a UFO disclosure advocate like Luis Elizondo?

To be fair, the answer isn't that obvious at first glance.

Transclassified Information

First, let us revisit an interview that UFO whistleblower David Grusch gave a few months back. Grusch has been thrust into the national spotlight after his interview on NewsNation with Ross Coulthart. Unsurprisingly, both of these men are also top targets for GSoW and their struggles with character assassination will be explored in a later edition of this series.

Grusch stated the following when asked about private industry's involvement in UFO reverse engineering programs by Paolo Gizzardi and Roberto Pinotti.

There's certainly been private corporations involved, both federally-funded research and development centers and for-profit companies that have contracted with the US government over the years. Like I mentioned in earlier interviews, the US government overlaid the Manhattan Project secrecy, personnel…generally what elements were involved corporately and governmentally in that, too. The Atomic Energy Commission, which eventually morphed into the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission later.

And that is why what you see in what we call the Schumer Amendment in the United States that will hopefully be signed here very shortly -- and maybe it'll be signed by the time the conference happens -- they cite the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and other provisions within the unclassified Schumer Amendment. That's because they understand that the secrecy justification ran along the lines of US nuclear secrets…

But yes, certainly private companies were involved. The specific ones I did provide to the Congressional Committees and the Inspector General down to specific facilities that I am aware of, down to the address where they exist. I also had the individuals that, first-hand, worked on the program provide that disclosure and interview with the Inspector General as well so it wasn't just coming from me.

In the context of Grusch's claims that the US government overlaid corporate elements of the Manhattan Project's secrecy onto the reverse engineering programs, it becomes clear once you understand who those private interests are.

Monsanto was one of the biggest.

In a declassified document from 1948 titled "Organizational Chart U.S. Atomic Energy Commission," Monsanto is designated as the manager of two facilities for the AEC. The first is Clinton Laboratories where they would conduct "general nuclear research." The second facility was under construction at the time and titled "Dayton Engineer Works" in Miamisburg Ohio. It is also known as Mound Laboratory due to its proximity to the local Indian mounds and was to be utilized primarily for research and development purposes.

The fact that Keith Kloor, a pawn of Monsanto, holds an equal amount of credibility as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the eyes of GSoW tells you everything you need to know. Seen in this light, at least some of the motivation behind his attacks on UFO disclosure advocates should be questioned.

I have conducted a plethora of research on those facilities that I now need to review, and there is much more to the story of Kloor, Gerbic, GSoW, Levine, and even Bill Nye the Science Guy.

This is the first in a line of articles that will attempt to level the playing field by exposing the true motivations of certain individuals who insist on disingenuousness and bad-faith arguments.

After all, we're just asking questions.

Several notable themes have started to emerge as we head further down the rabbit hole of hidden finance and covert operations, spanning the history of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) up to the present day. The first thing that has become increasingly clear over this journey has been the sheer number of high-profile, publicly-lauded individuals living double lives throughout their professional careers.

The number of mistruths that must have been told by heroes of academia and government service Is nothing short of staggering. Even more disturbing is the lack of interest from the public after this information is disclosed, usually posthumously, as well as the innate inability of scholars to incorporate these inconvenient truths into the mainstream narrative of US history.

The second major theme is a dilemma we are dealing with in our current news cycle. The willingness of some in academia to partake in unethical quid pro quos in exchange for the funding of their pet projects has been exposed through the ongoing release of documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case. Epstein, of course, "committed suicide" while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges several years ago.

His donations to universities and individual scientists even after his initial plea deal have led to questions over who knew what and when among those who accepted his vast sums of money. His case, though it will not be discussed in detail here, is an even more relevant representation of what we're uncovering when you consider his rumored connections to Western intelligence agencies.

Third, we have stumbled upon an obvious pattern of blatant disregard for the public interest in the name of "national security." This may seem like a legitimate trade-off to some, but the biggest issue with this current dynamic goes to the heart of American democracy.

When a handful of unelected individuals retain the power to make decisions for hundreds of millions of citizens — without their knowledge or input on fiscal and foreign policy — we have a serious problem. The idea that the legislative representatives of the United States citizenry have been left in the dark about how our money is spent, who is spending it, and who is benefiting, is a fundamentally unpatriotic form of government.

When one considers the price-gouging committed by defense contractors and tolerated by the Pentagon due to their revolving door of military officials and private executives, the idea that these massive amounts of taxpayer funds are still insufficient boggles the mind.

The existence of such vast private financial conspiracies as depicted in the book Gold Warriors — from the looting of Japanese gold bullion to the Iran-Contra scandal, and beyond — demonstrates an insatiable thirst for absurd amounts of black money by factions of the military-industrial-intelligence complex.

Given the need for brilliant minds to assist in the protection of our country's interests, some may argue the involvement of prominent academics in the intelligence sphere should be expected and perhaps even encouraged. That is all well and good in theory, but the covert nature of our national security apparatus and the power that comes with privileged knowledge are a recipe for corruption when exposed to such an insulated culture over a long enough timeline.

No aspect of United States history demonstrates this more comprehensively than the shocking revelations of MKULTRA and its related projects. The willingness of some in the medical and scientific communities to contribute their expertise to mind-control experiments on unwitting subjects is still subject to debate thanks to the destruction of records by the CIA after the program was exposed.

Weird Science

In the previous edition of my Black Gold series titled The Smithsonian Connection, we dove into the crevices of the Institution's history with intelligence agencies by highlighting specific examples of its potential involvement in covert operations and funding.

We demonstrated how the Smithsonian's longtime former director S. Dillon Ripley was a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — the precursor to the CIA — and how his relationships forged during World War II may have played a role in the decisions he made as the leader of the most highly regarded scientific organization in the country.

We also reviewed declassified correspondence between Ripley and CIA leadership, demonstrating a disturbingly cordial relationship between the two agencies. However, my more recent research has led me to the conclusion that despite Ripley's two decades in that role and some of the questionable decisions he made during that time, his appointment may turn out to be more of an act of damage control than anything.

As previously discussed in The Smithsonian Connection, the Institution was involved in a bird study the Washington Post dubbed "one of the largest and most mysterious undertakings in the institution's 139-year history." It was eventually revealed that the research project was a cover for biological warfare experiments that were being conducted by the Department of Defense.

We also reviewed the Smithsonian's involvement in Project Moon Dust, a US Air Force crash retrieval program that was partially funded by NASA and used Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory telescopes in foreign countries to track satellites.

As Ripley took over the role of Smithsonian director in 1964, I was curious to know what had happened leading up to his appointment. It turns out there was much more to worry about than these two relative missteps.

Ripley's predecessor at the Smithsonian Institution was a physician and teacher named Leonard Carmichael. According to a 1985 Washington Post article — the publication date coinciding with the year Ripley resigned as director — Carmichael reportedly felt deeply about US national security.

Carmichael was the director of a research board called the Human Ecology Society from the years 1959 - 1964. As it turns out, the organization was a front for the CIA to infiltrate academia and hijack scientific research for their benefit, specifically in the areas of psychological studies and bio-warfare.

In his detailed book on MKULTRA titled The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks devotes a chapter to the Human Ecology Society and spells out its operations. After its founding by Cornell University professor Harold Wolff, the organization branched out to provide research grants to academics — both witting and unwitting — using CIA money.

MKULTRA men realized, according to the veteran, that "ninety percent of what we were doing would fail" to be of any use to the Agency. Yet, with a spirit of inquiry much freer than that usually found in the academic world, the Society took early stabs at cracking the genetic code with computers and finding out whether animals could be controlled through electrodes placed in their brains.

By investing up to $400,000 a year into the early, innovative work of men like Carl Rogers, Charles Osgood, and Martin Orne, the CIA's Human Ecology Society helped liberate the behavioral sciences from the world of rats and cheese. With a push from the Agency as well as other forces, the field opened up. Former iconoclasts became eminent, and, for better or worse, the Skinnerian near-monopoly gave way to a multiplication of contending schools.

Eventually, a reputable behavioral scientist could be doing almost anything: holding hands with his students in sensitivity sessions, collecting survey data on spanking habits, or subjectively exploring new modes of consciousness. The CIA's money undoubtedly changed the academic world to some degree, though no one can say how much.

By 1965, the functions provided by the Human Ecology Society had run their course and those involved moved on to bigger and better things. Incidentally, the organization's closure occurred at the same time Carmichael left the Smithsonian Institution and Ripley assumed his vacated role.

So what other covert channels were these successful projects transferred to, and how was the funding maintained?

Some clues may lie within the other so-called "cut-outs" used during the time, with one in particular run by one of the most respected pathologists in the country.

Chemical Conduit

Dr. Charles F. Geschickter was a world-class pathologist and emeritus professor at Georgetown University, known as a prominent contributor to the field of cancer research. Along with teaching at Georgetown from 1946 up until his retirement in 1971, Dr. Geschickter also had duties as the Director of the Clinical Research Unit.

Before his work at Georgetown began, Geschickter had set up a private fund in his family's name to help finance research primarily into cancer and psychiatry called the Charles F. and Elsie L. Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. It was eventually learned that this foundation, like the Human Ecology Society, largely became a conduit for funding research that interested the CIA using government money.

According to Marks, as the Human Ecology Society began its process of shutting down, the address of its headquarters changed to reflect the building where the Geschickter Fund itself was located. This suggests the Geschickter Fund may have been seen as a long-term covert channel within the academic community as well as a suitable landing place for the transfer of this research.

One of the most notable revelations about the Geschickter Fund was the CIA's financial assistance in the construction of a new $3 million building at Georgetown Hospital.

The CIA provided these funds in return for the use of one-sixth of the beds and total space within the facilities, where Geschickter himself performed unethical, highly bizarre experiments on terminal cancer patients and the mentally ill. Parallels to the fictional Depart of Energy facilities depicted in the Netflix series Stranger Things are clear, except these human rights violations took place in the heart of our nation's capital.

Declassified documents on the CIA's involvement with the Geschickter Fund and the man who controlled it paint a rather shocking picture of disregard for human rights and the nonchalant attitude around these abuses within the CIA.

Known as MKULTRA Sub Project 35, the deal with Georgetown through Geschickter was made in 1955 with the agency's Technical Services Staff (TSS) "for the purpose of establishing a cover organization for highly sensitive projects in the field of covert Biological, Chemical, and Radiological Warfare."

The advantages of using Georgetown and Dr. Geschickter for this research are justified at length in the declassified documents.

(a) One-sixth of the total space in the new research wing is to be available to Dr. Geschickter and in turn, will be available to the Chemical Division of TSS. This will provide laboratory and office space, technical assistants, equipment and experimental animals for use of Chemical Division personnel in connection with specific future projects.

(b) The cost of the Chemical Division projects which are to be carried out under this cover will be covered by funds made available through Project MKULTRA, and projects will be subject to the procedures and controls established for MKULTRA. The funds will be passed through the [Geschickter Fund] as has been done in the past. The Fund in turn will either pay expenses directly or transfer the money to the University for this purpose. Each project will be individually funded based on its particular budget, and there will be no other continuing or recurring charges for items such as space, facilities, etc.

(c) The Agency's sponsorship of sensitive research projects would be completely deniable since no connection would exist between the University and the Agency.

(d) Excellent professional cover would be provided for up to three bio-chemical employees of the Chemical Division of TSS. This would allow open attendance at scientific meetings, the advancement of personal standing in the scientific world, and as such, would constitute a major efficiency and morale booster.

(e) Human patients and volunteers for experimental use will be available under excellent clinical conditions with the full supervision of the [Georgetown University] Hospital.

(f) There would be available the equivalent of a hospital safehouse.

(g) It is expected that the output of useful results of the Chemical Division in the bio-chemical field will be greatly improved through the more efficient use of technical personnel who would be able to spend more of their time on actual laboratory work.

(h) [REDACTED]

(i) Excellent facilities would be provided for recruiting new scientific personnel since members of the Chemical Division working under this cover will be in daily contact with members of the Graduate School of the University.

(j) The regular University library and reprint service will be available as a source of technical information.

Even more concerning than these perceived advantages may be the channels through which the studies were funded. The implications of the arrangements made here should worry anyone in the medical field with even just the slightest integrity.

This single grant will constitute the Agency's entire participation in the new hospital wing, and there will be no recurring obligations in the form of annual support of the hospital or additional grants. Transmission of Agency funds to the [Geschickter Fund] will be made through previously established cover channels set up by the [Geschickter Fund] for similar transmittals in the past. The donation on the Fund's books will be shown as having been received from an anonymous trust in [REDACTED].

In the future when TSS sponsors sensitive research projects which are to be carried out in the [Georgetown University] Hospital, each project will be individually financed through the [Geschickter Fund] as it has been in the past in accordance with previously established procedures and controls using allotted portions of the annual Research and Development budget. The University will be totally unwitting of Agency sponsorship, and the projects to every outward appearance will be sponsored by Dr. [Geschickter].

In the event of Dr. [Geschickter]'s death, the Fund will continue in being and any activities under this project will be continued through the Fund and will be unaffected by his death.

It is with the above excerpt that these clandestine funding mechanisms start to come into focus.

Firstly, the declassified memo establishes an unmistakable tone that this is business as usual. The phrase "previously established cover channels" implies a financial network already in place that is capable of enabling such a complex covert scheme as planned. The infrastructure is solid enough to justify this operation and the additional advantage that the hospital could serve as a "safe house" displays confidence in this assessment.

Additionally, the "donation" from the CIA to the Geschickter Fund showing in their books as an anonymous trust provides insight into the methods used to conceal this. Assuming this could be hidden from other agencies like the IRS using other front organizations once again displays the complexity and clandestine nature of the network.

If the OSS truly did have a political slush fund based on gold bullion looted from the Philippines during and after World War II, it's hard to see how it didn't end up in these studies based on the agency's own words here. This once again demonstrates the pitfalls of having intelligence operations intertwined with the private sector.

Let's now turn to the present day, and how this ongoing dynamic might be presenting itself on the surface.

A Willing Participant

As mentioned previously, managing the fund that provided cover for such horrific CIA activities was far from the only involvement Dr. Geschickter had in MKULTRA.

Although most of the details were likely destroyed in the 1970s, it is understood that Geschickter himself participated in studies that violated the human rights of his patients. According to one CIA memo, the security concerns of a contractor conducting the experimental testing would be eliminated since "the responsibility for the testing will rest completely upon the physician and the hospital."

The same memo describes the testing that was to be carried out on human and animal subjects, including a "knockout pill" that would "provide a maximum of amnesia."

A portion of the Research and Development Program of TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods:

1. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.

2. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.

3. Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

4. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.

5. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.

6. Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.

7. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brain-washing".

8. Materials and methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.

9. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.

10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.

11. Substances which will produce "pure" euphoria with no subsequent let-down.

12. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.

13. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.

14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.

15. Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.

16. A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.

17. A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatsoever.

In addition to these studies, Marks also notes that Geschickter became interested in behavior modification techniques beyond the use of drugs and hypnosis. He writes that "he branched out into trying to knock out monkeys with radar waves to the head (a technique which worked but risked frying vital parts of the brain)." This was corroborated by Geschickter himself in his 1977 testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research.

Senator Kennedy: Was the NIH involved in any of the research projects?

Dr. Geschickter: There was NIH involvement.

Senator Kennedy: Could you tell us the nature of that involvement? .

Dr. Geschickter: I can tell you the nature of it accurately. One was on studies on concussion in which they rocked the heads of animals back and forth to try to cause them amnesia by concussion of the brain. And that was for $110,000. The other, which was funded through this later business was the use of radar to put monkeys to sleep, to see if they could be, should I say, instead of Mickey Finn, they could put them under with radar directed toward the monkey brain.

Senator Schweiker. Could they?

Dr. Geschickter: Did they go to sleep?

Senator Schweiker: Yes.

Dr. Geschickter: Yes, sir. But, Senator, it showed if you got into too deep a sleep, you injured the heat center of the brain the way you cook meat, and there was a borderline there that made it dangerous.

In his Congressional testimony, Dr. Geschickter very clearly admits he used electromagnetic waves to induce physiological effects on the brains of monkeys. He also states that this was research commissioned by the CIA, or as he puts it, "funded through this later business."

These studies bring to mind more recent developments regarding the enigmatic cases of Havana syndrome, or anomalous health incidents. These are symptoms of unknown origin that have been affecting US spies and diplomats around the world, with the first reports taking place in Havana, Cuba in 2016.

The CIA eventually commissioned a study by the JASON scientific advisory group leading to the eyebrow-raising conclusion that our best and brightest were falling victim to hysteria brought on by a species of cricket native to the region.

However, a full investigation released by the intelligence community a few years later seemed to refute that hypothesis, opting for a more realistic cause for these incidents and exploring the biological effects of directed energy waves.

Interestingly, the report considered radio waves to be the cause of anomalous health incidents and cited a case of Norwegian sailors, but the symptoms experienced did display the core characteristics.

Exposure to high-power, pulsed radar that caused bulk heating and did not result in core characteristics. According to a scientific paper, 14 Norwegian sailors in 2012 were accidentally exposed to high-power, pulsed radiofrequency fields that caused bulk-heating effects.

The signals came from the radar of a US Navy vessel at a passing distance of 70-100 meters and lasted for about seven minutes. The estimated peak power density was about 55 kW/cm2 and the peak electric field was about 15 kV/m, with average powers and fields about 100 times less. Another group of sailors was inside the metal hull of the ship at the time and was not exposed, serving as an inadvertent control population.

The signs and symptoms were fairly uniform—acute onset and offset of warming of the skin and disruption of exposed electronics, followed by headaches that, for all but one individual, resolved after time, treatment, and reassurance. The exposed sailors reported none of the core characteristics, and the unexposed sailors reported no acute symptoms.

So the same problems with heating that didn't allow Geschickter to successfully put monkeys to sleep with these waves also could not explain the symptoms of Havana syndrome. That may lead one to wonder whether the mechanism behind anomalous health incidents would have resulted in a successful outcome of Geschickter's test.

Potentially, this mechanism appears to be precisely what Geschickter and the CIA were trying to prove in these studies.

The idea that studies on technologies related to anomalous health incidents went as far back as MKULTRA is intriguing. Additionally, the thought that some aspects of MKULTRA continued long enough to successfully develop these kinds of weapons is disturbing. If these covert financial arrangements persisted up to the present day, one might wonder what other technologies these funds are responsible for and whether or not there is any oversight involved in their development.

Indeed, overcoming the heating effects of these weapons may be the "holy grail" of controlling human behavior remotely.

Mind Games

When considering the history of the CIA's covert funding of science, it's hard not to see the parallels in the recent revelations of individuals like Jeffrey Epstein and his reported connections to intelligence agencies. Disturbing developments like anomalous health incidents and the corruption of academia are truly just echoes of the MKULTRA era.

Funneling money through foundations or universities to mask the nefarious nature of the research has been the practice of certain factions within the intelligence community for decades, and there is no reason to believe it has not been the case with at least some reports of Havana syndrome.

In the context of the UFO phenomenon and the ongoing push for transparency in the government, these types of behavioral modification programs have the potential to complicate things tremendously.

Famed UFO researcher Jacques Vallee has said as much recently in a lecture at Rice University, and I will leave the reader with his quote to ponder as we move forward with what promises to continue to be a fraught process involving players with unthinkable agendas.

Anyone going through the Rice archives in search of information about UFOs should, in my estimation, keep in mind that any cases dated after 1975 — and certainly after 1985 — must first be analyzed as potential fakes. Not necessarily hoaxes, mind you, but products of classified projects, of which there were hundreds, that played on human expectations of things in the sky in order to hide or simply disguise new experiments with secret platforms.

This is true for aircraft prototypes, whose capabilities, shapes, and material composition which must legitimately remain secret. But it also applies to biological experiments, tests of remote paralysis, special drugs, and psychic manipulation in projects reminiscent of the old MKULTRA. In such an environment, some cancelled projects never really die.

This is obviously a challenge to researchers like me, like us, and to any ufologist. It is even more of a challenge for researchers from the military and the intelligence community, because in spite of their special status, even they may not have the right clearance or access to the right dataset in the programs whose acronyms they don't even know.

Most of my readers are likely familiar with the Netflix series Stranger Things. Spanning four seasons and set in the 1980s, the show follows the lives of several adolescents and their families as they grapple with supernatural forces originating from a sinister parallel dimension aptly named "The Upside Down."

The real-life involvement of the Department of Energy in the UFO coverup is reflected throughout the plotline, as paranormal experiments conducted at the nearby Hawkins National Laboratory accidentally open the portal to this alternate reality.

Reminiscent of the more UFO-centric Sekret Machines fiction series written by Tom DeLonge and AJ Hartley, a plethora of true occurrences are used as building blocks to weave the narrative. The writers of Stranger Things give a nod to actual studies conducted by the US government and defense contractors in what most would refer to as "fringe science." The star of these experiments is a young girl introduced to the audience as "Eleven," a name derived from her test subject number reflected in a tattoo on her arm.

Eleven was taken from her mother as a baby by the director of Hawkins National Lab when it was revealed she had psychic powers. Raised by Dr. Martin Brenner at the nuclear facility with several other children who also displayed psi abilities, Eleven demonstrates exceptional abilities in parapsychological lore like remote viewing and telekinesis.

Unnervingly, my recent research has shown that this fictional origin story of Eleven may not be too far off from the realities experienced by certain individuals caught up in the more clandestine nature of US national security dating back to World War II.

The initiation of Nazi-inspired mind control programs like MKULTRA resulted in decades of illegal experiments being conducted on unsuspecting American citizens. The worst records of these were destroyed by the CIA before they could become public, and many recent revelations brought to light by proponents of UFO transparency demonstrate this culture is still alive and well within pockets of our intelligence community.

Before we continue, I would like the reader to know that I am well aware of the hijacking of the child trafficking epidemic by conspiracy groups like QAnon for recruitment purposes. I find these perversions of human trauma abhorrent and speak out against them as forcefully as I can. These can be dangerous rabbit holes when explored without the proper context or evidence, which I will do my best to provide through historical records.

My intention for the speculation that follows is for it to be interpreted as a thought experiment and not a statement of fact. I strongly urge all of my readers to use discernment in these areas, and also be aware that high-profile members of our defense establishment have actively promoted QAnon conspiracies themselves.

So with all of that said, it is hard not to wonder what these factions within our intelligence community and private defense industry may be hiding when considering events that have transpired over the past week. If they are willing to so brazenly engage Congress to thwart legislation referring to such an absurd accusation as non-human technology in their possession, what information are they concealing that could justify such an open admission of corruption?

What is the alternative to this clear vindication of the UFO community's damning accusations of illegal acts?

Perhaps it may turn out that some — if not most — are more accurate than the public suspect.

Covert Collaboration

It has been somewhat frustrating to witness the lack of media coverage in the wake of such mind-blowing revelations as told by UFO whistleblower David Grusch. Even after doubling down on his claims of a coverup related to non-human technology while under oath in a public Congressional hearing, there has been zero follow-up on the story by major mainstream outlets.

A few weeks ago, however, Grusch finally got a chance to expand on his story from one of the largest platforms to date when he was finally interviewed on Joe Rogan's podcast. Grusch made countless statements during a conversation with Rogan that ran for over two hours, but one thing he said stood out to me distinctly in the context of our current conversation.

After wading into the subject of telepathy and its relationship to the UFO phenomenon, his following words made me raise my eyebrows as I processed their implications.

Grusch: There were CIA documents about consciousness, and weird remote viewing stuff besides the Star Gate program that were released in the FOIA reading room on the CIA's website that were pretty trippy. It's like, "Wow, the CIA is looking into some really interesting stuff. They're a hardcore intel agency. What's going on there?

Rogan: They would kind of have to find out if that was bullshit or not. You can't ignore that if you were really doing your job if your job is intelligence.

Grusch: Or it's an aspect of the phenomenon because it's like a reach out from the crash retrieval program. Like, "Hey, I need you to look into some weird stuff because it might be the key to unlock something that we've got in a warehouse."

For a while now, I've been wondering why there seems to be such a connection and crossover of government-affiliated scientists between the UFO and psi phenomena programs. As I've written about previously, it appears the general correlation has to do with the potential consensus that these non-human craft can only be piloted through consciousness or a form of telepathy.

This very concept is explored in Sekret Machines within the character Alan's plotline. Alan is a decorated fighter pilot with elite cognitive response time. After encountering a craft in the Middle East, he is actively recruited into the UFO program for the ultimate purpose of successfully flying a non-human saucer after repeated failure by others to do so.

At one point in the first novel of the series, after nearly all of the reverse-engineered triangles that were based on the non-human saucer technology had been destroyed, Alan had no choice but to attempt to pilot the disk-shaped craft itself. Without any control surfaces, the mechanism behind the propulsion had stymied the engineers, who could only get it to hover briefly within the confines of the hangar.

“I have to caution you against this,” said Riordan. “It’s a very different ship from the Locust. There’s still a lot …”

Again the hesitation, the evasion.

“What?” Alan demanded. “I’m taking it up. That’s how it is. So if you know something that might help keep me alive while I’m in it, now’s the time to tell me.”

Riordan’s internal struggle lasted only a second. The constant looping wail of the siren and its various warnings seemed to be getting to him.

“It’s a captured ship, sir,” he said. “The tech is unfamiliar because we didn’t build it.”

“Russian?”

Riordan’s eyes flashed away. “That’s what I heard, sir,” he said.

“You’re not sure? How is that possible?”

“We’re just the engineers, sir,” said Riordan with a touch of hauteur. “Our job here is to figure out how stuff works. In this case, we’re still learning. We’ve had men working on it day and night for weeks, and we still don’t know …”

“It will fly?” “Yes, sir, but we’ve only brought it to a controlled hover in the hangar. It’s never really gone up. The controls are minimal, keyed to the user.”

Alan stared at him.

“Telepathically,” said Riordan, looking more than uncomfortable. He was frightened of what he was saying, and Alan couldn’t blame him. It was staggering. “You hold on to the controller inside,” said Riordan, his voice low, “and it … reacts. To your thoughts. To be honest, sir, we haven’t dared take it more than a few feet off the ground. We just don’t know what it will do.”

Alan nodded, feeling a strange calm come over him as if he were already in the pilot’s seat.

“Maybe that’s the point,” said Alan. “You need to really want it to fly.”

When you pause to consider that DeLonge’s military advisors at his company gave him the information to put in these books as a form of soft disclosure, it becomes clear that the piloting of these craft through telepathic means may prove to be one of the truer aspects of UFO lore. We can begin to see a narrative forming with this excerpt, as it is taken together with Grusch's inference that the same mechanisms behind remote viewing may be the key to unlocking this technology.

However, a more sinister aspect of Alan's unique abilities rises to the surface in the second Sekret Machines book — aspects that could lead to serious questions of morality in the same vein as Eleven's origin story as told in Stranger Things. Such parallels, as we shall see, may even explain some of the seemingly illogical and potentially brutal actions taken by these gatekeepers against Congress and the American people in recent days.

Anomalous Contracts

Luckily I am quite familiar with the CIA remote viewing documents Grusch brought up to Rogan that were (importantly) separate from the Star Gate program. I’ve been curious about why these studies took place after the psi programs were moved out of the Army and into the private sector, as this mirrors the exact strategy behind the UFO reverse engineering programs.

I don't believe it is a coincidence that Grusch stated there might be a connection between these two projects. The similarities between the privatization of the two solidifies my suspicions to a much higher degree than before.

The documents Grusch is referring to were produced by a lesser-known company called Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC. SAIC was founded in 1969 by John Robert Beyster in La Jolla, California, incidentally the area of San Diego where I myself spent the first two years of my life. After enlisting in the Navy during World War II, Beyster was sent to college to become a nuclear physicist, and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory through the 1950s. After founding SAIC, he remained the chairman until 2004.

SAIC was a unique company in the defense business due to it being entirely owned by its employees. This inspired a highly entrepreneurial atmosphere within an extremely decentralized — or compartmentalized — organizational configuration. The company recruited the brightest minds in the country to work on scientific problems for the most classified programs and need-to-know was almost a company policy.

The scientists working on the SAIC remote viewing studies — all of which were conducted in the 1990s — referred to psi phenomena as "anomalous cognition," or AC. One study proposal focused on using telepathy to influence lucid dreaming in a sleeping individual by assigning them a task to complete while they were consciously aware in their dream. Analysis of previous evidence cited to justify the study stated that "significant evidence for AC was observed under a variety of conditions" when the dreamers reported on their experiences.

A lucid dream is one during which the sleeper becomes consciously aware that the experience is a dream as opposed to the waking state. LaBerge et al. (1981) have found that it is possible for dreamers to know when they dreaming and to signal the waking world, through predetermined eye movements, indicating their awareness. Using this ability, LaBerge et al. (1986 and 1988) conducted a number of psychophysiological studies to determine the differences between waking and dreaming from that prospective. They found that dreaming is similar to the waking state. Motor action is mostly inhibited from the brain stem downward; however, the cerebral cortex appears not to "know" this.

In this preliminary pilot study, we will use the skills developed by LaBerge to teach individuals to lucid dreams. Differing from the earlier AC dream studies, our dreamers will be instructed to adopt a proactive attitude to seek out and remember the AC target. In this way, we will determine the degree to which lucid dreaming can facilitate the reception of AC material.

Another SAIC study on the CIA website focuses partly on "anomalous perturbation (AP)," more commonly known as telekinesis. Although the proposal states that less evidence exists for scientific proof of AP than standard AC, they still recommend research on the subject and define AP as "the perturbation of physical matter under conditions of complete physical and sensorial isolation."

We're now wading more deeply into Stranger Things territory, as telekinesis is one of the most effective psychic powers Eleven can wield. Considering SAIC was founded by a veteran of Los Alamos and does an enormous amount of contractual work with the Department of Energy, the idea that a setting like Hawkins National Laboratory is being used for psi experiments in the show starts to feel a little less fictitious.

But would secretive government contractors like SAIC really involve children in their studies, or is that just an outrageous plot point in a popular Netflix series?

To explore this idea, let's turn to some testimony and historical records that might suggest the former.

Questionable Consent

To build a framework for the evidence, it is pertinent to review the scenario we started laying out with Sekret Machines. A few sections of these books will be quoted at length due to the importance they will serve in subsequent arguements.

To reiterate, these books are fiction based on real-world events as told to Tom DeLonge by his military advisors, but because time has proven more of the stories true as demonstrated by Grusch's testimony in front of Congress under sworn oath, the narrative may be based more in reality than we would like to believe.

In the second edition of the series, Alan starts to have some bizarre anomalous events happen to him as a result of flying the non-human craft in the previous book. He unintentionally commanded a salt shaker to slide across the table at a diner when he became emotional that nobody had heard him when he asked them to pass it. In another odd intuitive reaction, he appeared to move a car out of the way by simply willing it to happen, avoiding an imminent crash that seemed inevitable only a few moments before.

At one point, Alan reminisces with his childhood friend Barry — another military officer who was miraculously assigned to Area 51 — about a doctor who used to come to see them both when he was in town. Timika, another character in the series who is adept at investigating conspiracies along with her friend Marvin, finds it odd that the same physician saw the younger Alan and Barry and they found themselves working together in the military as adults.

Timika and Marvin discover that the blood disorders that justified their checkups from this doctor weren't a real diagnosis after interviewing Barry's mother, who seemed evasive and eventually asked them to leave her house. They also realize the physician, named Dr. Vespasian, was a US Air Force Captain from Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Vespasian's location, it turns out, appears to be very relevant to our conversation.

“Well, it might be nothing but I see a Captain Vespasian in the Air Force who was listed as resident in Tysons Corner.”

“Barry and Alan were both Marines. So were their families. Why would they be seeing an Air Force doc from out of state?”

“I don’t know,” he conceded. “Do either of them show symptoms of their conditions?”

“Not that I’ve seen, but I don’t know how they would manifest.”

“Sure,” said Marvin. “But it’s weird, right? Health issues serious enough to get them looked at by a DOD doctor as kids but no symptoms and no interruption to their military careers as adults? Also, I looked into those conditions you described. That’s what I was going to tell you before. The firewall on these old digitized medical records ain’t what it should be.”

“What did you find, Marvin?”

“Right, so you said Barry has beta thalassemia from one parent and hemoglobin E from the other.”

“Yes.”

“Well, here’s the thing; neither parent was ever treated or—so far as I can see, diagnosed—with either condition. I checked their records. Some arthritis late in life, statins for cholesterol for Barry’s father, a hysterectomy for his mum five years after Barry was born. Nothing else worth noting.”

“You think there was nothing wrong with them?” “I can’t say for sure because their records are sealed tighter than a duck’s ass. Can’t get near them.”

“Okay,” said Timika, not sure what to do with this, but getting the same prickle of anxiety she had felt before. Something wasn’t right.

"One more thing,” said Marvin, “then you should go. In 2009 Tysons Corner, Virginia, became home to the SAIC: Science Applications International Corporation.”

“Which is what?”

“Not entirely clear,” said Marvin. “It’s part think tank, part R & D corporation emphasizing information technology, with fingers in various military pies including intelligence and engineering. They, and the related Leidos Corporation, have contracts with the NSA, Homeland Security, the works. Billions of dollars’ worth. They recently absorbed Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems and Global Solutions business. Heavy stuff, Timika. Seriously heavy stuff. According to this document I’m reading now, SAIC adopted a matrix operating model in which different service lines collaborate to serve a given contract.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“One-stop shopping for the military and intelligence services. They do it all: physical tech, personnel, information systems and intelligence gathering, connections all the way up the chain of command. You’d better hope these folks are on your side.”

“But when Barry and Alan were kids it would have been different, right?”

“Yeah,” said Marvin in a voice that implied only kind of. “These places tend to stay in the DOD family. Whatever it was then, I’ll bet it involved intelligence and technology, probably experimental.”

The fact that DeLonge names SAIC in this "fictional" scenario is fascinating and is a detail that could likely have only come from his military advisors giving him this information. The idea that an Air Force doctor would visit children on behalf of SAIC under false pretenses is immensely disturbing if this scenario is even slightly true.

But what could the true nature of these "check-ups" be?

DeLonge fills us in on a few more unnerving aspects of Dr. Vespasian's interest in the boys. After a run-in with the doctor, Barry explains the situation to Timika

“You doing okay? That stuff with Vespasian must have gotten under your skin. No pun intended.”

Barry grinned mirthlessly. “I’m okay,” he said. “Angry. Anxious. But okay. There’s still a lot to learn about what exactly they did to us, who authorized it, and what the results might be, but for now, yeah, I’m okay.”

Timika hadn’t understood much of what Vespasian—badgered and weary—had confessed about the artificial modification of codons and amino acids in the human genetic code. The doctor had tossed the terms out scornfully, knowing they wouldn’t mean much to the layman, all that stuff about CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—and Cas9. That had been intended to obscure rather than explain. But Barry had worried at him like a dog with a chew toy until Vespasian had used less opaque but rather more troubling terms like targeted genome editing. The Chinese were doing it, he said, as if that made everything okay. It was a huge leap forward, a monumental progression in molecular biology with all manner of applications, a field in which he had been an unsung pioneer . . .

But what it all added up to, Timika was still unsure and so, Barry thought, was Vespasian. He had tweaked people’s genetic code, rewritten the building blocks of their humanity, but what he had achieved in the process or why he had done it, he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say, and when Barry pressed the matter, Vespasian had merely become hungry for information.

“What can you do?” he said. “What triggered the change?”

Barry said nothing, but the hunted look in his eyes was all the confirmation Vespasian needed, and while the doctor wouldn’t give up anything further and left under guard, he did so with a look of almost serene triumph on his face. He didn’t know what he had done. Not really. But seeds he had planted decades before had sprouted and that, he had decided, was validation enough.

Timika and Barry had boarded the plane in somber mood, but Barry was less upset than she had expected and seemed almost relieved that the truth was out where he could see it, even if that truth was unsettling and incomplete. There was a great deal more still to be revealed, but he seemed somehow lighter, as if the secret was something he had been dimly half aware of all his life. Now he could tackle it and its implications head on.

In summation, it appears whatever the doctor did to Alan and Barry's DNA triggered an explosion of psi abilities after the mechanism was activated through non-human technology. This is an intense revelation, and would no doubt be something to hide from the public if children had been involved in experimental genome modification only to have it present itself with unknown consequences in adulthood.

But again, this is a fictional novel with no proof to back up these scenarios. So I did a little digging through the newspaper archives from the 1990s to see what SAIC was up to and did not come away empty-handed.

Help Wanted

I figured I would search for some articles on SAIC for any potential clues to support the claims made in Sekret Machines, but journalists surprisingly were not the most informative sources of information on this front. What became very revealing about SAIC's activities in the 1990s — again, when the remote viewing experiments that are still classified were conducted — came from the company itself in the form of job advertisements.

Before we dive into those findings, I want to address one last hint DeLonge gave us about why Alan and Barry's parents might have given the military consent to run experimental tests on their own children — by way of Dr. Vespasian's emotional reaction to a question posed by Timika.

She saw the concern beneath Vespasian’s anger. There was something he was keen to keep hidden, which was probably why he was sitting in on this little chat in the first place. “If you’re not actually treating a condition,” she said, “why would you need to see patients on a regular basis, and perform so many invasive procedures? That’s what Barry told me—of his own free will, mind you. He was always sticking us with needles, drawing blood, pumping us full of stuff. So I start thinking, maybe it wasn’t so much about treatment, and it was more about testing. Experimental, maybe. Using the military cover and promises to the family about the boys’ future careers to do things the AMA might not look too favorably on.”

“That’s an outrageous accusation,” Vespasian huffed. “How dare you . . . !”

Considering the decision to designate the character of Vespasian as an Air Force doctor, the way SAIC is so intertwined with the US intelligence apparatus and compartmentalization within the corporation itself, I figured it would be interesting to look into SAIC's Tysons Corner location and the positions all the locations were hiring for.

A 1995 Washington Post article about a report written by a psychologist on Star Gate and its subsequent programs stated the following:

A spokesman for Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) of San Diego, Calif., a Pentagon contractor that in recent years has coordinated much of the work, said, "We aren't going to be able to discuss any details about this without permission from the client." The principal SAIC manager on the project worked out of Tysons Corner.

So we now have confirmation that the psi programs in the 1990s run by SAIC were managed out of the Tysons Corner office, the same as Dr. Vespasian. In this context, the real-world job advertisements from the same era are quite concerning.

Perusing the classifieds (no pun intended) of the November 6, 1994 edition of The Atlanta Journal, I was very surprised to find a recruitment advertisement from SAIC under the section titled "Social Workers" and labeled "Counselors."

Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) specializes in providing counseling services internationally. We are currently recruiting for Adolescent Counselors for assignment in Germany.

Successful candidates will possess a Master's in Psychology or MSW, clinical license or certification, and three years full-time clinical adolescent substance abuse experience. LCSW preferred.

SAIC is an employee-owned company that offers a competitive salary, cost of living allowance, and benefits.

Qualified candidates should mail or fax a letter of interest, resume, and copy of license/clinical certification to:

SAIC, Dept. KHS-78, 1710

Goodridge Drive, McLean, VA 22102,

Attn: Kim Hessler. FAX#: (703) 821-4663.

An Equal Opportunity Employer

M/F/D/.

U.S. citizenship required.

This puzzling advertisement raises a couple questions in my mind.

• Why would a defense contractor so deeply embedded in the clandestine intelligence world be stating in a job ad that they specialize in providing counseling services to adolescents internationally?

• Why, specifically, would SAIC need to recruit social workers to assist children with their substance abuse issues in Germany?

As confounding as this advertisement is, there are several more that state SAIC is interested in hiring for similar positions. Another advertisement appeared in the November 2, 1997 issue of Detroit Free Press under the "Education" section titled "Early Childhood Special Educators."

Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) is the nation's largest employee-owned high technology and health sciences firm. With annual revenues in excess of $2.4 billion, the company and subsidiaries have more than 24,000 employees at offices in 150 cities Currently, we are seeking Childhood Special Educators to work with American families and their children with developmental delays in Europe, Iceland, and Korea.

Position requires:

Masters degree in Early Childhood/Special Education

Two years experience as service provider to infants and toddlers with disabilities

One year experience as a member of an interdisciplinary medical or early intervention team, providing family-centered intervention or in a community-based service delivery system.

Positions also available for Occupational Physical Therapists, Speech Pathologists, Nurses, Developmental Pediatricians, Clinical Child Psychologists and Family Service Coordinators. Some these positions may be available for some short-assignments.

SAIC offers very competitive salaries and a living quarters allowance in addition to an outstanding benefits package including insurance plans, comprehensive leave and a 401(k) plan.

It's honestly quite disturbing seeing job ads for social workers and special educators against the backdrop of other eyebrow-raising technological recruitment requests, particularly the first one on this list:

• Human Engineering

• Man-Machine Interfaces

• Kinetic Energy Weapons

• Fighter Pilot Training Systems

• Image Understanding

• Laser Hardened Materials Evaluation

• Hospital System Installers

• Organized Crime Law Enforcement

• International Travel Supervisors

Here is a gallery of SAIC job ads for the reader to peruse and quantify the significance for themselves.

If there truly is a Dr. Vespasian scenario going on at SAIC, as the term "human engineering" would suggest, it would make more sense to involve American families in other countries.

When you consider certain developmental aspects of the brain that are being studied in relation to the UFO phenomenon, the idea that this technology might activate something within the genome if placed there artificially, and how remote viewing programs may be related to the crash retrieval aspect of this coverup, things start to feel very eerie.

Additional Clues

Several stories outside of the specific framework discussed in the previous sections of this article appear to corroborate this recurring theme of the intelligence and defense establishment’s interest in recruiting children for future careers in the military. The most recent example of this was revealed by one of professor Diana Pasulka’s academic colleagues in her new book, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences.

As Pasulka became friends with Patty, another professor in her department, she started to notice some peculiar aspects of her life story and how she made multiple mentions of a “secret space program.”

On many occasions she mentioned that her father worked for the “secret space program.” I had never heard of that before but took note. It was only years later, when a television production company reached out to me, post-UFO life, about the secret space program, that I “connected the dots,” as Tyler would say.

But what Patty told me about her childhood and the space program was nothing like the mythology that is propagated by social and entertainment media. Instead, it corresponded to the lived realities of the people I had come to know—those involved with the most innovative technology, and the space industry, and those whom Tyler had named “factions within the intelligence communities.”

In an interview with Pasulka, Patty explains how, in hindsight, her parents were overly protective of her to an absurd degree — even speculating that their primary concern was their daughter being kidnapped. Another interesting anecdote about her father is that his primary languages were Italian and German, suggesting that he and/or his parents may have been brought to America as part of Project Paperclip.

Patty then speaks about an accelerated program at school her parents enrolled her in called “EAP.” She states she was taken out of her regular class two days a week, skipped grades four through six, and that many of her classmates there “had died young, as had many in other cohorts of EAP beginning before my own.”

Pasulka ends the chapter summarizing Patty’s experience and asking some pertinent questions about its implications.

Like Simone and Tyler, Patty downloads information. Her frustration for having to show her math work in school is telling. She just knew the answers. What she didn’t know was that she was a child of an Invisible, a man whose job dictated strict limits and constraints on his family. Patty didn’t understand how different her childhood was from her friends’ because how could she know otherwise?

Patty wasn’t the only child of an Invisible I knew, but she was the one I knew best and the one whose story is safe to tell. But there are others whose lives were even more constrained and whose alienation from normal society had taken a sad toll on them.

As an outsider looking into this world, I wonder who or what organization was responsible for these rules and regulations? Did they question the ethical and moral justification for these programs that influenced the lives of these children so significantly?

Interestingly, Pasulka asks the main question we are trying to solve here.

Who is in charge of making these decisions?

An interview with Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper may provide some insight on this inquiry. An article summarizing an appearance Cooper made on Coast to Coast in 2000 suggests these programs involve NASA as well, who has also been a significant customer of SAIC throughout the decades.

Siegel asked Cooper: "Who were the space kids?" Cooper answered: "The space kids were children with exceptional mental abilities [Star Kids] run through a kind of MK [MKUltra CIA mental programming] program, like the things that are coming out now." He went on to describe how NASA's mind-control program, which emphasized cultivation of the children's psychic abilities, involved such things as telepathy, remote viewing, and out-of-body-experiences (OBE's).

“Cooper's remarks generally support the claims of a growing cadre of Americans, now in their thirties, forties, and fifties, [and sixties -Ed.], who are recovering memories of unusual classes that they were enrolled in as children during the advent of the Space Age.

These "study groups" included speed reading lessons that enabled students to comprehend entire passages of English prose at a single glance, the use of learning machines to teach them vast amounts of information, advanced memory training, card games and situational exercises involving clairvoyance, and seminars in the guided imagination that forms the basis of "remote viewing."

“It is believed that NASA's mind control program was directed at preparing children who would later be able to communicate with the non-human intelligent species that humanity might encounter in space. This thesis is supported by the fact that one experiencer remembers being tutored in a hieroglyphic alphabet that author Fritz Springmeier has identified as a set of "intergalactic symbols" developed by NASA for the purpose of communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations.

“The accounts of some individuals suggest that in some cases, the children involved were given drugs to enhance memory and learning, and were physically spun on table top-like devices to induce the altered state of consciousness associated with OBE's [out-of-body experiences].

This sounds eerily in line with Patty’s early experience in the program, though she may have not advanced to the ultimate phase of psychic training due to her disdain for authority figures. Cooper’s description of spinning to induce OBE’s was echoed just a few months ago by former Skinwalker Ranch owner Robert Bigelow, who described an Air Force officer floating above his own body as it walked down a hallway after hitting extreme G-forces in a centrifuge.

An additional piece of history to consider is what transpired at the Ossining, New York home of Army doctor Andrija Puharich, known primarily for his work with psychic Uri Gellar. The plotline of Stranger Things is largely believed to be based on Puharich’s psychic training of children at his residence, with the character Dr. Martin Brenner actually based on Puharich himself.

In a biographical sketch of Puharich by his ex-wife titled The Maverick, the existence of a “space kids” program appears to be corroborated by one of the people who knew him the best. She became concerned when she learned her and Puharich’s son Andy was participating in a bizarre project involving extraterrestrial children at her ex-husband’s property.

I had no idea what "the experimental school" entailed, and I was sick with worry about my fourteen-year-old son. But Andy's letters soon reassured me that nothing dangerous, weird or spooky was going on. On the contrary, he was really having a wonderful experience. All the kids lived by themselves at the "Turkey Farm", a house on the estate, and maintained a strict daily routine of meditation, dream telling sessions, hobby time, workouts and swimming.

They took turns cleaning the house and doing the cooking. Either Andrija or somebody else would give talks on the hazards of drugs or smoking, or any subject they felt was detrimental to the physical or emotional well being of the youngsters. Andy wrote that his father also gave interesting talks on religion, the Self, and personal growth, but that he could not always understand what daddy was talking about, because the words he used were too difficult for his limited English.

But Andy never told me what it meant to be a "space kid" until recently. If he had told me back then that each kid was hypnotized in order to go back to his "parent civilization," I would probably have flipped, and kept him home.

According to Andy, most of the kids present came from another planet. They had voluntarily returned to planet Earth to help in the raising of human consciousness. By being born as a human they had to go through the same things anyone has to go through, meaning that they could also get trapped by all the earthly distractions and forget about their true self. "That's why daddy set up that program," Andy told me, "to remind those kids of their mission in life, or at least tell them what they were, and what their mission was.

Also to help them evolve themselves, and teach them how to use the knowledge they already had. Even the child Jesus was born as a regular human being," my son continued, "and he had to evolve himself just like anyone else. As he grew up he knew that inside he had all knowledge, but that he was too trapped in his ordinary life. So he went into the desert for forty day to drop all earthly desires, to let go of self, and become a higher spirit. Buddha in fact did the same."

Such a bizarre development like the “star kids” initiative adds color to reality of the government’s involvement with the testing of children’s minds.

However, we may soon get more answers to these questions in an upcoming book by a former intelligence officer under the pseudonym Scott Andrews. A Deadline article announcing the release of this non-fiction story contains a mind-blowing summary of what to expect. Even more intriguing is that Lue Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon’s UFO program, has vouched for the author and endorsed the story’s credibility wholeheartedly.

Set to publish in 2024, the narrative outlines how Andrews came home from a mission suffering a debilitating illness and “began to experience special, inexplicable abilities such as remote viewing, and his body began to heal, baffling doctors.”

As he sought more information about his health, Andrews came across a file compiled for him by his late father. It contained records from a past he did not remember, including documents indicating he was removed from school for weeks every year, from the first through 12th grades. The records also contained a shocker, that he received an honorable discharge from the U.S Air Force and worked in space intelligence communications as a minor. Andrews maintains he has no memory of having served in the U.S Air Force.

After starting to dig into his past with an unnamed CIA doctor, Andrews began to experience symptoms of Havana syndrome and it was determined he was being hit with an exotic directed energy weapon.

With the experience of so many individuals and historical events lining up with each other, these multiple examples of government experimentation on kids might just be the tip of a truly ugly iceberg.

Wrapping Up

The reality of MKULTRA was hard to come to grips with for many, and it makes one question what aspects of those kinds of programs might still be lurking around under the surface in the private sector. If these covert features of our intelligence apparatus prove to be true, it's no wonder there are reports of threats being made to members of Congress by those who do not want this can of worms opened. In a future article I will be diving into SAIC's relationship with Lockheed Martin, their split into Leidos in 2013, and where things might stand now.

To reiterate, this article is not intended to spread conspiracy theories, but to educate individuals about the recruiting practices of the clandestine intelligence services and their contractors. I am not trying to denigrate the work of true patriots who risk their lives for our country day in and day out. I am trying to urge the more honorable among them to hold accountable thier colleagues who insist on dishonoring our institutions.

The idea that any pillar of the military-industrial complex would advertise that they specialize in international adolescent counseling services is a bizarre concept, and one I find particularly hard to explain away as anything benevolent. All of this taken in tandem with the Dr. Vespasian story, as told to Tom DeLonge by his military and intelligence advisors to his Sekret Machines project and written as "fiction," shows these anecdotes from credible individuals may be closer to reality than may be comfortable to admit.

Add in astronaut Gordon Cooper's story about NASA's “star kids,” Lue Elizondo vouching for Scott Andrews, and Puharich's inspiration for Eleven's "Papa" in Stranger Things, and Pasulka’s telling of Patty’s childhood, there seems to be a narrative forming that would likely initiate some challenging conversations about the history and present state of our intelligence community.

Perhaps some stories relegated to outrageous sci-fi Netflix series aren't as strange as they seem.

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One of the most enigmatic outstanding questions in the realm of ufology has always been the origin of the craft and intelligence seen by millions over millennia. All sorts of theories are floated, with the extraterrestrial hypothesis leading the way for some time.

The idea of humanoid lifeforms traveling to Earth from another star systems is easy to conc…

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In the past two editions of the Black Gold series, we explored the history of the American elites' covert international financial network based on looted assets funneled through banking institutions around the globe after World War II. We also examined comments from the legendary attorney Danny Sheehan about the origin of the UFO cover-up, shedding light on the dynamic between the United States government and the wealthy "robber baron" families that put their fingers on the scale of policy to benefit themselves.

We then scrutinized aspects of this network that may have had an influence on our sciences and understanding of human history by installing career intelligence officials to head up institutions like the Smithsonian Institution. We also investigated instances of American intelligence services using scientific studies as cover for more nefarious activities like biological weapons testing and even MKULTRA.

As extensive as these inquiries may seem, there are still countless questions that have gone unanswered. Although this tangled web of covert finance may still be hidden from public view, the effects of its corruption can be felt today more than ever.

To that end, this article will explore the evolution of this system in more recent years. Through rampant consolidation of defense contractors, along with the revolving door of officials between the Pentagon and private industry, the political slush fund approved by Truman after the war has become a behemoth even Congress cannot penetrate.

Before diving into the specifics, however, let's set the stage with a roadmap we can use to navigate this unrelenting labyrinth that only an army of forensic accountants would be able to make sense of.

A Helpful Roadmap

One aspect of the fiction series Sekret Machines that is somewhat unique among the literature of UFO lore is the involvement of a private financial entity in the reverse engineering of these anomalous craft. Although this series is indeed fiction, the general ideas brought to light within them are informed by the extensive experience of the authors' government advisors who held high positions of power within the US defense establishment.

This "fictional" organization, called the Maynard Consortium, is portrayed as a kind of government all to itself, conducting intelligence and military activities along with its normal everyday business obligations. When one of the board members dies after an agent of the corporation forces him to jump off his balcony at gunpoint, his daughter Jennifer assumes his position on the board, blissfully unaware of the sordid practices used to put her in that position.

As Jennifer reviews her father's financial dealings, she grows concerned about what her father may have been involved in. Money was moved between countless bank accounts all over the world. Countries known for human rights violations were the beneficiaries of massive payments from Maynard's funds. Weapons and aerospace companies received backing in nations not known to possess the kinds of programs described in the records.

The Maynard Consortium had a snappy website, brochures, and interminable files detailing its various accounts and investments, but it all seemed to end in cascades of numbers. What they were actually investing in was anybody’s guess.

The numbers were not exclusively misleading, however. Whatever that aerospace investment was, it was expensive. Billions of dollars, funneled over the last six months alone, but to fund what? Even her father’s laptop had been unable to shed light on that.

“These files make no sense,” she remarked to Deacon as she pored over them. “Most of the directories are empty, and the accounts they do show explain only about a tenth of the funding.” She sighed and then whistled. “Nigeria has a space agency? And Saudi Arabia? This is weird.”

Deacon materialized at her shoulder.

“Maynard is funding the Nigerian Space Agency?” he asked.

“And the Sri Lankan Space Agency, if you can believe that. And the ones in Bangladesh, Tunisia, and Pakistan. That’s a pretty strange list of bedfellows, even without the space agency bit.”

“But the funding levels are low,” Deacon mused, peering at the screen.

“So where is the rest of it going? And why can’t we see it?”

A bit later on, Jennifer finds a thumb drive her father had hidden. However, the data contained on it raised even more questions about the corporation's business practices.

Some of the names in the files were not companies. They were people, individuals in a variety of professions and places, which simple online searches quickly revealed: English lawyers, German financiers, Russian industrialists, even one US Senator who she remembered visiting Steadings when she was an adolescent. A “friend of her fathers.” They probably all had ties—of some sort—to SWEEP, whatever that was, and none of it had shown up in any of the Maynard group’s records or files or—for that matter—their boardroom discussions.

Whatever this "SWEEP" entity was, it seemed very important to the international money transfers that the Maynard Consortium were involved in.

The companies and their assets were always global, scattered across the world but seemingly unconnected, and they tended to melt away after a few years. Until SWEEP appeared in 1964. It looked like it grew out of a conglomeration of previous corporations, though the historical record was so tangled at this point that she couldn’t be sure.

It seemed to quietly swallow up the other companies, until it was moving hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds, euros and other currencies through the Caymans and Seychelles, through Liechtenstein, Vanuatu, Belize, and Singapore.

As I stated previously, this series of Sekret Machines books is what the authors refer to as informed fiction, the result of meetings and consultation with advisors in possession of deep knowledge spanning decades of working within the military-industrial complex.

That in itself likely makes the investigation of potential real-world versions of these narratives worth our time, and we will do so throughout the rest of this article, starting with the financial organization referred to as "SWEEP."

An International System

One of the most important aspects of this covert international financial network is the mechanism that allows it to exist and maintain its transactions. When reviewing the characteristics of this fictional "SWEEP" organization I realized that many of them line up with the history and functionality of the international banking system called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — or as it is more commonly known by its acronym, SWIFT.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift), legally S.W.I.F.T. SC, is a Belgian cooperative society providing services related to the execution of financial transactions and payments between certain banks worldwide. Its principal function is to serve as the main messaging network through which international payments are initiated…

The Swift messaging network is a component of the global payments system. Swift acts as a carrier of the "messages containing the payment instructions between financial institutions involved in a transaction". However, the organisation does not manage accounts on behalf of individuals or financial institutions, and it does not hold funds from third parties. It also does not perform clearing or settlement functions. After a payment has been initiated, it must be settled through a payment system, such as TARGET2 in Europe. In the context of cross-border transactions, this step often takes place through correspondent banking accounts that financial institutions have with each other.

As of 2018, around half of all high-value cross-border payments worldwide used the Swift network, and in 2015, Swift linked more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories, who were exchanging an average of over 32 million messages per day (compared to an average of 2.4 million daily messages in 1995).

In recent years, the financial services firm has been in the news in the context of sanctions against Russia for its activities around the globe, with some Western leaders calling for the entire country to be cut off from using the transaction messaging system. Russia was finally cut off from the service after its invasion of Ukraine last year.

The use of SWIFT as a last resort in the context of sanctions is a testament to the importance of its service to the entire international banking structure. In other words, if a solar flare were to take out the technology these transactions depend on, it's fair to speculate that the world economy could potentially come to a grinding halt.

Besides the obvious "coincidence" of the acronyms "SWIFT" and "SWEEP" both containing five letters — of which the first two are the same — the history appears to line up as well.

Throughout the history of banking, the boundary between competition and cooperation has had to be navigated; in the case of SWIFT, support for a shared network slowly gained momentum and began to achieve institutional form.

The earliest available evidence for this is in the late 1960s, when the Société Financière Européenne (SFE), a consortium of six major banks based in Luxemburg and Paris, initiated a ‘message-switching project.' By 1971, there was sufficient interest to generate sponsorship from 68 banks in 11 countries within Western Europe and North America for two feasibility studies to examine ‘the possibility of setting up a private international communications network'…

What is remarkable about the early history of SWIFT is that a “society” founded by a relatively small number of banks to reduce errors and increase efficiency in inter-bank payments, evolved into a broader industry cooperative and became an unexpected network phenomenon.

The notion of a network effect was not part of the consciousness of those involved in the original SWIFT project during the 1970s. Their focus was solely on creating an entity, a closed society, to bind members together in an organizational form that would enforce standards designed to create efficiencies in transactions between the member banks.

The use of the phrase "closed society" as the original objective of SWIFT is quite interesting, and brings to mind the "breakaway civilization" hypotheses promoted by authors like Richard Dolan and Joseph Farrell. The fact that such a close-knit group of banking institutions was at the inception of this cooperative may lead one to wonder if these original members could have insulated themselves inside the system as it expanded, with each additional layer of seemingly legitimate growth providing the ability for more potential obfuscation of funds.

Given the international nature of the money recipients by the fictional Maynard Consortium in Sekret Machines, and the insinuation by Jennifer that "they probably all had ties—of some sort—to SWEEP," I think the SWIFT banking system is likely the leading contender for the organization being referred to in the series.

But now that we've established the most likely candidate for the mechanism that moves the money around, let's now turn to the possible real-life organization that could be represented by the Maynard Consortium.

Private Compartmentalization

As I've stated previously, one of the major factors that establish the Maynard Consortium as something more than just a banking organization is the extensive ties they appear to have within the covert world of international espionage. One of the main characters, named Morat, conducts mercenary missions on Maynard's behalf. The prevalence of doctors and scientists involved in these same activities under the employ of the Consortium suggests a private intelligence firm may be one of the company's subsidiaries.

After researching some of the largest conglomerates in the world and comparing relationships to the defense sector throughout the past decades, one of them stood out, particularly in the context of the UFO cover-up. Although the Maynard Consortium portrayed in the Sekret Machines books is a British corporation, I believe the international finance aspect of this scenario and the fictional nature of the series certainly allows for the possibility that they represent an asset management company based in the United States.

The organization that kept popping up time and time again throughout my research is a massive private equity firm with deep ties to the defense establishment known as the Carlyle Group.

Carlyle features many of the same names we have talked about in previous editions of this series, which may come as no surprise to the reader. The Bush family and those around them are major players, with George H. W. Bush being a top advisor to Carlyle for years. The company was by and large a top landing spot for many retired intelligence and military officials, harkening back to the good old days of strong ties between Wall Street and the OSS.

One of Carlyle's first defense acquisitions, and the most important to the story within the context of the UFO cover-up, was of the technical services firm Braddock, Dunn, and McDonald (BDM). BDM provided consulting services for military and intelligence throughout the US defense agencies, mostly to the Army at first in the 1960s.

An interesting meeting happened at the BDM McLean secure facility in 1985 when what is known as the Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group convened in a SCIF to create a plan for the study of the UFO phenomenon. Individuals present at the meeting included Hal Puthoff, John Alexander, Bert Stubblebine, Jack Houck, and many others with backgrounds in physics and aerospace engineering. When individuals hailing from corporations such as McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, and Boeing meet with individuals who ran Project StarGate and the ice president of BDM, it's fair to say that the discussion around anomalous phenomena that took place was likely a very serious one.

Five years after this meeting about UFOs with top-tier aerospace engineers and BDM executives, BDM was acquired by Carlyle in 1990. Two years later, BDM purchased another company that may be represented in the Sekret Machines series as the private intelligence firm under Maynard's control.

1992, BDM acquired a company called Vinnell. Vinnell was a defense logistics firm with strong ties to Saudi Arabia, having signed their first contract with the country in 1975 where they were hired to train troops for the Saudi military.

Journalist Dan Briody describes the history of Vinnell in the context of their acquisition by BDM and Carlyle in his book The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group.

In 1992, the time came to combine their newfound successes, when BDM, by then already under Carlyle's ownership, bought a little-known company of ambiguous ownership named Vinnell. The deal would marry Carlyle's burgeoning expertise in defense with its incipient relationships in the Middle East. And it would forever strengthen the political ties between two of the world's most powerful countries.

Vinnell is the clearest example of Carlyle's business inside the Iron Triangle. It combines all of the necessary elements of the military, government, and big business, in one neat, utterly secretive package. Vinnell defines the term war profiteer, a private company that trains foreign militaries in times of need, and would ultimately make Carlyle an insidious force inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Vinnell is yet another company with a highly controversial past that Carlyle snapped up, only to heighten its questionable legacy. Vinnell's history, before, during, and after Carlyle owned it, is a litany of covert operations, mercenary missions, and cover-ups: right up Carlyle's alley. Carlyle, it seemed, was building an entire portfolio of controversy, and Vinnell was the early centerpiece.

One of Briody's sources, a former board member of Vinnell, describes what went on at the top of the company, hinting at a dynamic echoing theories of the breakaway civilization written about by Dolan and Farrell.

According to one former board member of Vinnell, who wishes to remain anonymous, Vinnell had been a cover for the CIA for decades. Dating all the way back to 1975, the company was gathering intelligence on behalf of the U.S. government, by infiltrating the Saudi National Guard under the specious guise of military trainers. The board member also says that though the company was supposed to be nothing more than a front for covert intelligence gathering, the darn thing started making money…

According to this board member, even after BDM purchased Vinnell in 1992, there was very little anyone on the board did in overseeing Vinnell. Board members met regularly, but rarely was anything acted upon. The company that seemed to run itself was, in fact, being run by someone else.

Vinnell sounds exactly like the intelligence service in Sekret Machines — and at the very least, demonstrates the shadowy nature of international banking and intelligence activity within a private investment firm with deep ties to the defense industry.

To be fair, the Maynard Consortium depicted in Sekret Machines as having reverse-engineered UFO technology could be any of a number of elite private equity firms. However, I personally believe the dynamic between Carlyle, BDM, and Vinnell — along with BDM's proven interest in the UFO phenomenon — makes them the most likely candidates.

Considering Vinnell was sold to TRW and is now part of Northrop Grumman, it's hard not to imagine what has happened in the years since.

Hopefully, we'll find out soon enough.

It's always been an intriguing thought experiment to consider whether or not ancient civilizations on our planet may have been more advanced than we currently understand. The glaring lack of evidence for these postulations has pushed such theories to the fringe, with mainstream archaeology dismissing outright the work of authors like Graham Hancock.

The academic consensus is that ancient texts are meant to be taken metaphorically, and any suggestion that the events described within them could possibly be based on actual historical developments invites nothing but ridicule. This is besides the fact that it objectively seems even more absurd to believe that the authors of these texts, spread across the world, all decided to conspire in their writings as if they intended their work to be decoded as a puzzle by their descendants.

In my opinion, Occam's razor points to these texts describing real events. Sure, they may be described in symbology and hyperbole, but the basic narratives appear to line up in a way that is undeniable.

But what if these civilizations, seemingly so separate geologically, shared something much more fundamental than just these similar stories?

In a recent interview with Polygon promoting his new "informed fiction" UFO movie, Monsters of California, Tom DeLonge made some very interesting claims. Keeping in mind the knowledge provided to him by his military and intelligence community advisors, his words about ancient civilizations in particular caught my attention.

Tom suggests our ancestors may have been more advanced than we currently understand in response to a question about life after death.

Most civilizations celebrated it because they had a larger understanding of how the universe worked. I think that ancient civilizations were far more advanced than we give them credit for. And I think that their understanding of consciousness in particular is what we’re finally rediscovering now.

Obviously, the definition of consciousness in our current paradigm is far from pinned down, but DeLonge's comments here do beg the question of what the correlation is with the advancement of civilization.

For the most part, our culture currently measures a civilization’s level of development by the sophistication of its technology. However, as DeLonge's Sekret Machines co-author Peter Levenda likes to point out, our level of technology does not equate to our understanding of science. Science and technology are not synonymous even though they are portrayed that way more often than not.

In my view, technology is a tool to interface with the universe in a way that is helpful to us, and science is the practice of implementing experiments to explain how the universe works. Technology may help us complete more robust investigations and record them in more detail, but it is not representative of a deeper understanding of nature in and of itself.

The question then becomes whether or not advancements in technology are required for our species to further our understanding of the universe. We know that the Minoans used "star paths" to navigate trade routes in the Mediterranean Sea as early as 2600 BC, so clearly their understanding of their maritime environment didn't require modern-day conveniences like GPS or radio communications. Who's to say the ancients wouldn't consider such contraptions a distraction, in contrast with many modern sailors unable to imagine voyaging without them?

DeLonge's emphasis on consciousness being the mechanism behind the ancients' advancement is also worth examining. If a more evolved culture had no need for technological gadgets to accomplish certain tasks then there would be no archaeological record of them because they did not exist in the first place.

But the question remains: at what point was this transition made?

The Cultural Catalyst

If we take the idea of "consciousness" being the missing link in our connection with the universe at face value, along with our resulting reliance on increasingly advanced technology, it is fair to ask at what juncture this connection was lost and why. For me, an interesting place to start would be around the Neolithic revolution about 11,000 years ago.

Those familiar with Graham Hancock's theories probably know where I'm headed with this one. Hancock proposes that a more advanced civilization lived alongside humanity and taught us agriculture during this time period, approximately at the end of the last ice age.

His theories have been attacked and discredited in a somewhat overly aggressive manner by mainstream archaeology, likely because of his insistence that the establishment is covering something that they find absurd. I would like to see this angle dropped by Hancock myself, but controversy attracts attention and the guy is trying to sell books so I don't expect him to any time soon.

Hancock's percieved obnoxiousness aside, the main argument against his theory is that there is no trace of this advanced civilization existing at the same time as we did. His critics insist there would be some sign of a technologically advanced culture in the archaeological record if these "gods" were interacting with humanity, as documented by ancient texts from around the world.

This is where both Hancock and his critics may be making illogical assumptions. The current argument is based on the idea that this theorized advanced civilization would be assisting us for altruistic reasons. This is the "love and light," "alien brothers" belief system that has been exploited by charlatans throughout ufology for decades.

In the real world, organisms usually do things that benefit themselves and their evolution. It is for this reason I find it strange that ulterior motives for a hypothesized advanced culture teaching humanity complex concepts like agriculture and astronomy are not considered.

Perhaps the benefits of agriculture are not all they're cracked up to be. A recent study on the impact the domestication of animals has had on our DNA through disease is striking.

Human civilization as we know it would not exist were it not for farm animals. But neither, it seems, would many major illnesses in human history.

For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence that the domestication and husbandry of livestock coincided with the rise of animal-borne diseases, like the plague (Yersinia pestis) and louse-borne relapsing fever (LBRF).

Archaeologists have long suspected that as nomadic hunter-gatherers in Eurasia began to settle into large, pastoral communities around 12,000 years ago, the risk of pathogens jumping from animals to humans would have increased.

Recent advances in ancient DNA analysis have finally allowed experts to put that hypothesis to the test.

Sifting through 405 billion DNA sequences collected from 1,313 ancient human remains from across Eurasia, an international team of researchers led by geogeneticist Martin Sikora at the University of Copenhagen has identified numerous genes belonging to microbes.

Their sweeping search for pathogen DNA provided sufficient detail for a 12,500-year-long timeline on the emergence and spread of major human diseases.

The team's results are not yet peer-reviewed, but according to a pre-print paper, a substantial fraction of these microbes came from external, environmental sources, like animals.

While many microbes that infect humans remained steady throughout the sample period, zoonotic diseases – where pathogens spread to humans from animals or vice versa – were only detected from around 6,500 years ago.

In fact, the bacterium that causes the plague, which also lives in small rodents and fleas, and the pathogen that causes LBRF, which lives in lice, were both undetectable in human remains until around 6,000 years ago – a time that broadly coincides with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies.

From that point on, zoonotic microbial DNA was consistently detected in the genomes of the ancient human remains studied.

It's interesting to note here that the Old Testament itself is divided into antediluvian and post-diluvian lifespans, and that agriculture started at the time soon after the flood as described in ancient texts from around the world. Biblical figures Adam and Noah are described as living up to around 950 years, while the life expectancy of men written about after the flood, like Abraham and Isaac, dropped to around 180 years.

Taken together, one could speculate that if an advanced civilization with knowledge of microbiology taught mankind agriculture, the ultimate goal could have been to lower their lifespan through the spread of zoonotic viruses.

Highly speculative, to be sure, but do we do what we do to our domesticated livestock for their benefit? If we could find a way to maximize their output for sustenance (or profit) we would do so, as has been the case for centuries.

But where are the signs of this advanced civilization, as Hancock's critics demand?

Everlasting Evidence

Hancock's detractors appear to expect evidence of his claims to manifest in the way of a transistor inside a sarcophagus. Funnily enough, when the former director of the Pentagon's UFO program, Luis Elizondo, spoke about materials being found with isotopes not yet able to be produced by nature or human science, he equated such a discovery to a 747 being found in King Tut's tomb.

However, in a separate interview, Elizondo also introduced a thought experiment when it came to an advanced civilization leaving its mark on humanity and the planet we inhabit.

You know, near-Earth celestial bodies like the moon, where you don’t have atmospheric friction. You don’t have the tectonic processes that we have here on Earth that are constantly cycling. Someone might want to put something on the moon, reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where you have these monolithic markers. That’s certainly one way to do it. 

You know, you could put something where you don’t have those same processes occurring where maybe you might be able to extend your time twice as long for leaving some sort of archaeological evidence. The evidence could be right here. It could be right in front of us. It could be within genetic sequencing. It could be even more obvious than that, it could be the very fact that we’re alive and we’re on this planet is an example of some intelligent life, somewhere, making a decision that life needs to exist on this planet. 

We need to be open to all of that, we really do. I think we need to cast a very wide net, and this is why we say all options have to be on the table until they’re not on the table, because you might be surprised. Something that’s super, super intelligent probably isn’t going to build a pyramid that’s only going to last, you know, 20,000 years. They’re going to do something that’s far more enduring that will really be, no kidding, many, many years.

Elizondo's insistence that DNA would be the place to look instead of monoliths is a very interesting thought in the context of the introduction of zoonotic viruses into the human genetic code. Teaching us agriculture was one practical way to accomplish that, as unexciting as that may be to imagine in terms of a non-human intelligence intervening in our evolution.

It's also at junctures like these in my research that I find it very interesting that individuals like Elizondo and Dr. Garry Nolan, who both have backgrounds in microbiology and immunology, have been asked to lead efforts on researching different aspects of the UFO phenomenon. Considering the highly specialized aerospace experts and astrophysicists usually consulted in this arena, I always find connections to individuals with expertise in microorganisms to be fascinating.

So could the evidence for this advanced civilization hypothesized by Hancock be restricted to an individual's DNA, or is there more earthly evidence that can be located outside the human organism?

Weapons of Past Destruction

These days, anyone who turns on the news for five minutes can see that our technological and spiritual evolution as a species is way out of balance. War, and the global arms races they require, show that the catalyst for developing each major advancement is almost always for the ultimate goal of inflicting the most death and destruction possible.

Dual-use technology — that is, technology that can be used for both military and civilian applications — is a major dilemma nations currently face. Drones, nuclear energy, and artificial intelligence are just a few examples of advancements that can be beneficial to humanity in previously unimaginable ways.

This appears to also be one of the biggest stumbling blocks when it comes to the secrecy behind UFOs. The propulsion mechanism witnessed by military pilots and radar operators has been described as beyond next-generation technology.

The ability to harness this kind of energy would be invaluable to our species in countless ways, but the idea of such a powerful technology getting into the hands of "bad actors" is worrisome enough to keep it hidden away in black programs indefinitely.

The world has dealt with the same dynamic regarding nuclear weapons. Interestingly, there are signs in ancient texts that point to recent history not being humanity's first rodeo with such an existential threat.

Readings of sections within the Bhagavad Gita could be interpreted as describing a nuclear war long before the Manhattan Project came into existence. Weapons known as astras are detailed in the Hindu epics, specifically the Mahabharata.

A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe... An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its splendour...it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race. The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable.  Their hair and nails fell out, pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected.  To escape from this fire, the soldiers threw themselves into the river.

The leader of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoted the Bhagavad Gita as he watched the first Trinity bomb go off, muttering, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” When asked if Trinity was the first ever nuclear detonation, he responded that it was "in modern times."

An article in the Times of India reflects on more recent archaeological findings potentially supporting the idea of an ancient nuclear war.

In the territory of Rajasthan in northwestern India, a layer of exceptionally radioactive cinder was found close Jodhpur, which was sufficient to warrant an examination. Afterward, the old remnants of Harappa toward the north and Mohenjo-Daro toward the west were uncovered in Pakistan, where proof of an atomic blast going back a great many years prior was found.

Mohenjo-Daro was worked around 2500 BC and was rediscovered during the 1920s. The site experienced noteworthy unearthings from that point forward.

At the point when the exhuming achieved road level, 44 skeletons were found dissipated all through the city, spread in the city, proposing that they had endured an unexpected and rough passing.

Certain zones of the site additionally indicated expanded dimensions of radioactivity.

English Indian analyst David Davenport observed proof of what gave off an impression of being the impact epicenter: a 50-yard sweep at the site, where all articles were found to have been intertwined and glassified—rocks had been dissolved by temperatures of around 1500 degrees C and transformed into a glass-like substance.

In his book, “Conundrums of Ancient History,” A. Gorbovsky says that no less than one skeleton found at the site contained in excess of multiple times the dimension of radiation that it ought to have had, and a huge number of “dark stones,” which were once mud vessels, were discovered combined because of extraordinary warmth.

Davenport additionally clarified that what was found at Mohenjo-Daro emulates precisely the impacts of the fallout that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki amid the twentieth century.

The idea of a nuclear war in ancient times might seem outlandish, but the language used in the Bhagavad Gita is hard to ignore.

In this context, further hints from DeLonge may also be relevant. As I’ve mentioned previously, he suggests that the UFO phenomenon may actually be interested in our nuclear assets for reasons other than self-preservation and concern for the planet in an interview with Linda Moulton Howe.

My advisory group said that there are various ‘gods’ competing with each other and competing through mankind with different religions. I do know that even as close as 36 months ago UFOs were shutting down our nuclear weapons in the oceans.

I don’t feel comfortable giving any more detail than that but what I do think is important here is that this hasn’t gone away. Do they not want nuclear weapons because if the nuclear weapons go off it can kill them? Or do they not want nuclear weapons happening because it contaminates the DNA of mankind and they’re trying to farm us for whatever reason they’re farming us for?

Considering what we’ve discussed about the possibility of an ancient nuclear war, along with the countless descriptions of flying disks and other aerial phenomena mentioned in the Hindu epics, DeLonge’s comments here imply a non-human intelligence may have learned a few lessons long ago.

If they are indeed “farming” us as DeLonge suggests, it is fair to wonder whether the Neolithic Revolution was initiated by the teaching of agricultural practices inflicted previously upon our own species.

This additionally brings a whole new meaning to self-domestication, a concept many anthropologists theorize we are a product of.

Unparalled Power

Returning once more to the concept of "consciousness" — and what DeLonge could mean by this in terms of the advanced nature of ancient cultures — let's dive into one of the more speculative theories I've come across in my research.

Author and researcher Joseph P. Farrell has laid out an expansive theory on the history of our species that has been spread over several books covering countless ancient texts along with several more recent works. Drilling into one of the more consequential aspects of his hypothesis known as the "Cosmic War," we find supporting evidence for an ancient advanced culture of interstellar capabilities that has attempted to pass on knowledge through certain networks of secret societies.

I will present his main hypothesis of the Cosmic War here, as it could present a solid example of what DeLonge is talking about when he speaks of the ancients using consciousness as opposed to common technology to advance their civilization. I will not dive into the deep specifics as I could never do them justice, and would recommend reading his books on the topics in full.

Farrell writes of the Tablets of Destinies, a Mesopotamian mythological tablet that gave whoever possessed it supreme authority as the ruler of the universe. He posits that pieces of this tablet may physically exist somewhere on the planet and speculates as to what "powers" certain aspects of it might possess.

Grounded both in the ancient texts and a modern physics interpretation of them, the Tablets of Destinies were most likely crystals of some sort through which light or other electromagnetic energy was beamed, and these crystals contained information. This information was the “holographic” interferometric “grating” or “interference pattern”, Bearden’s quantum potential “template of action,” the scalar signatures, of almost every celestial body considered important in, to, and by the civilization of the “gods.”

These priceless catalogues were, moreover, compiled relative to our own solar system as their physical frame of reference. Additionally, they included within their catalogue of “gratings” or “templates” the “subtle influences” – as an impressed dynamic – of consciousness. They most likely worked best, therefore, when interfaced – by means now lost and unknown to us – with an intelligent and conscious user.

This catalogue of interferometric gratings, based on longitudinal waves in the medium, was thus the central component of any communications system that held together their vast and interstellar empire, since only the gratings themselves allowed one to select the system with which one wished to communicate.

Similarly, these interferometric gratings were the central components in any weapon system designed to target celestial bodies from a great distance. Finally, the catalogue which was the Tablets of Destinies also likely included numerous gratings or templates of emotional states, which could also be impressed into targets from a great distance.

If this speculative hypothesis concerning the Tablets of Destinies is true, then it constitutes an explanation that explains why their theft at various times

• Broke down communications between the solar system and other parts of their empire;

• Caused the “gods’” extreme concern that they would no longer be able to rule because of their lack of ability to continue to manipulate their subjects mentally and emotionally;

• Conferred hegemony to whomever possessed them not only for the above reasons, but because they allowed the targeting of scalar weapons of mass destruction at great distance.

In short, The Tablets of Destinies were the “software" gratings of phase conjugate mirrors for almost every celestial body that was considered important to them, that held their empire together, and made their scalar-and “electro-acoustic”-based communications and weapons systems work.

These tablets containing certain powerful physical properties in and of themselves have been a theme in Tom DeLonge's Sekret Machines "informed fiction" series as well, with these stones responsible for the propulsion system of the craft that can only be described as a UFO.

Throughout the series, tablets that had been glowing blue and recovered by the Nazi SS were found during archaeological excavations in Crete, and it is insinuated that having control of these stones would grant those in possession of them unparalleled power.

To me, this Tablet of Destinies may be what DeLonge is referring to in both his comments in his recent interview as well as his Sekret Machines books. This also may be what Elizondo means by "finding a 747 in King Tut's tomb." Furthermore, this may also be the reason archaeologists have found no evidence of "technology" left behind by an advanced civilization as we currently expect to see it, as the technology looks exactly like an ancient artifact.

Because it is.

Time travel is an concept that has perplexed me for a while now in terms of its practicality. Over decades of science fiction entertainment the novelty of the "time machine" has been explored exhaustively.

Movies like Back to the Future and Safety Not Guaranteed have used it as a plot device without getting into the weeds with the physics, itself an academic debate that seems to get more confusing the more I try to understand it. This is especially true when it comes to the subject of unidentified anomalous phenomena, which we will address in a minute.

Even movies like Tenet from the acclaimed director Christopher Nolan, which does its best to integrate technical theories into the narrative, are considered unscientific. After spending two decades writing the script and consulting with theoretical physicists such as Kip Thorne, Nolan himself stated in an interview that "we're not going to make any case for this being scientifically accurate."

Tenet deals primarily with entropy, the notion that information over time becomes more disorganized. The movie is based on the idea — specifically when it comes to weapons — that if you can reverse entropy, then you can reverse time as we understand it. The Los Angeles Times interviewed Imperial College London theoretical physicist Claudia De Rham on how accurate the concepts displayed in the movie actually were.

For most laws of physics, there’s a time symmetry. Anything that can move forwards, you can think of it moving backwards. Entropy is the only thing we experience — so we associate it with the way we experience time — in one direction.

As a whole, entropy always increases as opposed to decreasing. So you can imagine an alternate world where entropy always decreases and everything goes the other way as opposed to us. People in the alternate world would be living the other way. That’s fine by itself, but when you start making the interaction and making contact with that world then it doesn’t make sense from a physical point of view.

I can definitely concur with her on that last sentence, as the hardest thing to imagine would be how these physics would play out in the real world. Theoretical concepts of reversed time are definitely a challenge to portray visually, and Nolan does his best to demonstrate what it would look like in our physical reality.

As we extrapolate this train of thought into the relationship with the UFO phenomenon, I urge the reader to envision these concepts as one of the characters in Tenet urges the protagonist to do while explaining the functionality of "inverted" bullets:

"Don't try to understand it. Feel it."

The Antarctic Veil

The idea of time running backwards, and time travel in general, has been posited by several individuals who have sources within the government privy to more information than the average person on the reality of UFOs.

Blink-182 guitarist and To The Stars founder Tom DeLonge, known to have government advisors deep within the military and intelligence communities, was asked about an article in New Scientist regarding a recent study in Antarctica describing a potential scenario very similar to ideas he had alluded to in the past.

The article itself describes a series of balloon experiments on the continent that had provided strange results, lacking any real explanation that could be derived from currently known physics.

That strange finding was made in 2016. Since then, all sorts of suggestions rooted in known physics have been put forward to account for the perplexing signal, and all have been ruled out. What’s left is shocking in its implications. Explaining this signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same big bang as our own and existing in parallel with it. In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards. It is perhaps the most mind-melting idea ever to have emerged from the Antarctic ice ­­– but it might just be true.

When asked about this discovery, DeLonge's somewhat cryptic answer seemed to show he found it important to the study of UFOs.

I so wish I could tell you what I know about that, and I can't. It's a very big deal to the UFO subject, but I can't get into it. Well, what if the physics are opposite, time is opposite, and technological advancement is opposite? Think about that. It's a big deal and stay on this. Do not think this is just a cool little thing. Stay on it, that's all I've got to say.

Unsurprisingly, a Google search for "Antarctica Parallel Universe" brings up countless articles disputing the original story in New Scientist. These articles state that the scientists involved in the study never put forward that specific theory, and that the framing of the findings was incorrect and outlandish.

This might be true, but the fact remains that the hypothetical "anti-universe" is one of the few hypotheses that could sufficiently explain the findings regardless of how on the fringe it may sound. Almost a decade later, there is still no plausible explanation for why neutrinos detected by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) appeared to be coming from the Earth's surface itself.

However, one of the more open-minded articles from Astronomy.com admits that a parallel universe made of anti-matter may be a possible explanation.

Scientists reasoned that ANITA’s anomalies should also have produced signals in IceCube, and those signals could reveal the deep-space source of the particles. But after eight years’ worth of data was searched, the mystery remained: The exhaustive analysis turned up no matches.

“If the ANITA signal was astrophysical, then we should be able to detect it in IceCube — and we did not,” says physicist Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who works on the neutrino observatory.

The new findings, published March in The Astrophysical Journal, mean scientists have to continue looking for less obvious explanations. Some have proposed that the anomalies arose from radio waves bouncing through caverns or buried lakes in the ice.

Other theorists proposed more exotic ideas, such as that the heavy, high-energy particles in line with ANITA’s data may describe one candidate for dark matter — the mysterious stuff that’s believed to make up 85 percent of the matter in the universe but has never been detected. Still others hypothesize that the exotic particles fit an existing theoretical model of a parallel universe — one that is symmetric to ours, but populated with antimatter and running backward."

Another knowledgable individual, former AATIP director Luis Elizondo, has spoken about anti-matter in the context of the UFO phenomenon. When asked about hypothetical beings existing in frequencies we can't observe with our human-made sensors, he takes the thought experiment a bit further.

There's all sorts of anecdotal information to suggest that it may not even be just frequencies. There was a time in the universe where scientists speculate where the amount of matter and anti-matter in the universe, it could have gone the other way. We live in a world that we called all of this matter, but it could have been anti-matter that wound up winning out.

Life could have evolved exactly like it is now except it's the opposite of matter, in a sense that it's anti-matter — we would be living in an anti-matter world. Maybe the world we live in now is the anti-matter world, we just call it the matter world because we don't know what else to call it. My point being is that there's a lot of possibilities of reality.

As we unpack this quote from Elizondo and its relationship to our current conversation, we’re left with several intriguing questions.

• If there is a parallel anti-matter universe with potentially advanced life forms, what would that mean in terms of the UFO phenomenon?

• How would these lifeforms traverse to our own universe, and could hopping universal timelines be considered time travel in the classic Hollywood sense?

• What would these craft need to be capable of to do this?

The logistics of these hypotheticals are complicated, but I believe the ramifications of this scenario are definitely worth exploring.

Alternate Timelines

In another interview, DeLonge provides some more clues regarding these mechanisms and the potential reason for these beings to be crossing over in the first place. When talking about the way certain geographic areas tend to be hotspots for paranormal activity, he describes these UFOs as a "time displacement craft," fitting in with his previous description of a parallel timeline.

What interests me is that I think it gives us a potential pathway to discuss some alternate candidates for where they're from, what they're doing, or how it all works. I think most people like to think of UFOs as they're coming from another planet…the data doesn't seem to suggest that.

Really it's more what's happening at Skinwalker, where it seems like it's more about frequencies and dimensions, or they materialize. It's almost like they're displacement craft that displaces our time like a submarine would in the ocean. That was a lot of what Dr. Hal Puthoff worked on at AATIP, was understanding the attributes of the propulsion and the science that they're using.

I think once you think about UFOs using that kind of a technology, then it's kind of like, well if they do that then that means there's things that are adjacent to us that we don't see, we don't understand, but are like right here and every once in a while they can kind of cross over. Is it because we're aware of it and can see it and that opens it, or is it because it's a geomagnetic area where those types of things have an easier time coming through? Or is it everywhere and we just think it's in one location? I don't know.

The idea that certain areas on Earth are more prone to display these types of phenomena — usually places where magnetic anomalies exist — has always interested me. The fact that these specific coordinates may be easier entry points for a "displacement craft" from another timeline to enter our own would make sense if paranormal events are reported frequently in the vicinity.

• Could Antarctica be a similar hotspot where the veil to this anti-matter universe is more thin, and therefore easier to traverse timelines?

• Could the neutrinos detected by ANITA from the surface of the ice — instead of the cosmos — be indicative of that?

• If time displacement is indeed the mechanism through which these anomalies manifest themselves, why would they want to make their way here and interact with our species?

According to DeLonge, our technological development might hold the answer to this question.

Another baffling concept brought up by DeLonge is his comments regarding the technological cycle of a species. From our standpoint, technological development is clearly linear as systems get more complex, efficient, and smaller.

Humanity has only recently entered its information age within the past century. On a parallel timeline, however, our own species would be much more advanced. DeLonge explains a bit more in his interview last year with Steve-O.

The significance of UFOs has multiple parts. Number one, it's not what you think it is. It's not coming from other planets. The evidence doesn't suggest that. The reason is because time is parallel. It's not linear, time is side by side. It means everything in the past and the future is existing in this moment but within different frequencies. So a civilization at the end of their technological cycle could build a submarine that changes its voltage and materializes in that same location, just into our timeline.

In a hypothetical anti-matter universe existing on a reverse timeline, the further back into our past one traverses, the more advanced this species' technology would be. A species initially discovering this technology would likely use it frequently at first due to the novelty, which would explain the rise in UFO sightings in recent years if they are approaching the time of their own invention on their backwards timeline.

Enter the Swarm

Another major aspect of DeLonge's theories is that the UFO phenomenon itself has a hive mind. This science fiction trope has been explored in depth, but one theory I've been looking into makes the argument that the linking of humanity's brains into one "superorganism" is necessary for humanity's survival.

Lt. Col. Thomas Bearden posits that in order to survive our own human nature of developing technology coupled with inherent selfishness, the only way to avoid total self-destruction is to become one single hive mind. He suggests that the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon is representative of that, which sounds similar to what DeLonge hypothesized.

Thus for the unlinked, fifth-stage technological species, there are only two alternatives. First, and more likely, its intraspecies conflict will simply reach critical mass and the species will convulsively destroy itself and its biosphere. Humanity may be within 25 years or less of this asymptote. Second, and less likely, the species may link into a sixth-stage superbeing and eliminate its internal competition, friction, and suicidal bent. Linkage appears extremely unlikely unless outside assistance and intervention are received.

That “outside assistance,” in Bearden’s opinion, is the influence the UFO phenomenon may have on our species. He suggests the non-human intelligence behind this craft are a sixth-stage superbeing — or a hive mind, as DeLonge posits — and they are here in an attempt to make us in their image.

Granted even the tiniest probability of linkage, so many trials on so many planets have occurred that the probability of at least one success approaches closer to certainty by far than the discriminatory accuracy of the data assumptions used to set up the estimation. From the window viewpoint alone, one can essentially assign a probability of unity to the assumption that the UFO phenomena represent the contact of the human species with a sixth-stage being.

Thus the UFO phenomena can be fitted to the hypothesis that they represent the prenatal care of the earthman by a linked Superbeing, in preparation for the forthcoming linkage of the human species and the birth of another linked superbeing. To paraphrase Shakespeare, indeed there may be stranger things in heaven and earth than we have dreamt of in our philosophies.

This took a quick left turn, as is somewhat tradition when quoting Bearden. But let’s look now at a few intriguing questions his writing raises.

• So if the UFO phenomenon has a hive mind as DeLonge asserts, could they be “devolving” from this superorganism Bearden states is an essential evolutionary step for humanity’s survival?

• Considering the inevitable annihilation of both universes such a matter/anti-matter reaction would entail, are they attempting to communicate with us in an attempt to avoid mutual destruction if our timelines somehow converge?

• Was there an intentional seeding of technology to the human race through UFO crashes over decades, in the hope that we would link our brains in time to prevent some sort of catastrophe ending both of our existences?

It may sound as if we are returning to the beginning of this article in terms of science fiction entertainment, but taking these thought experiments to their logical conclusions is something that may turn out to be beneficial when study such a complex phenomenon.

If there is a negative aspect to UFOs — and all signs currently point to this being the case — then perhaps exploring these types of ideas will turn out to be beneficial for our collective acceptance of whatever the truth behind this reality might be, even if it’s something far different than the hypotheses put forward here.

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To me, one of the most fascinating and unnerving aspects of the paranormal is the idea of discarnate forces of energy acting upon the physical reality we inhabit on an everyday basis. Whether these enigmatic episodes are caused by "invisible" beings inhabiting imperceptible frequencies, sporadic telekinetic manifestations, or some other unknown anomalous mechanism, the poltergeist phenomenon has been reported all over the world for millennia.

Many are familiar with the term "poltergeist" from the titular film franchise that began with the 1982 film of the same name written by Steven Spielberg. Though the movie was lauded by critics such as Roger Ebert for its focus on how these bizarre incidents affected the family experiencing them instead of gratuitous special effects, the concept of departed spirits as the source of these hauntings was a tad predictable and campy for others.

When researching tales of real-life poltergeist events, the latter may seem like an even more justified opinion. Many of these reports detail much more horrific circumstances than some R-rated spooky ghost stories could communicate to an audience.

However, it goes without saying that most of these reports have been brushed off by the public — and especially the scientific community — as either hoaxes, delusions, or misinterpretations of prosaic occurrences, such as memories of dreams.

Any stigma associated with the UFO phenomenon can be considered minuscule compared to the discussion of poltergeist-like incidents, at least in Western cultures. The idea of funded studies into such an absurd-sounding horror trope would no doubt be a non-starter in virtually every modern-day academic institution.

But that hasn't always been the case. For a time, some serious people put a lot of thought into these cases and came up with some rather intriguing theories.

Not What We Think They Are

Always one to jump headfirst into controversial explanations for the world that surrounds us, Blink-182 guitarist and founder of To The Stars Tom DeLonge connected poltergeist experiences to aspects of human consciousness in an interview back in 2022.

DeLonge cited some examples of studies conducted by a university laboratory decades ago to make the point that the initial reaction of the observer may influence the intensity of the activity's escalation.

There's a consciousness aspect to this. You have to think of consciousness, it's like the mind of God. It's not a dude in a toga, with a crown of thorns making Jupiter, you know? It's like everything you see is one band of frequencies. The highest frequency is light, unified mind. The lowest frequency would be blackness, and absence of love. Physical matter is somewhere right in the middle. So you have the ability to tune up higher or tune down lower. Behavior, and all these things in time — it all comes together.

What it means is that your brain is what's called a transducer. You're an antenna. So you create matter, and when you think something it creates it. You're not reactionary to your environment, you're actually proactive and you just don't know it. So it really matters what you choose to see and feel because that's literally what's being created for you, and people don't know this. When you're like really into some crazy shit, the universe will start creating things and we just think it's paranormal.

For example, at UCLA they were studying poltergeist events, and they found out that… if you see a book move on the shelf and it scares the shit out of you, that book will then fly off the shelf and try and hit you. So the more scared you get the more shit starts happening, and they didn't know why. Well the reason is you're a transducer of your environment. You're an antenna plugging into all these frequencies, and once you go, "Oh, that book is moving," it'll move.

Our universe, it's just not what we think it is. The whole thing with UFOs is that they're fucking around with us because of that. I would not think of a UFO as a vehicle which aliens are going to travel in….these are more like entities.

The idea that the human body and brain are a transducer of certain frequencies related to consciousness is not new. Ancient civilizations, through their texts and rituals, have described these kinds of vibrational planes of existence and wisdom for all of recorded history. It may be because of these long-held spiritual beliefs that science has resisted any serious inquiry into what our modern paradigm considers to be "paranormal.”

As I mentioned earlier, however, there are a few times when these phenomena have been thoroughly investigated. The scientists behind UCLA studies cited by DeLonge in his interview did attempt to document and formulate theories on poltergeist events, as briefly as the university allowed them to continue.

An Emergent Property

Around the same time as the legendary Stanford Research Institute remote viewing program was getting started, the University of California, Los Angeles, was beginning its research into the realm of parapsychology.

From 1969-1978, UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute (NIP) conducted studies and even trained subjects in psi phenomena. The lab also researched anomalous events at the locations where they happened — surely a proposition that would give the head of any university's administration an aneurysm if asked for today.

An interview with one of the lab's researchers, Dr. Barry Taff, provides some intriguing insight into the cases of the time and the resulting theories that were postulated. In an interview with the website Reality Sandwich, Dr. Taff explains why these poltergeist events — of which he has studied over 4,000 — may not have such a ghostly origin after all.

In defining what he refers to as Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis, or RSPK, Taff starts by explaining the difference between microscopic and macroscopic scales of telekinesis and the connection to human consciousness for each.

There are two types of psychokinesis (moving physical objects around without physical means). There’s microscopic, which works on very small scales, things like affecting random number generators, random event generators, and moving subatomic particles around. It’s usually electrostatic-based, fatigue in the individual is shown, as it’s done on a conscious level. And then there’s macroscopic, what we call ‘poltergeist,’ and that’s a whole different ball of wax.

We’re talking about the ability of moving very massive objects, hundreds of pounds easily. It’s done on a subconscious level, as there is no fatigue seen in the person at the core of it. Like the microscopic type, it’s believed that the phenomena are generated by a living human agency.

Considering both the conscious and subconscious minds require a living host to exist, it would make sense that the RSPK theory of the poltergeist phenomenon would inherently rule out the spirits of people who have passed on to the next world.

This theory also clearly ties into what DeLonge Is saying about the human organism being a transducer of consciousness, particularly when taking into account what Dr. Taff goes on to say in that same interview.

It seems to be that there are several overlapping variables at work. One is the location—either a geomagnetic or an electromagnetic anomaly site—where there’s some strong form of energy that we know of affecting the individual at the core of the phenomenon.

The second variable is that the individual is usually seizure-prone or epileptic, sometimes without knowing it. Lastly, they also suffer from ineffective coping mechanisms and problems dealing with stress. If those three variables work in the right relationship with one another, you get phenomena.

The way the electromagnetic environment affects these people is stressful. It alters their body in some way. The mechanism is called ‘inductive resonance coupling’. So, even if you’re in the right environment and you’re seizure-prone or epileptic, if the field doesn’t resonate with yours…nothing happens. And that may be based more on your emotions than anything else.

What’s also curious is that most seizure-prone or epileptic people are not poltergeist agents. It’s unilateral, not bilateral, and we don’t know what the missing variable is. This is why, with every case we approach, on top of everything else we do a medical background check of the individual and ask a lot of personal questions that, seemingly, have little to do with what’s going on.

With DeLonge and Dr. Taff's ideas taken together, it becomes apparent that we are talking about a specific type of wave — be it electromagnetic, acoustic, or otherwise — permeating and creating a resonance between lifeforms and their environment. These waves are emitted by each individual’s unique “biomagnetic field” at their own personal frequencies, some of which may resonate with the fields of others.

This could be seen as the literal interpretation of the phrase “vibing with someone” or sensing whether a person is giving off “bad vibes” without even having to speak to them. DeLonge himself refers to these simple intuitions as “the beginning of telepathy.”

Certain abnormalities within the inputs and outputs of these resonators may cause the entire system to go haywire, as Dr. Taff hypothesizes with the potentially extreme effects of epilepsy on the level of activity. His suggestion that events may also be based on the emotions of the subject at the core of the phenomenon demonstrates a very human variable at play.

There is also another aspect to these poltergeist events that have risen to prominence in UFO lore even more recently that deserves our attention in this context.

Infecting Consciousness

During his time studying poltergeist phenomena at UCLA and after, it became clear to Dr. Taff that these anomalous events tended to follow people around even after they had moved their permanent residences.

As echoed more recently by individuals who worked on US government programs located at a property called Skinwalker Ranch in Utah's Uintah basin, Dr. Taff states that these kinds of paranormal realities have the apparent ability to infect people like a virus.

Speaking to journalist George Knapp on Coast to Coast AM in January 2020, Dr. Taff spoke of a dynamic within these experiences that sounds eerily similar to the hitchhiker effect reported during the Defense Intelligence Agency's AAWSAP program.

It's a psycho-virus. It has all the qualities of a biological manifestation, but it is energetic. If you're susceptible, it theoretically can infect you. Most people [experience] nothing.

But if you're the right person, at the right time, at the right place, then you can act as what I call a biological operational amplifier. Your body is able to absorb, mix up, and remit this under the right conditions.

In the book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, the authors lay out an almost identical description of an infectious agent model that spread throughout individuals they interacted with in daily life, such as family and other children at school.

Utilizing this terminology, Axelrod was the index case who was first “infected” on Skinwalker Ranch and carried the infectious agent 2,000 miles home to Virginia with him. Within a few days or weeks, the agent had spread from Axelrod to his wife and both his teenage sons, and all three began experiencing a bewildering diversity of anomalies in their home.

Within a few more weeks the infectious agent had spread to the neighborhood and infected two teenage friends, probably at school, who lived within a couple of miles of the Axelrod home. It should be noted that the symptoms of infection from Skinwalker Ranch are not respiratory distress or death, as with COVID-19, but rather profoundly altered perceptual environments.

It goes without saying that the number of people involved in these observations are too few to draw any firm conclusions, but the metaphor of an infectious disease could be a useful one for future research on the human effects of visiting the Skinwalker Ranch.

Considering what we have learned thus far in the paragraphs above, it seems like there is a strong relationship between certain electromagnetic frequencies and the resonances between individuals. Perhaps the abnormal biological hardware of some of the people who enter areas with magnetic anomalies exacerbate this phenomenon, as in poltergeist events, or act as super-spreaders in the context of the hitchhiker effect.

But what are the energies and propagation mechanisms at the center of all of these anomalous incidents, and why are some confined to certain areas even with the ability to follow people home from across the country?

To explore these possibilities we will turn to the work of a man who may be as confounding as he is fascinating, but I will do my best to lay out his relevant thoughts.

Disturbing the Aether

Dr. Taff himself admitted that he did not know what kind of energy could be facilitating the biological resonances leading to these poltergeist events, but theorized that it may have to do with zero-point energy.

My gut is telling me that if we find out what this energy is, it could take us to the stars. This is energy that does work without heat! There are only four forms of energy that we basically deal with: electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear, and gravitational.

Well, it can’t be gravitational because the mass is insufficient. It can’t be nuclear because the individual would be dead due to ionization long before any RSPK occurred. Is it electromagnetic? When you see a 215-pound man being picked up and thrown across a room, his clothing and everything else should burst into flame by the liberated heat of the force doing it. The second law of thermodynamics. But it doesn’t get hot, it gets cold! What are we being shown here?

Call it Zero Point Energy, call it whatever you want, but whatever it is explains much, if not all, of the paranormal—from ESP all the way to OBE’s (out-of-body experiences) and NDE’s (near-death experiences). However, the way this energy couples to us is almost assuredly magnetic in nature. The problem is we can’t simulate these conditions and test it in a lab yet.

One man who has conducted a massive amount of research into the concept of zero-point energy and its interactions with the human brain is former Army Lt. Col. Thomas Bearden.

Anyone who recognizes Bearden's name knows to strap in right about now because shit is going to get a bit weird.

In his book The Excalibur Briefing, Bearden writes of Soviet experiments where the

The Soviet work that measured coherence of cyclic rhythms (heartbeat, breath, body electric fields, etc.) in Kulagina is significant in this respect. Kulagina induced electrostatic fields around objects that she moved psychokinetically. Her biofield, which is connected through hyperspace to the object being moved, is orthorotated into ordinary fields at the interface of the object. Thus an electric field is created, and also a momentum field that causes the object to move by ordinary physics.

The Soviet work appears to have established that man, earth, and cosmos are psychotronically and coherently linked; that the boundary of an object is a transducer coupling internal and external dynamic changes in one-to-one correspondence; that the transducer effect applies to both living and nonliving systems; and that through tuning and resonance, internal patterns can be incepted externally, and external patterns can be incepted internally.

As we can see, the concept of a biofield once again comes into play in connection to telekinesis. Transferring this seemingly esoteric energy from the aether (or vacuum) into electrical energy that can be used within the physical world seems to be Bearden’s explanation for these abilities.

So if this transducer effect spoken about by both DeLonge and Bearden interacts with both physical and non-physical objects and energies, we are left with a few questions regarding the poltergeist phenomenon.

• Are these poltergeist "entities" just a physical manifestation of an erratic biofield?

• Are the values of these biofield frequencies relative to the emotions and intentions put out by those in the surrounding environment?

• Are certain geomagnetic anomalies triggering certain magnetic mechanisms in the brains of "poltergeist agents" and is that why these events seem to emanate from certain geographical areas?

• Could an ongoing resonance between biofields susceptible to such frequencies explain the hitchhiker effect or "psycho-virus" aspect of ongoing poltergeist experiences?

Whatever the case may be, there seems to be an aspect of consciousness that we are dealing with here that is presenting itself at a very human level.

If telekinesis is indeed real, and thoughts can have an effect on physical objects or even materialize them, then any abnormality in that process could potentially explain the seemingly emotional, reactive, and erratic nature of these poltergeist events.

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In Western society, very little attention is paid to aspects of human consciousness that most people have experienced at one time or another. The existence of dreams in itself is an enigma that usually gets swept under the rug upon waking, as the alarm goes off and our daily routines take over our thoughts.

The storyline we navigate in dreams feels as if it is reality, and in most cases, we do not realize we are in a dream until our eyes open the next morning. It is only then that our personal and societal responsibilities make their way to the forefront, requiring all the emotions and interactions we just processed in our unconscious state to become nothing more than a suppressed memory. No matter how impactful the dreams may have been, there's usually little incentive to mention them to coworkers at the water cooler that afternoon.

Another undeniable human experience is déjà vu. The feeling of having been through your present situation previously is a widespread phenomenon that, like a dream, is also filed away as something not to think about too deeply.

As easy as it may be to ignore the uncanny sensation afterward, it feels extremely obvious at the moment that the situation has already happened at some point in the past. Once the feeling passes, however, most people give it little to no thought and just continue on with their day. Research has shown that two-thirds of individuals have experienced déjà vu at least once in their lives.

A similar enigmatic time-related occurrence is synchronicity. These are coincidences in life that seem too extraordinary to have happened by chance. Thinking about someone a few minutes before they call, or saying a word at the same time as a character on TV are just two small examples.

One of my personal experiences involved my wife's grandmother passing, and a few months later I was assigned her old phone number when I got a new phone with a different plan from another service provider.

The first time I called my wife it appeared as if her Nana was calling her from the other side, when it was just myself asking when she would be home from work. Her side of the family had to change their contacts in their phones from Nana to me, which was a weird thing to ask of them, to say the least.

These experiences are undeniable, yet in society, they play a negligible role in shaping our day-to-day interactions because they are not "real." However, for some cultures, these anomalous events spurred by some mechanism within human consciousness are taken very seriously indeed.

The Australian Aborigines, one of the oldest surviving cultures on the planet, explain the origin story of the universe in an era they refer to as "the Dreaming" or "Dreamtime." These concepts were circulating among these groups over 60,000 years ago and tell of a place where all people existed for all time.

It is not just a past era of existence, but a realm that encompasses all of past, present, and future events. The Aborigines have put stories of this period into art and cultural ceremonies that have lasted millennia.

The age of these beliefs spans vastly longer than those of monotheistic religions of the present day — when a singular God created the universe, and so began the ongoing paradigm of linear time our science currently finds itself in. The wisdom of these ancient peoples is ignored as Western life follows the very concrete model of past, present, and future.

Aboriginal Australians, like many ancient cultures, viewed time in a cyclical manner. The seasons, tides, and stars all displayed a circular existence on our planet, far from the linear interpretation we currently employ today exemplified by milestone constructs such as technological development and Darwinian evolution.

If you really think about it, and as I've argued previously, without our current established societal need to use linear time to organize our lives around certain events, it would seem more rational to view time as cyclical based on observing our environment.

Recalibrating Reality

The implications of cyclical time for our everyday lives would be disruptive if proven true and incorporated into our scientific paradigm.

A New York Times op-ed written by two leading physicists was even published a few weeks ago, indicating that there may be a fundamental flaw in our understanding of the universe through the standard model-based data accumulated by the James Webb Space Telescope in recent months.

Dr. Adam Frank and Dr. Marcelo Gleiser suggest what we are now learning may force "a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time."

There is nothing inherently fishy about these features of the standard model. Scientists often discover good indirect evidence for things that we cannot see, such as the hyperdense singularities inside a black hole. But in the wake of the Webb’s confounding data about galaxy formation, and the worsening problem with the Hubble constant, you can’t be blamed for starting to wonder if the model is out of joint.

A familiar narrative about how science works is often trotted out at this point to assuage anxieties. It goes like this: Researchers think they have a successful theory, but new data show it is flawed. Courageously rolling up their sleeves, the scientists go back to their blackboards and come up with new ideas that allow them to improve their theory by better matching the evidence.

It’s a story of both humility and triumph, and we scientists love to tell it. And it may be what happens in this case, too. Perhaps the solution to the problems the Webb is forcing us to confront will require only that cosmologists come up with a new “dark” something or other that will allow our picture of the universe to continue to match the best cosmological data.

Considering the authors' proposal that a complete reevaluation of the fundamental nature of the universe may be required, could the "new 'dark' something" be related to time? Considering there are already theories of cyclic cosmology based on "phantom dark energy," it doesn't seem too absurd to speculate that a similarly imperceptible "phantom" aspect of the temporal dimension could be involved.

After all, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose — perhaps best known to my readers for his Orch OR hypothesis of consciousness developed with Stuart Hameroff — has proposed a theory known as "conformal cyclic cosmology" (CCC). Penrose essentially states that there is no beginning or end to the universe, but instead beginnings and ends of cycles separating blocks of expansion and contraction he calls "aeons."

Fellow physicist Lee Smolin explores Penrose's theory in his book Time Reborn.

He speculates that after some point all the elementary particles with mass, including protons, quarks, and electrons, would decay and only photons and other massless particles would be left. If so, there would be nothing to detect the infinite passage of eternity, because photons, since they travel at the speed of light, don't experience time at all. To a photon, the eternity of the very late universe would be indistinguishable from the very early universe.

…it does predict that there would be fossils of the past universe in remnants of the Big Bang, from which we could glean information about it. While much information is wiped out by the eternity spent in thermal equilibrium, one carrier of information that never is disordered is gravitational radiation. The information carried by gravitational waves also makes it across the bounce in the cycling models and into the new universe.

Considering the cycles observed in nature, a cyclical universe would appear to make sense if we extrapolate our perceptions to the cosmic scale. It also lines up with the view of many ancient peoples, with obvious connections between the Aboriginies' "Dreamtime" and the periods of what Penrose calls "information panspermia" — described as "propagation of life codes" — during the transition of one aeon to the next.

But what does this mean in our current search for extraterrestrial life?

When is Everybody?

Luckily, Penrose has explored the applications of CCC in the context of SETI — though "extraterrestrial" may not actually be the correct terminology to describe these civilizations.

In a paper titled CCC and the Fermi paradox, Penrose and his colleague Vahe Gurzadyan postulate that extraterrestrial civilizations may not actually be from other planets at all. They postulate that these civilizations may in fact be from different aeons, and that "fossils" of their existence may be imprinted on the cosmic microwave background.

If we are to consider signals from previous-aeon beings, then such regions might well be the most promising places to look, as the CCC-interpretation would be that there might well have been vast numbers of very large galaxies in these places, and consequently a large probability of the development and long-term stability of highly evolved technological societies.

What kind of signals might we expect that such beings could be sending out?

Penrose and Gurzadyan then go on to speculate why a civilization might be transmitting signals to another aeon in the first place, with some rather disturbing propositions.

…What might be a purpose to the previous-aeon beings of possibly deliberately transmitting such signals to beyond their aeon, where we must bear in mind that 2-way communication with us would be impossible in this way? Perhaps those beings might have wished to save the inhabitants of our subsequent aeon from some unpleasant fate that their greater wisdom could help us avoid. Here the purpose would, for one reason or another, simply be the transmission of information from their aeon to ours. Alternatively, there is the idea of information panspermia…i.e. the propagation of the ”life codes” by the use of such signals, like the bit strings of human genome and of other species of terrestrial life.

The physicists' proposition of an "unpleasant fate" — the likely apocalyptic transition to the next aeon — is disconcerting, to say the least.

Even more concerning is the echoing of this idea from certain individuals who have inside connections to government officials knowledgeable about the UFO phenomenon.

Around We Go

Tom DeLonge has been rather consistent when conveying what his advisors have told him about UFOs, and what their existence and an apparent increase in activity might mean for the human race.

In one particularly jarring statement to a crowd attending his book release for Sekret Machines, DeLonge goes into detail about what information will be coming out in the future about the intelligence behind these craft.

There’s a very specific way this is going to be framed for you guys, and the world in the coming years, that is understandable. But there is an element that is unknown that is really tricky with this stuff. There’s really smart people in very secretive places debating if the whole thing is steered to prepare us for the universe at large. Or, this whole thing is some type of farm.

It could be for energy, it could be for the resources of another nature, it could be whatever. There are also really smart people in secret places who are saying “Is this where consciousness and quantum mechanics cross over?” Do our brains have the capacity to create these things in the sky by making matter develop?

It’s like when the Native Americans would do rain dancing, and they all concentrate and meditate together, and then it rains. Well, is that happening when we all just go, “bug-eyed green aliens,” and all of a sudden they start to appear? 

They don’t know about some of this stuff. But we do know it has the power to direct how mankind evolves over a very long period of time, potentially in cycles. Because when you look at the Giza pyramids and some of these other places, there are some grand cycles that we’re starting to discover with mankind. We’re kind of going, “Okay, maybe we’re a little bit older than 3000 B.C.”

This loudly echoes the theory put forward by Penrose and Gurzadyan, if not more on a planetary level. DeLonge talks about cycles of mankind and the manipulation of our species' evolution over long periods of time. One can't help but wonder if these cycles and time periods are analogous — or even representative of — these larger aeons hypothesized in the CCC.

The process of information panspermia would allow the genetic code to carry through each crossover, rebuilding the universe from the same basic foundation each time.

If we assume the CCC hypothesis is true, the UFO phenomenon itself must have the ability to transcend these aeons in order to survive and maintain the same consciousness and memory of what has happened before. Perhaps this is also what DeLonge means when he says that UFOs are “from outside of time.”

Perhaps this is also what Lue Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon's UFO program, is suggesting when he speaks about a species that sees time differently in his burning cigarette analogy.

What if there were things that had the ability to experience…where the present was a much bigger cherry, if you will? A much bigger transition, where more elements of the future and the past are experienced in the present, and [they] can do that also physically, right? So it's not just an idea.

What if there were a species out there that experienced the universe with an extra level of dimension? So you and I are having this conversation right now with your audience, and we're having this conversation right here, right now. But if I were to have the ability to have this conversation right here, five minutes ago or five minutes from now, we would never meet. We'd be like two ships passing in the night.

Is it possible that maybe some of these things — these UAP — have [this] ability? We experience them when they are right here, right now, and every other time we don't because we're simply not intersecting with that extra-dimensional space of time.

There was another aspect of the cyclical essence of nature that Elizondo explored. When asked how we might know what signs to look for if an advanced civilization had left a mark on humanity, he stated that megaliths and even artifacts in orbit would not be enough to last the test of time.

Like Penrose stated the genetic code could be transmitted between aeons, Elizondo suggests that DNA would be the only way to continue a legacy on cosmic timescales.

So, if we’re trying to find some sort of marker, chances are you’re not going to find it buried in the Earth unless it only happened in the last five thousand years or so. Even some of the most dramatic examples of terraforming, let’s look at the example of the meteor impact in Arizona. It happened sixty thousand years ago. That’s already filling in. In another hundred thousand years from now, you may never even know anything ever happened because of the processes of Earth and what this planet does. It’s constantly erasing what’s on the surface. It’s constantly burying what lies beneath deeper and deeper and deeper, until it eventually gets recycled.

That’s a hard question. What would last long enough for us to go back and say, “Wow, this is an indicator of alien life on this planet one hundred thousand years ago?” What would you have to do to achieve that, to accomplish that? It’s a lot harder than one might think. Then again, would you recognize it?

One might say, well, DNA. DNA is a perfect example. If you wanted to do something that was enduring for humanity, where we could look back a hundred thousand years and say, “Yes, that was absolutely manipulated by an intelligent life form,” deoxyribonucleic acid may be one way to do it. You could put coding and sequencing in there that will perpetuate over time. And yes, you will have some degradation over generations, but in essence you could do something that way. Basically it’s a biological marker.

So we have to be careful when we say we have to look for evidence, because evidence isn’t necessarily a spearhead found in the Bighorn Mountains eleven thousand years ago. It’s not necessarily a pyramid sitting in the middle of a desert. It could be far more sophisticated than that. You said put it in orbit, right? What if, rather than put it in orbit, we put it in the human body?

So if both the genetic code and UFOs can transcend these aeons — each essentially residing outside of time as we understand it — perhaps these crossovers represent the ultimate cycle of the universe.

Perhaps the reported rise in UFO sightings might also signal the coming of the next aeon, with these craft potentially collecting data on the human genome to transmit these records in the process of information panspermia.

Perhaps this is what Elizondo means when he refers to "mankinds," that there are cycles that wipe the slate clean for the next iteration.

Perhaps this is the Wheel of Time.

And ultimately, perhaps, this is reincarnation.