Project Stargate: Ancient Aliens and the CIA
The Fallen Angels
The so-called experts of the History Channel’s ludicrous Ancient Aliens series are actually crackpot researchers who, with the assistance of certain covert government agencies, are communicating Masonic interpretations of history based on the legends of the Kabbalah, to present the devil and his legions, also known as the Fallen Angels, as having been the secret guardians of humanity over the centuries, and who will soon disclose their existence, to lead a one world government and herald the coming a of New Age.
Since the earliest times, mysticism centered around the worship of the stars and planets, who were revered as living gods, the most important ones being Venus or the star Sirius. This tradition was preserved in the West through astrology and alchemy, and reinterpreted in the late nineteenth century during the Occult Revival. The era derived from the perception that Western society had become overly skeptical, and attracted audience by promising contact with “supernatural” phenomena.
Séances then become very popular. The being contacted were typically interpreted as being souls of the dead, or human beings who had advanced to higher dimensions, and other times, as beings from other planets. And it is from these practices that so-called contact with “extra-terrestrials” evolved.
As the highly-respected UFO researcher Jacques Vallée demonstrated, there is very strong evidence the contactees have experienced contact with something, but those experience do not follow the typical science-fiction scenario popularized by the media, but rather, the same experiences described over the centuries with beings called demons, fairies, ghosts and genies, or what are called Jinn in Islam. And many so-called cover-up documents, like the MJ-12 papers, have been proven to be government-assisted hoaxes. As Brenda Denzler noted, in The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs, “the contactee movement was, in effect, a conduit through which established spiritualist and Theosophical ideas and practices moved into the UFO community.”[1]
The leading personality behind this trend was H. P. Blavatsky, a British and Russian agent, and founder of the Theosophical society, who is regarded as the godmother of the New Age movement, and whose books are considered “scriptures” for Freemasonry.
The Ancient Astronauts hypothesis, also known as Ancient Aliens, is related to the “White Gods” theories, developed from the Aryan racism of Theosophy, that was later adopted by the Nazis. Basically, the theory purports that ancient cultures like those of the Egyptians and the Maya, were visited by Caucasian civilizers who were ignorantly worshipped by primitive peoples as “gods.”
These ideas are derived from Kabbalistic interpretations of the Book of Genesis, which recounts the story of the Nephilim. Translated into English as “sons of God,” they refer to Lucifer and his legions who were cast out of Heaven, the so-called Fallen Angels, who descended to earth and interbred with the female descendants of Cain, to whom they taught magic. Thus they supposedly created a superior race, the Aryans, who have been preserving the “Ancient Wisdom” ever since.
The veneration of ancient Egypt derived from Rosicrucian traditions of Scottish Rite and Egyptian Rite Freemasonry, which claimed to follow a Christian Gnostic tradition inherited from the Ancient Mysteries of Egypt, founded on the worship of the dying-gods, Osiris and Sirius.
Because the Great Pyramid of Giza is such an essential symbol of their tradition, regarded as an emblem of the Hermetic philosophy, and placed on the reverse side of the American dollar bill, the Freemasons assert that the truth is the pyramids were built before the great Flood. In other words, by Atlanteans. According to Ignatius Donnelly, the pyramid is patterned after a pre-Flood type of architecture, examples of which are to be found in many parts of the world. As related by Masonic and Theosophical historian Manly P. Hall in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, it was somewhere in the hidden chambers of these pyramids and the Sphinx that the ancient initiations took place, and that at the fulfillment of time, these secrets would again be revealed, and “the Dying God shall rise again!”[2]
During the eighteenth century, speculations associated Mayan history with Biblical stories of Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. This included speculation about legendary culture heroes such as Votan and Quetzalcoatl. In the early nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt and Lord Kingsborough contributed further to such speculation, and were in turn cited by Godfrey Higgins, whose Anacalypsis (1833) contributed to the emergence of perennial philosophy and claims that all religions had a common origin in an ancient Golden Age.
Higgins proposed the existence of a secret religious order, which he labeled Pandeism, for the worship of a pantheon of gods, that he purported had existed from ancient times, which at one time had constituted a grand world empire, and maintained that the institutions of Christianity were borrowed from the heretical Jewish sect of the Essenes, who are believed responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, Higgins warned of the cryptic nature of much of the book:
I think it right to warn my reader, that there are more passages than one in the book, which are of that nature, which will be perfectly understood by my Masonic friends, but which my engagements prevent me explaining to the world at large.
In the late nineteenth century, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg became convinced that the ancient Maya culture could be traced to the lost continent of Atlantis. Brasseur’s work influenced the pseudohistory of Désiré Charnay, Augustus Le Plongeon, Ignatius L. Donnelly, and James Churchward. Le Plongeon and Donnelly in turn influenced H. P. Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner who introduced misconceptions about the ancient Maya into early New Age circles. Foster Bailey, the husband of Blavatsky leading successor, Alice Bailey, wrote that Freemasonry was a remnant of the “primeval religion” that had once been common on the whole world, citing the pyramids of Egypt and South America as “witnesses” of this ancient world religion.”[3]
These ideas became part of a belief system fostered by famous psychic and Freemason Edgar Cayce, who provided the notion of an ancient Atlantean “Hall of Records,” that became the basis of the fascination of the Ancient Aliens researchers with Egypt. According to Cayce, refugee Atlanteans arrived in Egypt after the sinking of their continent in 10,700 BC, bringing with them the records of their civilization, which were buried beneath the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx. When they will be uncovered, human civilization will be transformed. As Cayce explained:
With the changes that will be wrought, true Americanism, the universal thought that is expressed and manifested in the brotherhood of man, as in the Masonic order, will be the eventual rule in the settlement of affairs of the world.[4]
The source of these predictions were not only the visions of Edgar Cayce, but the traditions of the American Rosicrucian organization, AMORC. Its founder, Spencer Lewis, who ha been an associate of Aleister Crowley, the godfather of twentieth century Satanism, claimed to have inside knowledge about Giza derived from the “Rosicrucian Archives” which formed a major part of AMORC’s beliefs.
The Externalization of the Hierarchy
Blavatsky claimed to have been in contact with a hierarchy of “Ascended Masters,” known as the Great White Brotherhood of Mahatmas, who resided in Shambhala in Tibet, and which she identified with the Sons of God. According to Theosophical tradition, their leader is Sanat Kumara, who was the “King of the World.” To Blavatsky, Sanat Kumara belonged to a group of beings, the “Lords of the Flame,” whom Christian tradition have “misunderstood” as Lucifer and the Fallen Angels.
In The Lost Lemuria (1904), Blavatsky’s disciple William Scott-Elliot claimed that beings that evolved on Venus, came to earth and taught the inhabitants of Lemuria the arts of civilization. Ancient Martian civilization was then promoted by astronomer Percival Lowell, and the science fiction writings of H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize phenomena referred by Charles Fort (1874 – 1932), who theorized that old stories of demons could be related to visitors from other worlds, who may have communicated with ours in the distant past, left behind advanced technology, or attempted to colonize the earth.
As explained by Bailey, whose prognostications serve as the blueprint for many of the United Nations leaders, the ascended masters work to oversee the transition to the New World Order and a one-world religion, founded on Freemasonry, when there will be an "Externalization of the Hierarchy" when everyone will know of their presence on Earth.
According to the Djwhal Khul, the “master” channeled by Bailey, Freemasonry is very ancient and an earthly version of an initiatory school that exists on Sirius.[5] Likewise, according to popular writer Robert Anton Wilson, one of his contacts from secret societies in the US and Europe told him that the secret of the 33rd degree, the highest rank in American Freemasonry, was that the order was in contact with beings from Sirius.[6]
MK-Ultra
The modern history of the convergence of occultism, military intelligence and extraterrestrial contact begins at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which, according to Wouter Hanegraaff, in New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, after the Hippies, had been the second major influence of the 60s counterculture and the rise of the New Age movement.[7]
According to the authors of The Stargate Conspiracy, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, Esalen, through a government-funded project, became associated with the channeling of messages of a group of “extraterrestrials” calling themselves “The Council of Nine.” As the authors point out, there are numerous occult associations with the number nine, particularly with the enigmatic Enneagram of Russian agent and charlatan mystic, George Gurdjieff, whose ideas were influenced by Theosophy, and whose teaching strongly influenced not only Esalen, but the CIA’s infamous MK-Ultra proram.
The bizarre story of The Nine begins in a private research laboratory in Maine called the Round Table Foundation, which was also connected with MK-Ultra. It was set up in 1943 to research the paranormal and run by a medical doctor named Andrija Puharich, the “father of the American New Age movement.” Puharich also later confessed that his experiments with the Round Table Foundation were originally inspired by reading the works of Alice Bailey.
As exemplified in the Ancient Mysteries, their ultimate purpose was to achieve communion with spirits to acquire revelations of hidden knowledge. Typically, these mysteries employed intoxicants or drugs to induce such trance states, a method which was known to the modern psychological establishment and the intelligence industry, who sought to make use of them for their own nefarious plans.
These ideas were inspired by Blavatsky, who claimed that the shamanism of Central Asia, which she believed was best survived in the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, represented the purest ancient tradition of magic. These ideas were developed by Gurdjieff, who purported the existence of a pseudo-Sufi brotherhood in Central Asia, known as Sarmoung.
Gurdjieff believed that the ascetic practices of monks, fakirs and yogis resulted in the production of psychological substances that produced their religious or mystical experiences. Instead of the torturous practices of these mystics, Gurdjieff proposed that the man who knows the Fourth Way “simply prepares and swallows a little pill which contains all the substances he wants. And in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required result.”[8] It was that idea that inspired Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, a key figure at Esalen, to become devoted evangelists of the CIA LSD program.
At Esalen, under the influence of the CIA’s MK-Ultra project and inspired by the teachings of Gurdjieff, shamanism came to be seen as the source of the “perennial philosophy,” where the beings in the spirit world contacted through the use of entheogens also came to be regarded as extra-terrestrials.
This notion was popularized by occult influenced scholar, Mircea Eliade, who brought much attention to the subject in writing Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Eliade argued that the word “shaman” should not apply to just any magician or medicine man, but specifically to the practitioners of the ancient religion of the Turks and Mongols of Central Asia, because of their purported connection to Shambhala.
Puharich achieved international recognition as author of The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity and Beyond Telepathy, seeing the mushroom as a plant that could separate consciousness from the physical body. Puharich had been introduced to the visionary potential of magic mushrooms through Gordon Wasson, sparked widespread interest in psychedelics when he wrote a 1957 published in Life magazine titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” Wasson, who was a vice president of JP Morgan and served as a chairman to the CFR, had close ties to CIA-head Allen Dulles. Wasson and Henry Luce, Skull and Bones member who founded Life Magazine, were also long time members of the Century Club, a CIA front, along with John Foster Dulles, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan.[9]
Wasson was associated with at least six people suspected of being involved in the JFK assassination, including Henry Luce and C. D. Jackson and expert in psychological warfare with the CIA who was also key in establishing the Bilderberg meetings. Wasson’s name was found in the address book that was retrieved from the briefcase of George de Mohrenschildt after his death. The address book also contained an entry for “Bush, George H. W. (Poppy).”
Wasson was also a good friend with English poet Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess, a key book for modern Pagans and Wiccans. Graves was also a close friend of Idries Shah, who served as personal secretary of Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, whose rituals he formulated with Aleister Crowley. Shah was a close associate of George Gurdjieff’s leading disciple, former head of British intelligence in Istanbul, John B. Bennett. By founding Octagon Press, named after Gurdjieff’s Enneagram, Shah popularized his Luciferian version of Islamic Sufism as the origin of Freemasonry.
Wasson is considered the founder of Ethnomycology, the study of psychoactive mushrooms used for “spiritual” purposes, inspiring later researchers such as Terence McKenna, and John Allegro. In 1967 Wasson published Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, which proposed that the ancient Vedic intoxicant Soma was the magic mushroom. Wasson would later discuss the Eleusinian Mysteries, in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, co-authored with LSD scientist Albert Hofmann, who proposed that the special potion “kykeon,” used in the ceremony, contained psychoactive substances from the fungus Ergot, from which LSD was developed.
Robert Anton Wilson, one of the Esalen Institute teachers, commented on Puharich in his famous Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, for which Timothy Leary wrote the foreword, and which deals with Wilson’s experiences when he communicated “telepathically” with extraterrestrials from the Sirius star system. According to Wilson:
The cumulative evidence in such books as Dr. Andrija Puharich's The Sacred Mushroom, John Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, R. Gordon Wasson's Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Robert Graves' revised fourth edition of The White Goddess, Professor Peter Furst's Flesh of the Gods, Dr. Weston LaBarre's The Peyote Cult and Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, Margaret Murray's The Witch Cult in Western Europe, etc., leaves little doubt that the beginnings of religion (awareness of, or at least belief in, Higher Intelligences) is intimately linked with the fact that shamans—in Europe, in Asia, in the Americas, in Africa—have been dosing their nervous systems with metaprogramming drugs since at least 30,000 B.C.[10]
As UFO researcher Philip Coppens suggests, it was likely through his familiarity with Carl Jung and his theory of “archetypes,” as a euphemism for disembodied spirits, that would have led Dulles, as head of the CIA, to sponsor experiments like those of Puharich.[11]
The Council of Nine
Puharich was associated with George Williamson Hunt, among the mid-1950s contactees known as the “four guys named George.” Hunt had worked with William Dudley Pelley, founder of the neo-Nazi Silver Shirts, who popularized the idea of near-death experiences, and who published a major work on extraterrestrials called Star Guests. Pelley, like Hunt, was also associated with popular contactee George Adamsky, with whom he was involved in the Theosophical “UFO Religion,” the “I AM” cult. Adamski had an interest in Theosophy that dated back to the mid 1930s, when he founded what was called the Royal Order of Tibet. In 1952 and 1953, Williamson and his associates supposedly established radiotelegraphic contact with extraterrestrials, in which they received Morse code messages from “the Planet Hatonn in Andromeda,” the alleged site of the universal “Temple of Records.”[12]
In 1952, Puharich had brought into his laboratory an Indian mystic named Dr. D. G. Vinod, who began to channel The Nine or “the Nine Principles,” who would also often recommend the books of Blavatsky and Alice Bailey. Further séances in 1953 were attended by other members of Puharich’s Round Table Foundation, including Henry and Georgia Jackson, Alice Bouverie, Marcella Du Pont, Carl Betz, Vonnie Beck, Arthur M. Young and his wife Ruth.
Arthur M. Young, the designer of Bell Helicopter's first helicopter, was also an influential occult-influenced philosopher. Young married artist Ruth Forbes of the Boston Forbes family, a great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ruth was also a close personal friend of Mary Bancroft, devoted student of Carl Jung, and mistress to Allen Dulles and later to Henry Luce.
Ruth Forbes Paine's first husband, George Lyman Paine Jr. was an associate of Trotskyite James Burnham, a friend of E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate “plumbers,” and was also suspected of involvement in the JFK assassination. Ruth and Paine were also the parents of Michael Paine, who married Ruth Hyde, and who together became notable after the assassination of JFK because of his acquaintance with Lee Harvey Oswald. Michael and Ruth Paine met Oswald and his wife Marina at a party on February 22 1963 where they had been invited by George de Mohrenschildt. It was Ruth Paine who helped Lee get his job at the Texas School Book Depository while his wife Marina and child continued to live with her in Irving, Texas. When the assassination occurred it was the Paines who led the police to where Oswald hid his rifle, and provided much evidence such as some of the famous photos of Oswald posing with his rifle, and so forth.
Puharich became best known as the person who brought Israeli Uri Geller, was also at times in the employ of Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Puharich’s study of Geller was supported by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), headquartered in Menlo Park, California, funded directly by US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA. It was SRI which initiated what came to be known as the Stargate Project, established by the US Federal Government to investigate claims of psychic phenomena, particularly “remote viewing.”
At first Geller started to channel “Spectra,” an entity which claimed to be a conscious super-computer aboard a spaceship. When Puharich suggested to him there might be a connection with the Nine Principles. Through Geller, The Nine claimed to have been behind the UFO sightings starting with Kenneth Arnold in 1947, and alerted Puharich to his life's mission, which was to use Geller's talents to alert the world to an imminent mass landing of spaceships that would bring representatives of The Nine. However, Geller finally turned his back on The Nine, saying: “I think somebody is playing games with us. Perhaps they are a civilization of clowns.”[13]
When Puharich had to find other channellers, he joined up with Sir John Whitmore and psychic and healer Phyllis Schlemmer, who had reportedly also done work for Israeli intelligence. Schlemmer became the spokesperson for The Nine. She, Puharich and Whitmore then set up Lab Nine at Puharich's estate in Ossining, New York. The Nine's disciples included multi-millionaire businessmen, members of Canada's Bronfman family, European nobility, scientists from SRI, Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek and influential counterculture guru Ira Einhorn, who referred to the group of scientists of which he and Puharich were part as his “psychic mafia.”[14]
A key member of Lab Nine was James Hurtak, who was appointed Puharich’s second-in-command by The Nine. A former professor Hurtak’s educational background includes a PhD from the University of California and a second PhD from the University of Minnesota. Hurtak claimed to belong to a group called the Sons of Light of the Order of Melchizedek, “designed to change the destinies of the world by occult means,” and that he and Puharich, along with others with access to “confidential and secret information,” were working to make the public aware that the people of Earth were soon to be contacted by “highly evolved beings.”[15]
Hurtak was director of the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), where Willis Harman was president. Harman, a former consultant to the White House, had also been involved with Puharich in experiments with Geller. In 1974, he led a study conducted by SRI on how to transform the US into Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, entitled “Changing Images of Man.” The report was prepared by a team that included anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist B. F. Skinner, Ervin Laszlo of the UN and Sir Geoffrey Vickers of British intelligence. The stated aim of the study was to change the image of mankind from that of industrial progress to one of “spiritualism.” The report stressed the importance of the US in promoting Masonic ideals, effectively creating the ideal Masonic state.[16]
In 1976, Harman wrote An Incomplete Guide to the Future in which he advocated a society based on the ideals of Freemasonry. Harman believes that the symbol of the pyramid with the floating capstone on the Great Seal “indicates that the nation will flourish only as its leaders are guided by supraconscious intuition,” and he defines this as “divine insight.”[17] This recalls the words of former Vice President Henry Wallace, who was responsible for the adoption of the Great Seal, who wrote:
It will take a more definite recognition of the Grand Architect of the Universe before the apex stone is finally fitted into place and this nation in the full strength of its power is in position to assume leadership among the nations in inaugurating “the new order of the ages.”[18]
Willis Harman disciple Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), who depicts the counterculture as the realization of H. G. Wells’ The Open Conspiracy, tried to popularize these ideals by painting the drive to foster New Age doctrines as a spontaneous and positive development. Cognizant of the degree of their influence, Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
Harman had been president of the Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS) in their first remote-viewing experiments. Founded in 1973, IONS claims it “conducts, sponsors, and collaborates on leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness, exploring phenomena that do not necessarily fit conventional scientific models while maintaining a commitment to scientific rigor.”
New Egyptology
The Council Nine confessed to being the Elohim of the Old Testament, and claimed to have visited Earth from the star of Sirius. Their spokesperson was an entity called “Tom” who was eventually revealed as being Atum, the creator-god of the ancient Egyptian religion, and with the other nine composing the Great Ennead of Heliopolis. The Nine also described the “Knowledge of the Book” they had hidden in Egypt 6,000 years ago, during a previous visit to Earth.
Based on the millennial ideas, the Egyptian legends of Freemasonry and the communications from the Nine, SRI embarked on a number of projects to investigate the Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza, that would shape the evolution of the UFO phenomenon into the myth of Ancient Aliens.
SRI collaborated on a number of projects investigating the Giza Pyramids with the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), founded by Edgar Cayce in 1931 to promote his work. In the 1970s, ARE received a sudden influx of funding from important donors, and is now a powerful organization which has supported archaeological work in Egypt and elsewhere to try to find evidence of the lost Atlantean civilization and the Hall of Records predicted by Cayce.[19]
Most important of these was a study headed by D. Joseph M. Schoch, to determine the possibility of water erosion on the Sphinx. Also conducting work at Giza in the late 1970s coinciding the SRI’s projects was James Hurtak. In 1977 and 1978, following up on a tradition found in Masonic lore, Hurtak and a number of colleagues undertook a private expedition to Giza, where they measured the angles of the shafts of the King’s and Queen’s Chambers to test the hypothesis that they were aligned with certain stars and constellations, namely Orion and Draco, and the star Sirius.
One of the most influential books written about the purported “mysteries” of Egypt, is Robert K. G. Temple's 1976 book, The Sirius Mystery, which presents the hypothesis that the Dogon people of Mali in west Africa preserve a tradition of contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings from the Sirius star-system. Temple’s attention was first drawn to the Dogon by Arthur M. Young, through a French book called Le Renard pale, which he in turn received from Harry Smith. Known as a surrealist filmmaker, Smith was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis of Aleister Crowley, who he claimed was “probably” his biological father.[20]
Known for experimenting heavily in hallucinogenic drugs, Smith became a hero of the Beat generation of the 50s and the Hippies of the 60s, and in the last years of his life was financed by the Grateful Dead. He produced the Folkways anthology, which became an important influence for such artists as Bob Dylan and received a Grammy in 1991 for his contribution to the music industry.
Temple's The Sirius Mystery attracted the attention of the CIA, MI5 and the Freemasons. Temple was approached by Charles E. Webber, 33rd degree Scottish Rite and an old friend of his family and Mason, who had been high-ranking generations for generations, and asked him to join the Masons, in order to be able to discuss the book without divulging the order's secrets. Webber told Temple:
We are very interested in your book The Sirius Mystery. We realize you have written this book without any knowledge of the traditions of Masonry, and you may not be aware of this, but you have made some discoveries which relate to the most central traditions at a high level, including some things that none of us ever knew.[21]
The “mystery” that is central to the book is how the Dogon allegedly acquired knowledge of Sirius B, the invisible companion star of Sirius A. However, some doubts have been raised about the reliability of their work, and alternative explanations have been proposed, and the claims about the Dogons' astronomical knowledge have been challenged.[22]
Government Cover-up?
James Hurtak eventually established himself as a New Age guru, travelling the world giving workshops on his book of channelled revelations from The Nine, The Keys of Enoch. Hurtak was also associated with the Human Potential Foundation, founded in 1989 by Senator Claiborne Pell, who as well was a member of IONS. Also a member of the CFR, Pell was a very powerful figure in Washington, having served as Chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee from 1987 to 1994. Pell was also a leading member of the Club of Rome as well as friend of Aurelio Peccei.[23] Pell was also a close friend of figure Clark Clifford, who was involved in the BCCI scandal. Pell was mentor to former Vice-President Al Gore, with whom he shares an avid interest in the paranormal, with both supporting government-funded research into the matter.
IONS was established by Edgar Mitchell, the sixth astronaut to walk on the moon, who claimed to have undergone a cosmic consciousness experience on his return flight to earth. Mitchell briefed then CIA director George Bush on the activities and results of the IONS.[24]
Edgar Mitchell has become one of the chief authorities on the supposed government “cover-up” of extra-terrestrial contact. Mitchell has publicly expressed his opinions that he is “90 percent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets”[25] and that UFOs have been the “subject of disinformation in order to deflect attention and to create confusion so the truth doesn't come out.”[26] He offered his opinion that the evidence for such “alien” contact was “very strong” and “classified” by governments, who were covering up visitations in places such as Roswell, New Mexico. He further claimed that UFOs had provided “sonic engineering secrets” that were helpful to the U.S. government.[27]
An important promoter of the myth of alien-constructed structures on Mars first proposed by Hurtak is David M. Myers, who is another channeler of The Nine, also in contact with Tom. Myers is co-author with Britain's David S. Percy of Two-Thirds, a history of the galaxy and the human race according to Myers’ other-worldly contacts. Percy touts himself as an award-winning film and television producer, member of the Royal Photographic Society, and is best known as a champion of the “Face on Mars” and the moon-landing hoax theory. He was involved in the making of two Moon Hoax movies, Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers and What Happened On the Moon? The "face" on Mars refers to an unusual photograph taken by Viking 1 probe in 1976 when in Mars’ orbit.
The other major proponents of the “monuments” of Mars and their alleged connection with ancient Egypt is Dr. Richard Hoagland, who bills himself a former NASA consultant and CBS News advisor, who has promoted this idea since 1973. In 1971, it was Hoagland who came up with the idea he passed on the Carl Sagan of equipping the Pioneer 100, the first space probe to leave the solar system, with a plaque bearing symbolic information about human civilization, and a diagram indicating the Earth as the third planet from the Sun. He was also instrumental in the campaign to name the first space shuttle “Enterprise,” inspired by his friend Gene Roddenbery, creator of Star Trek.
In 1983, Hoagland was working for the SRI on a project concerning the rings of Saturn, and while studying photos from the Viking archive, found what he believed to be a pyramid complex near the “face” on Mars, in the Cydonia region. When Hoagland decided to set up a project to study the features further, he approached the Institute for the Study of Consciouness, founded by Arthur M. Young, who introduced him to Lambert Dolphin Jr., who had headed the SRI expedition to Giza in the 1970s. Hoagland and Dolphin then formed the Independent Mars Mission, with funding from SRI. The American and European Director of Operations for Hoagland’s Mars Mission were, respectively, David Myers and David Percy.
According to Uri Geller, the Face on Mars had been discovered by remote viewing in the early 1970s.[28] In fact, Hoagland’s interpretation of the “monuments” of Mars comes directly from The Nine. Hoagland’s writings claim “the Face on Mars” is part of a city built on Cydonia Planitia consisting of very large pyramids and mounds arranged in a geometric pattern, which must be trying to “tell us something.” According to Hoagland:
For it is now clear… that, if appropriately researched and applied to many current global problems, the potential “radical technologies” that might be developed from the “Message of Cydonia” could significantly assist the world in a dramatic transition to a real “new world order”… if not a literal New World.[29]
Hoagland described his theories in The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever, and co-authored the book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA, a New York Times Best Seller. Hoagland claims that advanced civilizations exist or once existed on the Moon, Mars and on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and that NASA and the United States government have conspired to keep these facts secret as explained in the “the Brookings Report.” Among Hoagland’s other claims are that the US government has covered up the presence of extraterrestrials, that the Space Agency murdered the Apollo 1 astronauts, that NASA missions to Mars are a “well documented interest of the Bush family,”[30] and that there is a clandestine space program which uses antigravity technology reverse-engineered from lunar artifacts and communicated by secret societies. He goes on to say that NASA is suppressing knowledge of an ancient civilization on the Moon, and that the advanced technology of this civilization is lying around on the Moon's surface.[31]
Hurtak also served as “technical consultant” to Sydney Sheldon’s 1991 bestseller, The Doomsday Conspiracy, which fed such fears, and for which the bogus MJ Twelve papers served as supportive evidence. In The Doomsday Conspiracy’s cover-up scenario, the protagonist Robert Bellamy is a man hired by the NSA to locate the witnesses to the crash of a weather balloon that the American authorities are anxious to swear to secrecy. When Bellamy reaches Switzerland he soon finds out that the so-called weather balloon was really a UFO and that the witnesses saw the bodies of two aliens.
The Magic 12
All related to the communications from The Nine, and the research of the SRI and ARE at Giza in Egypt, several authors associated with the Ancient Aliens mythos are characterized by Picknett and Prince, in Stargate Conspiracy, as part of a conspiracy for the “manipulation of beliefs about the origins and history of human civilization, in particular of beliefs about the existence of an advanced civilization in the ancient past and its influence on the earliest known historical civilizations, primarily that of Egypt.”[32] Expressed through a number of popular pseudo-scientific non-fiction works of a field known as “Alternative Egyptology,” the best-known names in this conspiracy are Robert Temple, John Anthony West, Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, whose works have been instrumental in arousing interest in the “mysteries” of ancient Egypt.
In 1990, Dr. Zahi Hawass granted a license to John Anthony West and Robert Schoch, known as the Schoch Project, backed by the University of Boston, where Schoch was a professor. In 1993, West’s work with Schoch was presented by Charlton Heston in a NBC special called The Mystery of the Sphinx that won West a News & Documentary Emmy Award for Best Research and a nomination for Best Documentary. Investors in the project included Dr. Joseph M. Schor, one of two leading members of ARE.
ARE had also arranged a scholarship for Dr. Zahi Hawass at the University of Pennsylvania, where he gained his PhD in Egyptology, before going on to become Egypt’s Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs. The project’s main discovery was water erosion on the Sphinx, but it also undertook seismographic tests to detect the possible existence of chambers beneath the Sphinx. According to Bauval and Hancock, a total of nine chambers in all were discovered, which they called the Genesis chamber. Also enthusiastic about these discoveries was Dr. Zahi Hawass, who suggested they may represent the symbolic “tomb of Osiris.”[33]
Also in 1993, Rudolf Gatenbrink famously sent a robot fitted with a camera to explore shafts in the pyramid of Giza. Bauval seized upon the opportunity to interpret Gatenbrink’s data to suggest that the southern shaft of what is called the Queen’s Chamber would have been aligned to the star Sirius in around 2450 BC, which therefore must have been the date of its construction. However, Bauval’s claim had nothing to do with the research of Gatenbrink, who rejected Bauval’s theory, but was rather developed from ideas first proposed by James Hurtak and derived from Masonic literature dating back at least to the late nineteenth century.[34]
One of the many recurring themes in several of Hancock's works has been an exposition on the “Orion Correlation Theory” (or OCT). It was the subject of a bestseller, The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval, as well as a BBC documentary, The Great Pyramid: Gateway to the Stars in 1994. The OCT proposes that the layout and formation of the pyramids of Giza correspond to the stars in the constellation of Orion. This is taken as evidence by the authors of advanced knowledge of the stars, which could indicate the extra-terrestrial origins of its builders.
The book that launched Hancock’s career as a bestseller was The Sign and the Seal (1992), where, following clues found in the Bible, the Grail epic of Eschenbach and the Knights Templar, he traces the location of the Ark of the Covenant from its supposed source in ancient Egypt, to Jerusalem, and from there to its final resting place in Ethiopia. In Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), without stating so explicitly, Hancock attempts to prove the historical accounts of Theosophy, by attempting to prove that a universal cataclysm took place, presumably the sinking of Atlantis, and that numerous cultures of the ancient world report the occurrence of “white gods” who taught them the arts of civilization, the proof of which are the various enigmatic monuments around the world.
Popularized by the works of Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin, these theories fall into a category of pseudohistory known as Mayanism, derived originally from Freemasonry and Theosophy.
The “White Gods” theory is popular amongst White supremacists, Christian Identity groups, ancient astronaut theorists and pseudoarchaeological and Atlantis writers. White gods theorists typically make reference to various South American gods supposedly identified as pale-skinned, blue-eyed and bearded. Typically, accounts of these gods refer to them as “civilizers” who instructed their societies with various skills.
Notions about extraterrestrial influence on the Maya can be traced to the book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken, whose “ancient astronaut” theories were in turn influenced by the work of Peter Kolosimo (1922 – 1984) and especially Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, the authors of The Morning of the Magicians. These latter writers were inspired by publications by Charles Fort (1874 – 1932), and by the Theosophically-inspired fantasy literature of H. P. Lovecraft.[35] However, contributing influences also included notions of lost continents and lost civilizations, especially as popularized by Jules Verne, and the preeminent nineteenth century Rosicrucian, Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Notions about extraterrestrial influence on the ancient Maya of South America can be traced to Chariots of the Gods, by Erich von Däniken, which brought widespread popularity to ancient astronaut theories. Däniken’s book was an immediate best seller in the United States, Europe and India, and subsequent books, according to von Däniken, have been translated into 32 languages and together have sold more than 63 million copies.[36] The book’s television adaptation, In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973), was hosted by Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone.
To support his theory, Von Däniken makes mention of the chariot of Ezekiel and the “wheel inside a wheel” as referring to a spacecraft. He also discusses the Ramayana, where the gods and their avatars travel in flying vehicles, or “flying chariots” called Vimanas.
To acquire an understanding of von Däniken’s sources, we can consider that in his 1970 follow-up to Chariots of the Gods he writes of Blavatsky’s Book of Dzyan, which he describes, much as H. P. Lovecraft did, as “older than the earth,” and claimed that chosen people who simply touch the book will receive visions of what it describes, through “rhythmically transmitted impulses.”[37] Von Däniken quotes from the book at great length, discussing how its seven stanzas of creation are a perfect account of alien visitation, and notes, "Mahabharata, Cabbala, Zohar, Dzyan. Identical as to facts that point in one direction. Are they accounts of things that really happened?"[38]
Hancock has since updated his Ancient Aliens hypothesis by marrying it with the entheogen thesis, by suggesting that “supernatural” entities such as aliens and fairies are actually transdimensional beings encountered by human beings under altered states of consciousness, most likely achieved by ingesting psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca. It was through such “contact,” he proposes, that early human civilizations learned advanced skills from their encounters with these beings.
These authors started forming expectations about a Giza discovery around year 2000, which was supposed to herald the Age of Aquarius. These ideas formed the bedrock of Bauval’s Project Equinox 2000, announced in 1998, and based around a group of twelve authors in addition to himself, whom he referred to as the Magic 12. It originally included Graham Hancock, John Anthony West, Andrew Collins, Robert Temple, Michal Baigent, one of the authors of the Holy Blood Holy Grail, and Christopher Knights and Robert Lomas, authors of the Hiram Key, which contains a radical hypothesis regarding the origins of Freemasonry, seeking to demonstrate a heritage through the Knights Templar to the Jerusalem Church and Pharaoic Egypt.
The Magic 12 were to hold a series of conferences held on the equinoxes and solstices throughout the year 1999, at locations regarded as the major Hermetic sites of the world, such as Giza, Alexandria, Stonehenge and San Jose, the headquarters of AMORC.
According to Bauval, the purpose was to perform a global ritual symbolizing the return of the Hermetic tradition to Egypt. The year’s rituals were to culminate on New Years Eve, when the 12 authors would deliver their “message to the planet” in front of the Sphinx, and which would mark the “return of the gods” to Egypt.
Hawass, who is also linked to AMORC, had announced that a ceremony of blatant Masonic symbolism was also to take place, where a gold capstone was going to be placed on the top of the Great Pyramid, but the event was finally cancelled due to overwhelming protests. Hawass has received widespread publicity internationally, and was the subject of a reality television series in the US, Chasing Mummies. But his links to business ventures and the Mubarak regime have caused controversy. In connection with the awarding of a gift shop contract at the Egyptian Museum and alleged smuggling of antiquities, he was sentenced to a prison term, which was later lifted.
Most recently, the pseudo-history of these authors, as well as the ancient astronaut theorists Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Däniken, has been popularized in another History Channel documentary, called “Ancient Aliens.” Although Sitchin taught himself Sumerian cuneiform, he wrote his books at a time when knowledge of the language was limited. His ideas have been rejected by scientists and academics for flawed methodology and mistranslations as well as for incorrect astronomical and scientific claims.
According to his interpretation of Mesopotamian iconography and symbology, Sitchin attributes the creation of the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he equates with the Nephilim of Genesis, and which he asserts were a race of extraterrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. In other words, the Fallen Angels.
Von Däniken was convicted of several financial crimes including fraud shortly after publication of his first book, but later became a co-founder of the Archaeology, Astronautics and SETI Research Association (AAS RA), which produces the Legendary Times magazine, published by Giorgio Tsoukalos, the Consulting Producer for the “Ancient Aliens” series. However, in Debunking Ancient Aliens, Chris White does an excellent job of not only making evident the dreadfully poor scholarship demonstrated by many of these authors, but also in several cases, the very bold mendacity employed in making many of their claims.
Effectively, it would seem, what is being prepared is the revelation of the expected messiah, known as Maitreya, the Mahdi, St. Germain and Christ, the “King of the Jews” of the Protocols of Zion, the proposed leader of the New World Order, who will come down to earth in, as the ancients ignorantly described, a flaming chariot, which in actuality, we are to believe, will be a flying saucer.
This scenario mirrors allegations presented in 1994 by Quebecois journalist and conspiracy theorist Serge Monast. Monast claims to reveal a secret plot known as Project Blue Beam, with the assistance of NASA, to attempt to implement a New Age religion with the Antichrist at its head and start a New World Order, via a technologically-simulated Second Coming. The image of God speaking in all languages will appear in a gigantic “space show” with laser projections of multiple 3-dimensional holographic images worldwide. The project was apparently supposed to be implemented in 1983, but was postponed several times, first to 1995, 1996, and finally by the year 2000.
The content of this article was taken from my latest book, Black Terror White Soldier: Islam, Fascism & the New Age where these topics are explored in a broader context.
[1] Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 164–167.
[2] Manly P. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy: Being an Interpretation of the Secret Teachings concealed within the Rituals, Allegories and Mysteries of all Ages, (San Francisco H.S. Crocker, 1928), p. 44.
[3] Foster Bailey, The Spirit of Masonry (Tunbridge Wells: Lucis Press, 1957) p. 9.
[4] Robinson, Edgar Cayce’s Story of the Origin and Destiny of Man, p. 79.
[5] Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on the Seven Rays, Vol. V: The Rays and the Initiations, p. 418.
[6] James Nye, “Chromosome Damage! A Random Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson,” Fortean Times, no. 79 (February/March 1995)
[7] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, (Boston, Massachusetts, US: Brill Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 38–39.
[8] Peter Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (Harcourt, 1949) p. 50.
[9] Jan Irwin, “The Secret History of Magic Mushrooms,” Gnosis Media.
[10] (New Falcon Publications, 1977) p. 147.
[11] Philip Coppens, The Stargate Conundrum: The US Government’s secret pursuit of the psychic drug, Chapter 3. Carl Jung and the archetypes, Introduction.
[12] Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, p. 154.
[13] Puharich, Uri: The Original and Authorized Biography of Uri Geller (London: Futura, 1974) pp. 14-15.
[14] Picknett & Prince, Stargate Conspiracy, p. 173
[15] Jacques Vallée, Messengers of Deception, p. 133.
[16] Picknett & Prince, The Stargate Conspiracy, p. 319.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., p. 320.
[19] Robert Bauval, “A Meeting with Dr. Joseph Schor in New York,” posting on Equinox 2000 website, 26 October 1998.
[20] Mike Everleth, “The Underground Film World Of Aleister Crowley.” Bad Lit (February 1, 2009).
[21] Email from Kim Farmer of AFFS (September 24, 1998); cited in Picknett & Prince, Stargate Conspiracy, p. 35.
[22] Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano. “The Dogon Revisited.”
[23] Anitra Thorhaug, Ph.D. President USA Club of Rome, “Obituary for Claiborne Pell,” USA Club of Rome
[24] Edgar Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer, (GP Putnam's Sons, 1996), p. 91.
[25] “Edgar Mitchell On The UFO Cover-Up” (subscription fee required). UFO UpDates. (Octover 11, 1998).
[26] “Edgar Mitchell, Ph.D. – UFO Researchers & People.” UFOEvidence.org.
[27] “Interview on Dateline NBC April 19, 1996.” UFO Evidence. Retrieved 2009-05-27.
[28] Picknett & Prince, Stargate Conspiracy, p. 153
[29] Richard Hoagland, The Monuments on Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever, (Berkeley, 1996), p. 373.
[30] “CSICOP Turns its Eye on Hoagland—And Gets it Blackened in The Attempt”; enterprisemission.com.
[31] “Is There Liquid Water on Europa?” (Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 6, September 1979)
[32] “The Rise of the Rough Beast” Adapted from a lecture by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince at the Saunière Society Symposium, Conway Hall, London.
[33] Picknett & Prince, Stargate Conspiracy, p. 91.
[34] Robert Bauval, posting on Egyptnews, August 13, 1998.
[35] Jason Colavito, “An investigation into H.P. Lovecraft and the invention of ancient astronauts." Skeptic 10.4 (2004).
[36] Kenneth Feder, Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to the Walam Olum, page 267 (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2010)
[37] p. 137; cited in Jason Colavito, “Von Daniken, Theosophy, and the Fraudulent Book of Dzyan,” JasonColavito.com (01-08-2012).
[38] Ibid. p. 142.