Age of Aquarius

The New Age movement is the ultimate millenarian movement. Although it is not typically associated with Christianity, the movement’s expectation of the coming of a “New Age of Aquarius” is derived ultimately from the Book of Revelation. As noted in New World Encyclopedia, the New Age movement was highly influenced by Joachim of Fiore’s divisions of time, and transformed the Three Ages philosophy into astrological themes. The Age of the Father was recast as the Age of Aries, the Age of the Son became the Age of Pisces, and the Age of the Holy Spirit was called the Aquarian New Age. The coming “Age of Aquarius” will supposedly witness the development of a number of great changes for humankind, reflecting the typical features of millennialism.[1] The Age of Aquarius is derived from the Bible, but from a Gnostic interpretation, in other words, heretical Christianity. It is stripped of its Christian language through the influence of Theosophy, which sees Eastern mysticism as the true source of the Jewish Kabbalah. The movement is not only founded on contact with discarnate entities, a practice known as channeling, but also on exploring the hidden physical properties of nature and of humans, otherwise known as magic, which they characterize as “human potential.” And for occultists embedded in the military, they believe these hidden forces can be tapped to participate in their goal of accelerating the apocalypse.

Reputedly, the first to coin the term “New Age” was Alice Bailey, who played a formative role through her friendship with Olga Froebe-Kapteyn in the founding of the Earns Conferences. Funding for the conferences was provided by Mary Mellon and her husband Paul Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in the United States at the time, and who worked with Allen Dulles in the OSS, precursor of the CIA. The couple also created Bollingen Press, which featured many authors associated with the history of Traditionalism and the Esalen Institute, which is recognized as the “mother church” of the New Age Movement. Mellon, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn and Dulles all worked closely with Carl Jung, a key figure at Eranos. In “Aion,” Jung calculated that, according to the longitude of the stars in Ptolemy’s Almagest, the next Platonic month, the Age of Aquarius, that would succeed the Age of Pisces would begin in 1997.[2] According to Jung:

…Considering the terrible time in which we are living… it reminds me of… those dark centuries when the culture of antiquity was gradually falling into decay. Now once again we are in a time of decay and transition,… The vernal equinox is moving out of the sign of Pisces into the sign of Aquarius,… Our apocalyptic epoch… contains the seeds of a different, unprecedented, and still inconceivable future…[3]

The British counterpart of Esalen is the Findhorn community, on the north coast of Scotland, which recognizes Alice Bailey as “prophet of the movement.”[4] In the 1970s, David Spangler, an American student of Bailey’s literature, joined the community and developed its education program. Spangler’s 1976 book, Revelation: the Birth of a New Age, became the early manifesto of both Findhorn and the New Age movement. Drawing on channeled messages received by himself and others at Findhorn, he declared that a New Age was beginning. According to Spangler, in the last half of the twentieth century, in part owing to astrological realignments, new cosmic spiritual energies were available that could bring humanity into contact with the masters of Blavatsky’s “Great White Brotherhood” and initiate a new era of light and love, the New Age. In Reflections on the Christ, to leave no doubt about true nature of these aspirations, Spangler wrote:

Lucifer, like Christ, stands at the door of man’s consciousness and knocks.  If man says, “Go away because I do not like what you represent, I am afraid of you,” Lucifer will play tricks on that fellow.  If man says, “Come in, and I will give to you the treat of my love and understanding and I will uplift you in the light and presence of the Christ, my outflow,” then Lucifer becomes something else again.  He becomes the being who carries that great treat, the ultimate treat, the light of wisdom....[5]

Spangler, a student of Alice Bailey’s literature, joined the Findhorn community in the 1970s and developed its education program. Spangler's 1976 book, Revelation: the Birth of a New Age, became the early manifesto of both Findhorn and the New Age movement. Drawing on channeled messages received by himself and others at Findhorn, he declared that a New Age was beginning. It was already evident in the vast scientific advances and technological improvements that so separated twentieth-century humanity from previous generations. According to Spangler, in the last half of the twentieth century, in part owing to astrological realignments, new cosmic spiritual energies were available that could bring humanity into contact with the masters of the Great White Brotherhood and initiate a new era of light and love, the New Age.

Like Spangler’s Revelation, the Birth of a New Age, the 1980 bestseller The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Willis Harman’s protégé and also a director of IONS Marilyn Ferguson, became regarded as the “handbook of the New Age.” As an indication of who represents the modern leaders of this “conspiracy,” Ferguson conducted a survey of 185 leaders of the New Age and Human Potential Movement and found that they answered that the most influential thinkers in their lives were, in order, first was Teilhard de Chardin, followed by Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow and Jiddu Krishnamurti. Nazi sympathizer and CIA collaborator Carl Jung was convinced that he had been chosen by God for a prophetic mission to herald the dawning Age of Aquarius, and it is through him that the idea became a mainstay of the counterculture of the 1960s and the 1970.[6] Scholars have listed Jung among the five chief influences of twentieth-century occultism, in addition Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff and René Guénon. Jung is the father of the “New Age” phenomenon, and coined many of the concepts employed by New Age writers, such as synchronicity, archetypes, collective unconscious, and individuation.[7] Jung appeared on the album cover of the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, along with H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, and Madame Blavatsky. Fifth Dimension had a hit song from the musical Hair echoing Jung’s ideas, and millions of people all over the world believed it was “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”[8]

Rockefeller Brothers

The New Age movement is intertwined with the environmental movement, which is heavily funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund was founded in 1940 as the primary philanthropic vehicle for the five third-generation Rockefeller brothers: John D. Rockefeller III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop and David. Laurance served as served as president (1958–68) and later its chairman (1968–80) of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, longer than any other leader in the Fund’s history. From 1956 to 1960, the Fund financed a study conceived by its then president, Nelson Rockefeller, to analyze the challenges facing the United States. Henry Kissinger was recruited to direct the project. Seven panels were constituted that looked at issues including military strategy, foreign policy, international economic strategy, governmental reorganization, and the nuclear arms race.[9] According to Nelson Rockefeller biographer Joseph E. Persico, the fund’s 1958 report Prospect for America was so influential “that during the 1960 election, both parties lifted from it for their platforms. The very emblem of the Kennedy administration was taken from a section of the Rockefeller Brothers’ report entitled ‘The New Frontiers.'”[10] Nelson served in politics as governor of New York (1958-74) and then as Gerald Ford’s vice-president (1975-77).

As Peter Collier and David Horowitz reported in The Rockefellers, in the 1960s most of the family’s cousins used their wealth to fuel radical causes.[11] After John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s widow, Martha Baird Rockefeller, died in 1971, she left her $72 million estate to charity–including $10 million to the Rockefeller Family Fund. Laurance Rockefeller’s daughter Marion wrote in an internal memo for the other cousins, “The task as we see it is often to attack the very political and economic forces which perpetuate the tax deductible contribution… We think the Fund has an obligation to seek out organizations like American Friends Service Committee, Friends of the Earth, Pacifica stations, American Documentary Films et al. and support them regardless of their tax status.”[12] “The Rockefeller Family Fund, explains Martin Morse Wooster, “has been a consistently leftist funding vehicle ever since. And the cousins gradually rose in influence at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a transition marked by David Rockefeller Jr.’s succeeding his father as the fund’s chairman in 1983.”[13]

Despite the fact that the major source of their wealth has been fossil fuels, the Rockefeller agenda heavily backed the cause of global warming and sustainable development, which has been mostly advanced by the Club of Rome, founded in April 1968 by Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Peccei also became active in organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth and the International Ocean Institute.[14] Friends of the Earth (FOE) was founded in 1969 in San Francisco by David Brower, Donald Aitken and Gary Soucie after Brower’s split with the Sierra Club, and has received funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.[15] The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth (1972), which sold 12 million copies in more than 30 translations, making it the best-selling environmental book in world history. The result of a ground-breaking exercise in cybernetic modelling at MIT, it predicted a Malthusian scenario, which forecasted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil.

Aquarian Conspiracy

The Club of Rome helps coordinate an international network of environmental agencies, whose ultimate purpose is to use the movement to promote New Age ideas, as the worship of “Mother Nature,” an idea rooted in neopaganism. Marilyn Ferguson, in The Aquarian Conspiracy, referring to this network—which in addition to environmental groups also includes peace groups, human rights groups, and groups fighting hunger—quotes Peccei as saying that they represent “the yeast of change… scattered, myriad spontaneous groupings of people springing up here and there like antibodies in a sick organism.”[16] Ferguson was inspired in the choice of her title when she read about a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—father of Justin, the current Prime Minister—to the United Nations Habitat Conference in Vancouver, where he quoted a passage where synarchist Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin called for a “conspiracy of love.”

Andrija Puharich, the prioneer the CIA’s experiments into the paranormal, claimed to have been working for the Canadian government to investigate the effects of low frequency radiation exploited by the Soviets, and to have advised Trudeau and President Jimmy Carter.[17] Trudeau became a very close friend of Fidel Castro, who according to historian Maurice Halperin, was “apparently was convinced that some of his ancestors were Marranos.”[18] In 2017, the suicide of Fidel Castro’s oldest son, Fidelito, spurred reports on several sites claiming that Fidelito left a suicide note referring to Justin Trudeau as his half-brother.[19] Justin’s birth was purportedly the result of an affair between the Cuban leader and Pierre’s notoriously promiscuous wife Margaret (née Sinclair). Over time, the Pierre and Margaret’s marriage deteriorated, and Margaret smuggled drugs in the prime minister’s luggage, made scantily-clad appearances at Studio 54. As recounted in her book, she had an affair with US Senator Ted Kennedy. She associated with members of the Rolling Stones, including Ronnie Wood and, according to Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life, Mick Jagger. The current Aga Khan, Prince Shah Karim Al Husseini, hereditary head of the Assassins, is a Trudeau family friend. In 2017, Canada’s Ethics Commissioner, began an investigation into Justin for a vacation he and his family took to Aga Khan’s private island in the Bahamas.[20]

The Aquarian Conspiracy was praised by author and CIA agent and GRECE member Arthur Koestler, who called it “stunning and provocative.” Psychologist Carl Rogers credited her with having “etched, in unforgettable vividness, the intricate web of changes shaping the inevitable revolution in our culture,” and said the book “gives the pioneering spirit the courage to go forward.”[21] Philosopher and religious scholar Jacob Needleman also predicted that the book would help to make “New Age” thinking “more understandable and less threatening” to the general public in America.[22] The Aquarian Conspiracy steadily climbed the best-seller list, and was credited by USA Today as “the handbook of the New Age” and by New York Times as “working its way increasingly into the nation’s cultural, religious, social, economic and political life.”[23]

Others frequently mentioned in Ferguson’s survey included: Hermann Hesse, Alfred North Whitehead, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts, Sri Aurobindo, D.T. Suzuki, Thomas Merton, Willis Harman, Erich Fromm, John Lilly, Werner Erhard, Oscar Ichazo, Buckminster Fuller, Alfred Korzybski and Marshall McLuhan, who is also celebrated throughout Ferguson’s book. Korbzynski, a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called General Semantics, was a Russian intelligence agent who emigrated to the US, and also had contact with Aufau member Boris Brasol, and the so-called “brain trust” of the America First Committee. After he moved to New York in 1921, Korbzynski was immersed in a period he called “the longest hatred,” before renouncing his anti-Semitism.[24]

Drawing on the philosophical background of Zen, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski, and also from Norbert Wiener’s early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published. Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life. The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit. In 1958, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, and met Carl Jung.

In 1961, Ferguson along with Abraham Maslow, renowned psychologist known for his theory of “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs,” founded the Association for Humanistic Psychology, of which futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard was a past president. While in New York teaching at Brooklyn College, Maslow had helped sexologist Alfred Kinsey with sex research.[25] Maslow and his network, explains Ferguson, accepted the invitation extended by Hubbard in 1967 to a thousand people around the world, to form a “human front” of those who shared a belief in the possibility of transcendent consciousness. A Jewish agnostic, Hubbard was the daughter of Louis Marx, whose toy company was the largest in the world in the 1950s. Barbara’s sister Patricia was the second wife of Daniel Ellsberg, an employee of the RAND Corporation, whom she assisted in the release of the Pentagon Papers, which precipitated a national controversy in 1971.

Marilyn Ferguson claimed that “spirits of the dead” help her write her book.[26] Likewise, Hubbard has long been influenced by spirits as well. She implicitly obeys a voice that tells her what to do: “Whenever I heard it, I was deeply relieved and joyful, and set about to follow its guidance minute by minute.” She also confesses that she has united herself with this spirit. She explained, “The higher voice and my conscious mind began to weave together. It was sometimes difficult to tell which voice was speaking. Barbara’s voice or the higher voice” and “then the ‘voice’ which until now had seemed to be my own “Higher Self’, became elevated and was transformed into an even Higher Voice, the Christ voice. I felt an electrifying prison of light, a field that lifted me up.”[27]

Hubbard ran for vice-president for the Democratic Party in 1984, and shared the following overt Masonic symbolism in her speech to the national convention:

Our forbears set for the vision. It is written on the dollar bill, as it is written in our hearts: E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many One.” Novus Ordo Seclorum, “A New Order of the Ages.” You see the unfinished pyramid with the cosmic eye. This means, that when we combine our magnificent building power with our spirit and love, we will have a New World Order of the Ages.[28]

Although less well-known, due to her vast financial wealth and influence among leading world politicians, industrialists, etc., Hubbard is having a major impact behind the scenes. Hubbard established the first Chair in Conscious Evolution at Wisdom University Graduate School and is a member of many progressive groups, including the Evolutionary Leaders Group, the Transformational Leadership Council, and the Association for Global New Thought. Hubbard has been called “the voice for conscious evolution…” by Deepak Chopra, and according to Buckminster Fuller, “There is no doubt in my mind that Barbara Marx Hubbard—who helped introduce the concept of futurism to society—is the best informed human now alive regarding futurism and the foresights it has produced.”[29]

Another important personality in the field of transpersonal psychology was another New Age luminary inspired by Alice Bailey, Jean Houston, who also collaborated with Hubbard. Houston, who is notorious for her name-dropping, claimed to have been a friend of Maslow from a very young age, and that Margaret Mead was her friend and mentor.[30] After working with Leary at Harvard and Millbrook, Michael Hollingshead set up a New York-based project of his own together with Houston.[31] Jean Houston is also the founder and principal teacher, since 1983, of the Mystery School, now called the Renaissance of Spirit. As revealed in a book by Bob Woodward, during the Clinton presidential years, first lady Hillary Clinton became close with Houston who assisted her in communing with the deceased Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi.[32]

Ferguson was inspired by the Human Potential Movement to write The Brain Revolution: The Frontiers of Mind Research in 1973. Two years later Ferguson launched Brain/Mind Bulletin, which at its peak in the 1980s had a worldwide base of some 10,000 subscribers, and which helped to popularize the ideas of such notables as physicists Fritjof Capra and David Bohm, psychologist Jean Houston and many others. Capra, a member of the faculty at Esalen, is the author of several books, including the international bestseller, The Tao of Physics. Ferguson eventually earned numerous honorary degrees, and befriended such diverse figures as Buckminster Fuller, Ram Dass, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine and billionaire Ted Turner. Ferguson’s work also influenced Vice President Al Gore, who participated in her informal network while a senator and later met with her in the White House.

UN Assistant Secretary-General and prominent New Ager Robert Muller described Ferguson’s book as “remarkable” and “epoch-making.” Muller developed the World Core Curriculum for which he was awarded the UNESCO Peace Education Prize in 1989, based loosely based on Alice Bailey’s Education in the New Age. He also contributed to Alice Bailey’s magazine, The Beacon, and addressed Arcane School conferences.[33]

Muller was the recipient of the Teilhard Foundation Award for his important contribution to shaping the UN, an “institution that functions so specifically in the spirit of the Noosphere.”[34] Muller, who served as Assistant Secretary-General of the UN for forty years, was also the former vice president of the Teilhard Center. Robert Muller wrote that, “Teilhard had always viewed the United Nations as the progressive institutional embodiment of his philosophy.”[35] He also noted:

…Teilhard de Chardin influenced his companion [Father de Breuvery], who inspired his colleagues, who started a rich process of global and long-term thinking in the UN, which affected many nations and people around the world. I have myself been deeply influenced by Teilhard.[36]

Teilhard exercised a formative influence on the direction of the UN. On September 20 to 21, 1983, at the UN headquarters in New York, an international colloquium was held in honor of Teilhard. In a message to participants, secretary-general H.E. Javier Perez de Cuellar mentioned that he, as did his predecessors Dag Hammarskjöld and U Thant, revered Teilhard as one of the contemporary thinkers who exercised great influence on them.[37]

Temple of Understanding

IONS has maintained close ties with the Temple of Understanding, founded by Bailey’s Lucis Trust. The Temple of Understanding promotes the “Interfaith Movement” with its centennial celebration of the World’s Parliament of Religions. The first Parliament of World Religions Conference, as a successor to the first Parliament of World Religions Conference, in effect the Theosophical Congress, gathered in Chicago in 1883. The recent one-world-religion agenda has been pushed with the re-establishment of the Parliament of World Religions Conference, the United Religions Initiative (URI) and United Religions Charter. The URI was founded in 1995 by Episcopalian bishop William Swing and dedicated to promoting inter-faith cooperation. The URI, which aspires to have the stature of the United Nations, was established to, “promote enduring, daily inter-faith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.” The Parliament of the World’s Religions was reconvened again in the city of Chicago in 1993. The Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was one of the co-sponsors of the Parliament, along with the Muslim World League, which was originally founded by Said Ramadan and Mufti al Husseini with the assistance of the CIA. Prince Muhammad al-Faisal bin Turki, former director of Saudi intelligence, who had worked closely with bin Laden and the CIA during the fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was one of its speakers. The first address was delivered by Robert Müller, titled “Inter-faith Understanding,” who said:

There is one sign after the other, wherever you look, that we are on the eve of a New Age which will be a spiritual age… We are entering an age of universalism. Wherever you turn, one speaks about global education, global information, global communications—every profession on Earth now is acquiring a global dimension. The whole humanity is becoming interdependent, is becoming one… this Parliament and what is happening now in the world… is a renaissance, a turning point in human history. So even the astrologers begin to tell us that there will be a fundamental change.[38]

The Temple of Understanding has NGO status and worked out of the United Nations premises directly until in 1984 it shifted headquarters to Manhattan’s historic Cathedral of St. John the Divine, dedicated to St. John the Evangelist, the author of the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation, and the patron saint of Freemasonry. Construction on the cathedral was begun with the laying of the cornerstone on December 27, 1892, St. John’s Day. Freemasons historically celebrate two feasts of Saint John. The feast of John the Baptist falls on 24 June, and that of John the Evangelist on 27 December, roughly marking mid-summer and mid-winter, coinciding with traditional pagan festivals. The Cathedral is replete with occult symbolism and often features unusual performances.

The Cathedral also houses the Lindisfarne Center founded in 1972 by William Irwin Thomson, a former professor of humanities from MIT and Syracuse University. The Lindisfarne was inspired by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead’s idea of an integral philosophy of organism, and by Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of planetization. Lindisfarne functioned as a sponsor of New Age events and lectures as well as a think tank and retreat, similar to the Esalen Institute with which it shared several members like Gregory Bateson and Michael Murphy.

The center was funded by Jean Lanier of the Physics-Consciousness Research Group and Laurance Rockefeller. Lindisfarne has also been supported by the Lilly Endowment, one of the world’s largest private philanthropic foundations and among the largest endowments in the United States, as well as by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation is a traditional front of the CIA. The Lilly Endowment was established in 1937 by the company Eli Lilly and Company, which was later contracted by the CIA to produced LSD in 1953 under Subproject 18 of MK-Ultra.[39] Lindisfarne listed among its faculty members Stewart Brand, Teilhard de Chardin-influenced Gaia theory biologist James Lovelock, and David Spangler.[40]

Earth Summit

At the same time, the Club of Rome published the report Limits to Growth, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment took place in the summer of 1972 in Stockholm, Sweden. One of the key results of this historical meeting was the adoption by participants of a declaration of principles and action plan to fight pollution. In 1984, the United Nations Assembly gave Gro Harlem Brundtland, then Prime Minister of Norway, the mandate to form and preside over the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), to draw up a profile of environmental issues and develop an action plan defining the objectives of the international community in matters pertaining to development and environmental protection. The Commission’s work led to the release in 1987 of the report Our Common Future, also called the Brundtland Report, which popularized the term “sustainable development” and its definition. In line with the report published by the Club of Rome in 1972, Limits to Growth, the report identifies the world-scale problems compromising the health and security of humanity and the ecological equilibrium on which life depends.

The WCED laid the foundations for the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held at the June 1992 UN Earth Summit in Brazil, whose Secretary-General was Maurice Strong, the Finance Director of the Lindisfarne Center. Strong, who has also been associated with IONS, had been heralded as the “indispensable man” at the center of the U.N.’s global power. Strong got his start with the Demarais’ Power Corporation of Canada, and later became CEO of Petro-Canada, and then under-secretary general of the United Nations. He has served as director of the World Future Society, trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Aspen Institute, and is a member of the Club of Rome. He was a founding member the Planetary Citizens founded by Donald Keys, a disciple of Alice Bailey. In the early 1970s, he was Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and then became the founder and first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), an agency of the United Nations, coordinates the organization's environmental activities and assists developing countries in implementing environmentally sound policies and practices.

During his address at the Earth Summit, which Time magazine described as a “New Age carnival,” Edmund de Rothschild quoted Teilhard de Chardin, who said, “Man can harness the wind, the waves and the tides, but when he can harness the energy of love, then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” The idea of an Earth Charter originated in 1987, when the UN World Commission on Environment and Development called for a new charter to guide the transition to sustainable development. One of the principle creators of the Earth Charter was Steven Clark Rockefeller, who is professor emeritus of Religion at Middlebury College and an advisory trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

A famous product of the Earth Summit was Agenda 21, a non-binding action plan of the United Nations with regard to sustainable development. The “21” in Agenda 21 refers to the 21st century. President George H.W. Bush was one of the 178 heads of government around the world who signed the final text of the agreement, and in the same year, Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Eliot Engel and William Broomfield spoke in support of United States House of Representatives Concurrent Resolution 353, supporting implementation of Agenda 21 in the United States.[41]

Baca Ranch

In about 1978, Maurice Strong and his wife Hanne Strong acquired an approximately 132,000-acre ranch in the San Luis Valley from Adnan Khashoggi. The San Luis Valley is one of the areas of most intense paranormal activity in the US. So frequent are such reports in the valley that a UFO “watchtower” was erected. “From the fall of 1966 through the spring of 1970 there were hundreds of unidentified flying object sightings and many of the first documented cases of unusual animal deaths ever reported,” notes Christopher Obrien, in The Mysterious Valley, a website dedicated to a study of the strange occurrences and sightings in the region. “During peak ‘UFO’ sighting waves in the late 1960s dozens of cars would literally ‘line the roads’ watching the amazing aerial displays of unknown lights as they cavorted around the sky above the Great Sand Dunes/Dry Lakes area.”[42]

A mystic had informed Maurice and his wife Hanna that the ranch, which they call “the Baca,” “would become the center for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that would sweep the globe in the years to come.” The Strongs say they regard the Baca, which they also refer to as “The Valley Of the Refuge Of World Truths,” as the paradigm for the entire planet. The first groups to join the Strongs in setting up operations at the site were the Aspen Institute and the Lindisfarne Association. The Baca is replete with monasteries, and Ashram, Vedic temple, Native American shamans, Hindu temple, ziggurat, and subterranean Zen Buddhist center. Shirley MacLaine’s astrologer told her to move to the Baca, and she did. Various reports indicate that visitors to Crestone have included such extremely high-powered personages as Laurence Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, Robert McNamara (then President of the World Bank), Edmond de Rothschild, British Prime Minister James Callahan, journalist Bill Moyers, and Henry Kissinger, sometimes described as CEO of the New World Order. A local rumor even has it that when Henry Kissinger visited, he proclaimed: “We will rule the world from here.”[43]

Baca is south of Crestone, Colorado, has been hailed as “the Vatican City of the New World Order?” Crestone would house Strong’s Manitou Foundation. Manitou Foundation also received initial donations of $100,000 from Laurance Rockefeller and $20,000 from Robert O. Anderson, former head of ARCO and director of the Aspen Institute of Colorado, which was located in Crestone at that time. Many New Age personalities have spoken in Crestone. Michael Murphy, the founder of Esalen, visited the community. At a lecture and guided meditation, Barbara Marx Hubbard informed her audience that a new and more spiritually-evolved kind of human is now appearing on earth. Hubbard maintained there is now a splintering of Homo sapiens into two separate species, of higher and lower spiritual capacities.

In an interview from an article titled “The Wizard Of the Baca Grande,” in West magazine of Alberta, Canada, in 1990, Strong shared a disturbing apocalyptic scenario he would include in a novel he says he would like to write. A small group of world leaders concluded that because the world’s rich countries would refuse to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment, they would form a secret society and to bring about a world collapse. Maurice Strong’s apocalyptic scenario is strikingly similar to Sydney Sheldon’s 1991 bestseller, The Doomsday Conspiracy. In the novel, the protagonist Robert Bellamy is hired by the NSA to investigate a UFO cover-up, perpetrated by a cabal of top-ranking officials of many different governments, who are concerned that the arrival of extraterrestrial visitors may cause worldwide panic or economic chaos. However, the real reason is that the aliens, who have the ability to shapeshift and communicate telepathically, from their mothership hovering above the earth, are observing humanity in disappointment. They want the world to stop harming the environment, using fossil fuels, contributing to global warming and causing wars. Concerned about the potential impact on their industries, the cabal is conspiring to keep the secret from humanity and working to develop SDI, or Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, to combat the alien intruders.

According to The Nine, all the races of the earth are therefore part extra-terrestrial, or “divine,” except the Blacks however, who are the only truly indigenous race of Earth. According to Hurtak in The Keys of Enoch, his guides Enoch and Metatron advised him not to allow his “…seed to marry with the fallen races of the earth.”[45] Hurtak was told that the Holocaust as a sad tragedy necessary for the creation of the state of Israel, an important part of the plan for Earth: “The greatest portion of these six million came at that time to sacrifice self, to make your planet aware that there were those who would attempt to rule and control humanity.”[46] Ultimately, according to The Nine, Jesus and Jehovah are one and the same, and have a special relationship to The Nine. Jesus was “the last of us to visit planet Earth.” The Second Coming will be a mass landing of extra-terrestrials, when Jesus will return as the Messiah of the Jews.

In 1975, Hurtak participated in the First Psychic Tournament in 1975 as part of Gnosticon, sometimes called the Gnostica Aquarian Convention. The events, which attracted many of the best-known Witches, Wiccans, Magicians and Neopagans of the time from all around the world, were covered in 1974 in Playboy Magazine by Canadian author Mordecai Richler.

Human Potential Foundation

John B. Alexander’s cohort, C.B. “Scott” Jones, a veteran of US Navy intelligence, was the president of the Human Potential Foundation, which was funded by Laurance Rockefeller. Jones was one of the aides Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island who founded the organization in 1989. Pell’s mentor was Skull and Bones member Averell Harriman. 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 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. Pell was also a leading member of the Club of Rome as well as friend of its founder Aurelio Peccei.[47]

C.B. Scott Jones has been head of the CIA-connected Rockefeller Foundation for some time and chairs the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR).[48] Jones worked in the private sector research and development community involved in the US government sponsored projects for the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. He has briefed the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and has testified before House and Senate committees on intelligence matters.[49]

From 1985 to 1991 C.B. Scott Jones was employed as a member of Pell’s staff for the stated purpose of studying paranormal phenomena, as reported in 1990 by The Washington Post.[50] Jones worked for Pell until it emerged that during the months before the Persian Gulf War, while in the employ of Pell, Jones wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, expressing concern that the word “Simone” appeared when audiotapes of Cheney’s speeches were played backwards. Jones had been investigating “reverse-speech therapy”. Addressing him as “Dear Dick”, Jones wrote to Cheney out of a concern that Simone might be a “code word that would not be in the national interest to be known.”[51]

The Human Potential Foundation’s activities included the studies of the social effects of alien contact and the most effective methods for lobbying Congress.[52] Its employees included Dick Farley, who resigned over concern that the Council of Nine exercised increasing influence over politicians and decision-makers. He wrote that The Nine “maintain a working network of physicists and psychics, intelligence operatives and powerful billionaires, who are less concerned about their ‘source’ and its weirdness than they are about having every advantage and new data edge in what they believe is a battle for Earth itself.”[53]

Soviet-American Exchange Program

While he was also pursuing research into Russian advances in parapsychology, Esalen founder Michael Murphy and his wife, Dulce, met Jim Hickman, who had trained in psychology and traveled to the USSR in 1972. Hickman also worked with Barbara Honegger, whose lover was Saul-Paul Sirag of Sarfatti’s Fundamental Fysiks Group.[54] In that same year, Hickman traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, to speak at a conference on the Freud’s theory of the unconscious and there he encountered one of their most important connections, microbiologist and hypnotherapist Joseph Goldin. As Sarah Laskow remarked in “How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War,” “What had begun as a project to find common cause with Soviets around human potential grew to include this progressively more political mission.” [55] In 1982, Esalen and Goldin pioneered the first U.S.–Soviet Space Bridge, allowing Soviet and American citizens to speak directly with one another via satellite communication.

In 1979, Hickman also participated in channeling sessions at Esalen with The Nine, through medium Jenny O Conner, who was introduced to Werner Erhard through Puharich’s Lab Nine partner Sir John Whitmore. Price joked about their agreement to disagree: “He puts up with my ETI and I put up with his KGB.” Likewise, Price would also sometimes tease Murphy about his “Three Rs”: running, writing and Russians.[56] Jack Sarfatti hinted that the Esalen-UFO connection at this time was significant. According to Sarfatti, “The fact remains, the iron post of observation that a bunch of apparently California New Age flakes into UFOs and psychic phenomena—including myself—had made their way into the highest levels of the American ruling class and the Soviet Union and today run the Gorbachev Foundation.”[57]

Joe Montville, an Esalen figure and career diplomat claimed that Gorbachev’s new ideological directions were taken from cues developed at Esalen.[58] In the 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in sight, given the damage incurred by the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan, Murphy and his wife Dulce were instrumental in organizing the Soviet-American Exchange Program with Soviet citizen Joseph Goldin, in order to provide a vehicle for citizen-to-citizen relations between Russians and Americans. Laurance Rockefeller provided seed funding. Murphy also noted that, through his long involvement with the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program, the role of Joseph Montville, a career foreign service officer, was to give an “unauthorized but symbolically very important blessing from the Department of State.”[59]

Gorbachev was also an honorary member of the Club of Budapest founded by Ervin Laszlo, a member of Willis Harman’s “Changing Images of Man” project at SRI. Based in Hungary behind the Iron Curtain, in 1984 Laszlo was co-founder of the initially secret General Evolutionary Research Group. Meeting behind the Iron Curtain, the group of scientists and thinkers from a variety of disciplines met in secret. Their goal was to explore whether it might be possible to use chaos theory to identify a new general theory of evolution that might serve as a path to a better world. In 1993, in response to his experience with the Club of Rome, he founded the Club of Budapest. Other Ervin Laszlo members have included Willis Harman, Edgar Mitchell, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jane Goodall, Elie Wiesel, Peter Gabriel, Robert Muller, Arthur C. Clarke, Peter Ustinov, Ravi Shankar, Vaclav Havel and Deepak Choprah.

In 1989, Esalen brought Gorbachev’s successor Boris Yeltsin on his first trip to the US. Although Yeltsin did not visit the Esalen facility in California, Esalen arranged meetings for Yeltsin with then President George H.W. Bush as well as many other leaders in business and government. Yeltsin also visited the Johnson Space Center, but it was a visit to nearby Randall’s Supermarket where he was impressed at the abundance produced by capitalism, and remarked, that if the Russian people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.” Nevertheless, the Esalen website boasts that, following his visit, Yeltsin “resigned from the Communist Party. The rest, as they say, is history.”[60]

A former president of the exchange program was American author and theologian Jim Garrison, a member of the Institute for Noetic Science (IONS).[61] Garrison took over as director of the program early in 1985, just a few months before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, and approved of Gorbachev and his reforming work in the Soviet Union. After Gorbachev stepped down, and effectively dissolved the Soviet Union, Garrison helped establish the State of the World Forum in 1995, with Gorbachev serving as chairman. According to Garrison, “Gorbachev believes we are giving birth to a new global civilization.”[62] The State of the World Forum, which has received funding from CIA fronts like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, “was founded in 1995 with the purpose of working with partners worldwide to gather together the creative genius on the planet in a search for solutions to critical global challenges.”[63] “Over the next 20 to 30 years, we are going to end up with world government,” explained Garrison, “It’s inevitable.”[64] Founding co-chairs included George Shultz, and Ted Turner, who brought in CNN to provide the forum’s initial global live broadcast with Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and George Bush. Jane Goodall joined as a co-chair in 1996. Financial contributions were provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Archer Daniel Midlands and NASDAQ.[65]

The Forum was a five-year process of consultation that would meet annually until the year 2000. About 500 people are expected to attend, including Milton Friedman, David Packard, Jane Fonda, Carl Sagan, Saudi princes, Deepak Chopra, Bill Gates, Daniel Sheehan, actor Michael Douglas, George Bush and Margaret Thatcher. The decidedly New-Agey direction of the Forum was exhibited by the presence of Willis Harman, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy, Maurice Strong, Richard Baker, Abbot of the Crestone Zen Center, Jean Houston, Ken Wilber and the respective leaders of Vietnamese, Mongolian, and Cambodian Buddhism. [66] A member of the press was prompted to ask Gorbachev about the absence of Christian leaders. David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Maurice Strong were among the participants in meetings.[67] Brzezinski spoke up and answered, “I happen to know that President Gorbachev is a very good friend of the Pope—and I am too.”[68]

[1] “Millennialism.” New World Encyclopedia (2014, October 27). Retrieved 19:35, December 17, 2017.

[2] C.G. Jung. “Aion,” Collected Works, 9ii. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

[3] “Letter to Pater Lucas Menz,” (February 22, 1955); Letters, II, 225.

[4] Michael York. The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-pagan Movements (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), p. 35.

[5] “Who is Maurice Strong”. from Donald McAlvany’s Toward a New World Order.

 http://home.sprynet.com/~eastwood01/mstrong2.htm

[6] Dusty Sklar. The Nazis and the Occult (Dorset Press, 1990) p. 132.

[7] Albert Amao. The Dawning of the Golden Age of Aquarius: Redefining the Concepts of God, Man, and the Universe (AuthorHouse, 2012), p. 183.

[8] Gary Lachman. Jung the Mystic (Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition), p. 192.

[9] Niall Ferguson. Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist (Penguin, 2015).

[10] Martin Morse Wooster. “The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller Family Fund: How a Great Capitalist’s Fortune Came to Fund Anti-Capitalist Causes.” Capital Research Center (January 18, 2005).

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Macmillan Aurelio Peccei, organizational web page, accessed April 22, 2012.

[15] “Grants.” Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Retrieved from https://www.rbf.org/grantees/friends-earth

[16] The Futurist (December, 1978); cited in Marilyn Ferguson. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) p. 410.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Tom Miller. Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 69.

[19] “No, Justin Trudeau is not Fidel Castro’s son.” Global News (February 17, 2018).

[20] “Canada’s Trudeau faces ethics probe over Bahamas trip.” Reuters (January 16, 2017).

[21] “Marilyn Ferguson.” Wikipedia. [accessed June 13, 2015]

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Bruce I. Kodish. Korzybski: A Biography (Extensional Publishing, 2011).

[25] Peter Watson. The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 414.

[26] John Ankerberg & John Weldon. Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 1984) p. 661.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Barbara Marx Hubbard, 1984 Democratic National Convention Speech. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/D1FWXm-8FGs

[29] “About Barbara Marx Hubbard,” Foundation for Consious Evolution. Retrieved from http://barbaramarxhubbard.com/barbara-marx-hubbard/

[30] Scott London. “On Soul, Shadow and the American Psyche:: An Interview with Jean Houston.” Retrieved from http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/houston.html

[31] Michael Hollingshead. The Man Who Turned On the World (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1973).

[32] Anne-Marie O’Neill (1996-07-08). “Rare ‘medium’.” People.com.

[33] Isobel Blackthorn. “Alice A. Bailey: Mother of the New Age or the New World Order?” New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 2. Retrieved from https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/alice-a-bailey-mother-of-the-new-age-or-the-new-world-order

[34] Zonneveld, ed., Humanity’s Quest for Unity, 60; “Report: Visionaries of World Peace: Teilhard de Chardin,” Teilhard Review 19/1 (Spring 1984; 25-26); cited in David Lane, The Phenomenon of Teilhard: Prophet for a New Age (Mercer University Press, 1996) p. 3.

[35] Leo Zonneveld & Robert Muller. The Desire to be Human: A Global Reconnaissance of Human Perspective in an Age of Transformation (Mirananda, 1983), p. 304.

[36] Robert Muller. Most of All They Taught Me Happiness (Amare Media, 2005), p. 116-117.

[37] David H. Lane. The Phenomenon of Teilhard: Prophet for a New Age (Mercer University Press, 1996), p. 2.

[38] Carl Teichrib, “Global Citizenship 2000: Educating for the New Age,” Hope For The World Update, 1997, p. 10.

[39] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 400.

[40] Hanegraaff. New Age Religion and Western Culture, p. 104

[41] “Nancy Pelosi Pushes Agenda 21, dispite fact that HAARP is culprit for global warming.” Retrieved from https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4362236/nancy-pelosi-pushes-agenda-21-dispite-fact-haarp-culprit-global-warming

[42] Christopher O’Brien, “The Mysterious Valley,” Retrieved from http://tmv.us

[43] Dr. Eric Karlstrom. “Appendix 13: Biblical Precedents and Scripts.” 911nwo.com (January 15, 2016)

[44] Dr. Eric Karlstrom. “Is Crestone/Baca, Colorado “the Vatican City of the New World Order?” WaterWatchAlliance.us (January, 2012)

[45] James Hurtak. The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch (Los Gatos: Academy for Future Sciences, 1977) p. viii.

[46] Phyllis Schlemmer & Mary Bennett. The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space, revised edition (Bath: Gateway Books, 1996) p. 173.

[47] Anitra Thorhaug, Ph.D. President USA Club of Rome, “Obituary for Claiborne Pell,” USA Club of Rome. Retrieved from http://www.usacor.org/news/index.html

[48] Armen Victorian. “Non-Lethality: John B. Alexander, the Pentagon’s Penguin.” Lobster (June, 1993)

[49] Robert J. Durant. “Will the Real Scott Jones Please Stand Up.” Paranet Information Service (Denver, Colorado: September 5, 1993)

[50] Tom Kenworth, Maralee Schwartz & Barbara Vobejda “Hearing It Backward.” The Washington Post (October 20, 1990).

[51] Stuart A. Vyse. Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 38.

[52] Durant. “Will the Real Scott Jones Please Stand Up.”

[53] Dick Farley. “The Council of Nine: A Perspective on ‘Briefings from Deep Space’,” Brother Blue website, 1998. Retrieved from http://brotherblue.org

[54] Sarfatti. “In the Thick of It.”

[55] Sarah Laskow. “How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War.”

[56] Kripal. Esalen, p. 366.

[56] Ibid., p. 366.

[56] Picknett & Prince. Stargate Conspiracy, p. 234.

[57] Sarfatti. “In the Thick of It.”

[58] Kripal. Esalen, p. 399.

[59] Sarah Laskow. “How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War” Atlas Obsura (December 8, 2015).

[60] “Accomplishments in Citizen Diplomacy” Esalen.org. Retrieved from http://www.esalen.org/ctr/pioneering-accomplishments-citizen-diplomacy

[61] Retrieved from www.noetic.org/directory/person/jim-garrison

[62] San Francisco Chronicle, pp. A, 15-17 (Sept 25, 1995); cited in Sarfatti, “In the Thick of It.”

[63] Retrieved from worldforum.org

[64] George Cothran. “Global Chic: Gorby’s Bash by the Bay.” Washington Post (September 24, 1995). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1995/09/24/global-chic-gorbys-bash-by-the-bay/d9d66e76-d75f-4371-a1ca-6277704ad36f/

[65] “Honoring Our Past.” State of the World Forum. Retrieved from www.worldforum.org/history/honoring.html

[66] “Honoring Our Past.” State of the World Forum. Retrieved from www.worldforum.org/history/honoring.html

[67] George Cothran. “Global Chic: Gorby’s Bash by the Bay.” Washington Post (September 24, 1995). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1995/09/24/global-chic-gorbys-bash-by-the-bay/d9d66e76-d75f-4371-a1ca-6277704ad36f/

[68] Berit Kjos. “Gorbachev's Plan for a United World” (1995). Retrieved from http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/gorb10-95.html

Volume Five

1. Team B

2. Secret Team

3. The Reagan Doctrine

4. Reaganomics

5. Second New Right

6. Project Monarch

7. Down Under

8. Sex, Lies and Wiretaps

9. Noosphere

10. Project Stargate

11. New Age

12. Psychic Warriors

13. Disclosure

14. Christofascism

15. The Clash of Civilizations

16. Black Order

17. Sacred Geopolitics

18. Third Secret of Fatima

19. Order of Eurasia