Barack Obama and the Masonic Martyr

If I had to guess, I would say that Barack Obama is a Freemason, possibly of the Order of Prince Hall, or more likely, in one of the many clandestine or affiliated Masonic orders. We have no documentation on that as yet, but it is certainly interesting that the Freemasons are holding their first-ever (public) inaugural ball in his honor.

UPDATE 7/24 - Famous Prince Hall Masons in politics:

David Paterson, First Black Governor of New York
Julian Bond, St. James Lodge No. 4, Atlanta. NAACP National Chairman
Thomas Bradley, mayor of Los Angeles, California
Medger Wiley Evers, NAACP field secretary
Wilson Goode, Sons of Light No. 120. First Black mayor of Philadelphia
Augustus F. Hawkins. US Congressman California
Benjamin L. Hooks, Former Executive Director NAACP
Rev. Jesse Jackson, Harmony Lodge No. 88, Chicago, Illinois
Kweisi Mfume, Mount Olive Lodge No. 25, Baltimore, Maryland. President and CEO, NAACP
Charles B. Rangel, Joppa Lodge No. 55, US Congressman New York
Rev. Al Sharpton, Jurisdiction of New York, civil rights leader
Carl B. Stokes, first Black elected mayor, Cleveland, OH
Louis Stokes, US Congressman Ohio
John Street, Philadelphia Lodge No. 74. mayor of Philadelphia
Lawrence Douglass Wilder, East End Lodge No. 233, Virginia. First US Black Governor, Mayor Of Richmond, Va.
Andrew Young, St. James Lodge No. 4, Atlanta, Georgia. UN Ambassador, mayor of Atlanta
Thurgood Marshall, Associate Justice, US Supreme Court

One individual we know for sure was a very high-ranking Freemason of the Scottish Rite is Virgil "Gus" Grissom (1926-1967), one of the original NASA astronauts and a man many see as a martyr to the increasing corruption of the space program. Alone among the original astronauts, Grissom is has retained the incredible mystique that the space jockeys had in the 60s.

Grissom also lent his name to the male lead "Gil Grissom" (as in Vir-gil) on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, played by William Petersen of The Skulls fame. Given that CSI runs on the All-Seeing Eye network, I believe whoever chose this name was making a definite statement.

Many higher-ups within the space program blamed Grissom for the loss of the Mercury capsule known as the Liberty Bell 7. Journalist-turned-neocon shill Tom Wolfe slandered Grissom in The Right Stuff, but his fellow astronauts always defended him. Many people believe that Grissom was murdered for his criticism of NASA, and see him as a martyr- a symbol of a lost dream.

Is one of those people Barack Obama?

THE FINAL FRONTIER

Like no president in my memory, Barack Obama seems very engaged with the space program. Of course, this is in the context of the rush to colonize space (or construct welcome centers) that we've been looking at. But on a 2008 campaign stop, he sounded a lot like Gus Grissom:

“I grew up on Star Trek,” Obama said. “I believe in the final frontier.

But Obama said he does not agree with the way the space program is now being run and thinks funding should be trimmed until the mission is clearer.

“NASA has lost focus and is no longer associated with inspiration,” he said. “I don’t think our kids are watching the space shuttle launches. It used to be a remarkable thing. It doesn’t even pass for news anymore.”

There's also been a lot of wrangling with NASA over funding, but Obama invited several astronauts to the inauguration and the new moon rover/habitat will be the first space vehicle to appear at an inaugural parade. Several prominent astronauts (including Freemason John Glenn) endorsed Obama. One, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, went so far to launch a door-to-door campaign for Obama, saying "This is the best thing since JFK. He put me in, Obama is taking us back." Incidentally, Schweickart was born in Neptune, NJ and has taught at Esalen.

THE NEXUS

While looking into the timeline of the 2008 campaign I accidentally stumbled upon a curious coincidence. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times story from Obama's February 10, 2007 presidential campaign announcement:

SPRINGFIELD, Ill., Feb. 10 — Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, standing before the Old State Capitol where Abraham Lincoln began his political career, announced his candidacy for the White House on Saturday by presenting himself as an agent of generational change who could transform a government hobbled by cynicism, petty corruption and “a smallness of our politics.”

This announcement was exactly forty years after the cover date of the issue of Life magazine that covered the state funeral of Gus Grissom and the other Apollo 1 astronauts.

Gus Grissom was born April 3, 1926. Exactly 80 years later, Barack Obama gave an major speech before the US Senate called "The Coming Storm: Energy Independence and the Safety of Our Planet" while gas prices were spiraling. He also spoke on "global warming," saying:

And just recently, this is the administration that tried to silence a NASA scientist for letting the rest of us know that yes, climate change is a pretty big deal.

Was this an oblique reference to the death of Grissom, born exactly 80 years before? As we will soon see, Grissom was himself a NASA whistle-blower, whom many believe was "silenced." Obama also said this during the speech:

See, there’s a reason that some have compared the quest for energy independence to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo moon landing. Like those historic efforts, moving away from an oil economy is a major challenge that will require a sustained national commitment.

Grissom was the captain of Apollo 1 and would have captained Apollo 11, the first moon landing. Obama would again refer to the landing in his victory speech, connecting it to a 106 year-old Atlanta (on the 33rd parallel) woman. On the 17th day following, we saw the Atlantis Rising ceremony in Dubai.

Nothing but typical boilerplate, you say? Well, let's go down the list. What other important details in Gus Grissom's life correspond with those in Obama's life, specifically his campaign?

Gus Grissom graduated from Purdue University in Indiana. Barack Obama chose Purdue for another landmark event in the campaign, his July 16, 2008 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations confirming his adherence to the CFR line on the "War on Terror."
July 16 was the launch date of Apollo 11, which, again, Grissom would have captained had he not died. Obama couldn't seem to resist making an oblique reference to the anniversary:

All of this will demand the greatest resource that America has – our people. In the Cold War, we didn’t defeat the Soviets just because of the strength of our arms – we also did it because at the dawn of the atomic age and the onset of the space race, the smartest scientists and most innovative workforce was here in America.

It's also interesting to note that Obama seemed particularly intent on winning Indiana, Grissom's home state, both in the primaries and the general election.

Also, Gus Grissom was a lifelong member of the "Church of Christ" denomination. What denomination did Barack Obama choose to be baptised in?

The Church of Christ.

LIBERTY BELL

As mentioned, Grissom fell afoul of NASA brass when he was was accused of blowing the hatch to the Mercury Liberty Bell 7 space capsule, causing the expensive equipment to sink to the ocean bed. This soured relations between Grissom and NASA and he soon became a critic of corruption within the space program. NASA fought back:

Critics of Grissom, including novelist Tom Wolfe, have claimed the astronaut panicked when his space capsule landed in the ocean, and he prematurely pulled an explosive charge to open the ship’s hatch, causing it to sink.

Fellow astronauts, however, gave Grissom the benefit of the doubt for several reasons. Grissom was a decorated Korean War pilot who had flown nearly 100 combat missions. He was a courageous man not known to panic. There was also evidence that the explosive device on the hatch could accidentally blow without being pulled -- a fact that led NASA to remove such devices from future spacecraft.

Also, had Grissom pulled the explosive release on the hatch, his hand or arm should have had powder and bruise marks. Neither were found.- Newsmax

On October 3, 1962, Wally Schirra, another Masonic astronaut from New Jersey, tried to absolve Grissom his own way when he splashed down in the Pacific Ocean between the Midway Islands and Hawaii:

Two Mercury flights later, Astronaut Wally Schirra manually blew Sigma 7's hatch after splashdown, in a deliberate attempt to dispel the rumor that Grissom might have blown Liberty Bell 7's hatch deliberately. As anticipated, the kickback from the manual trigger left Schirra with a visible injury to his right hand. Grissom was uninjured when he exited the capsule.

What significance does this important date in Gus Grissom's career have in Barack Obama's life? Well, exactly thirty years later, on October 3, 1992, Barack and Michelle Obama were married.

CONSPIRACY AND COVERUP

The controversy over Grissom's death is so hot that one ubiquitous media "skeptic" (and tireless defender of government orthodoxy) went so far as to shut down debate on the Apollo 1 murder theories on his message board.

One "Apollo hoax" conspiracy site boils the basic narrative amongst Grissom partisans to its essence.

In January 1967, Virgil 'Gus' Grissom, an American astronaut, held an unauthorized press conference in which he told reporters that the United States was "at least a decade away" from even contemplating a lunar mission. He was severely rebuked for giving that interview without permission. 

Following this reprimand, Gus Grissom later came out of a water tank reduced gravity simulation of the supposed lunar landing module, and attached a lemon to a coat-hanger, which he then hung in front of a NASA emblem to indicate to the cameras, without speaking, what he and his fellow crew members, Roger Chaffee and Edward White, thought of the Apollo programme. Clearly Mr. Grissom did not fit NASA's requirement of an easily-controlled, brain-dead military man. 

A few days after this, on 27 January 1967, Grissom, Chaffee and White were murdered, via a horrific pressurized oxygen fire, while locked in the capsule at the top of a Saturn V rocket.

But it's not just conspiracy theorists who believe Grissom was murdered for his whistle-blowing, it's also the Grissom family.

"My father’s death was no accident. He was murdered,” Grissom, a commercial pilot, told Star.

Grissom said he recently was granted access to the charred capsule and discovered a "fabricated” metal plate located behind a control panel switch. The switch controlled the capsules’ electrical power source from an outside source to the ship’s batteries. Grissom argues that the placement of the metal plate was an act of sabotage...

...Grissom’s widow, Betty, now 71, told Star she agrees with her son’s claim that her husband had been murdered. "I believe Scott has found the key piece of evidence to prove NASA knew all along what really happened but covered up to protect funding for the race to the moon.”

Grissom's death capped a tense period when the astronaut had been the target of death threats:

The Grissom family had reason to doubt the official NASA ruling from the beginning. Even before Apollo I, Grissom had received death threats which his family believed emanated from within the space program.

The threats were serious enough that he was put under Secret Service protection and had been moved from his home to a secure safehouse. According to his wife, Grissom had warned her that "if there is ever a serious accident in the space program, it’s likely to be me.”

For their part, Richard Hoagland and Michael Bara point out at The Enterprise Mission there was a "strange coincidence of the fire taking place at the same moment as a special White House space reception. A ceremony had been set up at the White House to commemorate the signing of the UN space treaty of 1967. Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, noted that this coincidence was "weird" in his book Lost Moon: 'The invitation said 6:14 pm. It actually said that. Not 6:15, or 6:13, but 6:14. It was unclear to me what they were going to do with the extra minute.'"

The deadly fire broke out at 6:31 PM, exactly 17 minutes after the start of the reception.

Hoagland and Bara note the "coincidence" of several astronomical alignments connected to events in Gus Grissom's career, involving Sirius and Orion among others. The alignments inspire the rearchers to conclude:

...the "Resurrection" of Grissom's capsule (in 1999) took place at a specific time and place so that all of the key gods in the ancient Egyptian pantheon could observe from "sacred positions" in the heavens. This overwhelmingly symbolic act was played out before Osiris, the god of resurrection, at the site of the recovery. Horus, the son of Osiris was at Giza, Isis, mother of Horus and wife/sister of Osiris was at the Viking 2 site, and Set, as represented by Taurus/Encke was at Cydonia.In the years that we have been tracking this NASA/Egypt connection, rarely if ever have we seen such a complete roll call of the Gods of the Nile.

This all smacks of long term plan, a predilection for ritual and reverence that can only be described as compulsive.

Gods and locations, eh? Well, the Liberty Bell 7 was recovered on July 20, 1999. 9 years later Barack Obama announced he would be giving a speech at Berlin's Victory Column, which would be entitled "A World that Stands as One."

But what of January 27th itself? Any link to the Barack Obama narrative?

MARTYRS

On January 27, 2008, the 41st anniversary of the death of Gus Grissom, The New York Times published an editorial by Caroline Kennedy entitled "A President Like My Father," in which Kennedy endorsed the young Senator at a crucial point in the campaign, although she'd previously donated $5000 to Hillary Clinton. The daughter of another 60s martyr, Kennedy wrote:

OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

Kennedy hadn't endorsed a presidential candidate since 1980 when her Uncle Ted ran. It seems that Kennedy will be rewarded for this by being appointed the Senate seat of New York. The man who will appoint her will be Freemason Gov. David Paterson, who was recently in the news when a USAir jet landed safely in the Hudson River.

Which makes for an interesting parallel to Grissom's more controversial water landing with the Liberty Bell 7, and his next mission as well.

UNSINKABLE

Despite the controversy, Grissom was given the task of choosing a nickname for his next flight on the Gemini III. He couldn't resist teasing the bosses who had been circulating rumors about his courage. From the NASA biography:

The Broadway musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown provided him with a source of inspiration. With the loss of Liberty Bell still on his mind, Gus decided to poke fun at the whole incident. Molly Brown had been strong, reliable and most importantly, unsinkable. It was a perfect name for Liberty Bell's successor. However, some of Grissom's bosses insisted that he choose a more respectable name. Gus replied, "How about the Titanic?" It was clear that Grissom was not going to back down on this one. Given a choice of Molly Brown or Titanic, disgruntled officials backed off. Without further ado, Gemini-Titan 3 became known as Molly Brown.

Molly Brown was Margaret Brown, a surivor of the Titanic who became a fixture on the social scene in Denver. And where did Barack Obama's coronation as the Democratic nominee take place?

Denver.

NOTE: Barack Obama chose the 42nd anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire- in other words, Gus Grissom's death- to essentially end NASA as we knew it. Read more here. 

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