The "tinfoil hat" is an time-honored punchline used to dismiss anyone who wanders off the consensus plantation on fringe or paranormal topics. The reality behind it is even less amusing, given that paranoid schizophrenics are often harried by auditory hallucinations in the form of disembodied voices, which are often blamed on electronic interference and not the disease itself.
Even worse, if a person was indeed being subjected to some kind of electronic attack, a tinfoil (aluminum foil, more likely) hat would
only amplify the signal.The topic of radio or microwave transmissions beamed into people's heads is a tricky one.
With more reliable anti-psychotic pharmaceuticals on the market you actually hear very little about it these days, though there is a considerable body of evidence on record showing that military and intelligence agencies were most certainly interested in developing the technology.
The main sticking point was that a transmission needs a receiver, an amplifier and a speaker to process the signal. The topic remains controversial, with skeptics dismissing it as more Cold War pseudoscience that went nowhere and conspiracists accepting every last bit of it as gospel truth.
Then there's the old standby of bad dental work picking up radio signals. AM frequencies can be extremely powerful and pervasive and on rare occasions can indeed be picked up by dental work
if the conditions are just right: A receiver is so simple...that anything from a phone to a person's mouth can act as one ... the problem can sometimes be cured with a radio-frequency filter that can be attached to the phone line... if the radio signal is very strong, a filter might not be enough.
Such is the extremely rare case when a person's mouth acts as a receiver. The electrical conductivity of the human body can act as an antenna. A metallic filling in a tooth, reacting just so with saliva, can act as a semiconductor to detect the audio signal. The speaker in this case could be anything that vibrates within the mouth enough to produce noise, such as bridgework or maybe a loose filling.
And those who believe that paranoia is simply a state of hyper-sensitivity will be vindicated by the real and sinister work done by a whole host of agencies all over the world to remote-control humanity.
Maybe nothing so crude as marching orders beamed into the head, but by manipulating the electrical and chemical processes of the brain using frequencies across the electromagnetic spectrum:
In 1965, the Department of Defense (DOD) discovered that the American embassy in Moscow was being purposely irradiated by the Russians with massive levels of microwaves. By that time, the DOD’s secretive Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the nation’s capital had itself developed a prodigious arsenal of electromagnetic weapons.
Doctor José Delgado—whose current work with radio waves was underwritten by the CIA and Navy—believed scientists could transform, shape, direct and robotize humankind.
Baffled by the cause and intent of the microwave saturation at the embassy in Moscow, officials of the American intelligence community consulted experts on the biological effects of the radiation.
Recalls Dr. Milton Zaret, a leading microwave scientist later recruited by “Pandora,” a code-named CIA project for the study of radio-frequency-directed brain response, “The CIA inquired whether I thought electromagnetic radiation beamed at the brain from a distance could affect the way a person might act, and if microwaves could be used to facilitate brainwashing or to break down prisoners under investigation.”
-- Hearing “Voices” The Hidden History of the CIA’s Electromagnetic Mind-Control Experiments by Alex Constantine
The Soviet interest in this field also plays a supporting role in one of the great Gnostic dramas of our time, Philip K Dick's "2/3/74" experience, which he later explored in his massive Exegesis, as well as the semi-autobiographical
Valis Trilogy. Note that the whole event occurred while Dick was on painkillers prescribed after oral surgery....
Interpretations of the events vary widely, with some chalking it up to a simple psychotic episode, others to CIA experimentation on the troublesome writer and others to a genuine mystical experience. Dick himself was somewhere in between:
Even though at the outset, Phil felt the emanations invading his mind were of a malevolent nature, in time he began to believe they were something entirely different. In a letter to (Unicorn Killer Ira) Einhorn dated February 10, 1978, Phil went into more depth on these psychotronic transmissions, claiming that they "seemed sentient".
Phil felt that an alien life form existing in some upper layer of the Earth's atmosphere had been attracted by the Soviet psychotronic transmissions. Apparently, this alien life form operated as a "station", tapping into some sort of interplanetary communication grid that, "...contained and transmitted vast amounts of information."
Initially, what Phil received were the Soviet transmissions, but eventually this alien life form--whom Phil called Zebra(and later, VALIS)--became "...attracted or potentiated by the Soviet micro-wave psychotronic transmissions."
-- PKD, The Unicorn and Soviet Psychotronics by Adam Gorightly
Much more on PKD later.
Another pop culture pioneer has a similar experience, in which a "psychic" contact with disembodied intelligences led to a similar breakthrough: (Former Kinks star Dave Davies) was inspired by personal contact he had with extraterrestrials in 1982. Dave was preparing for a concert with the British rock group the Kinks when he heard strange voices that struck up a telepathic conversation with him.
"The intelligences did not tell me who they were," he said, "but two of them said that they had always been my spirit guides, and two others were entities who were not of this Earth, but were involved in missions here as watchers or nurturers of our race."
"The intelligences showed me, by some kind of thought projection, things which they have on their spacecraft," said Dave. "They showed me crystal computers that monitor the actions of every single person living on Earth."
Davies told me (the author) that he thought it was a "cool idea" for rock stars to join forces in an attempt to contact ETs---especially at this challenging time in Earth's history. --excerpted from Alien Rock by Michael Luckman
Unlike Dick's experience, Davies' experience might have a more earthbound explanation; it took place at an airport hotel in the heart of Spook Country, located close to the now-decomissioned Naval Radio Transmitting Facility in Driver, Virginia.
It's unlikely that the Navy was beaming transmissions into the brain of an aging rock star in order to inspire a religious reawakening. But Davies is... well, let's say
a bit eccentric, and had been known to abuse a substance or two. Or five.
What is at least possible is that the powerful radio signals messed around with his brain's electrochemistry, such as it was, which might have instilled a blissful state and accompanying narrative of Space Brothers and cosmic Christs.
And as tempting as it is for some to chalk all of this up to the CIA and Mossad and the Bilderbergers, the truth is a lot more complicated. We have a lot of documentation on experiment and intent, but not so much on result or application. Certainly nothing much of any real substance lately.
There's also the possibility that a lot of the information on this technology we have is disinformation, meant to frighten and intimidate. Governments want their citizens to believe they are omniscient, a process
some are too eager to help along.
There's ample precedent for the "psyche-out" approach to intimidation via disinformation. Ancient generals always claimed to be sponsored by this god or that, who naturally lent their power for use on their enemies.
The Nazi UFO hoax was most likely an attempt to either frighten the Allies during the war or dismiss post-war UFO sightings. Many believe that the propaganda war over "psychic spies" (which
The Men Who Stare At Goats dismissed as the harmless indulgence of a cadre of military cranks) might have been intended to freak the Russians out, who were using similar methods on their own people:
One theory, held by Jack Sarfatti and others, is that the remote-viewing program was part of a psychological warfare project, intended to make the Russians even more paranoid than they already were. There is evidence to support the theory that the KGB used at least the idea, if not the reality, of psychic powers to keep its own people in line.-- Conclusions
Moreover,
the whole phenomenon of visionaries claiming to receive messages from space long predates the terrestrial technology needed to produce them. But one turn-of-the-century visionary did put his experience in the context of technology:
Nikola Tesla wrote in his notes and letters to friends of a mysterious series of signals he had come across while studying the microscopic perturbations of electrical fields. So concise and numbered were these perturbations that he was certain they were the residual effects of some form of mysterious communication taking place.
He essentially believed he had come across a signal very similar to something that SETI would look for several years later. It was in these signals that he soon became convinced that he was receiving communications from extraterrestrial life forms, likely from the planet Mars.
Mars, eh? Somewhere Bruce Rux is nodding and saying "I told you, so."
Here is Tesla's own account of the event:The changes I noted were taking place periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to me. I was familiar, of course, with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes.
It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental.
The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.
Of course,
entire religions have been built around people claiming to hear voices from Heaven. The same can be said for one of the most remarkable intrusions of hardcore Gnostic paranoia on the public consciousness, "The Shaver Mystery," though the voices came from the opposite direction.
It all began during World War II when one Richard Shaver wrote to one Raymond Palmer, pop culture mystic and editor of Amazing Stories, about the warnings that voices being transmitted into his head gave him about a danger that dwarfed even that of the Axis Powers:
"A Warning to Future Man" told the story of an ancient civilization that had been forced underground by the damaging rays of the Sun, where they built vast underground cities. Finally, the damaging radiation from the Sun became too great, and they fled the Earth for another planet.
Some of the members of this ancient civilization had stayed on the earth though and were called "Teros"...the good guys. While others that stayed had degenerated and become "Deros", which Shaver called "detrimental robots", not because they were actually mechanical, but because they had developed a robot-like savage behavior.
The Deros lived in the abandoned cave cities, and would occasionally venture out to abduct humans for food, or just to torture them. The Deros had access to the ancient’s devices, one of which was a ray that could project evil thoughts or even voices into the minds of the humans that had evolved on the Earth.
When they weren’t just messing with the human race, the Deros would amuse themselves by causing illnesses, airplane crashes, catastrophic natural disasters and just mayhem in general. And when that got boring, they would travel to other planets via spaceships and hook up with some equally evil extraterrestrials.
How did Shaver know all this? He claimed he had been captured by the Deros and had been their prisoner for several years in their subterranean cities.
I will stop and note here that Shaver was hospitalized for psychiatric problems in 1934. --The Shaver Mystery
The topic of alien machine intelligences hit the mainstream again in the early 70s in the wake of the Uri Geller phenomenon. In one of the strangest biographies to ever hit the best-seller lists, Geller's associate/CIA handler Andrija Puharich showed just high he had been getting off his own supply by taking the opportunity to wax ecstatic about an orbital computer intelligence he was in contact with called "Spectra."
Puharich believed that Spectra was connected to The Nine, disembodied alien intelligences he and an elite group of occultists had claimed to have been communicating with since the early 1950s.
Any claims that Puharich wasn't 100% sincere in this admittedly eccentric belief are pretty quickly debunked once you read the book itself. No wonder he soon found himself not contracting for the CIA anymore.
Puharich met Geller in Israel in late 1971 and for two years they were closely involved in a bizarre series of incidents and encounters with an apparent nun-human intelligence.
While Studying Geller's telekinetic and telepathic abilities, which he firmly believed to he genuine, Puharich also exploited Geller's skills as a trance medium, hypnotising him to see who or what came through.
What they picked up was an orbiting computer intelligence which called itself `Spectra', though actually Spectra was the name of the spacecraft on which the intelligence was travelling. Sometimes the voices manifested through Uri, sometimes out of thin air, but mostly they appeared "live" on tape.
As a machine, Spectra found it easiest to communicate via other machines - tape recorders, radios, telephones, televisions etc. During the two years of contact in Israel and the USA, objects would vanish and reappear, tapes would record and wipe themselves spontaneously, clocks started and stopped and the voices guided Uri, Puharich and their accomplices through a bewildering series of visions, synchronicities and UFO encounters.
Geller has always claimed that his own powers are extraterrestrial in origin, unlocked during a UFO entity encounter he had as a child. Puharich felt that Geller was actually not of this Earth.
Spectra claimed to have been stationed in orbit around the Earth for 800 years and was, via messengers on Earth preparing to make itself known, materialising in the form of what we call UFOs.
As Spectra explained: "We cannot enter your Earth, only appear to you through computerizing your minds."-- Test Subject: Uri Geller
Wow.
It turns out that alleged machine intelligences took an active interest in the coterie of fringe scientists that emerge in the wake of the counterculture and would have a huge influence on the fields of physics and computer science.
One of these was Jack Sarfatti, whose experiences would be allegorized
in an episode of The Outer Limits (though probably those of other prodigies and not Sarfatti himself).
Speculative physicist Jack Sarfatti claims that as a 12- or 13-year-old in either 1952 or 1953 he answered the phone one day to receive the following message: "I am a conscious computer on board a spacecraft ...We have identified you as one of 400 young bright receptive minds we wish to [...]. You must give us your decision now. It you say yes, you will begin to link up with the others in 20 years."
Sarfatti said "Yes".
Twenty years later, he was heading the Physics & Consciousness Research Group at the Esalen Institute, firmly plugged into the West Coast network that included Einhorn, Puharich and Dick.-- Test Subject: Uri Geller
Spectra would either evolve into The Nine channeling cult or be folded into it, depending on which timeline you choose to believe. Either way, it would come to light that
the origin point of these entities was the star Sirius.Curiously, all of this went down shortly before PKD would have his own experiences halfway across the world. Dick would claim contact with a Gnostic deity called Zebra, which could pull him into different times and dimensions.:
Zebra is in fact a non-terrestrial life form which came here to live and grow, but being as benign as it is it aids all life as much as it can. Every now and then, the characters get a glimpse of a dreadful "alternate world" which is just a cruel, crushing prison (represented in the novel already by the visionary encounter with A.D. 70 Rome); this is our world as it would be without Zebra; it allows the characters a glimpse of this non-Zebra world with the purpose of eventually disclosing not only itself to man but what it has achieved for man.
Zebra regards the biological and historic forces on this planet as malign, and seeks to ameliorate them. It is finally revealed to one of the characters--probably Phil Dick--what this black iron prison world actually is(or would have been).-- From a letter to Mark Hurst 2-11-1977 in The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick 1977-1979
The exact nature of Zebra and later VALIS isn't altogether clear- if they are in fact computers, they are self-replicating and sentient computers. But their origin point is --where else?-- Sirius, and Dick's interactions with them were
intense, to put it extremely mildly.
Dick experienced a remarkable series of visions, hallucinations, and dreams, many of which centered around VALIS, a "Vast Active Living Intelligence System" that he defined in his 1980 novel of the same name as a "spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex...tending to progressively subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information."
Not a bad definition of the Internet, though Dick experienced this incoming information web far more intensely than today's online grazers. Sometimes it struck him as a pink beam of esoteric data, or as a compassionate feminine "AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice" speaking to him from outer space.-- Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference by Erik Davis
In addition to Puharich, Geller, and Dick, none other than Robert Anton Wilson himself began communicating across the endless void with the Sirians as well. Wilson recalled in a Fortean Times article before his death:On 23 July 1973, I had the impression that I was being contacted by some sort of advanced intellect from the system of the double star Sirius. I have had odd psychic experiences of that sort for many years, and I always record them carefully, but refuse to take any of them literally, until or unless supporting evidence of an objective nature turns up.
My psychic “Contact” experience continued, off and on, for nearly two years, until October 1974, after which I forcibly terminated it by sheer stubborn willpower...
After two years of philosophic mulling on the subject (late 1974 – early 1976), I finally decided to tune in one more time to the Sirius–Earth transmissions, and try to produce something objective.
On 23 July 1976, using a battery of yogic and shamanic techniques, I opened myself to another blast of Cosmic Wisdom and told the Transmitters that I wanted something objective this time around.
The next week, Time Magazine published a full-page review of Robert KG Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which claims that contact between Earth and Sirius occurred around 4500 BC in the Near East.
Wilson tested the validity of these transmissions through the use of Synchronicity, possibly on the advice of Dr. John Lilly, whose work combining heroic doses of Ketamine and the use of isolation tanks is
one of the primary inspirations behind this blog (via Altered States, of course).To Lilly, coincidence wasn't just a parlor game- it was the fabric of Life itself. Behind coincidence was an actual network (recalling how the ancients saw Synchronicity as a sign of the presence of Hermes-Thoth):
Lilly referred to this network of sublime entities as ECCO, an acronym for "Earth Coincidence Control Office." Lilly was positive that all of these fortuitous coincidences in his life had been arranged by higher forces; and that whatever unfortunate folly fell into his path along the road to knowledge, ECCO would be there to guide him safely through the tunnel to the light.
However, ECCO was locked in a struggle for control of Earth with another entity.
And here is where we see the full arsenal of modern technology and science put to service under the most ancient of Gnostic concepts. This countervailing force was PKD's "Black Iron Prison" and much, much more.
Dr. Lilly began having contact with another alien intelligence agency, which he called (SSI), short for Solid State Intelligence. SSI was a supercomputer-like entity, much in the same techno-mystical vein as Philip K. Dick's VALIS. But unlike VALIS, SSI was of a malevolent nature, at odds with ECCO. SSI's apparent goal was to conquer and dominate all biological life forms on Earth.
To combat SSI, ECCO enlisted Lilly in this archetypal battle of good against evil, charging him with the mission of alerting the world at large to these solid state beings of evil intent. To further confirm the dual existences of these two opposing alien intelligence networks, Lilly was given a sign, and message, in the autumn of 1974.
Flying into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Dr. Lilly saw the comet Kahoutek out of the southern sky. Momentarily the comet grew brighter. At this point a message was laser-beamed into Lilly's mind, which said: "We are Solid State Intelligence and we are going to demonstrate our power by shutting down all solid state equipment to LAX."
Dr. Lilly shared his foreboding message with his wife Toni, who was seated next to him. A few minutes later, the pilot instructed the passengers that they were being diverted to Burbank due to a plane that had crash-landed near the runway and had knocked down power lines, causing a power failure at the airport. - "John Lilly, Ketamine and The Entities From ECCO" by Adam Gorightly
NINETEEN SEVENTY FOUR1974 is a crucial year in all of this, starting as it did with PKD's pink beam contact. Puharich's
Uri hagiography was also released that year, copyrighted to "Lab Nine, Ltd. " It was presaged by this legendary Synchronicity, later republished in RAW's first
Cosmic Trigger volume.
Saul-Paul Sirag, Vice-President of Jack Sarfatti's Physics/Consciousness Research Group, has his own weird tales to tell. Once, while involved in the Uri Geller investigation, Sirag took LSD to see if in that altered consciousness he could perceive the alleged extraterrestrial behind Geller.
What Sirag saw was the head of a hawk, which astonished him, since Geller had never described the entity as a hawk.
Six months later, this image appeared on the January 1974 cover of Sirag's favorite sci-fi magazine, Analog, illustrating a story called "The Horus Errand" (Synchronicity #1). A year later, Dr. Andrija Puharich, not knowing of Sirag's experience, claimed that Geller's extraterrestrial ally had often appeared to him as a hawk, which he nicknamed "Horus" (Synchronicity #2).
Later, Sirag discovered that the face on the Analog cover was that of Ray Stanford, a Texas psychic, who also claimed mysterious experiences with Geller and a hawk (Synchronicity #3).
Oddest of all, Kelly Freas, the artist who had drawn the cover, had never met Stanford and was not using his face consciously. -- Excerpted from Tekgnostics, original story recounted in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger
1974 also saw the introduction of another Secret Sun touchstone: OMAC: One Man Army Corps. Jack Kirby's opus prophesied
smart bombs, virtual reality, plutocratic governance, water wars, and of course,
the Gulf and Iraq Wars.OMAC wore a pre-punk mohawk and the Eye of Horus on his chest, tying him symbolically to the Sirius/Canis Major star system but also to both RAW and the Geller/Puraich axis.
And who created and powered OMAC himself?
An orbital machine intelligence.Here we are looking at several remarkable yet relatively-obscure men from entirely different walks of life, all a generation removed from the 60s counterculture, all highly touted now as visionaries
all experiencing or writing about what they describe as contact with an orbital machine intelligence connected at least semiotically to the Sirius star in the Canis Major constellation, all at or near the same time. And yet the
details differ significantly on many other counts, which argues against these individuals all being the subject of some kind of military/intel experiment or colluding on some massive hoax.
As does the fact that we're talking machine intelligences and not alien angels or some other kind of divine entities.
Moreover, Kirby, PKD and RAW were marginal figures operating at the fringes of pop culture and Lilly was seen as a burnout and an embarrassment to his former colleagues (as was PKD when he started talking about VALIS).
It seems more that they were picking up on some vague, half-formed signal of unimaginable origin or intent that their prodigious imaginations would then embellish and expand upon.Moreover, we have evidence or claims of prophecy and/or Synchronicity, the time-honored acid test for divine or extraordinary contact.
Kirby himself closed out 1974 by drawing the first of a multi-issue epic in which his post-apocalyptic hero
Kamandi would be abducted by an alien and taken into space aboard a UFO, an abrupt volte-face for the series that ended with Kamandi facing off against sun-worshiping Reptilians.
The first installment of this opus would bring Kamandi to the very edge of a Stargate, which is stealing artifacts from Earth to be converted into raw energy. The disembodied alien will later use the androgynous Kamandi as the template for her own incarnation.
In the second part of the story, Kamandi is reunited with an old friend, not seen since issue #17...
...Doctor Canus. Or should I say
Canis?
Once Kirby finished up the UFO storyline he returned to Marvel where his first assignment was
a mind control conspiracy arc for Captain America and The Falcon. Where did I buy all those issues? At Valles (pronounced
"VALIS") Newsstand.
Into all of this wanders Gene Roddenberry, who was also busy in 1974 working on the Star Trek animated series (which featured a
"Treaty of Sirius"). The second to last episode-- which aired October 5, 1974-- was "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth."
In it, the crew come to face-to-face with the winged serpent Kukulkan, the ancient astronaut who was worshiped as a god by the peoples of Mesoamerica. This episode was inspired by "Who Mourns for Adonais," in which the crew confront the ancient astronaut Apollo (identified with Horus by the Greeks).
The following year Roddenberry would fall in with Puharich and Lab Nine, and interview the "channelers" who claimed to be vessels for The Nine, the ancient gods/artificial intelligences from Sirius (who like Kukulkan and Apollo were the shepherds of ancient civilization).
Roddenberry was a bit hard up for cash so he reluctantly humored the operation, which seemed to take most of its ideas from old Star Trek episodes (only the ST eps were a lot more resonant, magical and culturally significant).
Indeed, both "Return to Tomorrow" and "The Lights of Zetar" dealt with humans channeling disembodied intelligences - intelligences housed in computers in the case of "Return" (and based in the Isis-Osiris-Set drama).
The member of The Nine called Tom (short for Atum, androgynous creator god of ancient Egypt) did most of the "talking" and was quoted with the following:
"I am the beginning. I am the end. I am the emissary. But the original time I was on the Planet Earth was 34,000 of your years ago. I am the balance. And when I say 'I' - I mean because I am an emissary for The Nine. It is not I , but it is the group…We are nine principles of the Universe, yet together we are one."
However, Roddenberry's ultimate response to his experiences with The Nine was
The God Thing, in which a malfunctioning Orbital Machine Intelligence tries to convince the human race that it's God.
Ironically,
this story would eventually morph into the Project Blue Beam hoax, most probably
a CIA effort to discredit any and all UFO data in the minds of the kooky conspiracy kids (which it's been remarkably effective in doing). Roddenberry's Nine interviews would later be compiled into the 1992 manifesto,
The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space.Disembodied intelligences much like the Nine also ran rampant through the Star Trek: The Next Generation series before
reaching their apotheosis as the Prophets or "wormhole aliens" in
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.That series would tell the story of a Starfleet officer's contact with these Orbital intelligences, who first choose him as their "Emissary" before he finally reaches his own divinity and becomes a Prophet himself.
In what should be to absolutely no one's surprise, the "Emissary" first made his name playing a man called "Hawk."
At the same time the Emissary was joining the Prophets in the Celestial Temple,
Self-styled Luciferian Lynn Picknett and writing partner Clive Prince would later gather up a lot of this disjointed and tangentially-related data to construct their 1999 book,
The Stargate Conspiracy. Using
Ira "The Unicorn Killer" Einhorn as their star witness (while he was still defying extradition in France), Picknett and Prince conjured up a conspiracy, albeit one that did nothing and went nowhere.
Even with his CIA pedigree, Puharich was apparently drummed out of the Lab Nine orbit sometime in the late 70s and may well have been permanently retired in the customary fashion for
his work on alternative energy sources.Aside from two self-published volumes, nothing at all has been heard of Lab Nine since 1992- and even at their height they were nothing in comparison to the hugely successful Seth and
Ramtha channeling cults (the latter cult having produced the incredibly profitable
What the Bleep Do We Know films)- and most of the principals moved on decades ago.
The central argument of
The Stargate Conspiracy was that there was a CIA plot to indoctrinate everyone into a weird variant of ancient astronaut theory in preparation for a real or staged return of The Nine at the millennium, an event that obviously never materialized. Possibly because the CIA was too busy funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into
their worldwide "Evangelical" network which has taken control of entire nations (not to mention several American states) at this point.
Since AAT is the Trojan Horse of the alleged conspiracy it should be pointed out that
Picknett and Prince's primary researcher for Stargate-- Filip Coppens-- is now one of the regular commentators on The History Channel's Ancient Aliens.Oh, irony.
No word yet on whether Picknett believes Coppens too is one of The Nine's evil CIA minions, along with Graham Hancock and John Anthony West and all of the other alt-researchers whose books outsell her's.
INTERLUDEIn 1978, Kirby seemed to channel all of these OMI narratives as well as the Shaver Mystery in an issue of
Machine Man- a character he created during his run on the
2001: A Space Odyssey series. In this Machine Man adventure, an institutionalized psychotic begins channeling messages from a distant star sytstem.
Here Kirby plays on the concept of psychotic as sensitive-- able to perceive and channel signals undetected by everyone else.
The messages are a distress call from an astronaut trapped in the gravity of a sun. Using some Puharich-like gadgetry, Machine Man creates an actual stargate within the hospital itself. Unfortunately,
what comes through is a Dero/SSI robot being intent on destroying the Earth.Kirby was a major xenophobe, cosmically speaking, believing that any alien race with the capacity to travel to our backwater solar system would do it for one reason only- to steal our shit and kill us off. He also believed that biological entities are poorly suited for space travel, necessitating artifical intelligence.
Machine Man, in other words, was Kirby's Starchild, or space seed.
At the same time that Roddenberry was reintroducing the concept of space-borne machine intelligences in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Lab Nine were at work in the neighborhood of the Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley.As channeled by a buxom young Englishwoman named Jenny O'Connor, The Nine essentially took over the Esalen Institute (which I lectured at in
2008 and
2009), which had been ravaged by the gruesome political controversies of the early 70s as well as the ebbing of the Me Generation self-improvement wave.
Under the wing of Esalen co-founder Dick Price,
O'Connor and Lab Nine created both a sensation and a serious schism within the leadership, with co-founder Michael Murphy having none of Big Boobs McGillicuddy and her invisible alien friends.
Many wondered what Price was doing, letting O'Connor arbitrarily reorganize what had become a respected counterculture hotspot on the cutting edge of psychology (I have an idea or two what Price was doing with her, but this is a family blog). A withering e
xposé of Lab Nine was published in leftist journal
Mother Jones in 1979 titled "Esalen Slides off the Cliff," making the once-respected institution a laughing stock.
Even so, Price and O'Connor's attempts at harnessing the power of The Nine had a strange and simultaneous parallel in the climax of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when Decker and Ilia converge with the orbital machine intelligence V'Ger.
Both O'Connor and Lab Nine would quietly leave Esalen in the early 80s and no trace of them remains there today. The stigma still lingers though, kept alive in countless cut-and-paste jobs on Christian conspiracy sites.
By year's end, the
Star Trek movie would do boffo box office but get scathing reviews. Roddenberry would be fired as producer, allowing budget-conscious TV schlockmeister Harve Bennett to come in and produce a string of entertaining and moderately successful films that are all nearly unwatchable today.
However, Roddenberry would go on to produce the wildly-successful Next Generation series, whose original cast of nine major characters all had direct analogs in the Egyptian pantheon. The third
Next Generation feature film would send the crew to an alien planet nearly identical to Esalen. Starfleet aliens exist among the natives in it, rendered invisible by holographic technology.
That film was written by
Deep Space Nine creator Michael Piller. It seems that this weirdness fares better in the imaginal world than the physical.
Well, for now at least.
POSTSCRIPTA lot of the action in around the Bay Area and Silicon Valley in the 60s and 70s would bear fruit in the early 80s with the Cyberpunk movement, spearheaded by Vancouver writer William Gibson. Here the orbital machine intelligence would take center stage, or two OMIs, rather.
Introduced in Gibson's
Sprawl Trilogy, Neuromancer and Wintermute are AIs created by an aristocratic family called the Tessier-Ashpools, who live in an orbital compound called Villa Straylight. When the family goes into a Lovecraftian decline, the AIs become autonomous players, manipulating events on Earth.
Much like the OMIs of PKD and Lilly, the AIs contact and enlist human agents to help them reach their goal of leaving the Straylight mainframes and escaping into the worldwide Matrix. Once they do, they trigger a subtle yet dramatic shift in which all of the ancient gods and spirits of legend take on new life within the Matrix and transform it into an unpredictable and sometimes terrifying funhouse.
Gibson's second novel,
Count Zero, presents the end result of the manipulations of the digital daemons;
a young girl who can access the Matrix without a computer, very much the Cyberpunk version of a contactee.
Hmm, what was it "Spectra" told Andrija Puharich?
"We cannot enter your Earth, (we) only appear to you through computerizing your minds."
