In my last piece on Jeffrey Epstein and Aleister Crowley, I found a detail that I didn’t have room to explain. It is the incredibly close relationship between the occult and government intelligence agencies. The relationship between these two is documented and growing. It starts in Elizabethan England. It moves into Hitler’s SS and then into the CIA’s Cold War programs. And it ends with a satanic high priest working inside US Army intelligence in the 1980s.
Governments have been using the occult as a real tool of statecraft for 400 years, but their relationship to the occult has changed. It started as a lie that governments would use to trick their superstitious enemies. But by the end of the story, those same agencies embraced the occult as a real tool to effectuate change. By the end of this piece, you will understand exactly how that happened and where it stands today.
VIDEO:
John Dee
I want to start with a 1994 article from the CIA about Queen Elizabeth’s court magician, John Dee. This article appeared in the CIA research journal called Studies in Intelligence, which is basically a magazine for spies that the CIA puts out. The article is titled “Research Intelligence in Early Modern England.” And in it, the CIA describes the intelligence work of that era as “a cold war practice by interventionists” that “gained its impetus from a sense of impending conflict with foreign states.” What that means is that their intelligence work succeeded because it scared their enemies into thinking something bad was going to happen, even if they didn’t have plans to do anything.
So, who was John Dee, the man that the CIA was writing about? John Dee was Queen Elizabeth’s court magician. And when I say magician, I mean in the traditional sense. He was the guy who could conjure spirits and speak to entities for the queen. But John Dee was also her spy. He gathered secrets and spied on rival courts and gave astrology readings about her enemies. But here is the key that you need to remember. Neither John Dee nor Elizabeth saw the occult work and the spy work as separate things. To them, it was all one role.
I know that sounds strange today, but let me show you what I mean. The big breakthrough in Dee’s occult program was that he got his hands on a book called the Steganographia, and it was written by a monk named Trithemius. On the surface, the book is basically a book of spells. It teaches you how to summon spirits and send your thoughts across the world using angels or demons as your messengers. But the book also works on a completely different level, because it’s a manual for how to perform cryptography. And cryptography is basically just a way of encoding information so that no one can read it except for the people who hold the key. And that word cryptography comes from the Greek word for hidden. It’s the same root word that gives us the word encrypted.
As Queen Elizabeth saw it, this spirit cryptography was a great tool for hiding real secret messages inside of ordinary looking text. John Dee, on the other hand, saw it as a real manual for summoning entities. It was Dee’s personal goal to actually speak with these spirits. So, the same book was literally both a book of magic and a book of ciphers at the same time, on purpose. And that fusion is the whole point, because to a man like Dee, occult knowledge and secret intelligence were not things that you could pull apart. They were the same thing, and Queen Elizabeth agreed.
But it should be noted that the occult work that John Dee produced is still relevant today. It’s considered foundational in basically every kind of occult or magical practice that we still have. Dee’s occult research became a foundational element in the magical systems of the Golden Dawn, which was Aleister Crowley’s original group. So John Dee genuinely believed in this angelic magic, and he ran it as statecraft, because in his mind whoever could control the spirit realm was ultimately the master of the universe.
Over the course of his career, Dee went on to build an incredibly robust system of magic called Enochian magic. And the name points back to Enoch, who was the great-grandfather of Noah, and he was the scribe to the Watchers. Now according to the Book of Enoch, angels and demons are not two different types of creatures. They are the same beings, but their name is what denotes their relationship to God. The original Watchers were angels who turned against God, and that rejection is what turned them into demons. A lot of these fallen Watchers have names that you probably recognize, like Semyaza or Azazel, and those are often the demon names in scary movies.
John Dee named his magic system Enochian magic because he said it was the original language that Adam and the angels spoke to God. So Dee’s whole project came down to one goal. He wanted to recover the lost language of the angels so that he could speak to them directly.
Dee’s work would hit its stride when he partnered with a seer named Edward Kelley. Together they worked out a system to learn this language of the angels. By the end of their project, they claimed to have figured out this language, along with the sigils, and using the sigils, how to summon them. The way John Dee and Edward Kelley allegedly figured this out is that Edward Kelley would stare into a crystal ball or a black mirror and speak to the angels while John Dee recorded everything that the angel said. This system of sigils and summoning angels is the exact thing that Crowley and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would pick up centuries later.
So John Dee, the angel summoner, was the beginning of modern intelligence work, because he was also the beginning of modern cryptography work, which is a system that we still use today. But Elizabeth and her royal court learned something important. It didn’t matter whether the summoning actually worked. What mattered was whether their targets believed that it worked. And that was the real power of John Dee’s work.
Louis de Wohl
Fast forward almost four centuries to 1941, and you will find British intelligence doing the exact same thing as Elizabeth, but this time on an industrial scale, in the middle of the largest war in human history, World War II.
At this point in the war, America was still not involved. But Britain’s chances of winning the war were not looking good. Britain badly needed to drag the US into the war, but it was hard to convince a country of 130 million people to send their sons to die when they had no real stakes in it at all. So, in an attempt to convince Americans of their impending danger, British spymaster William Stephenson introduced a new celebrity to the US to influence their religious and superstitious public. His name was Louis de Wohl. De Wohl was a famous astrologer with an incredibly accurate record of correctly predicting world events. The only problem was, Louis de Wohl was completely made up. He was a British spy.
De Wohl’s entrance into American media began with a prediction. He said that a top Nazi collaborator, Admiral Georges Robert, the High Commissioner of the French West Indies, was going to go violently insane. Three days later, US news agencies reported that he had. Newspapers across the country suddenly wanted to speak to de Wohl for exclusive stories. And at the time, the FCC had a standing ban on broadcasting astrologers, but they lifted this ban just to interview de Wohl on the radio. And just a few weeks later, a newsreel told his story to an audience of 39 million Americans. The only problem was that Admiral Robert never actually went insane. That story was fake, too. British intelligence fed de Wohl a fabricated prediction, but then they also fed a fabricated confirmation of the story to US news agencies as well. Both the prediction and the proof were manufactured by British intelligence.
But here’s where it gets even stranger. Once America joined the war after Pearl Harbor, British intelligence turned de Wohl around and used him to influence Germany. De Wohl started writing fake horoscopes where he would predict the deaths of specific Nazi admirals and generals. But most importantly, he also predicted that Hitler had been betrayed from inside of his own circle. The British would disseminate this message by printing these horoscopes in counterfeit copies of a real German astrology magazine called Zenit. And the reason that the British were convinced that this would actually work is that the Nazi party had a running occult program of its own. And they took all of this extremely seriously.
Himmler and Blome
At the very top of the SS sat one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, a man named Heinrich Himmler. Himmler ran a program called the Ahnenerbe. The Ahnenerbe has become sort of a footnote in World War II history, but it was a massive program. Out of the Ahnenerbe, Himmler ran about 50 subsidiary branches, a large research apparatus, and a special program called the Survey of So-Called Occult Sciences. This was an official government office that ran ESP programs. They hired astrologers. They tested dowsing rods. And they staged spirit channeling as official state research.
The second man in the story who matters just as much as Himmler is a man named Dr. Kurt Blome. Blome ran the entire Nazi biological weapons program, which operated under the cover classification of cancer research. On paper, it looked like Blome was working to cure cancer instead of building tools to weaponize disease. Blome’s chain of command did not run through Himmler directly, but the two of them did work together repeatedly on special projects. Across three separate meetings, which were all later documented in Blome’s own interrogations, Himmler gave him several ideas for new biological weapons. The first was Himmler’s own scheme to load plague infected rats into U-boats and release them off the coast of England or America to start an epidemic. Then, as the Allied invasion got closer, Himmler grew desperate. He pushed Blome for a way to stall D-Day using disease as a deterrent. First, he suggested that they infect Allied troops with influenza. Then, he suggested that they infect cattle with hoof and mouth disease to poison their food supply. And Blome turned down both of these suggestions because he was worried that it would end up infecting their own troops with these same diseases. But you should notice that Blome’s objection was primarily that it would cause harm to them, not that it was wrong to poison other people.
Shortly after these discussions, the war ended. But this is where the story really changes. This is the point where Allied governments go from pretending to care about the occult to fool their enemies, to actually investing in the occult as a real practice.
An American scientific intelligence unit called Operation Alsos, which was part of the Manhattan Project, walked into a bombed out villa in Berlin, and they found the headquarters of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe. A nuclear physicist named Samuel Goudsmit had his unit pack up all of the Ahnenerbe’s materials and ship them to a US Army headquarters in Frankfurt. But the Americans were not the only ones who breached that villa in Berlin. The Soviets also captured their own share of the Ahnenerbe’s documents at the end of the war. So both sides took what they could, and that captured research became the foundation of the US-Soviet psychic arms race.
Himmler’s Ahnenerbe research was kept, and it was put to use. And when the war ended, the Allies walked away with two separate pipelines of Nazi science. One was the occult and ESP research that had come out of the Ahnenerbe, and the other was the chemical and biological work that had come out of Blome’s program. They ran on completely different tracks inside of Nazi Germany, but they both ended up in the hands of the USSR and the US. We’re going to look at them one at a time.
Paperclip and MKUltra
On the bioweapon side, the Americans went a step further than just absorbing the research. They brought Dr. Kurt Blome into the country to work for the US. Blome was one of many Nazi scientists who ended up under a program called Operation Paperclip. This group of Nazis were mostly folded into government roles inside of NASA or the CIA. And we already know from my last piece that Crowley’s disciple, Jack Parsons, was one of the founding figures at NASA. Operation Paperclip then brought in people like Wernher von Braun, and that really established the NASA program.
After Operation Paperclip, Dr. Blome was slotted under the CIA umbrella, where they launched a new program under the name Project Bluebird. Project Bluebird then changed names several times. It was first renamed Project Artichoke, and then eventually it became the program that we all know today, MKUltra. But it had several parallel programs that were launched at the same time, like MKNaomi in 1952. It had MKDelta in 1953, and they actually renamed MKUltra a fourth time to MKSearch.
But here is the important thing to understand. MKUltra did not start on the intelligence side of the CIA. It started on the bioweapon side of the CIA, and it was run partly out of Camp King before it got transferred over to the Army’s Fort Detrick facility. Dr. Kurt Blome, the man who ran Hitler’s biological weapons program, served as Camp King’s doctor during the creation of Project Bluebird, which is the program that would go on to become MKUltra. To put it simply, MKUltra was founded out of the facility where Dr. Blome was the staff scientist.
As the director of MKUltra, Blome operated under the same ethics that he had under the Nazi regime. MKUltra didn’t recognize the basic human rights of the people that it experimented on. MKUltra’s goal was to alter people’s free will and to direct them to do horrible acts against their will. Richard Helms, who later ran the entire CIA, explained the purpose of the MKUltra program like this. He said, “The only way to find out what the risks were was to test things such as LSD and other drugs that could be used to control human behavior.” They wanted to know whether they could take apart the human mind and put it back together with chemistry. And to find out, they performed experiments on Americans. Some of these study participants included people like Charles Manson and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, just to name two prominent examples.
One early case of experimentation was a man named Frank Olson. The only reason Frank Olson was experimented on was that he happened to work at Fort Detrick on unrelated bioweapons research. One night in November of 1953, after dinner at a CIA retreat, men working under Sidney Gottlieb’s MKUltra program secretly spiked his drink and never told him. In the days that followed, Frank Olson lost his mind and eventually fell, jumped, or was pushed out of a window at a New York hotel, and he fell to his death. The official story has changed several times, but the one fact that has never changed is that Frank Olson had zero idea what had been done to him.
There’s a lot more to say about MKUltra, and I will cover it at some point in the future, but for now, that is the chemical half of the Nazi inherited research that took root in America.
Stargate
On the Soviet side, their research inheritance became state policy almost immediately. The Soviets took the Nazi research and they started an extrasensory perception, or psychic, research program. But the part that most people miss is that the US started its own psychic research as a response to the USSR pouring a ton of resources into their psychic program first, which came out of the Ahnenerbe.
So in response to these new Soviet programs, two CIA officers went to the office of a physicist at Stanford named Hal Puthoff, and they recruited him to start doing research for the US government. According to Hal Puthoff, the CIA approached him and said that there was “increasing concern in the intelligence community about the level of effort in Soviet parapsychology being funded by the Soviet security services.”
So the occult ESP research that the Ahnenerbe left behind is what started the Soviet psychic program. And it was the American response to the Soviet program that launched Project Stargate. For almost two decades, the Pentagon kept shutting this program down and then bringing it back under a different code name to hide its existence. It actually started under the name Gondola Wish. Then it became Grill Flame, then Center Lane, then Sun Streak, and finally Project Stargate.
The program essentially started as a straightforward science question. Can the human mind perceive things outside of its immediate reality? It launched at the Stanford Research Institute under Hal Puthoff and a second physicist named Russell Targ. When the project started, the CIA set up an experiment to make sure that they weren’t being scammed by these physicists. To test them, one CIA officer walked into the institute’s garden and caught a live moth and sealed it inside of a box. And they asked the psychic that they were testing to tell them what was inside of the box. The psychic was a man named Ingo Swann, who would go on to become very famous for his remote viewing work. Ingo Swann said, “I see something small, brown, and irregular, sort of like a leaf, except that it seems very much alive, like it’s even moving.” Two weeks later, on October 1st, 1972, the CIA signed the institute to a classified contract for $49,909, which is roughly about $400,000 today.
Then came the test that turned this from an experiment into a full-blown security crisis for the US government. A CIA officer named Kit Green gave Ingo Swann a set of map coordinates. Swann then described a building, a flagpole, and a circular driveway. Kit Green’s colleague, who we only know under his cover name Russ, was totally freaked out, because Ingo Swann had successfully remote viewed his own private summer cabin in West Virginia.
Then a second psychic, a man named Pat Price, who was not even part of the Stargate program yet, was given those same coordinates separately. Price described the same cabin, and then described a secret military facility down the road that Russ himself didn’t even know was there. So Kit Green, the CIA officer, got in his car that weekend, drove out to the coordinates, and found it exactly as Pat Price had described it. Kit Green also found a classified NSA listening post called Sugar Grove near Russ’s property. Pat Price was right. He was so accurate that he correctly described the color of the filing cabinets and the location of the elevator. The CIA was so freaked out about this that they opened up an espionage investigation to make sure that there had not been a leak. Both Price and Swann were cleared of all wrongdoing. But in clearing them, the CIA had no explanation for how Price or Swann knew any of this. In a CIA document dated January 27th, 1975, the agency itself concluded that ESP, or extrasensory perception, exists as a “real phenomenon.”
In a later example, Pat Price was handed nothing but map coordinates for a secret Soviet site. He came back describing a giant crane on rails and workers welding huge steel sections into a 60 foot sphere. Intelligence reporting later confirmed all of Price’s details, including some details that nobody in US intelligence knew about at the time.
After this, the CIA started pouring resources into Stargate. Then they brought another psychic into the program, a man named John Alexander, who was a Green Beret and Vietnam veteran who was writing about the psychic phenomenon at the time. His writing caught the attention of Richard Stilwell. Richard Stilwell was a retired four-star military general. Stilwell reached down 12 ranks and personally pulled John Alexander into Major General Albert Stubblebine’s Army intelligence program. Stargate was so successful that the entire US government had their branches of the military rearranging themselves to get psychics into their highest levels of authority.
Operation Often
Everything in Stargate was built to look at a target from a distance and report back what was there. But there was a bigger question underneath all of this. Could a human mind reach out and actually change the physical world using nothing but their thoughts? But that question was already being answered on the other side of this experiment, the MKUltra program, under a man named Sidney Gottlieb.
Sidney Gottlieb had been coordinating MKUltra since 1953. But in 1969, he went to the CIA director’s office and walked out with $150,000, which is about $1.3 million today. His new program was called Operation Often. And the stated purpose of Operation Often was to invade, understand, and harness demonic powers, and to turn those occult powers into real tools of espionage. And once it got going, Operation Often staff spent most of their time with mediums, palm readers, clairvoyants, demonologists, really anything odd that you could think of.
But in April of 1972, two of Gottlieb’s men went to see the monsignor in charge of exorcisms for the Catholic Diocese of New York. They wanted to discuss different methods of dealing or interacting with demons. The monsignor, which is just a title given to well respected priests, turned them away, and he refused to help them. But they didn’t give up. Later that summer, after they had been turned away by the Catholic Church, Operation Often approached a witch by the name of Sybil Leek. And they wanted help answering these same questions. Specifically, they wanted her to use black magic to infiltrate Russia and China.
But as you can imagine, Sybil Leek was not just some random witch that they found in the phone book. Sybil Leek had allegedly been mentored directly by Aleister Crowley himself. When Sybil Leek was a young girl, Crowley would come and visit their family home, and he would read to her, and he would encourage her in her studies. Sybil Leek’s actual work with the CIA ended up being pretty minimal. But she is the cleanest example of how far all of this had traveled. Because during the Second World War, Sybil Leek worked as a British disinformation spy. She had been recruited to feed the same fake horoscopes, with Louis de Wohl, to the astrology obsessed Nazis. This is the same operation that we covered at the beginning of this story. So, the same woman who started out in 1941 as a fake astrologer to push disinformation was hired again in 1972 to do real occult work for the US government. In one lifetime, magic went from a lie you tell your enemies to a weapon that you point at them.
Michael Aquino
And that brings us to the last case in the story, and it’s the scariest one of them all. Michael Aquino.
On paper, Michael Aquino looks like your basic military officer, but if you look into his background and the record that he tried to get expunged, it tells a very different story. The Army commissioned Aquino in 1968. He then served in Vietnam as a psychological warfare officer. His role in Vietnam was essentially to help shape the opinions of the Vietnamese population during the war. He then rose through the Military Intelligence branch to the rank of lieutenant colonel, until he eventually retired in 1994 with a Meritorious Service Medal. But if you go back through his working history in more detail, it gets very dark.
Aquino ran his psychological warfare work in Vietnam with the 6th Psychological Operations Battalion from the late 1960s into the 1970s. That is the same window that the CIA was running the Phoenix Program. The Phoenix Program was the counterinsurgency operation that took apart the Viet Cong civilian network. And they did this through a campaign of torture and assassination, and psychological operations were the core of how Phoenix battled the Viet Cong. I’ll tell you honestly that there is not a document that puts Aquino’s name on the Phoenix Program’s roster. However, he was a psychological operations officer working in the area at the same time as the Phoenix Program, and it is very likely that he worked in that program. Not confirmed, but extremely likely.
Aquino was also living a second life during this time period. While he was serving as an active duty intelligence officer, he rose to the fourth degree of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. He also was the editor of its journal, The Cloven Hoof. And by most accounts, Michael Aquino was the highest ranking member in the Church of Satan outside of Anton LaVey.
Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan is also an outgrowth of the work of Aleister Crowley. When LaVey wrote The Satanic Bible in 1969, he closed the book with a section called the Enochian Keys. And those keys are the exact same angelic language that John Dee and Edward Kelley claimed to have received 400 years ago, that I told you about at the beginning of this piece. But LaVey did not take that language straight from Dee. He got it the way everybody else did, which is through the Golden Dawn, or through Aleister Crowley, who had already published his material at this point. So LaVey took the Enochian system, stripped the angels out of it, and pointed that same magic practice at Satan. LaVey’s occult philosophy is a direct outgrowth of Aleister Crowley, which is a direct outgrowth of John Dee. And this branch of Satanism is where Michael Aquino was the second highest ranking member.
But Anton LaVey was not a true believer. He was not a Satanist in the way that you think. He didn’t believe in Satan or the devil in a real or even a religious sense. He was interested in the symbol of Satan. LaVey’s church was an edgelord art project of sorts. He wanted to mix the libertarian ideas of Ayn Rand with the work of Aleister Crowley, basically just to upset people. But this lack of belief really bothered Michael Aquino, because he believed in a literal Satan. So in 1975, Aquino broke away from LaVey’s Church of Satan and founded his own order, the Temple of Set. As Aquino tells it, Set is the correct name for Satan. It’s the more ancient name, and it draws from Egyptian religions rather than the Christian tradition. Aquino would then go on to incorporate the Temple of Set as an actual state approved church, and the Temple of Set would go on to become the first federally recognized satanic religion that received tax exemption status in the United States.
Then in 1980, while he was still on active duty, Aquino wrote a paper with an Army colonel named Paul Vallely titled “From PSYOP to MindWar.” Strangely, his co-author on this paper, Paul Vallely, actually sat on the advisory board of Turning Point USA until very recently, which is incredible and extremely shocking. To be fair to Vallely, he has since said that he was unaware of Aquino’s beliefs or his occult activities. I will take him at his word. But given how outspoken Aquino was about his Satanism, and how he openly celebrated it, and he has a very bizarre physical appearance, I find it hard to believe that Aquino’s participation in the occult was not known to his peers.
Wewelsburg
The next piece of Aquino’s story takes us to Germany, to a castle called Wewelsburg. In 1934, Himmler rented this castle with the intention of turning it into the spiritual center of the SS. He wanted it to become a sort of holy site for the Nazi elite. Himmler went on to renovate the north tower of this castle into two ceremonial rooms. One of the rooms was a crypt sunk into rock, which was meant as a sort of shrine for the dead SS officers. The room directly above the crypt had a sun symbol set into the floor. And this symbol is now known as the Black Sun. Today, that symbol is one of the most recognizable symbols of the white nationalist movement. So, if you’ve ever seen it on a patch or a flag, this floor is where that symbol comes from. All of the renovations on this tower were also done by slave labor from a concentration camp that was located next door. This castle was meant to be the ceremonial heart of the SS.
In October of 1982, while Aquino was on an official tour of the European NATO sites as a US Army intelligence officer, he tracked down the Wewelsburg castle, and he performed a ritual in that Black Sun tower. The reported purpose of that ritual was to do the very thing that Himmler built the castle for. Aquino wanted to use the site as a spiritual gate to call upon the powers of darkness at the spot that the SS believed it would be strongest. Out of that ritual, Aquino founded a new inner order inside of his Temple of Set. So, a serving American military intelligence officer used a NATO tour to get inside of the ceremonial core of Himmler’s SS, and then performed a black magic rite meant to reopen a spirit door that the Nazis had built there. And he was working for the US government while he did all of this.
The Presidio
The last piece in the Aquino story comes out of a US Army base in San Francisco named the Presidio. On the Presidio base, there was a daycare facility for military families called the Child Development Center. In November of 1986, a mother had her three-year-old son examined by a doctor, and the exam confirmed that the boy had been abused. The child named the man who had done it. He called him Mr. Gary. Mr. Gary was a man named Gary Hambright, who was one of the teachers at his daycare. Within the next year, investigators identified dozens of victims, all between the ages of 3 and 7 years old. Several of the children tested positive for diseases, and there were other signs of abuse as well.
I should say that I am leaving lots of this record out, because even the restrained version of the story is horrific. My sources are at the end of this piece if you want to learn more.
Mr. Gary was eventually arrested, but the case against him came apart over time. Charges were filed and then dropped and then filed again and then dropped one more time, and eventually nothing was done. He was never convicted of anything, and he died of AIDS in 1989.
But Aquino’s name was also entered into the case. On August 12th of 1987, an Army captain named Larry Adams-Thompson reported that his three-year-old daughter had seen Aquino and his wife at the military grocery store, and she became visibly frightened. This little girl called them Mikey and Shamby. In a later FBI interview, she named Mikey, Shamby, and Mr. Gary as the men and women that she and other children had made contact with. This story is directly from a federal appeals court restating the record in Aquino v. Stone in 1992. So, this is not hearsay.
That same little girl led investigators to the Aquinos’ private home, and described the inside of it, including the unusual satanic decor, before investigators had set foot in the house. So on August 14th, 1987, San Francisco police executed a search warrant on his home, and they carried out 36 videotapes along with photographs, negatives, and an address book. They noted what looked like a soundproof room in his home.
Then the Army’s own Criminal Investigation Division titled Aquino. In Army terms, to title someone means to formally name them as the subject of a criminal investigation. It goes in the file permanently, and it means that investigators believe that there is a reason to suspect that the person committed a crime. Aquino didn’t like this, obviously, and tried to have it removed, but a federal court later reviewed that decision and put it in writing that there was probable cause to name him as the subject of the investigation into indecent acts with children. Those are the words of a federal court filing restating the Army’s own findings.
But the entire time that this investigation was running, Aquino kept his top level security clearance. And according to reporting online, there is a police intelligence report that has Aquino also reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1981. I will tell you that I can’t find that document, but it has been reported by others, so take that for what it is.
The Army’s response to all of this was to basically run out the clock. They ended up transferring him to St. Louis, and they kept him in uniform until he retired with an honorable record. He was never charged.
Every other story in this series shows the government using the occult half-heartedly or seizing it from somebody else. But Aquino is the one case where the government stopped holding the occult at a distance and made peace with it. He was the officer and the high satanic priest at the very same time.
I just assumed that there was a wall between the serious people in the government and the wacky people who happened to receive a budget. I assumed that to whatever degree any of this was real, the state simply rented their believers and kept what they wanted out of all of these strange experiments. But Aquino cleanly breaks that wall. He is a decorated intelligence officer who founded a church of Satan and is credibly accused of abusing lots of children. This is the state and the occult merging into one thing. You wouldn’t let a guy like Aquino cook you food, but he had access to the highest levels of power on planet Earth.
And remember that principle, the revelation of the method. The operator shows you who he is out in the open. And the silence of everybody who sees it becomes their consent. Aquino never hid who he was. He told anyone who asked that he was a practicing Satanist. At one point, he even appeared on Oprah, where he said that the Army had known about his religion for the entire span of his career, and that other than a reasonable amount of curiosity, the Army had paid very little attention to it.
The government’s answer to all of this was ambivalence, which is a form of tacit acceptance. Governments faked the occult at first. Then they captured the real research. Then they funded it for 20 straight years. And finally they weaponized it and sent demons after their enemies. And then came Aquino at the very end of the line, where the state stopped keeping any distance at all. And I think the same operation that promoted and protected Aquino is the same operation that worked with Epstein. They were well aware of his illegal acts, and I think his occult interests. All of this was not bad behavior they tolerated in exchange for information. The occult practices themselves are the product. Just like Queen Elizabeth and John Dee, the intelligence work and the occult work are the same thing. And I should say that the men involved in Project Stargate are not at all like the rest of these men. Many of them are really fascinating people.
But we like to tell ourselves that men like Aquino or Epstein turn up inside of intelligence because somebody slipped up and got past HR. But then you run against the fact that this has been happening across decades of CIA history and across dozens of programs. These men are not simply tolerated. They are encouraged. They are given raises and top level security clearances. Men like Aquino and Epstein are not a flaw in the machine. They are the machine. The work is disturbing, and it takes a disturbed man to do it. These are the men that are pulling the curtains. These are the men that make the decisions behind the scenes.
Sources
Government documents
MuckRock FOIA request for the Kurt Blome files
CIA, “An Overview of Extrasensory Perception,” January 27, 1975, CIA FOIA Reading Room (PDF), also on the Internet Archive
Hal Puthoff, “CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute,” 1996
INSCOM, “1981 Grill Flame Project Protocol,” CIA-RDP96-00788R001100200005-4 (Internet Archive)
Grill Flame Project Report, CIA-RDP96-00788R001000410001-6, CIA FOIA Reading Room (PDF)
STAR GATE program history, Federation of American Scientists
Col. Paul E. Vallely with Maj. Michael A. Aquino, “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory,” 7th PSYOP Group, 1980 (PDF), also on the Internet Archive
Aquino v. Stone, 957 F.2d 139 (4th Cir. 1992), Justia, also at law.resource.org and CourtListener
Aquino v. Stone, 768 F. Supp. 529 (E.D. Va. 1991), district court opinion, CourtListener
Not publicly posted: the Army CID report of investigation on Aquino (August 1989, released redacted under FOIA), the SFPD search warrant and inventory of August 14, 1987 (summarized in Aquino v. Stone and in the San Francisco Examiner, October 30, 1987), and the police intelligence report on Joint Chiefs reporting. Aquino v. Stone is the public record for the first two.
John Dee
CIA, Studies in Intelligence (1994), “Research Intelligence in Early Modern England: Official Scholars and Action Officers,” William H. Sherman (PDF) and the journal listing
Jason Louv, John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World, pp. 109 to 120, 125 to 127, 201 to 203, 208 to 213, 230 to 231, 533 to 534, 590
Lon Milo DuQuette, Enochian Vision Magick: An Introduction and Practical Guide to the Magick of Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley, pp. 2 to 30, 35 to 36, 45 to 50, 60 to 62
Enochian Calls, Encyclopedia.com
Joseph P. Lumpkin, The Book of Giants, pp. 9 to 10; Banned from the Bible, pp. 25 to 27. Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil, pp. 35 to 37, 139
Louis de Wohl
Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, pp. 13 to 22, 393 to 395
Louis de Wohl (1903 to 1961), Encyclopedia.com
The Inconvenient Astrologer of MI5, The Awl
British Secret Service convinced of Hitler-astrology link, ABC News
Britain used astrologer in fight against Hitler, NBC News
Himmler, the Ahnenerbe, and Blome
Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena, pp. 17 to 22, 64, 475 to 476
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, pp. 7, 15, 64, 92 to 104, 185 to 186, 333 to 334, 438, 684 to 685
Alsos and the captured Ahnenerbe
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, pp. 11 to 15, 47 to 63
Samuel Goudsmit, Alsos (1947), Google Books
Paperclip, Bluebird, and MKUltra
Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, pp. 340, 357 to 375, 389 to 390, 410 to 434, 704 to 706
Operation Paperclip, Wikipedia
MKUltra, Wikipedia (source of the Richard Helms 1978 interview quote)
Richard Helms interview, Headliners with David Frost, May 23, 1978, Georgetown University Archives
What Cold War CIA Interrogators Learned from the Nazis, The Daily Beast
David McGowan, Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, pp. 7, 32, 52, 100, 112, 121 to 123, 139, 166 to 167, 178
David McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, p. 293
Stargate
Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena, pp. 113 to 119, 133 to 142, 186, 227 to 233, 239 to 242, 256 to 271
Hal Puthoff, CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute
STAR GATE, Federation of American Scientists
Patrick H. Price: Savior, Savant, or Sacrifice?, Chris Carosa
Sugar Grove Station, Wikipedia
CIA, “An Overview of Extrasensory Perception,” January 27, 1975, CIA FOIA Reading Room (PDF), also on the Internet Archive
Jacques Vallee, Forbidden Science 3, pp. 17 to 18, 75, 91 to 92, 185 to 188, 283 to 296, 341 to 343, 444 to 445
Rupert Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At, pp. 268 to 274
Operation Often
Nick Redfern, Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife, pp. 88 to 103, 211 to 212
Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena, pp. 13 to 14, 20, 69, 484 to 487
Michael Aquino
From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory (1980), full PDF, also on the Internet Archive
Jerry E. Smith, HAARP, p. 241. Bill Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse, pp. 16 to 20
Michael A. Hoffman, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, pp. 13 to 18, 55 to 56, 74 to 76, 88 to 89, 104 to 106, 142 to 149 (revelation of the method)
Paul Vallely, MindWar, and the Architecture of Influence, Merissa Hansen
Paul E. Vallely: From Military PSYOP Pioneer to Turning Point USA Advisor, Laissez Faire Lounge
Wewelsburg
Black Sun (symbol), Wikipedia)
Niederhagen concentration camp, Wikipedia
The Nazi castle designed to be the “Centre of the World,” Sky HISTORY
Order of the Trapezoid, Statement (Aquino’s account of the October 19, 1982 working)
The Presidio
Aquino v. Stone, 957 F.2d 139 (4th Cir. 1992), Justia, also on CourtListener
Aquino v. Stone, 768 F. Supp. 529 (E.D. Va. 1991), district court opinion, CourtListener
Presidio child molestation case, CAVDEF
David McGowan, Programmed to Kill, pp. 61 to 72, 165
Donald Jeffries, Hidden History, pp. 329 to 330, 436, and chapter 71 online
The Devil, You Know, Oregon Humanities (Aquino’s 1988 Oprah appearance)
Michael Aquino is a deep rabbit hole. If i recall correctly didn't the warehouse with the evidence in Presidio burn down? He was on oprah during the "satanic panic" at the time he was being investigated. Rather odd.
Bravo -- there really isn't enough coverage on figures like Aquino and Gottlie, or the lineage of programs like Stargate and Phoenix. We're made to think that these things are aberrant exceptions to the rule of conventional law and order, but their influence underlies so much of the power networks that actually govern American life in ways that we can't see but can certainly feel, especially right now.