Start of Interview
Kerry Cassidy (KC): This is
Kerry Cassidy and Bill Ryan, and we’re with Project Camelot. We’re here
on Thursday, February 12, 2009, and we’ve got Peter Levenda. He is a
wonderful researcher and author. He’s very well known for his book,
Sinister Forces, which apparently is a three-book series. Also for his
previous book called Unholy Alliance, delving into the background of the
Nazis.
Peter, I just want to say hello. Thank you so much for taking the time
with us today. I have to say I am incredibly impressed by your writing
style as well as your honesty as a researcher in the way that you write.
You actually remind me a little bit of Richard Dolan, and I think you
know who he is because you cite him a couple of times in your work.
Peter Levenda (PL): Certainly. And thank you, thank you
very much for the introduction. I’m very happy to be part of this.
KC: Great. So what we wanted to do is give the listener basically
a background on where you come from, how you come at this material,
because I think that’s really important - the fact that it dovetails
with a lot of what
Richard Hoagland, Jim Marrs, Joseph Farrell, and
others are delving into, but may even have pre-dated some of their work
and their realizations in this area.
And we’re talking about how the Nazis, how mind control, and how... the
direction America’s going and why we might be going in a certain
direction, and what the underpinning occult significance is of all that.
And I think your background is just really stellar in this regard. So
please just go from here and tell us where you come from and where
you’ve been going with all of this.
PL: Well, I’ll try. I tried, back in the 1970s, during the Watergate
era, to write a book that was going to explore the relationship between
religion and politics, which is a nexus that’s always fascinated me. We
tend in the United States to think of them as two separate entities.
But during Watergate I began to see a lot of the same personalities crop
up that we had run across during, oh, the Kennedy assassinations and all
of that, and I started to see deeper and deeper parallels.
So there was a book that came out in 1960, long before Watergate, called
The Morning of the Magicians. It was written by two Frenchman,
Pauwels
and Bergier, and it talked a great deal in there about a Nazi/occult
connection, but it was not documented at all. And I thought: That would
make a great chapter [Kerry laughs] in the book that I was planning. Let
me write something about the Nazis and religion, or Nazis and occultism
or mysticism.
And I went down to the National Archives in Washington, DC. This was
right at the height of Watergate. Nixon was still in power. He was about
to leave. It was a month or two before he left, so the whole thing was
at fever pitch in Washington.
But, oblivious to that in a sense, I was at the National Archives
looking at captured German documents. As I was in the National Archives,
the archivist there, a very famous archivist - anyone who studied the
Nazis back in the ’70s and ’80s would have known about Dr. Wolfe - when
he found out what I was trying to do, he suggested that I look at the
records of an organization called the SS Ahnenerbe, which was actually a
division of the SS that was specifically concerned with occult and
mystical research. I was stunned.
He led me to the microfilm rolls. I started going through the machines.
And here I realized - my jaw dropped - I was looking at the actual
documentation of a full-fledged Nazi program to investigate occultism.
Other authors had talked about a Nazi/occult connection. The book,
The
Morning of the Magicians, talked about it at length, but there was no
documentation at all. And some of the other books that had come out at
that time, for instance, The Spear of Destiny, and some of the others,
talked extensively about this but there was no documentation.
So it seemed like speculation until suddenly I’m staring at all the
documents - page after page after page of research in Tibet, Tibet
expeditions. There was research to find the Holy Grail. There was all
sorts of bizarre SS programs that were being financed heavily by the
Nazis during World War Two.
So it got me thinking that maybe there is a lot of documentation in the
world. Maybe you can find evidence of all of this without having to
speculate too much. So the Nazi documentation got me very excited.
I lived in New York City at the time. I’m from New York City. I was
talking to a lot of friends of mine who had their roots in Latin America
and South America. I read a book by Ladislas Farago called
Aftermath,
which is about the survival of war criminals, Nazi war criminals, in
South America.
And I came across the mentioning of a weird establishment in Chile
called Colonia Dignidad the Colony of Righteousness. This was supposed
to be a kind of Nazi safe-house which was also a weird religious group,
high up in the Andes Mountains. And I thought: This is just too good to
pass up.
So here not only do I have the documentation from World War Two, but now
I have a real live Nazi sanctuary in South America which is also a
religious operation, which is exactly what I was writing about.
So I decided to go to Chile
- this was in 1979 - and see this place
for myself. This was during the time of the Pinochet dictatorship. There
was martial law in the country, but I managed to make my way down to a
small town halfway down the coast of Chile called Parral. And close to
this small town is the colony, Colonia Dignidad.
I managed to go up there. The story is told at length in my book,
Unholy
Alliance. But I managed to go there on a Sunday morning in June of ’79,
and I as briefly detained. I was kept there. I was forbidden to leave.
My passport was taken. The film was taken out of my camera.
I was told by the Germans
- These were Germans. These were not Chilenos.
These were not Spanish people - I was told by the Germans that I was
not welcome in the country, that I had to leave Chile immediately.
And as I was allowed to leave, which was touch-and-go for a while, all
the way back to Santiago, to the capital where I had my hotel room, I
was stopped along the way. I was in a bus and I was stopped along the
way by troops who had set up roadblocks, who were making sure that I was
on that bus. When I got back to my hotel room, there was a note waiting
for me that said I was on the next plane, that a reservation had been
made.
So the amount of influence that the Nazi network had in 1979... ’79 was
so many years after the end of World War Two, you know. We’re talking 25
years later. They still had such great influence in a country so far
away as Chile that I began to see there was a lot more going on than
even I suspected. And that eventually became Unholy Alliance.
I began to see the connections between governments in Bolivia, Chile,
Argentina, Paraguay, an extensive Nazi network, a lot of money that had
left the Third Reich when the Nazis had lost the war.
I began to realize that the Nazi Party was not a political party the way
we understand political parties, but that the Nazi Party was a cult. If
you look at it from that point of view, you can understand the true
nature of this kind of evil, because the Nazi Party is... they’re not
going to go away simply because they lost the war.
The old war criminals who escaped
- and some of them are still alive. A
few of them have died recently in South America, in Chile and Argentina.
They have their followers. They have their philosophy, their ideology.
Bill Ryan (BR): Forgive me for interrupting you, Peter.
PL: Sure.
BR: But it sounds implicit in what you’re saying, then, that they have
support from deep within the governments of those South American
countries.
PL: Well, sure. I mean, it depends on which regime is in power at any
given time. But let’s take the example of Bolivia. Klaus Barbie, who was
the “Butcher of Lyon” in France, who was a man responsible for all sorts
of war crimes in France, at one point became the chief of the secret
police of Bolivia. I mean, he had a federally-appointed position in that
government.
Walter Rauff lived for a very long time in Chile. Walter Rauff was the
man who designed the mobile gas chambers, the vans that were used to
re-channel the exhaust into the vans to kill prisoners.
I mean, all of these people found safe haven, not only in South America,
but in the Middle East and in Asia as well, and to a certain extent in
Australia.
KC: And in the United States as well.
PL: Absolutely. Certainly. Of course we’ve had many cases here in the
United States of war criminals that we’ve found, uncovered, and
occasionally shipped back.
A famous one, which got me very involved in the story, was the man who
for a long time was the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the
United States. Here was an Archbishop who during World War Two had been
a member of the... what was the name... the Iron Cross? The Iron Arrow,
I think, a Romanian Nazi organization, who had tortured prisoners.
Here was a man who was a devoted Nazi, who after the war was over fled
to the United States, and although he had no seminarial training as far
as I’ve been able to uncover, he managed to take over one branch of the
Romanian Orthodox Church in our country, in the Midwest, and was not
even discovered until maybe 20 years ago, when he was forced to leave
the country.
So yeah, we’ve helped a lot of people escape.
The Catholic Church, also,
to a certain extent was involved in that, in an operation called Caritas
during World War Two, which provided Vatican passports to help some of
the more famous war criminals escape to South America. So there was a
lot of collaboration.
And even in our own country, in the United States, we had
Operation
Paperclip, in which we brought Nazi scientists over to help with our
space program, among other things.
So that got me working on what eventually became
Sinister Forces. I
began to wonder how was it that we in the United States could have sold
our souls so easily to something as heinous as a criminal organization
like the SS, and to the Nazis in general, to bring their scientists over
here, to make them work for us, and really to give them great jobs, to
give them positions in our industry.
Walter Dornberger is an example, who held a job on the board of
directors of Bell Helicopter. All sorts of people. People who worked for
the Space Medicine Program in Texas, at Randolph Air Force Base.
There’s
a very big story there.
KC: Right. And that has tentacles that go to the whole mind control
aspect. I think that you cover that really wonderfully in Sinister
Forces. I mean, I can’t imagine what you do in Book Two and
Book Three,
but I have to say that that’s really a huge story.
PL: Well, I develop the same ideas. In
Book Two I focus a lot on the
Charles Manson family, as a kind of quintessential example of what
sinister forces might be from the behavior modification/mind control
aspect.
And then in Book Three I sort of lay out what I think is the whole story
and how this works. I connect serial killers to
mind control operations
and try to understand.
I mean, our country, the CIA in particular in the 1950s, 1960s, all the
way up through until about Watergate, until the 1970s and
the
Rockefeller investigations, was involved in one of the most bizarre
experiments of modern times.
I mean, here we were, trying to figure out how the human consciousness
worked, how to understand memory, volition. How do we erase a person’s
memory, implant new memories? How do we make a person do something they
would not ordinarily do - for instance, commit an assassination? And
then forget about it and not know why they did it?
I mean, this was something like a medieval king, you might think, hiring
alchemists and magicians, you know, to contact the other world. We were
doing that in the 1950s and ’60s and probably still are today.
We have operations in which we are trying to understand how the mind
works and then to control it. Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, our
intelligence agencies stuck their fingers into human consciousness and
started playing around with the contents.
BR: What’s the answer to your own question, Peter, which you posed just
a couple of minutes ago? About how... I think the words you used were:
How America could have sold its soul to the extent where it not only
brought these Nazi scientists over to American shores to give them great
jobs but actually, seemingly, embraced their whole agenda and took it
much further?
Were there evil forces at work in America during the Second World War?
Or was this something that was opportunistic because they realized the
magic that they certainly held in their hands and thought that they
could use this to their own ends, and it was too great a temptation to
resist?
PL: Well, I think, as usual, the causes take place on different levels
simultaneously. I think to point in one direction only might be a
mistake. I think sometimes it’s desired that we do look in a certain
direction and not look in another one - the idea of misdirection.
I talk about sinister forces. I mean, that’s the title of my series, and
I took that title from Watergate because that’s how I started this
research. And “sinister forces” were blamed for that famous 18.5 minute
tape gap on the Oval Office tapes, on Nixon’s office tapes, where there
was suddenly a big gap and no one knew what he had said.
I think it was
Alexander Haig or Buzhardt who had said the tape, the
hissing sound on the tape was the result of sinister forces. And I liked
that idea, that there was something darker at work.
I think that in many cases what we see around us is theater, a kind of
theater, and that there are forces that are deeper, darker, less
visible, manipulating events. Or I like to think that what we call
coincidence and synchronicity is evidence of the action of a darker
force or a deeper force.
BR: And are these forces also much more ancient? Because of course there
are many researchers, possibly yourself, who conclude that this whole
thing, this whole dark agenda, had its roots 2,000 or even 3,000 years
ago and it’s been growing steadily since then.
KC: Well actually in your book you’re talking about going back into the
mounds in America, so you’re going back thousands if not millions of
years. Right?
PL: Certainly.
KC: And there’s also the allusion to
Egypt and the pyramids. And you’re
talking about, you actually have to get to possible
off-world cultures,
and how we humans, how humanity began on this planet, when you go that
deep, really.
PL: Well, when I started looking at the burial mounds... The idea of the
Indian burial mounds came to me sheerly by accident, because I was
researching Manson and I decided to go where Charles Manson had grown
up, which was a town called Ashland in Kentucky.
I was struck by the fact that there were Indian burial mounds right in
the center of town. And I started to research that, wondering what did
that mean? I had never really come across this before. This was brand
new to me.
I started to look at the fact that these mounds are all over the United
States, especially east of the Mississippi, but also west of the
Mississippi to a certain extent.
I was struck by the fact that there was actually an
ancient civilization
in America, in North America, that we have no clue about. It was just as
ancient as anything that was taking place in the Middle East. The
earthworks that they built were in some cases more grand and a lot
larger than the pyramids, and we know so little about it.
I began to look at America as a kind of haunted house, and I began to
ask myself: What forces are there really at work here?
The coincidences that we come across, especially a
conspiracy
theorist... Anybody who begins to investigate - the Kennedy
assassination is probably the most famous example - will come across
dozens and then hundreds and then maybe thousands of “coincidental”
connections, between people, places, and events, which drives them
crazy.
A regular historian, a mainstream historian’s going to say: Well, that
was a coincidence; and that was a coincidence; and that was a
coincidence, and dismiss them all because he cannot see a real
cause-and-effect relationship.
But to me, and it happens to all of us who investigate these things, we
find ourselves bedeviled by these coincidences.
I mean, I was researching
Sinister Forces for a while in Asia. I was in
Southeast Asia in remote areas and I would walk into an old second-hand
bookstore and find books that I needed for my research. They were books
maybe on Charles Manson or something that I had never heard of before.
Scholarly texts would suddenly appear.
Or texts would appear that had
been written and printed privately by someone involved with the group
that I call “The Nine”.
All of this stuff would fall into my hands even though I was in the
middle of nowhere, nowhere near any sort of academic structure, nowhere
near a Barnes and Noble bookstore or anything like that, [laughs] but
just really in the middle of nowhere.
So the multiplication of these events, to me, is an indication that
something else is at work, that maybe we need a quantum consciousness
approach to history itself, not just to our own minds in a kind of
theoretical way or a spiritual...
KC: Absolutely. Absolutely.
PL: History. Yep.
KC: You’re talking about Puharich. I’m not sure how you say his name.
PL: Puharich.
BR: Puharich.
KC: And that opens a can of worms around the mind control and how the
mind control itself seems to stem from those early beginnings and the
consciousness that supposedly Puharich (Andrija Puharich) actually got into contact
- those “Nine” people - of which there are people that have written books
since then and gotten involved in supposedly being in contact with, if
not those intelligences, then others. Some call them the Giza
Intelligences. So it’s all going back to somewhere back there, as well.
PL: Well, yeah. I mean, if you begin with Puharich, you can see the
contours of what I’m talking about quite clearly, because here was a man
who was a researcher into the paranormal, but he was also a captain in
the U. S. Army and a medial doctor, all of these things all together.
And this was all during the Korean War.
Here was a man who was giving lectures to the military on
how to weaponize ESP, you know, how to use man’s telekinetic and telepathic
powers as a weapon in the fight in the Cold War.
At the same time, he’s holding a séance or a series of séances at a
farmhouse in Maine to which he’s invited a handful of people. But the
people he’s invited are some of the wealthiest families in America, the
most powerful families in America, “blue-bloods”, I mean, who are
descended from the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The thing that fascinates me about this is that this is thoroughly
documented stuff. There’s no speculation about this at all. Anyone can
go and look it up and find out for themselves that these people did
meet, they conducted the séance, they were in contact with some
extraterrestrial or supernatural group of beings which called themselves
“The Nine.”
And we’re talking about people who were also tangentially involved in
the Kennedy assassination which would take place ten, fifteen years
after these events. I mean, it’s stunning. I mean, you ask yourself:
What is the connection? How could this possibly be?
BR: Yes. What did you think of Picknett and
Prince’s book,
The Stargate
Conspiracy, that you must have read as part of your research?
PL: I did read
The Stargate Conspiracy and I wanted to shout at Picknett
and Prince: Just go a little bit further! Go just a little bit more and
you will see the connections right back to the Kennedy assassination.
I was thrilled that they were writing about these events, about “The
Nine” also. They were writing about Puharich. They had mentioned him.
They had mentioned this group, but they had not drawn the connection.
They had not connected the dots between, for instance, Arthur Young, who
was a prominent member of “The Nine”, a man who invented the Bell
Helicopter, which I had mentioned just a little while ago as having been
involved with Nazi scientists...
BR: When you talk about “The Nine”, are you talking about a human group,
or an off-world group? Or is this an allusion to two groups of nine?
PL: Well, when I talk about “The Nine”, I’m focusing first on the human
group because those are the names of the people that we know. But of
course they were considered to be the Earthly representatives of this
spiritual or extraterrestrial group that called themselves “The Nine.”
BR: OK. What is that Earthly group of nine?
PL: Well, “The Nine” included families
- for instance, Arthur Young and
his wife, Ruth Forbes Paine Young, who is a relative of John Kerry’s, as
a matter of fact – John Forbes Kerry. So we have Arthur Young and his
wife, Ruth Forbes Paine Young.
We have a DuPont, we have an Astor, all as part of this group as well as
Puharich. So the Astor family was there - a very wealthy American and
British family, the Astors. Of course everyone knows the Astors and the
Waldorf Astoria, etcetera, etcetera. John Jacob Astor was on the
Titanic. So we have the Astor family.
We have
the DuPonts, of course – extremely powerful, wealthy,
influential American family. And we have the Forbes - as in Forbes
Magazine, Steve Forbes, and all of that. That family was represented.
Her name was Ruth Forbes Paine. Paine was one of the original signers of
the Declaration of Independence. She is a direct descent along that line
by marriage. And Arthur Young himself, the inventor of the Bell
Helicopter.
So you have a family grouping here of some of the most aristocratic
family names in America. If we had royalty, they would DuPonts and
Astors, Forbes, and Paines.
BR: Did they call themselves “The Nine”? Or is this your term for them?
I mean, did they have an agenda or some kind of thesis or reason for
being together and were recognized as a group of that size?
PL: Well, they called themselves “The Nine” in this fashion: They held a
séance. Puharich was conducting a séance. He had a medium from India, a
Dr. Vinod, and Vinod was in telepathic communication with a group of
beings that was somehow in space, hovering over the Earth, and there
were nine of them.
And they told the group of nine individuals:
We are nine, and you are
nine, therefore you are the Brahmins who are going to bring a new wave
of enlightenment, or a new wave of evolution to the planet. We’re going
to use you as our vehicle for causing this kind of spiritual evolution,
this jumpstarting of evolution, if you will.
BR: OK.
KC: And this was also a take-off on basically what
the Illuminati had
been, their philosophy since the beginning of the group that we call the
Illuminati, of which these families are all part?
PL: Well, that’s the implication. I mean, otherwise... Why are these
people, as I said before, some of the wealthiest individuals in the
United States, in Maine, in a barn, in the woods, on New Year’s Eve,
when they could have been anywhere else in the world? They had the
money, they had the wherewithal, they had the connections. Instead,
they’re holding séances in the freezing cold, in the winter, in this
barn.
What is the motivation for this? What is the purpose? How did they know
each other? We don’t know so much about that. We know that Puharich was
the guy bringing them all together for the séance and they willingly
went and took part in this endeavor, not just once but several times.
So their motivation, on their own? I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to
speculate except to say we’re talking about the most powerful people in
our country at the time.
BR: And the analogy that you’re drawing here is that there’s good
evidence that the Nazis were doing something similar, both before and
during the war, and yet you’re saying that this practice of powerful
individuals from powerful families in a powerful nation-state are
suddenly doing the same thing several decades later.
PL: Well, yes. I mean, less than ten years later. If we count the end of
World War Two as ’45, these people were meeting in the early 1950s.
And what
Himmler was doing, himself... I went and visited in Germany the
castle that he had renovated called Wewelsburg. It’s near the town of
Paderborn in Germany. And this castle was developed by him to be a kind
of Vatican for the SS. It was going to be their spiritual headquarters.
He was conducting very similar rituals there. He had duplicated a kind
of “Roundtable”, a sort of Arthurian, Camelot kind of idea. There would
be 12 knights around it, which were the highest ranking SS officers.
They would gather in meditation at this table, in a room which was
directly over a crypt, and in the crypt would be placed urns containing
the ashes of SS officers as they died, the high ranking ones. There was
special niche for each one. There were swastikas engraved in the floors,
and the whole nine yards.
And so, the similar idea of meditation, of trying to contact
supernatural beings to guide the SS, was now being duplicated by a group
called “The Nine.”
And if we think in terms of race - you know the SS, like all the Nazis,
were obsessed with race and racial purity - suddenly with “The Nine” we
have, as I said, the blue-blood of American families, DuPonts, Astors,
Paines, Forbes. We have this gathering of the... for want of a better
word, the most racially acceptable, to the Nazis, grouping in guided
meditations in the woods doing the same thing. Except there were not
twelve in this case. There were nine, very specifically.
So I’m not trying to draw too close a connection between what the Nazis
were doing and “The Nine.” The practices were quite similar. It was a
group séance. It was a meditation. It was something to do with evolution
of the race.
So you have a lot of the same themes.
KC: OK. But what you also, I think, continued to investigate is to find
out where that information that they were receiving from “The Nine” went
from there. Because I believe there is a trail that connects through SRI
[ed note:
Stanford Research Institute] and
Hal Puthoff and
Ingo Swann...
PL: Sure.
KC: ...remote viewing, and actually then circles back and also has to do
with people that were involved in mind control then utilizing some of
that information? And/or is it guiding, for example, the agenda of the
Illuminati to this day?
PL: Well, it certainly did make that route that you just described, and
the connective tissue in all of this, of course, is Andrija Puharich.
Puharich was the man largely credited with having discovered Uri Geller,
for instance, the famous Israeli psychic. He brought Geller to SRI in
California to be tested.
There was also a connection with SRI and that grouping, with the people
at
Jonestown. The connections are vast with all of this, and if you
start pulling at the threads, you become extremely paranoid.
BR: What’s the connection with Jonestown?
PL: Well, yes. In Volume Two I have about 100 pages alone just on
Jonestown because the amount of work that has yet to be done just to
decode that event is still leaning on us. We really know very little
about what really happened at Jonestown.
Slowly but surely more and more information has been revealed over the
last 20 years or so, some of it by a good friend of mine called Jim
Hogan, an investigative journalist who spent a lot of time researching
Jonestown and came up with some of the CIA documents to verify that Jim
Jones himself was some kind of contract agent with the CIA. He had
what’s called a 201 File at CIA. So we know there was a connection
there.
But as far as the connection with SRI, I think it was
Russell Targ
- if
I’m not mistaken, I believe it’s Russell Targ who was the man who was
involved with both Jonestown and SRI and Hal Puthoff.
BR: Yes.
KC: There’s also the link back to Puharich as working for the CIA.
PL: Yes. As far as Uri Geller was concerned, Geller always said that
Puharich was his handler for the CIA. He made that statement several
times.
But as far as SRI’s concerned, Russell Targ, the physicist who was part
of the SRI group, by his own admission was involved with a group of
Jonestown survivors. He was director of counseling at their Human
Freedom Center in Berkeley and left them to join SRI to study psychic
phenomena.
The group that he was working with,
Elmer and Deanna Mertle, after he
left them, a few weeks after Targ left them to join SRI, the Mertles
were found dead, murdered execution-style in their home. So the
connection between Targ, SRI, and Jonestown is definite. What it means,
we don’t know.
But we do know that Targ worked with the Mertles, which was a group of
survivors of the Jonestown massacre, people who had left the Jim Jones
church, The People’s Temple, and were trying to raise consciousness
against it. They had written a book about The People’s Temple and Targ
was working with them.
He left to join SRI and a couple of weeks later,
the Mertles were dead, murdered execution-style.
KC: So you have to also say that with all of this what happens is some
people will fall on working for the positive and some will be working
actually for the negative agenda, within the fact that there are
connections between these organizations - because there is very
definite connection between the CIA and SRI. And between Puharich and
CIA. So you get all these connections with CIA. Gordon Novel, the
Kennedy assassination. All of these link back to the CIA. So it gets
really convoluted. It’s really fascinating.
I know that you’ve studied
the occult in great depth. Have you come to
any conclusions? Are you going down some trails now that perhaps are not
publicized?
PL: Well, not publicized to the point that I don’t quite know how to
explain all of this yet in any way that makes any kind of sense from an
academic point of view, but it has occurred to me during this kind of
research... As I mentioned before, I consider coincidence and
synchronicity to be evidence of the operation of these forces.
I think that these forces are there and I think that groups of human
beings from time to time make a conscious effort to contact these
forces, to manipulate them, to use them for their own advantages.
I think that the CIA did that with
MKULTRA and Operation Bluebird and
all of the
mind control experiments they did.
If you take a human being and you try to manipulate their consciousness,
you try to erase their memories, replace their memories, program them as
assassins, as an example, then what you’re doing is, you’re essentially
initiating that human being.
I mean, you’re putting them through a kind of
spiritual initiation, but
with none of the safeguards, with none of the spiritual preparation that
a person would normally go through to become protected against whatever
demons are invoked in the process.
So it was a very irresponsible,
callous, cruel program that the CIA had undertaken at that time.
KC: Irresponsible or actually intentional? I mean, that’s really the
question, isn’t it, of the heads of the CIA, If they knew what they were
getting into? And they were invoking these negative forces, in essence,
and bringing them into the bodies of programmed assassins - and some of
which are actually sleeper agents that may indeed be part of our society
at the moment, sitting around waiting to be triggered.
In essence what you’re looking at could be an intentional agenda. And
that’s where it gets very interesting when you’re starting to look at
the future and what we’re actually faced with.
PL: Well, yeah. I mean, I think one of the good indications of just how
bad it got was the man who was for a long time in charge of this program
at the CIA, called
Sydney Gottlieb, Dr. Sydney Gottlieb...
When the MKULTRA project was “disbanded” by
Richard Helms in the mid-1970s,
Gottlieb went a little weird. He at one point became a Buddhist monk. He
went to India. He tried to essentially pay for his sins.
He wouldn’t talk about this program anymore but he became a kind of
recluse and was obviously trying to live simply. He was living off the
land. He was living in a farmhouse, I believe in Virginia, after he came
back from India. He was a man who was shattered by the realizations of
what he had done, by the sins that he had committed against other human
beings.
So if the leader, if the creator, or the handmaiden of this operation
felt that way, I wonder what the actual day-to-day perpetrators felt,
the people who were actually involved in the day-to-day programming of
these individuals.
I think there is a tremendous amount of evidence to suggest that
Sirhan
Sirhan was just exactly one of those assassins who had been created.
I’ve gone through Sirhan’s diaries, the diaries he was keeping up to the
point he was arrested for the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.
BR: And he has no idea what happened, does he?
PL: He doesn’t. I mean, he admits he did it because he figures, you
know, he did it. I mean, if he’s arrested for it and he was there, he
must have done it. But he has no memory of it. And his diaries are
extremely suggestive of someone who’s been through a behavior
modification program, something like a mind control program.
It’s
fascinating stuff.
BR: I read a wonderful book which I’ve got. I also had the experience of
what I guess you could call the International Library Angel suddenly
depositing a book at your feet when you’re traveling. [laughs]
It was a
book by
Long John Nebel who was the Art Bell radio host of his day, who
operated in the 1950s, who wrote an amazing book about the Control of
Candy Jones. You must be familiar with that.
PL: Yeah, I do. I’m fascinated by that account as well and I think it’s
genuine. It’s been attacked, of course, by other researchers and authors
by saying that Long John Nebel kind of made it up or
Candy Jones never
went through this.
But if you really go through as I do, which is the thing that I do, is I
go through and I try to document what goes on. I met Candy Jones a
couple of years before she died. I was actually interviewed by her on
radio in New York City.
And from my point of view, what she discusses, especially her trips in
Asia and Taiwan, have the absolute ring of truth. I mean, I lived in
Asia for a long time. I traveled in those countries. The things that she
discusses I believe actually did occur. I think that she did not make
them up.
I can recognize the places she’s talking about.
BR: I read that book several times and it rang very, very true to me.
PL: Yeah. It was not a sensationalistic thing that she was making up. I
really do believe what she said happened had happened.
KC: So where are you going now with everything? Because you don’t really
keep your blog up. You had been talking about McCain as a possible mind
control victim, and I think there’s great evidence to that effect. I’d
be interested to hear what you have to say about Obama. I don’t know
what your current situation is. The
Powers That Be, are they aware of
you? Have they made your life difficult? Because you seem to be one of
the best researchers actually pulling these threads together in one
place.
BR: And what does this mean for us at the beginning of 2009, looking at
the next few years, and what this may mean for this country and the
world?
PL: Yeah. These are very good questions. I took a little time out for a
while to get a graduate degree in religion and the thesis that I wrote,
I published as Stairway to Heaven, which came out about a year ago. I
have another book on the Freemasons which is coming out in April. I’ve
kept my hand in all of this but I’ve been doing a lot of academic-type
work on the one hand, and then a lot of investigative work, on the
other.
The political situation: The way I look at it these days, as I mentioned
before, is theater. It is basically theater. We are watching a play
being acted out in front of us, and we’re all willing or unwilling
audience members in this play.
I think we have to not believe a lot of what we see, as being “real.”
It’s a kind of consensus reality. We all kind of agree that certain
things are real and certain things are not.
And I always like to talk about the root of the word reality, because
the word comes from a very interesting Indo-European root which also
gives us royal. It gives us what is real and what is royal. And
basically what that means is, to me:
“Whatever the king says is real is
real.”
In other words, there’s a kind of agreement that we all enter into, a
kind of contract where we agree that certain things are, and certain
things are not, real. And I think we’ve come to the point where we have
to revisit what we call real. We have to revisit reality to a certain
extent. We have to come up with a new paradigm, a new way of looking at
reality, because it’s not working for us, the old way of looking at it.
We’re too easily manipulated. Our country has made a science of the
manipulation of reality since at least the Korean War, if not before.
Communication science, which is being taught in the universities all
across the country, came into being as a result of World War Two and
psychological warfare studies.
I mean, the same guys who created
psychological warfare for use during the war were the guys who in the
private sector developed programs for teaching advertising, marketing,
and communication.
BR: Mm hm...
PL: So we are really struggling with psychological warfare being
directed against by manipulating our reality.
KC: Right. A form of propaganda and mind control in and of itself, just
as television becomes in a sense a mind control tool.
PL: On a massive, massive scale. I used to live, as I mentioned, in
Asia, and we would get CNN out there. I don’t want to single out CNN
particularly for opprobrium, but they are sort of an international news
organization that you can pick up on cable channels all over the world.
There was one particular instance where I’m in Kuala Lumpur and there
was a riot going on, on CNN, on television, in a restaurant. It was being
carried live. And we’re looking at the television screen, and we’re at
the site where this riot is supposed to be taking place. And there’s no
riot there! [Kerry laughs]
We’re watching and we’re all looking at each other. We’re watching the
screen and we’re saying: What is this?
It turns out there were three or four people in a corner somewhere and a
camera was on them. And the way it looked, it looked as if there were
all of these really angry people rioting.
I was getting a phone call from friends of mine saying: Go away! Get
out! There’s a riot taking place. We can see it on television. And we’re
all sitting in the restaurant saying: Well, where’s the riot?
You know, there is no riot. I mean, it was
manufactured news,
essentially. And if that happened that one time, how many other times
has this happened? How much of our news is being manipulated or
controlled or created, you know, as we watch it?
KC: Right, but as a researcher going into this as deeply as you have,
you must be able to look towards the future and come to certain
conclusions, and/or think about certain uninvestigated trails to look
down.
I am curious: Do you think, for example, there are sleeper agents?
Because, you know, we keep having these incidents happen and they seem
to be evidence of mind control operations, in which you have school kids
suddenly flipping out, and so on and so forth.
Where’s it all headed?
PL: Well, if we characterize the agents of this madness as individual
human beings, we might be missing something darker and something deeper.
I believe that there are individual agents, of course, and that’s what I
investigate. That’s what I write about. That’s where the evidence leads
me.
But sometimes I think that there is something else at work here. I think
that there is a kind of level of consciousness that is creating this for
us as well, and that we’re victims of it because we haven’t learned how
to fight back. We haven’t learned how to take control of our own
consciousness. We’re essentially allowing others to do that for us.
I think that we have a kind of responsibility, perhaps now more than
ever, because the information is available to us, of fighting back by
taking control of our own minds, and taking back control of our own
consciousness, of trying to deprogram ourselves, if you will, away from
what we’re being fed on an almost hysterical basis.
I mean, things have ramped up to the point where paranoia, fear,
anxiety, stress levels have increased so exponentially, it’s as if
someone wants us to have this collective nervous breakdown. We have to
take a stand and fight against it.
I think that if my research has shown nothing [else], it’s shown that
humans who are involved in this quite often don’t really understand it
that well themselves. I’m talking about the CIA.
I don’t think that the people who ran MKULTRA really understood the full
ramifications of what they were doing. They had a very narrow focus.
They wanted to create deniable assassins, as an example, and that was
their focus. They didn’t realize the other forces they were unleashing
at the time.
And I think that there are paths, there are shamanistic paths, there are
paths in the occult that might be actually beneficial for us to
investigate to understand how we’ve been manipulated, how our
consciousness has been manipulated, our reality itself has been
manipulated. I think we have a chance because there is such an amount of
information available.
But we are headed into a very dangerous impasse, a very dangerous place.
I agree. But I think that we don’t realize how much power we have as
individual human beings, or as small groups of individual human beings,
to combat this madness.
And I think we can take back our minds and our
lives from these forces, from these sinister forces.
BR: Are you able to say anything, do you feel, about the role of
the
Vatican?
PL: Ah... [laughter] How much time do you have?
BR: You know about the work of Eric Phelps and that large body of
research that he, among many others, represents. I just wondered if you
could pull some of those threads together once again for the benefit of
our listeners who would like to see as much of a summary of the big
picture as you are able to present here.
PL: Right. I grew up as a Roman Catholic. I was born into a Catholic
family in the pre-Vatican II days. And when Vatican II happened, I was
actually kind of disappointed. I didn’t like all of the, you know,
guitar-playing Masses that were taking place and all this stuff. I felt
a little cheated of the mystery, somehow.
But then, as I started to research the Nazi information, that’s when
Phase One of my disenchantment or dis-enlightenment, or whatever you
want to call it, took place.
And that was understanding the degree to which elements within the
Vatican had assisted war criminals with hideous records to escape; how
they protected them at safe-houses throughout Europe and then in Latin
America; how they gave them Vatican passports; how we had the spectacle
of Nazi war criminals dressed as priests entering Argentina, entering
Brazil, in one case performing a marriage ceremony as a priest.
I mean, I can’t even imagine what that poor family would have felt, had
they known that it was a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds if
not thousands of people blessing their union as a fake priest. So all of
this began to... that was Phase One.
Phase Two was realizing that what we’ve been told about Christianity
itself, particularly about the Catholic Church, is based on so much
disinformation and so much manipulation of history and historical facts
that we really don’t know what
the Catholic Church is any more, or what
it ever was. We don’t know what’s going on there.
I mean, the Vatican scandals... The Masonic scandals, the
Propaganda
Due, the P2 Masonic scandal alone should have alerted people to the
degree of perfidy and cupidity that was taking place within the Vatican.
I mean, we had Licio Gelli and Roberto Calvi, all of these characters
who were heavily involved in the Vatican and at the same time financing
right-wing terror squads, assassination squads, in Europe, in Latin
America, working with Francisco Franco - the dictator of Spain for so
many years - heavily involved with fascist organizations and
operations.
It was mind-numbing, the extent to which this was taking place. So I
have a very hard time. You know, I’m thankfully a very lapsed Catholic.
You know, I want to stay that way. I can’t believe that I would go to
the Bishops, Archbishops of the Catholic Church and accept spiritual
guidance from people whose own morals and ethics I have to question on
almost a daily basis.
KC: Well, also there’s a link between the Vatican,
the Illuminati, and
the US government, apparently. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Because when you’re talking about the Nazi influence in America, and
you’re talking also about The Powers That Be with Paperclip, the
Ultimate Space Program, and all of the levels at which the Vatican is
involved... From what I understand their secret service was basically
the model upon which secret services all over the world have been built.
PL: Well, sure. In fact, even the SS... the Nazis emulated the Jesuits.
I mean, Himmler wanted to create a
Jesuit Order for himself, and that
was what the SS was, hence the black uniforms, and the rituals in the
churches, and the rituals at night in the forests, and all this other
stuff. It was a kind of pagan Jesuit Order that Himmler was trying to
create.
I mean, people may have disliked or even hated the Catholic Church or
the Vatican, but there was so much of it that they wanted to emulate,
that they wanted to duplicate. But the problem is that we have so much
information to discuss that it would take hours to get into it. I’ll
just bring up one or two points that will be enough to scare you, and
probably...
I think the place to look in the beginning, if you want to see the
connection between the Vatican, Nazis, and even the Illuminati, would be
the
Knights of Malta and some of the other
chivalric orders that the
Vatican maintains and supports.
I won’t even go into Opus Dei which is a whole other kettle of fish by
itself. I mean, we’re talking about a man who created that order who had
pro-fascist, pro-Franco sentiments. I mean, there’s no question about
it. And how he could be canonized is absolutely beyond me.
But anyway, look at the
Knights of Malta. Look at the connection between
the leaders of the CIA, many of whom were Roman Catholics, members of
the Knights of Malta or members of one of the other chivalric orders
around the Vatican.
When I was growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s, I saw with my own eyes
the influence that churches had with intelligence agencies, and
intelligence agencies with the churches. I mean, I witnessed it as a
young man of 18, 19 years old, working with a church in the Bronx that
was heavily involved with intelligence operations, which was actually a
front for intelligence operations.
And that brings us back again to
David Ferrie and Jack Martin and the
Kennedy assassinations, because I met the Bishops who ordained and
consecrated David Ferrie, Jack Martin, all these peripheral figures that
you saw in the movie JFK, you know, being played by Joe Pesche, being
played by Walter Matthau, I think.
These were people who were heavily involved in a church. They were also
involved in intelligence activities. They were also involved in
anti-Castro Cuban activities and considered to be involved, in one way,
shape, or form, with the assassination of a president in Dallas.
So
the nexus between religious organizations and intelligence
organizations is thick. It’s just thick, you know.
And like I say, I saw it with my own eyes. I know the church that Ferrie
and Martin belonged to in 1968 when Jim Garrison was starting ramping up
that investigation into the Kennedy assassination. David Ferrie died
mysteriously, but he was a priest and a Bishop with one of these
churches. So...
KC: Don’t you also get into, maybe, what’s going on with the agenda, in
terms of how this plays out? For example, in the economy of the world
going downhill, and the desire for the One World Government. And how
there’re certain problems being created so that a solution can be
created, as you know possibly
David
Icke’s work in that area?
So what I’m wondering is, are you following those threads? Obviously you
see the economy going down in America and around the world. There are
sacrifices, blood sacrifices. Some of these things, or maybe even all of
them, are actually planned as some kinds of sacrifices to these hidden,
dark entities in order to make certain things happen upon this planet.
PL: Well, if we don’t characterize the economic situation as a purely
economic situation, I think we can see more clearly what’s taking place.
In a previous era, this might have been a vast military conflict. It
might have been a World War Three, or a World War Four or something.
Now we’re fighting that same war but
we’re using economics to do it.
This is a different approach to the same type of general control that’s
being exerted over the world.
I mean, the whole world cannot go broke. The money is
somewhere. That’s
the funny thing. The humorous part of this thing, if you want to be
funny about it... that fact, you know, we’re thinking the whole world
economy is going down. But basically what happens, especially with
capitalism, is somebody gets rich and somebody gets poor. So who’s
getting rich?
During Watergate we were told to follow the money. And I think if we
follow the money today, we can find out who’s doing what to whom. We can
find out who’s actually doing this kind of control.
I’ve been looking at it. I’ve been trying. Following the money in
today’s economy is extremely difficult to do. I think even members of
congress are finding themselves totally unable to even explain what’s
happening. Some of them are not able. Some of them are strictly not
willing.
But if we can follow the money, if we can start pulling the threads on
the money over the last 12 to 18 months, we can probably figure out
who’s behind this thing.
For me, it’s been very difficult to do although I’ve been trying to
cover it. I think the answer is out there. I think, as Fox Mulder used
to say: The truth is out there. But we have to look at the evidence, and
the evidence is there. It’s just it’s very hard to figure out.
If we’re talking about manipulation of the world economy, it’s because
we’re being prepared for something else. Obviously there’s an agenda.
It’s not strictly to make some people rich at the expense of others.
That’s been going on forever. We don’t need a collapse in the world
economy to do that.
So if a collapse is being engineered in the world economy, it’s to
create a circumstance or a set of circumstances conducive to another
phase of action which has nothing to do with the economy. As you said,
it might be a
One World Government - possibly. It might be something
more heinous than that.
A collapse of the economy may be a way to keep in place the types of
controls that were put into our government during the last eight years.
It may be a way of preempting any kind of change that we thought we were
voting for - some of us anyway. So there may be a way to...
As
9/11 essentially was a
Reichstag fire which gave the president total
control of the government, in terms of the Patriot Act and everything
else, the collapse in the economy is essentially another 9/11, and it’s
going to give the government additional powers that it never had.
BR: It’s just another kind of controlled demolition.
PL: It’s another kind of controlled demolition. It’s a... what’s the
word I’m looking for... a consolidation of all of this.
If we put the Patriot Act and some of the other things that took place
- the wiretaps, the illegal stuff that’s been going on - and we now
couple that with government control of banks and corporations, you know,
we have fascism.
Some people are talking about creating socialism or
communism here, but
fascism is also a wedding between the state and the corporation. It’s
not just socialism that we’re talking about.
The one thing that nobody wants to talk about is the fact that we’ve
been creeping closer and closer to fascism in the last 40 or 50 years.
And that scares me, believe it or not, more than socialism does or even
communism. What frightens me most is a kind of fascism, an American
style of fascism.
KC: Well, I mean, this is the premise of Jim Marrs’ book, as you know.
PL: Yes.
KC: And it is a basically a fait accompli in the minds of many, even
behind the scenes, with
Richard Hoagland and his investigation into NASA
and the symbolism there, and the
Paperclip background behind, you know,
the space program. So the agenda seems to have been a kind of fascism
that stemmed out of World War Two and is being continued today.
But where is that going? Once they have total control, then what? You
know, it’s almost like they already have total control as it is. One
wonders: What next?
And the only thing we’ve gotten so far in our study of this mystery is
the idea of
population elimination. In other words, they want to
eliminate large segments of the population. They haven’t been able to do
so with other means, with viruses and so on.
In other words, this control you’re talking about has to lead to some
thing, because control is something they’ve, in a sense, always had. But
they’re tightening it, and as you say, they’re consolidating it.
So with
what purpose in mind?
PL: Well, that’s another good question and it’s something, too, that
would probably take a long time to try to analyze. I think that “The
Powers That Be” are not 100% happy yet. They don’t really feel they have
the kind of control they would like.
Part of the reason for that is the
explosion of technology, which seems
to be getting out of control. You don’t notice it perhaps as much in
this country as you would overseas where this kind of technology, the
internet in particular, has given people at the grassroots level a voice
they never had before.
So the governments in those parts of the world, especially in developing
countries, are struggling very hard to control the technology and
control access to information.
Right now we are talking over the internet and this will be available on
the internet, so people who want to can hear it. But this kind of
control eventually will probably have to be extended over what we’re
doing over the internet, over the free exchange of information.
I think it’s already started and I think it’s going to continue until
there is control over information. And once you control information, you
control reality. You control consciousness.
Once the independent
operators are gone, once they’ve been closed down, there will only be
the party line that’s left.
BR: That’s
1984, isn’t it?
PL: Well, it is 1984. Some people listening to this are going
to say to
themselves: You know, these are the aluminum hat people. You know, the
tin-foil hats. We’re all worried about vast conspiracies taking control.
I want to tell you something, to the listeners who maybe think that at
times this is out in left field. I was on somewhat friendly terms with a
man called Norman Mailer, a famous author, one of America’s most famous
novelists and journalists and authors, who passed away recently - a man
I admired very much.
He was kind enough to praise my own work and write
a foreword to Unholy Alliance.
He spoke in my presence about the fact that America was heading towards
fascism. Many people of that social setting, other authors, some of them
Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, people who are understood to be great
thinkers, great members of the intelligencia, have all said the same
thing to me or in my presence, that we are heading towards fascism, that
America...
According to Norman mailer, back a couple of years ago, he said America
was in what he called a pre-fascist condition, but that we were heading
inexorably towards fascism. Other authors since then have said the same
thing.
So this is not something that only a handful of people on the absolute
fringe are feeling. These are things that are being felt on other levels
by other people who are not involved in this kind of investigation,
people who are not doing this kind of research, people who have just
opened their eyes and who’ve looked around and said: My goodness, this
is what’s going on.
We’re becoming a fascist country.
BR: One of the things that confuses people sometimes, as you must be
well aware, is the idea that somehow there’s a spectrum with socialism
on the left and fascism on the right and the two are very different.
Actually, they meet in the middle, kind of loop round in a kind of
circle, one going to the left and one going to the right. Extreme
socialism and extreme fascism are actually very similar.
PL: That’s the point I was just going to make. To have fascism or to
have socialism, you have to have a marriage between the state and
business. I mean, that’s how it’s done.
Either the government owns the means of production as it does in a
socialist or a communist country, or the state and the corporations have
a working relationship, a nice working relationship, as
Eisenhower
warned us about when he left office. He talked about the military/industrial complex and how frightened he was that that was happening.
That is fascism.
So, does it matter to the average person whether or not the government
owns the means of production or the government and the state and the
corporations are in bed together? Does it really matter to us on the
street?
It’s going to be the same effect. We’re still going to be controlled.
Our economy’s going to be controlled. Our freedoms are going to be
drastically curtailed. So in the end, what difference does it make?
I’ve talked to people about 9/11 a lot. There’s been, of course, a lot
of discussion about 9/11. And I’ve always said it was a
Reichstag fire.
It’s what happened in Germany. How Hitler took complete control of the
government was the Reichstag burned down and he blamed the communists
for it.
And my point was, do we really care who burned down the Reichstag at
this point? All we really care about is the fact that it brought Hitler
to power.
So in our case,
what did 9/11 do?
It pushed all of these heinous attacks
on our liberty and our privacy. It pushed them right into the forefront.
It made it acceptable. That’s what happened. That was the real effect of
all of this.
We can talk about 9/11 - for instance, we can talk about conspiracies.
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that what happened, the effect of
it, was that we lost more liberty, we lost more privacy.
KC: Right. And so then that gets back to the overall agenda.
PL: Yes
KC: And it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy fact when you
look at all the evidence. And what’s happening is that this particular
agenda is being rolled out.
And, of course, it’s very heartening that you do talk about how
consciousness and the role of consciousness was getting out of the hands
of the people in MKULTRA, such that people like Gottlieb himself, who
was certainly one of the masterminds behind all of that, goes on his own
sojourn to India, looking for some kind of spiritual way out, I think,
of the responsibility for which he... You know, it’s basically like
walking around in some kind of living hell, I’m sure, being inside that
guy’s head.
And so, in essence, all of this is playing out in the microcosm around
the globe, not just America, because I see it in many countries. In
fact, England has the best surveillance system on the streets, cameras,
etcetera. So what’s happening is, on some level it seems to be
manifesting in America sort of in a more overt way. But in a covert way,
it’s actually existed in small countries, under despots that were
financed by the CIA, and then across the globe, masterminding the
governments behind countries like Switzerland, and so on.
PL: Well, I mean, what’s very amusing to me in a sardonic sort of way is
the fact that in the United States if you talk about conspiracies,
you’re pooh-poohed. You’re shot down. It’s considered, you know,
paranoid fantasy.
And yet we recognize without hesitation the fact that conspiracies like
this exist in every other country on the planet. Right? So when Benazir
Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was gunned down last year
in Pakistan, everyone said of course it was a conspiracy. There were
elements of the Pakistani secret police involved. Al Qaeda may be
involved, or the Taliban, or who knows what. But automatically it was a
conspiracy.
However, according to mainstream historians, not a single person
assassinated in this country has ever been assassinated by a conspiracy!
[laughs] No conspiracy. Nothing to see here. Move along. Right? We have
this idea somehow that the U.S. is immune to these events.
And yet we overthrow dictators in foreign countries. We’ve overthrown
and committed assassinations in Guatemala, in Iran back in the days of
the Shah. We overthrew the government of Allende in Chile. We put
Pinochet in power. All of these things we do on a regular basis and
we’ve done it for years and years and years. And yet somehow it doesn’t
take place inside the United States.
Why is that? Why is it so
impossible to believe?
KC: Right. And I think, though, nowadays it’s a lot easier to sort of
get people to, not so much believe, but really understand the roots of
conspiracy. And ever since the death of Kennedy I think that America’s
eyes have slowly been opened along those lines, at least many. Although
certainly 9/11, you still get people not able to accept the possibility
that a conspiracy took place there.
So again, I guess we’ve gone full circle with you. In many ways we’re
going over some material here that is just... the roots are everywhere.
The conspiracies, if you will, are everywhere.
It’s very heartening to know that you are behind the wheel,
investigating all of this and documenting it and pulling as many threads
together as you are. I encourage people to follow your work.
I certainly
want to read a lot more that you’ve written.
PL: Where I’m going now? I’m still in the midst of all of this, you
know? I’m still in the midst of researching. I don’t know what my next
book will be.
As I had mentioned, I have a book on
Freemasons coming out in April,
which is kind of a look at the connection between the Masonic society
and
the Mormons, and some of the occultism that was taking place in our
country before, during, and after the Revolution, the American
Revolution. So I look at the connections that were there.
It’s kind of a general look at Freemasonry. I’m not a Freemason myself,
of course. That’s coming out in April.
Stairway to Heaven was really more about
Kabbalah and Chinese alchemy
and that sort of thing, a very spiritually oriented book trying to
understand some of the implications of some of the ancient writings.
So, where I’m going to go from here? I’m constantly collecting
information. I’m constantly building up files of data, trying to see
more connections, and I’m sure I’ll have something like this to share
with you soon.
KC: That’s fabulous. One thing I do want to ask you, the book you were
talking about that you investigated the occult quite deeply...
PL: I was involved with it. Yeah.
The Necronomicon. Of course. I mean, I
made no secret of that. I’ve done some interviews based on that. That
was an occult work that, I think today it’s one of the critical texts,
probably, of the mid-20th century on occultism. It’s been reviled by a
lot of people. People claim it’s a hoax. Other people say it’s a very
terrible book, or it’s a very powerful work.
I look at it as the
survival of an old Middle Eastern occult practice
which involved a process of initiations, going through a series of
“gates”, gaining greater and greater illumination or enlightenment at
each time, each passing of the “gate”. It’s an interesting book and the
events around it were interesting as well.
KC: We’ll have to revisit that with you because I’m fascinated by that
as well.
PL: Sure.
KC: Well, thank you, Peter. This has been fascinating. We’re both really
very interested in what you’re going to be doing in the future, as well as
to get into your work after this conversation. And thank you for taking
the time today to talk to us.
PL: It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.
