UFO RESEARCH
Re-visiting An Interview With Peter Levenda
Exploring the cargo cult hypothesis for UFO phenomena
This article is a transcription of a 2018 interview with Peter Levenda, co-author of the Sekret Machines trilogy with Tom DeLonge of what was once called To The Stars Academy. The transcription has useful hyperlinks for further research into the topics discussed. The purpose of this work is to revisit the events of 2017 within the UFO community. Since then, some people have meandered down rabbit holes and found themselves stuck within the maze that is this subject. With little recent developments there is clamor for something to happen or some new information to be released. The idea of this article is to hit the reset button and go back to this little known interview at the beginning of 2018 where Peter Levenda discusses events going back to 2015 leading up to the 2017 release of the first book.
Levenda discusses his working relationship with DeLonge as well as how they worked with government insiders and how those relationships developed. He discusses his approach and intentions with the first book, which is a nonfiction dive into the subject from the perspective of looking at the UFO phenomena as a cargo cult. The cargo cult analogy is inspired by a real religion formed on an island during WW2 where the native population saw US troops loading cargo planes and worshipped the planes after they left. Levenda has an interesting take on searching for evidence of contact in ancient texts and interpreting them very literally. He claims that UFO’s can be projections of humans onto something that they are trying desperately to understand. Just like a cargo cult. Levenda argues it’s not just religion that’s a cargo cult. It’s our science and technology as well, which is a very interesting take on the subject.
He also discusses how he is not a traditional UFO guy and how he got into the subject studying other subjects such as Nazism and conspiracies. He covers the subject of this a bit as well as his involvement in the secret space program conventions and research into secret weapons programs. He states that DeLonge chose him to work with specifically because he wanted to explore the Nazi angle and bring in someone to the UFO subject that didn’t already have a narrative or agenda to get the community out of talking in circles.
The transcription isn’t the best because the software used seemed to have some trouble. If you notice incomplete or run on sentences it’s either because of this or the fact that natural discussions don’t often follow proper grammatical structure. It’s still very accurate and has been proofread. Feel free to listen to the interview instead and use the transcription to find useful hyperlinks for your own deeper dive into the subject matter. This interview is only part 1 of 3. A few pieces of information have been inserted using brackets that are not part of the original interview.
Al Introduces Peter Levenda
Peter Levenda is a leading expert on the obscure like Nazism, occultism, and real life conspiracy, etc. In the course of his more than 25 years of field research, he’s journeyed to more than 40 countries and has lived in a few of them. He’s headed a manufacturer company based in Malaysia and was a pioneer in successful trading with China. He has a master’s in religious studies and Asian Studies and speaks a variety of languages even some dead.
Through his life work and research he’s gained access to all sorts of fringe places, including archives, libraries, military installations, and classified government documents obtaining primary sources and making new discoveries. He has visited Chinese prisons and military bases, Buddhist temples, Muslim boarding schools, Russian Orthodox monasteries, mosques around in Europe, United States and Asia, the Palestine Liberation Organization, several voodoo home forts, the former KGB headquarters in Moscow to name some.
He’s interviewed Nazis, Neo Nazis, Klansmen, occultists, Satanists, Intel officers and Islamic terrorists. He was detained at the notorious Colonia Dignidad, being held at gunpoint in Latin America, and celebrated with a state dinner in Beijing. As a teenager he gatecrashed the funeral for assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and led the procession out of the cathedral. He was a member of the same front organization, a renegade Ukrainian church in the Bronx that provided cover for suspected co conspirators in the JFK assassination - David Ferrie and Jack Martin. In addition, he was an auxiliary police officer for the NYPD, is a member of Mensa, the American Academy of Religion, the Norman Mailer society and T.E. Lawrence Society.
His work has been praised by Jim Morse, Jim Hogan, Norman Mailer, Dick Russell, Whitley Strieber, Katherine Neville, Joseph Ferrell, and many others. He’s appeared in numerous television programs for the History Channel, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, TNT, etc, as well as magazines, radio shows and podcasts. And part of this genuine conversation is also related to the book he co authored with Tom DeLonge called Sekret Machines: Gods, which is the first of the trilogy Gods, Man, and War. So sit back and enjoy the ride.
Enter Levenda
Al: Welcome back to the forum,Peter.
Levenda: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.
Al: I’m so glad you could do this on short notice because we had to push up this schedule for this interview. I was thinking of completing the Nazi thread arc we had with you. But unforeseen development has forced us into this procedure.
Levenda: Right.
Al: And before we begin I have to say, Peter, I don’t regard you as a traditional UFO guy.
Levenda: Well, I’m not really. (laughs)
Al: Nobody thinks of you. If they’re gonna say, you know, the first UFO author that springs to mind and the same with me. I’ve never been big on UFOs. I was a little interested in it when I was young, but then I got deeper interests as far as I regarded it, and then I got a huge mind blow in later years, when I was confronted with a few things. I despise much of that culture and stuff around it. So it’s pretty ironic that here we are two guys who are not big on UFOs.
Levenda: Yea.
Al: (Laughing) We’re now going to comment on this big hoopla. Yeah, that’s good. But I think maybe that’s actually an advantage for both of us.
Levenda: I think it’s a good thing. I mean, the idea of UFOlogy in the minds of most people are is you know, tinfoil hats and people who are very credulous and they believe 10 impossible things before breakfast, and it’s that kind of…that we have put them in that box. But when I wrote Sinister Forces, there’s a lot of UFO material in that trilogy, but from the point of view that there were political connections and there were cultural connections that could not be overlooked. And I kept coming across and tripping over the UFO phenomenon. In the course of writing this because there’s so much documentation, there were so many individuals involved with UFOlogy who were also somehow involved with political assassinations and all sorts of other machinations. So I felt that I had to look into it. But, you know, then I did the Secret Space thing in Amsterdam. And again, that was the approach I was taking. I got into UFOlogy from a side door, or from a back door maybe. And it was because of all these really weird people who were involved in it. One way or the other. So, so yeah, and I think that’s really the reason why I was sort of in the top five list or something of people to be involved with the Tom DeLonge project. Because I had a bit more credibility. I wasn’t promoting one of the standard narratives on this, right. You have different groups of people, they’re pushing their own story, and I don’t have a story on this. I just want to know what it is. I realized that it does exist because the evidence for it is overwhelming. So let’s just calm down. Look at this thing dispassionately, and see how far can we go. Let’s enlist some good people from all different walks of life, who are specialists in their field and say, let’s take this thing seriously. Let’s accept that it exists. Where do we go from here? And that’s been kind of the approach of the Tom DeLonge project.
Al: We’re gonna go in depth into that as this unfolds, but no, I totally agree with you. And I usually say you can’t avoid UFOs in today’s discourse, it sneaks in everywhere. And you know, everything from entertainment to science, and it’s true. It’s the classified space fleet phenomenon that kind of forced the card. Also in our series I was determined when I began not to have a pure, like a traditional UFO show, like, you know, like 50% of coast to coast, not because I’m against it, but precisely because it’s not my forte. I think there’s so many other stuff that’s interesting and is already very covered. But I think after, and I’m not even materialist bias on this because I’m totally on board with all the perspectives like also, you know, Graham Hancock. Right? So, but I see this from several angles, and I think you’re right I think it’s, that we speak about it now it will be totally without agenda. We’re going to try to approach this from an inquiry perspective. And so the Secret Space Program also forced the card because obviously that will be determined as UFO.
Levenda: Right.
Al: So that’s mainly also how we ended up having several shows about that now, but today is actually a pure UFO program because it’s triggered by this drip of mainstream disclosure that just happened. But let’s rewind all the way back to what you were starting talking about, namely, your involvement with Tom DeLonge. Now for those who don’t even know who he is or what that’s about. Let’s start there.
Levenda: Sure. Well, of course, Tom DeLonge came to prominence as one of the frontman for a band called Blink 182. And blink 182 was really famous, mega platinum records and all the rest of it, sort of 90s to early 2000s I guess. That period, and he was just notorious for that band. It was the soundtrack for a lot of people who grew up at that time. And I mean, I knew of Blink 182. When I first got the, the contact from Tom DeLonge I thought it was a hoax. Because I recognized immediately blink 182. I say wait a minute. I know that band. What does this mean? Why is somebody claiming to be from a band? I’ve had trolls before so I was very wary of this.
Al: So, how did he convince you?
Levenda: This is the thing. I didn’t want to be involved in something that would ruin whatever credibility I have. In my own writings in my own world. You know, I write about Nazis, which is bad enough, right? So people think that you’re off you’re nut if you talk about Nazi occultism regardless of all the academic work that’s been done on that subject.
Al: And Satanism. You go into all of it. You go into all the dark corners.
Levenda: All of that, right. So you, you struggle to maintain a certain level of credibility by saying, okay, here are my sources. Here are the documents. This is why I’m saying this. This is what people have gone on the record as saying, and this is what I’m trying to do without an agenda. Just saying, Look at this stuff. It’s really weird. You know, and just trying to put it out there and say, What does this mean? What does it imply? So, when it comes to this kind of thing, the UFO stuff, and that’s really hard. It’s probably the most difficult of all of these fields to confront or to deal with because there’s so much misinformation. There’s government secrecy. You have to deal with which there really isn’t very much when it comes to Satanism for instance, or, or anything else I mean, but when it comes to this subject, you’re on very, very unsteady ground.
Al: Hey, and disinformation, don’t forget that.
Levenda: Absolutely. You don’t know who’s lying to you. You don’t know if you’re being taken for a ride. You don’t know if the people who are talking to you are deliberately lying, or they’re really sincere, but they have nothing but misinformation to share. Or they’re being deliberately disinfo forming, you know, to sway the narrative or to get you up and running off in different directions. I knew all this getting in. And I told that to Tom, when I finally realized Tom was Tom. And Tom said, Listen, we have to get to the bottom of this. We have to do what we can to once and for all make some progress on this UFO thing because everybody’s going around in circles. You know, everybody is just repeating everybody else. There are no good sources accept project Bluebook or a handful of government documents. Past that there’s nothing and all we’re doing is running around in circles. Each side is blaming the other side for being disinformation agents and all the rest of it. And it just it’s a mess. How do we solve this? And the only way to solve it is to scrap everything we think we know. Start from a fresh page and say, Okay, there’s a UFO phenomenon. What can people tell us about it? People in positions that people who would know. So our approach was to go to people in the government, people in the military, people in the intelligence agencies, start from there just to see what shakes loose and go with the attitude that we’re not here to blame you or to accuse you. All we want is to know what you know, and only what you can tell us. If you can’t tell us something than don’t don’t tell us a story. If you’re going to speculate then say you’re speculating. Otherwise, we want to cooperate. We want to understand what this is because we feel at this time in our history and in the history of the globe. This is probably the best time to start talking about this in a realistic way. You know, take away all the nonsense and all the disinformation stuff, all the phony stories that came out about Roswell, one after the other. All the other stuff. The Richard Doty/Paul Bennewitz material which ruined the idea of government cooperation for a lot of people, because Richard Doty was an Air Force officer and he was sowing disinformation everywhere he went. And we’re very sensitive that this could be another case like that. So we got to be very careful. And people, if they can’t go on the record, then they’ve got to give us really good deep background that we can corroborate somewhere else. So we took that attitude and it was a non confrontational attitude. And of course, we also approach people in the sciences and the humanities. Also to get their interpretations to get their takes. I did a lot of research in that area, talking to philosophers, you know, and people who are dealing with you know, existentialism, and Foucault Aldean philosophy and all the rest of it just trying to figure out what are we dealing with if we’re not dealing with something human? If we’re not dealing with a phenomenon that is based on the earth or from within an earth based civilization? What therefore can we expect? What will be the difficulties in communicating? What will be the difficulties in identifying these visitors? What are the technical problems? If you’re talking to people at Lockheed Skunkworks what are the technical issues? What do you see as the reason why this is impossible? Why is the UFO aeronautical characteristics impossible from our point of view of physics? How could we overcome them if we wanted to, if we accepted that these things were real? So these kinds of questions, gradually opened a few doors and then I wrote what became the foreword to Sekret Machines: Gods.
Al: You wrote the foreword. I thought you wrote the book.
[The Prolugue to Sekret Machines is not in the interview, but I’m inserting it below here for your reference if you wish to read it. It is not 20–30 pages so I assume it’s a condensed version of the preliminary document he references]
The Stone Age
The sound from heaven was like that of thunder, but it was a clear night. They stood frozen where they walked beneath the dense tropical canopy at the rumbling growl from the sky. The oppressive heat was a physical presence they ignored. Water dripped from the leaves of the dense foliage all around them. This was their land, a land they knew intimately. They fished, they foraged for herbs and tubers, they built huts made of bamboo and grasses. They lived, they ate, they had children. But this . . . this was not from their land. It was not even from their earth. They became statues, wide-eyed and trembling in the moonless dark, transfixed by what they heard; afraid of what they would see. Their chief was summoned, but there was no need. He already had been alerted by the sound, the insistent thrum that descended upon them from the sky. Then the heavens opened and the night was full of light and fire. Above the tree line, above the roof of palms and ferns, they could see the sun shining impossibly at that darkest hour. The jungle around them shivered, the ground vibrating with the steps of some unseen being. Most fled, to the doubtful security of straw walls and old habits, but the distance they covered in an hour was only a second’s work to the secret machines of the gods in the sky.
The ones that remained heard inhuman voices booming from above their heads. Lights played all around them, penetrating the branches of trees, the puddles of rank water at their feet, frightening the snakes, the rodents, the birds into taking flight. What power on earth or in the sky could turn night into day? They crawled on their bellies, seeking the camouflage of weeds and grasses, and crept along the jungle floor towards the unholy din, the clamoring of demons, the ceaseless clattering like the shaking of dried peas in a gourd only so much louder, so many more gourds, so many countless numbers of peas. But these few had to know. They had to see the source of this light and this terrible sound. They were the elders of the People. They were the only ones who could understand the meaning of the sounds, of the lights, of the horror. A kilometer further down a hill — a mound sacred to their fathers, for reasons no one remembered — they came upon a clearing and their hearts leapt into their throats. What they saw was impossible. What they saw no man had ever seen. What they saw had no words in the language of the People to describe. Beings, clothed in light, descended from the skies. There were spheres turning in all directions. There were faces, like the faces of the People, shining from every direction. There was a canoe — a kind of canoe, a vessel, like a gourd — rising up from the ground and was the source of the insistent throbbing noise that had aroused them from their slumber hours ago. The elders kept watch. In their minds, they tried on different words — like hats — for their images to describe what they saw. So they could tell the People when they returned. They were witnessing the arrival of beings with tremendous powers, beings who controlled light and sound and could fly through the air. They heard the voices of these beings — huge voices, voices that could carry through the air like the drums of the People — but they understood not a word. They saw symbols, and they had no word for symbols. They were pictures but they were not images of anything they had ever seen. The elders knew, without expressing it in words, that what they were experiencing was a moment of initiation. It was a spiritual event, a crossing over into another existence. The lights, like little suns, like giant stars, illuminated the night.
By morning, the images became clearer. There was more color. More activity. The elders could see beings that looked like People, and they were very busy. A huge building of some kind — but a building that could move all over the ground — was the source of many wrapped packages. These packages would be distributed to various beings, who then took them to other places, other buildings, sacred shrines or gravesites. The elders quietly discussed whether they should approach these beings. Whether it was safe. Whether they would be welcomed. But before they could make a decision, there was another terrifying sound from the sky. A sudden, blaring, shrieking noise caused the elders to drop to the ground, prostrate, in the presence of the most powerful, most unearthly event in their ancient history. Another “building” came flying down from the sky, and came to the ground some distance away. It crawled over the earth until it was close enough to see clearly. And from its stomach more packages were removed. The elders took careful note of the design of the temple and its broad avenue. They noticed the lights. They noticed a high place, made of wood. At the top of that high place, the beings seemed to speak directly to the Father of the Sky. The packages were filled mostly with things the People did not understand, but with some things they did. Some seemed to be food, for the beings ate from them. Others seemed to be implements of some kind. Clothing. Water. The elders smacked their lips at the sight of all that bounty. They returned to their village. They told stories of what they had seen. Supernatural beings from the sky. Flying devices. Light. Sound. And the many, many packages sent from the Beings. The People asked them many questions, over and over again. Finally, it became clear: The elders had been initiated into the mysteries of the Light Beings. They had become “illuminated.” (Only people who lived in darkness could appreciate the divinity of the Light.) They knew what to do. They knew how to summon these Light Beings so that they, too, could receive the gifts from heaven. They made ceremonial clothing in imitation of what the Beings wore. They made implements in the same design as those of the Beings, magic devices to communicate with the Spirit in the Sky, magic devices to fly, magic devices to see at long distance, magic devices that made terrifying sounds. They found artifacts on the ground when the Beings finally left to return to their villages in the heavens, and they kept them as sacred relics of power. These machines were kept apart from the People and only revealed on sacred days. The machines contained power and knowledge, and access to that power and knowledge was the privilege of those who had seen the Beings firsthand. There were no words to describe all that had been seen, no vocabulary available to people living in the Stone Age, so the essence of these machines remained secret, wrapped around with ritual language and arcane ceremony that made sense only to those who had seen. The People built a broad avenue in the jungle near their village. They erected a high tower like the one they had seen. They stationed their elders on top of that tower to scour the heavens for a sign that the Beings were returning. And they created a prayer: “Spirit of the Sky, Remember!”
The People lived in the Stone Age, but in the midst of the twentieth century. In 1942. They lived in the South Pacific, on islands that had been contested by Japanese and British, Australian and American forces during the Second World War. They had never seen aircraft before, or motorized vehicles. They had never seen Japanese or European men. And the effect of all of this was the creation of a new religion based on gods who descended from the skies, bringing wisdom and knowledge, Coca-Cola and hot dogs, machine guns and medicine. This religion is called by anthropologists and journalists a “cargo cult.” It exists to this day. Quite possibly it has always existed. Everywhere. Quite possibly since the beginning of recorded history
Levenda: Well, Tom, and I wrote the book, but what happened first, was I wrote this maybe 20-30 page preliminary document, which turned into the prologue to the book. Jacques Vallee, wrote the foreword, but I wrote the next chapter in that line. And this was circulated first. And this got the attention of a lot of people who suddenly sat up and said, Oh, okay, we see where you’re going with this. Okay, we can work with this. And then they started to talk. And that was the opening salvo and all of this was this document that compared our human civilization, our entire human civilization, to a cargo cult.
Al: Right, right.
Levenda: And that concept resonated with so many people. We were really astounded. And people started to open up to us people who were, you know, General Staff. We’re talking about people with a lot of stars on their shoulders and talking to us and saying, Okay, we look at it this way. We look at it that way. Have you considered this? You know, have you considered this approach? And it gradually led us to the position where we felt more and more confident. And yet, we were trying to keep everybody’s identity secret, because they didn’t want it to be known generally that they were cooperating with us. That was the first rule. The first rule of fight club is there is no Fight Club. In the case of this, the first rule of our advisors is that there are no advisors. So we tried to do that, but of course, then 2016 happened.
Al: Yeah, but he was still allowed to say he was in touch with so and so guys.
Levenda: Yes.
Al: He could just not name them.
Levenda: He could not name them or identify really where they were based, right? So he couldn’t say I’m talking to three Air Force generals or something. That wouldn’t fly either. So he could talk general vague terms, but not really be any more specific than that. And then of course 2016 happened and there was the Podesta email hack.
Al: Oh, and you have to tell you because I guess I’m touching base more with with the readers than you do. I have to say that your association with Tom DeLonge and his association with Podesta kind of hurt you a little because they’re guilty by association. Logical fallacy, right?
Levenda: Sure.
Al: So there’s a lot of critical people I’m going to I’m going to race those topics later with you. But just so you know, in case you don’t.
Levenda: Oh, I’m very well aware (laughter.) That’s all I ever get is well, you know, don’t quote Podesta don’t say Podesta because he’s an evil this that and everything else. We don’t believe it. We don’t feel guilty by association where that’s concerned. Others may feel guilt is the correct word. But we met him obviously that was back in 2015. That was before the campaign really started. And we talked to Podesta very you know, openly. What do we do? How do we shake the tree loose? How do we get more information out of government on this because obviously he thought about this a lot.
Al: Yeah, he’s on the record for having been interested in this phenomenon for years.
Levenda: He wrote a foreword to Leslie Kane’s book on UFOs.
Al: Right.
Levenda: So I mean, he’s very open and upfront about it. So this was an excellent opportunity for us to say, okay, you’ve been in government your entire life. How do we go about shaking the tree loose? How do we find out what’s going on? So he was very helpful where that was concerned, too. So we don’t you know, we we do not deny or in any way try to disparage our relationship with with John Podesta. So we can discuss all of that later and all that weird stuff about that. But when that came out, the one important thing it did was it revealed to the world that what Tom had been saying all along was true. He was talking to a lot of very high ranking people in the military and the government and everywhere else. But what it did is it spooked everybody, and the promises he was making about big revelations were postponed and postponed again for one reason or another.
Al: Oh, you mean it spooked the people you were in touch with?
Levenda: Yes, of course.
Al: Right, right. Because it spooked half the population, too. (laughter)
Levenda: Absolutely. I mean, it spooked us because we fell out. We were in radio silence for a period of a couple of weeks. We did not communicate. We didn’t know what was compromised. We had to change emails. We had to encrypt things we had to do. We do all kinds of crazy stuff. Just to make sure that we could have a conversation that wasn’t going to be leaked by whoever was responsible for this.
Al: You know, this is a casualty of war because I’m totally in favor of WikiLeaks. But I see how it’s very unfortunate the timing here because you didn’t have sinister reasons to be…how you were forced to communicate incommunicado with these people and then you were kind of just casualty of war. Like you know, you were dragged into this because if this revelation had happened earlier, it would’ve been better because then it wouldn’t have hurt this process.
Levenda: Sure. Sure.
Al: So we have to kind of have two thoughts in the head at the same time. That it is good to leak stuff that…you could say it wasn’t the most important stuff that was leaked, but I’m so for transparency. But on the other hand, I’m totally on board with…if I were in your shoes and Tom’s shoes, you have to do it that way. So that was very bad timing. Very unfortunate.
Levenda: Yeah, of course. What I have a hard time making people understand because I don’t have my name on the New York Times masthead or something. But I still consider myself bound by the same rules. And one of the primary rules of journalism is you don’t reveal your sources. If sources want to talk to you on deep background or they want to talk to you anonymously, you have to respect that. But once you start down that road, then people accuse you of covering up for someone else so they accuse you of disinformation. Until they know your sources and until they know who they are, see their pictures, see their Facebook page, you know know their date of birth and blood type. They’re not satisfied and even then they won’t be satisfied.
Al: Yea, but you can’t blame them. Look at all the fake whistleblowers. I’ll actually name one. In my view. You have Corey Goode as a typical example of a hoax. So because of these things, you know, people have to be critical, right? And skeptical.
Levenda: Well, well, absolutely. And that you raise a very good point here because Corey Goode is a good example. No pun intended. (Laughter) This is the thing. You can refer to your sources anonymously only for so long.
Al: Hmm.
Levenda: You know, we were always going to begin revealing people who agreed to it once they felt comfortable. And once WikiLeaks happened, it was revealed that we did have legitimate sources. And now with the To The Stars Academy rollout that happened just a couple of months ago, now you see their names, their dates, places, it’s all there. I mean, you know, who we’re dealing with, there is no, there is no secrecy on that level. So if anybody wants to, you know, complain about mysterious unnamed sources, that was true when we started, but now it’s sort of in your face, right? And now that it’s in your face, people are now complaining about that, too. (laughter)
Al: Yeah, because now its, oh they are pentagon and intel, we can’t trust them because they’re all shills, right? So it’s damned if you do damned if you don’t, that’s how it goes.
Levenda: They wanted disclosure, where were they going to get disclosure from except the government, the military, and industry? Those are the only places it’s going to come from. And so what are we supposed to do otherwise we’re just speculating and we’re back in the territory of just making stuff up. We don’t want to make stuff up. We want to show you okay, if you have a problem with the material we’ve released, you know, if there are critiques that can be made of the videos or of the personnel or whatever, that’s fine, but it’s all out there. We’re not hiding this. We’re revealing what we can as we can. As the articles in the New York Times revealed. We would have talked about this months earlier. But there were problems with the journalists, problems with the media, problems with you know, various people over which we had no control. So it made Tom look like he was just talking nonsense, right? I have a big revelation coming big revelation and it never came.
Al: Joe Rogan really ridiculed him. People thought he was crazy.
Levenda: Absolutely. Absolutely. And Rogan didn’t do anybody any favors by doing that. Himself included. Because in the end, it was shortly after that interview that all this broke and it showed what we were always talking about. We were reputably reporting what we could at the time.
Al: Bad timing for Rogan. That’s true. (laughter)
Levenda: Yea.
Al: But in a way that kind of also saved you because there’s no guarantee how this would have rolled out according to plan, so now at least that kind of, because I think after the Rogen thing if that would have allowed to unfold, Tom would have been toast.
Levenda: Yea.
Al: In most people’s view.
Levenda: Sure.
Al: And he’s in trouble because there are some genuine criticism I’m going to raise with you later. But I have taken some notes here from what you said. First, I want to spring to your defense, because you mentioned Jaque Valee earlier and nobody is questioning his…well, there’s always someone who questions something…but in general, he’s a vetted, decent sincere guy. So he’s into this for the inquiry. And I have the same view about you. When it comes to Tom, I have no doubt that he is an idealist. In fact, he borders to being naive, I’d say. Maybe he isn’t, but he kind of comes off like that to me. But on the other hand, he’s not inept. He has the resources. He has the connections. So as far as his motives goes, I think he is sincere. But let’s just start with taking the biggest problem immediately. But you started with saying, you presented a scenario like it sounded like it was an either or. So let’s start there actually. I don’t think it’s an either or. I think this phenomenon, UFO, UAP or whatever you want to call it there can be there are several causes for them. Most become identified. But even for those who aren’t identified, evidence points to there can be multiple phenomenons. So what’s your approach to this either or kind of thing that you started with?
Levenda: Yeah. Yeah. The either or I think what you’re referring to is either they are or they aren’t. Either they are phenomena that are worthy of study or there’s something that we dismiss scientifically.
Al: No, no, no, I was referring to you said that if they are not human, then what are they?
Levenda: Right, right. Well, same idea.
Al: Well, can’t they be both? Can’t it be several…
Levenda: That’s the issue. That’s what even the scientists that we’ve talked to and others who have gone on the record have suggested. That, you know, I believe it was Chris Mellon, the former Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, who was part of our project was asked, I think it was on CNN. Someone asked him couldn’t these, um, he was talking about specifically aircraft carriers in the ocean and the UAPs showing up or the UFO showing up in the pilots chasing them and all of this. And he was asked, well, couldn’t that have been designed by a human group? Or maybe it was the Russians, or maybe it was just we ourselves testing a secret weapon. And Chris, you can see he was having a hard time from laughing to keep from laughing. He was, I mean, here was a guy…Melons job was basically to audit all the projects in the Defense Department. I mean, he had this overarching responsibility to go everywhere. He had complete clearance to go into any place anytime. And you know, basically figure out what it was they were up to. That was his job, one of his jobs. So the point he started laughing, he says, Listen, one thing we know for sure is we don’t have that technology. It does not exist. And number two, we would not use our own secret weapons against our own people. In other words, we wouldn’t try to scare the hell out of our own fighters maybe cause some deaths in the process. That’s just not the way that we work. We secret test weapons. It’s out of area 51 or something. I’m putting words into his mouth, but you know what I mean, we tasted…
Al: Did you believe him when he said that? Did he come off as honest?
Levenda: He came off as quite credible because I met Chris Mellon, prior to all of this, and a few of the other people who are involved in the project and they discuss things quite openly that they could discuss. There were things that because they’re still bound by my secrecy agreements and their security classifications they will not discuss even to me or to Tom or to anyone else. So we know how far we can push and how much we can get out. But it does make sense from a scientist and an engineer will tell you as the guy who came to us from skunkworks. Here was the guy in charge of developing these systems for skunkworks. And he told us, he wants to know how these things fly. He really wants to know how that’s possible. And he’s working on projects to try to, to understand that. So we’re in this position, that it can’t be the Russians. We pretty much know that no other country on Earth has the capability to send aircraft into the atmosphere. And then to turn on a dime to make a 90 degree turn, to do all of these other things that they do to to just disappear.
Al: Yeah, the traditionl narrative.
Levenda: Yes, right. And it seems to be because of all of the secret machines that have been revealed to exist in the last 70 years we can see the path of evolution of aeronautics, [at this point my take on the 1890’s airship “mystery” seems relevant] you know, we can we can watch it we can see, okay, they got this far they broke Mach one, they broke Mach two. They did this they went this far. They had developed these systems for depressurization and all the rest of it, we can see that evolution quite clearly.
Al: In the white world. Yes. But you know, as well as me that when they roll out something commercially, it’s like decades after it’s been. That’s when they’ve upgraded, classified…where you’d like internet, for instance (laughter ) available long before…that’s always how they do it. So you can assume that there are who knows so many decades ahead. When I say they that’s another question, right? There’s many compartments and maybe those you talked with were actually on the record with everything but I’m pretty sure they held something back.
Levenda: Well, everybody holds something back, Yeah. They couldn’t because they have security clearances. They are going to hold something back.
Al: Exactly.
Levenda: But there’s a very big difference between holding something back and just saying outright, we don’t have this kind of technology. We’re nowhere near having that kind of technology and giving the reasons why. If you talk to regular scientists who are not involved in the military industrial complex, or if you talk to other people, just scientists and engineers in the average world, they are aware of the problems inherent in that type of flight characteristics. So if we’ve solved that problem, the problem of turning on a dime, making a 90 degree turn at full speed and mid air and then going straight up or straight across. That implies that we’ve solved a number of other issues prior to that. Prior to getting to that point, and there’s no indication that we have yet so yes, you could say you there’s decades of black development of covert secret weapons development of which we’re not aware. But then that’s the problem that we’re stuck here saying, Okay, now, what do we talk about? You know, if we, if we take that approach, it’s like, there’s like, well, then that could explain anything.
Al: Yeah, and that’s true. So you have to relate to what can be accounted for. So you have to relate to the kind of white…that’s your approach. I mean, you’re not even an insider. So that makes totally sense.
Levenda: But that’s the approach we’re taking because there is so much in the white, that can be brought to the table and say, Look at this, this is what’s going on. And that’s what we did with the videos and all the rest of it. We’re pulling this stuff out and saying, Okay, we now acknowledge that this stuff exists and the government doesn’t know what the hell to do about it. And this is what we’re coming out with. This is why we’re talking this is why Luis Elizondo quit the Pentagon and sent his letter of resignation to Mattis saying, I can’t deal with this anymore. You’re hiding this from the people. He walked out and said, We’re going to look at this more seriously.
Al: Wow, he said that to Mattis?
Levenda: Yea, he said that to Mattis. Yeah. And then a week later, he’s on the stage with us during that presentation. So…these are whistleblowers, where else can we go for a whistleblower than deep within the military industrial complex? That’s the only place you’re gonna get them.
Al: It’s so true. These are actual whistleblowers, how it’s defined, not unnamed those people or people who you can’t check the credentials for like these fake whistleblowers. These are traditional whistleblowers, these are what qualifies as whistleblowers but still there’s many people who you know, won’t trust Intel and Pentagon people because weren’t they once CIA? (laughter) Always CIA, so you will always have that problem.
Levenda: Where do you go? But where do you go then?
Al: I see.
Levenda: But where will you go? Then you’re stuck with the anonymous whistleblowers, who talk telepathically (laughter) to somebody else who’s written a book or who has a DVD out?
Al: Good point.
Levenda: You gotta draw the line somewhere. Otherwise, you’re stuck with tinfoil hats again.
Al: Yeah, that’s true. I just want to air it. So we venture all aspects of this.
Levenda: And I’m ready to vent anytime. (Laughter)
Al: Good. Good. So back to the issue, the main issue here, if you can trust Intel people. It would be nice if they could bring about some evidence to back up their claims and in a way that actually has happened. We will not go there yet. But Tom did promise a lot of stuff. And I realize his project was sabotaged by the developments but like I mentioned to you before we went on I just read an article on VICE, there’s been many articles, but there was one VICE article on motherboard which was called How Accurate Were Tom DeLonge Aliens Claims; An Investigation. I kind of like that. I don’t like VICE too much. But I did like the article and could verify half of his claims which is quite a feat in this area. Quite impressive. The rest may be accounted for that stuff was sabotaged. But I suggest that we now go into your book before we go back to Current Affairs again. Okay, because it’s probably easier for people to understand your perspective if you can account for the actual background for the perspective you take here. Before we see it in light of what’s happened. And the book secret. Is it Sekret Machines? Is that how you say it? Yes, even though it’s a K and not a C?
Levenda: Yeah, the K is it’s a long story. But yeah, it’s secret just the way it would normally be pronounced.
Al: So Sekret Machines. Let’s start with the obvious why a K and not a C?
Levenda: Well, that was Tom’s idea from the very beginning even before I spoke with them before he even contacted me. His name for this project was going to be Sekret Machines with a K and that was to make it look a bit more street than something that was unapproachable. He didn’t want it to be too obvious that we’re talking about secrecy. He wanted to give people a different idea of what secret means. And the K there is kind of, it’s also an allusion to a sort of Germanic spelling of secret.
Al: I thought it was ancient Egyptian.
Levenda: Okay. Well, you could say it’s serket and do a whole riff on Egyptian gods. But sekret in this case had a lot of other connotations and Tom is of the of the feeling that the Nazis might have been also involved in some way with trying…
Al: Okay, so he admits to that possibility.
Levenda: Oh, he admits to it. He admits to the possibility and he’s trying to find evidence to support it if there is evidence. And you know, since I wrote three books on Nazis, it’s, it seems like I was the guy to go to on this. And I’m pretty well aware of the Horton brothers and I’m aware of the whole Joseph Farrell issues with the bell. And with General Clapper(?), you know, and all of this stuff going on and the, the factories in Czechoslovakia, all this stuff that we talked about in zero point gravity, for instance, that you’ll learn about in that text, all of these things come together, and they kind of lead you in the direction of that maybe the Nazis had access to some kind of advanced form of technology. Either through accident or design, that they came up with alternate source of energy or an alternate source of propulsion. And that led me down the rabbit hole of trying to trace back all of the U boats that were at sea, after Germany surrendered. And the kind of cargo they were carrying, where they were going, where the crews were headed, and all the rest of it, and of course, the entire Antarctica scenario as well.
Al: So what about Kammler? And Schauberger?
Levenda: Yeah, well, Kammler, of course disappeared. So we don’t know what happened to Kammler. And that right away is kind of a red flag to me. He was obviously very well known very, very important guy responsible for moving Panama and down to Nordhausen, responsible for getting that whole thing up in remarkably record time. Digging all these tunnels under the mountains and moving the entire, you know, Messerschmitt operation in there and everything else was just an incredible feat of administration. And then at the very end, he’s there with Verner von Braun and with everybody else…
Al: All the usual suspects.
Levenda: Yeah, yeah. And saying, you know, I’ll be right back boys, you know, and then disappearing forever. Did he disappear to the west or to the east right?
Al: Well, the South if you ask me.
Levenda: Did he cut a deal with the Soviets? Did cut a deal with like you say with the South? Possibly he wound up in North Africa where the Germans had a very strong you know, rocket program at the end of the war in the 1950s.
Al: Or Patagonia.
Levenda: Or Patagonia. So you’ve got all these possibilities. You have the Horton brothers who were actually trying to build a saucer. They had designs for it, which were then later picked up by Avrocar and places like that, where they were trying to develop some kind of a flying disc. When I was a kid, I had a model of that. I had one of these plastic models of the Avrocar. That was one of those famous, you know, do it yourself plastic kits. So I mean, this was something that was well known to us in the 1950s this whole idea of building this flying saucer. So I traced all that. I traced the Horton brothers and I found that one of the brothers wound up in Argentina working for Peron. There was a kind of a atomic energy plant that was in Argentina, close to the border of Chile that was being developed to try to find alternate sources of energy. All this stuff existed there.
Al: Yeah, what was his name again, the chap who headed the project? He was a Nazi Bell scientist. Joseph also writes extensively about him.
Levenda: I forget his name. [The name is Ronald Richter. Control F to search his name into the link to Joseph’s book above.]
Al: We all know who it is.
Levenda: You have all of that stuff going on. Right? So we know that’s going on. We know that the Germans were shipping uranium to Japan at the end of the war, when they saw that their war was over. They were shipping engineers. They were shipping physical engineers, drawings, documents, prototypes of bombs, you know, and a lot of uranium.
Al: And a nuclear scientist on board.
Levenda: Right, which we seized off the coast, I think Newfoundland, at the end of the war. And that was when we still did not have the bomb. We were still struggling with making the bomb work. We captured the submarine. It is believed because there are eyewitnesses to the fact that Oppenheimer boarded that submarine and inspected the uranium, inspected the diagrams and everything else. Went back to Los Alamos and people we have the bomb. So it’s possible the Germans had solved some problems or had taken such a different approach that it opened up Oppenheimer’s eyes to another possibility. And therefore, we had the atomic bomb when we did because, in May of 1945, we did not have the bomb. We were nowhere close to having the bomb. But suddenly by June and July, we had it. So there are these stories that were around and Tom is you know, has entertained the possibility that maybe there was a German consortium somewhere. The problem with this is that it takes so much industrial material, to do the kind of prototyping work and the building work and everything else you need. Special metals, you need a big shop you need the raw materials you need. You need a supply chain to do this. And of course, you need the personnel operating under complete secrecy. All of these things together, can we sit date with any kind of certainty that there was such a German program in place it’s really hard to do. Because of all the requirements they would need. However, that’s the first critique of this and that’s the critique I’ve heard from a lot of people and it’s, it’s a valid one. Anybody who’s worked in manufacturing as I have, knows that you have so many different moving parts. It’s really hard. Look at the Manhattan Project. So many different factories and people and 1000s of personnel scattered all over the country all working on different aspects of the problem. You would need the same thing. So, but there’s a counter argument. And that is that we know and it was covered in the Congress of the United States and officially in the Congressional Record, we know for a certainty that before the war ended, Germany expatriated a lot of their technicians, a lot of their technology, money, everything else all around the world. There were hundreds and hundreds of corporations set up around the world as branches of their German counterparts. So the Germans could get all this stuff out of the way before the allies came in and seized it. So there was basically a German infrastructure not necessarily a Nazi infrastructure, right. But there was a German infrastructure, a network globally in place when the war ended. So that could have contributed to this and they could have been able to accomplish this, the development of a secret weapon with a great deal of secrecy. Without a lot of transparency. They would have been able to do this pretty covertly at least for a short period of time, until their networks started getting rolled up. And not many of them were rolled up. There were networks in Asia and South America, even in the United States and North America.
Al: Let’s not forget the obvious contribution to this and that is that huge multinational cartels were German, loyal, and even Nazi loyal. And they had no problem. I mean, they are still the biggest corporations out there today. And we know most of this stuff, even NASA stuff has gone private. It’s been compartmentalized, it’s been privatized, it’s been Corporation takeover and that’s just the same model the Nazis used right before the end of the war. And these big corporations, many industries all the time doing covert stuff, not necessarily sinister, but that too. So that would be a contribution, too, if the leaders of these multinational corporations were on board or in touch with each other in some sort of network. Then that could be a contributing factor, don’t you think?
Levenda: Well, it certainly could be because some of the corporations that you mentioned, might have been pro Nazi leaning, pro German in one way or another and they would never have come under scrutiny by the intelligence services. We never would have looked at them because they were American or they were French or they were English or whatever. So they would have been above scrutiny. It’s only the Nazis that we were chasing the actual guys who wear the uniforms. But the corporate executives were simply not bothered because…I don’t mean the German companies. The German companies were looked at they were broken apart in some cases as an example, I think. But as far as their European and American and other corporations who were pro Nazi, who were openly pro Nazi, they never came under scrutiny. For instance, the American intelligence services, the OSS was pretty much out of that business when the war ended. And that was it. There was this hiatus period in the 1945-46 until 47 When CIA was officially created. And even then they were they were small at that point, and struggling to find their way and they found it in an anti communist crusade. But until that point, though, we didn’t have OSS agents barging into offices in Chicago or Milwaukee, or Los Angeles to typical American corporations and demanding to see their records, right. It just it was not happening. It wasn’t on the FBI was not going to go after, you know, domestic corporate executives just because they had expressed pro Nazi sentiments. Which means they could operate completely secure from oversight. They could do whatever it was that they wanted. And if they were pro Nazi, if they sympathized, and a lot of them did, they could, you know, help covertly fund or contribute in some way to a weapons program. For instance, Hans Ulrich Rudel here was probably the most famous pilot of German of the Nazi of the Luftwaffe at the time. Rudl was an ace, you know, he had shot down so many planes. He was Hitler’s favorite ace. After the war, Rudel really was not arrested. He was kind of de-nazified. He was a military guy, wasn’t considered a member of the Nazi Party or anything like that. But we actually went to Rudel for guidance on how to design our fighter planes in the 1950s. I have evidence of that. I spoke to the people who talked with him. And that was I think, during the Johnson administration, all the way into the 60s. Where we actually were talking and he was consulting for, you know, our war department. Basically, for our Pentagon. Trying to get information as to what flight characteristics were good, what was bad and what problems did you have with the measurements and everything else and on and on trying to get information how to improve our own fighter jets. And this was the most decorated ace of World War Two of Germany. And Rudel was running and ODESSA operation right under everybody’s nose. You know, in South America and Europe, in the Middle East. His address book is a font of information of people who are sympathetic to the Nazis in the 1950s and 60s. People who were living all over the world. Addresses phone numbers, which I published all in the Hitler Legacy. So here was a guy right away that we know of just the tip of an iceberg. Here’s somebody that we know, cooperating with our government, our military, you know, I don’t say that he contributed designs. He was not an engineer. He was a pilot, but he could contribute very good you know, anecdotal information as to how the planes work. What their strengths and weaknesses were, and what he would have liked to see in a fighter plane. And he was just some guy as far as we were concerned. They all liked him because this was Hans Ulrich Rudel. He’s a pilot, he’s one of ours. The flight guys stick together, you know, and he was one of ours and we liked him, but at the same time, he’s running ops in Latin America. And he showed up in Chile in Colonia Dignidad. He knew all the players. He knew the players in the United States. He knew the the neo Nazi groups in the United States. I mean, he knew everybody.
Al: Yes. Yeah, he’s a good example to use. Because from this example, we can surmise two facts. One, if even he, kind of low level in a way, yeah, had this double role in a way, then it goes for all of them.
Levenda: Sure.
Al: And you’ve pointed out and I want to share with you detailing this post war, how the, you know, your books about this. So we’re gonna go back to that in detail, but you pointed out how almost none of them were regretful which means that they kept the loyalties. But you kind of went a little too quick past the German corporations because although you got a good point for the Western Nazi sympathizers, you know that chemical, Big Pharma, lots of industries, the Nazis were ahead of. And what they did was that just changed headquarters before the end of the war. 30s and the 40s. And so that maybe the German counterpart were taken, but there wasn’t much there. And we know that most of the German elite from before the war they so like Chusen and all these people lived in huge mansions, huge estates. Down in, for instance, especially South America. And so this upper class thing, they didn’t go anywhere. They contributed to the development of the corporation, the globalization and all that and they didn’t even have to pay to…I know they cut up the IG Farben eventually.
Levenda: Right.
Al: So that’s an example. But, Monsanto all these huge corporations are still…many of them were involved in as you know, in the concentration camps. I wouldn’t go too easy on the German corporations in this perspective.
Levenda: I didn’t realize I was. (laughter)
Al: I interpreted like that.
Levenda: No, no, no, okay. What I said was, there was this famous document that everybody claims was spurious, called the the Maison-Rouge meeting, which took place in France. In German occupied France. Where there was a meeting of all these high ranking German industrialists with the SS and the SS a telling them get your stuff out of town, get as much of it as possible overseas. We don’t want the, you know, the allies to come in and seize all this. Now that document has been questioned, has been criticized a lot, but our own congressional record, and I think I give all that information in the Hitler Legacy, our own congressional record. I mean, it’s on the record, they went and said, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these corporations that were started by Nazi Germany. I mean, they were expatriated during the Nazi period, all over the world. And the congressmen are going nuts over this. They’re saying, this is like an entire fifth column, and it exisst all over the world. So you’ve got German corporations in Latin America and Egypt, in North Africa all over the place. And to make matters worse, there was a huge amount of currency and you know, liquid assets in Swiss banks and other banks, even in New York and all around the world that was used to finance whatever they had to finance when they had to put a stop gap measure when someone’s running out of funds. They can easily move funds from one account to another and keep these things going.
Al: And the gold, the Nazi gold…
Levenda: Well, certainly. The gold is notorious. I mean, the gold is almost legendary and iconic, but it’s actually quite true. The gold that we’ve traced seems to be even more gold than people thought could exist on the planet. From the amount of gold that the Nazis had in their possession, which they moved around the world. And of course, they moved a lot of gold into South America but also into Asia. As I recounted, 40 tons of gold left Portugal. The Bank of Lisbon, and 40 tons of that went to Macau, which was a Portuguese colony, of course at the time. 20 tons of that gold went into China, and the other 20 tons of gold went into Indonesia. And that’s just what we were able to find out of 40 tons of gold, but that documentation is quite secure. And the provenance is well known. It was reported in the New York Times and other places. We know that there was an enormous shipments of gold all over the world. What was that going to finance? You ask yourself Cui bono, right? Who benefits from all this gold being moved around? Who has access to those accounts? Who can draw on that gold? That was the important question, and that kind of got lost in the 1950s. And things started to fall apart because of communism, and there was Korea there was Vietnam and all the rest of it. People stopped looking. But there was an enormous amount of gold and it’s unaccounted for. That’s just traveled all over the world. And some of them wound up in banks in New York City and First National Bank for instance. In their vaults they had Nazi gold with the Reich Bank symbols on it. I mean, all of this stuff wound up everywhere. Who owns that gold? Well, that became a major scandal in Asia for a while because it was understood that Hitler’s banker, Hjalmar Schacht, wound up in Indonesia shortly after Sukarno took over. After the revolution. They got rid of the Dutch and advise Sukarno on how he should handle the money. How he should handle this gold. And Sukarno set up something called the revolutionary fund. And the revolutionary fund was designed to be a competitor with the World Bank and the IMF. And of course, we were not going to let that happen. Right. So Sukarno did not last very long. But where did the money wind up? And why was Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi banker, advising Sukarno on anything.
Al: So you think it was rolled into the Anglo American economic system?
Levenda: Oh, I think so. Sure. Schacht, his contemporaries, and the contacts that he had, were in banking and bankers basically don’t recognize boundaries, national borders. They're globalists. They don’t care about any of that. They just want to make sure the money is safe. So Schacht was part of that.
Al: So, great. Now we’ve covered much of this already with you. And we’re going to cover more when we can have our total program on this based upon your last Nazi book. But let’s rewind even further. Because, you know, you know about Steven Greer, right?
Levenda: Sure.
Al: In a way I look at Tom DeLonge and Steven Greer as two polar opposites when it comes to hypothesis. One side says Oh, no, this is Steven Greer. Oh no all these quote unquote aliens are really good guys. They’re here for our benefit or pose no harm, but it’s the bad guys in our system who shoot first ask after who is to blame here and that also goes for all the bad stuff that is associated with encounters. And in a way that’s tempting argument not just because the religious connotations around that, but also because there are some circumstantial evidence you can point to because one if they have machines, and they can defend themselves, obviously, they’re advanced and if they had bad intentions by now, I mean, how long do you need to do bad stuff? Right?
Levenda: Yeah.
Al: So in a way you could kind of go for that scenario, and I wouldn’t even mention criticism of that that goes to that they are doing it covertly, which is much smarter than overtly. (laughter)
Levanda: Right. Yea.
Al: But that’s, that’s the one pole. Then comes along Tom DeLonge and introduces a totally opposite pole. Namely, although you say he’s open for several scenarios, he’s kind of been associated with this approach that you also took with insiders of if you if you trust us and open up to us, if we show you that we have some trust in you and we’re gonna give you a chance to speak out and you’re actually heroes, and you get no credit because you’ve been fighting covertly against these these bad guys. It’s kind of back to the cold war mentality only is now the aliens that are the commies. So you have those polarities here, and I think there’s a case to be made for both and I want to hear the case for both before I make…because I’m like you I want to inquire, I want to find out and I don’t entirely go I can see weaknesses with both poles. So let’s start with the approach that you actually do, as some people call it demons and that takes us straight back to the Gnostics. So could we take it from there?
Levenda: Sure. Let’s bring it back even further than the Gnostics. In the book that I wrote with Tom, a Sekret Machines: Gods, this is a book that’s focused almost completely on the religious aspect of this phenomenon. If you want to call it religious or spiritual or otherworldly, or however you want to call it, and we take a different approach. I think we take a different approach. I’ve been criticized that that book just as warmed over on Danica and or Zechariah Sitchin or something and that’s most emphatically not true from the perspective that we’re taking or the approach we’re taking.
Al: At least you give footnotes and stuff, right, references?
Levenda: Of course! That’s very important to me, and I think, to many of my readers that they know where I’ve sourced things. But the point is, is that yes, is that Zechariah Sitchin and Von Daniken have referenced ancient civilizations and blah blah blah and all that stuff. We’re taking a different approach. We’re saying forget who built the pyramids. Forget the Nazca Lines for now. Just forget all of that. Look at the texts that were left behind. Look at their writings. Look at what they’ve themselves said. And what did they say? What were they implying? They’re saying that there was contact. They were saying that something came down from the heavens. They said there was a kind of communication a rudimentary form, and that this kind of jumpstarted civilization all around the globe. Humans have been on the planet for more than 2 million years. But we only know about civilizations in the last, oh, 20,000 years, perhaps. So. And it all happened almost simultaneously. So you had civilizations in Asia and South America, North America everywhere. There were civilizations being built up in Africa all over the place, using a lot of the same ideas, some of the same architecture. We have pyramids in China. We have pyramids, of course in Egypt and in Mexico and all around the world in Asia. So you have this impetus, people are trying to do this and they’re linking this technology with ideas of immortality and space travel. This seems to be common to a lot of these cultures. So we’re saying is let’s just stop there, hold it there. What are they trying to tell us? If we look more deeply will we find other evidence of contact? So this goes beyond Gods, demons, angels, anything else. These can be projections of humans onto something that they are trying desperately to understand.
Al: Yeah, like a cargo cult. Right?
Levenda: Exactly. Which is why we start off the story with a cargo cult. This is like a cargo cult and from our perspective, from my perspective, especially, it’s not just religion that’s a cargo cult. It’s our science and technology as well. Because our science and technology is geared towards these double ideas of immortality and space travel. We are geared towards this. We’re looking up we’re trying to get off planet. No matter what science we’re involved in. that seems to be the unspoken thing. The unspoken Gestalt behind all of this. We’re not really that interested in preserving the planet. Have you noticed? It’s not a question of, you know, sitting there and saying, How can we make the planet safer for ourselves or our children? We’re not. We’re developing rockets. We’re developing machines. We’re developing a high speed internet and all sorts of artificial intelligence, weapons, cyborgs, robots, androids. This whole thing is geared towards space travel. And my feeling is that back at the times of ancient Egypt, or in the times of ancient Sumer, or any of the ancient civilizations, religion and science, were not two separate boxes. It was all the same thing. It was one thing it was one approach to reality, one approach to this contact. We’ve broken it into little pieces in the last few 100 years, especially since Newton.
Al: Good point.
Levenda: But what we’re looking at is really one concerted effort that we’ve all been touched by this, what I call a traumatic event, and we’re all reliving this traumatic event.
Al: You mean the fall? The catastrophe? In ancient times?
Levenda: Well, whatever happened, yes, whatever that was, I’m still open to suggestion. I’m not to finding it, like others are. I’m saying something happened. It was traumatic. And like victims of post traumatic stress disorder. We’re kind of reliving this trauma generation after generation and we’re expressing it in our culture. We’re expressing it in our science and in our religion.
Al: You’re so right, because we are like, Yeah, we have PTSD because victims will have trauma. Will give them amnesia, and they will give them denial.
Levenda: And make them violent.
Al: Exactly. And we are like that we don’t recall anything before let’s say maximum 10,000 years, and we’re in denial about it. I always say if you want to control someone, the best method more than force more than anything else, is to remove the memory.
Levenda: Sure.
Al: And the same goes collectively, as individually. So we only see like a real victim would give subconscious tells and that’s what we do. Because despite the suppression, it slips more and more out there. Stuff from antediluvian and ancient times. And what you guys do is commendable in this perspective, because what you do is that you just kind of roll up your sleeves and you say, Okay, let’s start from scratch. What can we definitely surmise? Like, when you say we know something happened, but we’re not going to advocate a hypothesis about it, but we can still surmise something from what did happen, like this denial thing.
Levenda: Yeah.
Al: I’m on board with that. But continue.
Levenda: Well, you put it beautifully. This is our approach. We cannot come out definitively and say anything one way or the other. That would make us basically like leaders of a cult or something, which is exactly what we don’t want to do. We’re trying to increase knowledge. And in order to increase knowledge, we have to broaden perspectives. We have to think outside the boxes that we’ve grown up with that we were educated into. So we have to sort of stretch the limits of the way we know things and try to find out other ways of knowing that are still amenable to process. They’re still amenable to the scientific method, let’s say to a certain degree. So what we want to do is just take it honestly take it seriously. We don’t…Yes, the the visitors whatever they are, this phenomenon may represent a threat. We have to be aware of that. We have to do what we can to protect ourselves against the possibility of that. Anything less will be kind of foolish in my estimation. That doesn’t mean we have to go and shoot them down. That doesn’t mean we have to act aggressively. But we do have to understand how these things work how these machines work. We have no idea why they’re here. We cannot have any idea what their intentions might be. Anybody who says that we know what their intentions are, we know absolutely has to be lying.
Al: Yea, to themselves or to us.
Levenda: Well, yeah, because we’re projecting human ideas, human emotions, human values, and human motivations on something we don’t know anything about.
Al: And we’re doing exactly what the ancients did. Only we do it with our current paradigm.
Levenda: Exactly. And that to me is dangerous. So we have to kind of be careful in both ways. Don’t assume that they’re out here to kill us. They may kill us accidentally because they may not see us as anything more important than an anthill. There could be I don’t know, hostility. It doesn’t have to be the human idea of evil intention. It could just be that we’re treated with violence as a kind of accident of whatever is going on.
Al: Collateral Damage
Levenda: Yeah.
Al: Richard Dolan has argued for this that we need to take this approach and he’s kind of brought back to honest, decent perspective that you can be critical to your voice. You don’t have to worship them religiously.
Levenda: Sure.
Al: But what does the ancient sources say? Do they take a multiple approach? And I think they do because there are like I said, the Gnostics were very critical. Maybe you can account for the different perspectives that the ancient had.
Levenda: I can do that…
Al: And some seem to be on board with them. So what was the ancients examples of ancient approaches to this problem?
Levenda: I think it wasn’t until the new testament era that we actually talked about God as being all good and all loving and all kind. There was always this kind of schizophrenic attitude where the gods were concerned. These are entities, whatever, to be feared. You are in terror of God. Even Moses cannot look God in the face, right? God is you know, asking for massacres. Wipe out this tribe and wipe out that tribe. As you keep going back further you find the gods are very capricious. And this idea of their being capricious and not caring about humans, except sometimes other times not, may not be because they were humans who were psychologically disadvantaged. It might be because we did not understand what they were doing, how they were doing it, and what their rationale was. So we imputed to them human emotions, of love and hate and revenge, and all the rest of it, that we’re confusing. Even Jesus is confused this way because Jesus cursed the fig tree. Jesus threw the money lenders out of the temple. It’s not non violence. Jesus was violent also. There we have a problem and that could be the problem that we face. If I may be so bold as I hesitate to criticize people by name. I don’t think it’s fair, but in the case of the Grear Gestalt in the Greer narrative, we have yet to find a god figure in any mythology, in any religion around the world that is just the center of peace and kindness and sweetness and light. There just aren’t any.
Al: At least there are aspects of a deity that is destructive.
Levenda: There always are. Otherwise why would we obey? If the God was just you know, like, Mom. (laughter) It’s some sweet old lady making cookies. If that’s God, then what’s the point? So God has to be this parent figure for us, right? Somebody’s going to slap us if we’re wrong and praise us if we’re nice. So, we’re imputing all of these human ideas of human qualities onto these machines.
AL: But now you’ve bogged it down into the big, timeless question of evil. The great philosophical problem, right?
Levenda: Right. Because we have conflated evil with a spiritual concept. The Gnostics believed in the Dēmiurgós. So the Dēmiurgós was basically evil. But the Dēmiurgós was responsible for creation.So we’re in that catch-22. We’re in a bind. We are creatures and so we’re in this bind now. How do we deal with the spiritual world? We have very little experience direct experience of the spiritual world. That’s another problem we have as human beings. We cannot discern what these different altered states really mean and how they relate to ourselves. We only read about them in books. So we try to make sense of the texts and balance them one against the other, and we’re more confused than ever. The problem of evil the problem of spirituality in general is such a deep problem that can only be experienced directly. And what people are telling you in books or leaders or gurus wherever else, you know, it’s blind men and the elephant. Basically all talking about one aspect of this thing, but never giving you the complete picture. And we thought that by getting a multidisciplinary approach to at least this one phenomenon, the UFO phenomenon, getting a multi getting all the blind men in the same room with the elephant. That we will compare notes and come out with a pretty good picture of the elephant. We realize everyone’s going to have a different perspective on it. Everyone’s going to have a different idea. But maybe if we can put them all together without having an agenda without saying I’m right and you’re wrong. Just bringing this information together. Bringing it not just from the sciences, but from the humanities as well, because the humanities may have the key to this more than the sciences. Science fiction may have the key to this. People like Arthur C. Clarke, Philip Dick, and people like that may have understood this phenomenon better than we realize. Have some of the keys to understanding it, to opening up the dialogue in specific ways that we can begin to appreciate it. So if we could do this, then we may get to the ancient answer to the age old problem of evil. Evil may be a word that we use indiscriminately because we don’t quite know what it is. If a hurricane comes along and destroys your house, do we characterize that as evil? The effect on us is the same as if somebody came and burned our house down, right?
Al: True, true. But even in religion there is distinctions like they say well it’s the force of destructions…it has to happen eventually. Something disruptive.
Levenda: And if you take that position, then you have to redefine evil. You have to fine tune that concept. Finer and finer and finer until it almost doesn’t mean anything to the conscious brain.
AL: No, but at least we can say evil has to do with intention. If I accidentally step on an ant that’s destruction by accident. But if I intentionally step on an ant hill that’s quote unquote evil. I’m not trying to reduce the complexity here.
Levenda: To the ant is the same thing.
Al: Exactly. And if we are the ants here and there is someone intentionally at least interfering with us we’re kind of in a position where we are obliged to take a stance against that.
Levenda: Sure. We are in that position, but not only if they’re intentionally trying to destroy us. We have to take as many precautions against the accidental destruction as well. And when we’re dealing with the secret machines, when we’re dealing with the UFO phenomena, we may very well be dealing with a phenomenon like that could be destructive unintentionally just through proximity to us. As many experiencers have claimed, you know, proximity to a UFO that’s landed for instance. There’s all sorts of stories about people experiencing radioactive kinds of burns or other you know, harmful effects on their body. Whether those things are true or provable or not, it’s still in the mindset of people looking at the UFO phenomenon. We’re thinking, is this a potential source of harm? Am I going to get sick from this? You know, or is it going to cause some other kind of psychological damage? There’s a lot of people who’ve had experiences or who claimed to have had experiences that would seem to be to some extent psychologically damaged. Did that happen before or after? Was that a consequence or was that what setup this experience? There’s so much we don’t know and we’re not taking seriously. We have to take it seriously.
Al: And to make it worse, there’s claims of the opposite to have been healed.
Levenda: Exactly. Exactly.
Al: Right. So full disclosure, I haven’t had time yet to read your book. It’s still pretty new. So I can’t give you the optimal questions for that. But I imagine you take on a narrative where you argue that machines have been around pre human industrialization, right?
Levenda: Well, I don’t go quite so far as to say it that way. I say that machines for instance, I quote a famous Egyptologist who says that the Great Pyramid of Giza is a resurrection machine. He uses that term quite deliberately. That it was a machine designed at least the intention was to enable the Pharaoh or whoever was in it to resurrect at some place, perhaps not on Earth, perhaps in some other dimension or some other planet or wherever. So the idea was that he understood that these were machines. These are not just temples or something that we just developed as humans to worship the gods. This was something very specific. They had temples. You can go to Luxor, you can go up and down the Nile and see temples. The pyramids were something else. They were intended to do something else and they were very specifically constructed. So to look at them as a machine and in the words of this Egyptologist, as you know, as a resurrection machine, I think it shows tremendous insight. We had machines long before the Industrial Revolution. Obviously. The machines were intended to do a variety of things and sometimes the machines had what might have been considered fanciful applications. I’m thinking, I’m thinking of Babylon. Around the sixth century, seventh century BCE. I’m thinking of Ezekiel, who’s in Babylon, and he’s having his vision of a machine. He’s having the vision of the chariot. And his vision is so complicated, that people really can’t get their heads around what he’s seeing or what he’s talking about. Nothing seems to make a lot of sense it’s coded language. But if we compare his vision to what they actually did in Babylon, it becomes a bit more clear. And in Babylon, they would take the statues of the gods out of the temples at certain times of the year, and roll them through the streets on chariots. And so the gods would actually come down to the people from the temples, and be paraded through the streets all the way down to the river, and then all the way back up again and put back into the temple. That to me, then, might have been the inspiration for Ezekiel ‘s vision because he’s talking about a God or something that appears like unto a man sitting in a chariot coming down from heaven. I mean, if Ezekiel was even slightly stoned, this would make a lot of sense. So maybe that’s what he’s talking about. If so, we’re talking about again, another kind of machine, a machine that was intended to repair the breach between the people and the gods. The ones who had been here and who had left. Because, of course, the prayer of the ancient Sumerians was “spirit of the sky remember spirit of the earth.” Remember, this idea that that they would light the fires on New Year’s Day, on top of all the ziggurats to kind of signal back to those beings from us to come back down and not forget them. So there was a tremendous literature about that, which is why I always say, you know, the architecture is important for sure. But if we focus too much on the architecture and trying to figure out how it was built, and claim it was Aliens who did it or some advanced technology, we’re gonna miss the point. The point is in the writings, the writings are very specific, and we have to take them as literally as we possibly can.
Al: Right. There is the problem of course of…becaue it’s not just our science and spirituality, that was one in ancient times. There’s also that dualism, as is so inherent in our modern consciousness didn’t exist. In other words, distinction between matter and spirit wasn’t there. In fact, you can make a scientific case for it also. Some call it a spiritual materialism, it’s that it’s just degrees of frequencies. Distinction between matter and consciousness. When I perceive something when I experience something, obviously it’s an it’s an imagination taking place in my consciousness, and I’m resorted to only have the five senses. Well, you can discuss Of course as all the senses, but at least five senses gives me that information. But if I had other access to vibrations that we can’t sense you know, the electromagnetic spectrum is huge. Just talk about X rays, you can talk about infrared Ultra view, and we do compensate somewhat with developing machines to help us perceive into these specters of existence that we don’t have direct access to. But my point is, that if we then acknowledge that there is no big difference, then it brings even the so called spiritual experiences with the UFOs in a different light. Because then Graham Hancock has a point that…let’s say a Shaman takes a journey in consciousness and perceives other aspects of this vibrational reality that we can perceive. We don’t call it material because we can’t sense it directly. But it’s still valid in that let’s say like, an astral travel if I journey all the way to where you are and I can actually perceive something going on there then consciousness does work. As my friend [unintelligible] says it’s proven consciousness works. That you can actually get practical results from consciousness. Do you understand what I’m getting at that?
Levenda: Sure.
Al: The distinction is weaker than you would think from a dualist perspective. Do you touch this?
Levenda: I do. In Sekret Machines I go into even specifically shamanism and you know, various cultures around the world how they approach this idea of ascending on a tree or a ladder or something going up to the heavens and coming back down. I even talk about Jacob wrestling with the angel, you know, and seeing the ladder and angels coming up and down. The idea that this is a consciousness field that we’re talking about where we have to include the consciousness studies in this and I do that in the second book of this trilogy that I’m working on with Tom. Talks about the consciousness aspect of it specifically. So Hal Putoff is of course, someone who has been dealing with consciousness stuff since the 1970s, as far as I know, and he’s part of the team around us. This is aside from the remote viewing experiments and all the rest of it. The idea that consciousness is not a secretion of the body the way some people will say it is. That it exists kind of outside the body in a sense, and that the idea of a shaman, perhaps making these contacts, because the shaman goes to the heavens and comes back down. That’s his function or her function is to go to the heavens and bring back sacred knowledge and bring back the spells that are needed to to cure diseases and all the rest of it. So there is this connection between traveling to the heavens and sacred knowledge and the assistance of the gods to help humans. This idea exists but you have to go up there. You have to be the one that climbs the rope ladder that climbs the snake that climbs whatever it is to get to the heavens to get the information and bring it down. So there’s kind of an onus is on us to go and find out what this is and to make that journey, whether we do it collectively or as individuals, but that journey still has to be undertaken. So your point about spirituality, the body, there’s a very good selection of essays, and I forgot for the moment the name of the book, but it will come to me, on Haitan voodoo and the idea that there is that the gods are not just the gods but people that the soul of an individual person is trans corporeal. That there are multiple spiritual types of souls within a given identity, and that these can leave and make room for the gods during the transposition of the loa, the rituals, but it’s not a mechanistic dualistic point of view. It’s not well, my spirit left and another spirit came in. It’s more complicated than that and Voodoo understanding of the relationship between body and spirit and soul and all this is quite complex.
Al: Sounds like they’re talking about the resonance principle.
Levenda: You could say so yeah, in a sense, they may disagree, but it sounds from my perspective there’s lot of similarity. So you have two angels, which are the grosser parts of your spiritual components, the little good angel and the big good angel. The big good angel leaves the body to make room for the spirit of the loa to enter you and to possess you during the trance. So there are these two, this the little angels still remains there, but the big angel has gone according to their system. But then there’s a lot more to it than that. There’s the medtech there’s the spirit of the head, you know, like you’re almost a superior self that’s involved. They have all the they broke it down. Many different ways. And they use that not just to have theosophical discussions, right? They use that as their technology. They use that in creating the charms and creating the bottles in which they encase the spirits and to affect change in the world. This technology is integral to understanding how to operate their magical practices. It’s all integrated. It’s still a science and technology mixed. And I find that fascinating.
Al: It’s true if I levitate by means of machines, technology machines… matter. Or if I levitate by means of something else I manipulate reality with directly through my consciousness, the end result is the same. I’m still imitating the forces as they’re responding.
Levenda: Sure, exactly.
Al: So it is a technology.
Levenda: Well, it is as far as I’m concerned. I mean, I’ve been taking this position for 20-30 years now, that spirit, I’m interested in the technology of religion, the technology of spirituality. The dogma does not interest me, really, in the least. What I’m interested in are the practices. How do you do this? How does one get from this place to the next place? So to me, it’s a technology which is why I’ve always found it interesting that Tibetan lamas, for instance, can have very deep and detailed discussions with Jewish cabalists. They have no religion in common at all, no language, no culture in common, but they do meet on one issue of when you meditate how does it happen this way? And do you experience this and does this happen then they compare notes. And this is the technology that interests me because I think it’s at the root of understanding the UFO phenomenon. It’s if we don’t have that knowledge, we don’t have it yet. We don’t understand how our consciousness works. And I think that might be the key to understanding how the phenomenon works.
Al: You actually agree here with Steven Greer. He kind of makes the same point but he comes from it from almost Savior perspective. His intentions that are different here. He kind of puts it in almost religious perspective where there are good guys, superior and savior and angels. Whereas you are more critical but you can have both point to the multiple approaches that’s possible to take on this.
Levenda: Sure. I think it’s the only rational approach to take. It’s just I don’t have a good guy, bad guy narrative on this. I just don’t have enough information. And I think that may be a projection of human desires to see human qualities in the “other” and I try to understand that I think that’s a mistake. I think if we take that as we’re always going to be running around in circles. We’ve got to be open to a different interpretation of consciousness intention and of what’s good and bad for us and all the rest of it. If you’re uncritical and you operate on the assumption that these forces, whatever is flying these machines is benevolent and godlike. I can’t think of anything more, more naive, and more potentially self destructive. You just go off into into the secret garden. And for me, that’s a really dangerous place to be because I’m not by nature a follower of a religious impulse that way.
Al: You wouldn’t meet Cortez with flowers and fruits?
Levenda: No, no, no, no, no, I might send somebody else to do that. But I’ll be hiding behind a rock with a bow and arrow. (laughter)
Al: I’d be fleeing before you can see the ships anchoring. (laughter)
This is the end of part 1 of the 3 part interview.
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