CIA Chief Breaks Silence on Time Travel Abilities

Our American Alchemist this week is Rolf Mowatt-Larssen. Sign Up With Our Sponsors Below For Exclusive Alchemy Deals! KetoneIQ: Visit https://ketone.com/ALCHEMY for 30% OFF your subscription order PLUS receive a free gift with your second shipment—or find Ketone-IQ at Target stores nationwide and get your first shot free! Shopify: Start your business for just $1/month at https://shopify.com/jesse. Sponsored by Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10% of all U. S. e-commerce. Superpower: Superpower: Take the guesswork out of getting healthy in 2026. Get full body testing that goes 5x deeper than an annual physical and a personalized action plan that tells you exactly what to do next. All for just $199. Go to https://Superpower.com and use code ALCHEMY] for $20 off your membership this year. -------------------------- Support Our Other Projects Below! Grab Your American Alchemy Merch Here ➤ https://www.americanalchemymerch.com/ Join The American Alchemy Magazine Here ➤ https://americanalchemymagazine.substack.com/ Subscribe To Our Clips Channel (10 Minute Highlights!) ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@UC8ZKTXN9trt5dhixz6b6l6w -------------------------- JOIN OUR WHOP (Early Drops/Ad Free) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels Discord ➤https://discord.gg/crHc44m3kF Instagram ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TikTok ➤ https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjessemichels X ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican Spotify ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify Clips Channel ➤ https://www.youtube.com/@JesseMichelsClips Apply For Jobs ➤ [email protected] Sponsor Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Media Inquiries ➤ [email protected] Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 6:37 A State of Mind 9:59 CIA and Spirituality 13:16 The CIA's Dark Side 13:47 9/11 and Its Aftermath 15:53 Weapons of Mass Destruction 17:48 Briefing the President 19:34 The Iraq War Decisions 24:08 Reflections on War 27:31 Nuclear Threats 31:01 Mystical Experiences 40:50 The Journey to Mount Athos 1:08:25 A Dream State Awakening 1:16:12 The Reality of Dreaming 1:19:19 Spiritual Growth Through Flight 1:22:50 The Dream Sequence 1:24:53 The Final Door and Revelation 1:25:13 A Night on the Beach 1:26:50 The Dream Begins 1:29:21 Encounter with the Virgin Mary 1:31:53 Monk Timotheus 1:35:59 Journey to Mount Athos 1:39:47 Life as Odius Maximus 1:42:34 Revelations with Evagrius 1:52:16 The Virgin Mary’s Message 2:01:45 Discussion on Faith 2:14:53 Culmination of Experiences 2:18:19 Response from the Vatican 2:39:04 Crisis in Moscow 2:44:21 Meeting Vladimir Putin 2:52:05 Understanding Russia's Identity 2:54:14 The Role of Individuality in Society 2:55:45 The Concept of Individual Rights 3:00:22 A Life-Changing Experience on a Train 3:05:32 Exploring the Meaning of Faith 3:10:56 The Conflict of Duty and Belief 3:19:58 The Secrets of the Department of Energy 3:32:26 The Nature of Secrecy in Government 3:54:03 Anticipating a Paradigm Shift 4:05:23 The Intersection of Faith and Reality 4:18:28 The Path of Selflessness in Humanity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:59Jesse Michels?

  Our next guest worked for the CIA for over two decades.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  He goes, "If you are Storm, die in your separate foxholes."

• 1:09Jesse Michels?

  His name is Rolf Moat Larson. He served in various roles all over the world, some of which he can't even speak about today. What's the most on-the-brink the world has been that you can talk about?

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Well...

• 1:25Jesse Michels?

  He's been shoulder to shoulder with Putin. He describes working directly with NSA Director Michael Hayden, CIA Director George Tenet, and even briefing former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. But while he's worked at the highest, most illustrious levels of international diplomacy, that is the least interesting thing about our next guest.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  In 1991, I went on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, Greece. And I'm sitting at this, and I fell asleep, sort of napping, on this stone chair facing the church. And with every step I'm taking, the time is going back in time.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  It was as if time was evaporating. But I wasn't aware if I could wake up or get back to my old world because I was going back in time.

• 2:16Jesse Michels?

  He claims to be a time traveler. He says that he left his 20th century identity behind in 1991 to go live as a monk in Mount Athos, Greece in the 14th century.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  I became a recluse up there. I burned my hut up there, like all the things a recluse does. You know, I learned to fly.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  And when you're flying, you're spiritually open.

• 2:45Jesse Michels?

  He time traveled back to the medieval era for months, eating, walking around, socializing, and sleeping in his physical body in medieval Mount Athos, Greece. Now I'm sure you're wondering if I mean time travel in the metaphorical sense. Our guest stated multiple times to me that the reality he experienced in medieval times was indistinguishable from his current waking reality. According to him, not remote viewing or astrally projecting himself there. Does all of this feel as real as this interview feels?

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:21Jesse Michels?

  If senior CIA time travel whistleblower was not on your bingo card this year, it wasn't on mine either. But here we are. But if it can't get any more interesting than that, it does. Our next guest ran intelligence and counterintelligence for the Department of Energy.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  I learned some of this nation's most important secrets at DOE, not CIA. DOE does stuff that, man.

• 3:48Jesse Michels?

  And if you know anything about this show, we are obsessed with UFOs and think and kind of know that the Department of Energy has a lot to do with managing UFO secrecy and crash retrievals. So you better believe I threw literally every single UFO program-related question at our guest today. I even coordinated on the questions with my friend and UFO whistleblower David Grush, fellow YouTuber UAP Gurb, and author of UFOs and Nukes, Robert Hastings. Do you think that we have propulsion modalities that transcend chemical combustion? Do you think nothing happened at Roswell? Have you ever seen a one-of-one material? I'll let you assess our guest's answers for yourself.

• 4:29Jesse Michels?

  And whether you come out of this interview thinking he's just a savvy former CIA case officer running circles around us, or whether you think he's being genuine, is up to you. I will say that for me, this was hands-down one of the most thoughtful and mind-blowing conversations on metaphysics, fringe science, and the nature of reality that I've had on this show. So without further ado, here is all four hours of it. Former CIA and Department of Energy Intelligence Officer, Moscow Station Chief, time traveler, and religious mystic, Rolf Moa Larsen.

• 5:28Jesse Michels?

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• 6:13Jesse Michels?

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• 6:56Jesse Michels?

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• 7:38Jesse Michels?

  I'm here with Rolf Moat Larson. I am so grateful for this interview. I've read your book, A State of Mind: Faith in the CIA. One of the most remarkable books I've ever read. It's really fascinating because interspersed with stories of real-life espionage, of kind of moments where, you know, the world pivoted and you literally see like timelines shift. You're in the Oval Office, talking to Bush and Cheney and that sort of thing. Interspersed with that are some very profound mystical experiences. So why don't we start off with just, why did you write the book to begin with?

• 8:16Speaker 03

  All right. Thank you, Jesse. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm an admirer of your work. And I look forward to telling my story in the context of all the stories you present of people who have things to offer that really expand our understanding of reality and of faith. And I wrote the book because I wanted people to benefit from my story, which is really my relationship with God. And I like people to think of it more as a relationship than as a religious book, or, and it's not in fact about that. I don't, I don't proselytize or try to convert people to a specific religion. My story started as a little boy where I was

• 8:57Speaker 03

  aware of the presence of God. And the presence of God that I, that I was aware of was something I felt a need to develop. And I saw God as even a child, as a creator God and a personal God, which meant I could communicate. So we opened with a little prayer. And I like to try to keep a continuous prayer idea with God, always interacting. And there's an arena. The reason I entitled my book, A State of Mind of Faith in the CIA, was a state of mind refers to a desire to be close to God. John Paul II, it's a paraphrase of him saying, "The hell is not a place," which is an interesting concept. You figure Dante's Inferno, it's

• 9:39Speaker 03

  a state of mind. It's a state of mind of being separated from God. And all throughout my life, I had a sort of a fear of being distant from God or not being close enough to God. But it wasn't a traditional thing of go to church and give money. It was more of like in my personal relationship with God, since God knows all things, God would be aware. And when I would pray in the way we started, I got responses and ultimately evolved into a destiny. I felt my destiny became tied to my relationship with God. My destiny was to fulfill God's wishes through my life and my experiences. And that set up certain conflicts with I call my secular world of CIA, which I devoted my whole

• 10:22Speaker 03

  career to started in the military, went to West Point and spent six years in the army. I had an auspicious time in seventies on the Czech border and then transferred over to CIA. So that whole story, that whole, all those experiences had, you know, their own role in national security, et cetera, but also in my relationship with God. And the, and the faith part was understanding my faith as that relationship with God, not as what I called myself or what people thought of me in religious terms, but in my relationship with God, how was it developing and was I fulfilling God's will through my actions and thoughts?

• 11:00Jesse Michels?

  And what did you end up doing at the CIA and throughout your intelligence career? I think a lot of people, what we try to do on the show is kind of marry some of the most out there experiences or claims people have with, you know, kind of rigorous credentials.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's really important. So in my CIA career, I, I started as a, in Europe, just what we call a European officer. We had different areas of the world we were in, that was where I started, but I got quickly into arms control. And then over the years I seemed to gravitate. I didn't think of this as things went on as being coincidental, began to converge with my spiritual developments more and more towards war and nuclear war, collapse of the Soviet Union. I did two tours in Moscow, in the old days, in the Soviet days, I came back, I was what we call our chief of station in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Of course, that hope that gives me some credibility on my religious, or my spiritual experiences, but they were, they were, my credibility as an intelligence officer that I was always seemed to be at the threshold of history, like many, I'm not unique in that, by the way, there are so many of us that have been. Observers of history, helping to make history in some small way. And I was extremely fortunate in my career. Moscow ended my, we did nine tours overseas, each two, three years. Under cover, sometimes deep cover through the whole experience. And ended the whole thing, which I don't think was a coincidence in the Middle East between 2011 and 16. Uh, when we served in, uh, in the Middle East for the last five years.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  So between Europe, Soviet Union, Middle East. We sort of saw the whole world, served as, as CIA officers. My wife also worked most of that time in CIA. She's written her own book called Story of a CIA Wife. Um, I'll, I'll close with one thing. I mean, people have different reactions. Well, the first day I walked in CIA headquarters. Uh, you see the stars on the wall makes a huge, if the stars on the wall are CIA officers who fall in the line of duty. They can't put their names to the star. There's a book that has that. Uh, code book that tells you this star here and they is this person. There are people who lost their lives serving their country overseas. And, and of course I never wanted to be on that wall like any of us.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  But right next to that, the, the stars on the wall was this. Large, bold imprint into the marble walls of the CIA atrium. When you walk inside the big building, the old headquarters in Virginia. And it says, John 832. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. And I thought, wow, this is really quite extraordinary that CIA is, you know, secular organization. Has this New Testament, uh, line verse on, on the wall. And I wondered at the time when I walked in the building. Whether I would be satisfied that that's what CIA was all about. Were we truth seekers? Or not truth seekers. And that's the ultimate litmus test.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  When we don't seek truth and we have another agenda, we do bad things. As CIA or intelligence officer or army officers or anything in life.

• 14:17Jesse Michels?

  Do you find that at times the CIA has not sought truth in the past?

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Oh, of course, of course. I mean, people are people, organizations are organizations. The problem with giving organizations such powers as CIA has is you, on the, on the positive side, you can accomplish great things. On the negative side, you can be, do very bad things. And especially when you're doing them in secret.

• 14:38Jesse Michels?

  You have some interesting stories that you talk about in the book of being in the Oval Office, you know, giving, giving Bush advice, giving, giving Cheney advice. Do you want to, do you want to give a, you know, a couple of examples there of just stories where you kind of helped out or, or, you know, advised in kind of very high up American national security context?

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Right, you, you, my career breaks down into three phases. Really, the first phase was between when I started 1983 to 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's what we sometimes refer to as the good old days, which was espionage in the shadows. Like the books you always read, the classic espionage books of running spies and great stuff. And I, I became really good at that. Then suddenly, boom. Ten, almost 10 years into my career, we get, almost exactly, we get hit with nine 11. And after nine 11, I was like, I was actually in language training to go to Asia to become a chief of station of a large Asian country. When I saw on TV that the Twin Towers got hit by terrorists.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  I'd been on the director, director CIA staff the year before preceding nine 11 as Associate Director of Central Intelligence for Military Support. So I was a staffer, uh, supporting the director, who was a good friend of mine, wonderful director in my mind, George Tenet. And, uh, we knew that we were going to be hit nine 11. We didn't know where. And, and I'm not in the school of belief, and I know that it's a valid way to think of it, that we failed, well, we failed because we allowed the attack to happen, but could we have prevented it? I think that's in ways, a problematic way to think of it, because I don't think we could have prevented 9/11. We just have to give the credit to the terrorists, to Osama bin Laden, the terrorists.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  But it changed everyone's lives and future of the world, and that was the intent of the terrorists, including my little life. So they pulled me from my language training and George Tenet made me head of what they called the Weapons of Mass Destruction Department in the Counterterrorism Center, which was to stop terrorists from acquiring biological or nuclear weapons.

• 16:45Jesse Michels?

  I mean, that's a, yeah, it's, if the, you know, future of the world hinges on any job, that's the job.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  I did say to George Tenet, who I already knew well, because I'd been on his senior staff, I said, George, isn't there anybody better than me for this?

• 17:01Jesse Michels?

  How did he respond when he said, you know, hey, can't you find anybody better than me?

• 17:06Speaker 03

  The classic George Tenet response, like I said, great leader, a great leader of men and women. He said, hey, I got worse news for you, you don't have any people yet. I went from three people at that meeting that, that had been assigned to me to 150 over the next weeks. And then he said, but you're behind the eight ball. And he explained why, which is still classified, which meant there was a plausible reason to be worried that Al Qaeda might obtain a nuclear weapon, which was, I can say the basics, which was they were negotiating with Pakistani nuclear scientists to try to acquire a nuclear weapon they could use in the United States. This was something, as George said to me, we can't fail on this. We're going to fail. We're like athletes playing in sports, team sports.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Sometimes we fumble, sometimes the other team scores. We can't let them score on this. We can't let them do this one time and take out the White House or Congress or something. And, and so you're just going to have to make sure the president knows everything we know when we know it. We met as a group, and a lot of this is in my book, of course, we met every day at five o'clock and we just pulled everything together raw. Nothing was going through the normal formats. All our information, we briefed the director. And when we had the meeting at five, it usually lasts till eight or nine at night. And just going around the table, everybody sharing everything they know with everybody. And everybody included

• 18:31Speaker 03

  usually the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who of course, I also got to know very well. The NSA director, Mike Hayden, was was a part of the group. And just a number of people around the Washington area who needed to know. Somebody would pop in from the National Security Council.

• 18:47Jesse Michels?

  Stephen Hadley part of it.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Stephen Hadley was often, you know, involved. And everything was briefed raw. The president was told everything that night. First thing in the morning, he was briefed by Bob Mueller and George Tenet together, the FBI and CIA directors. And then we would come in ad hoc. And I would go in and I outlined some of the most important, you know, moments of briefing the president when there was something extraordinary from my area. And I felt an immense responsibility. So the answer, the short answer to your question is, I would brief the president when there was a possibility we were going to get hit with a biological or nuclear attack because something was developing. And he needed to know because usually, it was something

• 19:29Speaker 03

  that we couldn't, we didn't know exactly the timing and we weren't entirely sure of the accuracy or the providence of the threat. But we knew we needed to know because we don't want him to read about it with us when it happens. And for example, probably the most, the most, most important of the whole, of my whole experience with the president was when I briefed him that right, three weeks before we invaded Iraq. So now we're talking 2003.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  We obtained information that a notorious terrorist that my people were tracking. His name was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He's a famous jihadist. He was head of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Once we later, but this is before the invasion. So this information is very privileged at the time. And I had briefed the president several times on him and his network and how they were trying to obtain these weapons. And I came in, I said, Mr. President, I have bad news. The only people in the Oval Office were me, George Tenet. And George Bush, George H. W. Bush.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  He was in a wheelchair at the time. So I was an amazing sight for me as a citizen. And I have to say to your listeners, you know,

• 20:40Jesse Michels?

  So W.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  W and

• 20:42Jesse Michels?

  And his father.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  His father and George and me. That was it in the Oval Office.

• 20:45Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  For an hour.

• 20:47Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  And I have to tell you, as an American, I had goosebumps.

• 20:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And everything I had briefed the president, you know, all I had from dealing with everybody I dealt with at that level was they were incredibly dedicated to serving this country. They're incredibly dedicated to doing the right thing. All the things you hear, and the president is very smart. He remembered everything from the previous. I don't even know how he did it, frankly. He would recall the facts of the previous time I talked to him, if it was a month earlier or two months or whatever, he'd remember. So this time I told him, we know where he is. He's in this camp in northeast Iraq. Now, remember, this is three weeks before we invaded Iraq. So I said to the president, he's here, and I had the overhead imagery of the camp.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  And I had a nominated board with all the jihadist terrorists that were working with him, him on the top, his picture, his mug. And the president, who already knew him, said, Rolf, what would you do if you were me?

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Now, when I briefed the president, I hope this is reassuring to your listeners, is like trying to make it. I did it as a citizen, like I'm not putting any of my spin or influence on anything I'm telling the president. There's no Rolf agenda. That was my key task. I had facts. I had things to say. I never went beyond the. And that day, we had had an internal discussion on exactly what I should say to the president about what I'm describing, including that we shouldn't do anything. We should let this play out, and I was too close to the invasion. But when he looked at me, he said that I started to say what I was told to say. And he knew me too well. So he said, look, I don't want to know. I don't want to know what they are telling you to tell me. What do you think I should do?

• 22:29Jesse Michels?

  What were you told to say?

• 22:30Speaker 03

  I was told to say, we shouldn't, we shouldn't bomb it. We shouldn't attack it.

• 22:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Because it could, you know, the invasion and I was already, because I was obsessed with this, this terrorist. I was obsessed and I knew that it was an unhealthy obsession. I had been known to be slightly obsessive within work, hopefully not other things. But, but it turned out that, that, uh, you know, he, I, my look betrayed because I was so zealously telling him, here he is, here they are. He goes, no, I mean, what would you do if you were me? Not, you're telling me not to do anything, but you're saying that something else. I think you're thinking something else. So I looked at the director and he just gave me the, like, he asked you the question. He asked, you know, he didn't ask me the question. He asked you the question. You answer the question. And, and I looked at the director, looked back at the president. I said, Mr. President, I'd bomb it.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  So nobody said anything. He went on meeting. He didn't seem plus, you know, nonplussed by the whole thing or anything. We're driving back in the director's car to this agency headquarters and he says, uh, well, oh, I said to him, well, should I have said that? He goes, he asked you, you told him, I have no problem with it. He goes, typical. Now, when you get back to our building, you make sure you tell everybody what you said. And of course it, it, there's no, there, one thing I liked, I think I emphasized in my book.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  The right and the wrong and who's to blame is so much less on our minds when we're doing things than people think it is. Like we're just trying to make, do the right thing. And sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't.

• 24:05Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Speaking of this pivotal moment and at least from the kind of public perception, uh, you know, uh, in, in intelligence failure, wrongdoing, people think of the overall invasion of Iraq, which is not, you know, for, for, for the audience at all, what you're talking about with this targeted bombing of Zarkawi. They think of that as an intelligence failure because they think of. Says having tagged Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction when he never had any, you know, maybe at most he used, you know, biological weapons in Kuwait, which is horrible. And he was, you know, very bad guy.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:43Jesse Michels?

  But, uh, you know, maybe this was this kind of, you know,

• 24:48Jesse Michels?

  huge waste of money, you know, uh, lives and, you know, created this kind of void or vacuum, for which ISIS, you know, ironically to actually like take root.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:59Jesse Michels?

  And, uh, you know, which kind of ended up radicalizing the region even more. So yeah, well, I'm sure you were thinking deeply about this at the time. What do you think happened there?

• 25:09Speaker 03

  I struggled with whether I should include this, but I, I consider resigning when we, we invaded Iraq.

• 25:14Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 25:15Speaker 03

  I didn't, I noted that briefly. I didn't, I didn't get into it in any detail.

• 25:19Jesse Michels?

  So you were against it?

• 25:20Speaker 03

  I was against the war philosophically, but a couple, some of my colleagues were also feeling it was going to be a disaster. The idea that we didn't know that it would turn out badly. I think most people had the most experience, knew this was going to turn out badly.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Uh, now the decision to do it, at least I believe, and I can't say, there's a lot of, it's a split decision of views on this. I bel, I don't see any, um, intent for the administration to deceive anybody that, that by saying Saddam had WMD and he didn't. It was a failure, a massive failure to conclude that it was based on bad sources, which is usually the origin of all bad decisions and intelligences. When you have, you know, dubious sources or bad sources. These were both sources that didn't know much and were over represent, fabricating information, we call it when you're making up information. And on that basis, we made a terrible decision is my view.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Uh, but it was exacerbated by the idea that, that even if it had been the right decision, it, the result probably would have been the same because. We couldn't control Iraq like we couldn't control Afghanistan. And it didn't take, uh, and I have a chapter in my book where I'm talking to the Vice President, Dick Cheney, who I got to know exceptionally well also, uh, where he just called me in a week, a weekend from, from the White House.

• 26:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  I came in on a Sunday.

• 26:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  To talk to him about why are we losing the war? And by the summer of 2003, this is six months after our invasion. But I didn't say what I was really thinking was, you know, sorry, Dick, but if you don't know what's going on here, I, I can't help you. And then I'm, I was really like worried that we didn't seem to know what we were up against. And, and that was the, the real shocker to me of Iraq wasn't that we made a mistake in the invasion side as bad as that was.

• 27:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Is that we didn't know what we were getting into.

• 27:12Jesse Michels?

  What's the most on the brink the world has been that you can talk about?

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Well, you know, the Soviet Union had collapsed.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  And the biggest worry in Congress and in Washington's mind, which we had almost no inkling of in Moscow, where we're actually doing the work, was that one of these nukes would end up in rogue states or terrorists. And the US government at that time launched a heroic, really heroic effort with the Russians to try to account for every nuclear weapon. The so-called suitcase nukes. Nukes aren't just missiles that come in and destroy the world. That's really the answer to your question. My biggest worry with the world will blow up, literally. There's nothing fun about trying to stop terrorists with nukes. There's certainly nothing fun about trying to recover nukes in a country that's just lost control of its entire empire, like Russia had in 1991, two and three. So I'd, I'd say that answers two things.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  It answers kind of what the big, uh, there are a lot of things to worry about in the world, you know, there's. Biotech technology, there's AI, there's nuclear, but nuclear weapons are still for me the king of the, uh, king of the hill because it can happen that fast and we won't even be aware of, we're not really serious about stopping it from happening.

• 28:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're in a scary world right now where you have all these kind of, you know, this asymmetric warfare and all these capabilities. And then all this ability for if you're China or Russia or some sort of larger adversary to gain plausible deniability and act through sort of rogue actors. But I want to back up and just talk about, you've had these kind of mystical downloads and I want to talk about the first one. You were kind of a nihilistic youth at West Point.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:05Jesse Michels?

  What happened?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there was a, a point in my life when I was, I had combined my interest in knowing truth and to an extreme where I was receptive to whatever input I would get to the point I pushed myself to an extreme. Uh, I had had experiences where I had dreams that came true. And I realized that I started thinking about consciousness and subconsciousness. And these were things that were affecting me in terms of being receptive to the idea that there's way more out there than we see in logic and reason, or even if you add intuition to that, right? And so at West Point, I did these dream experiences. I talk a little bit

• 29:48Speaker 03

  on the book. They were kind of childish in a way and not very scientific. But then when I, when I graduated, uh, I went to Fort Knox as an armor officer. I was going to go to the Czech border as an arms, uh, arm, uh, guy. And, uh, I, they started to become much more vivid. And the first briefing I got actually in the army, a secret briefing was on the, the Russian nuclear threat in Europe at that time. Cause I'm going to go out and, and be the, what they call the covering force. We were the, literally the closest American forces on the border to confront the Soviet hordes. Now this was in 1976. So we're talking eight years after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. So everything is very real and palpable.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  And the Germans were depending on us to, uh, to defend them and, and the whole world in a, in a sense. And, and part of that briefing was the idea that we had tactical nuclear weapons. We would fire on them if.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  If they invaded, and that was a shock to me. That was my first introduction to nuclear weapons as in a context of war, which nowadays, when we listen to, where this has gone full circle, we listen to Vladimir Putin talking about using nukes in Ukraine, we have to think about this idea of nuclear weapons, the tables have been reversed. Back then, we needed them because we were afraid of being invaded, and he's using them now what he regards to be if Russia's existence is threatened by NATO and the West, he would use them too, which is really what he said. So the point being, at the time, I'm in this kind of mode, and my friends and I are all going through this together, the ones, four of us, kind of the four horsemen

• 31:24Speaker 03

  of the apocalypse. And so I had this incredibly vivid dream, in the midst of all this, at Fort Knox, where I dreamt that I was in a battle, like a battle of Armageddon. It's the first time the mystical things turned, I would call turned religious, or, you know, religious history, or when I became a big advocate or hobbyist in eschatology, which means the theology of the end of days, which I kind of, now I hobby in it because it's such a, it started then, the roots of it. I didn't understand that at the time. And it was just such a vivid dream. And in the dream, these numbers appeared. So there were no voices. I couldn't hear anything,

• 32:07Speaker 03

  and the whole, everything was black. So I'm in a dream state or escape, in which I can't see, I could sort of smell, like, you know, the acrid smoke and things like that that was around me. And I was aware of these forces gathering for a great confrontation. And in that sort of context of, I would say, an apocalypse, it didn't necessarily have to be at the time, but I saw these numbers roll out in cubes. And it all was around 747.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  So the number seven four seven becomes a lifelong number for me, like, like a mystical, a mystical number.

• 32:54Jesse Michels?

  What does it mean to you?

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Uh, to me, well, I, I don't know, actually, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book. I don't know, but my, I think it has to be a divine number. It has to be something related to what I later became, which was a watchman for terrorism and, you know, these kinds of things in my professional life, in my religious life. I was getting more and more interested in understanding what these numbers would mean. So I've done everything from Reed, Nikola Tesla's obsession, because the numbers were three, six, nine, 12, 18, 27, and 40. So they're cubes.

• 33:31Jesse Michels?

  So first you get seven four seven.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  First I get seven four seven, then these cubes kind of are circling in the smoke. They were cubes. And the cubes were these numbers, three, six, well, the three and the six were one cube, but they kept spinning. So it could be three or six or nine or both, right? Because they turn, right? I would never realize that if I hadn't seen it, you know, it was that it sounds silly because of course they can, but it was not a, uh, and then the rest of the, well, all, all of course, except for 40, a variation or a multiple of three, three cubes, 27, you know, three, nine, 12, 12 tribes, 40 days and 49. I started to ascribe what had to be religious meanings

• 34:17Speaker 03

  to the numbers. I, but I didn't understand why I was receiving them. Like, what was the point? You know, I began to think as, as I lay it out, I tried to do it in a very systematic way in the course of my book, when I would see the numbers and why in subsequent, but you asked me the first time. And I have to say a word to my wife before I'll say how the numbers get completed.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  And because that wouldn't be till I was in Germany after the course, when I met my wife, she was a German. Just girlfriend, we're carousing. She was as nihilistic as I was for lots of reasons. And we were just party animals, like, but we had no interest in like long-term hookup or what became three kids and nine grandkids in our life, 54 years up to now. And she's in many ways the opposite of me, just practical. Get stuff done to this day. I mean, we're like real opposites. I'm philosophical, kind of all over the place. She's like on feet on the ground, get you through the, you know, with our kids. Everything was always that way and it served me great because she I had a tether and she'd

• 35:19Speaker 03

  always reel me back in. But that night she was really disjointed and she woke up because she's always joked, she's never, and I never told her this dream. I didn't want my girlfriend to think I was completely nuts. Right? Yeah. Logical thought when you're nineteen, twenty. Of course. And but she wakes up, she goes, I just had a really strange dream. I said, what? She said, well, we were at the Schwandorf, which is the town next to the town I was garrison, which is Amberg, Germany. And Schwandorf was less than a half hour away. And there was a like almost a large church on a hill there, Catholic church. And she said, I was in by the church. Now, we had gone, that was our favorite discotheque

• 36:02Speaker 03

  was in that town. And we met all our friends there, three, four nights a week. It was like a real carousing party time, as I'm saying. And she says, it was night, I was alone, you weren't with me. I'm never there without you. She was never in that town without me. And she said, but I was going down an alleyway, but along the church, I knew what we knew that the geography of it, you know, was coming down a big hill. And I went to the end of this alleyway. And as I came approached the end, dim light, just some lights on the church on the side, I saw your desk. And I approached the desk and there was a chair behind it and the chest desk was facing me. And there were numbers cubes on your desk. With numbers on them. Whoa.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  I said, I started almost hyperventilate, but I didn't want to say anything. I said, do you remember what the numbers were by any chance? She's, well, how could I forget? Of course. It was like I woke up and all the numbers. That's why I just woke up because I remember it was three, six, nine. No way. Yeah, yeah. It was the same numbers? Same numbers. One additional number, forty nine.

• 37:06Speaker 00

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• 37:36Speaker 03

  So now, just to say one last thing on my wife as a witness. Like, for me, for no one else, for me, I needed this. It's almost like a sanity check. I said, well, I told her then, of course, about my dreams. I never told her that before that. To this day, 54 years later, oh, 55, 56, whatever it is, 1978 is when that started. She, she said, well, I don't want to read your book. I don't want to talk about this anymore. She had that kind of a reaction to it. But it doesn't in any way diminish. She knows the truth of it. She knows the truth of all of it because she was a witness to all of it.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  All the, everything in my book, that, those were the earliest mystical experiences were around numbers and war. And the final sort of bearing testimony to the truth. Because you have to, again, I stress to everybody, don't start thinking you're having like these things. Like, you need, you need very deep authentication, very deep testing of your own mind. Are they, are things like this true or not true? I just want to assure anybody listening to any of this that I put myself through all that in great detail, at great depth, test, test, test, test. You know, in the end, you start to know, it's just of God. Is this of God? That's, that's the essence of it. If it's of you, if it's of your imagination, if it's of someone else putting in your mind, it could be anybody.

• 39:02Jesse Michels?

  Did she have any prior knowledge of the numbers that you received in your download?

• 39:07Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 39:07Jesse Michels?

  Before she had her dream?

• 39:08Speaker 03

  No, no, none.

• 39:09Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  And, and the other part, which, you know, you, you know, and I had to actually test my, because remember, all this is happening in the non-internet era. I couldn't look anything up. But right, right after my, you know, in the same time I'm having these dreams, two other things that now informed me, that's all they were informing, a perfect stranger walked up to me in a fish restaurant. It was a Long John Silver's. I don't think they're around anymore. There's a fish restaurant, like a, like a fast food restaurant called Long John Silver's. But you go there for fish, which I rarely did. I go McDonald's or, but one of our friends says, so the four of us were gathered, the four musketeers or the, my friends that West Point graduates who all went to Germany together and all experienced all these things I'm saying and partied together. We're sitting in the restaurant and this guy walks right up to

• 39:53Speaker 03

  me, who I describe in the book and says, read Ezekiel Daniel revelations and walked away.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  We all looked at each other like, okay. I mean, but you don't, there's nothing you do with that. It's just like, that's very strange.

• 40:08Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  But it's coming at the same time, all this other stuff, which he knew nothing about, obviously.

• 40:14Jesse Michels?

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• 40:56Jesse Michels?

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• 41:37Jesse Michels?

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• 42:22Jesse Michels?

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• 42:26Speaker 03

  And the final experience, which is just the basis, this is just the foundation for things in the future, was when I was at the course, getting a lecture on the assembly and disassembly of the M60 tank engine. Now, you have to understand at the time, I'm very nihilistic or whatever, but I'm also very, I've always been very creative and always wanted to be a writer, even at that time. So I'm imagining, and I was so bored in the class, I was like, that's when I realized I'm not very good at tank stuff, you know? I mean, I ended up being, I learned forced learning. I was, I was good at my profession as a tank commander

• 43:09Speaker 03

  and of the troops and in the army while I was in it. But I didn't really like it. And this, this was the worst of all, which was learning about maintenance related things on tanks. So I'm writing, I'm doodling and so I decided, oh, I'd come up with a name for myself as a author. I'll be Frederick Wolf. So I wrote Frederick Wolf. Now, that was in honor of two things I admired at the time. You know, you're again, young. This is like typical of the way I was thinking of the time. Nietzsche, who was my favorite, Friedrich Nietzsche, but you know, Frederick, adaptation of Nietzsche, who I'm obsessed, I was obsessed with, even at West Point, I go through some stories of Nietzsche. And maybe because he fit this idea of, you know, to know yourself, you have to free yourself, you have to free, and even of

• 43:53Speaker 03

  God, you have to free yourself of all constraints on who you are, confront yourself as to who you are. Which was also a theme at that time of a lot of the novels, fiction I like to read, particularly Herman Hesse at the time, and Steppenwolf. So the wolf came from that. Frederick Wolf, ah, the man searching for his true nature, his true character. I'm willing to lay it all out there as a, you know, again, brash, brash guy. And so then I said, what would be my first short story? I'll write it here in this class. Well, I decided, I called it on suicides, suicide note.

• 44:29Jesse Michels?

  Why did you choose that?

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Well, I thought it'd be, I chose it because it seemed like a really dark, deep theme to write about it. So I imagined the note was the note I would leave if I actually committed suicide. So it was, it was like, like if I left a note now, because I, now I don't, you know, I don't want to encourage this thinking, anybody out there. And, and I came to my senses, so to speak, but I was getting into the novelistic. In fact, the irony was, I've never in my life felt in the slightest bit suicidal, ever, ever. And I attribute a lot of that to my, my faith and belief, because I'm, I'm also a veteran optimist, even, even the future of the world, even with all the dark things I've talked about, war and apocalypse and Armageddon. And I'm actually very optimistic

• 45:12Speaker 03

  about it. Because it's all tied to this God I know is a loving God. This God is the Creator God, means everything around you in nature, you can see God, how wonderful it is. It's this personal God you can talk and interact with who loves you, who wants you to love Him.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  So how can you not be an optimist if that's your perspective? So I had that perspective even then because I hadn't forgotten the childhood things in my, in my life that made me feel that way. But I'm going to go down this dark road because it's interesting. And one of my inspirations was Camus, philosopher, who was obsessed by the question and muse that maybe the only really relevant question to think about was, is life worth living? Cause you have complete control of your life from that very basic way of looking at it. And I, and I, so I wrote this thing and, and that's when I had these dreams, uh, you know, and, and at that same time, this is all happening concurrent with what I've talked about.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  So I realized I was getting in way too dark, way too deep. It was, and then the dreams were exacerbating my, my thinking. Again, never got negative or self-destructive. That's the, the funny part. And I'm convinced I could have kept plowing down that deeper, deep, that tunnel deeper and deeper without ever hurting myself or any, anybody or anything, but that's not necessarily for other people. Something I would advise, right? Uh, but it all culminated in, in the next day I saw, gotta, gotta clear my head. Let's go play golf. So we were all terrible golfers, but we like to go hacking at golf at, at Fort Knox. They have military golf course right on the base. So we went golfing and you can look this up if you need to, because I couldn't for years.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Had to actually look up on the internet what I experienced. As we're, as we're golfing, it was going to be a stormy day, you know? Of course that fits, it has to be a stormy day with thunder and stuff, but we went anyway, you know, being irreverent. And at one point we reached, uh, I'm trying to get, shoot to the hole, straight over this cemetery. And of course the ball hooks, there's an iron hooks into the cemetery. And, uh, I, you know, feeling very

• 47:23Speaker 03

  not respectful, just been a bad mood. Let's just put that way. So I, I remember climbing over the wall. I go over wondering where the grave is, the ball. And I saw it sitting right centered on this very, very small gray oval grave in the ground. You know, and I walk up to the ball, it's right centered on the ball. I said, I wonder who's trapped my ball kind of, that literally was what I was thinking like, again, really the tempting fate, you know? I was really tempting fate. And it says Frederick Wolf.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  German soldier died.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  November 5, 1944.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  I had no idea who this guy was, but I know that my birthday is on November 5, 1954.

• 48:06Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  And I just dropped my club and

• 48:13Speaker 03

  completely freaked out by the experience at the time because I realized there's no way that could be, you know, coincidence. That's the night where I had the 747 dreams.

• 48:23Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. Did you try to find anything out about the historical?

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Yes, and I did. And it was, he was a German soldier who, after World War II, was sent to Fort Knox as a prisoner of war. And he was involved in like a little mini German uprising over conditions there and he was shot by the guards, you know, and killed. And then he, of course, buried there. I don't know why he wasn't, his body wasn't sent back to Germany. I never found that level of detail. But it became also kind of this like very interesting connectivity because I was going to Germany.

• 48:58Jesse Michels?

  I mean, what do you, do you think there's something apocalyptic going on?

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Well, I do. Yeah.

• 49:03Jesse Michels?

  This guy goes up to you, he says, read Daniel Ezekiel revelations. All of those books are kind of notably apocalyptic.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:11Jesse Michels?

  You're dreaming of this sort of Armageddon like thing happening.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  Well, yes. And, and, and the ways I would tie that together would be, so the first apocalyptic, well, future dream, now we're talking Ezekiel, Daniel revelations, I mentioned the person who walked up to me. At that time, I, that's another thing I did. I filed that away and I didn't think about it much more. But it was always there, you know, I kept it there. It's going to serve a purpose later. I didn't think that at the time, actually, but it did. And one of the purposes was after 9/11, I realized, oh, I get it. I'm Ezekiel's watchman. It's my duty to

• 49:53Speaker 03

  warn the people, which is really the quintessential CIA officer's role. I mean, it is in a very modest way. I don't want to make this sound too huge, humongous. It's just, that's what we should do. If we don't do that, there's not much purpose for what we do. And I realized it was much more specific in my case because my first dream, which I chronicle in the book, was Sadat's assassination in September 6, 1981, where I was in, I was there, I was on the scene. When he was gunned down in a parade field. The interesting thing about it, I wasn't thinking about Assad. I didn't even know the event was taking place the day he was assassinated. And of course, given the time change between where I was at Fort Bliss, Texas at the time

• 50:35Speaker 03

  as an army officer, this is right before I joined the agency and where he was killed in Cairo. It was the exact timing. I woke up in the middle of the night, having had the dream, and I remembered it in every detail, watching in slow motion while gunmen pulled machine guns out of their cloaks and, you know, shot him dead and a number of others. And I pictured this thing. So I couldn't verify any of that until the next day. Again, no internet, no, and it was reading it in the papers.

• 51:05Jesse Michels?

  Did all the details line up of what happened?

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Every detail, including the timing, it was just impeccable. And I did do one additional thing. I woke up-

• 51:12Jesse Michels?

  Was there an example of like a small detail that you dreamt of that was corroborated?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  I think, I think, I think, well, the main, the most important detail, which I was tying into nine 11, was among the, it's never been entirely established, but it certainly was in my mind that Zawahiri, who was, of course, deputy head of Al Qaeda, later the chief of Al Qaeda, was bin Laden's lieutenant, right? He was one of the conspirators in the, that pulled it out. And I, and I, I mean, weirdly remember him and another guy named Saif Al Attal, who was the number three guy in Al Qaeda at the, now, he's the head of Al Qaeda. So two of the people I pictured in my dream became the heads of Al Qaeda after bin Laden were killed, was killed.

• 51:59Jesse Michels?

  And you know, they were implicated in Sadat's assassination.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Well, it's not 100%, but I did in my dream.

• 52:05Jesse Michels?

  It's like-

• 52:05Speaker 03

  But you can, if you Google it, you'll see they probably were.

• 52:08Jesse Michels?

  So it's like you remote viewed the event or something, or time traveled or-

• 52:12Speaker 03

  Well, it felt like that. And it felt like it because it happened at the same time. And the more important thing is-

• 52:18Jesse Michels?

  Or bi-located or something?

• 52:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I had no, I had no reason to be thinking of this. This is the other, I think, compelling thing. Many experiences, particularly as you get into the Virgin Mary and things that had later, happened to me later. There was no logical explanation why I went in that direction, except for the warning theme, you know, the warn, the idea that was building up to a series of serve as a watchman, serve as a messenger.

• 52:48Jesse Michels?

  Let's try, I want to go through the numbers themselves because I think they're fascinating. And, um, you know, I think of seven, four, seven, you know, we were talking earlier, actually, before we started rolling, uh, you have the seven story mountainist by Thomas Merton.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:03Jesse Michels?

  And he is one of many mystics where the number seven is this extremely important number. I just had this guy on, Peter Lavenda, and he wrote a book called Stairway to Heaven, which is a book about celestial ascent traditions across history, the Merkabah, the, you know, the Ziggurat, the Hecholot, the Arie, you know, all of these things contain seven levels, even esoteric orders like Rosicrucianism, you have to go through seven levels and leave a garment at each level or whatever. It's always discarding or passing a test at each level. And so, you know, I think of seven as sort of, you know, something celestial.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:40Jesse Michels?

  And then four is the ascent or conversion into matter or something. And then seven is like the, you know, the re-ascend into the celestial. And so maybe there's something around fallen angels or fallen celestial beings, you know, the fall of man or something.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:55Jesse Michels?

  That seems really important with that, that first number.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I, I think that's entirely, you know, not only plausible, but I, I think the, the track you're on is, is probably true. I mean, it's hard to, you just have to continue to explore it and see what insights it, it renders. That's, that's the bigger challenge is never to think of it as reached a conclusion.

• 54:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  A continual journey and almost a non-ending journey to infinity on, on these subjects.

• 54:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  But to understand, to see the associations may be more important than being able to analyze the association.

• 54:35Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Completely thoroughly. Cause if you, the moment you thoroughly analyze it and you're, you're sort of done with it, it means you've closed your mind to other possible interpretations. And since we're in such a broad vista of.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Reality is really what it is. Exploring a reality is very broad. There's not a lot of evidence we have through our normal application of language, logic and reason, which is why, again, numbers help because they take communication on a far more objective level. If you're, but most people, including me, we're not, not that facile at using numbers in the ways that the real geniuses can with numbers. And the people have defined for us what the numbers mean just for physics. I marvel at what some of the great mathematicians have produced. And the insight they've gotten from just looking into things that seem to have no purpose, much less something with a purpose. So I think, I think you're on to something there.

• 55:30Jesse Michels?

  Well, let's keep going. So then you, then you have three, six or nine is three, maybe, have you, I mean, have you thought of the Holy Trinity?

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 55:38Jesse Michels?

  Father, Son, the Holy Ghost. Six or nine, six, you know, the amount of days, you know, before the earth was, was created, maybe in Genesis or something. Does nine mean anything to you?

• 55:50Speaker 03

  Well, it's three threes, you know, it just continues a pattern of where there's a, a, emphasis of three, you know, 12 being lots of things like 12 tribes and.

• 56:04Jesse Michels?

  These 12 tribes, yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Forty days and 40 nights, of course, the temptation of Christ among 40 years for the, for the Exodus, for the Jewish people under Moses. I mean, there's just lots of religious significance, but I hesitate that like you've done well. I mean, you know far more than I do about the way it ties into other fields and other potential explanations that broaden really from religion. One thing I've done with, with ongoing satisfaction, I have no conclusion, is reach out to physicists that have, I've had a number of physicists contact me, read my book. And, and those are very interesting, or I've given my book to some other physicists. And through my time at Department of Energy, I spent three years as the head of intelligence

• 56:51Speaker 03

  and counterintelligence at Department of Energy between 2005 and eight. And then beyond that, especially when I continued the nuclear stuff, but expanded it a great deal. DOE is an incredible organization. We have the, what they call the, the America's National Laboratories Hall, based in Department of Energy. So I, it's been an amazing ride for me to. Get connected to all these incredibly smart people who could probably be doing anything. Don't have to work at lower pay in most cases for, for the US government doing things, but do it because they want to serve the country too. So there's all those kinds of people out there that I get to know. But the physicists that I, I've given them a challenge, which is kind

• 57:33Speaker 03

  of what you're doing with the numbers. I said, look, I, you know, read my book or you read my book. I now want to know more than ever, what's the physics behind mysticism?

• 57:47Speaker 00

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• 58:17Speaker 03

  There have to be physics behind it. It's not something that belongs to a different reality. It's part of our reality. It happens in this world. Therefore, there has to be an E equals MC, it has to be a quantum or relativity, space, time, all have to be taken in account as to what happened and what, how do we explain it?

• 58:39Jesse Michels?

  Have you ever gotten a satisfactory answer?

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Nothing that I would describe as answering the question, but I have gotten the kind of encouragement I need, that it's not a silly question. That's kind of what I'm looking for.

• 58:53Jesse Michels?

  It's not, I mean, the most interesting scientists, whether it be Einstein or, you know, Heisenberg has an apocryphal quote that's often attributed to him where it's like, the first sip of the science, you know, the bottle or whatever, leaves you an atheist, but when you get to the bottom, you know, there lies God.

• 59:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:12Jesse Michels?

  And, you know, so, so, okay. So that's good. So they don't think it's all, you know, that's like a bad, that's a bad framing, at least for, for inquiry.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  And you know what Einstein said?

• 59:21Jesse Michels?

  What did he say?

• 59:21Speaker 03

  I want to know God's thoughts. The rest are details.

• 59:24Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. Wow.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  That's a great quote from Einstein.

• 59:27Jesse Michels?

  That's a really great, great quote for somebody who's. Uh, you know, theory has basically become the modern scientific paradigm.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 59:35Jesse Michels?

  And.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Well, I think all, almost all the great physicists, or I would say were great ones that I certainly have become hobbyists of. I'll never quite grasp the full math and science aspects of it, of course, but like Paul Dirac, you know, people like that. People, I encourage people to, to, which I used to do when I, you can imagine a, a layperson like me, not a scientist, or taking on weapons of mass destruction and trying to stop terrorists from getting bombs and biological weapons. And one of the biggest skeptics, you know, skepticism I encountered was the Russians were really good. I went to Moscow to lecture them and brought a bunch of people so they could stop this stuff in Russia and other places. And it's one of the old Russians I knew from way back when we were catching and recruiting and catching spies.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  Hey, you know, Ralph, we know, you know, you, you don't know anything about this stuff. So why, why, you know, I said, that's why I brought all these other people, listen to them, don't listen to me. I'm not, I'm not, if you notice, I'm not telling you the science, they are.

• 1:00:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  I'm pulling it together because you have to, you have to establish, science is irrelevant without the consequence, understanding the consequence of science. And I used to say that to DOE scientists quite often, if you can't explain this in layman's terms and make it relevant to real people, like everybody listening to this, if we make it irrelevant to them and their lives, then we've lost our sense of mission. So the idea with, with, um, with, with the, the idea of the physicists, I asked them, I tasked them, I would call it jokingly. Come back to me with some plausible explanation. The biggest roadblock I've encountered from talking to real men of science on this, or women of science,

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  is they say, well, the problem we have is you almost have to create alternative, um, not universes per se, but a space and dimensions in the universe in which things occur that we can't experimentally measure.

• 1:01:32Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  And that becomes our problem because good physicists will say, anything I can't experimentally confirm or measure is, is not. And, and I would say, this is me talking, so I may, anybody listening could easily contradict me on this if they know more. But I've reconciled quantum and.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Relativity, you know, is a problem of scale, nothing else. It's just to me, it's the idea that you're measuring things at two different extremes, but the underlying reality, there's no conflict.

• 1:02:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  It's the same reality.

• 1:02:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  Measured in different scales. So we have to start thinking of when we have these mystical experiences, thinking of them as things that happen at scale, but maybe there is no time and maybe there's not even motion. Maybe the idea of an angel of going between two different, that's why we put wings on angels, right? It's a tradition. Is this this a medium of coming from a world at rest into a world in motion and needing to somehow cross over that divide and that barrier? That's just the way I think of it. So I haven't, I haven't solved any of these things, but you asked the question of how do you think of them? And all I can say is you, you open your mind to all kinds of potential explanations.

• 1:02:44Jesse Michels?

  And the truth is probably, you know, everybody, you know, I come from UFO world. You talked about your history at the DOE and we will get into some questions there. But, you know, I think a lot of people in, you know, in that world think of the truth as something to be disclosed, like you can say it prosaically. And I don't think that's the case at all.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:03:03Jesse Michels?

  Like, um, you know, I always find it interesting, you know, so St. Thomas Aquinas was like working on his Summa Theologica, this like rational explanation of, of God. And I think he had this conversion, you know, kind of moment while he was in mass. And it was like this mystical experience and then he like stopped speaking after that. There's a, there's a scientist, I think his name is Mishka Gregory Perlman, and he's like in Siberia right now. And he, he's like known in like theoretical physics world as like one of the top, like best guys. And I've even talked to some people who are like, you know, if anybody's like sitting on like a, you know, a theory of everything that like marries, you know, general relativity and quantum mechanics, it's probably this guy.

• 1:03:46Jesse Michels?

  And like he, I think he claims that he has like a unified theory and he just won't talk. And so there's, there's, there is this some, something very interesting about, you know, it's so, you know, maybe the truth is just so hard to like grapple with. And there's, there's a translation function between like what a, what a person knows and then what they can even describe to, you know, the world. Like that's a, that's a really hard thing. To, to, to, to do, you know, to, there isn't some Archimedean point where like everybody instantaneously gets it all at once. And it's just the sema, it's a semantic truth. But, um, yeah, anyways.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  Well, the only thing I'd add to that, cause I think that's so important too, is, is as you approach unification of like, understanding the nature of all reality in some equation form, or something that could be expressed through physics or mathematics, you are in fact, getting closer to what I would describe as what I think of God as, which isn't the head of the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church, or it's, it's the entity of the creator God and the personal God. On the creator God level, I mean, if you know on the religious side of that,

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  the idea of God, Yahweh, you couldn't even say it. So you, you develop a term that you couldn't even pronounce. So it gets a little bit backward, like a Perlman who's, if he is at some level where he can no longer talk about it, that I tend that, I think that tends to happen when you reach a point of insight, that just where you're, you're overwhelmed by the profundity, if that makes sense.

• 1:05:17Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  Of what you're looking into.

• 1:05:19Jesse Michels?

  I want to switch gears. We can talk forever on all this stuff, but, um, you have had direct experiences with the Virgin Mary. And that is a really rare thing for somebody with your background and in your position to say, can you go into those experiences and describe them as sort of viscerally as you can?

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  For me, it's the most important part of the book.

• 1:05:51Jesse Michels?

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• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  So what the story was when in 1991, when I was in Greece, I was, I went on a pilgrimage to Monathos, Greece, which is an Orthodox mountain that's something akin to the Vatican in Greek Orthodoxy, Orthodox world. It's 20 monasteries on this amazing peninsula that juts out by Thessaloniki up in northern Greece, right? And I got a three-day diplomatic visa to go with Diplomat, the Diplomat's Club. And I, but I did it with a, with a, with a calculation in mind, a work-related reason, pretext, which was I had been given a tip

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  by a Greek very close to the president, Prime Minister of Greece, about a monk at Monathos who was actually a Russian intelligence officer, who was getting cover and changing his identity to go on a mission to the US on behalf of Russian intelligence and would be undercover at a Russian Orthodox church in the US to be, to do God knows what. But he would have, you know, just wonderful cover to be in the US. So it was, it was an amazing tip. I didn't solicit it, or it came to me. They came to me with the tip. And handed me the file so I could read it. And then I, then I resolved to go up there and investigate through direct, you know, direct contact.

• 1:09:04Jesse Michels?

  So you're looking for this spy who's going undercover as a monk in Mount Athos? And then you go to Mount Athos? And then what happens?

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm going through an all night, experiencing an all-night service at the, the small Catholic con of monastery Dionisio, which is one of the monasteries on the, on a huge cliff. And I was just, they were very, they were very relaxed on, you know, how, how, I wasn't Orthodox to begin with, which the monks all knew. I was just a visitor. I just described myself as a Christian. And so I go out and I'm sitting at this, and I fell asleep, sort of napping on this stone chair facing the church, little church on the hill. It's a stone courtyard, all stone courtyard, very severe, very severe looking, thousand-year stones, thousand-year walls, a thousand-year throne that I'm, there was only chair, I'd

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  call it, carved in the stone wall.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  I was sitting at it. It reminded me of the scene out of like Conan the Barbarian or something, you know, it really was that kind of a feeling. And with the waves rushing, crashing against the sea, crashing against the walls way below, hundreds of feet below me, you know, and beautiful, just absolutely gorgeous, you know, mesmerizing, balmy day, so I'm just relaxed, sitting there, fall asleep. And that's when I immediately went into this dream state.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  I realized this is one of those, like that's what had started to happen to me. I knew when one of those meant it was not a usual dream. So your description of was it time travel? I mean, I would say that's a possibility. I mean, I don't know, I can't, but I felt like it was something happening.

• 1:11:00Jesse Michels?

  And first you go to 1800s Paris?

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  Yes, I go to 1800 Paris and I, I just walking down these 18th century Paris streets and I'm walking in Le Bravel. I just want to see what's going on. That's kind of a typical me thing. And, and that's when I encounter what turned out to be the Virgin Mary, didn't call herself that, but I just felt, I just felt that without, without an introduction. And this one open door was, door was open and it was like all the others, it had like a waistback, it was soiled condoms and things, you know, and it looked awful, blood on the sheets. And I was thinking, ah, this is awful. And I looked at the woman and she just looked at me with these imploring eyes, just like the suffering of the world was on her, weight on her shoulder. Where, what better place to be to feel that with the exploitation and things of this place?

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  And it just, the gravity of that hit me because I'd also seen a scene where like a rotund priest is. Of course, this is coming unbeknownst to me, you know, kind of at the height of the sex scandals in the Catholic Church and things too. So I don't, I'm not tying these things together, but it's just very depraved. And I felt, I felt the depravity. I felt nauseous in my own dream. And then, yeah, I walk outside the brothel and this guy meet this guy outside. And he says, basically, your odious maximus and go, go atone for your sins, kind of conversation I have with this guy, Harry Hiller, which was one of the characters from, from Herman Hesse's

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  Steppenwolf. And Harry Hiller basically encourages me to go to Monothos to sponge myself or find clarity or salvation or whatever the, whatever I could find.

• 1:12:40Jesse Michels?

  So, okay, so you're in 1800s Paris, you meet Harry Hiller.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Jesse Michels?

  You see this scene and you're confident that this is the Virgin Mary in this brothel because of?

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  It was a conclusion I reached, not at the time, but only after it became a pattern, if that makes sense. So at the time, I wasn't entirely sure who this old woman was, other than she didn't fit. And I could feel the suffering, which became a common, every encounter with the Virgin Mary, there was an element of the weight of her suffering for the world, for the fate of the world, in particular, for the fate of people who are suffering, for the pain and the agony of others. This is the common feeling I had each of the experiences. But I didn't know that at the moment. I just knew that, wow, this is certainly disruptive.

• 1:13:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  You know, so when I continued the dream.

• 1:13:33Jesse Michels?

  Did you feel love coming from her or?

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  I didn't particularly feel love. I felt more pathos.

• 1:13:43Jesse Michels?

  Like, like, like, her ultimate empathy for everything.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:13:47Jesse Michels?

  And all suffering and all beings or something.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  Nothing so much directed towards me. What I, I think I put in my mind more than something she, a vibe she gave was the idea that I, man, I shouldn't be here.

• 1:14:00Jesse Michels?

  Did she say anything to you?

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:14:02Jesse Michels?

  Do you, have you thought of the? Symbolism of her being in a brothel where all this kind of, kind of, you know, corrupt, you know, horrible deeds are being done or whatever. Like, did you, do you think of that as somehow significant?

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Well, yes. I mean, certainly not at that time again, but certainly looking back, I realize how it fits so well into the subsequent encounters and the, the pattern being, okay, you want, you want an image? You want images of what I'm, what I mean by suffering? This is the, this is the image, right? What's, what can be worse? There's very few things that are worse than that. Certainly the Holocaust, and there are things that are worse than what I, what she, she showed me the reaction everyone should have to this, or her reaction to this reality of the world that I was seeing with her at that moment and, and sort of stumbled upon. So then when I went back in time, it became kind of a, then it became kind of a disappearance

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  of time to put me in the right state of mind to do the, the exploration I needed to do at Montalto. So the rest of the dream sequence that I outline in, it's called The Bizarre World of Odysseus Maximus in my book, because it's how bizarre I felt when I knew it was still me, but I'm going now into this, I have to adopt this cover of a character, so to speak, which is a CIA thing anyway, so I should, but it was so, it was so unusual and unique to me that it was really scary. I wasn't sure I could not be that character. I wasn't sure that I'd ever be Rolf again. So then I'm going back in time as I'm traveling, as you would in those days, to Athens and then from Athens to, and with every step I'm taking, the time is going back in time.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  And, and by the time I get to Montalto, it's the capital city, which I had sort of landed in when I came off the boat in real life now, and to where I'd had the dream a couple of days ago getting there, I saw that town again, but back in. Back in the 1500s, you know, and I go there and I present my credentials, so to speak, at the Capitol to say, if you will, the governance people there, including this guy, Monk Gabriel, who was the head.

• 1:16:13Jesse Michels?

  So Harry Hiller is this character that's in 19th century Paris-ish.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  I leave him.

• 1:16:19Jesse Michels?

  You leave, he said, but he says, you are Odious Maximus, you must go to Mount Athos. You go to Mount Athos and then all of a sudden you're like a few hundred years earlier in history. So like 1400s, 1500s.

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:16:32Jesse Michels?

  And.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Trapped up there essentially.

• 1:16:35Jesse Michels?

  Trapped up there. Did, was there a gradient of time moving backwards from the 1800s to the 14 or 1500s? Or like all of a sudden you're in Mount, like when you get to Mount Athos.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  It was a gradient. It was a, it was as if time was evaporating. It was a way like with each step you could like it got, that was what was so, uh, I would say very unnerving was going back in time, but feeling it happening as it's happening. And it's getting, and I was trying to adjust, but it was getting too difficult to do. So I tried to limit any contact with anybody like on a ship or on a coach or as I'm going back because I didn't want anybody saying anything that would think I was some insane person and throw me in some.

• 1:17:18Jesse Michels?

  You also don't want to alter the future forever with changing a variable or something.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  I did not think that, but that's a good thought. I did not think, I remember not thinking anything profound. It was like pure survival. I remember being in pure survival mode, including, uh, I would say my mind. I was, I, I hoped I wasn't losing my mind to the point where, you know, whatever the, the, say, inspiration was to adopt this way of thinking of myself as being a very onerous, bad person, that I would overdo that again. I mean, that wasn't really the point. I kept reassuring myself, but I would have to play this out. So I get up there and I describe this and long and the short of it, the monks take me in, even though they argued against it. But this Gabriel, he saw something in me. He said, we're here to, like Peter said, open our house to those who need it. This, this man needs it. So I get assigned to the monastery at Donatianisio,

• 1:18:08Speaker 03

  which is where I happened to be when I was having the dream.

• 1:18:11Jesse Michels?

  Do all, does all of this feel as real as this interview feels?

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:15Jesse Michels?

  So it feels like. Any sort of real experience that you've had?

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:18:20Jesse Michels?

  It's indistinguishable.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Pretty much. It's, there are things that occasionally in all the dreams, like the, the sadat dream. And I'd had a other, you know, dreams also, which I lay out pretty much all of them that I can remember in, in the book. I had a dream, a basketball game dream even like when I was a teenager. And when I did, I, I knew immediately a qualitative reality in those dreams was close to reality. But I could usually still understand it was a dream. If that makes sense. So in this dream, I still knew I was in a dream. I could still distinguish the Rolf I was from the character going back in time.

• 1:18:59Jesse Michels?

  But otherwise, outside-

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Outside of that, it seemed totally real to the point where I don't think there were historical, like you've seen movies where there things in, in movies that shouldn't be there at a historical time. You know, I didn't see telephones in the 16th century or things you shouldn't see, you know?

• 1:19:15Jesse Michels?

  Were you wearing your clothing from-

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  And it changed. It was changing. It was going back time.

• 1:19:21Jesse Michels?

  So your clothing was becoming more and more appropriate for the time?

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  Well, I also found myself, and I don't remember specifics on this, trying to find more appropriate stuff. So I wouldn't look like a space traveler back in the 17th century. You know, I was trying to like, like a person would do to try to fit in. I was trying to alter my look and things like that. I was getting a beard because I didn't shave, you know? I remember those kinds of details. So when I'm at the monastery, then it got deeper and deeper into what monks do, which I learned a lot about through the dream, but also through what turned out to be two trips there, spending a grand total of a month in Monatos. That's the end, at the end of the story, that's what it consisted of. Because I got, of course, very into this, understanding not just a dream, but then the encounter that followed, which was the idea that-

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  You live a life in a monastery. A lot of people just sort of quickly jump to the conclusion that's world evasion. You just want to avoid the world. You want to go off on yourself. It's very selfish. So I understand people when they say that about monastic lifestyles. I don't feel that in large measure because I had this dream where I experienced it on such an intense level because for some people, it's the only way they can pursue God. It's the only way they can be close to God. It's the only way they can get themselves closer to God. They don't give up on the world in most cases. They're not doing it to avoid the world. They're doing it to get close to God. Sometimes it's a consequence of those other things when you do that. So I felt that. And so when I experienced the life up there was not experiences I had felt spiritually before,

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  which made, again, this was a new reality I was learning from. It wasn't just adapting what I already knew and living it vicariously as a monk. It was something very different. Through the character I became in the monastery, I was growing. I was developing. I became a recluse up there. You know, I learned to fly, you know? And I remember that. And I thought that other people have had the flying experience. That's a different conversation we can have one day because I've had reactions from people who read that part of my book and said, oh, I can, I've done that. I've been able to fly, you know? For me, flying was a manifestation. The more I think about it, I see it as a reward almost of some, in a way.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  A reward you're not asking for, but it's a tribute to opening your mind. And when you're flying, you're spiritually open. You're just in a different state of consciousness than you are when you're just praying, if that makes sense. And what we talked about even right before the interview is what I didn't expect to find was, as I went through the whole experience here, as the flying monk and I burned my hut up there, like all the things a recluse does.

• 1:22:08Jesse Michels?

  Were you doing, you were burning your hut there?

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  Yes, I was, yes.

• 1:22:11Jesse Michels?

  And so this is happening across. Months or days?

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  Well, in, in, in the dream, it's months. In reality, it's the course of the dream, which I, that's, that's easy for me to do years in a dream. But this, in my dream stay, it was weeks, days went to weeks went to months.

• 1:22:29Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. And so you are aware that your reality has drastically shifted from

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:22:37Jesse Michels?

  20th century rolfe.

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:22:39Jesse Michels?

  CIA.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:40Jesse Michels?

  Case officer.

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:41Jesse Michels?

  To, it was trying to catch the spy on Mount Athos to, it's like you entered a portal and you are here for days upon days and you are going to sleep and waking up within this.

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  Yes, within the dream.

• 1:22:54Jesse Michels?

  That is fascinating.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Well, the, the biggest thing about it was I knew at the time I had the dream, as I was dreaming, that I was dreaming and I might not be able to get back. That was the scariest thing was I felt trapped.

• 1:23:08Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  And I wasn't sure I was going to wake up. And, and at one point, um, I told one of the emissaries, so this father Gabriel, who got the kind of note, sent this other young monk called Evagrius, and he would come and meet me. And I remember my encounters with him and he was encouraging me and we were talking all the time. And I remember some of those, I just put a snippets of them in the dream. And I frankly forgot some of them, but I just knew that was really alive. It was my only contact with a human being when I was in reckless stage was when I was doing the flying about. And he told me, yeah, the other monks had seen me and wondered if it was real. So I remember that stuff. It was so, so palpable. But then I of course had three dreams within a dream. And now we're reaching the culmination of the, I would call the fruition of the dream.

• 1:23:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  Point of the dream was what follows. I, the farther I'm getting away from myself, the farther I'm detaching my, my faith in God from a selfish interest in me, that's when I start flying. That's when I start, my spiritual growth is happening when I'm being less selfish, when I'm joining.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  Sort of I call the general universal salvation idea of mankind, if I'd call it that. And the more intense my spiritual experiences were getting it within my dream, to the point then I had three dreams within a dream. And very quickly, because one, and they're very intense. One night I go to sleep in my dream, and I have a dream where I'm in the middle of a big room. And we all have to go pick numbers from what looks like a barber shop, number thing, you pull the number, and I got my number, two digit number. I don't remember the number. It's too bad. It could have been, it would have been great to add to the number collection. I was so frustrated, I forgot the number. But it was a two digit number. And everybody got a two digit number. That's very strange.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  There are way more than 20 or 99 of us here. What's the, what's the, what's the number? Didn't, nobody explained anything. Nobody talked. They were just murmuring, walking around. Then I, then I woke up. The barber shop clanged with the number. I pulled the number up. I woke up from the dream, and within a dream. It startled me. So then in my dream, the next day, I go to bed, I go to sleep in my hut, and I have another dream. It's a second dream. Now in that dream, now I'm standing in the room again. It's a big round room with seven doors.

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• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  And I'm looking at my number, and I just had this wild thought, which I had never thought religiously, like until the dream. I thought, man, what a bummer. I mean, we're all gonna go through these doors, I guess, and these numbers must be, and we were wearing clothes. They issued clothes. And I had fine clothes, I remember, with brown suede shoes.

• 1:26:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Speaker 03

  And some people were with rags, and I saw an old woman in the corner. Who again, I thought, is this the Virgin Mary, the same woman I met in the, in, in, in Paris? I, I didn't know. It's like, I don't want to overstate it. But I thought, is that her? And, uh, I said, oh, I'll see what happened. I kept my eye on her, but I didn't want to go up to anybody or say anything. It was like, everything in this, I was just like, trying to survive. It's really, I was trying to survive, even in my dream, within a dream. And then the doors opened. Seven doors opened and we had to walk through the doors. And I remember thinking, the heretical thought, like in a way of doubting God again. What if my number's like right under the ones that are going to heaven, I'm going to hell? I mean, imagine missing by one number.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  But it's kind of stupid thought you like, if the situation were real, that's a real thing. If there's such a thing as heaven and hell, right? Which I've never believed after this and other things, that there's such a literal thing. As that I think you have in hell is in your mind. But partially because of this. So then the, boom, wake up again, startled by this. The door is groaning and having to walk through them. And then the third dream is walking through the door. And I remember it very carefully, particularly I reread it, you know, last night, actually, where I'm standing at the beach and it brought it all back to me really clearly. There was a dark, dark night, not a star in the sky, I remember that. But the sun, it was bright light. I thought, well, the sun's not up.

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  But it was a bright light on the other side of the, and I remember thinking of the contradiction that the sun's not out. What's that light? It wasn't the moon. There's something very bright on the other side of the sea shore. And it was like a river kind of thing, a river, like a wide river. And it was churning, dark. And I could tell, though, we were all being encouraged. We knew, no one was saying anything, announcing anything. But you, you had to walk across the river to the other side. Which I took, at that time, I thought, this must be salvation, the salvation, test of salvation for all of us. And I'm walking on the top of the water, like Christ, you know, in Galilee, you know? And I'm thinking, oh, this can't hold me with my brown suede shoes. And

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  I but it started to work. And I said, well, if I put all my effort into my faith, maybe I'll make it to the other side. And then people are, I heard plump, like it was a terrible sound like somebody going into the water and being swept away in the depths. You couldn't see below except like an inch below your shoes. And I was wondering, stupidly thinking my shoes are getting wet. I remember thinking that I was like, oh, these shoes are going to get ruined. They're going to be stained.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  And and then, you know, sure enough, I get halfway across and think I could do this. I can make this. And then the old woman is right next to me. And she stumbles and loses her step. And I instinctively just tried to grab her arm to hold her up. And we both went swept away and I woke up.

• 1:29:19Jesse Michels?

  The Virgin Mary.

• 1:29:20Speaker 03

  Well, I don't.

• 1:29:21Jesse Michels?

  What you interpret.

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  What I interpret, probably, because it tied into the but then here the final scene is that I wake up. Like this is the I'm done with the dream. That was getting swept away was the final part of the dream. So I wake up at the throne sitting there and and I realized I saw a light in the church. This was like this from from distance, maybe we're gonna say six, seven yards or whatever it is, 15 feet to your windows over there. Right. That's where the wall of the church was with the windows, stained glass kind of windows I had. And I saw this red light moving along the thing. And I got up out of the chair and moved toward the window

• 1:30:04Speaker 03

  and it gone all the way up to the front, you know, of the church, the altar, and was sitting there burning, you know, red. And now I think, but the lights were related, the light and the the red light, of course, of the

• 1:30:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  model and the red light of Mary. So I attached the all the Marys together that in the dream, this must be this. But I but to be clear, I had never seen the Virgin Mary. So I saw the dream image of her. And then I saw the light, which I took to be that I took that light immediately when I saw it. I talked to a monk the next day. I said, I saw this mysterious light in the church after it was closed and it moved from here to here. I thought he would just say, oh. Were you dreaming something? I said, well, I was awake, I said, but he said, no, that he said this, it was like, his name was Monk Demathais, and I ended up going back to, I'll seek him out, and he ended up taking me back to his cell that they call it, where they live, their little like

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  bunk in a stone place, really, really austere, you know, rugged kind of living conditions, and gave me, he had like 10 books on his shelf, he gave me three of them about Athos, because he said, I just want you to read more about this, because this seemed like you saw that for a reason, he goes, there are monks who have said they've seen the, this is the light of the Virgin Mary going down the thing, and it seems like you might have seen that, I don't understand it. He was very confused by it, because he said, you're not even, he even tested me, he said, you're not even orthodox, all right? He said, no, no, we went through that, he said, well, I don't know, but I'm not going to doubt it, and that's when he gave me, and I kept those books for, I still have those books, and I read them.

• 1:31:39Jesse Michels?

  When you wake up and you're at the church and you see the red light, and maybe that's somewhat symbolic of the Virgin Mary, is that in 19, is that 1990s, or is that, okay?

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  That's 1991.

• 1:31:52Jesse Michels?

  Okay, so you basically, you go back to 1800s Paris, then you go to Mount Athos, Mount Athos is days turned into months, you are Odious Maximus, this monk, who goes through all these kind of ascetic protocols, and you know, you're fasting, and you say you're burning your huts and stuff?

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  Then I finally requested permission to go away from the monastery and just be a recluse in the wild, in the wilderness, you know, like, there's a, there's a tradition there, some monks go out and they're just separate themselves from everybody, even their fellow monks, and the only time they see their anybody is they come in to get provisions, or medical emergency or something, I mean, they don't completely abandon all ties to civilization, if you call that civilization, they just limit it as much as possible to get even closer and closer, and in fact, I ended up meeting a recluse, who I feel was like kind of a full circle experience, that I actually met a real recluse, the second time I went to Mount Athos, and who gave me a book, and tremendous conversation we had about.

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  The apocalypse. I mean, here, normal get together. I'm sitting on a curb and, you know, with this guy and talking about things and he's asking me who I was and where I worked and I have a family back in this thing. And he said, I haven't seen anybody in a few weeks. This is kind of nice. He was carrying bags of, um, he's bearing some, some lettuce and one bag, plastic bag and the other bag he's carrying a baguette, you know, he's going back to the wild, into the woods. But anyway, he stopped and chatted me up. And the next thing you know, we're talking for a couple of hours on, turned out into the apocalypse and everything else. It was amazing. Like we both had studied the same books about this, but that's, that's aside. That's just the idea of what it meant when I went into this room. It was almost like I needed this

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  full circle, which is so much of the story for me where the things are explained later. So when I, at the time I saw the light of the Virgin Mary, I mean, I honestly didn't think that much of it. It was a light, maybe it was a light, even the image of the old woman, maybe it was her, maybe it was not her. That, so I had all those things, you know, the dream itself is the way you describe and that has its own, it's its own story in a way. But it wasn't until two more things that happened with the Virgin Mary that it all came together.

• 1:34:09Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. It's fascinating. And you also then come to realize that there had been Virgin Mary apparitions all over Mount Athos?

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  Not at this point.

• 1:34:20Jesse Michels?

  Okay, that was a belater, you're right.

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  I had talked to people there later, everything was later, uh, including the story of the Virgin Mary being on the mountain that I'd learned and wasn't until 2006 or seven, 2007, that I heard some of the backstory of the history and lore that included the site. And that's, so I'll save that because at this point, I don't know any of this, including, I wasn't ready at that point, prepared in the sense of thinking it would happen to me. So there was no predisposition, for example, to actually meet the Virgin Mary or understand what, you know, like what has happened historically with the Virgin Mary. Some people ask me that, well, when you started to have your Virgin Mary experiences, were they in any way because you read about, you

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  know, lords or Fatima and all this? They, well, I honestly knew nothing about any of that at this point. And this was 1991.

• 1:35:13Jesse Michels?

  What did you find out later in 2006 and seven about? The Virgin Mary showing up at Mount Athos. Cause I think it's very fascinating that there's some historical corroboration on other people are experiencing.

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:35:26Jesse Michels?

  What you're experiencing spiritually in this specific location.

• 1:35:31Speaker 03

  Well, I find out that there's at least a legend lore that they they have at Mount Athos that the Virgin Mary, after Christ was crucified and rose from the dead, was traveling along with other Christians at the time or apostles around in ships and of course, they were all based in Corinth and places like that. So she was on a ship on its way to see of all things, John at Potmos and also to go to Cyprus because Lazarus supposedly fled Israel when the Romans started looking for him because they wanted to execute him as being this person who rose from the dead, a very disruptive idea that Jesus going around

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  raising people from the dead, right? It was the reason why the, both the Jews and the Romans saw the early Christians, they called the way at that point, they weren't called Christians, as being the saboteurs disruptive to, to order and society. So they're looking, hunting him down actually. So he fled apparently. And I didn't believe that story either until I believe, I didn't like, maybe it's true, maybe it's not. And there's actually, if anyone, anybody listeners goes to Nicacia, Cyprus, I urge you to, to take a look at the Lazarus's tomb, which is supposedly in Cyprus was where he went and became the first bishop, starting the church in, in, in there. So Mary was supposedly traveling

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  on a ship and there was a big storm, which that part of the Aegean is famous for that. Going all the way back to the Spartans and the Athens, having huge summer storm that ruined fleets and everything, shipwrecked she fleets. And she got blown on the island of Mount Athos and there's a monastery on, placed on the site where she supposedly landed, went ashore called Ivaron.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  On the, it's on the west coast of this peninsula at that monastery in the south part of monastery. And I've been to that monastery, but it wasn't until this 2005, 2006 period, when a monk told me the whole story about this little icon in a hut right on the shore, that this hut, this is supposedly the spot where she landed at that time.

• 1:37:43Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  Wow, this has got way more. And of course, I've sent my book and gotten letters back from the Vatican and also from, from the Orthodox Church hierarchy in, in Istanbul, Turkey. And the letter I got from the Orthodox Church was really priceless. It said, basically, you know, we wish you had become one of us and still join the Catholics, but we still consider you, you know, a friend, a friend of ours. And your book is in our library and His Eminence has read it and, and all that. Because I really appreciated that. Because I, I've said to many people, the accident of me being Catholic or Orthodox is not what any of this is about. Right? And I think they appreciated that. Mary belongs to the world, not to Catholics

• 1:38:27Speaker 03

  or Orthodox. Orthodox and Monathos, they consider her the whole object of the veneration of that the mountain is dedicated to, which is why women to this day can't go, and I think this is misguided, just to put that out there, but women to this day cannot go on Monathos, step foot on Monathos, because it's dedicated completely to Mary at the exclusion of all women. As I said, this is not, I think this is veneration that goes too far. But the point of it is to emphasize how fundamental Mary's history and role is.

• 1:39:04Jesse Michels?

  Have other visitors or pilgrims experienced Mary that explicitly?

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

• 1:39:10Jesse Michels?

  Just like you there at Monathos specifically?

• 1:39:12Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. And, and I can't like enumerate, you know, their examples, but I know it's not a unique phenomenon. So much so that. I would say what's was like I'm having with you, Jesse. This is highly unusual to have an easy conversation on these subjects. Right? You can do that. Most people can't. What's been very gratifying is that I never bring it up, the subjects, any of these subjects almost, except the, just, you know, obviously the intelligence and all history and all that I do, but any of the religious or focus on God with anybody who doesn't bring it up. And then I usually bring it up and I found some very fascinating takes or additions that

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  people have to make on what I've said that they've experienced, like really close friend of mine would never expected this came to me especially to say, he's had very vivid dreams of flying after reading about that part of my book. And I'm, it's, it's very gratifying to hear. I've also had more basic things of people saying, you know, why would you join a church with all this that you describe yourself in your book is having all this sex abuse and this and that. And I said, well, I said, I never give up on the church. Like I have never give up on your faith, but those kinds of conversations have been the great, the great gifts of writing, writing, writing the book.

• 1:40:33Jesse Michels?

  So while you're at Mount Athos and you're this character, Odius Maximus, what do you feel like it is? So you feel like it's your mission to get closer to God by sort of detaching yourself from the contemporary world in some ways? And so what are you doing on a day to day basis? You're fasting and you're praying or what's your, what's your day to day life like? And again, this feels as real as you waking up, you know, in, in, you know, Maryland where you live, right?

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I remember feeling a bit of a contradiction of feelings. On the one hand, being there and doing things like tending to the grapes and cleaning the dishes, you know, until I become a recluse, then it's just trying to survive in the wild and, you know, that kind of thing, doing like continual prayer or that kind of thing. But up until that point, I'm thinking, man, this is, I'm also miserable. I want to go home. Hmm. So I never lost the feeling I wanted out.

• 1:41:36Jesse Michels?

  Do you feel stuck?

• 1:41:37Speaker 03

  I felt stuck. Yeah, as I said that a few times, but I felt very stuck when I was in the reckless phase, but I understood without any, like, there was no messaging or voicing, or which I've never heard, by the way, with mystical experiences, any like audio. It's interesting, real audio, real talking words. But it was the idea that I needed to do this to go home. I needed to go through these different levels of this experience in the dream before I could. No one said that. But as I knew it, I knew that until I had gone through the different levels of what was expected, I couldn't go. It was almost like it was a spiritual training. And the Jesuits call it their spiritual exercises that they go through, is this was much more intense than the dream.

• 1:42:22Jesse Michels?

  How old were you as Rolf when you went back, when you time traveled as Odious Maximus? How old were you?

• 1:42:29Speaker 03

  In my real life?

• 1:42:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, in your real life.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  So it's 1991 and I'm born in 54. So it's what?

• 1:42:37Jesse Michels?

  Thirty seven.

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, thirty seven.

• 1:42:39Jesse Michels?

  Interesting.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40Jesse Michels?

  And so you're you're communing with Gabriel and the other monks as well? Did you ever tell them, hey, like, I'm kind of trapped here?

• 1:42:50Speaker 03

  Oh, I the only, yeah, no.

• 1:42:51Jesse Michels?

  I actually exist in the future.

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  No, no, it was like a cover. I was living my cover until at the very end, near the end, after, you know, in one of the times I wore the brown, the brown suede shoes in my dream within a dream, and then they were suddenly under my hut. So they're in the dream now. They they had gone from the dream within the dream to somehow appearing in my dream. And that was very discombobulating, right? And and at that point, when Evagrius came back on another to check, check on me, make sure I was had plunged off a cliff or something, I told him. I told him who I really was. And and I remember the reaction. I had to, by the way, I never.

• 1:43:35Speaker 03

  Knew exactly all some of the things I said, but I knew that all of it was consistent. So I had to create dialogue with Evagrius on this scene in my book that I don't remember exactly.

• 1:43:46Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  What the dialogue was.

• 1:43:48Jesse Michels?

  As with waking memory.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  Right, so I did, I did with my best. So I don't want anybody out there to think I've got this photographic memory or anything, but it's very close.

• 1:43:56Jesse Michels?

  What, what did you roughly?

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  The main thing I remember that I based the dialogue I created on was, to be true to that, was the idea that Evagrius was wise beyond his years. He was a young spry little monk, wise beyond his years. And when I told him the reality, I did it because I knew he was wise and I, I, I needed somebody to tell. And it was him. He was a someone I could trust. And, and he reacted in a way that, you know, redeemed my, my idea that this was a good time to do it by, by basically reacting as I would have hoped, which is I hope you get back to your, your family and, and, you know, keep praying to God and God will take

• 1:44:41Speaker 03

  care of you in a way that I real, I suddenly felt a sense of peace, knowing this wasn't going to go without somebody knowing what had happened to me. And maybe I will get back because I think this guy would offer me some wisdom and insight into that, and he did.

• 1:44:59Jesse Michels?

  Did he freak out at all and say, what, you exist in the future?

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 1:45:04Jesse Michels?

  Did you say, yeah, there's this place, it's called America or the United States, and it ends up breaking off from, you know, England in 1776? Did you have to like go through any of that? Or he just kind of took it on its more spiritual dimension or something and kind of ran with it?

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  Well, Jesse, there was one, there was one thing, no, I didn't do any of that, but I made a big slip up early on that I realized and nobody called me on it. I think they knew there was something really wrong. Going back to my presentation of my credentials, so to speak, to Gabriel, when I said I was Odious Maximus and all this stuff, not who I was. And, but I did say something really absurd, where I said, you know, I'm an American mystic. Cause I knew I'd had to present myself as a mystic because I wouldn't be able to go through any grilling on doctrine or theology or stuff they might expect. So I had to play the mystic card. And then you maybe don't, or you can grunt, or I was gonna fake it in a way that I knew I couldn't

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  if I had actually explained my knowledge of liturgy or, or anything else. And they, they saw through it and he did, but he had pity, right? That was the earlier description. But I said at that time, I'm an American mystic, thinking I came from this continent. I call them, that didn't exist, right? At least in their minds, nobody said anything. Uh, and so when I presented the story at the end of my real name and future, I'm from the future to this monk, he seemed to take it all in stride. And it's really interesting because if there are people, I think, who understand the notion of future, time travel, there's no super religion, no super, um, spiritual person in, at least

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  in the Christianity, uh, I think all of them, honestly, and the monotheistic religions, who aren't able to separate time from discussion in a way where they're comfortable with the idea of past, future. Cause for one thing, the most credible, credible, um, witnesses to what's going to come and what the past means are the prophets. Right? It's Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations, John, it's, it's Christ who talked about the raising of Jerusalem. It's the history of the church is in question when people, in fact, but even Christ himself

• 1:47:29Speaker 03

  said he can't predict when the future ends or that's up to God. So there are limits and I don't look at prophets as soothsayers in the, you know, sort of Shakespearean tradition of Ides of March, or no, prophets are those who concede into the future what happens, they don't influence it. If that makes sense.

• 1:47:51Jesse Michels?

  Do you think right now, as we speak, Rolf is also Odious Maximus, living in 15th century Mount Athos, Greece, trying to, you know, commune with God?

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. That's those. See, now we're getting into fun stuff. But, but I mean, everything I've said is a product of.

• 1:48:11Jesse Michels?

  You could speculate, you know?

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  All right. And I will. And I'll just say as a preface that everything I say on this subject is not, is really philosophical science. It's, it's, it's drawn from my greatest love of intellectually in the world, which is philosophy, which is what? The search, the love of wisdom, right? The love of knowledge. And, and so in that spirit, I, I think that

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  it's possible. And my experiences bear this out for me, that the dreams we create are as real as the physical reality we're in, which means the answer to your question would be yes. Because if I dreamt it and I created it.

• 1:48:50Jesse Michels?

  And it felt real. It didn't feel.

• 1:48:52Speaker 03

  Felt real and I created it. Now, the more you get into whether you're taking a trip, taking a trip, so to speak, in reality versus, like, I make this great distinction, which I'm not sure is as great a distinction as bright lines as I make it, between when I met the Virgin Mary and when I've had interactions. Just like when you pray to God, you, you think you're getting responses and telling versus actually like meeting God.

• 1:49:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. But let's, let's go, go a little deeper into this Odious Maximus example. Do you think that that is a real historical figure?

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know he is. That's, that was one of the ironies. So to my great shock, great shock. This was like a wonderful shock. I went, when I went back to Athos in, so Mary, one of the things Mary said to me at the end of the experience in Paris in 1998, I neglected to mention at the first iteration. She said, we will meet again, like a reassurance, we will meet again. So I thought, oh, this is so great. You know, because this is like, so this is the highlight of my life kind of thing. And.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  Part of that would be come back and visit me at Monathos again where it all started. So it took me a long time between 1998, took me about seven years to go back. Seven years, that is interesting. And I went back to Monathos. And back at the holy mountain, only because I felt the Virgin Mary would now be my tour guide. So I did something kind of extraordinary. I got the Greeks to allow me. I knew the, I was still like with CIA, like associated with CIA. I was at Department of Energy at that time, by the way. Uh, head of intelligence there, but I still had all my contacts and friends at CIA, including the guy who was head of our office in Athens, right? And I lined it up with him. He's a close friend of mine and he's also, interestingly enough, a religious scholar as CIA officer.

• 1:50:41Speaker 03

  But he lined me up with a month-long visa. Now normally someone like me, I could only get three days and I got one and I'd never get another one. But he had his contacts and they explained my past and they were like, oh, this good stuff. And, and I got a month. So I knocked on the door at Karyas. I feel like, I feel a little bit like,

• 1:51:01Speaker 03

  Alice in Wonderland or something and, and sort of my mentality, right? Going back and just like, I'm just gonna soak it all in and I felt guided the whole time. And unlike most people, I didn't have to register what monastery I went to, what nights. I'd just go one of the 20 monasteries and they have a number of what they call skeets. Skeets are like miners. They're not considered monasteries. They're one or two monks there and they're safeguarding a specific tradition or history of Monathos. So for example, was one, and I wandered and ran in these things. It's a huge peninsula if you look on the map. But I was wandering around and running these things like I was being guided. And I felt like I was going from place to place, showing up unannounced, spending a night, going off into the woods. By the way, just as a hiker adventurer, it's like almost one of the most wonderful places on the planet.

• 1:51:47Speaker 03

  So I end up at Saint Ansgie, which is where Saint Anne's named in honor of Mary's mother. Anne, I didn't even know that historical fact at that time. Now, later, I would, many things. So I got into biblical archaeology and lived in the Middle East. I got into all of this stuff. And just as an aside, when I didn't, I didn't just do biblical archaeology of meaning Christian. I did Old Testament, Judaism, Islam.

• 1:52:12Jesse Michels?

  Did you try to find certain?

• 1:52:14Speaker 03

  Oh, I tried to find, I tried to find all kinds of, but anyway, at Saint Ansgie, they, you know, claimed to have her bones, some of her bones or whatever. So, I mean, I'm kind of fascinated with that stuff, too. So I, and then the next day I take off from there. I said, well, I've been introduced to Mary's mother. That would be something she would want. So I take off from there and I go down the coastline and I catch a boat, go around the corner, the, the horn of Monothos. And I end up at this bottom of this pier with a big walk up a side of a mountain. And coincidence, right? Coincidence is this monk walks by with the donkey who's gonna go up there. Little monk and I'm got my big backpack and so come there a month, I got a big pack back, one backpack for the month, but that's, you know, I got everything in it.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  And he goes, hey, why don't you take my donkey to the top of the mountain? I said, this poor donkey, you sure you want to do it? He goes, oh, he's used to it. So the guy just slaps him in the rear and off we go. And I'm sitting straddling this donkey up this cliff afraid. Like, I wouldn't want to let the monk down. I was afraid I was gonna go off the side and off the, into a cliff and abyss, you know? Is that kind of a thing? And then it starts raining and it's getting very steady, donkey just up the mountain. Get to the top of the mountain. There's nobody there. There are no pilgrims. There's nobody there. I walk into, into the entrance of the skeet.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  And this guy comes out, greets me, young, young monk, probably, you know, in their 30s. He's the guy caretaker there. And he goes, let me tell you this history of this skeet is called the skeet Kaflo Slovakia. Slovakia. I said, oh, that's hard to say. It's a mouthful. He goes, yeah, this is named in, in the honor of one of the saints we have here. Saint Kaflo was known as Maximus the monk. He was not, not Odius, Maximus. And he was known as a flying monk and he burned his huts and he had these miracles and they were sightings of him flying. I almost lost. I mean, I lost, not lost, it's not the right expression, but I was, had a like gasping for air. Just that the thought.

• 1:54:18Speaker 03

  I hadn't made this up.

• 1:54:20Jesse Michels?

  So crazy.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  This had a historical connection and I was there. Now, normally you could go a month in a monothes, you never run into this place. But here I was, standing right at the front door, so to speak.

• 1:54:32Jesse Michels?

  Well, you were, you were meant to have that run in.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  Well, by now, I'm not doubting things like that. You can take, by the way, I don't want people go now, think everything that happens to them is not by chance. And, but you also have to be attuned to the possibility, things aren't coincidence. It's not believing everything is not a coincidence. It's getting the right. Being able to make a right judgment of when things aren't just coincidence.

• 1:54:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, like discernment is.

• 1:54:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:55Jesse Michels?

  Viewing patterns and synchronicities as.

• 1:54:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:54:58Jesse Michels?

  Possibly very meaningful and being attuned to them, but not always like.

• 1:55:02Speaker 03

  Not always.

• 1:55:03Jesse Michels?

  Taking them at face value. And, but I, I mean, yeah, you could literally right now, Google Maximus Katsokovia. And this is this flying monk from Mount Athos. And he was known for burning his huts. And so it's, it is fascinating that you went back in time. Not having any, you had no context.

• 1:55:23Speaker 03

  No idea.

• 1:55:25Jesse Michels?

  And then you, you find real historical corroboration for this through happenstance. And this is just online, like people can search this open source. That's, that's pretty remarkable and interesting. Do you think this was, you know, people talk about like past life regressions? Do you think this was like a past life for you or?

• 1:55:45Speaker 03

  Well, I don't, I haven't really thought of that. I don't think of. I don't, I don't say. I don't believe in reincarnation, but nor do I reject, reject it. I just, I mean, I don't know. I don't have, I do, I do have a fairly strong.

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  Discipline in submitting. Everything we've talked about to a high degree of scrutiny. To the point where, and we, you and I have talked about this, where sometime I'm reticent to say the full. To provide the full effect of what I think I've learned or what I experienced, because I don't, I don't want to, the one thing I can't do. Is mistake. Any of this. Cause that judgment. Comes down on me from God.

• 1:56:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Speaker 03

  And God knows. So you, you go through all this trouble to tell a story about your devotion to God and how you fulfill your destiny as being. To fulfill God's will and do the right thing and do right by people, which is what it all boils down to, really does.

• 1:56:45Speaker 03

  I can't misspeak on that. I, you know, so I, I'm not going to inflate or, or add to an experience. So the idea of like, I, I love exploring with you. I'm just being careful for your listeners and others. I, I, we could talk about that over a beer or something. I go far, way farther. I, I don't know. I, I, I think there's evidence that out there that's like all the things, all the phenomena you research, Jesse. It should all be researched. We should be very cherry of drawing conclusions to things that are, that we don't have really solid evidence for, but nor should we be so, so respectful of conventional wisdom.

• 1:57:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  Science that we don't explore it.

• 1:57:26Jesse Michels?

  And you should also give yourself the grace to speculate. A, have, you know, everybody has a game of telephone they're playing in their mind where they, they don't remember anything accurately that's ever happened to them one to one perfectly. Uh, but also the ability to speculate, which I know you do, but uh,

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  I do, I do. And the thing about these experiences that I'm, I've described is that they do form a pattern and the pattern becomes a major part of their authentication, you know, as a, as gen, being genuine. Truth related things, not truth seeking, uh, rather than self-focused or self fulfilling. And I think part of the dreams at Monathos that I experienced was a necessary part of my own, um, faith-based development that I would, the more you,

• 1:58:18Speaker 03

  the more you discuss or try to convey a belief in God, the more you have to remove yourself as the object of your intentions. This is one of the most important things I can say. If you're, uh, you know, one of the apostles who followed, and I'm not, putting myself on any level with the people I'll describe, you have to be willing to be a martyr to, to pull that truth forward and become part of human history because God needed, Christ needed.

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  Them to go out as they did all over the world. Uh, in the way they did, and they needed to, in a way, the, one of the proofs they were willing to do is lay down their own lives for, for the truth. And it's easy to say, lay down your life for the truth, but you know, it's a harder thing to do it. And the other thing is to not do it for their own benefit, because you can even lay your life down for the truth because you think it's to your benefit, but it's not even your goal. At some point, you try to eliminate yourself, the, the object, the paragraphs I wrote of my time at Monothos in my dream, I tried to be very, very careful to describe the essence of what I was experiencing in the dream, which was this process of shedding myself.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  It's the reason when I read Meister Eckhart or somebody like that, he talks about looking down at God, not up. It's, it's a psychological thing, you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The more you can remove yourself from any honor or glory in faith, the closer, the more responsibility God will give you, if that makes sense, to promote the faith, because it can't be about you.

• 1:59:53Jesse Michels?

  And there's a, yeah, well said. There's a Yale professor, he's very well respected, uh, religious studies professor named Carlos Ayer. He wrote a book called They Flew, and it's all about flying saints and monks and Saint Joseph, the, the divine, Saint Joseph of Cupertino is probably the most famous example. I think he was 16th century. You have Teresa Vila, who also seemed to experience, um, you know, bilocation and all these sort of other paranormal things, even Saint Francis of Assisi, by some accounts, might have levitated. And so this is actually, and this guy came, went into this research thinking, oh, you know, this must have been written about sort of historically in this sort of metaphorical way.

• 2:00:38Jesse Michels?

  And he came out of it being like, no, there, there are enough, there's enough eyewitness testimony around these flying saints, uh, to, to call it history. And it's well beyond the threshold of evidence we'd need to say that like, the war of 1812 was fought or whatever. And, and he, I think he truly believes that. And, uh, you know, I have a friend named Diana Pasulka, is a religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington. She's gone very deep on Saint Joseph of Cupertino, and she has gone through a lot of his files, and she agrees with that, so. And it's it's across, like you said, it's across different religions. So maybe this is a real phenomenon where you do shed the baggage of individual ego and you you become one with

• 2:01:21Jesse Michels?

  God and you and you fly. There's even, in fact, Jeffrey Kreipel, who's a Religious Studies professor at Rice University in Houston, he was giving a lecture on flying saints at MIT.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 2:01:35Jesse Michels?

  And a guy who I've met, actually, who runs Revolutionary Technologies at Skunk Works. It's their most advanced R and D division, obviously, of Lockheed Martin, and he's running their most advanced R and D division of Skunk Works. He attended the lecture and was very interested in flying saints.

• 2:01:55Speaker 03

  That's so great.

• 2:01:56Jesse Michels?

  It's interesting.

• 2:01:57Speaker 03

  That's so great.

• 2:01:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think there's any question that it, once you start believing in certain mystical experiences, either because you've experienced them yourselves, or you've heard such compelling tales. Like, I read Virgin Mary, which I didn't know, as I stress a lot, really, the history of those appearances. And now, of course, I sort of study them to look at the similarities, to hear the different descriptions, see how close they were to mine. And then it was very reassuring as I see a sort of so many similarities and commonalities. But the point is, to your explaining, I, yeah, you got to be willing to believe all kinds of manifestations, what I would call the holy, meaning things that are not of human construction

• 2:02:42Speaker 03

  in our, in our, whether it's our minds, or even what we call the laws of physics, they come from something else. What's the physics of that? Or where is that? The where might even be, you know, not, not, not a real question, because it may not be anywhere in that sense. We understand location, right? Because what's location outside of distance and move motion? And it's really nothing, right? So is it over, under, or side? I'm sure it's relevant. But then you're getting closer to all the mystics. Because when they get together, I've read, you know, some, some really cool stuff, and I'd love to be in one of those gatherings. When Merton used to have them in Asia, and you had Buddhist mystics, and you had Islamic

• 2:03:23Speaker 03

  mystics and poets, Hafiz, for example, one of my favorite, talking about his love of God, and the heretics who were burned and things for going too far with things that were mystical. They couldn't help themselves because they were just devoted to the truth. Their crime is always was why Elijah was sawed in half or this is is is speaking truth to people don't want to hear it.

• 2:03:48Speaker 00

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• 2:04:19Speaker 03

  Or sounding enigmatic because their prophecies or their what they see in the future don't accord with the conventional wisdom of the day. That's usually the problem. So.

• 2:04:31Jesse Michels?

  Is there some version of that you think you have some truth that from all of these mystical experiences you've come back with that the average person might have kind of an allergic reaction to or might not want to hear might be an uncomfortable truth?

• 2:04:44Speaker 03

  Well, I think I think frankly, an average person is probably uncomfortable. All of this.

• 2:04:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  Right? I mean, let's be honest, right? And this, the idea, well, who do you think you are? It starts with things like that. It's and it's the mistake, of course, is over over interpretation or look, because I've realized also, this is just something I've learned. Because I continue to occasionally have enigmatic dreams. I don't mean anything as vivid as in the past, but with age is less and fewer and fewer, which I, when I was living in the Middle East, I once went to my Jesuit priest friend, friend more than any more than a spiritual advisor and said, yeah, I just don't know what my purpose is anymore. Now I'm not meeting the meeting Virgin Mary. I said, I don't want to sound, you know, like I should be meeting Virgin Mary, but I sure miss it.

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  And he goes, well, have you tried praying to her? I said, well, I don't really pray to the Virgin Mary. I feel her presence. But I pray to God and I pray to, you know, Jesus Christ. That's it. I don't pray to other people or other things. But he said, well, you can pray, but just let's don't get hung up on the word. You can interact, you can talk. And so I asked, I said, well, you know, Mary, what?

• 2:05:53Speaker 03

  What's my, why am I here? Like, why I'm in the Middle East? I have the sense I was praying or thinking that there's a reason I'm here. And then you brought me here because why would we be here? And I was spending all my time in five years in the Middle East, 2011 to 16, spending all my time on the road going, I did biblical archaeology. I did, you know, went, went on tour. I went all over everywhere, many times over. Then later on, you know, in Saudi Arabia, et cetera. And I said, there's got to be a reason for this. So I used to say, just, just tell me so I know what I should expect, kind of thing. And got back kind of a, again, nothing verbal or just a, an answer, which was, you're here to be here. And it put me at ease.

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  It was the idea, okay, this is almost like, I don't need to overthink this.

• 2:06:43Jesse Michels?

  I think in other messages, she says to you, don't strive, don't try, don't reach.

• 2:06:49Speaker 03

  This was in, well, 1998 was when I, seven years after I met her at Monothos, I met her in Paris, met the Virgin Mary. So that, none of this discussion would be occurring if I hadn't actually met the Virgin Mary. And we call the apparition, and I mean the Virgin Mary. So I had a, was in Paris on a work trip for CIA. I was doing actually Russian things. I was heading up a lot of our Russian, CIA's Russian activity at the time, 1998. And so I'm in Paris for those discussions with one other colleague. And we both went, you know, we, we signed up at a boutique

• 2:07:30Speaker 03

  hotel, five minute walk from Arc de Triomphe, kind of, you know, place. And no, not from Arc de Triomphe, from, from the American Embassy, down in the southern part of the, that lane, Arc de Triomphe, down there, Hotel Crillon area. And we're in the, I'm in the hotel, it's a nice little room, and it had a bed with a old fashioned hotel, really old, and it had a table in front of me and had a light switch on the wall, but small room, typical French style. And as I went to bed, thinking nothing in particular, except maybe my last thoughts before going to sleep, was going through my notes in my mind of what we were going to raise the next day. And as I

• 2:08:11Speaker 03

  like to joke, I didn't have any weird food or anything else. And went to sleep and immediately was there, like in one of those dreams again.

• 2:08:21Speaker 03

  And I knew it right away, but it was a dream. I knew I was dreaming. So I'm by a riverbank. So I'm thinking of the river dream from way back, which was a more raging river. This is a nice, gentle, almost stream type river. And I'm sitting at a riverbank of grass, lush grass. It's beautiful day. Gambal me, nice weather. I'm sitting on the top of the little mound that goes in, goes down into the stream. And there's nobody around and I'm just thinking, just relaxing. And then an old woman comes dressed in a brown, uh, brown cloak with a hood up. And sits almost within touching distance, but just outside my reach.

• 2:09:04Speaker 03

  And sits there and stares, looks ahead too. And I, I didn't want to disturb her. So I didn't like introduce myself or say anything. I just thought, well, maybe wait for her to say hi or something. I won't do it. And so we're just sitting there and then it starts sprinkling. And it was the sun stayed up. The sun didn't go away. So I thought, oh, it's just a little sprinkle when the sun's out. And it's as it's hitting my skin, I remember hitting my arm and hands first. I see brown, like oozing brown dirt.

• 2:09:35Speaker 03

  And I thought, wow, this is really kind of strange. And then I looked at, see what reaction the woman was having to this strange rain. And I, at that time she went, turned towards me and I felt this kind of ease, I felt really at ease and I fell kind of backwards, like almost like, whoa, into her arms.

• 2:10:03Speaker 03

  And then I realized it was a Virgin Mary. And I thought, at that moment, I thought, okay, it's a dream. And I think this rain is like, I don't know, purifying me or something. I just had that weird thought. So then I wake up. So I wake up in my room. And I get up to turn on the light because I need to clear my head. You know, it's very jarring. It was very jarring in a nice way, but very jarring.

• 2:10:29Jesse Michels?

  How'd you know it was the Virgin Mary in the dream?

• 2:10:31Speaker 03

  I just knew it then.

• 2:10:32Jesse Michels?

  You just knew.

• 2:10:32Speaker 03

  I just knew that was Virgin Mary. Unlike the other things I said.

• 2:10:35Jesse Michels?

  Where you weren't as sure.

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  Where I wasn't as sure. This I knew right away. This was a Virgin Mary. Because I had had the one experience too in Portugal where I met the Virgin Mary, but not in flesh and in the mind kind of thing. So this was like completely normal to me now.

• 2:10:49Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:10:50Speaker 03

  The dream that I would have a dream like this. It was not no longer some, maybe what all this was is preparation, right? Because all along the way, I was getting more and more used to the idea this wasn't strange.

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  None of this was strange. This was all part of a sort of a process in a way. So I get up on the, from the chair, I hit my shin. I forget it hurt, I hurt my shin bone as I got up. And that's how I kind of knew I was awake. And then I saw this like, like we're sitting in a room here. It was in that corner, coming from the top of the corner, a light coming down like this. Radiant light. And Thomas Merton described the light better than I could when I read it in one of his books. Because he had some of these experiences. It was a light so bright that it bore no resemblance to visible light.

• 2:11:38Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:11:39Speaker 03

  If that makes sense. So it didn't shine. You'd have to look away from it. It was very bright. And it came and set straight in front of me when I was standing up. I was still standing up. Where the curtains are like right across from me when I'm standing there and off the ground was the full image of the Virgin Mary.

• 2:12:02Jesse Michels?

  Wow. In your room?

• 2:12:04Speaker 03

  In my room.

• 2:12:05Jesse Michels?

  Wow. So she was in the dream and then she comes into your room?

• 2:12:08Speaker 03

  And I knew, as I was standing there, I specifically had the realization, clear, absolute realization. This is not a dream. In fact, I kind of pinched myself. This is reality as opposed to, and the dream must be preparation.

• 2:12:26Jesse Michels?

  What happens next? So she's in your room?

• 2:12:27Speaker 03

  She's in my room and then I, I don't have any conversations, but I can read her mind or she can read my mind or vice versa. There's an exchange. There's communication going on at a non-verbal level.

• 2:12:40Speaker 03

  And it's very intense. I'm feeling combination, you know, at the one time, a rushing sense of grief that she's feeling at the same time, the hope of the message she's conveying that in the end, it will all come out fine. But there's this tremendous pain and suffering. She's and she she said at one, like said, I knew the message clearly, got the message, write a letter to the Pope. No instructions what to write or what you've seen, seeing me, but no other specific instructions, what to say or why, no explanation, but just write a letter to the Pope. Then I was looking for some form

• 2:13:24Speaker 03

  of greater understanding, I'd say, and she sensed that. And I think she sensed I was like still shocked, in shock, right? But I went into a state of ecstasy.

• 2:13:40Speaker 03

  So I've never had that. Only time in my life, 71 years old, that I was in a state of ecstasy. I could, I remember my teeth chattering. I remember that. I remember the sound of them going and my head going back like it was like, and it was incredible. It was like, I mean, I credible orgasm of like beyond that, without a real orgasm, obviously, but it was like more that was, it was just an incredible feeling. The bona fides of the moment, so to speak, were right there. I mean, this is absolutely what it was. And then I sought like more of a,

• 2:14:20Speaker 03

  if if I'm so graced to be here in your presence, you know, I've sent, then there must be something specific you you want me to to do other than the letter to the Pope and I've been sort of thing. And then little things came out, like, for example, a sense of Tying together, I, there was no numbers or, but I sensed that it was all related. I just sensed that it was all related to this, plus my encounter I'd had with her in Portugal, where I hadn't met her, but I felt her mind and thoughts. She was explaining when she told me there, deliver the message, write what you see.

• 2:15:00Speaker 03

  Whatever you do, you do in sin. That was specific, I wrote that down after Portugal, which was a few, a few years earlier. Said, keep all that in mind as you go forth on this mission, or you go forth to fulfill God's will. And she made it clear, everything is God's will, not her will. There was a, a major distinction. This was, I wasn't doing anything for her. This was all in accordance with her serving God, the same way she was asking me to, or anybody else.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  Now, you asked earlier, I, at this moment, this point, I had never read anything about

• 2:15:34Speaker 03

  her, you know, encounters with the Virgin Mary, but I became, of course, a hobby, a student of that as well. Great detail. But the thing that you mentioned earlier, I, I, I think she sensed that I was not losing it, but like, needed further reassurance in some way that I could do this. Cause the first thing anybody has is an expectation of getting any mystical experience that's genuine is, well, why me? There's no reason, and the answer to that is, there is no reason, it's you. I wasn't being singled out because I was noble or worthy, or no, no such reason. When, when Paul was on the road to Damascus and he was struck down by the light of Jesus standing over him,

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  the light, the divine light of Jesus saying, Paul, why are you persecuting me? He turns from a person going to kill members of this Jewish sect to the leader of that sect because.

• 2:16:29Speaker 03

  Of the mystical experience with Christ. Without that, none of that would have happened. So, you know, I'm very well aware of that these aren't only real, but they're incredible important moments in human history, every time they happen to anybody, to continue to gather them up and as you're saying, tell, relate the story. So at the very end of the encounter was, you know, it's funny, time kind of like, I got lost in time. I don't remember. It was just minutes, the whole thing. I know that. Where she said, like encouragement again, this was the important part. Don't reach. God lies within you. Don't want. You

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  have no needs. Don't strive. There is no purpose. And it was incredibly important guidance because it reminded me of things I thought I knew, but then I got, you get lost, right? Particularly the one of don't reach. Don't go out and try, you know, it's all there. It's all inside you in the end. And even the experiences going on the mountain with the monks and going back in time, all that was a way of intensifying that it's here.

• 2:17:46Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:49Speaker 03

  And being confident in that.

• 2:17:50Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. Did your life change after that? Did that fundamentally change your person?

• 2:17:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It was the, it was a culminating moment. It was a culmination of all the dreams in a way. Because in her, the images I associated with her presence in the room, there was the idea of war and conflict and apocalyptic things. I could sense the wars and things of previous dreams all being present with her as well. So it was her great suffering.

• 2:18:22Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, particularly of women and children in war and conflict, lives being lost, that kind of level of of concern and hope and and need to get people do things to minimize or to end it, or to be part of God's will in in in writing the course of human history.

• 2:18:41Jesse Michels?

  She visited you every seven years, three times, is that right? So 1991, 1998, and then again, 2005.

• 2:18:49Speaker 03

  Well, then the she didn't visit me in 2005, but it's one of the coincidences that ties the connections together. In 2005, I didn't have an experience with the Virgin Mary, but I found myself through Chief of Europe at CIA. I was back in Paris, probably the first time since seven years, maybe, I don't know. I didn't go there that often, but I I'm back in the same hotel, Creon, which is two blocks from the one I was in. I remember thinking, this is autumn, so close to where all this happened, because by now I'm intensely aware and thinking and looking into what all that was meant for me and what should I do? More from a practical, I didn't need evidence, I just needed to know practically what to do now that I had had these experiences.

• 2:19:34Speaker 03

  So on that particular, the seven years fulfillment of things was the night that John Paul II died. And it was the idea that that this is related to that, her, the explicit idea, of course, I had to write a letter to the Pope, and I sent that letter to the Vatican and, and you know, I got a response from the Vatican, actually.

• 2:19:55Jesse Michels?

  What was the response?

• 2:19:56Speaker 03

  Well, it said His Holiness had, you know, appreciated the gift, and I suppose they sent some of these things out, but it seemed like it seemed like it had a personal touch to it.

• 2:20:05Jesse Michels?

  What'd you, what'd you say to the Pope?

• 2:20:07Speaker 03

  Well, it's, I, I put the letter in the book. So the, the letter I sent to the Pope, I put in the book and I want it, I want everybody to read what I said, because.

• 2:20:17Jesse Michels?

  Go check it out. Did you, did you say just high level? Did you say, the Virgin Mary told me to write to you?

• 2:20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:24Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:20:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I put the experience, I put all the numbers in it. I mean, all the numbers are in the book. Cause again, the idea is

• 2:20:31Jesse Michels?

  The numbers from the original download you got at West Point.

• 2:20:34Speaker 03

  Seven, four, seven, and all the numbers, I've seen the numbers. Yeah. So if you read the letter in two pages, two and a half pages, it's the whole story in a way.

• 2:20:41Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:20:41Speaker 03

  I met her in Portugal. I met her in Monothos. And it's the same letter I shared with the Orthodox Church. I, because it's, it's not about me.

• 2:20:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:52Speaker 03

  I mean, it is my story, but to, to the extent the story serves a purpose or is relevant.

• 2:20:57Jesse Michels?

  So you were just relaying your experience mostly to the Vatican. So it's 2005. Pope John Paul the second dies, you're in Paris.

• 2:21:05Speaker 03

  That night.

• 2:21:05Jesse Michels?

  Ironically, at the same spot that it's almost this like Nichian eternal recurrence or something.

• 2:21:10Speaker 03

  Well, that satisfies your sevens, you know, we have three sevens here.

• 2:21:13Jesse Michels?

  Three sevens.

• 2:21:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:15Jesse Michels?

  Exactly. So that seems significant, maybe for the numerology aspect, but so you're there, you're in Paris.

• 2:21:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:21:20Jesse Michels?

  And then what happens as far as your just, your third experience with the Virgin Mary?

• 2:21:26Speaker 03

  Well, the, the third experience preceded the first Paris. It was the one in Portugal.

• 2:21:31Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:21:32Speaker 03

  Uh, in, uh, no, wait a minute. No. Gosh, I'm losing the date on that, but it, it, yeah, it was before the Virgin Mary appearance because it was in Portugal where I was, uh, encountered her in, in, I already told you what that conversation was all about and what she relayed more guidance at that meeting. So there again, it was idea of a presence, not seeing anything, but I realized this presence is continuing and it's, I'm getting more, if you will, aware of what I should and shouldn't be doing related to, to all this. And in between all this, you know, there's.

• 2:22:09Jesse Michels?

  But in Paris, you see her again.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:22:12Jesse Michels?

  And what's, what's that experience like?

• 2:22:13Speaker 03

  Well, there's only, the only one time I've saw, seen the Virgin Mary was in 1998 in Paris.

• 2:22:18Jesse Michels?

  Yep. But in, in 2005, you see her again.

• 2:22:21Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:22:22Jesse Michels?

  Oh, you don't see her again. Okay. Got it. Got it.

• 2:22:24Speaker 03

  No, as I've got down there, there were, there were only one, only one. It's, it tied everything up. Where she appeared in a way that, you know, you examine phenomena, right? And I like to present this in various ways. One is as phenomena, uh, I have to know. For my own satisfaction, I want to know, I should say, I'm not supposed to want, but I do want to know the explanation of the, you know, physiology or the, the, the, the reality aspect of what was she, where did she come from? She, there's a, there has to be somewhere she came and went when she retreated back into the, because she, at

• 2:23:08Speaker 03

  the end, she went back into the top corner of the wall and, and she was gone. So that's, that's an event, that's a real thing. So I have talked, we talked some about it, Jesse, because you do a lot of inquiry and research into, to these subjects. There's, there's an explanation for it in, based in physics. Hmm.

• 2:23:28Speaker 00

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• 2:23:58Speaker 03

  Just like there has to be an explanation of what heaven and hell are in physics.

• 2:24:02Jesse Michels?

  Do you have a best explanation in physics for kind of metaphysical or spiritual?

• 2:24:06Speaker 03

  Well, I have one that I, I have one that I favor, and I'm, I'm hesitant to share it, but I want to give a direct answer to a direct question, because I don't know. I mean, I don't know.

• 2:24:14Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 2:24:15Speaker 03

  But to me, the, the most sensible explanation is that things we describe as divine or part of a permanent, things that aren't prone to being affected by time anymore, meaning they're not in the physical universe in motion, because time is a function of, of motion and ma- matter, right? Mass and motion. So without those things, if you had a universe at rest. Then what we call heaven and hell, God presides over everything, including our universe, including where angels might come to give us messages, or how prophets get their insights. Because it doesn't come from our universe. It doesn't come from the Big Bang universe.

• 2:24:56Speaker 03

  It can't come. The idea, I think if the great thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, and you pick your favorite, pondering the theological basis of God, even someone like Leibniz, the mathematician, who said God has to create the best of all possible worlds, which is one I love, because I think he's absolutely right. But that's because God isn't in our world. God, to be perfect, to be great, to be everything we ascribe, including indivisible, so massive we can't even contemplate it. It can't be rooted in the Big Bang universe in motion, because everything in our universe is relative.

• 2:25:28Jesse Michels?

  So it's like there's an alternative universe that's at rest, that's more primordial?

• 2:25:33Speaker 03

  Or a universe that, I don't know why I use the word alternative, well, that's perfectly valid. I'd say a universe that lies beyond or above, or in which our universe is just a small part.

• 2:25:47Jesse Michels?

  And you're saying the Big Bang universe, because that is the proverbial kind of, you know, first prime mover event that scientists now herald as, you know, definitely true, that then kind of deterministically, kind of, you know, you get this entropy from there, and then you end up with this, you know, what a lot of scientists would now say, this happy accident of, you know, our Earth and the world and the universe as it is. And you're saying that there is something next to that, or outside of that?

• 2:26:18Speaker 03

  Well, the only explanation I can come up with, which is, you know, I'm embarrassed almost to say these profound things when there are so many scientists and physicists. But, I mean, the simplest way I think of it, it came to me kind of as an insight, as a possibility, was sitting in my porch, with screens all around my porch, and picturing the Big Bang for the first time in my life. I'm God, I'm sitting in my chair. And picturing the big bang as being a ripple in that space-time in that room, in the corner of the room, just a little ripple. There's, it starts with a little tear in the corner. And just goes, spans out. And you're God, you're looking over that, but it's just, to you, it's just a ripple.

• 2:26:58Speaker 03

  Everything we take is the ultimate reality in the, the accumulation of all things is just possibly a very small sideshow occurring in a big room.

• 2:27:08Jesse Michels?

  Is the implication of the title of your book, A State of Mind, that your mind can get to this universe at rest, this timeless universe?

• 2:27:17Speaker 03

  Yes. And so the clues, because it's not completely just a stab in the, in the dark of, of the big room. It's as much as to say, you have to have an explanation of how people can reliably, this doesn't just happen to a few people. This has happened throughout his, human history, being able to see into the future and, and sometimes claim to go into the past. So there must be a way of, if you will, overcoming time, which means time can't be an absolute in our equation. And you have people like Einstein saying, time is but an illusion, which Harry Hiller said to me in my book when I went with the Monothos. And sure enough, he proved it was an illusion because I kept going back in time. So in a way, the dream was a manifestation of a very basic potential truth,

• 2:28:00Speaker 03

  which is time is just a, an aspect of spacetime that we create in the big bang because we're all in motion. There's nothing not in motion. But who is to say that there's not a universe at rest? Because I don't know how you can have something called everlasting life. If Christ went somewhere, he didn't go somewhere in a big bang after crucifixion and resurrection. He didn't stay in our earthly realm, even if we expend, extend that meaning to the whole universe as we understand the universe. You know, it stands to reason then that every species, intelligent species in the universe would be beholden to this rule, not just humans.

• 2:28:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I, you know, question a lot of people who are more fundamentalist in their beliefs on these things. Well, if Christ is, you know, immortal, like, where is he now?

• 2:28:52Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 2:28:53Jesse Michels?

  Like, he should be on earth. And they often talk about like an ascension body. You know, that they're, they exist in, and maybe the ascension body is where this other sort of universe lies? Or something? I don't know. I'm speculating here.

• 2:29:05Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I, I think you got another clue that's a really fascinating one. And I don't want to overstate any of these, but they're just things that come to mind. The transfiguration of Christ, which for many people, they don't, they don't know what that is. There was a period after crucifixion where he appeared to the disciples in a form where he wasn't yet in heaven or wasn't at earth. And that's where you had the famous doubting Thomas putting, Jesus saying, if you doubt that it's me, because you're, you're not supposed to be here, put your finger in my wounds. And, and he is, and he's called doubting Thomas. But if you look at that beyond as a religious kind of story, you know, it has to be true again. If they witnessed Christ in some form, then what is that? How would you explain that in physics?

• 2:29:50Speaker 03

  I, I think you can. I think it's an, it's a deliberate staging of before reaching the next period. I absolutely believe as a result of my religious experiences and growth and that we don't die when we die, we just go pass. We pass, it's better word would be a passage. There's a passage from this state. I think if you believe, truly believe in Christ and really, you have to believe that. And this, I always say, it doesn't matter how often you go to church and how much you donate to this or that. What matters is, do you really believe the heart and soul of what the faith is about? Which is, there's life after death. So once you posit, there is life after death. You're not really trying to determine, like, what is that?

• 2:30:33Speaker 03

  Like Dante's stages of hell, which is kind of like fun to think about. People deserve the different levels of hell. That kind of explains why you're a little center, you go here, you're a big center, you go down here. But it's all silly, right? It's silly.

• 2:30:48Speaker 03

  The idea of hell as a place is silly.

• 2:30:51Speaker 03

  Now, the idea of hell as being the absence of God, from God, being separated from God. Ah, now we're getting somewhere because God doesn't exist in the Big Bang world. God exists beyond it. So the closer you get beyond the Big Bang world to a world not in motion. So maybe when we die, we pass to a world at rest. We pass to a world where time no longer exists, which then creates

• 2:31:16Speaker 03

  consequences of what you've done in your life because you're suddenly aware of them. We can't even accurately go back and recreate any moment of our time, much less replicate it again. It happens, we have memories of it and all our memories are fading, all of them.

• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  But there is a place where all the memories are the events themselves, if that makes sense. All the events are occurring always as they occurred in what we would describe as this year, this place, this time. Because in that world, none of the time exists. That's all. It's a very simple concept. And all it presupposes is that physicists have told me where we've discussed this. And I've learned a lot from good physicists, especially young ones, I find, that are really into this subject like you are. They're really interested in constructing ways of thinking of metaphysics in ways that aren't just traditional physics. Where if you can't prove it experimentally, forget it.

• 2:32:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:17Speaker 03

  No, of course not.

• 2:32:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, that's, that can't be true. Like if something is phenomenologically real or experientially real. It's not fake because you can't experimentally reproduce it in a lab. Like, that's an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. That is the epitome of the kind of the hubris of enlightenment. But time in physics is also extremely weird. You know, general relativity is a theory of gravity. But even in general relativity, you have time dilation. You know, you have, you know, time moves based on, you know, the speed of the observer, which is sort of really weird. Gravity itself is really weird on a macroscopic scale. You know, you basically are justifying the weakness of gravity with dark matter,

• 2:33:03Jesse Michels?

  which seems like this undetectable mathematical placeholder. And time and gravity are kind of super linked. You know, the more you get closer to a kind of a dense gravitational source like a black hole, time seems to slow. And so, you know, if gravity is kind of weird, you know, and then gravity is obviously weird on a, you know, it's irreconcilable with the other forces on a quantum level. And then time is also on a quantum level. It's taken as this sort of classical axiom in something like Schrodinger's equation. So it's just, time seems like this not super well-understood thing. Like at most, maybe you can think of it vis a vis the movement of bodies on a macroscopic scale. And on a microscopic scale, maybe the oscillations of an electromagnetic wave or something. Right.

• 2:33:48Jesse Michels?

  But it's, it's, you know, it's the most commonly used noun in the English language, but it always has to be defined with respect to other things. Right. And so it seems a little bit like the eye, seeing the eye, or like that David Foster Wallace, you know, a Kenyan commencement speech where he's, you know, this is water. And it's like, if you're a fish talking to another fish and you're in water, we're all in Zeno's arrow of time. You can't really get out of that sort of epistemological framework. But simultaneous to that, you have all these interesting thinkers in physics, like Yakir Erinoff or Kramer, where there's like a, the present is a handshake between the future and the past, which is, that's a legitimate interpretation of kind of quantum mechanics.

• 2:34:34Jesse Michels?

  And, you know, you have ideas of retro causality and the future sort of causing the past, or the present being constricted and there being probable futures and probable past. Schrodinger talked about, you know, if you measure a Particle in its present, you might affect its past. You know, they're all, it's, it's, it's way trippier than sort of meets the eye. I even think, you know, even position, momentum, superpositionality, spooky action at a distance, which Einstein grappled with till the end of his life. You have spooky action over time as well, where, you know, it looks, if a double slit experiment is performed in the future, it looks like the measurement of that double slit experiment is affecting someone that's done the present or the past, which is crazy.

• 2:35:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:35:17Jesse Michels?

  And so, you know, it's almost like quantum mechanics implies, you know, people say it implies, you know, there, there, there's an issue with position and momentum measurements. That's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But there's also level of energy and time, quantum indeterminacy as well. And what if the Schrödinger's equation, which is more position and momentum based, what if time superpositionality is causing the position and momentum superpositionality? And just like, you know, you can place Newton within Einstein, but Einstein better describes Newton than Newton. What if you could place Schrödinger within some time agnostic modality equation that describes Schrödinger better than Schrödinger?

• 2:36:01Jesse Michels?

  You know, we don't know the answer to these questions.

• 2:36:04Speaker 03

  No, and, and the hardest part of exploring them is separating the influence of scale from, from the actual reality. So because we are at the scale we are, everything we measure is measured proportional to our scale. So, and that's not, we can obviously go beyond visual and we have lots of ways to measure things other than our senses, but we can't avoid is our scale. So if you go up in scale to cosmic level or down to subatomic levels, you, you've got the same problem. Your ability to measure anything gets less and less.

• 2:36:44Speaker 03

  And then the worst, your worst ability to measure anything is when time changes on you, you get into black hole physics or whatever, where suddenly you realize mass, you know, it goes infinite and, and time stops. But that's a clue. It's another clue. The, the idea again of time being a variable that we take is.

• 2:37:07Speaker 03

  In a way, an absolute reality, even though it changes, but the existence of time I'm talking about isn't necessarily real. It's real for us in the Big Bang world. But if you if you stop everything, which we don't contemplate, because we can't, we can't, at least in science, contemplate a world at rest.

• 2:37:25Jesse Michels?

  So why don't we, we'll kind of, you know, take a page from the book, so to speak, and can weave in and out of some of these more mystical experiences and your more prosaic life. What were some of your early missions?

• 2:37:37Speaker 03

  So I would say in the early years, there was no mission there, other than basic conclusions I drew, like, okay, I'm drawn to Russia, because it's, it's the action. It's, it's, there's no better place to be in the CIA than the belly of the beast. So I had those kinds of connotations early on, but nothing, nothing explicitly, you know, linked to religion, or, or faith, or apocalypse, or nuclear weapons, or any of that. It was very, just a kind of basic career, until the things I described that happened later.

• 2:38:11Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. And so, and you taught, you have a lot of story. I mean, you were almost overrun, right? In the Yeltsin coup. So there's this attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin.

• 2:38:20Speaker 03

  1993, correct.

• 2:38:21Jesse Michels?

  1993.

• 2:38:22Speaker 03

  And I came back, and, yeah.

• 2:38:23Jesse Michels?

  You're the Moscow station chief for the CIA. And it just seems like you're kind of, you know, in this very dire situation, they end up having, they end up helping you, right? Is that, is that right?

• 2:38:34Speaker 03

  That's correct. I mean, it's one of those things where the idea of a liaison relate, we call liaison relationship, when, when we cooperate with other countries' intelligence. On the face of it, there was nothing really to cooperate between the CIA and the KGB. You read all the story, they're all true. As we say, there's a lot of blood in the water. We kill, you know, not kill, but their agents, our agents end up dead, killed, executed sometimes, imprisoned. So it's a very ugly history, and we weren't going to be friends. But the idea was, when I laid out the first CIA directors that ever went to Moscow for, to visit, to even visit Moscow, much less deal with the Russians as partners. It was Bob Gates was the first, when he was CIA director.

• 2:39:19Speaker 03

  And I'll never forget that trip in nineteen, except the fall of nineteen ninety-two. He came there and laid the groundwork by giving a great toast. We had dinner. Russians love toast. They love dinners. And you gotta win. You gotta, you gotta be good at the whole art of toasting. And so I learned a lot about that. But his essentially was around the theme of, we're not friends. We're not here because we're ever gonna love each other and be, be, be real partners. We're here because our countries demand that we put aside some of our differences in cooperating meaningful ways for the security of our countries. That was when Yeltsin had just emerged. There was the hope then, right? But it was a realism attack he attached to it that was very important, needed to make it real.

• 2:40:02Speaker 03

  Cause if otherwise, you would have, you know, been pretending and playing games, which there's no point to play games if you're arch enemies. You just do what you need to do. So a year later, it all culminated in this coup in Moscow when hardliners tried to overthrow Yeltsin. But the one thing it showed is that at a time of extreme need,

• 2:40:22Speaker 03

  we could work with the Russians because we had a common interest to keep Yeltsin in power. Russian intelligence decided they weren't ready to overthrow Yeltsin through force and violence. They ended up doing that. This is ninety-three, eight, it was eight years later, of course, when Vladimir Putin came to power legally, the right way, if you want to call it that. And the Russians don't like coups and violence any more than we would like in our own country. So we worked together and it was astonishing. I didn't know when I first called Russian intelligence chief and said, hey, we need help. We need you to protect us. It looks like we're going to be taken hostage. When I was leading a detachment of people outside the embassy and coming under fire from coup plotters,

• 2:41:07Speaker 03

  snipers and things, I called them for help and I didn't expect any help. In fact, it was the ambassador at the time. Ambassador Tom Pickering, he's the one who I called him in desperation, say, there's no way you can help us, is there? Because the embassy, all, everybody in the embassy was underground in the embassy compound, except for us. We're out doing reporting and things like that to tell Washington what was going on. Otherwise, they wouldn't have known anything going on at the time. All the news networks had shut down and

• 2:41:33Jesse Michels?

  And you end up like holed up in an abandoned building or something?

• 2:41:36Speaker 03

  Well, we, we holed up, everything was abandoned, but we were in the ambassador's residence, which we opened up and used just as a command post. I think that started as five of us. I think we ended up with seven or eight. Long, I put the whole, like, all the details in that. I was a little surprised that, again, it was nice to see they, they had no problem with telling that story. I think it's important. The, the purpose of the story and the purpose of me describing it is that, you know, intelligence is almost always unexpected.

• 2:42:06Speaker 03

  And it's, it's greatest value is proven in the most difficult times pro and con. And, and you, you can't fear or avoid the difficult circumstance. You have to kind of run into them and embrace the, the, the difficulties. So they, they ended up sending a, a team to protect us from being taken hostage. And the only rules we had, I'll never forget the phone call from the director. He said, okay, Ralph, there's very extraordinary circumstances. We're going to send you a team of heavily armed guys to try to keep you from getting captured. But here's the deal. One is do not commingle. Our guys and your guys are separate. We'll do our work

• 2:42:49Speaker 03

  outside your perimeter or whatever. So don't mix. And he goes, if you are stormed or they take, get in a firefight or whatever happens, die in your separate foxholes. And he didn't have to explain why. Because however that day turned out in Russian history.

• 2:43:08Speaker 03

  Didn't want to leave any evidence of who would work with whom along the way. Cause it was in doubt. I, the one thing I learned personally in a way that helped me even with the spiritual stuff later, mystical experiences is history is not inevitable. History isn't, history comes together because of the decisions people make. And when you're experiencing it live, like in a war or in a coup or in a change of government, you realize it could go that way if these things are done and goes that way if another thing is done.

• 2:43:40Jesse Michels?

  You've been in the room with Vladimir Putin. What's your impression of him?

• 2:43:45Speaker 03

  Well, it wasn't as extensive as so many of the people, you know, obviously in the US government, who have had a lot of interaction with him. So I don't want to put it on. So I just happen to have a fairly unique one time thing where we met in his first foreign trip. I was in Norway. I'm Norwegian American, as I said, so it was a great honor for me to go back to Norway. And I happened to be there, again, one of these things I thank God a little bit for the privilege of, to be there during the last meeting of what was called the Oslo peace accord process, who started in Oslo, Norway, and now was culminating. So this was in the November 19.

• 2:44:23Jesse Michels?

  Ninety-three?

• 2:44:23Speaker 03

  Ninety-three, no, no, 1998.

• 2:44:26Jesse Michels?

  1998?

• 2:44:27Speaker 03

  The last meeting.

• 2:44:28Jesse Michels?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:44:30Speaker 03

  And the last meeting was one amazing.

• 2:44:35Speaker 03

  No, I had no role of any appreciable, nothing. I was there as, as literally a appreciation gift. I knew the prime minister and other people in the Norwegian government. They said, invite, invite me and my wife to the, to the dinner. But at the dinner was President Clinton. Came, of course, Vladimir Putin's first foreign trip as prime minister. And then, of course, the main ones, Yasser Arafat.

• 2:45:03Speaker 03

  And Ehud Barak, who was the prime minister of of Israel at the time. Now, I had never met Arafat, Ehud Barak. I had met Clinton, just, you know, kind of like formalistically, but and Putin. And and I got to see them all in this kind of as an observer vantage point where if anything, anybody would say, who's this guy? Because everybody there was more important than me, literally, everybody at the at the dinner. But that was great. There's no pressure. I could literally just observe Putin and others. And it was just amazing. There was a moment when, after dinner, when everybody got up and mingled, went to the King's Library to visit the castle in his library to have cognac and chocolates. And everybody's walking there. And I'm going

• 2:45:46Speaker 03

  to catch everything on the way. And I see Clinton literally grab Arafat in the middle of the room. Clinton was whatever one thinks of him politically, that's not what I'm talking about here. He had a presence, right?

• 2:45:57Jesse Michels?

  Oh, everybody says that. Everybody says the most charismatic guy.

• 2:46:01Speaker 03

  He just had a natural charisma. He didn't do anything. He just stands there, right?

• 2:46:04Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 2:46:05Speaker 03

  So he grabs Arafat, who also in his weird way, had a charisma too, a presence, right? Because he's the iconic head wrap and etc. And he says to Arafat, take the deal, Yasser. Take the deal. It's your last best chance for peace. And I remember listening to that thing. Wow, so like, important. What I just heard, I thought is very important.

• 2:46:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:28Speaker 03

  And I just felt so depressed. And so I knew it was no, no, you know, foreshadowing our future. I just like instinctively, my gut was, all this is not going to turn out well.

• 2:46:38Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:38Speaker 03

  And of course, it's turned out terribly.

• 2:46:40Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's turned out terribly. I mean, partially, Yasser Arafat would speak out of both sides of his mouth. And he would speak to his own population, say certain things, and then speak to the West and say other things. But also, Yitzhak Rabin, also, you know, taken out by by his own, you know, people and Haredi, you know, Jews who are just really extremists and wanted, you know, to cede nothing at all costs. And, you know, I think in many ways, that whole, the Middle East. You know, conundrum, Quagmire has been, has been so stuck for so long. And maybe we, you know, maybe we've made a little bit of progress in the last year, but it's been so, so stuck because of kind of extremists on, on both sides. And because in many ways, the incentives

• 2:47:25Jesse Michels?

  of the leaders are to like actually maintain the conflict.

• 2:47:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:29Jesse Michels?

  So unfortunate.

• 2:47:30Speaker 03

  It is, it is.

• 2:47:31Jesse Michels?

  It's a factory of, yeah.

• 2:47:33Speaker 03

  Well, my, my, my, then watching Putin, just to point of your, your question was, I already had the impression that he would be more consequential than I thought he might at the time, by any standard of reasoning or what I knew about him. I, but I just had, he had the presence too. He was boring, like gray man on the corner, but that in itself impressed me because he wasn't trying to fit in. He wasn't trying to like speak aloud late to be heard. He, he, he was way too self-assured, you know, for, for that kind of a reaction to the situation. And I respected that. I thought, okay, this guy could end up being way more of his own man than we, we think he might be going into that time

• 2:48:16Speaker 03

  period. One last thing on, on the, cause it's, it's ties to Russia and the Middle East again. Five years earlier, 1993, again, after the coup and all that, I was meeting with the Russians. Yeghenni Primakov is his name. He was the head of Russian intelligence. I got to know him very, very well. He was, we'd meet almost every week and had all kinds of discussions about everything. We'll talk almost like we are, Jesse, about all kinds of big subjects. And he was a guy I felt very comfortable. I thought he was a brilliant, brilliant man, actually. And he probably would have been a prime minister before, instead of Putin, in the mid 90s, after Yeltsin was left, had he not passed away from health problems and old age, et cetera. But at the time, he was always musing with me about

• 2:49:01Speaker 03

  what, what can we do to be serious people? There's a Russian expression, serozny chilovak. That's the most important thing in Russian. It can love you or hate you, but you gotta be a serozny chilovak, a serious person.

• 2:49:13Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:49:13Speaker 03

  Serious professional, serious about what you do. Don't give me bullshit.

• 2:49:17Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:49:18Speaker 03

  And he says, you know, we gotta do something, but I can think of one thing that would be unbelievable if we could find a way to do it. I said, what's that? He said, well, you have your means, meaning CIA. We have our means, meaning the SVR, which is the foreign intelligence component of Russian intelligence. And we have them in the Middle East. So let's apply all our efforts in the Middle East, where we really need something to happen to break this longstanding stalemate problem. Our goal will be to keep Arafat alive. Your goal will be to keep Rabin alive.

• 2:49:56Speaker 03

  And I thought it was genius. Of course, I sent it in, everybody thought I was insane.

• 2:50:02Speaker 03

  And I never got a good explanation as to why it really wasn't even considered. Maybe you just offered it.

• 2:50:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, I mean, we've talked about this, you know, too, in our last interview, you know, where, you know, people always talk about a deep state. And, you know, it's, I think clearly there is no sort of cabal in a back room smoking cigars or something. But there are, there is, that only is conspiracy to say that there are all sorts of misaligned incentives when it comes to big bureaucracies, and that's any institution. And so, yeah, no, just going back to like, you know, why would somebody senselessly say no to a thing like that? Or, you know, I am sympathetic to a lot of the John Mearsheimer arguments as well, that like, you know, we've totally reneged on Putin a million different times. And, you know, we've, we've encroached a lot on, on, you know, their, their territory

• 2:50:52Jesse Michels?

  and, you know, not, not to at all, you know, apologize for a lot of his wrongdoings, which are very real. But, um, yeah, there's, there's, the incentives are often wrong in these organizations.

• 2:51:05Speaker 03

  Well, when you talk about people like Mearsheimer or others who try to express a different way of thinking of our policies and their impact, I mean, there's, there's a utility in those points of views. I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but I think he should be saying some of the things he's saying, and it's helpful. The biggest thing we habitually do wrong in terms of follow through on policy, some of our policy ideas aren't so bad, but it's usually the, the huge flaws in the implementation usually. And, and it's not so much the underlying motives that line up with as much as people think they do with sort of deep state agendas. It's just either a mixture of incompetence, or I'd say more the idea that we, we mirror image too much. So our biggest problem in

• 2:51:50Speaker 03

  understanding, for example, the Russians, now what I'm saying is not acceptable, is it's not accepted, uh, thinking, but it's widely accepted, but some people understand it, is our biggest mistake is not seeing things through their eyes. And it doesn't justify what they're doing or thinking, but it's understanding it.

• 2:52:09Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:52:10Speaker 03

  And if you want to know why we are where we are with the Russians, you have to understand, see the world through their eyes. It doesn't mean you accept that view, or more importantly, what they do is a consequence of what they feel, but at least understand why you're there and don't be surprised about it.

• 2:52:26Jesse Michels?

  Isn't there a Kenan quote about understanding the Russians or something? It's like, once you ascend to the, the top of the mountain, you know, you, you end up equally confused as to the Russian motive, motivation or something. I'm, I'm totally paraphrasing and botching this, but there's something like that.

• 2:52:42Speaker 03

  I don't remember that, but I, I suspect the, I.

• 2:52:45Jesse Michels?

  It's like they're always mystical, confusing. There's no way to ultimately understand what they're up to or something, which feels somewhat right. You like, you know, the, the idea of a Politburo is like this, you know, concealed, sealed off, hermetically, you know, uh, enclosed sort of organization that, you know, you can never fully sort of understand. And Putin's always keeping the people around him on his, on their toes. And there's this really hard kind of hermeneutic game of reading the tea leaves at all times with, you know, governments like that.

• 2:53:17Speaker 03

  I think you read, I think you read tea leaves and see everything as being unscrutable when you don't have any real depth in either living in the country or having enough experience with the people of the country where you can understand where they're coming from. One of the biggest mistakes we make with Russia or Xi Jinping in China, or anybody for that matter, all the leaders, even some of our friend, friendly countries, is, is, uh, not understanding that the country's not the leader.

• 2:53:44Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 2:53:45Speaker 03

  So the thing I'll never do is think of Russia as Vladimir Putin.

• 2:53:50Speaker 03

  I've read too much, many, too much Russian history, philosophy, uh, gotten into Russia. I've known too many Russians. I lived in Russia for, for enough years where I think of Russia first as the people, right? And then you can assess what Putin's doing. And the most important way you need to assess it is not what impact it has on the US, but what impact is it, what he's doing having on the Russian people? Now I would make an argument that what's happening now is very damaging to the future interests of ordinary Russians. The same way I might assess what different presidents' impact has on America. I don't, I don't care so much about how the president's policies affect the stock market

• 2:54:34Speaker 03

  as I do how the president's policies affect ordinary Americans. So I think we have to look at foreign countries the same way. If you look at China's meteoric rise in the 20th century, you're not compelled to think of China as an enemy or rival, deep rival, and everything that's progress in China is being antithetical to our interests. Look what they've done for the Chinese people over, in a remarkable period of time. That's not all good, obviously, but start from a more solid basis to understand why the leaders do what they do in their own history, traditions, culture, environments, and religion. If you look at the reason, I've always said, and a lot of Russia experts disagree with

• 2:55:17Speaker 03

  me on this, I've always said Russia can't embrace, cannot be a democracy like the United States. The Yeltsin years were a mirage. They weren't a missed opportunity. There was never an opportunity for Russia to go west. Even when famously, you know, Peter the Great talked about Western orientation, it had nothing to do in the context we would like to ascribe it to, like he wanted to be more connected culturally, et cetera, with the US. Russia is what Russia is, which is a deeply orthodox, homogeneous country with a very rich history and very rich, they're very smart people, they're very educated people. And they want what they want. They don't want what we want.

• 2:55:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:00Speaker 03

  And I think that's a big mistake of what we try to impose, not so much our, any way of controlling countries, but our idea of imposing our culture.

• 2:56:10Jesse Michels?

  For sure. Well, they had, you know, under Gorbachev, you know, last leader of the USSR that disbanded it, you had Glasnost and you had Perestroika, poor Perestroika, and you had, you know, open minds make open markets or whatever, and, or open markets make open minds, right? And I think what a lot of neoliberals sort of like miscalculated is that you'd inevitably, you'd get this like opening up of markets and then, you know, you'd end up with all of the Amazing things about liberal democracy in the West, you know, in both China and Russia. And that's just not happened at all.

• 2:56:46Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:56:46Jesse Michels?

  And like, it took us a long time to, I think, update on that.

• 2:56:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right.

• 2:56:50Jesse Michels?

  You know, this neoconservative sort of hubris of like, you know, this would just happen on its own. And that's just not, you also have things like, you know, with Putin. I think there's this guy Vladislav Serkov.

• 2:57:02Speaker 03

  Oh, Serkov, of course.

• 2:57:03Jesse Michels?

  Who is this advisor?

• 2:57:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:57:05Jesse Michels?

  Who wrote this book Almost Zero. And it's like all about like, performance art and how that has to play into like your, you know, your, how you do politics. And so I just find it so fascinating. You know, that whole, that whole world, it's just so different. Or even like, I think this is to a true, you know, Alexander Dugin, who I don't think he's, I don't think he's that close with Putin, actually. Like, I think people think he is.

• 2:57:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:57:30Jesse Michels?

  But I mean, Putin is, I mean, that whole world is definitely trippier than we, than we, you know, realize. Like, some of these guys are like, they're more esoteric than, you know, we might realize. And so it's like, how, how do you really understand how they make decisions at all?

• 2:57:45Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. Yeah, no, it's, it's, I think it's a little like our previous discussions on faith and mysticism and analyzing other countries and understanding what, more importantly than analyzing it, is understanding what's happening.

• 2:58:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:01Speaker 03

  What, what track are they on, what road are they on? Especially in a world where our notions of individual identity are changing through, of course, social media and the internet. Our ideas of technology or it's blowing up around us in ways we don't really understand. Now, that's affecting all of us. The cultural reaction to it is different everywhere. The thing it's testing most.

• 2:58:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:24Speaker 03

  In my view, is the idea of individuality and identity. So in a country like ours. Which started at the point of our creation as a nation, the idea of very unique historically, unique, completely unique ideas of individual freedom and the role of individual liberty, identity in a collective society where the collective part was put way down. I mean, the idea of a right, an intrinsic right to life, liberty, and not property like John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise of Government, but pursuit of happiness. Yeah. What a weird idea. Franklin came up with that, I understand, when they were drafting the Declaration of Independence.

• 2:59:07Speaker 03

  It was a change and made edit to Jefferson's original. That's only something Americans can come up with.

• 2:59:13Jesse Michels?

  It's a very Western concept.

• 2:59:15Speaker 03

  It's not even European Western. So when we're decrying and criticizing all Europeans for being socialists, I would maintain, we have no idea what we're talking about. I've lived in most of those countries, whatever I call that socialism, I want those pensions. We make fun of the French because I got a four day work week. Okay, well, you know, I like the idea of universal healthcare. Okay, you gotta wait. First thing I always, Americans will say about, talk about Danish healthcare or Norwegian, is, oh, you gotta wait in line. Well, you got some healthcare, right? We're striving to try to create some normalcy around the idea that citizens also have a right to maybe some form of universal healthcare. We can't even agree on that, really. So that's there.

• 3:00:00Speaker 03

  Then you go further, you go to the Russians or the Chinese or pretty much anywhere in Asia, just the notion of the individual's place in society is far more collective. They're part of something. The idea of the culture, of the societal framework, is that your individual rights only go so far and then you're part, and most people feel that. And it's not a religious based thing where they're members of the same church because particularly in Europe or Asia, there's those organized religions don't hold as much a hold on people as even they might in the United States today. But it's the idea of the society itself is constructed with this idea of collective responsibility. So when the Russians drew up their, the philosophers, the great Russian philosophers,

• 3:00:45Speaker 03

  I call the religious philosophers, working with the political scientists after the breakup of the Russian Empire, the Tsar. First yielded the Soviet Union and the Bolshevism. They were drawing up a system of government that would resolve the question of how can you have a true democracy that wouldn't be corrupted by special interests and foolish leaders, who would be not up for it. You need more of a Plato's Republic, a republic that was based on people having roles, which we all have collective responsibilities.

• 3:01:18Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 3:01:18Speaker 03

  And you have distinct classes, like Plato's guardian class, that manage the government, etc. Responsibility is conferred to individuals within their collective obligations, not just... And we really struggle with that. We've struggled that for decades, but it's really coming to a head, I think, in a way where every country is sorting through that. But the bias in most country is much more towards limiting individual freedom for the collective good.

• 3:01:46Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:01:48Speaker 03

  Does that make sense?

• 3:01:49Jesse Michels?

  No, it makes total sense. Well, if you look at like Marxist dialectical materialism, the individual has very little place at all. It's very, you know, the individual can go through a meat grinder, and as long as the byproduct is social progress on the other side, whether it's, you know, Mao's Great Leap Forward, or, you know, any of Stalin's initiatives, you know, send people to Gulag, like, that's, that's okay in their, in their model.

• 3:02:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:02:13Jesse Michels?

  And so, you know, I think human, human suffering is inevitable in that, in that model, and there are no individual rights, and it's all about this sort of collective

• 3:02:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:02:23Jesse Michels?

  sense of progress. And I think that is very alien and foreign to somebody thinking about Western liberal democracy. I also, you brought up Plato. Plato himself, you could think of him as, you know, he's a really, obviously, deep, interesting thinker. I think he had all these kind of interesting ideas about ontological truth and metaphysics, you know, which maybe modern scholars would disagree with me on or something. But also, if you read The Republic, like, it's sort of like this proto-fascist book. It's like you're separating the kids from the adults, and like, you know, you have this guardian class that's like, pretty hierarchical and stratified, and, you know, it's, it's, it's not at all like a non-violent, you know, like egalitarian, like, you know, book at

• 3:03:05Jesse Michels?

  all. But forty was one of the numbers that you got in your download as well. And something very interesting happened to you at the age of forty, another sort of metaphysical experience. Do you want to talk about what happened to you on, on the train?

• 3:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I've been, this is between some of the Virgin Mary things and of course, many years after the introduction to not only mystical experiences, but what they might mean in terms of my work, my, my role in life and trying to reconcile the sacred. And so I was just on a normal, I'd say everyday espionage, travel trip in, in Europe from Zurich to Vienna and on the night train. And I'm sitting on the train, I, I carried my Bible with me, which was engraved in glossy, my, my name, full name on the cover. We all were, got this Bible

• 3:04:01Speaker 03

  when we were in our first year at West Point. And I'd kept it over the years, but I have a, I have a superstition. I have to carry it with me everywhere I travel. So I stick it in my box. Well, then I have to have a cover story for, because many of the times I traveled over the years, I'm an alias, you know, alias person. I've got a cover story. I've got even phony passports and things for my, that the agency provided, right? So I may have to explain who this Rolf Mott Larson, friend of mine, it's, it's almost a little bit like the Odious Maximus story, you know, I have to come up with a reason why I'd have this guy's Bible with me. So I opened the Bible and I had a pencil there that I just used to mark, you know, something and, and I just

• 3:04:43Speaker 03

  usually just pick out something random, read most times 10, 15 minutes. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't someone who spent pouring, I don't pour over biblical texts or bibles or things and never did then and now, plus I'm very distracted by my mission. I'm going to Vienna, exchange documents and, and going on the, the next day. And so I, I look up at the clock, there are very few people on this particular train in my car. So I'm not paying attention to them. I look up at the clock that's in the center, Swiss train, right? Everything's clockwork. And I look at the clock and the, the, the hands, the second hand is starting to like get heavy. It's like, and I'm

• 3:05:23Speaker 03

  feeling like a weight. My body's feeling heavier and heavier. I feel like something's like overwhelming me, almost like I'm experiencing some sort of thing, but I, it's like space and time are slowing down around me. And I remember thinking that even, but I didn't say, wow, this is very strange. Is it like? Uh, having an epileptic fit or something. I mean, I was really kind of worried for a minute. And then, you know, as it slowed down, my pencil I was holding, I dropped it and it just crashed onto the Bible like a

• 3:06:01Speaker 03

  then I wrote, oh, and then I just, and then it was, okay, I had always said I was aware of God's presence, but I didn't really know what, not in this way. God was like there.

• 3:06:12Speaker 03

  Didn't see anything, you know, like I said, it's not a visual thing. I just was aware of God was that close.

• 3:06:18Jesse Michels?

  Do you get a message?

• 3:06:19Speaker 03

  Well, it was, uh, yes. And, and, but the, the thing about the presence that time that was different from just being aware is it was scary. It was really scary because it was like the almighty creator who's also personal. I mean, great minds like Thomas Jefferson could never reconcile that. He had to be one or the other, you know? I wasn't going to reconcile it on the train, but it was the idea that, uh, it was not good to be in God's presence. That, that was my, my reaction to the intrusion was, whoa. He could, I already knew he could hear, understand, interpret everything I'm thinking or will do or might do because he's way ahead of me, you know? But this was kind of different, right?

• 3:07:01Speaker 03

  So then I did hear, it was a very definite, short. This was all very short. But the started with, I am, have, the verb was interesting. I didn't, I never know, it was one church, one church. So I grained that in my mind. Do not criticize my church.

• 3:07:25Speaker 03

  The old and the new are one. Just old and new. I interpreted that to be a testament, but I was old and the new are one. Swallow them whole.

• 3:07:39Speaker 03

  And finally, read it as a child. So I know that's exactly what it was because I wrote it down exactly like that. I still have that original note somewhere. Exactly that way. Because that's it. And that was it.

• 3:07:53Jesse Michels?

  What does that mean to you?

• 3:07:54Speaker 03

  Well, it's pretty, I think it's pretty obvious. I didn't think it was obvious and it really did, has taken years to just kind of like, in a way, it's my Sunday school in a way because I never left as a child because I'd learned more from this, what I think it is. But the one church means, you know, don't think of a church as the various churches, Protestant, Catholic, even Buddhist. My church is the church of believers, whatever they call themselves. Even people consider themselves atheists or agnostic. I mean, labels are labels, even what you label yourself. What does God see? God sees way beyond that. So that's how I interpret that. Do not criticize my churches.

• 3:08:35Speaker 03

  Make a distinction between criticizing the sins or the crime of organized religion, which we have every right to do, from dating from the Inquisition to the Crusades to anything you want to take your hand on. And you can get so obsessed by it, and so many people do, that you're incapable of loving God anymore, being part of this community of believers because you associate everything with the fallen, fallen angel, right? And then the really cool ones for me, because I immediately reread the whole Bible cover to cover after I heard about the old and the new are one. The inspiration that gave me was to, for the first time in my life, I was 40 years old on the train, was to go reread the Bible from cover to cover, just as a history.

• 3:09:20Speaker 03

  No longer, you know, is Jonah's whale really a whale? Is it a metaphor? You know, Red Sea parting? No, just read the damn thing, but read it as a child. Meaning have that same receptivity to me. I've had the most, my own grandkids, like I said, I got nine of them, but they're all have asked me the hardest questions on religion because they just ask the most important, obvious ones. Where's God? Why did Jesus die for our sins? My daughter said that that mean when she's, first time she went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and watched Jesus's cross and she was just standing there for a long time and she was like nine years old. I said, honey, what are you thinking? She says, why did Jesus have to die for us?

• 3:10:04Speaker 03

  That's a kid reaction, but that you need to re kind of like recharge completely on the Bible that way to think of it in that kind of a we're given this document is what it is. There's nothing holy about the thing itself and there are things in there undoubtedly that are wrong and it's a language. As soon as you got a language, you get misinterpretations, reinterpretations, everything else, but don't think about all that. It's like a lot of the other things we've talked about, Jesse. Don't overanalyze it. Just let it go and think, read it. And so I did.

• 3:10:37Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. And you think it's a coincidence that this happened at the age of 40 and that you received 40 in your dream and that, you know, it was 40 days of Jesus.

• 3:10:49Speaker 03

  I don't think it is. I don't think it's a coincidence.

• 3:10:52Jesse Michels?

  And 40 days of the desert or 40 years in the desert for the Israelites as well. There's almost 40 years of being away from God before you experience a communion with God. And in your case, 40 years of maybe more nihilistic, less believing youth or something. And then you you experience this Gnostic direct connection or something.

• 3:11:14Speaker 03

  Right. That's a good explanation. I can't, I can't say it's definitive, but I mean, I love your fascination with numbers. I think the really interesting thing you do is not just my numbers, but the idea of tying numbers into a deeper understanding of reality itself and how that can help us tie together disparate kind of fields that we think of as separate. And one of the problems we have as human beings is when you get too deep into the specialization of of different, you know, faculties, you tend to think of them all as standing alone and needing to justify themselves. So the the number of people I've run into can speak across various

• 3:11:56Speaker 03

  disciplines in that way to tie them together in a meaningful way. That's pretty unusual itself.

• 3:12:03Jesse Michels?

  You also, you have another dream, final dream we'll talk about, but you have a dream about the Order of the Broken Cross, which is this apocalyptic cult in Jerusalem. And you have to sort of fly in there behind enemy lines, be a CIA case officer and recruit some spy, and then you kind of infiltrate this order and systematically, you know, figure out what's going on with them. And then you, you give their information coordinates or something to the, to the West and then they end up getting, getting bombed and they, you know, the, the apocalypse is sort of saved or whatever. Is that symbolic, like

• 3:12:41Jesse Michels?

  now, after having led a, a long life of trying to, you know, being anti-proliferation of WMDs and, you know, going after people like Zarqawi and stuff. So do you think that in some ways you are like this, like almost like biblical prophet-like character who is, your, like your mandate or your mission in life is to stave off the apocalypse? And that the instantiation of the apocalypse in the modern day is in fact, just the proliferation of biological weapons and, and, you know, WMDs and that sort of thing. And that, that that's your kind of divine purpose, if you will?

• 3:13:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I can say this in a way that doesn't sound too grandiose, but it's certainly not a personal mission that I feel I'm on, that if I don't do this, somehow we fail as a species. Or I'm very, I'm just very aware that all the work I've done, particularly in nuclear and proliferation, I've gotten into trying to stop networks from trafficking in nuclear materials and doing, which by the way, a lot of people do. And that's a lot of my solace or, or I take comfort in. In fact, there are a lot of really great people working on this, with or without a sense of divine purpose. I mean, and I never expressed or carried into my, my work, the divine notion of purpose that I feel, because

• 3:14:04Speaker 03

  I do keep that separated. I'm a very strong believer in separation of church and state, and not just as a way we think of ourselves as, as a country and a society, but as a principle of, of keeping that separate. I have to unite them in my mind though. I have to, to reconcile them when there's conflict. I learned at West Point, duty, honor, country, which is a very high-minded principle and difficult to. I say it's the greatest thing West Point gave me was a sense of principle of having honor, doing your duty and doing it with integrity and understanding country not being the president, but country being the people and our history and what we represent. So that's almost religious,

• 3:14:48Speaker 03

  right, to do it right. And so there's not that big of a gap. But when it comes to the apocalypse and, and those ideas, yeah, I'm very aware of. I became a very aware of it. I was, I didn't start aware of it, except through my dreams. Typically, all my dreams and the sequence of things I've described here today, Jesse, are, are ways of saying I was conditioned, preconditioned, prepared for both my work and my, my, my spiritual growth and growth in faith, the same way. They were assets to me to have some ideas what this was all about. And I had to connect it still. And I was sometimes reluctant to do that. It took me a long time to write the,

• 3:15:30Speaker 03

  the letter to the Pope that Mary, Virgin Mary told me to write, and it should have done it the next day. And there's a whole story there that I think could guide a lot of people. We're always reluctant, maybe, to do the things we know we should do. I'm no different.

• 3:15:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:45Speaker 03

  You know, I'm certainly no warrior, you know, that's out in the lead of everybody in stopping the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons and proliferation. But I'm one of them. I'm there. And fortunately, there are a lot of people like me. And I think people should take great comfort that I have found that most people in public service, which is a counterintuitive conclusion to come to in today's world, are amazing people and, and do great things. And the best people, and including a lot of the scientists in the Department of Energy and our nuclear labs, things like that, could get a lot more money not working for the government or working on the outside. So for them, it's like for me, it was never about money.

• 3:16:30Speaker 03

  Or fame or recognition or reward.

• 3:16:32Jesse Michels?

  Hmm. And you mentioned the Department of Energy. What was your exact title there?

• 3:16:37Speaker 03

  I was the Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence of the Department of Energy.

• 3:16:41Jesse Michels?

  And you gave me this, uh, it was this Department of Energy, uh, Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. And it says, we keep the real secrets. And it's a little, little gray alien.

• 3:16:54Jesse Michels?

  Now, uh, you know, as you know, and we've spoken about this, you know, I've run into all these connections between UFOs and, and, and, uh, or in aliens and, or I don't know if they're aliens, but some sort of like non-human presence and the DOE. And, um, you, you mentioned actually, like in your book, that there was some sort of like hazing ritual brief that you got. Is that right?

• 3:17:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because it's such an obvious thing to pull a thread on, we like to do a thing, which I was introduced to, I didn't create it, which we took a director level. So Deputy Director, Secretary of Energy was involved and several other bigwigs and me as the Director of Intelligence. And we take a newbie, the newbie would be a political appointee, very high level, maybe, you know, Deputy Secretary or Assistant Secretary or some level, who had just signed up and gotten their clearances and were taking their jobs. And we bring them down to the bowels of the Department of Energy, where some of the most secretive things are guarded and you know where those are. Kind of everybody whispers when they come by and you pull them into this back room like Maxwell Smart

• 3:18:02Speaker 03

  and the old, old TV shows, going back through layer and layers of secrets back into the vault. And you get back into the deepest vault in the DOE and you bring them back. So the person's back there and they're already, and you have a briefer and you have about six, seven people, seniors sitting around a table, looking very grim. And the hazing ritual is to explain to them that we really did have aliens.

• 3:18:24Speaker 03

  We covered aliens. One was injured, one was not. And we got the alien tech, space technology of, through, through Roswell, you know, et cetera. And it was a real thing. And the, the briefing is so good. It's got all the real DOE, what they call tickets, you know, we call secret access program, SAPs they're called, and things on this to make it seem as real as possible. And then the briefer goes through and tells a very convincing story that he's now this person that's come in, is being brought, brought into this. Ultimate secret access program SAP, ultimate one. As a member of a very rare team that transcends all the different presidencies and parties. Cause you can't obviously brief every president coming in on this.

• 3:19:07Speaker 03

  You gotta be very discerning and only bring in people when they can contribute. And you're going to be part of the expedition that goes to, we hired you. In fact, you were hired for this job, but you're really going to go on this expedition to this planet. We've, they've helped us develop the technology to travel to their, their location and greet us when we get there. So it's got all this, and there's, you know, obviously there's corpses on tables and stuff to make this all look.

• 3:19:32Jesse Michels?

  At what point do you tell them it's a joke?

• 3:19:34Speaker 03

  Well, if somebody cracks up and it, it, it, somebody can't keep it in any longer. We betray our own.

• 3:19:40Jesse Michels?

  And the secretary of.

• 3:19:41Speaker 03

  We're not that good actor.

• 3:19:42Jesse Michels?

  The secretary of energy is literally in on this.

• 3:19:45Speaker 03

  It's a deputy secretary who's, who was, in my case, was in the room.

• 3:19:49Jesse Michels?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we raise it to the, the highest level. And, and what's funny is there are, there are, but there was a serious side to that chapter I put in the book. I wanted to first take a, I wanted to take a break from some of the subjects. It was a writing, a writing technique involved, but part of it also was to, to raise a bigger point. That is something you are doing a lot of inquiries into and others. I don't know what secret that I don't know myself. I don't know everything, obviously. I used to know in CIA, got so paranoid at one point, got so paranoid. I couldn't pass a polygraph anymore. And I, they actually let me publish a chapter on that, which I was really surprised when I was failing the polys.

• 3:20:31Speaker 03

  Because I knew too much and I was one of the few people that knew everything about a certain subject that, uh, that, uh, I couldn't even tell the polygrapher. I didn't trust a polygrapher. Let's put it that way. So you get to this, uh, uh, wilderness of mirrors. It's a famous poem, but there's a famous book on it too, about espionage where you start looking at everything. Everybody and everybody being, knowing something you don't. And the fact is, I used to marvel at people walking around the halls of CIA that thought they were so smart on everything. They used to talk smack and I, they don't know what I know. And then I thought, well, there's probably stuff that this guy over there knows that I don't know. So you start looking that way and DOE is even worse.

• 3:21:13Speaker 03

  Cause I, I tease my CIA colleagues and friends. I said, you know, I learned. Some of this nation's most important secrets at DOE, not CIA. DOE does stuff that, man.

• 3:21:26Jesse Michels?

  Do you feel like that is true?

• 3:21:27Speaker 03

  Oh, I know it's true.

• 3:21:28Jesse Michels?

  You know, it's true.

• 3:21:29Speaker 03

  I know it's true.

• 3:21:29Jesse Michels?

  What years were you DOE?

• 3:21:31Speaker 03

  Two thousand five to eight.

• 3:21:32Jesse Michels?

  Two thousand five to eight.

• 3:21:33Speaker 03

  Now, the point in the story, though, is it's a valid thing to wonder, does the president know? This has come up a lot in UFO history. It started with really Reagan and Gorbachev musing about, um, they need to get together. So when the aliens come, the US and Russian, Reagan mentioned that he was joking, but it was, it was on his mind, right? And then later was President Clinton, I know, was interviewed by somebody and said, do you believe that we have signs of alien life? And we're hiding or there's a program or something? And he basically said, I don't think they tell me, even though I'm the president. He said that. So it speaks to both the dangers of secrecy, really, because you can't get to that point.

• 3:22:17Speaker 03

  You can't get to the point, both of this, that you don't want to share secrets because you just, they're secret. Or you're thinking you've got to withhold this from the president. I don't think you can go there and have a small group of people. That's when you could get into your deep state. If groups form around, subgroups form around the real government and start to do things the real government's not aware of. Well, that's kind of the textbook. I don't believe in the deep state. I've been, since I was seventeen years old, and I'm seventy one now, and I'm still very connected. If there's a deep state, I want to know who's in it and where it's operating from and what's, what they're doing. Because I have no idea. But when you get to something like this, somebody would say, and I told you it would be me.

• 3:23:02Speaker 03

  If I knew that we had, we had evidence of extraterrestrial visits to Earth, I'd, I'd go to the press.

• 3:23:10Jesse Michels?

  What about if we just had evidence of some sort of anomalous phenomenon around our nuclear sites that we can't explain?

• 3:23:18Speaker 03

  Well, see, that's intriguing. You've, you've talked a little with me about that, and that's the first I heard of it.

• 3:23:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Interesting. Because if you. Google or even Chat GPT like UFO incursions to around like the National Labs and nuclear sites, even in that time range, 2005 to 2008, you'll see stuff, you'll see.

• 3:23:41Speaker 03

  Right, I believe you.

• 3:23:42Jesse Michels?

  Effie Warren, you'll see Malmstrom base and you'll see literally people, missile security officers who've signed affidavits saying that they've seen incursions. And this is, there's a great journalist who's a friend of mine, named Robert Hastings, and he's written a book called UFOs and Nukes, and it is ubiquitous. He has 167, you know, top TS, you know, secret cleared, you know, missile security officers, radar operators, guys on the PRP program, which I'm sure you're familiar with, where you have to report if you're on Ibuprofen, you know, because you're guarding the crown jewel secrets of American defense. And they just see saucers, Tic Tacs, orbs everywhere around our nuclear sites. And in some cases, these sites are getting shut down. There's a 2010 case in Effie Warren,

• 3:24:28Jesse Michels?

  where literally Obama gets briefed because it was down for, you know, they say it was 59 minutes, but I think, so this Bob Hastings backchanneled with this retired missile technician, and he was in touch with some missile technicians on site, and they attribute it to this cigar shaped object that literally, you know, this, this sort of Tic Tac thing

• 3:24:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:24:51Jesse Michels?

  that shut down the, the base. And so, did you not hear of anything like that?

• 3:24:55Speaker 03

  Well, I can, I can say completely openly and transparently, when I was in DOE and I was Director of Intelligence, I never was briefed on any of that. So it doesn't mean it didn't occur. And I take very seriously what you said. I, I think in all likelihood, a lot of those reports are, are true, or at least being truthfully reported.

• 3:25:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:17Speaker 03

  And I don't know if it's because they're handled somewhere else, which gets to kind of some of the big questions, or whether because they're individual things that never get resolved, they're, they don't go anywhere, but we can never resolve it because we don't know what's going on.

• 3:25:33Jesse Michels?

  I would believe that. Cause I, I guess I would, I worry if the head of intelligence and counterintelligence for the DOE isn't, isn't hearing about these incursions, like, that seems so fundamental to this, you know, the safety of, and maybe that's why it's impossible to talk about. On the kind of the civil side, on the open side or something because how can you say, you know, these things are flying with impunity over our sites, but I don't know, I wish there was some better way to talk about it or something.

• 3:26:02Speaker 03

  I think, you know, I'm not, obviously, I'm not the president or, you know, anybody who would be in that decision making, but I think it would be a strategic mistake of historical proportions for a body of government at any given time to conceal that truth from the American people thinking we can't handle it or somehow it compromises. If our security is being, or national security is being compromised that way, I can't think of a scenario where it's better that the people don't know it than if they do know it. Because if there's a problem, we need everyone to know, kind of have some things to go on. And I don't believe in like the mass panic sort of things and stuff like that.

• 3:26:44Speaker 03

  So it's really a question of trust and when you get to trust, the government has very little trust. The whole, the whole deep state phenomenon is rooted in mistrust of government.

• 3:26:53Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 3:26:53Speaker 03

  And the assumption that we don't, if we don't know what the government's going on, we don't believe what we're being told, there must be something really bad going on. My experience is really kind of the polar opposite. It's been, you'd be very disappointed at times if you knew what we're doing because it's not always very good and sometimes it's malicious and bad, just bad, wrong, illegal.

• 3:27:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:15Speaker 03

  Because you again, if you're doing a certain amount of things, some people are going to do illegal things, like it's just inevitable.

• 3:27:22Jesse Michels?

  I think the public on this issue is probably so confused by the government's messaging because you have people like James Clapper, Jim Semivan, guys who are like, you know, James Clapper's DNI oversees all the, yeah, you know them exactly. Yeah, Jim Semivan, very high up at the CIA.

• 3:27:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:27:39Jesse Michels?

  So like have you, if you, if you know them, you know, they're out in this movie, Age of Disclosure, saying, you know, this is, non-human intelligence is real. We're in an arms race with China and Russia on this stuff. We have a reverse engineering program with UFOs. Like, have you called them up, hey, guys, like, what are you talking about? Like, this isn't really like.

• 3:28:00Speaker 03

  Well, it, no, I haven't called them up specifically, but I certainly, and you've helped not only whet my appetite, but give me some things to work with in terms of broadening my, I'm open minded on it. I truly am. I, I'm not dismissing it at all. I think that's a big mistake. I was more going to the the idea of that we got in our hazing ritual is how do we handle these things? And are we actually prepared for the reality that could come to us at any time? You talk about your ultimate, we intelligence, the thing we worry about most as intelligence community is the fear of surprise, strategic surprise. Nine eleven, collapse of the Soviet Union, Arab Spring,

• 3:28:45Speaker 03

  aliens coming to Earth and we not being have a clue.

• 3:28:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:50Speaker 03

  I mean, every time there's an interstellar object coming now and you've got this astronomer saying it's nothing and this one's saying, I don't know, though, not so fast. I mean, I pay a lot of attention to that as a just reader, because I think one day one of those things won't be just a comet.

• 3:29:05Jesse Michels?

  Do you, do you, do you think nothing happened at Roswell? Or do you have it? Do you have a take?

• 3:29:10Speaker 03

  Well, what we know is happened at Roswell, maybe then or certainly over the years is I suspect something happened, right? And so the question is, is it something we created and contain like experimental flights or or development of our new aircraft? I mean, the whole history of which is a lot of CIA's history is on the technical side and the SR71 and all these different aircraft, secret aircraft, the whole, the key to that is secret, you know, to be to be ahead of everything on that. So we can fly them around the world and not be seen. So the idea that we're doing exotic testing and there are accidents and crashes and things that much, I'd be surprised if there's not more of them, any of us know.

• 3:29:54Speaker 03

  But and again, I wouldn't know that at CIA because I wasn't in those, you know, those, those, those saps or whatever you call them. The thing that did surprise me at DOE for all the incredible secrets, many, some of which were nuclear related things, is just how few of them related to this. So again, that could suggest two explanations. One is it's done somewhere else and even I

• 3:30:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:20Speaker 03

  was was hazed by

• 3:30:23Speaker 03

  or, or, or, you know, there's less to it for the more banal reason, or I'd call it that. That no one's pulling it together. You know, you talk to someone like Jim Sammy Van Good. By the way, the people you mentioned, I have immense respect for.

• 3:30:36Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. So why would they? Cause yeah, I, I, I wouldn't imagine they would want to lie about this.

• 3:30:41Speaker 03

  No, no, I don't think, I don't think they're lying.

• 3:30:43Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 3:30:44Speaker 03

  They don't, they have no motivation to lie about it.

• 3:30:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:46Speaker 03

  So I think it's well, I think it's sincere and, and well intended. Statements, you take it.

• 3:30:52Jesse Michels?

  But you wouldn't put your money on them being right.

• 3:30:56Speaker 03

  Um, I don't know what being right is. See, one thing I haven't been able to get from, we had congressional testimony. We've had this movie, which I haven't seen yet. So, so I'll defer judgment on the, on the movie. But the one thing we haven't heard from any of them, and the question I would ask Jim Clapper or Jim Sammy Van or anybody, if I called them up and as old friends is to say, okay, you say this and that. I never heard that before. You say that before, like, what, why don't you then say exactly what you mean? What, if, if you have that as a statement, you've, say a summary of what you think.

• 3:31:30Speaker 03

  You're not going to provide any like specifics of what you mean by that.

• 3:31:33Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 3:31:34Speaker 03

  When, where, how, where is it now? What does it migrate? I understand it might be deeply classified.

• 3:31:40Jesse Michels?

  They provide some specifics. They talk about Roswell is a real event. There were beings that came out of, I think they say four beings that came out of this craft. You know, I think they even mentioned one surviving or something. So they do, they do mention some specific details.

• 3:31:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:31:55Jesse Michels?

  So, you know, I don't know. There, those are real claims.

• 3:31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I, like I said, I see no reason to discount the people you mentioned among some of the other people I've heard are in it, just because they don't have the proof.

• 3:32:13Speaker 03

  Again, I'd, I'd, I'd implore the government to think hard about what they're trying to do here. What's, what's the purpose of, of not disclosing?

• 3:32:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:23Speaker 03

  Of non-disclosure. Secrecy, one of the things I've always felt strongly about is there's too much secrecy in the government.

• 3:32:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:32Speaker 03

  And it's this kind of insidious secrecy that's disruptive, it's corrosive to democracy.

• 3:32:37Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:38Speaker 03

  And, and this is coming from me and my community, there's too much, too much. There are damn good reasons not to talk about certain nuclear data, or who's a spy, and when you have, you know, you're starting to pick up evidence of a spy in your ranks, or you're going to compromise the thing and lose it. But other things, we, we just keep secret way beyond its time for no reason. I won't even say apparent, which to qualify, I just say, I could, I could state categorically, we, we just keep.

• 3:33:08Jesse Michels?

  Do you think the UFO thing could be an example of that?

• 3:33:10Speaker 03

  Well, I, I think it is not by virtue that it wouldn't be revelatory, therefore, somebody would say, keep it secret, because it's like, Hughes is going to change our whole impression of life in the universe, okay?

• 3:33:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:25Speaker 03

  But that's the reason I would say they got to declassify it.

• 3:33:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:29Speaker 03

  You can't keep something like that secret.

• 3:33:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:31Speaker 03

  You know, you can't, you, you've got to share that. Everybody in this country ought to know if the US government has concluded that there's life on other planets, because we have evidence.

• 3:33:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:41Speaker 03

  Not because we've seen, you know, Tic Tacs, or, I get all that, you know, and there's still, the big joke, of course, which you know all this better than I, is, you know, why are all these images always fuzzy? But it's, it's the idea that.

• 3:33:55Jesse Michels?

  But they even have explanations for that. They say, is like, you know, gravitational lensing, and blue shifts, and redshift. The guy who talks about that is this guy Hal Puthoff, who's at University of Institute of Advanced Study, Austin, and he, you know, is, I think, a longtime CIA guy as well. And he talks about Stephen Hadley, and the Bush administration is going through this whole exercise of should we disclose, or should we not disclose? And them reading the three-body problem as part of this exercise to figure out whether, you know, this is this Chinese science fiction novel that involves this, you know, trisolarian alien race, or whatever, and the aliens having a lot to do with frontier physics as

• 3:34:39Jesse Michels?

  well, clamping down on our physics, because that's our tip of the spear ability to defend ourselves as the human race.

• 3:34:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:34:45Jesse Michels?

  And. And he says they go through this whole exercise and they come out saying, you know, it's actually, it's not worth it to disclose. And Hal Putoff said this on, you know, Joe Rogan, like the biggest podcast in the world. And I'm like, what's going on? You like, you have on the one, you have this indetectable, undetectable dark matter. You have on the one hand, people like Elon Musk, like yourself, who like, you know, super like amazing bona fides, extremely respectable, like highly intelligent, you know, know a lot of stuff. And then you have Jim Semien, Hal Putoff, Jim Clapper, and they're all like so pro UFO. And they have like discreet stories of these things. And I'm like, what's like, how do I make sense of this, you know?

• 3:35:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:35:29Jesse Michels?

  It's so confusing.

• 3:35:30Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I think the way you make sense of it is to keep, keep pushing it and keep interviewing and, and keep.

• 3:35:38Jesse Michels?

  Do you think Hadley ever went through an exercise like that? I mean?

• 3:35:43Speaker 03

  There's really no, I put no value in my, in my judgment, except to say, you know, I know Steve Hadley and I respect him too.

• 3:35:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:51Speaker 03

  I've never heard anything like that.

• 3:35:53Jesse Michels?

  Never heard anything?

• 3:35:54Speaker 03

  No. I mean, I, I, I said, you know, I just want you to know one thing.

• 3:35:57Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:58Speaker 03

  I don't know. And if I knew, I probably would. I can't say categorically, I know I would, but I can't see why I would keep that a secret, even at risk to myself.

• 3:36:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:07Speaker 03

  Of being punished in some way.

• 3:36:08Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:09Speaker 03

  I just, I feel that fervently.

• 3:36:11Jesse Michels?

  No, I appreciate that. And I also, you know, I think if that weren't the case, you probably wouldn't come on the show because I, I mean, like, I mean, I, and I, and I, you know, I'm not, I won't belabor this too long, but like, there's so much, it's like a whole ontology that has, basically you can, you can create around the DOE being like holding the crown jewels of the US FO stuff. There's transclassified foreign material and, you know, special nuclear material from the, you know, 1954 Atomic Energy Act. Where you have restricted data, anything that could be radiological in nature is immediately born secret upon sort of retrieving it.

• 3:36:50Speaker 03

  Yes, I know that, yeah, yeah.

• 3:36:51Jesse Michels?

  I'm sure you're familiar. So like, there's this idea that that is sort of this Trojan horse for UFO material. And then, you know, NEST, nuclear emergency support teams, like, you know, I spoke to my buddies, UAP Gerb, and then this other guy, David Grush, who's this whistleblower before this, and they were talking, you know, about those two things. And so, there's nothing that you know about any of that stuff?

• 3:37:15Speaker 03

  No. And then I hasten to add, when I think back at myself, in all modesty, some guy coming in from CIA to head up intelligence for three years, obviously, the intelligence shop is not the place to go for this information, or having access to it. Now, there might be one person they trust with it. And it is, it is an organization, Dewey, that you could easily imagine, because I described the going in through the multiple vaults, back deeper and deeper into the recesses of the building, to the point where there's not a sound coming in out of there, other than the people talking in the room. So you have a culture where this is all very possible.

• 3:37:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:01Speaker 03

  And I have known other subjects, a few, that I've got roped into where there was a very exclusive group of people looking at it. And to the point where this was even at CIA, where we didn't put anything, well, specific, very specific thing, not generally done and very highly unusual, irregular, I'd call it, where nothing pertaining to that was even put into any kind of a record.

• 3:38:27Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, there, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:38:30Speaker 03

  So, anything's imaginable.

• 3:38:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's possible. Yeah, I mean, at the Seoul Foundation, there's just this Stanford organization that's dedicated to UFO research, these NNSA guys, National Nuclear Security Administration guys showed up. And so, it's like, why are you interested in this stuff? And then, there's this News Nation, which just covers UFOs a lot. There's this slide that was like, uh, advanced gravity propulsion research. And it was a guy who had incurred some sort of Havana syndrome like, you know, biological effects. But it was, you know, it was like, that was his title. And so I'm like, okay, DOE is doing this exotic.

• 3:39:11Speaker 03

  Well, that doesn't surprise me at all.

• 3:39:13Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 3:39:14Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 3:39:15Jesse Michels?

  But the UFO stuff surprises.

• 3:39:17Speaker 03

  Well, there's, there's, there's a major distinction here, you know, looking into, I would call all forms of materials. And advanced propulsion techniques and, and, uh, energy related, when people think of Department of Energy, just for a very quick, very quick explanation of what it is. Which most people don't know.

• 3:39:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:36Speaker 03

  Is Department of Energy consists of really three main components that are, but it's a hybrid that shouldn't exist together, but it's a product of a lot of politics that created DOE. The one side, there's the energy part, which contrary to a lot of, a lot of common belief is not just gas and oil and fossil fuels. It's also advanced form of renewables. It's for top nuclear power. And of course it's for looking into advanced energy forms, some of which we don't, gravity, magnets is what, okay. So all that's in the energy department. And there's an overwhelming thought. It's just, you know, Jimmy Carter created it during the crisis with the Middle East over gas and oil. So that's no, but it's all this other stuff.

• 3:40:18Speaker 03

  That's strengthened by the second major component of DOE, which is the science part of DOE, which a lot of which does pure science. So the pure science part of DOE is some of its research for ongoing needs of the US government. Some of it's just advanced things. I've met some of the most fascinating people who do things like chaos theory. And look for numbers, they're looking for the equation, you know, the equation of chaos or it got me on a whole track of thinking of. My philosophy and my beloved philosophy in a totally different way, which is wow, what if every human decision like in in history is just permutations of choices we make freely.

• 3:41:03Speaker 03

  But no matter what we do, it's determined outcome because all those choices inevitably because are driven by an equation of human nature. So they all drive you to the same result. Well, I got some of those ideas from DOE scientists. So who are who are doing and some of them are into that esoteric, those esoteric kind of aspects of their work. And again, wonderful people to talk to, some of them, you know, very eccentric or whatever you want to call it. And then the third part is the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is almost like I describe as an autonomous republic within within the DOE because it's got some independent status because

• 3:41:42Speaker 03

  for a time, the NNSA was seen as not getting it the attention and freedom of action it needed within a dysfunctional DOE. It's not dysfunctional anymore. DOE is quite functional, but there was a period. That's why I refer to the politics. So you had those three, many ways complementaries, but in some ways independent. And then the National Nuclear Security, our national laboratory complex serves those three things, energy, nukes, and pure science.

• 3:42:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:13Speaker 03

  And they they're they're proportioned in their work and what's required, what the basic priorities are.

• 3:42:19Jesse Michels?

  Have you ever seen a one of one material, like the a super unique material that's never, you've never seen elsewhere?

• 3:42:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:42:30Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 3:42:31Speaker 03

  I would remember that. The other, the other, you know, common attribute is you realize how vast what I just described is. So the probability that I know a lot of it is small and but it's prescribed. So by that, I mean, I'll be kind of vague, but everything that's exceptional.

• 3:42:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:49Speaker 03

  Typically, you get read into individually.

• 3:42:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:53Speaker 03

  It's not just yours as a result of the job you hold.

• 3:42:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:57Speaker 03

  If it's important enough, then you get like someone will tap you on the shoulder and you have, you know, specials, things happen, things happen, they're different. So it's entirely possible that there are very few people that know. A lot about all the most important things, if that makes sense, because they're divided.

• 3:43:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:43:15Speaker 03

  And I could easily see things like we're talking about being in a separate category, which is even curtailed further by people who really need to know. Because the ultimate, the need of the, the chapter that I have in my book for this is called Need to Know. So the other, I'm trying to also illustrate a principle. I've never been entirely comfortable about intelligence and government secrecy is the idea that need to know governs it all. Well, that's fine. If need to know is perfectly interpreted.

• 3:43:46Jesse Michels?

  Well, I think the public needs is, is, is, has a need to know for the ontological truth. The basic, you know, it's just like nuclear science is taught at every university, but nuclear trade secrets should be classified. I think that should be applied to

• 3:44:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:44:01Jesse Michels?

  this if it's at all real. And to me, when people ask about, you know, my conviction in UFOs, I always say, you have to view everything probabilistically. The idea that we're in some reverse engineering arms race, I would probability weight much lower than, I am sure that there are these objects showing up around nuclear assets all over the world, not even. There's a town in Japan, we have our American alchemy Japanese shirts here. There's a town in Japan next to the Fukushima Prefecture, which is their civilian energy grid that has a, it's this mountain, Senkamori, they have a whole museum dedicated to UFOs and all these geomagnetic anomalies and they're obsessed with UFOs. So I do, I do think that is this ubiquitous, you know, commonality.

• 3:44:46Jesse Michels?

  And that, that is, that is the thing I think you can be most high conviction in the UFO world. But, um,

• 3:44:51Speaker 03

  Well, then I can also see that the tie, there's just such an obvious tie in with, um,

• 3:45:00Speaker 03

  Other than worldly life forms or intelligence and our highest forms of intelligence or most destructive things like nuclear, I mean, because there again, the, the whole idea of I've, I've tried to get accustomed or adapted to the reality of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrets my whole life. Even having spent by, by accident as I unfolded, it unfolded as a big accident. But when I look back on it, yeah, it's like nuclear here, nuclear here. And it's always, it's a little bit like your appearances at all the nuclear sites. It's like, it keeps coming to me. And you could even make a case, if you wanted to write that script, that some of these appearances

• 3:45:40Speaker 03

  were a divine awareness in sense of messages and of the need to warn and the, because the essence of the Ezekiel warning as a watchman, the watchman is a specific type of, you know, it's not a messenger, it's not a prophet, it's a watchman, only responsibility is to warn. So specifically in biblical terms, the idea of the watchman warning the people will be held accountable, not for if it's true or stops whatever's going to happen from happening. That's not the accountability, the explicit accountability of being a watchman is to warn. Your job is to warn. So when you ask me, did you prevent or you, you have to banish that idea from your mind that you are

• 3:46:24Speaker 03

  going to prevent the apocalypse or shape it in some form, because I don't think any human being's going to have that responsibility, but it's pretty hard just to do the warning part.

• 3:46:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:36Speaker 03

  Because like you said, if people genuinely believe that this is part of it, and maybe you're a watchman for, for, you know, shining a light on so, so much on this factor, particularly depending how things turn out.

• 3:46:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll see. I'm, I'm curious to see where this whole topic goes. You know, in the, in this, in this kind of hazing ritual brief that you had on UFOs, do you remember the date of Roswell that they gave you?

• 3:47:02Speaker 03

  Ah, no, not off the top of my head. I think I had it in the, I think I wrote it in the book.

• 3:47:07Jesse Michels?

  It is in the book and it's July 7th, 1947.

• 3:47:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:47:11Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that connects with your download 747?

• 3:47:15Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness. Good. You know, that's the first time I've ever thought that, that it might.

• 3:47:22Jesse Michels?

  Are you, are you trying to tell the audience in coded fashion that you might know?

• 3:47:26Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm, I'm being as what I've tried to be throughout the, I've been complete, and it's even better in complete honesty, but it didn't even cross my mind. So I couldn't possibly have fabricated that to make it more compelling. There's one other one that's a really interesting, there was a, uh, this will fit your, you need to look this up if you don't already know it.

• 3:47:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:46Speaker 03

  So one of the scientists at DOE kind of knew my, my stuff with numbers and this may have been a red. Explain to me the famous Vella, have you ever heard of the Vella incident? Nuclear explosion. It's, it's called, uh, the seven, they labeled it as the 747 incident.

• 3:48:01Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 3:48:02Speaker 03

  It's a nuclear test that South Africa made, right? But the suspicion is they did it on behalf of the Israelis.

• 3:48:13Speaker 03

  So suspicion, I'm not saying to your viewers, you know, this is, but this is into the murky secrets of the development of the Israeli bomb, which of course the US kind of gave the big thumbs up handshake deal to, you know, we know you need this kind of thing. At least that's what I, what I've heard. So the, the point being there is, boy, that's a very Vella 747. Look it up.

• 3:48:33Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating. Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I think there's something very ontologically interesting about nuclear. And it's some sort of energy unlock that if I were some sort of concurrent civilization, whether it's extraterrestrial, you know, which the people who deny UFOs at the highest levels often say extraterrestrial because I think it's a. We don't have evidence that's extraterrestrial, you know, I think it's it could be like, you know, some sort of non-human or even ultra-terrestrial, some past civilization on Earth or something. But it seems like they would want to monitor nuclear, like that just seems like this really important unlock.

• 3:49:15Jesse Michels?

  And that seems to be corroborated by all the evidence, but as to what that means, I just don't know.

• 3:49:20Speaker 03

  That now you're thinking of other people looking at us maybe way past this point. There's some secret we may bump into. I don't know that there is worried about us blowing ourselves up as we, you know, they probably have no reason to worry too much about that. But what if they're worried we're going to cross a threshold of knowledge that they're already aware of? And that has grave implications for them.

• 3:49:41Jesse Michels?

  That's really interesting. I mean, it's like the building blocks of life or if life is, if you think about the universe as like information theoretic, like maybe you're getting into the root access or something.

• 3:49:52Speaker 03

  Well, you know, but it adds another element to this that isn't, I don't think well enough understood or absorbed by the public is we take for granted the kind of the expression of this incredible God secrets, we call it, has manifested in our discoveries of those secrets. And yet in every domain, whether it's AI or nuclear or biological life sciences, in every one of those domains, our knowledge is so limited.

• 3:50:24Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:50:24Speaker 03

  Of what we're dealing with. And if you go to, we, we think a little about the implications of AI and I've heard some in various places. I've heard talks and even by some of the top guys on this and it scares the hell out of me.

• 3:50:36Jesse Michels?

  Well, it does.

• 3:50:38Speaker 03

  They don't know what they're doing.

• 3:50:39Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's, it's, you could call it a process of like umvelt hacking or something. So like umvelt is like, um, this is my old colleague, Eric Weinstein talks about this where it's like, you get to deeper layers of ontological truth, the more, the better your measurement instruments are. Or there's even a physicist who was at CERN for a while, Ken Wilson, talks about phase transitions in materials. And the more you put them under duress, you know, that you get these whole new properties, like, you know, as you, you put them under duress. And so. I wonder if, you know, it's kind of what we were talking about before with quantum indeterminacy between level of energy and time.

• 3:51:20Jesse Michels?

  If you have particle accelerators or nuclear blasts, you might get weird ontological weirdness around those events.

• 3:51:29Speaker 03

  Of course, particularly as little as we know the physics, you know, and especially since the people at the top of those fields are guiding all of us. And it's the same with these other fields, right? And that's the, I mean cloning.

• 3:51:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:46Speaker 03

  Stunning.

• 3:51:47Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:48Speaker 03

  I never, I never thought, I had a dream once on cloning.

• 3:51:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:52Speaker 03

  Long before clones.

• 3:51:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:54Speaker 03

  And I thought, that's never gonna happen in my lifetime. Well, you know, pets are being cloned, brought back to life. And that in itself, we're playing God. So we're at the point where we're, in a way, we've earned this as the only, by, in biblical terms, again, where we created in the image of God.

• 3:52:10Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:52:11Speaker 03

  I was always seized by that. I, at an early age even, I recognized this is special. Image of God means, really, it's a two-way thing, means God has a responsibility for us in a way that I'm sure God will fulfill and that that's been the essence of everything we've talked about. God's gonna send messengers, God's going to send his own son, God's gonna do X and Y, send a prophet, mom. But all the things that, with, with the typical characters behind them, always the same people, Angel Gabriel, and they're always the same people, always the same entities, right? Behind all. And then all that's gonna be his way of guiding us, making sure we don't screw up entirely before, in the end, well, okay, I'm gonna give them some reassurance, which sounds awful, but Judgment Day and Apocalypse, that things are gonna turn out, because that's really what it's about.

• 3:52:55Speaker 03

  It's not about punishing us. We punish ourselves. It's about reconciliation. It's about judgment, meaning you, there is a reward and a penalty for what you do in your life. You're not, you're not here anonymously.

• 3:53:07Jesse Michels?

  Hmm, hmm.

• 3:53:08Speaker 03

  Like, that was the thing on the train. It was like, I'm not, God's aware, he's there right now, he's like, standing there.

• 3:53:14Jesse Michels?

  Hmm, hmm.

• 3:53:15Speaker 03

  That's why that is in the book, because I'd never had that feeling before or after. It was the one time it was that.

• 3:53:22Speaker 03

  Deep. And, and so the same thing applies with handling God's gifts. So we're, we're entitled, we're given access to things that we in a way have no right to have access to, but we're not, there's no point to give us freedom in the whole Garden of Eden story unless it's full freedom, which because of the way we're wired, we're going to screw that up for the most part. And so that's all known.

• 3:53:46Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 3:53:47Speaker 03

  You can write your equations now.

• 3:53:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:49Speaker 03

  God is, God knows.

• 3:53:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:51Speaker 03

  It'll play out how many Hegelian dialectical histories you want to write. They all might be different, but guess what? They're all going to end the same way. But when it comes to how the handling of the power of God turns out, that's the unique test. And that's what, so I never get into prophesies. I don't prophesy anything, but predict when's the apocalypse, when's it start? And one of the things about my dream was that I specifically remember was 2060 in the chameleon dream of the future where I was trying UFOs and going out and trying, I was already in an apocalypse of going back and forth, the nuclear, part of the world had been destroyed with the great nuclear war of 2034. And I was going back and forth trying to find people trying to make bombs. This is way before I did the terrorist bomb stuff.

• 3:54:34Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 3:54:34Speaker 03

  By the way.

• 3:54:35Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 3:54:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:54:36Jesse Michels?

  You had a dream about that?

• 3:54:37Speaker 03

  This is the dream that I hadn't, that you talked to, you asked me about in 1981.

• 3:54:42Jesse Michels?

  And you said you were flying on what the DOE would call UFOs?

• 3:54:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it was, I had the dream in 1982.

• 3:54:49Jesse Michels?

  And, and, but this was, these were our like crafts, like American crafts?

• 3:54:53Speaker 03

  Our crafts sent from CIA.

• 3:54:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:54:56Speaker 03

  From, all managed and all connected to a massive supercomputer we would call a quantum. I didn't know that back then. In, in the bowels of CIA underground.

• 3:55:07Jesse Michels?

  Do you think that we have propulsion modalities that transcend chemical combustion?

• 3:55:13Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 3:55:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:55:14Speaker 03

  No idea.

• 3:55:15Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:55:15Speaker 03

  But in the dream, certainly.

• 3:55:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:55:18Speaker 03

  In the dream, certainly. I I didn't know what it was. I just was flying around like it was all known, but my dream didn't reveal to me how it but it was it was a manifestation of Reagan Star Wars thing. Star War, which before Star Wars. So he gave the great Star Wars speech, I think in eighty four.

• 3:55:35Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:55:35Speaker 03

  And my dream was in eighty two. So I was already anticipating, I'll call it that, this idea of a shield. So my dream was basically the world had been divided in two. The world in the shield, the world out of the shield. And the whole point was to keep of the UFOs and intelligence was a global intelligence service that would keep out, keep out the people trying to break through the shield.

• 3:55:57Jesse Michels?

  Well, yeah, that's fascinating.

• 3:55:59Speaker 03

  So now we're into what? We're into exactly what you're talking about.

• 3:56:02Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, and that, in fact, the Blue Gill Triple Prime thing was, it was a high altitude nuclear test, but it was a defense against Russian ICBMs and Soviets ICBMs. And there's even a Rand Corporation paper a couple of years before it was pulled off around speculating as to how that would be done. And Malmgren was at the Institute for Defense Analysis at the time, and they've been involved in every missile defense, you know, system since then. And he directly ties Blue Gill Triple Prime to Star Wars and to, you know, a strategic defense initiative. And so then there's, again, there's this like weird question of like, is there some dual use around UFOs for that or something?

• 3:56:46Jesse Michels?

  And like, I don't know. And you have the Golden Dome now, you know, and.

• 3:56:51Speaker 03

  Well, I think one of the questions, I know people are asking, but just like when you're hearing us talk.

• 3:56:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:56:55Speaker 03

  Muse about this is we're sort of due for another big transformational change. And we've had, of course, the industrial age, and then we had now more recently the internet age.

• 3:57:10Jesse Michels?

  Hmm.

• 3:57:11Speaker 03

  And this just strikes me that we're due for something like this, this idea of something propelling us into a future we really haven't anticipated as over.

• 3:57:21Speaker 03

  In a way overwritten on everything, every possible permutation of our future. Something that's going to change on that. We're going to say, well, it's not that future after all.

• 3:57:31Jesse Michels?

  It feels like we're on the verge of a paradigm shift, for sure.

• 3:57:34Speaker 03

  It does.

• 3:57:34Jesse Michels?

  And it feels like, at least for the stuff I'm investigating, feels like the dam is going to break. Cause there are, if the kind of incumbent, you know, current paradigm is like, you know, inside of the dam or whatever, there are like 15 different vectors of like holes in the dam. And that thing is just, it's about to burst.

• 3:57:57Speaker 03

  You'd think. That, when I hear you, you know,

• 3:58:03Speaker 03

  talk about all these different things that you're working on too, that's the immediate reaction I had is what we just said there with, with one another is just, we're ready for a big paradigm shift. It's probably going to be something we've never anticipated.

• 3:58:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 3:58:17Speaker 03

  Based on something we didn't see coming. And the most important thing of that is it's happening at a time. And I think very few people understand this. I'm not trying to, I don't want to talk, be condescending, but I just, I myself struggle with this a lot.

• 3:58:34Speaker 03

  Where time and scale is, time is rapidly shrinking on us. Everything is more accessible so fast, we can't process it much like make, make it back in the day when you mailed things and you sent cables and you, you imagine how easier you could contemplate things you can make. And even then it was rough making good decisions. And at a certain point, we reached a happy medium where this, where speed increased to the point where you can make better decisions faster. But now we're at the point, I'm sure of this. In government or even maybe the private sector, I think, where the amount of things we have to decide at the speed we have to decide in is overwhelming us. At the scale it applies because of population growth and how everything's interacting and the way the internet is tied everything together.

• 3:59:17Jesse Michels?

  Well, that's what that movie Age of Disclosure felt like. It felt like the government trying to get in front of all these kind of truths coming out and figuring out a way to frame it or something, you know.

• 3:59:31Speaker 03

  I hope so.

• 3:59:31Jesse Michels?

  Proactively.

• 3:59:32Speaker 03

  Would be good.

• 3:59:33Jesse Michels?

  Sure. Yeah. And, but you know, it feels, it does feel like that is inevitable. Like this stuff is, is sort of coming out. And I wonder in some ways, like you, you believe in angels, right?

• 3:59:45Speaker 03

  Yes, I do. Yeah, of course.

• 3:59:46Jesse Michels?

  So.

• 3:59:48Jesse Michels?

  These, all these things have literally happened to you. And I wonder if like, it's like the age of disclosure has their veneer of like extraterrestrials. Your veneer might be angels, demons, eschatology, the Bible. If I were like, would you believe that angels might show up around nuclear sites? That might seem more plausible to you.

• 4:00:07Speaker 03

  Well, in a way, in a way, and I'm, you know, I told you, I'm so hesitant to link UFOs to faith and mysticism. So with that gigantic caveat.

• 4:00:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 4:00:18Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, don't apologize. It's fun. It's fun, right? I don't, I don't think it discredits religion or faith or in any way insults.

• 4:00:25Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's trying to figure out some underlying truth between, you know, the, the way you're describing what's happened to you personally. And then these, you know, all these other intelligence officials who are saying, we are not alone, you know?

• 4:00:37Speaker 03

  Right. Well, I think, I think where it ties, I was getting to the, my big however, you know, is, is if you believe the one, like, like, like you said, I'm utterly, there's not even any doubt in my mind about all these things. And also the existence of angels like Gabriel. And now what, how you describe that or what that reality is, whether, you know, obviously the wing figure coming from is I think symbolic of a messenger from a different state of reality. But now we're getting very close to being visited by life forms in our own universe that are, that technically shouldn't be much intersection with us. It's, I've never really doubted the, the sort of actuarial realities that intelligent life must exist

• 4:01:21Speaker 03

  in the universe. I've really never questioned that. What I've, I want to see is the evidence of it and begin to understand what that means for us. But I've also wanted to understand how spacetime makes that work because everything is so distant from us that even with advanced forms of Star Trek, forms of travel, which I loved that show when I was growing up, it's hard to imagine we're going to intersect at precisely that moment of advanced development of our civilizations in this place, in our place. That would be a very low odds, not impossible. But, and then, but then when you introduce something that we just talked about as being some breakthrough of truth somewhere that changes entirely our notions

• 4:02:05Speaker 03

  of reality. We already know we haven't unified physics. Well, that's a big one right there.

• 4:02:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:02:12Speaker 03

  There's a reason for that. And I don't think Einstein just got lazy after, you know, his earliest part of his life when he was at his greatest. I will, I will sort of reinforce one idea, though, is I, I have a much greater belief in younger people like you and others pushing us into the future than I do my generation. And not so much because we've done, achieved what we want to do. But you know, your minds change. You don't, you know, I, I don't deserve to be the person I was getting all the insights and things to guide my life and my work that I, now that I had then. So if I want them now, it's more for my own, you know, satisfaction.

• 4:02:48Speaker 03

  And that's not good enough, right? But, but the idea behind this is that, that we need people who don't consider themselves experienced or informed through advanced degrees and all this, to think like you and others think and to push us. That's where the inspiration's going to come. I mean, Einstein was a clerk when he was doing his greatest work. And there's so many scientists who were like that. Now, yeah, maybe he's a genius, but.

• 4:03:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens. It feels like there are all these kind of heterodox threads of science that weren't taken seriously at all, you know, for the last 30, 40 years. And increasingly, they're kind of in vogue and being taken seriously. And in certain cases, I think they've been behind, you know, walls of secrecy or stigma, you know, things like, like documented is, you know, the, the CIA's efforts in remote viewing and parapsychology. And, you know, that's, I think, a well-respected intelligence modality and, you know, at Langley. But, um, you know, and only until

• 4:04:00Jesse Michels?

  the last few years, you know, that was, that was kind of rested out of the government with the Freedom of Information Act request in 2017. And only in the last few years are people saying, there's something clearly here. And I think the, the problem I have with the super anti UFO people are like, they.

• 4:04:17Jesse Michels?

  You know, say, oh, this can't be possible, this observable thing that you've seen a million different times with all these credible people coming out and saying it can't be real because of the physical, this physical, because of our current physical model of the universe. But if you were to bet on the anomaly historically and against the physical model of the universe, you would always be right. You know, you're always wrong if you bet on the physical model of the universe. So I do think we're on the precipice of something exciting.

• 4:04:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with you totally, and I hope it's very positive. I worry on one, one aspect that I think as we learn more about the reality we're creating, rather than the reality that exists, we need to make sure we continue to make that distinction. And that can, that can take the smallest form of knowing when you're a virtual reality figure in, in an app you're playing on your iPad, or if you're a kid, making sure that kids, you know, don't lose their minds in, in, in, in a fantasy reality. And this is coming from someone who's had these very vexing, disturbing, disorienting dreams that I've had, and who am I to talk? And, but it was a problem for me in some respects, too, that

• 4:05:28Speaker 03

  I've outlined. And then there, it goes up one level from that, where you have people, you know, relying on ChatGPT to be their girlfriend or boyfriend, or give them life advice. I'm saying, wow, this is, this is more than dangerous. People are, you know, the idea, I, I said at one point, we talked about identity a little bit, and how culturally that was different from people are more individualistic societies versus, say, common, common bond societies.

• 4:05:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:05:56Speaker 03

  That depend on one another, have a perception, they're more involved with one another. But think about it from the standpoint of, of how that changes, uh, when you can create a reality that doesn't exist and replace your reality, because it's not a very good life you're leading.

• 4:06:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:13Speaker 03

  Right now, you might go buy opiates or do something because you see no hope in your future, and you don't have a good healthcare, you don't have a good job, you don't really have any hope you're going to break out of this terrible cycle we put, we, I think that's a we thing, personally. Yeah, some people bring it on themselves. But we, as a country, owe more to people than we've given them. This isn't a now problem that we create. This has been a growing problem for decades. And, and into that environment comes the temptation to create. Alternative lives and realities. I would, you know, watching Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg and others trying to create this idea of having people, why do they want to do this? They want people to come on these virtual realities so they can buy imaginary plots of land. So they can make money off it.

• 4:06:58Speaker 03

  I mean, wow.

• 4:07:00Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. No, it's dystopian. That's part of the reason I'm into the UFO thing because I think it's if our life is, if this is somewhat of a simulation, I think there's a life-affirming version of the simulation where we're in a platonic cave and you can ascend outside and see the light that's lighter than light and, and, you know, witness great things in this reality. And so why would you go into this sort of bit compressed reality? And so that, that's what motivates me when I'm trying to close this gap between well, super well-respected people like yourself and then these other people like, you know, Chris Mellon, Deputy Assistant Director of Intelligence for, you know, under Bush and Clinton. He even, he just said, he was like, you know,

• 4:07:44Jesse Michels?

  we want to put the CIA's Director of Science and Technology. I think it was the, one of the last ones. He was like, we need to figure out what she knows about UFOs. And so I'm like, I'm like, it's maddening to me. Like, how, how would, how would you advise that I figure out what's going on?

• 4:08:02Speaker 03

  Well, I think you're doing a good job. The best thing you can do is what you're doing is interview credible witnesses. Avoid drawing conclusions until you have to. But by the same token, I think most of the, most of the mind-shut phenomena, whether it's UFOs or frankly, a lot of traditional things. There's a whole massive number of people, I can name any, but I won't embarrass people. Who, who just flat won't deal with terrorists having nukes or big biological weapons simply because they want to think that, you know, men, men wearing rags, you know, you can't, can't do it. And, but it's the idea though, that you just miss something because, you know, you want, you underestimate them. And that's what you're not doing. And you, you can't underestimate, and the people who tend to do that and dismissive,

• 4:08:47Speaker 03

  dismissive people and anything I've ever dealt with, there's a group of dismissive people. Because you're usually placing your bet on probability basis.

• 4:08:55Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 4:08:55Speaker 03

  Not impact basis. And, and the real risk equation for any good national security person or someone doing what you're doing is to assess risk as intent times capability. Times consequences.

• 4:09:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:09Speaker 03

  So we sometimes assume intent. That's typical. That's done a lot. Assume intent. They can, they don't. Part of our failure on nine 11, frankly, as an intelligence community was we didn't assume they had the intent to do that.

• 4:09:22Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:22Speaker 03

  And then the capability you don't even really look into, you don't see it because you haven't really ascribed that intent to them that they do something that audacious.

• 4:09:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:30Speaker 03

  And then, of course, the consequences, all they're really looking for. So that, yeah, you, you, you multiply those things out. But it's the same thing with UFOs. She's like, your, your best bet is observer trying to maintain some credibility.

• 4:09:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:45Speaker 03

  Like astronomers who cast judgment on every new visitor to our solar system is to dismiss it as anything. And then if the day comes at some point when it's a real thing, oh, they, they're, they're nowhere to be found.

• 4:09:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, yeah, exactly. No, exactly. Yeah. Did, did you know Glenn Gaffney at all?

• 4:10:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did.

• 4:10:07Jesse Michels?

  Cause he, this guy, um.

• 4:10:09Speaker 03

  I, I really, I like him a lot.

• 4:10:10Jesse Michels?

  He's a nice, he's a good guy. He, he was, um, he's, I think currently on the board of Arrow, the all domain anomalies research resolution office.

• 4:10:18Speaker 03

  Okay. I didn't know what he's doing. He was the director of science and technology.

• 4:10:21Jesse Michels?

  Technology at the CIA and there's, there are a couple of people, one of which was under oath in front of Congress, said he blocked the, the transfer of UFO material from Lockheed Martin to Bigelow Aerospace. Do you know anything about that?

• 4:10:38Speaker 03

  No, but it's pretty specific.

• 4:10:39Jesse Michels?

  It is specific. It's a specific, yeah. Anyways, well, okay. Uh, well, I appreciate you indulging my crazy questions.

• 4:10:46Speaker 03

  No, I'm not indulging. I'm learning and it's fascinating. I, I will say one more thing about, like, wasn't when Glenn was the head of director of science technology, but I, I've had a lot of interactions with them over, you know, the decades. And one thing I did learn from the interactions is that most of what they do, most of what they do, I hadn't, I wasn't privy to, I had no, no reason to be brought into from a need to know perspective. So there's all kinds of things I probably don't know.

• 4:11:12Jesse Michels?

  So you, and you swear to God, you know, nothing about UFOs?

• 4:11:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I swear, I swear to God.

• 4:11:16Jesse Michels?

  Okay. Wow.

• 4:11:18Speaker 03

  I'd hedge it.

• 4:11:19Jesse Michels?

  And I know that means a lot to you because you're.

• 4:11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, it's a whole different conversation, but I try never to be deceptive or lie. That's what it would be. Even when I'd have a reason like you're given an alibi because oh yeah, you're told not to tell so you can lie. No, I'll find a different way to not say it than lie.

• 4:11:39Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:11:40Speaker 03

  And I've learned that actually it's extremely important being in a manipulative business, which you can't deny, intelligence can be. It's even more important to maintain your personal integrity and ability to be credible with people. So if I'm dealing with the Russians, we've had some stories about that. Or I actually, there's a chapter in my book where I'm dealing with Syrian intelligence or any other intelligence service in the world or country. My credibility lies and not lying to them.

• 4:12:12Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 4:12:13Speaker 03

  And because then what I tell them is suspect. So then I contaminated whatever CIA has to offer. So I make it not only a habit, but my personal integrity. I also believe, and I've given lectures on this, there's no contradiction or conflict between recruiting agents and running them. And there we obviously use aliases and things. That's not deceptive if your goal is to protect the agent. The agent knowing your real name is bad for the agent.

• 4:12:43Jesse Michels?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 4:12:43Speaker 03

  Those kinds of things.

• 4:12:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, of course.

• 4:12:45Speaker 03

  But when it comes down to a real litmus test, how far am I willing to go for the agent versus what the agency tells me to do with the agent? I will defer to the agent's welfare because this is a human being. So ultimately, I'll find a way to reconcile the two. I don't like to flat out defy headquarters if I can help it, but I have done it. And then the test is a different test when I flat out say no or defy them and don't do what I've been told to do, which I don't recommend to everybody out there. But in those cases, I'll hold up to it.

• 4:13:26Speaker 03

  Usually before I'll say, no, I'm not going to do what you just told me to do. Then there'll be a discussion.

• 4:13:32Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:13:33Speaker 03

  And this is again, a test of the

• 4:13:37Speaker 03

  integrity of your organization, whether it's CIA or any other in the US government. What, how does an organization react when you've done something you think is either, you're told to do something that's either illegal or immoral or both? How do you handle it? And it's a test of the organization, whether you're asked to do that. Now, what I personally, I've said to myself personally over all my careers, and I've never had to go to the mat on it to the point I quit, but I would have. If I can't reconcile that, I will do what I know is the right thing to do.

• 4:14:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:14:10Speaker 03

  So we've done some bad things, but I understood the reasons for it and we did it for not doing the wrong thing, but just because things, sometimes you're faced with a terrible choice.

• 4:14:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:14:20Speaker 03

  You don't have an option, but I just wanted to stress that because it's, it's come up again in, in recent times, you know? You just to be very careful about work through the whole, for example,

• 4:14:31Speaker 03

  forgetting his name, Edward Snowden defected

• 4:14:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:14:34Speaker 03

  China and the Russians, and he's been described by people as a whistleblower and, and there was a whistleblowing aspect to his motivations and tensions and actions, but it was far exceeded by the damage he set out to cause to the US government for no whistleblowing reason. So you have all this.

• 4:14:56Jesse Michels?

  It's complicated with him because on the one hand, I, I do think it's important that the public know that the NSA is a backdoor and every big tech company, they have these programs like Prism and Bull Run, and they can just spy on you through your smart TV and your phone and like, that's a, that's messed up. That's not cool.

• 4:15:14Speaker 03

  Well, it's not that simple.

• 4:15:15Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 4:15:16Speaker 03

  No, it's not that simple.

• 4:15:16Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 4:15:17Speaker 03

  But the other, the other part of the answer to that question is, Um, the government should in fact have done maybe some things different than he alleged. And so he had, there was a, a certain, but he went far.

• 4:15:30Jesse Michels?

  He, well, he definitely, you know, compromised.

• 4:15:32Speaker 03

  Far beyond that.

• 4:15:33Jesse Michels?

  Sure, sure.

• 4:15:34Speaker 03

  And things that had nothing to, that just pure immense damage to national security. With no whistleblowing benefit. So he knew exactly what he's doing. And then you look into the whole background. Now, why do I single him out? I'm not trying to make him a particular, you know, target of my wrath or ire. He said, this is, this is the problem in a nutshell, is citizens, individual officers integrity. Everybody comes together on trying to maintain the integrity of what we're doing. And the more it's secret, the more it's dark and deep, the more we have to, to do it. And the more disclosure is necessary at the right level. And we've talked so many ways about how we limit it, where we limit it, you know, this kind of thing.

• 4:16:14Jesse Michels?

  Do you, do you think anything's gonna happen further on the UFO front? Do you think more is gonna come out or?

• 4:16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can't imagine it's the end of the story, right? It's just almost in a way feels like it's just beginning.

• 4:16:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, that would be my expectation as well. I mean, I, like, in the world in which we have reverse engineering programs, material, all that stuff. It is actually like a serious national security issue. If the left hand's not talking to the right, you have these bigoted special access programs that are like unqueriable, not answering to any sort of civilian organization. There's zero congressional oversight. And then you're competing against Russia and China who have these central bases where they can just, you know, pluck scientists from wherever and place them there and get them to work on whatever they want. Like, if, in the world where that's real, it's, it would seem like a dire issue.

• 4:17:11Jesse Michels?

  Just for the, and like, I always say that as a dog whistle to the national security people. All I care about is the truth. I care about the truth coming out.

• 4:17:18Speaker 03

  There you go, there you go.

• 4:17:19Jesse Michels?

  But like.

• 4:17:19Speaker 03

  The watchman.

• 4:17:20Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:17:21Speaker 03

  Well, one, one, you know, more thing on that, I, I think it's, can't reach a conclusion, but. When you start thinking Area 51 and the crash and you've you've said this, I haven't done that research and I haven't looked into aside from.

• 4:17:36Jesse Michels?

  And you've been to Area 51, right?

• 4:17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:17:39Jesse Michels?

  And you've never seen any UFOs, alien UFO type things?

• 4:17:42Speaker 03

  No, no, I'm sure that, yeah. But I mean, there are kind of two explanations. One is it's our testing and what crash and

• 4:17:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:17:49Speaker 03

  We're covering that up. And two is it intelligent life was there watching what we're doing. And that's an area which you would be in at that point with all the nuclear testing.

• 4:17:59Jesse Michels?

  I think it's that.

• 4:18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:18:00Jesse Michels?

  Because they're over, you think maybe it was that?

• 4:18:03Speaker 03

  No, it's plausible. I don't dismiss it.

• 4:18:05Jesse Michels?

  Cause in 1945, over Hanford plutonium base, you have this guy, this pilot Bud Clem falling this like, you know, ball of light around. You had, you had stuff happening super early in 47. I mean, Robert Goddard, who was a rocket pioneer in the US had just been testing V2 rockets right at Roswell. So it's like, I don't think we were testing super advanced propulsion. You know, there was some interesting stuff happening in Nazi Germany to that effect. But, you know, you had Kommler Staub and you had these interesting scientists doing some stuff in that, in that world. But I, I think what happened at Roswell was, was otherworldly. I do.

• 4:18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I, that's why I wanted to reinforce the possibility. I, I don't see how you can dismiss it.

• 4:18:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 4:18:56Speaker 03

  Unless you know it's not. In other words, if someone, this is another reason to declassify because if there was an internal experiment or, you know, something, maybe it's, the problem with that is even if you then declassify and, and, and put it out there, then there's this possibility we've continued over the decades to work on whatever we were working on it. And it was an early miserable failure. There's always that explanation why we won't release.

• 4:19:23Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, that's also maybe my take. I don't think we've done much with what we've recovered. I think it's like, uh, you know, um, caveman with a USB drive. The caveman doesn't understand, you know, uh, information theory. They have nothing to plug it into. There's no interface. It's not like an iPhone, you know? That, that would be my guess, so.

• 4:19:42Speaker 03

  Well, when you consider the fact that probably one of the most. At least plausible continuations of our species over the next hundred years is that we evolved to the point where the AI we create doesn't want us around anymore. Per all the, all the movie, but that, that seems so plausible. The problem with being so clever as we are on, on artificial intelligence is, is easy to imagine us out programming the reality of our, our lives in, in ways not, they all lose control aspect of is, is just one thing. But I could easily see humans deciding that the perpetuation of the species and the continued evolution of

• 4:20:25Speaker 03

  human beings will no longer follow the, the script of what might've started as a, a biblical uh, kind of a idea and to the point where the one thing God would have wanted preserve in the evolution of not just human species, but all life on earth, if it's a God, God plan, is the idea of mutation and the idea of the weak uh, moving on to take over the earth as it goes. And a definition we wouldn't think of is the stronger and the superior. And even the idea Darwin laid out of the survival of the fittest, I kind of, because of my faith, look entirely the opposite now. Which is really that is, it's, it's the idea of sacrifice drives everything.

• 4:21:09Speaker 03

  And certainly if there's truth to the idea behind Christ, it's the idea he came to sacrifice and therefore the way forward is sacrifice. And then all the truly great people, almost all of them, we would call great people. We don't emulate, by the way. Nobody emulates Christ mainly, but also people like Gandhi or Mandela or people we admire, you know, who took the path of Tolstoy was one of the greatest pacifists in, in of world history. The way he wrote and thought, uh, we don't really follow that, that lead. We, we kind of respect it. Well, we're on a completely different path.

• 4:21:45Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. On that note, yeah, I think it should, you know, everybody out there should try to imitate, you know, sacrifice and be Christ-like. And yeah, I mean, it's fascinating model of human evolution is, you know, your upward path through natural selection is actually selflessness. And it's not, it's not the, it's not the Richard Dawkins selfish gene. It's the selfless gene or something.

• 4:22:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, you think about it, human beings are at this point at the apex of, of, of global domination on the basis of what's really our conquering aspects, our, our animalistic side. And we have this other side we're aware of that's more charitable and sacrificial. But we have a choice whether to be one or the other. And the way forward looks like it's domination, looks like it's control. And in fact, I've always felt, but even more so as faith developed, that I don't look at world history as sort of Marxist-Leninism versus capitalism and all the rest of that at all anymore. I look at it as even people whose, whose lives committed or dedicated to making money is for control. It's all

• 4:22:55Speaker 03

  about control. And the opposite of what God gave us all was to let control go and allow us to explore creation on our terms. And we spend human endeavors to enslave everybody again. That's it. That's the upside. It's almost like that's my sermon on the mount.

• 4:23:15Jesse Michels?

  Right. Well, that's a beautiful note to end on, Ralph Mott Larson. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your remarkable mystical experiences and indulging my UFO questions and for being here. Really appreciate you.

• 4:23:30Speaker 03

  Thank you, Jesse. It's been a great, great session for me. I appreciate it.

• 4:23:33Jesse Michels?

  It's been an honor. All right.

• 4:24:07Speaker 00

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