Basement: Peter Levenda | Nazis, UFOs, and the Hidden History Nobody Tells You

Peter Levenda has spent more than thirty years investigating the connections between occult history, intelligence operations, and the events that shaped the modern world. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Unholy Alliance, the Sinister Forces trilogy, and the Secret Machines series co-written with Tom DeLong. His work draws on primary documents, national archives, and firsthand research across four continents. He is known for finding connections between subjects that most researchers treat as separate — Nazi occultism, the Kennedy assassination, CIA mind control programs, UFO phenomena, and the hidden religious networks that ran through all of it. The Sinister Forces 20th Anniversary Edition is out now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 0:30AJ Gentile?

  Today, I'm talking with Peter Levenda. He's the author of more than 20 books. Unholy Alliance, The Sinister Forces Trilogy, The Secret Machines series with Tom DeLonge. The guy's been investigating the dark intersections of occultism, intelligence operations, hidden history, CIA, for over 50 years.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's been investigating the CIA for fifty years, and he's still alive? It's either very impressive or very suspicious.

• 0:56AJ Gentile?

  And it started when he was 17. He dressed up as a fake Orthodox priest. He talked his way past the Secret Service and snuck into Bobby Kennedy's funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral. The stunt dropped him into an underground world that he never climbed out of.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's lucky he didn't end up in a duffel bag he couldn't climb out of.

• 1:16AJ Gentile?

  Peter has some of the most mind-blowing stories I have ever heard. CIA fronts disguised as churches, Nazi colonies in Chile, classified documents on SS expeditions to Tibet, a possible escape room for Hitler that nobody was looking at. We cover a lot of ground. The assassination connections, the Council of Nine, consciousness, a Men in Black encounter that takes a turn that I'd never expected, and the theory about Hitler that actually shook me. I mean, seriously, I had to stop the show for a minute to process it. But we kept the camera rolling. Let's go to the basement.

• 1:58AJ Gentile?

  Peter, welcome to the basement.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here.

• 2:03AJ Gentile?

  My typical process with a guest is do a little reading, do some prep, get to know the material, and then just chat. Rarely do I refer to notes. I keep them around, but rarely do I use them. Today, this is the only way I can keep up with you.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Sorry about that.

• 2:19AJ Gentile?

  No, no, it's, it's, I love it, but if you catch me just, just fumbling through pages, that's me just trying to, because there's so many names, so many connections.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was bewildering to me. I mean, when I started this, I thought I'd have a handle on it. It got out of control real fast. Too many names, cross-reference with too many other events, too many other people. So it made it, I had to do it. And people argue with me sometimes, "How come you don't give us, you know, an analysis? Tell us what you're really, you know, what's really going on? Give us your, you know, your analysis." I said, "I can't do that. In the first place, it would be wrong, right?" What I want to do in Sinister Forces was to give you this data and say, "You tell me, you know, what do you think this is?" I'm not going to tell you the Kennedy assassination is a perfect example. You know, I hesitated to write about that because everybody writes about the Kennedy

• 3:13Speaker 03

  assassination. But for me, it's not just what we think it is, it's something deeper. And I wanted to say, "Look at all of this stuff. Look at all these weird coincidences, these synchronicities that multiply like crazy around the assassination. I'm not going to go and tell you Oswald acted alone, or Oswald was part of a conspiracy. I'm going to say there's another thing happening here. There's something else going on. Take a look at this. You tell me what this means." And if you're so literal-minded that you think it means it's a conspiracy of a bunch of guys in a back room smoking cigars and saying, "Let's kill Kennedy," it's, there could be that, but there's something a lot deeper going on.

• 3:47AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Because it happened. And it happened in a certain way, in a certain time, in a certain place. All of these things meant something deeper than what we're looking at. So what I wanted to present was the data and say, "Look, open your eyes and look, there's a UFO connection."

• 4:03AJ Gentile?

  What? What?

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Right? Look at, look at it. I mean, Jacques Vallée pointed it out back in 1963.

• 4:10AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  Vallée said, "Wait a minute, you know, Kennedy just got shot. There's something weird going on. There's some, some violent..." Eruption, a volcanic eruption underneath our society, under our daily lives, that we don't even suspect it exists until it erupts. And he says, "Kind of like the UFO phenomenon as well," right? These things are somehow talking to each other.

• 4:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they are.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  And that was inspirational, too. I saw that and I said, "Okay, that's where we're headed."

• 4:38AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, one or two connections you can dismiss, but when they...

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 4:41AJ Gentile?

  Hundreds, hundreds you connect. And I think I've heard you say that you've had readers reach out and actually make additional connections for you, like, "Hey, Peter, in this book 10 years ago, you said this, but this matches here."

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Yes, it does. And things that I will miss because, you know, I'm too focused on telling one story.

• 4:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  And that's what happens. When you're focused on telling a story, you're ignoring evidence. That happens all the time. With Sinister Forces, I try to pull back and say, "I'm not going to tell you a story. Not that way. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a lot of evidence. I'm going to challenge you. Come up with a reason why this is happening."

• 5:16AJ Gentile?

  Right. Your books are so fun because the reader becomes part of the detective story.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 5:21AJ Gentile?

  They're super fun.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  That's what I want them to do. I want them to contribute just the way they have. In that particular instance you mentioned, for instance, I was writing about Indonesia, and I was writing about a Nazi war criminal who had escaped to Indonesia after the war and wound up at a remote island, and people thought he was Hitler, that Hitler had actually escaped. And he had a wife who looked a little bit like, you know, Eva Braun. So this whole thing was like very strange, very mysterious, but it was real. There were photographs, there were documents, and I said, "I've got to look at this." And I really, I went nuts, you know, compiling the information. And because I was telling the story, because I was trying to make a case, I didn't catch all the evidence that I had in front of me.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  And that happens all the time to any kind of researcher, right? Your bias makes you selectively choose things and ignore other things.

• 6:13AJ Gentile?

  Hundred percent.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  And here I had, basically, a major story in front of me, and I didn't know it.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Until somebody went and said, um, excuse me, but in the first book you wrote about this guy, you mentioned these two particular weird numbers and this address. And then in the second book that you're writing about this guy, you don't put it together. Right? You write about everything but that around it. But I got news for you. It's the same numbers. That means that your famous Nazi war criminal opened an account in Jakarta that was used to funnel Nazi gold into the country.

• 6:48AJ Gentile?

  This is true.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  And it's true. It's there, right?

• 6:50AJ Gentile?

  So facepalm moment, right?

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 6:53AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  How did I not see this? It was the same numbers. Just repeated. And I didn't, I didn't put it together. And the address was the same. And they said, uh, take a look again, right? And that opened up another entire, entire front in the war, you know? So here was all this Nazi gold, tons of Nazi gold. Came out of Portugal at the end of the war. Wound up in Macau, which was Portuguese territory at the time. 20 tons of it went, disappeared somewhere into China. Maybe to support the Guomindang, maybe Chiang Kai-shek's people, I don't know. But the other 20 tons went into Jakarta, went into Indonesia for, uh, Sukarno. He was trying to create an international monetary fund of his own. That would be for non-aligned nations.

• 7:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Oppose.

• 7:34AJ Gentile?

  A new IMF.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  A new, a new IMF.

• 7:36AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Right? It was called the Revolutionary Fund, it was called. Right? And then it kind of disappeared. We don't know what happened. But then I found out that there was, you know, the 1965 year of living dangerously. All of this stuff that happened, this revolt that took place, the civil war that erupted. Uh, Sukarno being deposed, the army taking over. All of the embassies, the, the West German embassy and the West German consulates in Indonesia were staffed by former SS, okay? Former Nazis.

• 8:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Were in position there, which I found out only much later. And gold was being used to finance this operation against the, against Sukarno and that government by painting him as a communist.

• 8:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  By saying he was 100% communist, which was not true. But even OSS at the time and CIA said, no, it's not true. The people who said that at CIA were fired. Right? So, anyway, this is a long story, as long aside, but what I'm trying to say is, if you try to tell a story, it can be very believable and very convincing, but you're going to miss some evidence that tells another story. So I pulled back with sinister forces and said, I'm going to give you a lot of evidence. Unfortunately, look at the size of that thing. It's.

• 8:50AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I needed help carrying it in here.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Oh, it's, I'm sorry about that, guys, but had to be done. So it's all there. You can take it, you can just start anywhere. Open it up any place and start, look at names that you, that are familiar. And then, you know, Google away, guys. You're gonna find all kinds of amazing material.

• 9:07AJ Gentile?

  Well, today, and it's on my list to get to Nazis escaping, different Hitler theories. I covered it myself. I ended up in Argentina where everyone else does. I was, Indonesia took me by surprise, so I'd love to dig into that. But I think we need to set the stage. 1968, dodging the draft.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:27AJ Gentile?

  And you, you become a priest. Can you tell the story?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  It was cool. This is the thing, okay? It was 1960, well, actually in 67 is when it started for me. I'm in high school, Columbus High School, as you pointed out before. And I'm, I'm going to high school and I'm, you know, I'm turning 18 in 1968. And there's the draft. It's an actual draft, so, you know, no way out. And my politics at the time, my, my parents were sort of right wing. My father was kind of right wing. He was a segregationist, actually. Well, he was in high school, so that, we were sort of worlds apart on that. So he, he was sort of right wingish on these things, and my mother was similarly right wing.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  But I could not get my head around why we were bombing Vietnam. I could not, I could not understand it. I understood World War II. I understood the Nazis going after them. My uncles fought the Nazis. I understood Japan, you know, fighting Japan, fighting in the Pacific. My uncle similarly fought in the Pacific theater. So all of this I kind of understood. I understood these were bad people doing bad things, enslaving populations, murdering populations. Yeah, you gotta stop that.

• 10:44AJ Gentile?

  Did you understand Korea?

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Korea, that was a, my parents were kind of always, they were on the fence about Korea. They were saying, "Well, it's not really a war, it's a police action."

• 10:53AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  And I'm saying, "I mean, people are getting killed, right?"

• 10:56AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  "They're shooting at us, we're shooting at them." So Korea was a problem, but Korea was where we got brainwashing and all this other stuff, right? How cool was that, right? So, um, so we had that issue. So Korea, but at least we weren't fighting in Korea at that time. When I was in high school, Korea was like, "You could get sent to Korea and sit there."

• 11:13AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Okay, you know, but likelihood, knowing me and my luck, I would be in the tall grass before you know it. And it wasn't a question of my safety that I was concerned about. This is the thing. I didn't want to be responsible for what might be a series of war crimes. I mean, I was, I grew up on the Nazis, right? I grew up on Casablanca.

• 11:35AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  How can you grow up on Casablanca and say, "Let me go to Vietnam and bomb a bunch of villagers"?

• 11:41AJ Gentile?

  You had that sense back in sixty, I mean, because it's all war crimes as far as I'm concerned. Which I, I don't think it's debatable at this point, Gulf, and all of that, but you, but back then, you had that instinct very early.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Yep, I did. I, because I was a strange child.

• 11:58AJ Gentile?

  I bet.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  I was, yeah, I was a sort of, I was a loner, I was very, I'm very introverted by nature. I'm the kind of introvert that doesn't answer his phone, if you know what I mean. So, um,

• 12:07AJ Gentile?

  My wife is nodding her head right now.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Okay. That's the kind of introvert person I am. So I'm very introverted, for that's concerned. And, but at the same time fascinated by foreign cultures. I mean, the, the pivotal moment of my youth was watching Lawrence of Arabia when it came out. Okay, so in nineteen sixty-two.

• 12:25AJ Gentile?

  The best.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  I was sent, we were part of a class that had to go and see the movie, if you can imagine, a class of like, seventh graders going to see Lawrence of Arabia. Strange choice, but okay. Uh, so we went and we sat there and it blew me away. And I said to myself, okay, I never had a childhood hero or anything growing up, but I said, "I want to be that." "I want to be that guy who goes out in the middle of nowhere to all these people who he's not related to, doesn't even speak their language, but gets right into it with them, you know, and in the end winds up leading the revolt."

• 12:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Uh, later I found out, was not that great of a guy. Drew the lines for what we're constantly dealing with in the Middle East right now. Drew the boundaries. He and Gertrude Bell. Sat there and created Iraq out of whole cloth.

• 13:09AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  And on and on, but that's another, another story. But at the time, that was my sensitivity. And growing up on war films, Passage to Marseille, Casablanca, all these, you know, Bogart and, you know, and Claude Rains and all the rest of this stuff. And who do I see in Lawrence of Arabia? Claude Rains again. So it's like, there's a continuum in my mind, if you can understand how I'm thinking and how I'm understanding this. And to go to Vietnam, I would have welcomed going as a kid with my kid sensibilities. I would have welcomed going to war against the Nazis. I would have joined up. Anything like that. I mean, there was a mission, there was a real mission. I didn't see the mission.

• 13:50AJ Gentile?

  You can't see John Wayne in Vietnam. You can't see him there.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 13:54AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  No, you can't. And I'm now with a bunch of, you know, people my age in high school. And they're thinking to themselves, why are we doing this too? And I've got SDS, Soonest of a Democratic Society. They were in, they were in, you know, Columbus High School. And eventually they became the weathermen, right? One branch did. And so they're trying to raise-

• 14:12AJ Gentile?

  I don't think Dad liked them.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  What?

• 14:13AJ Gentile?

  I don't think Dad liked those guys.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, not his couple too.

• 14:17AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  So we had this, you know, happening. So all of this was there. My consciousness was being, you know, bombarded and raised, basically. I mean, I was surrounded by people saying, what the hell are we doing going over there? You know, and then seeing the, the footage on television every night, the body counts and all the rest of this stuff. They said, body counts? That's what we're reduced to now? We don't win battles, we just have body counts. What the hell is that? So a lot of that just didn't make sense to me. So I said, no, I'm not going to do this, you know? And there were options. You could go to Canada, you could go to Sweden, you know? But I was a strange child, as I said. And in the, the late, in the mid sixties, I was doing a lot of research into occultism. And, you know, seances and things of that nature. And I would get Fate magazine.

• 15:01AJ Gentile?

  What, as a 10th grader?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  As a, in 1963, 64, so I was 13, 14 years old, yeah? Something like that.

• 15:09AJ Gentile?

  Reading occult magazines?

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Fate magazine was like the, my, my, my bible.

• 15:13AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Fate magazine was great, you know? But not just so much the articles, it was the ads in the back.

• 15:19AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  The ads were great.

• 15:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  All kinds of weird stuff were in the ads. And you could send away for free for a lot of stuff. So I'm sending away for whatever was there for free, because we were pretty broke as a family. So I'm just sending away, whatever you have, that's, that's, that's, you know, free, I'm on board. And so I would get these, these things for the Universal Life Church, right?

• 15:39AJ Gentile?

  And that's gonna come up a lot today.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Is it?

• 15:42AJ Gentile?

  Universal Life Church, sure.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, there's reasons. So there's Universal Life Church, I'm looking at this thing and I'm saying, "Wait a minute, I can send in five dollars and I'm a priest of the Universal Life Church?" Okay, so I did that, I scrounged together five dollars, and I really mean scrounged, that was difficult in those days.

• 15:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  And I got my, my certificate and I'm now a priest. And I'm thinking, "Does this get me out of Vietnam?"

• 16:05Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:06AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  As it turns out, not exactly. So, I'm starting to do some research, which in those days, there's no internet, boys and girls, there's no cell phones, there's no laptops, there's no computers, there's nothing. You do research, you go to a library and look at paper. And I'm doing this and I'm researching it, and I'm researching the deferments. How do you get deferred from going into the army, the fours, right? So, 4F means you're physically unable, so you gotta be missing a, a, you know, an arm or a lung or something. I said, "That's a little drastic." But there was a 4F deferment, and that said clergyman.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  And that's when the light bulb came on. And I said, "Wait a minute, if Universal Life can do this, we could do it, we could do it better." "We" meaning "me," the editorial "we."

• 16:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  I said, "Let's see what I can do." So I'm in high school, in Columbus, with a, with a schoolmate, whose background is similar to mine. My father's parents were from Slovakia, they were immigrants from Slovakia. His grandparents are immigrants from Czech and Slovakia, both sides, Czechia and Slovakia. So we kinda got along on that basis, we had a common Slavic sort of heritage. And he was totally into religious stuff. Kind of alarmingly so, as I later found out. But he had, you know, he was Third Order Franciscan, which is a kind of monastic thing for laypeople. He had a closet full of vestments. Catholic vestments, chasables, cassocks, the Roman collars.

• 17:37AJ Gentile?

  Again, as a teenager?

• 17:38Speaker 03

  As a teenager.

• 17:38AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  See, his parents were divorced. And what happened was one parent would play against the other parent. So he was getting money from both sides. So he would go and get this stuff from places, right? Sometimes it was secondhand, whatever. But he had a chalice, he had a suborium. You could say mass in his bedroom. It was all there. Everything you needed was there. And his father worked for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in Manhattan. So he was a welder, right? So he's welding suits of armor, he's welding shields, he's building swords, lances. He had a mace.

• 18:13AJ Gentile?

  Wow, he sounds awesome.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  He was an awesome guy. But he was like a no-nonsense kind of guy. He was salt of the earth kind of guy. Very strong human being, right? But very salt of the earth. And his son was this very wispy, as I learned later, very gay guy. And I was like innocent as hell. I knew nothing about gay straight. You know? Everybody else seemed to know he was gay, I didn't. If they had told me, I would have known what they meant. So he had all this stuff. He just loved all of this. And he had a mustache, you know? He was, he's a junior in high school and he has a mustache. He would wear suits, right?

• 18:45AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  The whole thing. So he was, and he took snuff.

• 18:48AJ Gentile?

  And he took snuff?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  He had a little snuff and he took snuff.

• 18:52AJ Gentile?

  I see him with a pipe or?

• 18:54Speaker 03

  No, snuff.

• 18:54AJ Gentile?

  Stuff, okay.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Snuff. So this was, he was fascinating, right? He was a fascinating character. And he was fascinated by me, I think, because I was so strange, right? So we would have these discussions. And I liked foreign languages. I was always studying foreign languages. I was, I had three years of French. I had a year of Latin. So I was, you know, linguistically inclined where this was concerned. And he was as well. So we were looking at things. And then Vietnam would inevitably come up. And I said, you know, you've got all this stuff. Why don't we create our own church? Well, that's all we have to do. We just get it incorporated in the state of New York. We need somebody, because we're too young, to sign incorporation papers.

• 19:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  We need people to sign for us. We create a church. We register it in Albany.

• 19:39AJ Gentile?

  So who did you find to do the paperwork?

• 19:41Speaker 03

  I think we had, I think his father was a signature. I think we had one teacher who signed as well.

• 19:47AJ Gentile?

  And what, you just sold it as a project?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  No, his father knew what we were up to. Okay. I think the teacher might have known, and as I found out later, the teacher was also gay. So I think there was something going on there between the teacher and the... Not to defame the dead, he's gone at this point, but... So my friend, you know, he had his connections, I guess, and I had mine. So they signed the papers. And we were incorporated in the state of New York, we had the seal, the whole thing. The wax seal, you know, the stamp, everything. We were legit. And you know, Congress can make no law concerning the establishment of religion. That's right. That's in our constitution, boys and girls. So if we say we're clergy of this legally incorporated church, we are clergy of that church. Now, the next hurdle would be convincing, right?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Selective service that this was true. So how do you, if you're just, if you're both seventeen? A little mysterious how you can be priests at seventeen. We needed another priest. We needed somebody who had some clout. And he had a friend.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  And this friend had been, he's an Eastern European of some description. We don't know, I don't think we ever knew where he really came from. He had a heavy accent that was identical to Borat. Really? Identical. When I hear Borat, I hear this guy. He talked like that all the time. We used to make fun of him, the way he talked. And he had been a clergy of some kind. He had been stationed at Grotta Ferrata outside of Rome, which was a place where Eastern European Catholics were taken quite often when they were escaping communism. So they were like set up there for a while. So he talked always fondly about this place. But anyway, he lived in this weird basement apartment in the Upper West Side that had Christmas lights strung up like year in, year out. He just never took them down. And he was just a crazy guy.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  He was just totally crazy. But we named him our bishop.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  And he said, "No problem." "It's okay, we know about it, I might be bishop, no worries." So he was the bishop of this church. So he was, his name was in the middle and we were on the other side. So I was Petro, which is Peter, which is just Slavic version of Peter. But my friend, he had to have a different name. So he went for Elefthery. Elefthery is from the Greek, it means freedom.

• 22:34AJ Gentile?

  Oh, nice.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  In his head, he was, this was his freedom, right? We built this church out of nothing, but we had all the garb, right? So, okay, we're gonna be Orthodox now. We are now Eastern Orthodox. We can't be Catholic, obviously, the Catholics would have a word with us.

• 22:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  But Orthodox was a free-for-all. We were very astute at seventeen.

• 22:54AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you were.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Because Orthodox churches, a lot of them were behind the Iron Curtain. So they didn't communicate with their Orthodox churches outside. So we picked a church that was in Czechoslovakia, still behind the Iron Curtain.

• 23:05AJ Gentile?

  Brilliant.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  There were no Slovak Orthodox people.

• 23:08AJ Gentile?

  As you're going through this, are you still afraid of the war? Or are you more excited about the project?

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Oh, it's both.

• 23:14AJ Gentile?

  It's both, okay.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  So the energy into this project was because, you know, Vietnam. So we, we really hustle on this. And we say, "We have to somehow create like a paper trail that we're really Orthodox." So we visited all these Orthodox churches. And we made friends with Brother Victor. Brother Victor was the principal of St. Sergius Russian Orthodox High School, which was part of the anti-communist Russian Orthodox Church, the Tsarist, you know, which was really a beautiful outfit, up on the Park Avenue, 92nd Street.

• 23:51AJ Gentile?

  Oh, nice.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Very, they have the whole mansion.

• 23:53AJ Gentile?

  Very nice.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  That they brought with the money from Tsarist Russia.

• 23:56AJ Gentile?

  And if he's gay as well, that's fine.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Victor, I don't know about Victor, but never knew that. He never got a chance to find out if he was gay. But the church, the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, as it was called, this brings us back to the assassination. Because Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia is usually spelled R O C O R, abbreviated ROKOR. ROKOR figures prominently in the assassination. And I'll get to that in a minute, but of course, I had no way of knowing then. So, we would visit this guy, we would hang out with him in our stuff. And we had the hats, you know, these stovepipe hats with the veils, right? Like, you know, never on Sunday or, you know.

• 24:39AJ Gentile?

  What, on the F train? No, just in your stuff?

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 24:43AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:45AJ Gentile?

  I love this.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  No, you had to, I mean, Orthodox, we had to do the whole thing.

• 24:48AJ Gentile?

  I love this.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  So, we would go and hang out there, and of course, the other Orthodox would look at us and they were suspicious.

• 24:54AJ Gentile?

  I sure am.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  They had every right to be. But we kind of passed. We were, I mean, we're all Slavs, you know, and we managed to pass.

• 25:02AJ Gentile?

  You're doing the accent on the train and stuff, just chatting?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  No, I didn't, I wouldn't do the accent.

• 25:06AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Only when we had to do the accent, only when it became absolutely necessary. Otherwise, no, we talk like normal English-speaking people. So, they were our friends. And then we would go and visit the other Russian Orthodox, which was the Communist Church, we called it, which owed allegiance to Moscow, the Patriarchate of Moscow. Now, if you watched the TV series Americans?

• 25:25AJ Gentile?

  I have.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Okay. The last season, there is a prominent number of characters who are Orthodox priests who are actually KGB agents.

• 25:34AJ Gentile?

  That's right. It took a long time to get there.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  It took a long time to get there. And I was so pleased when they finally got there.

• 25:38AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Because I'm waiting for this, because I knew that was how they were moving agents into the country, as Russian Orthodox priests. And that comes back to my story again a little later.

• 25:48AJ Gentile?

  I don't think I knew that.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:50AJ Gentile?

  Okay, great.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  So, KGB agents, dressed up as priests, sent by KGB, but trained in Moscow to look and act like Russian Orthodox priests. And of course, in some cases, they kind of grew up with Orthodoxy around them, even though it was suppressed by the Soviet Union, but the churches were there and they heard stories from their parents. They had basically an understanding. So, they would move these people into the church on 97th Street, on 5th Avenue. So, in our heads, we would say 97th Street, 93rd Street, 92nd Street, 97th. We knew the streets, we knew what we were talking about. We said 97th Street, it meant the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate, right? We said 92nd Street or 93rd Street, it was Russian Orthodox Church, anti-Communist. Pro Nazis, it turned out, another thing, but anyway.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  So you had these two to deal with, right? So we would go, we would settle back and forth and keep an eye on both. But then we visited the Serbians, the Bulgarians, everybody.

• 26:43AJ Gentile?

  Are you going into the churches?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We're introducing ourselves.

• 26:46AJ Gentile?

  Wow. This is audacious.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Well, we, you know, and they took us at our word. We, we, we dressed the part.

• 26:52AJ Gentile?

  When you walk up to the-

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Who else would dress like that?

• 26:54AJ Gentile?

  Right. When you walk up for the first time, are you like, oh, is this gonna work this time? What's, what?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  We had no, after the first time, it became easy after that.

• 27:03AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  We would gatecrash things you would not believe.

• 27:05AJ Gentile?

  Being 18 is amazing.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Isn't it? You have, you know, testicles. And you just don't really, you just walk in and do it, you know?

• 27:13AJ Gentile?

  Beautiful.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  You brass it out, you don't care. What possibly could go wrong?

• 27:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  So we're doing all this and we're building this sort of thing. And we're getting the robes right and we're making this ourselves. The hats we had to make, right? So clothes were made. But we had the material, you know? And the guy turned out to be a pretty good seamstress.

• 27:28AJ Gentile?

  I was picturing it, picturing the sewing.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. There was going on, everything was happening fine. So we're doing all this and, and he's going to town now. He's getting more money from both sides of his family, from his mother and his father. He's buying gold crosses to wear from his neck, imported from Greece, right? Cause Greek Orthodox is like the, the motherland for all this stuff. And he's got all kinds of stuff. He's got the staff with the serpents, you know, around it, the whole this. He's got this he's traveling with. Um, I'm getting whatever, you know, I can get from the side because I'm, my family, as I say, is broke. So my working, my father and my mother is not gonna help. But he's got all this great stuff, right? So I get whatever he has extra, so.

• 28:05AJ Gentile?

  You guys aren't hearing confessions on the train or doing anything like that, are you?

• 28:08Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 28:08AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  But we are blessing graves.

• 28:12AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Yes. St. Michael Cemetery in Queens. When we needed money, we would go on a weekend, like a Saturday. We would just show up in a cemetery. Fully decked out in the black robes and everything else. We would walk very sedately through along the graves. We would stop at a grave and we would like bless it in the Orthodox cross and the whole thing and mumble something in church Slavonic. People would see it and they would walk up to us and say, "Father, could you come and bless our grave?"

• 28:39AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Of course. We would go and do that and they'd give us five dollars.

• 28:43AJ Gentile?

  I don't know if that's heresy or beautiful.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Both.

• 28:46AJ Gentile?

  I guess it's both.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  It's a beautiful heresy.

• 28:48AJ Gentile?

  A part of you has to start to connect with it, though. When you're blessing graves, you have to connect with it on some level, right?

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Well, you want to do a good job. You want everybody to be pleased with the result.

• 28:59AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  I don't know about the person in there.

• 29:01AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  They're saying...

• 29:03AJ Gentile?

  But you're not mocking, is what I'm getting at.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  No, we're not mocking. No, but...

• 29:08AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  So, we would bless graves, so we would do that. And we'd pick up, you know, sometimes twenty dollars, which in those days was a lot of money.

• 29:14AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  And it paid for, you know, things that we needed. So, we would do that every weekend or so if the weather was promising. We would go, or if it was like a memorial day, we would go on a memorial, especially a memorial day. There'd be a lot of, you know, customers.

• 29:26AJ Gentile?

  Oh, God.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  In the cemetery then. So, we'd just go and work, you know, work the crowds.

• 29:30AJ Gentile?

  Let's go work the crowd.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  How is that different from any other religion?

• 29:33AJ Gentile?

  I was just thinking the same thing. What's the difference?

• 29:35Speaker 03

  What's the difference?

• 29:35AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  So, okay, yeah, so hearing confessions, no, but blessing graves, yes. So, this is going on, this is going on. And then finally, okay, the event that changed it all for me was June 68 and Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. And I watched it, you know, I'm watching the returns in California on our little black and white Zine the TV. And there's Kennedy saying, you know, onwards to, you know, I forget what state he was going on next. But they had just won the California primary. He had just won. And then suddenly, the newscasters are coming on, you know, Bobby Kennedy's been shot.

• 30:10AJ Gentile?

  So, you were sitting there when it happened live?

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I'm, it's, that was gonna be like the savior, right? He was gonna get us out of Vietnam.

• 30:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  We believed that, anyway. And remember, this happened only three months after Martin Luther King.

• 30:24AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  And I remember Martin Luther King's assassination, what happened in Columbus High School in those days. I mean, that was just, that was surreal. And then this, you know, and this is the month we're gonna graduate high school, June 68. And I'm stunned by this. I mean, I think, this is it, this is, it's over, you know? We really gotta get out of this situation, because this is gonna be terrible now. And we have no hope. Hubert Humphrey? Are you kidding me? So, anyway.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  What does my friend say?

• 30:56Speaker 03

  "We're gonna go to the funeral," he tells me.

• 30:59AJ Gentile?

  Which is at St. Patrick's?

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Yes. They're holding the funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Now, because he was a Third Order Franciscan, he had connections at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

• 31:09AJ Gentile?

  How, as a teenager?

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Well, because of the society.

• 31:13AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  I mean, he had a mustache.

• 31:14AJ Gentile?

  True, true. That goes a long way.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Goes a long way. People don't ask questions if you have a mustache. So, but he knew some bishop, he knew somebody there. Believe me, I never knew all the details about my friend Prosky, William Andrew Prosky. I never really knew all the background here. I don't know if... I don't know what he was involved with, you know, to be honest, more than what I saw of myself. So, I can't jump to conclusions, but he knew a lot of people. You know, we could get into, for instance, the Metropolitan Opera, we can go into Carnegie Hall. We could go to places like that and just sort of show up when nobody was there and play the organ in, you know, in the opera house or at Carnegie Hall or something. He knew, he had contacts. As a teenager, he had contacts somehow.

• 31:59AJ Gentile?

  And you didn't, I guess as a teenager, you really wouldn't ask. You would just go.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  You'd just go.

• 32:03AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  "Oh, this is cool, let me go, I'll go." So, this kind of thing would happen. So, anyway, and the night before the funeral, the night before, we go down to St. Patrick's. And it's, like I say, at night. He goes into, we both go into the building that's connected to the church. And we talk to somebody who's evidently somebody in charge, a Catholic priest of some kind. I think he was a monsignor, he had the red with the thing. And...

• 32:30AJ Gentile?

  Did you go down as, in costume?

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:33AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And we said, you know, we want to pay our respects as well. Is there possible for us to, we also get in, you know, tomorrow and do that? We represent the Slamanic Orthodox Church. And the guy says, "Okay, maybe come back tomorrow." Right? And so, we go into the church itself and the coffin is already there.

• 32:55AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  So, Bobby Kennedy is there.

• 32:58AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  And Rose and Jackie are in the front pew. There's nobody else in the place.

• 33:02AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  And they're kneeling and praying. And we see the coffin, you know, and my friend doesn't miss a beat. He goes right up to the coffin and starts going, you know, doing the sign of the cross and everything else and, you know.

• 33:15AJ Gentile?

  Is the impact of this hitting you at that point?

• 33:19Speaker 03

  It's really hard to say. It's surreal.

• 33:22AJ Gentile?

  It really is.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  I'm looking at the guy who would have saved the country in my seventeen-year-old imagination. And he's in a box in the church, and I'm there next to him. I'm touching the coffin.

• 33:34AJ Gentile?

  This is so powerful.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  It is, but my friend doesn't see it that way. My friend, this is an opportunity for him to act like a bishop, because he wants to be a bishop now. He's not, he's not, priest is no longer enough. He's, he's, he's turning eighteen that month. And priest, no, he wants to be Archimandrite, which is a higher level, just below bishop. But he, he has his sights set on bishop. So he's like, he's, you know, blessing and he's like in his element. Me, I'm just shaking, you know?

• 34:05AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  So there's just two different poles happening at that moment. And there, and I look over and there's, you know, people that I've seen since I was a kid, Rosen and Jackie. And they're praying, of course, they're praying, we're not going to bother them. At least my friend had enough sense not to do that. So we left. We go back to the Bronx on the subway. And he says, we're going tomorrow. He says, I'm going to rent a limo. And we're going to go down that way. And I remember to this day, the limo cost us eighteen dollars. So that was a good twenty dollars we got at the.

• 34:38AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  So that cost eighteen dollars. The limo picked us up in the Bronx. We had all the, the stuff on, you know? And we got into the limo, and he drove us straight to St. Patrick's, right up to the side entrance. The door is open, select, the Secret Service is there, obviously. You can imagine the, the security. At the funeral of a dead Kennedy.

• 35:01AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah, well, you had to get through PD first, no? So they just, they wave you in?

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Wave you in.

• 35:05AJ Gentile?

  Okay, and now you're at the door.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  They saw, they saw a limo, and they saw hats. They said, come on in.

• 35:11AJ Gentile?

  Come in. It was probably auxiliary guys.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Probably. What do you expect? Boy Scouts, one of these. So, and then the, this, the, the, the Secret Service is there, right? They got the things in their ears and they got the lapel buttons. And they, they run up to me as we were, we're leaving the car. We're standing there and there's Rosie Greer, right? The guy who tackled Sir Hans Serhant. He's right there. I mean, I'm, my mind is, I'm, I said, what the hell am I doing here? Right?

• 35:39AJ Gentile?

  Is your, just pounding in your chest?

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I don't know where this is gonna lead.

• 35:42AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  I don't know, I don't know how far this is gonna go.

• 35:44AJ Gentile?

  I need to hear that. I need to hear some nerves here.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, absolutely.

• 35:48AJ Gentile?

  But your partner, he's probably cool.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  He's cool with it.

• 35:50AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  And he says, we, we made this agreement. He will not speak. His voice was still changing.

• 35:58AJ Gentile?

  Oh, good God.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Okay. His voice was a little bit still changing.

• 36:04AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  He says, okay, I'll do all the talking. You're gonna be the bishop, cause now by this time, he's bishop. He has the, the pana-gia, he has the cross, he has this big.

• 36:10AJ Gentile?

  Oh, well, congratulations on his promotion.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Yes, there you go. I'm still the schmuck in the back. So, we go up and the, the Secret Service walks up to me and he says, Russian Orthodox representatives? And I say, nyes, Slavonic Orthodox representatives. And he says, okay, follow me.

• 36:27AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  And he says, we're gonna go, he says, a rather circuitous way into the church, but you know, we'll be fine. So the two of us, he's, my friend is walking like this with his cane, with his crozier, or whatever the hell he's carrying. I'm walking behind with, you know, my heart in one hand and my lungs in another. And so we, we imagine, and he opens the door. And we're in the freaking sanctuary. We're in the sanctuary. I thought we'd be out with the, you know, somewhere in the congregation.

• 36:53AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  We are in the sanctuary with everybody else.

• 36:57AJ Gentile?

  With, and that's in capitals, everybody else.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Everybody else, yes. All the high clergy people, all the bishops, archbishops, cardinals, whatever you want, they're all there. From all the different religions as well, not just the Catholics, right? Mostly Catholics, but, and there's the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, Yakovos, the hated and dreaded Yakovos, Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, you know, very powerful guy at that time. He owned all kinds of, he was a slumlord, basically. He owned kinds of property and he was, you know, but there he was, he's glaring daggers at us, like, who the fuck are these people? Right? I never saw these people in my life. I know everybody in here.

• 37:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  I don't know who these guys are, but he can't say anything, right? So my friend goes to that side. We have to go on the opposite sides of the altar. So he's on one side, I'm on the other to keep, I guess the numbers even or something. So he's on that side, I'm on this side, and I'm in the front row now of the sanctuary. I'm just staring at this like, what do I do now? There's Klieg lights, there's huge lights, you know, the whole thing is happening. And I look over there and there's like the President of the United States.

• 37:59AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  There's senators, there's names that I recognize, there's actors, there's... I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, holy Christ. What am I gonna do here? How... I'm in deep shit if something, if they find out. What are they gonna do, drag me out in front of everybody? I don't know.

• 38:14AJ Gentile?

  This has spiraled out of control. I don't think you're aware of it.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  No, out of control at this point. And I kind of think, in a way, this is gonna sound outrageous. With the passage of like, how many years now? Fifty? Something like that, more?

• 38:29AJ Gentile?

  Almost sixty.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Almost sixty? With the passage of all that time, I'm thinking, did we like create at that moment an alternate timeline suddenly? Was the weirdness and the impossibility of this something that split off into a different direction? Because there's something strange about everything that happened after that.

• 38:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  It should never have happened. I was a poor kid from the Bronx.

• 38:49AJ Gentile?

  Because this set you on the whole path.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Whole path, completely different path than I was already set on.

• 38:54AJ Gentile?

  What were you planning on doing?

• 38:57Speaker 03

  I just wanted to be a writer.

• 38:59AJ Gentile?

  Just wanted to be a writer?

• 38:59Speaker 03

  That's all I wanted to do.

• 39:00AJ Gentile?

  Novels?

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, anything.

• 39:02AJ Gentile?

  Anything.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  I wrote everything. I wrote poetry, short stories, novels, essays. I just wanted to write. It was like a thing.

• 39:07AJ Gentile?

  So let's get, let's not go to Vietnam, I'll be a writer.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:10AJ Gentile?

  All good, but instead?

• 39:11Speaker 03

  And I wanted, not even to make money. I know we got a regular job, I would write for the drawer. I didn't care. I just wanted to write with nobody telling me what to do. So that was the extent of it. That's all that I had. That was my only dream in life, right? Maybe travel, of course, I wanted to do that. But, you know, general terms, right? But here I am, sitting in this pew.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  And as I'm sitting there, the service begins, right? And there's Ted Kennedy giving a eulogy as well. What am I doing, right?

• 39:39AJ Gentile?

  If you are anyone else, think of the security breach here. Oh, my goodness.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  I was wearing one of these freaking hats.

• 39:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  They're tall stovepipe hats. You could have put anything in there.

• 39:51AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  You could have put a bunch of dynamite in there.

• 39:54AJ Gentile?

  Boy, talk about making the news.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Like that dynamite? I could have had that in my...

• 39:58AJ Gentile?

  Now that's in poor taste. Sorry.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  But that's what I... I could have done that. I could have had a pistol. I could have done anything, right? Nobody was checking me for weapons, right? I'm wearing robes like this. I could have had a machine gun underneath there. Who would have known?

• 40:12AJ Gentile?

  They're not patting down the...

• 40:13Speaker 03

  No.

• 40:14AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  They're not patting down the A-list, right?

• 40:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  So, I mean, I could have just leaned over and taken out the first couple of rows. I mean, anything was possible. This is a horrible breach of security.

• 40:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  But at that time, I'm not thinking of that. I'm thinking, how do I get out of this? And so, the service is proceeding. We're standing up when we have to stand, sitting when we have to sit. As Orthodox, we have certain things that we do. So, we move the hat at a certain point, put it back on. All of these things are going on. They're reciting the creed. We make sure we don't say "filioque." So, all of these weird things that you know, as an Orthodox, you're supposed to do, which we, you know, crash course, we've figured out. So, we're doing everything right. And at one point, I get a tap on my shoulder. I'm thinking, okay, this is it. I turn around, and it's Andy Williams. And he asks me, "Am I on yet?"

• 41:02AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 41:05Speaker 03

  I say, "No."

• 41:07AJ Gentile?

  You say, "No."

• 41:08Speaker 03

  No, no, you're not. I just shook my head and said, "No." I'm thinking, I just told "no" to Andy Williams, who, at that time, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, was a very big pop star.

• 41:18AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  If you saw Breakfast at Tiffany's, Moon River, etc.

• 41:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  So, I figured he wasn't going to sing "Moon River." I just had this instinct. That was not going to come out of his mouth. But I had no idea. I mean, there was a program, but I didn't... I'm not looking at it. So, eventually then, of course, the service is over, and everybody has to get up. But I'm the last one in. My partner, Froski and I, we're the last ones in, so we're the first ones out. We have to lead the procession out of the cathedral.

• 41:50AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Now, a little backstory for you. I was terrible doing this in Catholic school.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  I was so bad because I was the shortest kid at that time in Catholic school. And Catholic school does everything in size places. So when you're the shortest kid, you're in the front. You're the leader. You've got to memorize everything that the big taller kids in the back, they can just doppily follow you.

• 42:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  And I could never get straight. How I go down this way, turn right here, turn left here, do this thing over here. They had all these elaborate ways to lead this procession in the church, holding candles and flowers and stuff. When you're a kid in Catholic school.

• 42:23AJ Gentile?

  Were they want you to lead like down the nave?

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely, you know?

• 42:27AJ Gentile?

  Past the heads of state and?

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Well, when I was a kid in Catholic school, it was the whole church, right?

• 42:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  And I always screw that up. And at one point, Sister Agatha grabbed me by the shoulders and she shook me so bad, she, and I couldn't get it straight. I vomited all over.

• 42:42AJ Gentile?

  I'm telling you, I know her name.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Sister Agatha?

• 42:44AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  She was evil.

• 42:48AJ Gentile?

  That's what that said?

• 42:49Speaker 03

  I was terrified by Sister Agatha. So anyway, that was then. So now it's not that much later, really, because I'm still a kid. But now I'm leading the procession out of the cathedral, straight down the center of the church. They're going to open the doors in front of me. Atlas, you know, Rockefeller Center is there.

• 43:06AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Okay, so what happens behind me? Andy Williams is finally on.

• 43:10AJ Gentile?

  Singing you out?

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Singing me out, the battle hymn of the republic.

• 43:13AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my God.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Right? And then as he's ending, right, that Leonard Bernstein, okay, has the choir and the organs. And he's doing the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. As the doors open and as Atlas is there, and I'm thinking, well, I don't know, but I just graduated high school, man.

• 43:32AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  I'm not going back for this, right? My problem was, I still can't do a procession right, right? So I'm walking down the aisle, but I'm hoofing it.

• 43:42AJ Gentile?

  You're hoofing it.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  I'm going a bit too fast.

• 43:45AJ Gentile?

  The cameras are trying to track you.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  And somebody comes up behind me, one of the clergy says, slow down, right? And I realized that Prosky is.

• 43:53AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  So we're not in sync, right? So I have to wait for Prosky and then we start moving the rest of the way out. We leave the church this way. No, your listeners are thinking, what does all this have to do with anything? Well, this is what it has to do. We leave the church. We know a way to get out without being seen because we're going to take the subway back. We didn't keep the limo.

• 44:14AJ Gentile?

  Didn't keep the limo.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  We go out through like an underground passage that's there. Again, who do we run into? Rose and Jackie. They're doing the same thing. They're trying to get out to avoid the paparazzi. So we mumble something about condolences and everything else. We don't, it's a shock, right? They're shocked, we're shocked. We keep going. We come out on the other side and there's a strange looking bishop waiting for us. This is a guy dressed in some purplish robes and stuff with a hat and everything. And he says, what denomination are you with? Okay, and I'm still doing the talking, Slovenic Orthodox Church. And he says, here's a pamphlet from our church. We're in the Bronx, the American Orthodox Catholic Church. Why don't you come up and see us? And we take the thing, we say, okay, fine.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  And we just leave and we get in the subway, coming back home. We're looking at this thing. We're saying, this guy's like not that far from us. He's near the Bronx Zoo, actually, appropriately enough, as it turned out. So we said, okay, we're going to go and visit these people. So like a Sunday or two later, we go and visit the American Orthodox Catholic Church, not having a clue who these people are. And that church turns out to be the one that had David Ferry and Jack Martin as bishops.

• 45:27AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Among others.

• 45:29AJ Gentile?

  Fred Crisman as well.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Well, Crisman. And they were running ops, you know?

• 45:34AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  For, for the feds. The whole thing was totally bizarre.

• 45:40AJ Gentile?

  But you don't know any of this at this point, right?

• 45:42Speaker 03

  At that time, of course, I don't know. I know nothing about Fred. I never heard the name David Ferry. I mean, didn't know anything about any of that. Or Jack Martin, nothing like that. All I know is here's a church, a beautiful mansion. And they had a beautiful church, a wooden church. I think it was a wooden structure. Inside it was anyway, it was a lot of wood. An Orthodox church, they had icons, they had everything set up. You know, and they said, why don't you just join us? And we thought, this is it. We don't have a church, we don't have a building, we have got nothing. We tie up with these guys, we're home free, right? And so we go on a Sunday, we're figuring we're gonna go and do this elaborate ceremony with them. There's gonna be all these people, place is empty. There were no parishioners.

• 46:20AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  There never were any parishioners.

• 46:22AJ Gentile?

  Never.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  That wasn't the point.

• 46:23AJ Gentile?

  Wasn't the point.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Beautiful church, though. They had the edifice, it was there.

• 46:27AJ Gentile?

  Total front.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  And every Sunday, they did the mass, they did the divine liturgy. They did it with nobody present. But they had to, to keep up the appearances, right?

• 46:35AJ Gentile?

  And are you concerned yet? Like, this is odd.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  No, because we don't have any parishioners.

• 46:40AJ Gentile?

  I guess that, nobody has it.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Nobody has them, we're cool.

• 46:42AJ Gentile?

  No flock anywhere, okay.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Until day after day, things start getting a little strange.

• 46:49AJ Gentile?

  In what way?

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Well, the bishop, the guy who runs the church, a guy called Profeta, was a Ukrainian Orthodox priest first. And then he broke away from the church and formed his own denomination called the American Orthodox Catholic Church. And he was a valiant anti-crusading guy. He hated communism, really, as a Ukrainian. He despised communism. And anything that was wrong in the world was due to communism, right? So, he had these things, he was on television programs in the 50s and the early 60s, talking about the Katyn Forest massacre, talking about atrocities committed by the communists against the Ukrainians. And on and on, trying to build this big anti-communist crusade. So much so that he showed me a letter

• 47:36Speaker 03

  from Dewey, who was running against Harry Truman at the time for the presidency. If Dewey had won the presidency, he would have been, Profeta would have been, the White House chaplain.

• 47:45AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  He had it in writing from Dewey. So this guy was that much of an anti-communist crusader. And he ran a lot of anti-communist stuff in the state of New Jersey. A lot of his, his real background was in Ukrainian churches in New Jersey.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Which is a little strange also.

• 48:04AJ Gentile?

  Why would that be strange?

• 48:05Speaker 03

  The deeper we get into this, the more, it all gets very connected. But a lot of the Ukrainians in New Jersey, they turned, was, okay, let me background a little bit. During World War II, People talk a lot about Ukraine and Nazis. It's a trope, you see it all the time.

• 48:21AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  It's very complicated. Ukraine was under Soviet Union control. They were not allowed to speak Ukrainian, print in Ukrainian. Of course, their church was basically banned. So when the Nazis came along and said, "We're gonna help you be free of the Soviet Union," a lot of the Ukrainians said, "No problem, we'll support you."

• 48:41AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  So you had a lot of pro-Nazi Ukrainians, just because they wanted to get away from Russia, from Soviet control. Not because they necessarily agreed with Nazi philosophy.

• 48:49AJ Gentile?

  Right, and Vatican supporting all that as well.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  And the Vatican was supporting it.

• 48:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Right? So you had this big movement, "Let's get the Ukrainians on the Nazi side." So after the war, there was an entire Ukrainian SS division, an entire division of SS Ukrainians. They wound up in New Jersey.

• 49:06AJ Gentile?

  Whoa, wow.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  They were brought over. Family, not just the officers themselves or the soldiers, but everybody.

• 49:11AJ Gentile?

  Were they brought over under the paperclip?

• 49:13Speaker 03

  No, it was just another special, you know, either as asylum seekers or...

• 49:17AJ Gentile?

  Right. Because now we're learning that paperclip was mostly just intelligence assets coming over, not scientists.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:23AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  So, here they are.

• 49:25AJ Gentile?

  Here they are.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  They have a church in New Jersey, and, uh, it'll come to me.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Anyway. And they have their own cemetery, and they've got, you know, famous Nazi Ukrainians bury there. I mean, the whole thing is like that, right? So that's, you know, and that's what's Profeta's background, was this. I mean, that was his people there. So anti-communist...

• 49:47AJ Gentile?

  Did you know this at the time, or not later?

• 49:49Speaker 03

  Putting it together later.

• 49:50AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  But at the moment, okay, Ukrainian, and that he was anti-communist was perfectly, he made that clear upfront. He showed us film clips from when he was on television with famous spokespeople and other bishops and everything else, talking about communism. So all of this was known to me at the time.

• 50:06AJ Gentile?

  And anti-communism was a thing everywhere, so it's fine.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Big thing, so nothing too surprising.

• 50:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Right? But then, you know, weird people start showing up at the church, right? So you get a guy from Italy shows up, an Italian, obviously a Catholic background, but he's going to be consecrated as a bishop. This guy never met Profeta, Profeta never met him. But the Italian consulate sends people to witness this, this thing, and to send this guy back, again, part of the anti-communist thing.

• 50:35AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  And then, Holy Prophet Eluyah shows up. This is like the freakiest thing, right, of my memory with him. There's this African priest.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Whose name on his passport was H period P period Alouya. HP stood for Holy Prophet. That's his name. And he was, I don't know what he was, but he was coming from Nigeria to the United States to be consecrated a bishop and sent back. Why? Because he represented the anti-Biafra wing of Christianity. Now, if you know about the Biafran Civil War at that time, again, it gets into the weeds. I'm sorry for your listeners who may think, what the hell is this all about? But there was a civil war going on that was really very famous at the time.

• 51:19AJ Gentile?

  No, it's okay.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  The Biafran were mostly Catholics or Christians anyway, and they wanted to secede from Nigeria, which was mostly Muslim. So what the Muslim majority in Nigeria needed were Christians who were supporting the regime. So we consecrated this guy, the Holy Prophet, who showed up in African robes, right? Put him back on a plane with a big photograph of him smiling, getting consecrated, and a document, sent him back to Nigeria.

• 51:47AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  I mean, this is the kind of stuff that went on. And at one point, Propheta told me, you know, we have no problem here. I have one CIA agent and one FBI agent as people who incorporated my corporation as a church. He says, we are very protected here, you know? And then once, one day, these guys show up, wingtips, you know, black suits, the whole thing, FBI, obviously FBI. They walk in, close doors, have meetings with Propheta, and walk out again. So he's working hand in glove with the feds.

• 52:20AJ Gentile?

  Now, what are you thinking when you see that? When you see the suits come in? Like, what is going on here?

• 52:26Speaker 03

  I'm a kid. The adults are doing adult things. You know what I mean?

• 52:28AJ Gentile?

  Fair enough.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the feds are there. I'm not a conspiracy theorist at this point, right?

• 52:33AJ Gentile?

  They're not bothering you, so?

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it sounds cool.

• 52:36AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  We're cool, right?

• 52:37AJ Gentile?

  HP Louya.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  I should be a...

• 52:39AJ Gentile?

  It's hilarious.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I kind of know he's on the wrong side of this conflict.

• 52:43AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  I mean, the, you know, Propheta must have his reasons. I mean, he doesn't look like a Christian would dress to me. But who knows? It's Africa. Different people, different customs.

• 52:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  As they said in The Man Who Would Be King. Different people, different customs. So I don't know what's going on. You know, I just go along, go with the flow. Until it does start to look too weird, right? So it starts to get stranger and stranger. We go for a meeting. Why? I don't know. Downtown.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Lower Fifth Avenue.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  A place called Delta Metal Industries. Delta Metal Industries had a showroom of metal furniture that they imported from Europe, Italy, I think mostly. And it was like wrought iron furniture. And this is big elaborate showroom. Nice one whole floor of a building down there. Third floor, I think, on this building.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  And it's owned and operated by a guy called Harry Kay.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Kay was not his real last name. It was, Kay was the initial, but he had made it his last name, I guess. For purposes of legal purposes or signing documents, whatever, so he's Harry Kay.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  And there was something very fishy about Harry Kay. So we would go for meetings there once in a while with Harry Kay. Harry Kay would be there. And there was never any customers at the showroom, nobody ever showed up, nothing like that. It's like another Orthodox church deal.

• 54:08AJ Gentile?

  What are you discussing at your meetings?

• 54:10Speaker 03

  I couldn't figure it out because they're talking in code, you know?

• 54:13AJ Gentile?

  You're right.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  They're talking like in a code like they understand. But we don't, we're just there for like window dressing because we're dressed right.

• 54:18AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  And the one time there's a party they're throwing. So they throw this party and we're invited to this party. And there's like Hollywood, there's like Broadway celebrities, Hollywood celebrities like there at this thing. I kind of recognized some of them here and there, I thought. I didn't know what I was doing there, except again, to give legitimacy, right? So making a long story short, I began to suspect there was something very fishy about Harry Kay and Delta Metal Industries. And then I befriended the secretary who worked there. And she's telling me, oh yeah, you know, this is not what it looks like. You know, this is something else. And she would get a little drunk on rum and cokes and start saying, oh yeah, this is like a whole different thing that we're doing here.

• 54:57AJ Gentile?

  Did she tell you specifically or just?

• 54:59Speaker 03

  No, just in general.

• 55:00AJ Gentile?

  It's not what you think?

• 55:01Speaker 03

  It's not what you think.

• 55:01AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Plus, you know, they kind of want to get rid of you.

• 55:06AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Not, you know.

• 55:08AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  But just to get rid of me from this thing because I'm not on board with this program or I would not be expected to be.

• 55:14AJ Gentile?

  Of course, get rid of you, of course.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  I'm a liability. So that makes me worried. Now, at the same time, we make a friend. Some other bishop shows up. I mean, we're up to our neck in bishops, right? There's no other clergy and there's no parishioners, but we got bishops like you would not believe.

• 55:29AJ Gentile?

  Are you clear of selective service by now?

• 55:31Speaker 03

  I'm getting to the exactly to that point. I'm getting right to that point. I know it takes me a long time.

• 55:35AJ Gentile?

  No, no, no. This, I could all day. This is amazing.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  So, this guy shows up.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Andre, Andre, Pinocchio. Pinocchio, very Italian, and he, as he insists to us, very Sicilian. So, he's Andre Pinocchio, and he's a priest with the Liberal Catholic Church. Now, the Liberal Catholic Church was kind of an offshoot of the Theosophical Society. And they had their own church that had, you know, they did mass on Sundays.

• 56:01AJ Gentile?

  Is this Blavatsky?

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Blavatsky's people.

• 56:03AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. They have their own wing, sort of a church. Liberal Catholic is called.

• 56:08AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  And they have like a Buddha statue with the cross and everything else. It's like, you know, whatever, right? And they have mass on Sundays, or they used to. I went to one or two just to see what that was all about.

• 56:17AJ Gentile?

  That's swastikas too, didn't they?

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Not in the mass.

• 56:20AJ Gentile?

  Okay, not in?

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Not in New York.

• 56:22AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  So, but this was going on. So, Pinocchio was a priest of that denomination. And he was kind of a chaplain at one of the prisons as well. He would go and, I don't know what he would do in the prisons. And so, he had that, but he was like a macher. He knew everybody who was anybody. He knew a guy called Harry Hirschfield. Again, people wouldn't know who he is, but he was a very prominent kind of guy back in the day. Cartoonist, political cartoons and stuff. And he was connected with the unions and he knew every, he had a statue of Nefertiti, which was an original head, you know? Without the eyes, the eyes missing and stuff. He says, "This is the original." They always show her with the eyes, but she didn't have any eyes when we found it. So, he knew people like that. He knew Joseph Kono, who was a major union guy at the time. He knew everybody. I mean, he knew everybody.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  He knew comedians, he knew actors, he knew wrestlers, he knew, he just knew everybody. He was like a major Hollywood-plugged-in guy. Later, it turns out, he got a role in The Godfather.

• 57:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, all the Godfather buffs are saying, "No way."

• 57:23AJ Gentile?

  No way.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  He doesn't show up anywhere. He does. If you look at the baptismal scene, the famous baptismal scene.

• 57:29AJ Gentile?

  Everyone knows that scene.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  That scene, right? He's the guy standing in the back with the purple and the white, saying nothing. He has no lines, but he's standing there, right? And he's standing again outside in the church when they're all leaving. He's that guy. That's Andre Pinocchio.

• 57:42AJ Gentile?

  Wow!

• 57:45Speaker 03

  He became a bishop by the time they were making the Godfather. At the American Orthodox Catholic Church, they made him a bishop. Because he had all these connections. And he had connections enough that when it came time in October for my selective service situation, he brought me to the head of selective service in the federal building downtown. Colonel Kirshenbaum, thank you very much Colonel. And this guy sat in a nice desk, he looked like Alan Dulles, he had

• 58:13AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  The jacket with the patches on the sleeves and the whole thing and the pipe and the glasses and the mustache.

• 58:18AJ Gentile?

  Forgive my language, but are you shitting bricks in your robe?

• 58:21Speaker 03

  No, because again-

• 58:22AJ Gentile?

  It's a Colonel.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Well, he's now dressed in a uniform.

• 58:25AJ Gentile?

  Okay, that's a little easier.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  It's a little easier, he's in civvies.

• 58:28AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  But that's his rank, it's Colonel Kirshenbaum. And he's sitting there looking at me and looking at Pinocchio who brought me in. And we want to make sure that he gets his ministerial deferment. And he's looking at me and he says, "Well, we can do that, or you know, you could be a chaplain in Vietnam." And he's joking, like, he's just like pulling my leg. I'm looking at him like, he says, "I'm kidding, I'm kidding, okay, I'm kidding. But, we do have one request." And I'm looking at him like, "What is it, my liver, what do you want?" And he says, "We want to know when the Russians are moving agents through 97th Street."

• 59:07AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  And you guys are well-placed.

• 59:09AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 59:10Speaker 03

  Keep an eye, you see somebody you know is not really a priest, which we saw a few times.

• 59:14AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  He says, "Just let us know." I said, "Okay." Stamp the papers, I'm done, I'm out, I got my deferment, no worries.

• 59:22AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. From the head of selective service in New York himself.

• 59:27AJ Gentile?

  Unbelievable, did you ever report a name that you saw?

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Uh, I am not at liberty to discuss this.

• 59:33AJ Gentile?

  Understood.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Um, but, but, things went south after a while with Harry Kay and the Orthodox Church and my friend, so-called high school friend, Prosser-

• 59:46AJ Gentile?

  Are you a member of Athio?

• 59:48Speaker 03

  Hmm?

• 59:48AJ Gentile?

  Are you a member of Athio?

• 59:49Speaker 03

  I am, yes.

• 59:50AJ Gentile?

  Okay, that's fine, that's it, I'll just throw it out there.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  That's another story.

• 59:54AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  That brings in Michael Aquino, I don't think you want to know that story.

• 59:57AJ Gentile?

  Oh, everybody does, of course, Temple of Set?

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:01AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  We'll get into that later.

• 1:00:02AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  But that's why I was in Athio.

• 1:00:04AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Long story. So-

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

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• 1:00:37AJ Gentile?

  So you're out.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Things are getting worried. I'm getting worried. They're telling me, the secretary is telling me, you know, your goose is cooked. And that's the expression she used. I said, okay. In that case, I'm out of here. So I, I just told them, I said, I'm through with this. I'm out. I quit. I quit the whole thing. I quit the church.

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Within, I would say, a week, I get a notice from Selective Service, your classification's been revoked.

• 1:01:04AJ Gentile?

  No. Wow.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  A little piece of paper.

• 1:01:08AJ Gentile?

  Eyes all over you.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  Yep. So I said, okay. I called Selective Service. And I said, you guys want to do this? Then I'm going to talk about what I know.

• 1:01:21AJ Gentile?

  With both balls on you.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  And they gave me back my 4D. My 4F, uh, 4F deferment. They gave it back.

• 1:01:28AJ Gentile?

  Did you know how dangerous of a move that was?

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  No, the more dangerous I've been in Vietnam.

• 1:01:33AJ Gentile?

  That, fair enough.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  To me, that was dangerous.

• 1:01:35AJ Gentile?

  I guess that's true. Right. One or the other.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  I'm gone either way.

• 1:01:40AJ Gentile?

  Did you call Kirshenbaum directly?

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  No, no, no, I didn't call Kirshenbaum. I called, who did I call? Because I figured Kirshenbaum, Panacio, that's all part of the same cabal.

• 1:01:47AJ Gentile?

  True.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  Right? So, you know, let me go and talk to, you know, go directly and say, this is what I'm going to do. And I got my card back in the mail. I was cleared again.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Very mysterious.

• 1:01:59AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  And then I started getting calls from the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, from all different groups were starting to call me, like they knew what had gone on, and they're trying to get me to join them. Right? Which would keep me sort of under, uh, control, under observation by all these guys. I even got, this is another story which takes too long to explain, but I even got, uh, involved with the Syrian Orthodox Church at one point.

• 1:02:24AJ Gentile?

  Oh my, it's out of control.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  The Syrians were saying, I knew somebody who knew somebody, and they said, you know, you can join us. And I'm thinking, the person who made that introduction?

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Was questionable political background. Let's put it that way.

• 1:02:40AJ Gentile?

  Understood.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Okay. Middle Eastern, questionable. So I said, "Maybe not." So I just, I joined no one. You know, I met some of them just to visit, see what they were talking about, what was up, you know. I met the Russian Orthodox guy, who was very strange. But then, okay, so I break off my contacts with all of these people. I have my deferment, that's all I really care about. Everything is copacetic, I'm fine. I've left the church and, you know. But before I do, before all this has happened, Pinaccio has one or few tricks up his sleeve. And then before I actually leave, while we're still sort of all friendly, kind of, he says, "We're gonna go to another meeting. We're gonna go to a meeting at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Greenwich Village." I didn't know what that was, but that was a synagogue that was half synagogue, sort

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  of, and half Presbyterian church. And the guy running the Presbyterian church side and the guy running the synagogue side, Pinaccio knew both of them. So, "We're gonna go to a meeting." I don't know why we're going to these meetings, I have no freaking clue. I'm just showing up, because I'm supposed to show up. So, Prosky, my friend, is there, as usual.

• 1:03:45AJ Gentile?

  The robe comes back on.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  The whole thing, everything, you know. I'm there. Pinaccio is there. The rabbi of the rabbi block of the Brotherhood Synagogue is there. And another guy shows up. Turns out he's a famous wrestler, Antonino Raca.

• 1:04:07AJ Gentile?

  Antonino Raca, doesn't ring a bell.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Famous wrestler from, again, back in that time. Argentine-Italian, okay? Italian ethnicity, but Argentine.

• 1:04:15AJ Gentile?

  I came into the Bruno San Martino years, that's maybe a little later.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  A little later. So, this guy is there. What the hell is he doing here? I never heard the name before either, I didn't know who he was. Huge guy, right? Hands like this, you know. And he starts telling us stories of working for CIA in the Middle East, right?

• 1:04:37AJ Gentile?

  The wrestler in the synagogue.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  The wrestler in the synagogue is talking about CIA in the Middle East.

• 1:04:42AJ Gentile?

  Nothing makes sense.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  No, of course not. This is all David Lynch material, you know, except minus the smoke machine.

• 1:04:49AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  And the little guy dancing, but everything else is there. I mean, so he's going on about this. He says, "Don't worry," he's telling the rabbi, "don't worry, we got you covered. It doesn't matter what Congress does." He says, "We're flying in Phantom jets. They've not been approved by Congress. They were sold to Luxembourg." He says Luxembourg ordered these jets. Luxembourg doesn't need jets. Says, "We're flying them from Luxembourg to Israel. No worries." He said, "And Lebanon? I had two people killed off under me in Lebanon. No worries. We got it under control. Everything is fine." I'm listening to this thing, "What the hell am I listening to?"

• 1:05:26AJ Gentile?

  Is this still 68?

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  This is 60, early 69, spring of 69.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  In March of 69, I was elevated to an abbot.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  I forgot about that. Slipped my mind. That was in March. So, yeah, this month in 69. So, yeah, so I'm still in good graces there, everybody, at this point. But now Panacio is running the show. And so there's Antoni Araca. Now, okay, I filed this away. A couple of years later, he died. There was a funeral. The whole thing was there.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  But before he died, I tried, there was an agency you could call to get contact information. And I thought to myself, "I want to talk to this guy again." I didn't imagine all this, right? So I called this agency. "Oh, yeah, we have Antoni Araca's control, you know, contact information. No worries."

• 1:06:16AJ Gentile?

  What, you call his agent or something?

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  It's not an agent. It's like an agency that specialized. This is before internet again, right? So this agency specialized in having contacts of famous people. That was their thing. "Oh, yeah, we have it. I'll call you back." I said, "Okay, fine." They call me back. I'm at the office, right, and I'm working at, I think, the Bendix Corporation at this point. And they call me back and they say, "No, we got nothing on it, hung up." What the hell, right? And then I find out later that the whole CIA stuff was most likely true.

• 1:06:44AJ Gentile?

  So do you ease out of the clergy?

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  I eased out of all of that.

• 1:06:48AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Until I get a call from Prosky again in 1972. I think it was 72.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  And he says, listen, could you do me a favor? I want you to meet, I have a favor to ask of you. I don't have any hard feelings. All right, okay. I show up, he says, listen, there's these guys, these monks, they're, they're, they joined the church, you know? I'm a little nervous about them. They don't know you, they've never seen you, they don't know you exist.

• 1:07:20AJ Gentile?

  Which church is he with now? The one in the Bronx?

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, see, still, oh, oh, yeah, no, no. He, he's now has his own autocephalous Silvanic Orthodox Church of North and South America, Inc.

• 1:07:30AJ Gentile?

  Autocephalous?

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, autocephalous, not autosiphalous, as people used to, to make fun. Autocephalous. So it's a self-governing-

• 1:07:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Orthodox church. So, no, he has, you know, he's doing that, but he's, he's involved with the Ukrainians. This is another story. He got involved with the real Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and they acknowledged him as a bishop. They consecrated him as a bishop, and then he became a genuine Ukrainian Orthodox bishop.

• 1:07:56AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  And there's photographs of him at the meetings at the, at the, and he was a kid.

• 1:08:00AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  Right? They consecrated him when he was not even 20 years old.

• 1:08:04AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  I have photographs of him with the bishop, very famous bishop, Rihari.

• 1:08:09AJ Gentile?

  Does he have a mustache in the photo?

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Well, he's got the beard now. He's doing the whole thing. So, you know, so he's now heavily involved with the Ukrainians. He's learned pretty much to communicate in Ukrainian. He's actually learned to pick up some Greeks, so he's talking to the Greek Orthodox, like the, the breakaway Greek Orthodox groups. So he knows, like, a lot of people in the church. But now, most importantly, he's really affiliated with the Ukrainians. And that eventually proved his downfall, but at that moment, it was fine. But he says, you know, and he shows me this library that he's been developing, all these ancient rare books, you know, stuff hundreds and hundreds of years old. And they're all like palmistry, astrology, you know, occult-oriented stuff, because he's still, he got the bug from the time, right? So he started collecting all these books, he became fascinated with it, he says, look at this.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  You know, and I'm looking at books, then my jaw is dropping, and this, you don't find this stuff in libraries.

• 1:08:59AJ Gentile?

  And you know that stuff already, from the magazine?

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  I know it already.

• 1:09:02AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  More than the magazine, but yes.

• 1:09:04AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  So I'm looking at all this, and I'm thinking, well, this is great, you know? And he says, they, they just bring me this stuff all the time. He says, I don't know where they're getting it. He says, I, can you just- Kind of go over there and like spy on them?

• 1:09:18AJ Gentile?

  Go over where?

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  To where they have their operation and just kind of spy on them because they have a separate little, you know chapel quote unquote. He says, "Just tell me what they're up to because I have a feeling these books are stolen. And if they're stolen, I got all this hot property here." He didn't have really much of a problem with that. He just didn't want to get busted for it. And that would be the end of everything. So he says, "Let me know. I need to know if this stuff is hot or not." So I said, "Yeah, all right. Okay. Sounds like fun. I'll do it." Where are they? They're in Queens.

• 1:09:45AJ Gentile?

  So you suit up?

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  I suit up.

• 1:09:47AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  And I suit up. I got all the stuff. I got the collar and everything. So I go to their chapel. I have the address. And I'm looking at the address and I'm saying, "This can't be right." This is, it's a, it's a, it's a strip joint on the first floor. And they're on the second floor, right?

• 1:10:02AJ Gentile?

  Where in town? Where, what part of town?

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  Uh, Jamaica.

• 1:10:05AJ Gentile?

  Okay. Down in Queens.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  Jamaica, Queens. So I go upstairs, you know, creaking upstairs. And I knock on the door timidly because I don't know what's going on the other side of those doors. And it turns out they have this little chapel set up like in the front facing the window that faces outside. But in the second half of this apartment, I guess, there's this elaborate operation for steaming seals out of paper and for eradicating ink, right? But it's back there. Like they're not talking about it up front. So I walk in there, you know, I was here. I did this. I was this background, that background. And they, and Prosky had told me, these guys, you know, they seem to be really into books and book binding. They claim to be book binders.

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  Read up on book binding so you sound knowledgeable on book binding. Can you imagine the intelligence operations we're running in our teens and early twenties?

• 1:10:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  So anyway, so yeah, okay. So I do that. So I'm, at least I know the language and the lingo. So I, what's verso, what's recto, you know? So I go in there and I'm talking to them. They, they look at me like, "Oh, this guy could be useful. He knows this kind of stuff," right? I go back two, three times. By only, I think, the third time, they're inviting me into the back to show me their operation.

• 1:11:16AJ Gentile?

  What did you tell them the reason for your visit was?

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  Well, because I was, I, I found your church and I wanted, you know?

• 1:11:21AJ Gentile?

  Just, okay.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  You know, and of course they were vain enough to believe that must be true.

• 1:11:25AJ Gentile?

  And the strip joint's downstairs.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  And the strip joint's downstairs. Well, that's convenient. So.

• 1:11:28AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  And you have to convert all these people. So, um.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  They say, "Okay," and they kind of introduced me. "Well, we use this machine for steaming out the seals." And they're showing me. You know, we get this book, it's got this seal. And they didn't say they stole it, but they have a book. And they gotta remove this seal, or there's an ink stamp. We gotta get rid of the ink. So, they do it. They say, "We sell them to collectors," you know. "Okay, fine." And then the thing that tore me. They had maps, old, old maps, that they had taken out of the books they were in to sell them separately, because they make more money that way.

• 1:12:04AJ Gentile?

  Oh. Where are the books coming from at this point?

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  Well, they're not saying, right?

• 1:12:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  I'm looking at them, and I'm sort of smiling and going wrong with it. But my soul just died.

• 1:12:14AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  That they're tearing maps out of books.

• 1:12:15AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  Are you kidding me? So, I put all this together, and I go back and I tell Pratsky. I say, you know, "This is what's happening." And he says, you know, "I was afraid of that." And, uh, within a couple of weeks, they were busted by the feds.

• 1:12:32AJ Gentile?

  By the feds.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  And what happened was, um, they had another clergyman. This clergyman up to here on all of us, Father Fox. And if you're listening, Father Fox, give us a call. Father Fox was a remarkable character that everybody seemed to know, but nobody knew. Father Fox had been with the Russian Orthodox Church. He had been with the Syrian Orthodox Church. And at one point, I had access, I had to hold him in my house, a lot of his personal papers. And in those personal papers were all of these air tickets, these stubs, from flights to Vietnam in the 60s.

• 1:13:14AJ Gentile?

  Why are you rifling through Father Fox's papers?

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Well, somebody had Father Fox's papers. They wanted me to hold on, I think it was Pratsky. He wanted me to hold on to this stuff, because he didn't want it in his place in case they got busted for the books. So, I'm looking at this stuff, and there's like, letters, there's stuff. This guy was in constant contact with Vietnamese, with our army in the Vietnam. Like, what the hell is he doing? Who flies to Vietnam for vacation? You know what I mean? This doesn't, this doesn't look right. And then I started, I find more documentation that shows he's married and has a wife and child in the Bronx, right? Which is unusual, to say the least, because he was not, he was supposed to be-

• 1:13:50AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  A monastic. Russian Orthodox priests, Orthodox priests in general can be married, that's not the problem. But, his reputation was quite different. So I'm thinking, wow, wow, this is weird. What is all this about? Then these guys get busted, the two monks who were stealing books, they get busted by the feds. The guy who turned them in was Father Fox.

• 1:14:08AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Why did, Father Fox got the call probably from Prosky.

• 1:14:12AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  Fox calls the feds, has them turned in. Why was he so eager to turn them in? Because he, and one of the other monks, had fought over a woman.

• 1:14:23AJ Gentile?

  Oh, you're kidding?

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  So, you know, this is as pathetic as this whole situation-

• 1:14:30AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  Then you're in the middle of a soap opera with priests and guns and Vietnam and spies and communists, I mean, and it turns into a soap opera overnight, you know? Because of the propheta church experience, because of all of that, the anti-communism, Vietnam, everything else that was going on, and the fact that I had been brought up, as I said, on Casablanca and Passage to Marseille and, you know, all the Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart and all of that, um, I was fascinated by the Nazi phenomenon, let's call it that. Because I, there was something about it that was, to me, indigestible. I couldn't quite get past what it meant.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  And, talking to people who were viciously anti-communists to the point that they were pro-Nazi, like the Russian church on Park Avenue, uh, which was kind of pro-Nazi, they, they wanted the Nazis to win and to defeat the Soviet Union. Not because they were necessarily, you know, in tune with the Nazi ideals, but they, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, that kind of thing.

• 1:15:35AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  The same thing with the Ukrainians. There were anti-Semitic Ukrainians, don't get me wrong. There were some who embraced the idea, but there were a lot of Ukrainians who simply wanted Russia gone, the Soviet Union, out of their lives. So I'm kind of sensitive to the fact that there's nuance in the world, you know? But when it came to the Nazis, I wonder how much nuance can there be, really? You know, how can I understand it a little bit better? And the best way to do that would be to confront them face to face, to just to see what these people believed. Neo-Nazis, okay, I can start there. But that's not the real thing.

• 1:16:07AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  Neo-Nazis are like fan bros of Nazis.

• 1:16:10AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  I want to know what the real Nazi was. And that basically was what led me to South America. I wanted to, just to see it with my own eyes. I wanted to talk to them and see in their eyes what they really, how they act. I wanted to get a vibe, I wanted to get a feeling from them, you know? I wanted to say, okay, this is what we're dealing with here.

• 1:16:26AJ Gentile?

  Were you writing a book?

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  I was writing Sinister Forces.

• 1:16:29AJ Gentile?

  Okay. So this was research, this wasn't just?

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  This was research.

• 1:16:33AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  But Sinister Forces, the original idea was the relationship between religion and politics. That was like the original feel, because I was, I was in that world, right? With the Orthodox churches.

• 1:16:43AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  I was in religion and politics, I was awash in it. I wanted to understand it better. How do these things interact? How do they influence? They should not be on the same page, right? But they obviously are, they're all over the place.

• 1:16:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  So I wanted to know more about that. So I started researching that, and I started going to, and I started reading these weird things about Nazi occultism. And, you know, morning of the magicians, everybody was brought up on that in my time. So I said, half of this book has got to be fake, you know? Uh, there's no documentation, there's no sources. I said, it's cool, but, you know, I need to know more. And then more books came out, and they were also really badly researched. And I said, I, this is not good enough, you know? So I'm going to the National Archives, and I find out that, uh... They have a, you know, a captured German document section. And again, boys and girls, before internet. And so I'm going to this thing and I say, I want to research the Anunnarba.

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  I heard that there was an organization called the SS Anunnarba, the ancestral heritage research division of the SS. And the very kindly guy, I think his name was Wolf, the archivist there, very famous guy, everybody knew him at the time. And he says, oh, you want these documents on the SS documents on the Anunnarba? Yes, you come with me. And he had all this microfilm, right? We noticed these microfiche, these cards.

• 1:17:57AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  And he said, all of these, these trays here, that's what you're looking for. Have a nice day. So I'm there at the microfiche reader, my eyes are like falling out of my head, and I'm looking at the SS expedition to Tibet, where I'm looking at SS.

• 1:18:12AJ Gentile?

  Well, hold on, like the Shambala Invest?

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:18:15AJ Gentile?

  That document?

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  It's there, yeah.

• 1:18:17AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that. I didn't.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:20AJ Gentile?

  I cover these stories and it's half of them, it's like, ah, this is all nonsense.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's there.

• 1:18:26AJ Gentile?

  So Tibet, I didn't mean to interrupt, I just blew my mind.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  No, but yeah, no, in detail, not just the Nazi documents themselves, not just the authorization forms signed by Heinrich Himmler with Heil Hitler on them and his signature in the swastika, allowing these guys to go to Tibet and do this.

• 1:18:41AJ Gentile?

  Tibet, Antarctica, search for the Spear of Destiny?

• 1:18:44Speaker 03

  All that's there. No Spear, I didn't come, I came across the Spear from a different angle, but this stuff was Antarctica for sure, Tibet for sure. It was research on runes and can we have a yoga that's based on runic symbols instead of the other stuff the Indians do, which is like maybe interdimension, we don't know. So all this kind of stuff is going on, right? And I'm looking at this thing, I'm thinking, holy shit, how come nobody's gone here and done this?

• 1:19:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  Why are they writing all these books when the mother lode is sitting right here? Well, it's all in German, okay, but there's pictures. So I'm there, you know, spending a fortune copying page after page after page, it was very expensive, it was like 25 cents a page or some damn thing at that time. So I'm copying page after page of this thing, I'm coming back home with the stacks of this and I'm thinking, oh my God, nobody's going to believe this, you know? The Ersten Schweizchen, Ersten Deutschen? No. The first, I think they said the first white people in Tibet, not the first German. The newspaper articles about the Tibet expedition, right? And there's photographs of, you know, of these so-called archaeologists and anthropologists

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  with their Tibetan contacts and with swastika flags behind them and everything in Tibet in the 30s, you know? And so I'm freaking out. I look at all of this, and then I discovered there's a place called Tibet House in New York. That was, I don't know if it's still funded by Richard Gere, but it was like a major thing. And they had all this film footage.

• 1:20:14AJ Gentile?

  Film footage?

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  Film footage of the Tibet expedition and film footage of when OSS sent their people to Tibet to see what the hell was going on. Right? So, I'm thinking, "Oh my God, are you kidding me?" And I'm looking at all this and I'm just like, I'm going crazy. This is now in the 80s now, I'm doing this. Right? By this time, all kinds of other things have gone on in my life. I've been to China, right? And I've come back with photographs of Chinese, you know, Tibetan rituals in China, you know, the Tibetan Buddhist rituals in China. And I'm showing them to the people in Tibet House, and they're telling me, "Oh, you know, Richard would be, love to see these, Richard Gere." So I'm researching Tibetan stuff in the 70s, but I'm amassing this information. I got nothing to do with it. I mean, I don't know what to, where to put it, right?

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  So, again, no internet, nothing like that, so you're very painstakingly trying to create drafts of books and manuscripts and proposals and going publisher to publisher. It's taking forever, right? So in the meantime, I'm still doing the research. So I'm still collecting it. But I'm telling anybody who will listen, "Listen, there's this weird shit on you." So then I find out there's this place down in Chile. And what's his name writes about it, Ladislas Farago. He writes about it in a book called Aftermath.

• 1:21:28AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  And it's about the post-war Nazi underground. Well, he is roundly attacked by people who claim that he's making stuff up, and he obviously was not. Did he make mistakes here and there? Possibly, sure, everybody does. But did the basic story come through to me, as far as I was concerned? Yeah. He was looking for Martin Bormann. He thought Bormann had escaped to South America.

• 1:21:49AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  So he was on the trail of Bormann. Now, the standard ritual that we have to say is Martin Bormann died in Berlin in 1945. There's no mystery there, blah, blah, blah. We have his grave. We have his body. Yeah, I don't think so.

• 1:22:01AJ Gentile?

  I don't think so.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 1:22:03AJ Gentile?

  In my research, I don't think so.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I agree. I think he did get out. But that's another story.

• 1:22:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:22:09Speaker 03

  So I'm researching this, I'm reading Farago, and he says, you know, there's this place in Chile, it's called Colonia Dignidad, and it's run by ex-Nazis, and they have a weird cult that they, you know, operate out of there. They're doing weird cult things, and they're Nazis, and it's like weird, and I thought to myself, book me a ticket, right? I'm going, I'm there. I'm 28 years old, I'm invulnerable, I'm gonna go down to Chile in the middle of martial law and the Pinochet regime to go and take a look at a Nazi estate. What could possibly go wrong?

• 1:22:36AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my goodness. Is it common knowledge at this point that Nazis were fleeing to South America? It must have been, yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, of course. Oh, yeah, sure. But Argentina was everywhere.

• 1:22:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Argentina, because Eichmann had been picked up in Argentina.

• 1:22:47AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  So they're thinking Argentina, and that's it. They, they cut it off there. Brazil then came into play because of, of Mengele.

• 1:22:55AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  Doctor Mengele. He was, you know, dead in, in Brazil. So, so it's Brazil, it's Argentina, but Chile, nobody knew. Who knew from Chile? Except I had Farago to lead me, to guide me there. So I said, I'm going to go and figure this out, see if this place really exists.

• 1:23:11AJ Gentile?

  Martial law.

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  This is 1979.

• 1:23:13AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:23:14Speaker 03

  Okay, it's in June of 79. So they had taken over, Pinochet's people had taken over in 73, on September 11th, 1973, they had deposed Salvador Allende. Salvador Allende, Allende, who historically was notoriously anti-Nazi, right? He was like, he was a political leader at the time during the war, and he was very much anti-Nazi, in a country that was kind of pro-Nazi the whole time.

• 1:23:36AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  So, I'm down there and, you know, I'm gonna go to Colonia Dignita in this town called Parral. And so I'm just waiting for a couple of days. I'm getting the lay of the land. I'm looking around and it was the weirdest vibe ever, right? I'm downtown Santiago, the capital. And it's quiet. If you can imagine a downtown municipal, municipality of any kind, mention downtown New York. People are on the streets, there's cars, there's people, but nobody's talking. There's no noise, you know?

• 1:24:08AJ Gentile?

  It's like a Twilight Zone episode.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, you go into a restaurant, it's deadly quiet. People are there, they're eating, they're deadly quiet.

• 1:24:14AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  Because they don't know who's listening.

• 1:24:16AJ Gentile?

  Oh, right.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  They don't know what to say, they're afraid.

• 1:24:20AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  So then I go, there's a, there's a military school, right? And there's Bavarian-style architecture, okay, so you know what's going on here.

• 1:24:30AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  And then there's this young guy, he couldn't have been like eighteen, nineteen years old, in the guardhouse in front. And I wanted to take a picture of the school. And I raised my camera, no phones in those days, boys and girls, it was an actual camera. I'm raising my camera to take a picture. And this guy goes like that. And he's, it's this terrified look in his face, like, don't make me shoot you, you know? But I will if I have to. And I dropped the camera, it was on a, around my neck, I dropped, I backed away, I said, okay, no problem. My boy. So, um, it was that, that was the atmosphere. So in that atmosphere, I just like, let me go to Colonia Dignita anyway, just to take a look. It's in a small town, in the middle of nowhere, in the Andes Mountains, what could go wrong?

• 1:25:12AJ Gentile?

  Right, it'll be fine.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  It'll be fine. So I go and I, I buy a bus ticket. Now, I'm a New Yorker. I never learned to drive at this point, okay? I take a bus wherever, like, public transportation, I'm not gonna rent a car.

• 1:25:26AJ Gentile?

  Look, we didn't know what gas cost.

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  Well, exactly, no clue. So, I go and I, I get a bus to Parral, the town where this place is located. And I get it, I get there. And I get off the bus. It's the middle of the night, it's like four o'clock in the morning, freezing cold. It's June, but you know, the seasons are reversed. And I'm wearing, you know, a trench coat. Why? Because I want to be really visible, right? So I'm wearing this really visible, obviously foreigner trench coat with the thing, round belt, the whole nine yards. And I'm just there, and it's quiet, it's deadly quiet. And then out of nowhere comes this guy on a bicycle and a dog. And the dog is attached with a rope to his bicycle. And he bicycles over to me from like a street, from a corner.

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  And, I mean, it's so quiet, it's, there's no lights and everything, it's like a ghost town. And this guy comes out, and he's wearing a beret, he's like something out of a Fellini movie.

• 1:26:22AJ Gentile?

  What the hell is this? You're thinking.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't know, I don't know.

• 1:26:26AJ Gentile?

  What is this?

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  He doesn't look dangerous, but that dog, I don't know. So he rides up to me, and he asks me who I am, what am I doing? In parallel, like, he didn't say, "What the are you doing?", but he said, you know. And I said, "Well, the train station was right there, since I'm waiting for that train." And he starts laughing. He says, "There hasn't been a train here in years."

• 1:26:45AJ Gentile?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  Are you kidding me?

• 1:26:50AJ Gentile?

  So, plan B.

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  Plan B, tell the truth.

• 1:26:52AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  "I'm here to see Colonia Dignidad." And he says, "Are you, are you out of your mind?"

• 1:26:58AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  "You better just wait for the train." You'd have more luck there. "You're not going to cl-" No, you don't want to do that.

• 1:27:04AJ Gentile?

  Did you tell him, "I'm a writer, I'm looking into this"?

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't go into all the explanation, because my Spanish at that time was pretty rusty.

• 1:27:10AJ Gentile?

  But he's saying "por qué".

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I'm saying, you know, "Yeah, I'm doing research", you know?

• 1:27:14AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  So, okay. He says, "Come with me." And I'm thinking, "Where?". So he goes to his house, and his, he has this stunning wife sleeping, and his kids. This is an old grizzly guy on a bicycle, right? And he says, "This is my wife, they're sleeping in bed, right? They kind of wake up and look at me. This is my, these are my kids." Oh, but when is my job?

• 1:27:39Speaker 03

  Un placer, you know, what can I say? So then he leads me out of there and he says, "Come with me." And I said, "Now where are we going, right?" And two guys walk up to us. They're obviously carabineros. They're, they're police-army.

• 1:27:50AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  Combination. And they walk up to us and then he introduces and he makes the introductions. And he says he wants to go to Colonia Dignidad. Predictably, they laugh. So they said, "Come on, come with us." We go to this hut, you know? And we walk into this hut and we're sitting there and they bring out the aguardiente. Now, aguardiente is rotgut, basically. It's homemade, it's like moonshine.

• 1:28:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there's like grapes in it and everything else at the bottom. And it's really strong stuff. And we're gonna sit there and drink until the sun comes up.

• 1:28:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you are. You have to.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  What are you gonna do? And then they start opening up. You don't wanna go up there. It's like they have their own embassy up there. These are not people from Chile. They don't obey our laws. They're dangerous. Okay? And they said, "Besides, they're heavily funded." Every week, a car comes down from Chile. A Mercedes, they were very, pointing that out.

• 1:28:44AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  And they go to the bank, so they go to the post office first. They get a bunch of envelopes. And then they go to the bank and they take money out of the envelopes or checks or whatever. And they deposit it into the account for the Colonia. They said they're getting money from overseas, from every country. He says, "From Europe, from the United States, every place."

• 1:28:59AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  He says, "They've got this funding. They're very dangerous, but they have a clinic." And that little clinic is open to people from Chile for free.

• 1:29:08AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  He says, "But we don't wanna go there unless we, we really have to. Because sometimes we don't come back."

• 1:29:15AJ Gentile?

  They said that?

• 1:29:15Speaker 03

  They said that. They said, "We've lost children mostly up there." They said, "So be, you cannot, you really should not go. It's not safe for anybody. It's not safe for us."

• 1:29:24AJ Gentile?

  Why do they lose children? I mean, is it that dark?

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. As it turns out.

• 1:29:30AJ Gentile?

  Trafficking?

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  Trafficking.

• 1:29:31AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  And, and the, the leader of, whose name was Paul Schaefer oddly enough. Which confuses with the bandleader at Letterman Show. But anyway. He was evidently a pedophile. That's what really came out about that later.

• 1:29:47AJ Gentile?

  And US Embassy is aware of all of this, all of this.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  You can say so, yes, as we found out more as more time went on. But at that time, what do I know, right? So I'm thinking, okay, I came this far, I'm gonna go, I don't give a shit. So I find a driver, it's Sunday morning, the church is going to open, dawn is breaking, you know, the birds are singing, and there's this-

• 1:30:11AJ Gentile?

  The hangover is pounding.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. And there's this driver, you know, there's for hire, a car, it's an old, old Chevy, you know? And I say, "Look, I'm looking for someone to take me to Colonia Dignidad." And he looks at me, "Colonia Dignidad?" And he says, "Yeah." He says, "Bueno, vamos." He didn't care, he says, "Come on in." So I set up in front with him, you know? And we drive up to the colony, and he's telling me his stories about the colony.

• 1:30:38AJ Gentile?

  What does he hear? Because it's local legend, no?

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  Local legend, he says, "Nazis," you know, "It's Nazis."

• 1:30:43AJ Gentile?

  He flat out said it.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  He just came out and said, "It's Nazis."

• 1:30:45AJ Gentile?

  Was he the first one to say that word?

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  I think he was the first one to say Nazis.

• 1:30:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:30:49Speaker 03

  The others were saying Germans, they were saying evil, they were saying this, they were saying that. They were saying, "They don't use the same religion we have, they're not Catholic," right? That was a big deal, they were not Catholic.

• 1:30:59AJ Gentile?

  Right, they talk around it.

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  They talk around it, but they don't really get there.

• 1:31:01AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  So this guy is, you know, he's having a great time. It's a Sunday morning, he's making money more than he probably ever made in a week, because I agreed to whatever he wanted, you know? So we're driving up, and we pass, you know, basically Gauchos, guys on the horseback with the hats and everything else that are coming down the mountain. And it's a dirt road going up, and I realize we're getting really, really remote. Then we pass by a place called Colonia Italiana, which is like the first place you get to before you get to Colonia Dignidad. And I said, "Colonia Italiana?" He says, "Yes, you know, Italian." And it was kind of poor and rundown, and I said, "Okay, an Italian colony, now the German colony."

• 1:31:36AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:31:36Speaker 03

  "Okay, all right." So we get to the German colony, and it's quiet. There's a gate, and it's open, right?

• 1:31:42AJ Gentile?

  What does it look like? Does it look like German architecture?

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 1:31:45AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  We cross over a little bridge. A little tiny, like, pointless kind of looking bridge. There's a gate that's wide open. We drive to this, like, gravel parking lot. But there's nothing in, there's no cars parked there. We're the only ones. And there's a building there that seems to be like a, maybe a, um, a guardhouse, maybe, or something like that. It's, it's a large enough building. It could be for meetings or something, or maybe for dealing with the press. I mean, I don't know. It's just a building. Uh, no sign on it that I could see. I walk up to the building and I hear voices on the other side of the building. And it seems like they're talking on a radio.

• 1:32:21AJ Gentile?

  Can you, do you hear the language or speed?

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  It's, it's German.

• 1:32:24AJ Gentile?

  It's German?

• 1:32:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. So I said, okay. Uh, I took a bunch of pictures. I got into the car and I said, okay, let's go. I just wanted to take pictures. I said, let's, let's get out of here.

• 1:32:33AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  He says, okay with me?

• 1:32:35AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:32:35Speaker 03

  And as we're pulling out, that's when the Mercedes, the mysterious Mercedes pulls out, the gates close, Mercedes blocks our way of getting out. And two really big guys get out of the Mercedes.

• 1:32:45AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 1:32:46Speaker 03

  And they stand on either side of the car, just looking, not saying, not speaking.

• 1:32:49AJ Gentile?

  Big blond guys.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52AJ Gentile?

  Big, big.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  Heavyset wrestler types.

• 1:32:55AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  On either side of the car. And I'm looking at each, and my driver, all he can say is, uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, over and over again. I wanted him to stop saying that.

• 1:33:06AJ Gentile?

  Please stop saying it.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  But he was, he was pretty frightened at what was happening. This isn't good, right?

• 1:33:11AJ Gentile?

  Were you?

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  The funny thing is, a kind of switch went off in my head that said, keep your cool, we gotta get out of this.

• 1:33:19AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  Do not freak out, right? It was a kind of, something took over that said, just wrestle it out, right?

• 1:33:27AJ Gentile?

  Man, you're no armchair researcher, man.

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  I left the armchair now.

• 1:33:31AJ Gentile?

  This is balls of steel. This is real, real stuff.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  Stupidity of steel.

• 1:33:36AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  And as I'm sitting there, I hear someone's running at the car and I'm thinking, and it's somebody who's out of breath and he's wearing a lab coat.

• 1:33:45AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:33:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lab coat, that's all I needed to see, you know? So is it safe? So I don't, you know, I'm flashing on movies.

• 1:33:54AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  Marathon Man.

• 1:33:55AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  So, here's a guy in a lab coat. And he knocks on the window, tells me to roll down the window, which I had rolled up. So I roll down the window. Yes? And he looks at me and he says the classic line that I've waited my entire life to hear since Casablanca. Your papers, please.

• 1:34:13AJ Gentile?

  No!

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  Exactly, those words in that tone. Your papers, please. How wonderful was that moment, you know?

• 1:34:23AJ Gentile?

  Fear and joy, fighting.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  Fighting. So, he's looking like, "You better hand me your passport, or we're gonna get it." So I took out my passport and handed it to him. And he walked away with it. Right, which is a sinking feeling for any person.

• 1:34:37AJ Gentile?

  Sure, like, wha, wha, wha?

• 1:34:39Speaker 03

  What, yeah. That's happened to me a number of times since, but not as bad as this. So this was, you know, when am I getting it back? No one's talking. And then, who shows up but Paul Schaefer himself? The leader. The leader stands behind the car like he doesn't want to be seen. But he's wearing a Sam Brown belt. He has the military jacket on, the whole uniform. And he's got like a fatigue campaign cap on his head. And he's, you know, hands on the hips like this, you know? And he's barking questions in German to this person who's then translating it into English. Because I refuse to speak Spanish under these circumstances. My Spanish being not good enough to negotiate for my life.

• 1:35:22AJ Gentile?

  Fair enough.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  I make a grammatical error. I could be doomed, right?

• 1:35:26AJ Gentile?

  But at that point, you could probably hear a little, pick up a little German.

• 1:35:29Speaker 03

  I could pick up the German as well.

• 1:35:30AJ Gentile?

  So you're catching words.

• 1:35:31Speaker 03

  Oh, of course, right. Not enough that I could speak. So I'm listening to that go on. And so they're translating for me. "Why are you here?" Right? "I'm here researching German immigration to South America." That got a huge laugh out of Schaefer. Right? Yeah, bullshit, basically, he's saying.

• 1:35:47AJ Gentile?

  Of course!

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  And he's, yep, yeah, okay, that's not it. Okay, next question. When did you arrive here? Right? Kind of give them basically when I got here. At the same time, they're talking to me, they're talking to the driver. They're asking him more pointed questions. How many of them are there? When did they arrive? Where are they living?

• 1:36:06AJ Gentile?

  Did they pull you out of the car separate?

• 1:36:07Speaker 03

  No, we're still in the car.

• 1:36:08AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:36:09Speaker 03

  I still feel safe. I'm still in the car. I don't have a passport.

• 1:36:12AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  And I can't get out, but I'm still safer. So, they're asking him these very pointed questions. And finally, in Spanish, and I can understand perfectly what they're asking him. And then they ask him, they say this one thing. We have to be careful of the Jews. There's a lot of Jews these days, they're around, and we have to be very careful.

• 1:36:29AJ Gentile?

  What an odd thing to say, no?

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  It was odd, until just a couple of years ago, I found out what that meant. I only found out recently, what that really meant. But at the time, I thought, they must think I'm some kind of an Israeli commando.

• 1:36:42AJ Gentile?

  Do you want to tell us what that?

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  This was an Israeli commando.

• 1:36:45AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  If you can see me, no, this is not what an Israeli commando looks like. And I was in my twenties at the time, you can imagine. Hundred and twenty pounds, no, not a commando.

• 1:36:53AJ Gentile?

  But are they also worried about Mossad, Nazi hunters, all of that?

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  All of that.

• 1:36:58AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  Of course, yeah. Nazi hunters for sure, as I found out later. But again, later, at this time, I'm going on Latazlo Sfarago's book, that's all I got.

• 1:37:06AJ Gentile?

  That's all you got.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  Right? So, the rest of it, I don't know. So, I'm there, and they're talking back and forth to me, back and forth. They come back and they hand me the passport, thank God. But they tell me a very strange thing. They say to me, you're no longer welcome in this country. You must leave immediately, go back to the United States, and do not come back again. People who are Germans in Chile, telling me I'm not welcome in Chile. Not welcome here, at Colonia Dignidad, no problem, I won't be back. But telling me, no, we don't want you in Chile.

• 1:37:40AJ Gentile?

  But you don't say, you don't have jurisdiction.

• 1:37:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, I'm gonna say that. You don't have jurisdiction, right?

• 1:37:45AJ Gentile?

  You say, okay.

• 1:37:46Speaker 03

  Okay. No worries. Remember, I have the driver as well. They pull me out and kill me, he's a dead, dead gunner.

• 1:37:52AJ Gentile?

  For sure.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  He's the witness.

• 1:37:54AJ Gentile?

  For sure.

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  That's not gonna happen, right? We cannot fight with these guys. So, all right, the car pulls away, the gate opens. We hit the road. My driver starts laughing uncontrollably. He says, "Oh, my God, you don't know what danger we were in. We got out of there. You are so lucky." He says, "This could have turned out so..." He's just like laughing the whole way down. He can't believe the relief was incredible. Incredible. He gets back into Paral, into the town. He wants to tell everybody what happened. And I pay him like, I forget how much money. He must have made a hundred dollars that day. And then two more-

• 1:38:28AJ Gentile?

  Are you relieved as well? You just wanted your passport back.

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  I wanted my passport back. I'm OK.

• 1:38:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:38:33Speaker 03

  I don't know if I'm getting out of the country, quite frankly.

• 1:38:36AJ Gentile?

  Still?

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know what's going on here with these guys. How can they tell me I'm not welcome? What influence do they have over the Border Patrol?

• 1:38:43AJ Gentile?

  But you felt they had it.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  I felt they had it because what happens next? Two more carabiner, he walk up to me, two more cops. And they say, "Are you the guy that..."

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  And I said, "Yeah." "Is your name Peter Levenda?" "Oh, shit. How do you have my name?"

• 1:39:00AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  Right? "Can we see your passport?" I show them the passport. They look at each other. "OK. Are you going back now to Santiago?" "You bet your sweet ass I am." So, OK, I waited for the bus as usual, because I'm a New Yorker. I take the bus. I got on the bus and I'm going back to Santiago. And halfway up, like, not halfway, twice on the way up, so I guess every third of the way up, the bus is stopped. That didn't happen on the way down. And troops come onto the bus, asking for me by name.

• 1:39:29AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  To make sure I'm on the bus. That freaked me out.

• 1:39:32AJ Gentile?

  That did.

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. That means, yes, they have that clout. They could tell-

• 1:39:38AJ Gentile?

  They made the call.

• 1:39:38Speaker 03

  -the Chilean military and the Chilean army, right? "Look out for this guy. Make sure he leaves the country."

• 1:39:43AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  So I get back to Santiago. I get back to my room in the hotel there. I open the door and there's a note. "Your reservation is confirmed."

• 1:39:55AJ Gentile?

  You're going.

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  So they got me, they got Lanchile to make sure. They controlled that as well.

• 1:40:00AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  Right? So I was on, I was on the flight. So I get on the plane and I'm still, I'm cool as a cucumber. I'm sitting next to two people, a married couple, who actually worked for Flying Tigers in Asia. You believe it. It was a shipping company, but it started as, you know, this ad hoc sort of civilian military air force that was bombing the Japanese back in the day during World War II. And they became then part of the regular air force, kind of, and then they became, you know, a shipping company, basically.

• 1:40:32AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, there was like a Shanghai check thing, wasn't it?

• 1:40:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're sitting next to me in the plane. That's weird. And as I'm sitting there, suddenly I start to feel ill. I get up and I go into the, to the restroom in the back of the plane. And I am sick as a dog for almost the entire flight back. The tension finally hit.

• 1:40:50AJ Gentile?

  Finally.

• 1:40:51Speaker 03

  The adrenaline hit on the plane out of the country. It kept me sane and sober and perfectly measured until I got on the plane. And then I was freaking out.

• 1:41:00AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  So I finally got myself together just before landing. That's a long flight from Santiago to, and actually it was only to Santiago to Miami. I wasn't supposed to go to Miami. I was supposed to go to New York, but it was the first plane they had that could get me on, get out of the country. So I get off the plane in Miami and I'm sick as a dog. I'm walking through immigration and then it starts again. Then two guys meet me at the airport at immigration. Two of our people.

• 1:41:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  They flash some badges too fast for me to see what it is. And they say, are you Peter Levenda? Can we see your passport? And I showed it to them. They looked at each other. They nodded like the Chileans did and they walked away, no explanation. My people, right? People were supposed to protect me.

• 1:41:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:41:41Speaker 03

  Were making sure I was getting off the plane. They didn't somehow get off somehow, somewhere else.

• 1:41:46AJ Gentile?

  All being controlled by some remote German village.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Imagine that.

• 1:41:52AJ Gentile?

  Having our...

• 1:41:52Speaker 03

  When people ask me, and they did ask me in the Patreon, they asked me, you know, "What do you think? Does this still go on?"

• 1:41:58AJ Gentile?

  Are you kidding?

• 1:41:59Speaker 03

  So then, okay, now I'm still shaking, right? I get past immigration, I get a booking to go to New York, and there's the Miami Herald, and I open it up, and there's the headlines. "West German Parliament Vows or Votes to Continue Statute of Limitations on Nazi War Crimes." In other words, they were voting in the German Parliament that week-

• 1:42:22AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Whether or not they would continue to hunt Nazis.

• 1:42:26AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  And they voted to continue to hunt Nazis. And they thought, at Colonia Dignidad, I was there as an Asian provocateur or something to try to make them do something stupid-

• 1:42:35AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  To switch the vote, to make sure I influenced the vote. That's their thinking, their rationale. So I said, "Oh, my God, this is what happened."

• 1:42:42AJ Gentile?

  This was a terrible idea.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  Yes. And then I get back to New York, right? I'm fine, I get back to Bendix, right? "Oh, where did you go?" "Uh, Chile." "For what? Not to hang out." I didn't tell them what I was doing. So that's fine. And then, what happens? Jack Anderson, if anybody remembers Jack Anderson, he was a famous journalist. At the time, an investigative journalist, he was in all the newspapers and stuff. He had columns everywhere. Very famous guy in the 70s and 80s. He had stories on Colonia Dignidad. He was running stories on it after I got back. I said, "Thanks a lot, Jack."

• 1:43:16AJ Gentile?

  After you got back?

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, not about me at all, just about that Colonia Dignidad was being investigated, the CIA knew about it, were there Nazi war criminals there?

• 1:43:26AJ Gentile?

  And that was all happening while you were there?

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29AJ Gentile?

  Just wandering, so of course...

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  Of course, there's synchronicity, right?

• 1:43:33AJ Gentile?

  Yes, of course.

• 1:43:34Speaker 03

  Of course, these things happen, right? So I'm thinking, "Okay, my goose is cooked. Now they think I was responsible back at the colony."

• 1:43:39AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  My friends down at the colony, back at the ranch, they think, you know, that I did something here. So now, I'm freaking out, right? And I did have problems. So now I'm on the street. I'm in Queens, I'm going to Astoria. I'm gonna eat Greek food in Astoria. That's what you do in Astoria.

• 1:43:56AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  I went to Astoria to have some Greek food. And I'm walking down the street.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  And this guy walks up to me. He's wearing a white suit. And he has a red carnation in his lapel. And he walks up to me and he says, "Don't worry, you're among friends."

• 1:44:17AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 1:44:17Speaker 03

  And then he walked off.

• 1:44:18AJ Gentile?

  I don't want any part of whatever that is. What are you talking about?

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:44:23AJ Gentile?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  Now I'm going to Brooklyn. I'm going to Brooklyn just because I used to live in Brooklyn Heights. I'm going down to Brooklyn. And a taxi with four big guys in it starts following me down the street, calling me Juden. Right? They're talking to me in German, calling you're blah, blah, blah, so-and-so Jew. On and on and on, going on about this, right? And they're following me and I have to, I don't know what to do. They're getting ready to get out of the car and beat the shit out of me. So I have to get, I have to find, go down a one-way street that they can't drive down and try to lose them. You know? So all of this is taking place. This is all in 1979. This is all so weird. This is all like, you know, part of the same problem that's going on. So that went on for a while.

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  And then that same, I think, just a month or so after I got back from Chile, Bendix no longer needed my services.

• 1:45:13AJ Gentile?

  Of course not. That's that.

• 1:45:15Speaker 03

  That's that. So all of this was, you know, all tied in, all connected together, I imagine. But that was what was going on. So that was my adventure down there in Colonia Dignidad in South America. But that led me to, to really energize me on the research. This was too much. I couldn't let, I couldn't walk away from it. And I couldn't say, "Well, that's it. This is too dangerous. I'm not going to do this." This was like, if you're an investigator, if you investigate, you know, you're a journalist of any kind, you need this, right?

• 1:45:45AJ Gentile?

  You do.

• 1:45:46Speaker 03

  You have to have.

• 1:45:46AJ Gentile?

  You needed, you needed that, you needed that experience.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  You need, you need the experience and you need to keep going.

• 1:45:51AJ Gentile?

  I'm the armchair researcher, though. I don't have the balls to go down there.

• 1:45:54Speaker 03

  These days, armchair can be just as dangerous.

• 1:45:57AJ Gentile?

  Well, this is a great time to take a quick break because we would come back and then now it gets thick. Now it gets thick.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  Now it gets thick, okay.

• 1:46:04AJ Gentile?

  Back in a minute. I didn't realize how amazing that story is.

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  The problem is when you start with one, there's so many tentacles that reach into other aspects of everything that, you know, that's the problem. You just can't tell the straight story. I have a problem doing that and I know that I can go on, so I've tried to like narrow down to the essentials. But sometimes there's an aspect that connects to something that we've talked about already that's, you know, pertinent and is relevant and, you know, what can I do? That's, you know.

• 1:46:30Speaker 00

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• 1:47:01Speaker 03

  I tell people, I use this expression all the time. I say, "A Forrest gumped my way into this." Right? I wasn't intending to join a church that was, you know, a front for an intelligence operation. I mean, to begin with, right? I just wanted to get out of going to Vietnam, right?

• 1:47:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  Had this been 1942, I would have enlisted, you know? It's just, it's, it's what happened, right? So there was no intention to wind up where I wound up. I look back now and I took, there was a fork in the road at that point.

• 1:47:31AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  You know, and that's what happened. And then people think, "Well, you must have this, you must have these connections or those connections." Nah, you just pay attention. You just show up. You know, 90% of success, right? Is just showing up.

• 1:47:43AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  So what you have to do is show up. A New Yorker said that. So what you have to do is just be there, you know? Be there, be aware, keep your eyes open, and when you see opportunities, you take them if you can. You know, if you can't, you file it away for next time and you'll be more aware. But...

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  I think that a lot of people essentially go through life either afraid to take those chances, or smarter than I am and don't take the chances, or whatever, but

• 1:48:12AJ Gentile?

  Or don't recognize the opportunity.

• 1:48:13Speaker 03

  Don't recognize the opportunity, right. And they don't have, it's a question of imagination. That was my thing. As a kid, I was really an imaginative kid. So I lived in my head a lot. I read a lot of books. I imitated the writing of people that I liked and that kind of thing. So I was like in that mindset all the time. So it made me sensitive to certain things maybe other people weren't sensitive to.

• 1:48:37AJ Gentile?

  Well, this is a storytelling show, so whatever detail, color you want to add, that's fine. So is the Chile experience what led to Unholy Alliance?

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  Yes. See, basically, the Chile thing was supposed to be a chapter of sinister forces. I was just going to do one chapter on the Nazis. That was my idea initially. But I came across all that data at the archives, the National Archives, the stacks of paper on the Tibet expedition and all this other weird stuff the Nazis were doing. And then, you know, Colonia Dignidad, all of this, it became a book, basically. I didn't know what else to do with that information. I was gathering it together and around about 19, in the 1990s was when Unholy Alliance finally became a book. That was my first book. It took that long. When I made the trip in 1979, it took that long to find somebody who was interested in that story.

• 1:49:28AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:49:29Speaker 03

  And I said, "It's Nazi occultism, you know, but it has ramifications beyond that, right? It has political ramifications." People tend to think Nazi occultism is this kooky, you know, side alley of history. And most historians think of it that way, too. A lot of the feedback I still get from academia where this is concerned is, "Yeah, it's not that important. It's not really, you know, essential to understanding it. You're overblowing it. It's not..." I'm just quoting what I saw.

• 1:49:56AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I disagree. I think it's very important.

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  I kind of think so because it speaks to something darker about it.

• 1:50:03AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it does. Something that's still here.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  Right. It's not only a story about battles won and lost, right? Why did they go to war in the first place? Why did the Holocaust happen? Why did they invade Russia? That didn't make any sense, right?

• 1:50:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:50:15Speaker 03

  Why did they do half the things they did? Why did they send SS officers all around the world looking to see if there were swastikas painted on old pots, you know, in the jungles of South America, or the jungles of Asia, or someplace? Why were they doing this? What was the, what was the end game here? What was really what they were trying to establish? They were trying to establish a, a complete ecosystem for Nazism, right? To rewrite history completely, from a Nazi racist eugenicist point of view. That's what they were trying to do. And if we look at it only in terms of the battles that they fought, we won't understand them.

• 1:50:49AJ Gentile?

  No, the Reich meant the whole thing.

• 1:50:51Speaker 03

  The whole thing.

• 1:50:52AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  And that's why I always tell people, the Nazi party was not a political party the way you think of it. It was a cult. It was a complete cult. If you study Nazism, you are studying a cult. That's, that's it. So Nazi occultism is almost, you know, a tautology. I mean, we are talking about Nazism and occultism, but it was kind of the same thing for a while. Under Himmler, of course, it was. But Hitler as well? He didn't, I always fight with people who've claimed that Hitler performed magical rites or something. No, I don't think that at all. But he was very well aware of all of that material. As a poor impoverished painter in Vienna, he made a lot of very strange friends.

• 1:51:32AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  And he lost, he read a lot of strange literature.

• 1:51:35AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  Which helped fuel this idea of a master race. Fuel the idea that, that Europe should be for one race only. Fuel the idea that there was pure Germans and not pure Germans. All of this, he was reading in the occult magazines of the day, the fate magazines of their time. He was picking all of this up at the time.

• 1:51:51AJ Gentile?

  But do you think Himmler was driving it?

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  Oh, Himmler was off to the races where this was concerned. He was totally sold on it. Remember, Himmler was one of the earliest followers of Hitler.

• 1:52:01AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:52:01Speaker 03

  As well was Rudolf Hess.

• 1:52:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  Rudolf Hess was very much into the occult as well. I mean, he picked an occult auspicious day for his flight to England, right? He was very much into, he claimed he was in telepathic communication with his wife after he was arrested and thrown into Spandau Prison. So he claimed he was in telepathic communication all the time. They talked occultism all the time. So Hess, Himmler, and then the other people around him in that circle, including some of the people who got him involved with Japan, right? These were people who said, "Don't get involved with China. They're like the mongrel race of Asia. You know, the Japanese are the elite. You want to be allied with the Japanese." A major political decision was made on some guy that had visited Japan, right, and was

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  studying Japanese and thought that this was, you know, a good thing to do. I mean, and he died in the camps. He was eventually, they got rid of him and his son because they were thinking about maybe joining a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler at the end. That didn't work out. But the Nazi Party itself, where did it come from, right? The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was invented almost out of whole cloth in the basement of a hotel in Munich in the Four Seasons. And in the same hotel, it's the Thule Gazelle Schacht, had meetings in the same rooms. The Thule Gazelle Schacht was a blatantly occult organization.

• 1:53:19AJ Gentile?

  We know it as a Thule Society?

• 1:53:21Speaker 03

  Thule Society, right. Gazelle Schacht Society, same thing. The Thule Society. Their symbol was the swastika, right? That's where that came from. But it has earlier antecedents, right? So the swastika, not only as around the world, it's a symbol from around the world, but the Theosophical Society embraced it. When the American Theosophical Society was founded in New York City, it was called the Aryan Theosophical Society, and they had the swastika. And these were the Blavatsky followers.

• 1:53:51AJ Gentile?

  And when was that?

• 1:53:52Speaker 03

  Around the same time as Blavatsky had started the, what we know as a Theosophical Society, which also started in New York City.

• 1:53:59AJ Gentile?

  Did Hitler and his crew base this ideology on Blavatsky's?

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  No. Well, not Hitler, no. What happened?

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  For those of you interested in this part of ancient history, what happened was that the swastika was seen by the German racial theorists of the turn of the century. So we're talking 1890s, 1900s, 1910s. They saw that as the symbol of the Aryan race. And they got some of that from Blavatsky. Because Blavatsky talked about Aryan race in terms of root races and what races were coming into power, which races were leaving it. She had some kind of dark things to say about Jews. She insisted that the Afghans were the real Jews in one book.

• 1:54:40AJ Gentile?

  I discount her importance in history, I think.

• 1:54:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:44AJ Gentile?

  I think I do.

• 1:54:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that...

• 1:54:48AJ Gentile?

  Because when I read it, it's like, who would believe it? This sounds wacky, theosophy is wacky.

• 1:54:54Speaker 03

  But at the time, it was a response to Darwin. Right? The religions were being shaken by this idea of the origin of species and the possibility of evolution. The religions were the ones to get the brunt of that.

• 1:55:08AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:55:08Speaker 03

  Because science was saying, no, it was not Adam and Eve. Right? It came from this long line of monkeys, right? And then branches branched off and you had monkeys on the one side and the humans on the other. That didn't sit well with the Genesis people.

• 1:55:21AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  So that was a problem. So you had Blavatsky come along and spiritualize Darwinism and say, we can look at it as spiritual evolution. And that kind of made everybody sit back and think, oh, maybe we can work with this. Right? But then that worked for everybody. So you had the Germans, the Austrians and people in the northern regions thinking to themselves, yeah, well, you know, we had religions before, we had symbols, we had runes, we had all of this stuff. You know, we had our own race, we had our own religion, we had our own... So there was this idea that maybe, yeah, we could go along with this theosophical thing. Maybe this is, they're talking to us right now. You know, this ancient racial knowledge, ancient racial mysticism theory.

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  So that was very much, I think, part of it when World War I was coming to an end.

• 1:56:13Speaker 03

  And the communists were in danger of taking over Germany, which we forget was going on in 1918.

• 1:56:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:56:18Speaker 03

  Uh, Germany was falling apart. They had lost the war. Their troops were coming back from Russia, saying, "Yeah, we want a workers' revolution," right? So you had this, you had, the navy was turning red. Different cities were turning red. All this was happening. And suddenly, out of nowhere, in Munich, comes the, the Stahlhelm, the, the Freikorps brigades, these sort of militias. And one of these militias had the swastika symbol as their symbol as they marched into Munich.

• 1:56:45AJ Gentile?

  Just one unit?

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  One unit, one big unit, but one very violent, brutal unit. But the swastika was their symbol. And the Tullergesellschaft had the swastika as their symbol. In 1919, there was a massacre of people who worked at the Tuller offices. I think it was seven people who were massacred on April 30th, 1919. Valpergus Nacht, which is a very famous holiday in Europe. It's their Halloween, basically. So there was a massacre that took place. These people were killed, and there was an ad in the newspaper that the, the Thule's put out commemorating this massacre. They said, "These people were just killed." One of them was a, was a von Turnen Toxis, which is one of the, the noble-blood Prussian types, was killed, also a part of this. So you had all these people who were killed.

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  And that sparked an outrage in Munich. So suddenly, you had red units fighting, uh, the, the German, you know, the, the... What color we call them if they're not reds?

• 1:57:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:57:41Speaker 03

  The, uh, yeah. The Reds fighting the, the fascists. So you had this, the Stahlhelm brigades, the Freikorps brigades. Now they're fighting, and they're using the swastika as their symbol. Maybe in commemoration of the Thule's who were killed, because that was their symbol, right?

• 1:57:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:57:55Speaker 03

  We don't really know the, the chain of events.

• 1:57:56AJ Gentile?

  Could be, yeah.

• 1:57:57Speaker 03

  It could be that. But they came in with that, with the swastika, with a song about the swastika. They even meant, had a song made up that they would sing as they were marching. So that was 1919 already. Long before Hitler came to power, long before there was the Nazi Party as we understand it. So Hitler, who had been in the trenches in World War I, had written poetry.

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  To the Nordic gods, to Thor and Odin.

• 1:58:22AJ Gentile?

  That's right, Thor and Odin.

• 1:58:24Speaker 03

  So he was already on that wavelength.

• 1:58:26AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  And those poems have been reproduced, I think, in the famous, one of the, one of the big histories of.

• 1:58:31AJ Gentile?

  One of his biographies.

• 1:58:32Speaker 03

  One of the biographies, yeah. Tolan, Tolan's history. So he's, it's in there, you can read the poetry yourself, so it's there. So he was already on that wavelength. He was already talking about, you know, and he was, what was he a fan of? Wagner, right?

• 1:58:45AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  He was a total Wagnerian. He would stand SRO in the back of the halls where they were doing, you know, Tonhoiser, and stand there for like four hours, it would hover along that thing takes. And he was just totally into it. So you got Wagner, which has a mystical element writ large, but it's mystical Nordic paganism.

• 1:59:03AJ Gentile?

  Well, how do you think Hitler got attracted to that? Where did that leak in from? Because that wasn't a movement, no?

• 1:59:11Speaker 03

  Not particularly, no. I mean Wagner, of course, was.

• 1:59:13AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  But I think he got into all, I think it was, it was an emotional thing. He had, he had watched his mother die of cancer, I think on Christmas, on Christmas Eve. And the doctor who was treating her was Jewish, as it turned out. So there's something going on in the background there. I don't know all the, all the details, but having your mother die on Christmas Eve is kind of Wagnerian.

• 1:59:37AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:59:38Speaker 03

  You know? So, it could be something to do with that. So, anyway, he is sent to investigate the German Workers' Party by a group within the military that's trying to salvage whatever they can of the German government before it collapses entirely and becomes communist. So he is sent there as a spy, basically. Go and check these people out and see what they're up to. And he was looking at them and thinking, uh, you know, he went back and said, they need a little help. I think I can help them. And he went back and said, we're going to change the name of this organization. German Workers' Party sounds too red, too communist, you know, you guys are toolists, basically. You're in the same freaking building and the same room as theirs.

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  We're going to change this, we're going to make it the National Socialist German Workers' Party. And they said, National Socialist? That sounds a little red too, doesn't it? And he says, but it's National Socialist.

• 2:00:31AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:00:31Speaker 03

  We're not internationalists like those other guys. We don't care about other countries, we only care about National Socialism. He joins that and he changes it entirely and he adopts the swastika though as their symbol. He takes from the Tula society and puts it there. So there was a guy called Sabatendorf, Baron von Sabatendorf. He had founded, or one of the co-founders of the Tula society. When Hitler came and took it over, Sabatendorf says, "Yeah, maybe I'm out of here." So he goes back to Turkey, where he's appreciated for what he is. And he had been an occultist and astrologer and all this kind of stuff. He had been doing all of this. He had basically given the Tula society all of its mystical fascinations, right?

• 2:01:12Speaker 03

  He goes to Turkey, he comes back from Turkey and he writes a book before Hitler came. He's gonna reveal what happened, how Hitler took over the party, what the party was like before, what Tula Gazelschaft was, the Tula society was, all of this stuff. And it's banned, right? They throw him in jail, right? They're gonna kill him. I think he escapes, if I'm not mistaken, goes back to Turkey. But his books were unavailable, you couldn't get it. Because that was, especially after the Night of the Long Nives, when Hitler really took over power.

• 2:01:40AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:01:41Speaker 03

  All of that stuff was out, right? People who knew him from before, killed or they disappeared. Anybody who was part of that scene. So we have reason to believe that Hitler maybe was more involved in occult thinking than he was, but all the witnesses are dead. So, we don't know, right? Yeah, I don't think he was, I don't think he had patience with occult societies, per se. Because he didn't have patience with the, with the, with the German Workers' Party either. I mean, he didn't have patience with sloppy organization and stuff. And that's pretty much the hallmark of most occult societies, is a lot of sloppy organization. So I think he thought to himself, "No, we can't, we can't have this." And he would definitely was not gonna join any society that he was not the president of.

• 2:02:21AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:02:22Speaker 03

  So it's, it, none of it made, made sense after that point. The generals knew, right? And generals, that some generals tried to kill him.

• 2:02:29AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:30Speaker 03

  And you know, it didn't work. That didn't make sense either, right?

• 2:02:34Speaker 03

  They were all there in the room. They had the bomb. Hitler escapes.

• 2:02:37AJ Gentile?

  Behind the table or something.

• 2:02:39Speaker 03

  Behind the table, right. So, this is the problem. This is the problem that I see. It's not just what we can see and prove. There's something else that's going on. Something else underneath the, the, the, the surface of all of this. That's making sure these things happen.

• 2:02:53AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna say Hitler was inevitable.

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:55AJ Gentile?

  Because of whatever it is under there. And I think that could be part of our fascination is it's a way to tap into that darkness. Just to try to understand it.

• 2:03:03Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:03:04AJ Gentile?

  Cause I'm drawn to those stories.

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:03:07AJ Gentile?

  Even though you despise the man and everything he stands for, but oh, he's digging for Spear of Destiny, Holy Grail, Ark of the Covenant.

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17AJ Gentile?

  That's interesting stuff.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  Sure it is. Fascinating. It's, and it's, it's somebody who has the money, the means and the resources to say, and the will to say, "We're gonna go and find the Holy Grail," right? Send poor Adurán out there to find the Holy Grail, you know?

• 2:03:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  Let him do it. He can do it. He's written stuff like that. You know, so I mean, it's, that's, that's, yeah. And we're looking for that. We're looking for somebody to say, "Let's go find the Holy Grail." You know, and we don't have that yet. We don't have a person that has that division that can excite people to that extent. To the better angels of their nature, right? We're looking for somebody to do that, and to do it with class.

• 2:03:53AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  To do it with, with, with elan. To do it with style. To do it in a Hugo Boss outfit.

• 2:03:57AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:03:58Speaker 03

  To do that. We're looking for that. We, we're, we're kinda conflating it with masculinity, I think, to a certain extent. We think it's masculine to be that, that rigid, to be that Nazi.

• 2:04:07AJ Gentile?

  I think so. Stoic.

• 2:04:09Speaker 03

  Stoic?

• 2:04:09AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:04:10Speaker 03

  Uh, courageous.

• 2:04:11AJ Gentile?

  Courageous, in control, organized.

• 2:04:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, we, we associate that with Nazism, right? And, or we associate Nazism with that. You can be that and not be a Nazi, but people, Nazi is the most easily accessible image of that we have.

• 2:04:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:04:26Speaker 03

  Of that, right? And we've, and it's our fault that it is, because we keep portraying them that way. There are a lot of cowardly Nazis out there.

• 2:04:35AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:04:36Speaker 03

  They were drug addicted, they were psychopathic, they were horrible human beings that put on the uniform and had the badges, but they didn't strut like, you know, Werner Klemperer, you know? I mean, they were not, you know, Hogan's Heroes. I mean, they were a comic opera Nazis, there were a lot of them.

• 2:04:52AJ Gentile?

  Of course. And we need to stop calling each other Nazis.

• 2:04:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, well.

• 2:04:56AJ Gentile?

  That's not.

• 2:04:57Speaker 03

  Unless you really are.

• 2:04:58AJ Gentile?

  Unless you really are.

• 2:05:00Speaker 03

  But we need to draw a distinction as to what means Nazi.

• 2:05:02AJ Gentile?

  We do.

• 2:05:03Speaker 03

  We do. So that's, yeah.

• 2:05:05AJ Gentile?

  1947, Kenneth Arnold sees some weird stuff, draws the little delta wings. And then, I think it's a couple of months later, Tacoma, Seattle area, Moray Island, there's a UFO incident. Do you want to tell this? I've covered this at length. You want to tell the story? You tell it great.

• 2:05:27Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I'll try to make it brief because I know there's a lot more we could do with it.

• 2:05:32AJ Gentile?

  Don't, you don't have to.

• 2:05:33Speaker 03

  Ah, you know.

• 2:05:33AJ Gentile?

  You don't have to. And I'll just add color like John Madden.

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, yeah. Well, the Kenneth Arnold sighting was June, I think, right?

• 2:05:43AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:05:44Speaker 03

  Roswell was in July.

• 2:05:45AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:05:46Speaker 03

  So it was in between that period, kind of, it was really close to Kenneth Arnold's sighting, where a guy called Harold Dahl, D-A-H-L, he's in a little boat out in Puget Sound. He's got his dog there and his son. And they're in the boat, I forget for whatever reason, but they're just sailing around.

• 2:06:04AJ Gentile?

  They're scavenging logs.

• 2:06:06Speaker 03

  Scavenging logs. There we go.

• 2:06:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:06:09Speaker 03

  Log scavengers, which is a thing. So they're out there scavenging logs. And in the middle of their scavenging, what happens is something flies over them, a bunch of things fly over them, but one of these things that are flying over them is in distress of some kind, and it rains down a kind of shrapnel or slag onto the boat, killing the dog.

• 2:06:33Speaker 03

  And wounding his son, in some case. Harold Doll freaks out, sails back to port, and he goes to the port master, I guess, at that time, who's a guy called Fred Crisman. And he says, Fred, they killed my dog. It's the first ever UFO fatality.

• 2:06:51AJ Gentile?

  I don't mean to laugh.

• 2:06:52Speaker 03

  No. And, by the way, also, my son got damaged, but the main thing is the dog. So, and Crisman says, what happened? And he shows him the slag, whatever that was that fell. And Crisman is saying, you saw what? What did you see? Well, you know, you heard this thing about Kenneth Arnold? There were these things flying around? Was it like, maybe like that? And Doll is saying, well, yeah, kinda like that. It was like a squadron of them or something, and they flew over. But one of them was like, was raining this stuff on top of us. So, one thing led to another, between Crisman and Doll. And they start calling people. And, uh, this is a long story, but to make it manageable, they eventually call the, the Air Force, right? This is 1947.

• 2:07:37Speaker 03

  The Air Force is in the middle of a transition. They're gonna become a separate entity, but right now, they're Army Air Force. And there's an Air Force base near, near Tacoma, and, you know, they're gonna send some guys down to look it out, there was something going on, so, let's look it out, let's check it out. At the same time, though, Crisman decides to contract, to contact a friend of his, Schaefer, who writes these Weird Tales magazines, he's an editor of these magazines that does these strange stories.

• 2:08:02AJ Gentile?

  Amazing stories or something like that, yeah.

• 2:08:04Speaker 03

  Amazing stories, something like that. And tells him the story, says, you know, we could do a story about this. We can like, make like, a weird story and, and write about it. And like, Schaefer says, yeah, it sounds good, right? Write about it, let's, let's write it up and do this. So, we're in this area, era, where it's kind of fact and fiction already is, is together. There's something factual that happened, but now they're creating stories about it to sell magazines, you know? At the same time, he's contacting, um, Kenneth Arnold, saying, Ken, can you come and talk to us? We're gonna get some guys from the Air Force, we're gonna get together and talk about what you saw, and what happened to us, you know, in Puget Sound. And Arnold is like, I don't know. You know, he was kind of hesitant about it, but they eventually managed to convince him to go.

• 2:08:47AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:08:48Speaker 03

  So, he shows up.

• 2:08:51Speaker 03

  But there's no reservation form at the hotels.

• 2:08:55AJ Gentile?

  Everything's booked.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  Everything's booked. There's the convention or something in town. It's a small town anyway by today's standards. Everything is booked until he calls like the most expensive hotel in town and they already have a booking for him.

• 2:09:08AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they do.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  How do they have a booking? And he's amazed. I didn't make a booking. Nobody that I know made a booking, but there's a booking. So he gratefully accepts the booking and he's in this hotel. A very, like I say, a fancier hotel than what he was expecting. And they have a meeting in there. There's Fred Krizman, Raoul Doll, and these two Air Force guys and, you know, Kenneth Arnold.

• 2:09:30AJ Gentile?

  Did those Air Force guys come out of right, Patterson? Was that a Blue Book dispatch?

• 2:09:34Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't think, because they came right away. I think they must have been local.

• 2:09:37AJ Gentile?

  Close by? Okay.

• 2:09:38Speaker 03

  I think they were local.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  But they were Air Force intelligence.

• 2:09:41AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they were.

• 2:09:42Speaker 03

  For sure. So...

• 2:09:43AJ Gentile?

  And we know their names. That's all.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  We know their names. They were a FOCE or what would become a FOCE later on. So they show up and they, you know, listen politely to this whole discussion. And Kenneth Arnold's a famous guy now because of the saucer stuff, the Delta wingcraft that he saw. So they're all having a nice time together, talking about this. And then the, the Air Force guy says, listen, okay, can you give us the stuff that you collected? We'll take it back and have it analyzed. We'll take it back to base. And Krizman says, okay, you know, they get a cereal box. They couldn't think of anything better than a cereal box. And they put all this slag in the cereal box. Not all of it probably, but a box full. And at the last moment, they hand it over to the airline, to the Air Force guys. They put it on board their plane. They wave goodbye, see ya, get onto the plane, take off, and

• 2:10:29Speaker 03

  moments later, the plane explodes in midair. And these two, these two Air Force people are killed. I think the pilot makes it out alive.

• 2:10:38AJ Gentile?

  Did he?

• 2:10:39Speaker 03

  I think, I think somebody made it out alive.

• 2:10:41AJ Gentile?

  That was a B-25?

• 2:10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:43AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:10:44Speaker 03

  I think, I think he made it out, but they definitely did not. And the slag went with them.

• 2:10:48AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:10:49Speaker 03

  Wherever that went. So these are really, not the dog, but these are the first fatalities of the UFO era, I guess. So this is bad enough, right?

• 2:11:00Speaker 03

  But there was a reporter who was trying desperately to find out what they were talking about in that hotel room, and they were not talking to the reporter.

• 2:11:08AJ Gentile?

  I think it was Tom Morello.

• 2:11:10Speaker 03

  Yes, Tom Morello. And yet, old Tom, he did manage to find out what was happening.

• 2:11:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he did.

• 2:11:16Speaker 03

  He heard a transcript of what was happening in that hotel room.

• 2:11:19AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  They had that place mic'd in 1947, okay? They had that room set up.

• 2:11:25AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  Everything was all arranged. They went there. So, who was doing the taping? It wasn't the Air Force officers, most likely. They went down with the ship. So, who is doing that taping? Who is actually behind the mic? We don't know. Tom Morello can't tell us. He died.

• 2:11:42AJ Gentile?

  That's right. It's pretty soon after, yeah?

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  Pretty soon after. Died very mysteriously. So, he's gone. And that transcript, I guess, gone with him. So, what was going on? What was that all about? Now, that's not the end of the story.

• 2:11:58AJ Gentile?

  Oh, by no means.

• 2:11:59Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, it gets worse. Because at the same time this is happening, there's this rather portly dude called Bannister. W... I don't know what the W stands for. Walter, maybe? Guy Bannister. W. Guy Bannister.

• 2:12:15AJ Gentile?

  Rings a bell.

• 2:12:17Speaker 03

  He's an FBI agent.

• 2:12:18AJ Gentile?

  Out of Pacific Northwest.

• 2:12:20Speaker 03

  Out of Pacific Northwest. But he has a brief. He's been told directly by J. Edgar Hoover himself. There's all this weird UFO stuff going on. Flying saucers, Kenneth Arnold, all this stuff. I need you to go out there, keep tabs on all of this. Any UFO sighting? I want to hear about it. Any people who saw occupants, aliens? You tell me. You get back to me on this. And fortunately, what we do is we have the documentation. Because old Guy Bannister, he sent airtels. An airtel was the old-fashioned form of a telegram. I'm saying telegram to people who know what I'm talking about. But anyway, it's a way of sending a digital message to somebody. But it had to be printed on paper, eventually.

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  So Guy Bannister is out there and he's religiously, he's visiting people. He's like a Men in Black kind of guy. He's going where there's sightings. He's asking questions and then he's reporting back to Hoover directly.

• 2:13:15AJ Gentile?

  And just to jump in, that telegram, those are X files.

• 2:13:19Speaker 03

  Yes, they are.

• 2:13:20AJ Gentile?

  Those are designated as X.

• 2:13:22Speaker 03

  If you look at the originals, they're called X slash files.

• 2:13:25AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:13:26Speaker 03

  This was the origin. These are the real thing, the real X files. And they're all about UFOs. Definitely, it's consistent. So this stuff is going back, you know, to Hoover constantly. This is 1947. Guy Bannister is doing his thing. He's a respected FBI agent. I think he becomes SAC, Special Agent in Charge in Chicago.

• 2:13:43AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  And then eventually he retires from Chicago and he winds up in New Orleans.

• 2:13:48AJ Gentile?

  Interesting.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  And he opens up a detective agency. Okay? So it's the Guy Bannister Detective Agency in New Orleans. And Guy Bannister is a racist, son of a bitch, and very anti-communist, belongs to all the right-wing organizations, hates everybody. He's a guy you really have a hard time getting along with, based in New Orleans, involved with a lot of shady characters, including a guy called Jack Martin. Jack Martin was one of his so-called researchers. He worked for a guy out of that office. And another guy that was around at the time was a guy called David Ferry. David Ferry also did some research for Guy Bannister.

• 2:14:30Speaker 03

  David Ferry also involved in very strange, extreme-right organizations, anti-communist groups, stuff like that.

• 2:14:35AJ Gentile?

  As was Crispin.

• 2:14:36Speaker 03

  As was Crispin. Because why? Why do we even know about this? Well, because one of the other people that kind of hung out at Guy Bannister's location was a guy called Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, we all know Lee Harvey Oswald, Guy Bannister Detective Agency. He had stamped the address of his agency on his fair play for Cuba leaflets, which is how we know these people went together.

• 2:15:00AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:15:01Speaker 03

  Not only that, but Lee Oswald was in the CAP unit that was being run by David Ferry back in the day.

• 2:15:09AJ Gentile?

  And did we mention that address was the same building as Guy Bannister's?

• 2:15:12Speaker 03

  Same address, Guy Bannister's address.

• 2:15:13AJ Gentile?

  Just the other side of the street?

• 2:15:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:15:16AJ Gentile?

  Camp Street, I think it was.

• 2:15:17Speaker 03

  It's Camp Street. It's the same building.

• 2:15:19AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:15:19Speaker 03

  Depends what door you were. So there you go. All these people, right? You have David Ferry, you have Jack Martin, you have Guy Bannister, you have Lee Harvey Oswald, in one building. But wait, there's more. So, back in 1967 or so, is it 68? We have the district attorney in New Orleans. Right? Very famous guy. This district attorney decides, he says, you know, there's something really weird about this Kennedy assassination stuff. I was disturbed by what happened in 63. There was like notices, there was something to do with David Ferry. There was, you know, connections to New Orleans I didn't quite understand at the time. Guy Bannister was involved.

• 2:16:04Speaker 03

  I know Guy, weird Guy. He had that detective agency, right? So he's putting these pieces together. And he opens up an investigation into the assassination, thinking that the plot took place in New Orleans. Harvey Oswald was there. Everybody was there who mattered in this thing. Maybe it had something to do with New Orleans. So they start pulling at threads. And the threads they pull lead them to Guy Bannister, obviously, who was hunting UFOs in 1947. And it leads them to Fred Crisman, who was a victim of a UFO by association in 1947, who was involved in this thing with the airline pilots and the blowing up of the plane and all the rest of it. What are the odds

• 2:16:46Speaker 03

  that in 1947, a UFO incident that attracts Fred Crisman and Guy Bannister then turns into the assassination conspiracy in 1963? The purported conspiracy, right? Same guys. Crisman involved, Bannister involved, Crisman involved in the same kind of weird, extreme right organizations as everybody else. They all know each other. Fred Crisman's in a weird church. David Ferry's in a weird church. Jack Martin's in a weird church. And it's all the same church. The one that I belonged to in 1968.

• 2:17:20AJ Gentile?

  United Life, right?

• 2:17:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I wasn't involved in any conspiracies, thank you very much. But the same, the same, the same bunch of people.

• 2:17:28AJ Gentile?

  And Crisman has this strange background that he was maybe OSS. He was a pilot.

• 2:17:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:32AJ Gentile?

  The easy papers, which are a kind of myth.

• 2:17:35Speaker 03

  A kind of myth, but he knew Clay Shaw.

• 2:17:38AJ Gentile?

  So Clay Shaw, which was the Tommy Lee Jones character.

• 2:17:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:17:42AJ Gentile?

  For some reason, he was the only arrest, I think Garrison made.

• 2:17:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:17:45AJ Gentile?

  The first call goes to Fred Christman.

• 2:17:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:17:49AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 2:17:50Speaker 03

  We don't know. To this day, we don't know. But.

• 2:17:52AJ Gentile?

  But he was subpoenaed.

• 2:17:53Speaker 03

  Yes, he was subpoenaed. He was interviewed.

• 2:17:55AJ Gentile?

  And he said, "I'm in New Orleans to help this guy, Tom, get a record contract."

• 2:18:01Speaker 03

  Yes, right.

• 2:18:02AJ Gentile?

  And I think the transcript is like a page and a half. That's it.

• 2:18:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it.

• 2:18:05AJ Gentile?

  That's it.

• 2:18:06Speaker 03

  And it was Beckham, right? Tommy Beckham.

• 2:18:07AJ Gentile?

  Tommy Beckham.

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  And Tommy Beckham also involved in the churches.

• 2:18:10AJ Gentile?

  Yep, and the right-wing stuff.

• 2:18:12Speaker 03

  And all the rest of it. But nothing to see here, right?

• 2:18:15AJ Gentile?

  No. And I think Christman is accused of being a chaos agent for Boeing.

• 2:18:20Speaker 03

  Yep, there was that rumor.

• 2:18:21AJ Gentile?

  Uh, trigger man.

• 2:18:23Speaker 03

  Possibly. Grassy Knoll. We don't know.

• 2:18:25AJ Gentile?

  We don't know.

• 2:18:26Speaker 03

  We don't know.

• 2:18:27AJ Gentile?

  One of the tramps, perhaps?

• 2:18:28Speaker 03

  One of the tramps, yeah. Howard Hunt might have been one of the tramps.

• 2:18:30AJ Gentile?

  Might have been.

• 2:18:31Speaker 03

  Howard Hunt had a major beef with Kennedy, we know. Hated him because of the Bay of Pigs not giving the air support.

• 2:18:38AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:18:39Speaker 03

  Hated, when Kennedy hated the CIA at that point. So who do they put in charge of the Warren Commission? But Alan Dulles.

• 2:18:48AJ Gentile?

  The last guy Kennedy wanted.

• 2:18:50Speaker 03

  Right. Of that investigation. The last guy you would want.

• 2:18:56Speaker 03

  So it goes on and like that.

• 2:18:57AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 2:18:57Speaker 03

  It's nauseating.

• 2:18:58AJ Gentile?

  But Dulles is a great segue, unless you want to add more color to that story, is a great segue into the nine.

• 2:19:04Speaker 03

  I know where you're going, yep. Well, yeah.

• 2:19:08AJ Gentile?

  That's so, now, now we're going to New Year's Eve, 1952, in a.

• 2:19:14Speaker 03

  Let's not, let's not get there just yet.

• 2:19:16AJ Gentile?

  Take, take it away.

• 2:19:17Speaker 03

  Let's open the door.

• 2:19:18AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:19:18Speaker 03

  And say, "Why are we going to talk about the nine in this situation?" Well, because of Oswald.

• 2:19:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:19:27Speaker 03

  We already talked about how weird it was that you had Fred Christman, you had, you know, David Ferry, Jack Martin, Guy Bannister, all these people involved somehow in the assassination. And they all have like UFO connections and weird religion connections.

• 2:19:40AJ Gentile?

  We know they've been together, we know they're spotted together, we know they're.

• 2:19:43Speaker 03

  They knew each other.

• 2:19:44AJ Gentile?

  At the Ruby's Bar, Tippits and Ruby's, everyone's there.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  Everybody's there. They're all part of this. And now there's poor Lee Harvey Oswald in the middle of it. The poor bastard never had a chance, right? He's surrounded in all sides.

• 2:19:55AJ Gentile?

  He's a patsy.

• 2:19:56Speaker 03

  He's like the ultimate patsy. He's like the poster boy for patsies. So here is this poor guy. I mean, I'm saying poor guy in a sense, in a kind of majority sense. He's desperately trying to find a job, right? He's looking for a job in Texas now. He was in New Orleans. He got busted in New Orleans for the fair play for Cuba stuff. So there's a problem there. So now he's going to go from New Orleans. He's going, he was from New Orleans. So now he's leaving New Orleans. He's going to Texas.

• 2:20:28AJ Gentile?

  What's the timeline of his defection at this point? Is this prior? He's back.

• 2:20:32Speaker 03

  He's back from the defection, oh, for sure.

• 2:20:34AJ Gentile?

  So he defects to Minsk?

• 2:20:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, where he's known as Alec.

• 2:20:37AJ Gentile?

  As Alec?

• 2:20:38Speaker 03

  We'll get to that later.

• 2:20:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:20:39Speaker 03

  So he defects to Minsk, where he's known as Alec, and he defects back to the United States with a Russian-born wife, who's the niece of a GRU Colonel, a military intelligence Colonel in the Soviet Army.

• 2:20:49AJ Gentile?

  And with a-

• 2:20:49Speaker 03

  No problem.

• 2:20:50AJ Gentile?

  No problem. And with a convenient loan from State Department, too.

• 2:20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:20:53AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, come on back. I know you defected and you gave up your citizenship and all that. No hard feelings, man. So he comes back. So he's now in Dallas, and he needs to find a job. He needs what to do, you know, what am I going to do? There's a guy called George de Morinshilt, a very strange operator himself, a guy with a lot of sleazy connections, maybe Nazi connections, all this kind of stuff. And he says, you know, we can help you out. And he introduces him to, well, to a number of people. I'm trying to, how do I parse this down to where it makes sense?

• 2:21:30AJ Gentile?

  Ruth?

• 2:21:31Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, it's Mary, it's Ruth Payne. But, okay, well, let's use that. Ruth Payne-

• 2:21:38AJ Gentile?

  This is a lot right now.

• 2:21:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is a lot. And I know people are listening, what? I can't keep track of all this.

• 2:21:43AJ Gentile?

  It's gonna work.

• 2:21:44Speaker 03

  Ruth Payne- Wants to study Russian. That's her story. This is in 1963, when the world thinks Russia is the Antichrist, right? So she wants to study Russian. She's Quaker. She's open to it. Yeah, no problem. I want to study Russian. And Marshall says, "Well, I have the perfect guy for you. Here is Lee Oswald. He's from Russia." I mean, he speaks some Russian, but his wife speaks fluent Russian. She is Russian, right? And, you know, this is their group that they're meeting of Russian Orthodox people, right? So a lot of the people attending this party where they all meet are members of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, which I introduced to you a long time ago, about four or five years ago in this interview. And we talked to you about the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia,

• 2:22:26Speaker 03

  the anti-communist, pro-Nazi, briefly, Russian Orthodox Church. "Oh, they're gonna hate me for this. You're gonna get mail." But this is inescapable. This is what happened. So, and Ruth Payne is like, "Oh, this is cool. Let me, let me learn some Russian from, you know, your wife, your very beautiful wife, and you have these kids. Stay at home with us. If you're looking for an apartment, stay with me for a while. You can teach me Russian. Meanwhile, I'll help you find a job in the Texas Schoolbook Depository." Okay, so he gets a job in the Texas because of Ruth Payne.

• 2:22:59AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:23:00Speaker 03

  Ruth Payne is the key. Ruth Payne also is another key to another whole branch of this thing. She's the daughter-in-law of a guy called Arthur Young. Arthur Young invented the bell helicopter during the war. Arthur Young gave up on military technology and all that sort of thing. He wanted to study occultism and the paranormal and astrology and spiritualism. He devoted his life then to studying that.

• 2:23:28AJ Gentile?

  Because he made a fortune with it.

• 2:23:29Speaker 03

  He made a fortune.

• 2:23:30AJ Gentile?

  Right, so he said, "I'm out."

• 2:23:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, he says, "I'm out. I got my money. I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'm gonna study spooks."

• 2:23:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:23:38Speaker 03

  So he has a friend called Andria Pucharic. Who is a medical doctor, but also with a lot of very strange intelligence ties.

• 2:23:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:23:46Speaker 03

  And in ties to anti-communists as well. And Puharic was about to take up a position at a hospital on the west coast. And Kaiser Wilhelm, I think. And instead, he meets some friends of his who are fellow Serbo-Croatian people. And they're saying to him, nah, why you want to do that? Why don't you set up here, just stay in Maine, the state of Maine. It's winter, you're snowed in, now you can't go home anyway. Stay here and open up an institute to study paranormal things. You know, and to do your electronics research too, because you're doing weird things with electronics. You're putting microphones in people's brains and stuff. This sounds pretty cool, why don't we do that?

• 2:24:27Speaker 03

  So he kind of falls in line with this and says, okay, yeah, maybe I'll do that. And he opens up this thing in Maine where he's going to do this. The Round Table Foundation. And he's going to do all this kind of weird stuff there. And the people who induced him to do this, these fellow Serbo-Croatians of his, they were friends of Nikola Tesla. In fact, the gentleman in charge of this defection played the violin at Tesla's funeral.

• 2:24:58AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that.

• 2:24:59Speaker 03

  Yes. So these people were really in with Tesla. And they're telling Puharic, I think you should do this stuff instead. And Puharic says, sounds good, maybe I'll do that. I won't take up a prestigious position, running a hospital on the west coast. I'm going to stay here in Maine, in a barn, and do this instead. So 1952 to 53, there's a séance. He invites all his closest friends. His closest friends are blue-blood Americans, right? Astors, DuPonts, you know, people like that, Forbes.

• 2:25:30AJ Gentile?

  Royalty.

• 2:25:31Speaker 03

  Royalty, American royalty, and American money, and American royalty. Arthur Young is there with his wife. The excessively nomenclatured Ruth Forbes Payne Young. Okay, so she's, her name tells you her story.

• 2:25:43AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 2:25:44Speaker 03

  Forbes is in there.

• 2:25:45AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:25:46Speaker 03

  Okay, Ruth Forbes Payne, Payne, Thomas was, was, her, her husband at that time, uh, was kind of a Trotskyite or something, but he was related to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

• 2:25:58AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:25:58Speaker 03

  And then you had, of course, Arthur Young himself. So she has all these connections, and her best friend is Mary Douglas, I think her name is. And Mary Douglas was the BFF, the best friend of, of, of her, of Ruth Forbes Payne Young, but also the girlfriend, the mistress of Allen Dulles.

• 2:26:17AJ Gentile?

  Long time mistress.

• 2:26:18Speaker 03

  Long time, wrote about it, everybody knew. Very intense connections between all of these people.

• 2:26:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:26:26Speaker 03

  So those are just two of the people at the sink. There's an Astra, right?

• 2:26:29AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:26:29Speaker 03

  Of the famous Astra family, who's, uh, was it her father that died in the sinking of the Titanic?

• 2:26:35AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, the wealthiest person on that boat.

• 2:26:37Speaker 03

  Wealthiest, yeah, and there she is, she's attending. There was a DuPont there, DuPont, no, no, no more needs to be said. Uh, and a couple of other people who have kind of strange pedigrees, which, you know, we can kind of explore later. They were hard to pin down. So there's a group of nine people, and a medium from India. And this medium, who, according to his family, because I contacted them.

• 2:27:03AJ Gentile?

  You did?

• 2:27:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I went back and contacted the family to see if I could find out if he ever was really a medium in India. And they said, you're kidding me, he was never a medium in India. He was interested in religion, he was in the United States for some world religious conference or something, but he never evicted any, evinced any, you know, mediumistic abilities to us. At least that's what they'd said in, in writing to me. So he's the medium, though, and he's going to make contact with some forces.

• 2:27:29Speaker 03

  And he does evidently, and he starts talking. And Puharich is taking all this down, like he's transcribing exactly what's being said. Puharich asks him questions, scientific questions. He's getting correct answers from this guy who has no scientific background.

• 2:27:44AJ Gentile?

  Who's he channeling?

• 2:27:46Speaker 03

  Well, we, this is what we don't know yet.

• 2:27:47AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:27:48Speaker 03

  In the beginning, we're not quite sure.

• 2:27:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:27:50Speaker 03

  Except they say something strange. They say, "You are nine individuals, you're nine people. We are nine." So whoever they were, were nine of them. "And you are nine and we are nine. Together, we're going to change the course of history." Right? "We're going to change the course of what's happening in the world." We don't quite know what that means yet. Because they're kind of ambiguous about it. But they go on and on about it. They go on about different things and they talk about all kinds of stuff. You can actually read these transcripts. Puharich published them. There was no mystery about it. There was no, no, no, no intent to hide anything about this.

• 2:28:21AJ Gentile?

  Right. We know all these people were there.

• 2:28:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. We know the people were there. We know who they are, who their background is. He started attracting more people like that later. So there was a lot of other people from the paranormal sort of community were involved. But these were all people that were involved in this, in this séance. And it turns out, eventually, it's revealed that these nine individuals are in some kind of UFO. They're evidently in what they deliberately term low Earth orbit. So they're here. They can't be seen, but they're here. And they're somehow directing things that are happening on the planet. Which is what a lot of people are saying now anyway, right? They're saying, "Are they controlling us? The alien presence is here. How is this happening?" Right? Back in 1952, 53, that's what these people believed.

• 2:29:06AJ Gentile?

  52 is a wild year for this stuff.

• 2:29:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because what else happened in 52?

• 2:29:10AJ Gentile?

  The UFOs over, over, over the White House, the weird press conference where the Bible's mentioned along with the...

• 2:29:17Speaker 03

  The press conference freaks me out.

• 2:29:19AJ Gentile?

  That's a wild thing. Why are they talking about angels and demons in 52?

• 2:29:23Speaker 03

  And who was at the press conference? Who was one of the people organizing that and speaking at it was the guy at Roswell. The Air Force general who was there at Roswell.

• 2:29:30AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:29:31Speaker 03

  Who doesn't bring up Roswell in this press conference.

• 2:29:33AJ Gentile?

  So step out of the story for a second and tell me what's going on in your mind as you're untangling this. Are you like, these are all holy shit moments and they just keep piling up.

• 2:29:44Speaker 03

  They keep piling up, especially when I realized that, you know, Ruth Payne went up and visited her relatives just a couple of months before the assassination and told them what was going on. Said, "I got this Russian defector in my house and his wife and kids," right?

• 2:29:59AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:30:00Speaker 03

  I mean, that means that's a direct plug into this whole world, this whole other world that's going on. And poor Lee Oswald's like in the middle of this, he's like clueless, I believe. And he's also involved in New Orleans with all these other weird people. More UFO stuff, more UFO connections. This is UFO connection to the assassination.

• 2:30:17AJ Gentile?

  And you're not a UFO researcher up to this point, right?

• 2:30:20Speaker 03

  I wasn't. I wasn't. This what brought me into the UFO stuff was finding this out. I was fascinated by UFOs like everybody else, but I wasn't planning on writing about it. And then I come across all this UFO stuff for the assassination. I'm saying, "Oh my God, who's going to believe this?"

• 2:30:35AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna ask you, you gotta be thinking, "I don't want to do this. This sounds nuts."

• 2:30:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I said, "I'll have to start from scratch on the UFO stuff then. I'll have to become an expert on it, at least as much as we can be, and figure out why this connects," you know? And it turns out, you can't figure out why it connects, it just does. So you gotta start with the basic premise, it connects. Okay, now how? What are the ramifications? What are the implications, you know? What can we predict on the basis of this? It's tough going because these people show up and they disappear. They show up and disappear. I'm talking about the actual people, not just the UFOs. So you're dealing with this conundrum, it's impossible to figure out. And, you know, one of my favorite characters in this whole thing was David Ferry. I mean, David Ferry, played by Joe Pesci in the

• 2:31:24Speaker 03

  movie JFK, you can't forget him. He has the fake red wig and the whole thing. And he's like smoking cigarettes like crazy and drinking coffee and he can't, you know? They revealed it in the JFK movie, in that scene after his suicide, supposed suicide.

• 2:31:39AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:31:39Speaker 03

  So there's Kevin Costner there, and there's the clerical garments. There's a photograph of Ferry with the bishop's mitre.

• 2:31:45AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:31:46Speaker 03

  Not a Catholic bishop's mitre, an Orthodox bishop's mitre. Only if you're into it, would you pick it out right away. That crown he was wearing is what the Orthodox wear, not what the Catholics wear. So he was in the Orthodox, doing this Orthodox stuff.

• 2:32:01AJ Gentile?

  I don't think they really addressed that in the movie, do they?

• 2:32:03Speaker 03

  Oh, not at all.

• 2:32:04AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:32:04Speaker 03

  Even Jim Garrison, the DA at the time doing this, he couldn't figure it out. He wrote to the Church Committee. He said, "Guys, there's these weird churches. I don't know what they represent on those. You should probably check it out." I couldn't find out what the connection was.

• 2:32:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:18Speaker 03

  He blatantly said, "I have no idea." Threw up his arms. Can't handle it. So I feel for him, believe me. So, yeah. So there's the church stuff, there's the UFO stuff. There's the intelligence operations that are obviously underneath all of this as well. And there's people who are obviously not really intelligence-type people. There's the, you know, the Arthur Youngs of the world. You know, yes, they have intelligence connections for sure, but they weren't running ops, you know? These are just people who were peripherally around them. Puharich also, of course, became, he had a military commission during the Korean War, when all this was happening. In 1953, he was giving speeches at Edward's Arsenal. But he was giving speeches on weaponizing the paranormal.

• 2:33:03AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:33:05Speaker 03

  So, we're in the thick of it with these people. We're in the thick of it there.

• 2:33:09AJ Gentile?

  And he's the one who brings Yuri Geller to SRI.

• 2:33:12Speaker 03

  Yes. And Yuri Geller starts channeling the Nine.

• 2:33:15AJ Gentile?

  Starts channeling. So what blows my mind is you've got, Puharich brings Yuri Geller into what will be Stargate. SRI, Russell Targ, Hal Putoff, to the stars, Peter Levenda. There you are again.

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  There you are again. Can't get out of it.

• 2:33:34AJ Gentile?

  What's going on?

• 2:33:35Speaker 03

  Every time I think I'm out.

• 2:33:37AJ Gentile?

  They pull me back in.

• 2:33:40Speaker 03

  And you know, I didn't approach Tom DeLonge. I was like a poor innocent guy when he called me. And I thought, yeah, sure, you're Tom DeLonge from Blink 182. Yeah, right. Tell me another one. And it turns out it was true. And he said, no, we're gonna do this. You know, we're gonna knock on doors. We're gonna get some answers, man. But we're gonna do it in the right way. And I want you to help me do this. I said, okay, fine. I'm on. It sounds good. You know, I don't know how much I can help it. I'll try. So, yeah, that came out of the clear blue sky. I did not go looking for Tom DeLonge or Blink 182. I didn't go looking for any of this stuff.

• 2:34:14AJ Gentile?

  It's, I'll find you. We're gonna come up on a break. And on the other side of the break, we'll get into consciousness. Maybe some Jacques Vallée. But before then, how about a yarn or two about Kino, your Men in Black experience is wild. If you want to tell either of those.

• 2:34:37Speaker 03

  Well, Aquino will take us a little bit more, probably. Well, it'll bring us back to something we've already talked about.

• 2:34:43AJ Gentile?

  Whatever you want to do.

• 2:34:44Speaker 03

  The Men in Black thing is something that, again, makes no sense also. And it's because it makes no sense makes it important, if you know what I mean. It means there's something else at work, something else at operation that we're not, we cannot realistically comprehend. I was living...

• 2:35:01AJ Gentile?

  And every time you tell a story, the skeptics step up and then you smack them right in the mouth, which is what you're gonna do right now.

• 2:35:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do my best to tell you straight what's going on here. I can't promise anything. I can't promise your reaction, what it'll be. I'm living in Rhode Island. I'm living in Westerly, Rhode Island. It's a small town on the, on the border of Connecticut. You can go back and forth state from each state. It's just walking across the street and suddenly you're in Connecticut. So it's that close. And I have, I'm living in this house on Ashaway Road. And, you know, this is a town. It's a small Rhode Island town. It's not a city. There's not like a lot of traffic. There's, you know, it's a small town, a couple of houses here, a couple of houses there, a house across the street. It's like that, rural.

• 2:35:49Speaker 03

  I mean, very suburban, look at it that way, on the verge of rural. So, and I'm living in this old house and on kind of a hill, there's a driveway that leads down to the, to the main road. Which is just two lanes, right? Basic road. And I've just come from shopping, I think. I had learned to drive by this point. Just for those of you who are keeping track. Yes, I did learn to drive. But I was thirty-eight years old when I learned. So people tell me, "You really haven't learned to drive yet." I did learn. I'm unpacking the car from shopping. And I notice, I look up and I notice there's an old black Cadillac. Like, an old model Cadillac. Big, black car.

• 2:36:32Speaker 03

  Parked, not parked, idling in front of me, in front of the house and my car and my driveway. And out of the window, the driver's side window, somebody's aiming a camera at me with a very large lens. This wide lens. And I'm thinking, "What the hell is this?" I put down the bag of groceries and I start walking over to the car. This is not done.

• 2:36:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:36:52Speaker 03

  You know, it's small town, New England, you don't do this. I walked over to it and they just took off. And I tried to see the license plate number, but I didn't get a chance to get all the numbers. But it was the same color as the Rhode Island plate. But a Rhode Island plate and a federal plate, they were the same colors at that time. So I didn't know what I was looking at. I said, "This is very weird." I ran back to my car. I was gonna follow them. For some reason, I felt I had to do that. This was just too strange.

• 2:37:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:37:17Speaker 03

  And, you know, I had run-ins before with people doing things like that. You know, following me or doing that kind of stuff. So it pisses me off, so I'm gonna follow them. I got to my car and another car pulls in right behind me, blocking my way of getting out of the driveway. And it's another old car. It's an old station wagon with the wood paneling on it. I haven't seen those, like, in years. And out of the car, there's two women, the front seat, driver's side and passenger. They open the doors, they have these sort of wide eyes. They get out of the car and they're dressed kind of oddly in, like, old-fashioned clothing. Not really old, but like nineteen-fifties-era clothing.

• 2:37:56Speaker 03

  Like cloth coat, that kind of thing. And they walk out of the car and they look at me sweetly. And they say, "Do you know where De Vilbus lives?" And I'm really pissed off. I want to get out and follow the other car.

• 2:38:07AJ Gentile?

  Right, it's getting away.

• 2:38:08Speaker 03

  It's getting away. I say, "There's nobody named De Vilbus here." "Thank you." They get in the car and they drive off. But of course, by then, it's too late. I can't get out. And I don't realize, I always kick myself. It's obviously was a two-car team.

• 2:38:21AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:38:22Speaker 03

  And they blocked me from leaving, right? Obviously, because they were just as weird as the guys in the other car. Two very old model cars, but in pretty good condition. With strange people in them, you know, messing with me. So that kind of bothered me and kind of really bothered me.

• 2:38:37AJ Gentile?

  That was, that feels like a message. That could, if, because you're, obviously you've been surveilled the whole time.

• 2:38:44Speaker 03

  But by what or whom?

• 2:38:45AJ Gentile?

  I don't know, because it's, because that's sloppy tradecraft.

• 2:38:49Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. Plus, it's expensive tradecraft.

• 2:38:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:38:52Speaker 03

  Two cars, four people?

• 2:38:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:38:54Speaker 03

  That's a lot of money for somebody like me, just sitting at home.

• 2:38:56AJ Gentile?

  So they're sending you a message?

• 2:38:58Speaker 03

  Right. It has to be a message of some kind. So I look up, I think, De Vilbus. De Vilbus, I said, "That name sounds vaguely familiar." I start looking it up. Nobody in Rhode Island with that name at all. So that's not happening. But then it occurred to me, I know the name. It's the name of a company in Ohio. They make machinery. And the reason I know is because a guy I worked with in Rhode Island gave that name and phone number to me, saying, "You should call these guys because they might be good customers," right? So I had called De Vilbus, I think, once or something, and nothing ever happened with it. That's fine. But the guy who gave me the phone number to call De Vilbus had used to work at Huntington, uh, Huntington, what's the name, in Alabama, Huntsville.

• 2:39:40AJ Gentile?

  Huntsville. NASA?

• 2:39:41Speaker 03

  NASA. He worked for NASA. He was an engineer. He worked at NASA. And he retired and started working up in Rhode Island and worked at this thing. So he knew Werner von Braun. He had met von Braun personally.

• 2:39:51AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:39:53Speaker 03

  So he had stories he would tell, you know.

• 2:39:55AJ Gentile?

  And he recommends De Vilbus.

• 2:39:57Speaker 03

  And then these two people come over there and ask me about De Vilbus. It's like they looked inside my brain for a possible name, a connection. "Oh, De Vilbus, that'll work." And they gave me De Vilbus. Okay, that's not the end of the story, though. That was weird enough. Okay, I was fine, but I was really annoyed. I was annoyed at myself for not being more alert. Back to Singapore, remember I said I was in Singapore?

• 2:40:18AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:40:19Speaker 03

  I was constantly in and out of Singapore for years. And so I'm in Singapore, I just landed at Singapore Airport, probably from abroad somewhere, from the States or from Europe, I forget where. And so, I'm dragging myself through the airport, this is why I always term it dragging myself because that's what I felt. I have my same suitcase, probably the similar one that I came in with today. I was dragging it in, and I feel a tap on my shoulder. Someone just taps me on the shoulder. Now this is Singapore and people don't do that, you know, it's kind of straight laced here, we don't go chummy each other.

• 2:40:50AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:40:51Speaker 03

  But it could have been somebody I knew from the States or somebody, somebody tapped me on the shoulder. But they just tapped me on the shoulder and left. I turned around to see who it was, it was the girl from the car.

• 2:41:01AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 2:41:02Speaker 03

  And she looks at me and smiles and waves like that.

• 2:41:05AJ Gentile?

  How many years later is this?

• 2:41:07Speaker 03

  This would have been in the 90s, this happened in...

• 2:41:10AJ Gentile?

  And the first...

• 2:41:11Speaker 03

  A good 10, at least 10, 15 years.

• 2:41:13AJ Gentile?

  So it's, because the first one was, I think, 88? Around there?

• 2:41:16Speaker 03

  It was, it was the time of the first Gulf War.

• 2:41:19AJ Gentile?

  1990.

• 2:41:20Speaker 03

  Okay. So this would have happened in, about 10 years later, 1999, roughly 2000, something like that.

• 2:41:27AJ Gentile?

  Are you sure it was her? Okay. I have to do my job.

• 2:41:30Speaker 03

  She looked at me like she recognized...

• 2:41:31AJ Gentile?

  I have to.

• 2:41:32Speaker 03

  She looked at me like she knew I recognized her, you know? And she waved.

• 2:41:36AJ Gentile?

  This is the message.

• 2:41:37Speaker 03

  And I, I said, holy, I started following her, right? Because you don't do that, I mean, that's like too blatant. And I said, who is this? What is going on? I go running after her and of course she disappears in the crowd. Later, a couple of years later, I meet Timothy Good, the UFO, British UFO researcher. We were doing this thing in Amsterdam. And this secret space conference in Amsterdam, there's videos of it all over the place. So, I was, I used to read Timothy Good's books, so the two of us, we're in this hotel in the middle of nowhere, it's Amsterdam but we're in the middle of nowhere, it's not like the cool part of Amsterdam. So we're sitting there going, okay, what are we gonna do now, right? And he had a bottle of Scotch, and I said, okay, we're gonna drink it.

• 2:42:20Speaker 03

  So we just sat there in his room, we drank, I think, the bottle of Scotch, that night. And he started talking, you know, to me, and he's talking to me about, you know, if you want to see, catch them in the act, if you want to know if they're among us... It's all you have to do. And I think he wrote about this in one of his books as well. Just go to a very public place, and an airport's the perfect place, or just any very public place. Just sit there. Close your eyes, think for a second, and just say to yourself, to them, if you're here, say hello, give me a sign. You know, just give it a minute, and open your eyes and look, and see if anything happens, right? And somebody will turn around at some point and kind of look at you, wink at you, give

• 2:43:03Speaker 03

  you the high five, something they will acknowledge, and that will be it.

• 2:43:06AJ Gentile?

  Well, you just took a turn. So, we went from intelligence surveillance to non-human intelligence surveillance.

• 2:43:13Speaker 03

  Exactly. Right. And I interpret what Timothy Goodell told me as a way of saying, they are here, right? And we can mistake them for people like us, we can mistake them for intelligence agents, the whole men in black. Were they really intelligence agents, or were they something else?

• 2:43:32AJ Gentile?

  So, did you think, like I just did, did Timothy make you go, "Holy shit, I thought, I thought they were just sloppy, sloppy agents"?

• 2:43:42Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, initially, until, until Singapore, I thought they were sloppy agents.

• 2:43:47AJ Gentile?

  So, Singapore, then you're like, "There's something more."

• 2:43:48Speaker 03

  Singapore, there's something more, you know, this is not right, right? If you're an intelligence agent, why would you call my attention to the fact you're in the same airport?

• 2:43:55AJ Gentile?

  I would think it was a threat, you know, as a horse head in the bed.

• 2:43:58Speaker 03

  Possibly, yeah. But they weren't carrying any suitcases in the airport, they were like, Freezerbird, just walking around, you know?

• 2:44:03AJ Gentile?

  So, what, so speculate, then. What was, this is clearly a message, what is it?

• 2:44:08Speaker 03

  It's a message? I think we have to interpret the men in black, generally speaking, not as intelligence agents working for the government, but as something else. That this is part of the phenomenon. Because I never saw a UFO at that, at that point in time, I had never witnessed personally a UFO. I didn't deserve a visit from the men in black, right? According to the mythology. So, why would, why did they show up?

• 2:44:30AJ Gentile?

  I don't know if they're saying, "Stop doing this," or they're saying, "You're on to something, keep going."

• 2:44:35Speaker 03

  That's what I felt, the latter.

• 2:44:36AJ Gentile?

  The latter.

• 2:44:37Speaker 03

  In fact, Whitley Strieber, I think, kind of came down on that side of the argument as well. They're just saying, "Hi."

• 2:44:43AJ Gentile?

  He would know.

• 2:44:45Speaker 03

  They said they're just acknowledging.

• 2:44:47AJ Gentile?

  No, you hadn't had a UFO sighting until then, but you had one since.

• 2:44:51Speaker 03

  I hadn't one, only one since, and it was.

• 2:44:54AJ Gentile?

  It's one more than I've had.

• 2:44:55Speaker 03

  Well, I, I, I believed in the whole subject. I understood it thoroughly. I know that the whole thing exists. Without having to have the benefit of personal attachment, right? Nothing like that ever happened to me. So, I mean, but I saw the evidence was strong enough that I had to believe in the UFO phenomenon. And that's why I wrote about it and sinister forces and everything else. This is a real thing.

• 2:45:13AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:45:14Speaker 03

  Um, I didn't need to see a UFO to do that.

• 2:45:19Speaker 03

  And then, a couple of years ago, just when COVID started, the December before the whole COVID thing happened. I'm now back in, I'm in Florida at this point. I get around, I know. So I'm in Florida and I'm driving back from having eaten at a restaurant. And it's like a little gated, sort of pseudo gated community. I get past the gate, I'm driving down, and suddenly I see what I thought were the lights, the very bright lights of a helicopter. We get helicopters all the time. We're close enough to the, the private airports, a private airport there that we get sometimes jets and stuff, so. I, I was just interested, you know, a lot of light, right in front of me. I stopped the car, I'm looking at it, but I don't hear rotors.

• 2:46:01Speaker 03

  I don't hear a helicopter. So I'm confused by it because I know the terrain very well. There's nothing up there that has, that emits light.

• 2:46:10AJ Gentile?

  Do you hear anything?

• 2:46:11Speaker 03

  Nothing. So I get out of the car. I sort of open the, first I open the door, I roll down the window and I look up and I see there's, there's, there's light. But then I have to get out of the car and then I can see the whole picture. And it's three lights in a triangle, right? And I'm looking at this triangle and I'm thinking, what kind of plane looks like that? I'm so freaking stupid, right? I think I'd be the best one, like the, the men in black thing.

• 2:46:38AJ Gentile?

  I hear it all the time. Nobody takes the picture because they're like, I didn't think of it.

• 2:46:41Speaker 03

  I didn't think of it. Obviously, you're thinking of every other possible explanation.

• 2:46:44AJ Gentile?

  You're just trying to make this work.

• 2:46:46Speaker 03

  And as I look at it, I suddenly realized it was gone. And then I had this, this. Terrific sensation, look behind you. I looked behind me and it was out there, all the way at the horizon and then gone again.

• 2:47:01AJ Gentile?

  Did it fly or did it teleport?

• 2:47:03Speaker 03

  It just disappeared from here and appeared over there. I didn't hear anything, I didn't see, it didn't like accelerate that you would expect to see, go slower than faster, nothing, it just was there and then not there. And I said, "I just saw a UFO." And I emailed everybody, emailed Tom and you know.

• 2:47:19AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:47:19Speaker 03

  "I just saw one for the first time in my life, I saw this thing." And Tom was jealous. I said, "It's, I saw it, what can I say, it's the weirdest thing."

• 2:47:27AJ Gentile?

  Did anyone else see it, did you report it to MoveOn or?

• 2:47:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:47:30AJ Gentile?

  No?

• 2:47:30Speaker 03

  I knew, pointless. Yeah, MoveOn, okay.

• 2:47:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:47:35Speaker 03

  No, I didn't, it just was there. I mean, I talked about it enough and I, you know, reported it like online kind of, but I didn't actually go to the efforts, I mean, would have meant nothing, I just, it was a momentary sight of this thing that made me stop the car and look up and then took off. And then since then, there's been odd things, you know, and Whitley says it's, you know, they're just saying hello, don't worry about it. But I had the, it was after that, very late at night, maybe 2 o'clock in the morning, I frequently work late at night, so it's extremely quiet, there's...

• 2:48:04AJ Gentile?

  Is this about 2 a.m.?

• 2:48:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48:06AJ Gentile?

  Let me tell you a quick story first.

• 2:48:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:48:10AJ Gentile?

  I had Mark D'Antonio in here very recently, a great guy, astronomer, scientist, had a visitation, he woke up middle of the night, 2, 3 a.m. and he heard rhythmically, "1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3." Proceed. Yesterday.

• 2:48:34Speaker 03

  It's 2 a.m.

• 2:48:35AJ Gentile?

  He told this story, yesterday.

• 2:48:37Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, this is the first, I think this is the first time I'm talking about this on here. It was 2 a.m. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Nine knocks, three groups of three, but only once. And then this weird electronic sound like, like I blew something. You know, like something went, I blew a fuse. So this is, this is sort of zapping sound. And then it stopped. And I searched the house for whatever could have caused that. There's nothing, nothing, I had nothing that would do that. There was nothing plugged in, nothing that could have caused it. My computer was, was fine, it was not making that noise. So there was nothing, I had nothing. It was just an electronic noise in the middle of nowhere, of nothing, after those knocks. So who do you call when you have a problem like that? You call Whitley.

• 2:49:20Speaker 03

  I didn't call him, I sent him an email, I said, "This just happened, now what am I supposed to do?" He says, "Oh, don't worry about it, they're just saying hi." They're just saying hello.

• 2:49:28AJ Gentile?

  Did you boys ever follow up to that? Because Mark had another experience the next night, no?

• 2:49:32Speaker 03

  I did not. No follow up from him.

• 2:49:34AJ Gentile?

  And his experience was not a positive one?

• 2:49:36Speaker 03

  I, I avoided that. Because they liked me better.

• 2:49:39AJ Gentile?

  Maybe, but the three knocks-

• 2:49:41Speaker 03

  Sorry, Mark.

• 2:49:42AJ Gentile?

  It blows my mind. I heard that story yesterday in this room, and there it is again.

• 2:49:47Speaker 03

  Well, that's bizarre.

• 2:49:48AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. So now I, I want to look for that.

• 2:49:50Speaker 03

  I'm glad you, you said that first, so, you know.

• 2:49:54AJ Gentile?

  You know, speaking of Whitley, I, I know we have to take a break, I can't help myself. There was something that, that you were working on with him, I had never heard before, that he may be suppressing memories-

• 2:50:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50:09AJ Gentile?

  That have to do with Nazis again?

• 2:50:11Speaker 03

  Sure, yes. That's the reason that we basically got in contact the very first time. I was still living overseas, and Unholy Alliance had come out already. It came out in 95, I think it was. So I'm overseas, 96, 97, already. And he manages to get an email to me, I guess through the publisher. And so we start communicating, and I'm thinking, "This is cool, this is the guy from Communion, this is Christopher Walken." So this is, you know, this is, the book was great, and the movie, I, I loved the movie, but I know-

• 2:50:44AJ Gentile?

  Creepy.

• 2:50:45Speaker 03

  I liked the creepiness, that was the point.

• 2:50:46AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:50:47Speaker 03

  So, so we're in contact, so we're communicating, and he's, he, this is, this is the thing about Whitley, if I can tell tales out of school, I guess, I'm not violating any confidences. Whitley is a, he's a sincere guy.

• 2:51:02Speaker 03

  He's not trying to sensationalize anything. And when he contacted me, it's because he was extremely okay. He was okay with figuring out that what he was having maybe were screen memories. That the UFO stuff, the alien stuff, was a memory that was hiding something darker, that he had developed this to protect himself against. And he was more than willing to accept that his experiences were not, you know, alien UFO stuff, that they were hiding something darker. And he said, here's the reason why. I grew up outside of Randolph Air Force Base. My father worked there. You know, we had relatives there, all this other stuff. I know that Strickhold, this famous Nazi doctor, had his

• 2:51:43AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:51:44Speaker 03

  Aviation science operation there.

• 2:51:45AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:51:46Speaker 03

  He said, and I have memories of being in a room with a German guy. I guess I won't mention the name. I think that's probably between Whitley and whatever. But he gave me the name. It was a very common German name. And I have the feeling that this guy was SS or something. He was a Nazi. And I think what was going on is that these experiences seemed to connect with that in some way that I can't understand. So maybe if you could find out, because since you wrote this book about the Nazis and the Nazi underground post-war, maybe you can find out, well, who this guy was. You wrote about Strickhold, you've written about this. Maybe you can narrow in on who this might have been. Maybe we can solve this problem that way.

• 2:52:29Speaker 03

  So, yeah, that's how it started. That's how relationships started with Whitley Strieber, was me looking for that. And it took years. I mean, it took decades, I would say, to find this, because a lot of those documents don't survive. Randolph was not, you know, forthcoming particularly on this either. So that was a problem. I wouldn't even know who to ask at Randolph to narrow this down. Maybe it happened off-site. You know, maybe it was something that was Strickhold, you know, was doing, having to do with psychiatry, having to do with mental manipulation.

• 2:52:59AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna ask, is this an MKUltra? Is this a bluebird?

• 2:53:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's come up in conversation, right? It's come up as a possibility.

• 2:53:07AJ Gentile?

  But you didn't know, nothing definitive?

• 2:53:08Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:53:09AJ Gentile?

  Where do you land opinion-wise?

• 2:53:11Speaker 03

  I had, well, I had a name. I had Whitley's definite insistence this was a Nazi. I wasn't so sure about SS necessarily, this could have been any Nazi or it could have just been no SS at all, it could have been something else completely. It could have been Gestapo, he mentioned Gestapo, I said, "That's not secret police, this is not what this is about." So, I started to investigate it, and that meant doing a lot of investigation in South America, you know, long distance for the most part. But there was a connection with Colombia for some reason. Now, a lot of people don't realize, there was a large Nazi presence in Colombia during the war as well, there were pro-Nazi sympathizers but also Nazi agents in Colombia, running stuff down there, and after the war, there was a post-war Nazi presence in Colombia.

• 2:53:54AJ Gentile?

  FBI was hunting Nazis in Colombia as well?

• 2:53:56Speaker 03

  Yes, they were.

• 2:53:57AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:58Speaker 03

  So I was following that up, and one thing led to another, a very long tedious process, as this kind of investigation is, but you will find a school, that was a kind of an international school but designed for German-speaking people only, for German-speaking students, and I started to peel back the layers of that, that got closed during the war mysteriously, no reason given, and then opened mysteriously after the war, no reason given, but enough after the war, not immediately after, sort of 1950s era-ish, 52, 53 maybe, and then I found that one of the guys there was, had the same name as the person Whitley was looking for, and he was a teacher at the place, and he was known for, you know, having the Nazi sympathizes, sympathies and everything else, but he was also involved

• 2:54:40Speaker 03

  in medicine in some way, whether it was psychiatry, psychology, or something like that. And so I managed to put it together, and I said, "Okay, well, this is Colombia, this was the school, this was the location, they were closed during the war, they reopened, this guy traveled back and forth, I know that much," and then it kind of, the trail goes kind of cold.

• 2:54:58AJ Gentile?

  What brought you to Colombia? What was the thread that pointed you down there?

• 2:55:02Speaker 03

  Well, that's just a long, that's a long story, it's like papers, it's documents, it's names found here, names found there, the link back to Colombia that way, and Colombia being kind of, I thought, like everybody would think Mexico or Argentina at first, right?

• 2:55:17AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:55:18Speaker 03

  Because I was looking for... I was looking for Nazi agents in Mexico at one point, crossing the border into Texas, back and forth, for another project I was working on that had nothing to do with this. And that led me, that opened up some documents and archives that I had been looking at, that I then went back to and looked at. But eventually, I got to Colombia. So that's what, and I started researching Nazis in Colombia because I had to do that, right? So that's why I look older than I am. Actually, I'm actually only 25 years old. But, you know, it's...

• 2:55:46AJ Gentile?

  So, and now we have to do this, if you have the, the, the energy. Operation Eagle Flight, ever hear of that? It's a theory about Hitler escaping.

• 2:55:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:59AJ Gentile?

  The U-boats, and I think part of that theory is Bariloche, is where he ends up, lives out his life, divorces Eva, new wife, that sort of thing. I was able to track down quite a bit of that, not Hitler himself, but, but there were U-boats bringing stuff down there, the sympathetic government, all of that. When I read that you ended up in Indonesia, I had never heard that.

• 2:56:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:56:26AJ Gentile?

  Can you connect those dots? And did, did Hitler make it out? Because I, I covered the jaw, the skull doesn't make sense, digging up the body, it's a mess.

• 2:56:36Speaker 03

  It's a mess. It is a mess, 100%. And I happen to know, I'd never met him, but through emails and phone calls, I know the archaeologist, who used to be the State Archaeologist of Connecticut, who had gone to Moscow to investigate what they claimed was Hitler's skull.

• 2:56:51AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:56:51Speaker 03

  Right? And he came back and said, "No, it's not."

• 2:56:54AJ Gentile?

  It was a, like a woman's skull?

• 2:56:56Speaker 03

  It was a woman's skull, right. And it wasn't Eva. He had enough information that he could do DNA testing, and he said, "No."

• 2:57:03AJ Gentile?

  And I think, then the Soviets stopped cooperating after that embarrassment, yeah.

• 2:57:06Speaker 03

  Because it was essential that they had the skull to their mythology. And, no, it's not. But anyway, yeah, that led me on a whole coup, just going to Indonesia. That Indonesian story is a whole story. You sure you have time before the break?

• 2:57:18AJ Gentile?

  I do, uh, you want to take a quick, we'll take a quick break and come back with that. It's too good.

• 2:57:22Speaker 03

  Whatever's comfortable for you. I'm, I'm easy.

• 2:57:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you are. We'll be right back. So we were talking about these Hitler escaping. And let's just get right to it. Do you think he did?

• 2:57:34Speaker 03

  There's, I think that the...

• 2:57:37Speaker 03

  There's enough evidence to suggest that he did that hasn't been investigated. I think they don't investigate it because they just say, "Well, he died in the bunker." The problem is, the eyewitnesses of that all have a different story. Right. He shot himself, he took poison. He shot Eva, Eva took poison. Eva took poison, then he shot her. So there's all these different stories. Was he shot, or did he take poison, or did he do both? How did that happen? Right. So there's enough of doubt there. But the doubt comes because the people that were captured, who knew what happened in the bunker, were split among the British, the Americans, and the Soviets. They all had their own witnesses telling them a different story. Yep. None of these stories matched. Right away, you know there's a problem.

• 2:58:22Speaker 03

  Right? So then, the second problem was burning the corpse. They say he took the corpse out outside of the bunker. They poured gasoline, they cremated it, end of story. And this is the Soviets. This is the Soviets. Well, that obviously didn't happen. No. The amount of fuel it takes to burn a corpse, not counting he and Eva at the same time. It's an enormous amount of fuel. It has to be tended. Nobody was doing that, they were being bombed. So they took the bodies out, they poured some gasoline, set a fire, that was it. Those bodies would be not necessarily 100% intact, but pretty much intact. Yep. You would have a lot of tissue to work with. You'd have a lot of skeletal material to work with and all of that. But according to Soviets, no, they didn't have any of that. They had his skull. Right? At one point, they said they had his skull.

• 2:59:07Speaker 03

  With the bullet wound in it, and that was the proof that he was dead. But then we found out, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB files were opened on this case, and they told a completely different story. They found bodies. They didn't find cremains. They didn't find ashes. They found intact bodies. Okay, that was number one. They had bodies. Now they're transporting these bodies. They don't know what to do with these bodies. Because this could be a rallying point for neo-Nazis, you know, whatever Nazis still existed, to have the body might be, trigger some kind of an uprising. Right. They gotta bury the bodies. Yes. They bury the bodies. Eh, like a week later, they dig them up and bury them, take them someplace else and bury them again. They do this a couple of times.

• 2:59:51AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:59:52Speaker 03

  And that's in their own records.

• 2:59:53AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:59:53Speaker 03

  No one's making fun of them. They're actually telling you, say, "This is what we did."

• 2:59:56AJ Gentile?

  And why did they do that?

• 2:59:58Speaker 03

  They didn't know what to do with it. They kept giving different, they kept getting different commands.

• 3:00:02AJ Gentile?

  Because it was like, "We're waiting on orders, bury them here, and we'll come back and..."

• 3:00:06Speaker 03

  Right. We'll come back and get them.

• 3:00:06AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:07Speaker 03

  And that's what they had to do. They came back and got them. They buried them again, and they buried them again. They finally buried them under what would be in East Germany, a KGB headquarters, in a parking lot. The parking lot paved over their graves.

• 3:00:18AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:00:18Speaker 03

  And they had this KGB headquarters. So that's where the bodies remained. Okay. There's also the dental records.

• 3:00:26AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna ask you about that.

• 3:00:28Speaker 03

  This was so strange. Both Hitler and Eva went to the dentist in Berlin to have new dentures made. Hitler had notoriously bad teeth.

• 3:00:37AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:00:37Speaker 03

  He only had like one or two teeth left in his head.

• 3:00:39AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:00:40Speaker 03

  So he had to use dentures. He went and got new dentures a month before Berlin fell. What? You're in the bunker.

• 3:00:49AJ Gentile?

  You're in the bunker.

• 3:00:50Speaker 03

  There's bombs falling everywhere.

• 3:00:51AJ Gentile?

  You've lost the war for a month.

• 3:00:53Speaker 03

  And you're getting new dentures?

• 3:00:54AJ Gentile?

  New dentures.

• 3:00:56Speaker 03

  Eternal optimist.

• 3:00:57AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:00:58Speaker 03

  Eva, you get a pair of dentures too.

• 3:00:59AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:00Speaker 03

  In fact, get two.

• 3:01:01AJ Gentile?

  The food's great in Nuremberg. Let's...

• 3:01:05Speaker 03

  So two sets for each person, according to the dentist. Two sets of dentures.

• 3:01:11Speaker 03

  What would you need two sets of dentures for? Unless you're gonna leave one set with the bodies and take another set with you.

• 3:01:17AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:01:19Speaker 03

  They found the dentist, that's what the dentist said. "Look, I can only tell you what happened." They came, they got two sets of dentures, you know? "Are these Hitler's teeth?" "Yes, those are the dentures that I made." "That's Eva Braun also." But you know, they made two, right? Nick's nay on the two.

• 3:01:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:01:34Speaker 03

  So that was a problem. Now, a British researcher went and did all of this. It wasn't, you know, some weird conspiracy theorist. This is a British researcher saying, "There's some discrepancies here, man. I gotta find out what this means." Okay, the other story is, well, Hitler could not possibly have left Berlin at the end. Except Hanna Reich, his famous favorite pilot, flew into Berlin, right at that, at the end, right? Flew right in, no problem into Berlin, visited with Hitler, hung out with him for a while, got in the plane, flew back. As far as we know, flew back alone. We don't know.

• 3:02:05AJ Gentile?

  Right, right. But we do know he was there.

• 3:02:07Speaker 03

  We know he was there.

• 3:02:08AJ Gentile?

  We do.

• 3:02:09Speaker 03

  Yep. So now what? Right? What's the next avenue of escape, right? So all the stories that we have, the bunker story and everything else, yeah, it's, it's, we prefer that to be the story, right? We prefer that's, that's the way. Maybe he made the two dentures because he was planning this whole thing and maybe he didn't make it out in time. That's a possibility. The problem is, the Soviets do not have the skull. What happened was, around, I'm losing track of the dates, when that would have happened, around 1980 or so, whenever it was that, um, the KGB, uh, guy became, you know, before he became premier of the Soviet Union. Anyway, I, I get back to it in a second.

• 3:02:53AJ Gentile?

  Were we talking in drop off?

• 3:02:55Speaker 03

  No, before Andropov, the other one, um, Andropov was later.

• 3:03:00AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:03:01Speaker 03

  I think, okay, it might be, Yuri Andropov?

• 3:03:04AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it might have been him then. Um, the same time that my Indonesia story is taking place, this other story is taking place. Some guy, some weird guy in Indonesia dies, sort of unexpectedly, in the town of Surabaya on the coast, the northern coast of Indonesia. He dies. Nobody pays much attention to that particular death. It becomes important later. The same time this guy dies, within a month, I think, Andropov, I guess it was Andropov, orders the KGB to dig up the bodies of Eva and Hitler, of Adolf, and really destroy them this time.

• 3:03:46AJ Gentile?

  And this time we mean it, yeah.

• 3:03:48Speaker 03

  This time we need those bodies gone. They dug up the bodies, they took them to the bank of a river, and they did a complete full cremation, the ashes into the river, the whole thing. They allegedly kept the skull of Hitler with the bullet hole. As we know now, that's not true. That's not what they have. But for some reason, he took that particular moment to say, we have to destroy this, get rid of the evidence. So, they did.

• 3:04:13Speaker 03

  Testimony of the eyewitnesses all contradicts the dental records, the sightings. My problem is the trip to South America. I am not on board with him going to South America surrounded by people who would have dimed him to save their own ass, quite frankly, right? He was like the commodity.

• 3:04:34AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:04:34Speaker 03

  Everybody wanted this guy and they wanted him dead. So would Hitler have trusted his henchmen? Would he have trusted, you know, an Eichmann? Would he have trusted a Mengele? Any of these guys, right?

• 3:04:45AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:04:46Speaker 03

  A Klaus Barbie?

• 3:04:47AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:04:47Speaker 03

  These guys that we know were in South America, would he have trusted them to keep him safe?

• 3:04:52AJ Gentile?

  Would he have trusted Peron?

• 3:04:55Speaker 03

  Peron, he might have trusted.

• 3:04:57AJ Gentile?

  I think he might have trusted.

• 3:04:59Speaker 03

  Might have trusted Peron. But then Peron would really have had to keep him under wraps from all the other Nazis. He would have to go out of his way. Look what happened to Eichmann.

• 3:05:07AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, yes. Oh.

• 3:05:09Speaker 03

  So that was Argentina, you know, so that's, I don't know. But I think going to South America would have cost him. But Indonesia, there were things I didn't know until I started looking in that story. And then I thought, well, how come I didn't know this? One of them was Hitler's closest friend was a guy called Walter Hevel, H E W E L. Walter Hevel. He was known as Surabaya Wali among the Nazis because why? He had been on the march for the Beer Hall Putsch with Hitler. He was an old guard guy. He was with him right at the beginning. He was a kid at the time. He was a teenager. He marched with Hitler. He was arrested with Hitler in 1923 when they had the Putsch, the attempted Putsch.

• 3:05:53AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:53Speaker 03

  Okay, he was in, he was in prison. He gets out of prison kind of early because he's a kid. He winds up in England for a short time. He gets a job with a tea trader, some guy who sells tea in Indonesia. So Wally Havel winds up in Indonesia. And when he's in Indonesia, what does he do? He establishes Nazi Party offices everywhere.

• 3:06:14AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 3:06:15Speaker 03

  All over Java, from one end to the other. Jakarta, which was not known as Jakarta, Batavia in those days. Surabaya, everywhere. He's opening up these offices. There's photographs of these Nazi Party meetings in Indonesia in the 1930s. Right? So this is Surabaya Wally. He has all these stories about Indonesia, how great it is, and how safe it would be for Hitler because they're Muslim. And, you know, they don't care about any of the stuff going on here. You might be, you might be a hero to these people, you don't know. But you'll be anonymous because they don't know what's going on.

• 3:06:44AJ Gentile?

  I'm annoyed that I don't know any of this. I never heard this theory.

• 3:06:47Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:06:47AJ Gentile?

  I hadn't heard about the gold either, which I, which I think is documented, yeah?

• 3:06:51Speaker 03

  The documented, yeah. Gosses.

• 3:06:53AJ Gentile?

  Gosses, correct? Exactly.

• 3:06:56Speaker 03

  So, yeah, it is. So Walter Havel, I'm thinking, well, this is outstanding. So Hitler would have known about Indonesia because why? Havel was always telling stories about Indonesia. He was regaling everybody around with these stories. And Havel had no other job but to hang out with Hitler. He was called ambassador without portfolio, which is like, you know, a bullshit job. So he just sat there and hung out with Hitler.

• 3:07:19AJ Gentile?

  Entourage.

• 3:07:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was entourage. And he was really like a tall guy. He was, you know, very dignified kind of guy. But he told all these rabble stories about growing up and all this stuff, the tea plantations and stuff. Now I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, well, this is really strange. Indonesia and Nazis, that's kind of a stretch. And then I find out about the, the Freundeskreis Himmler. Himmler's friendship circle. Himmler, not Hitler, but Himmler. Himmler had what they called a friendship circle. And these were wealthy industrialists who were kind of financing Himmler and his stuff. Right? When the Nazi Party couldn't have enough money, these guys pooled their resources. And Himmler wanted to do this, I want to do that. I want to buy Wavelsberg Castle. Okay, no problem.

• 3:08:03Speaker 03

  So this were people, and this same Freundeskreis, friendship circle, then went and they lobbied for Hitler to be reinstated as chancellor. They went to the president of Germany. Hitler had lost the election.

• 3:08:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:08:16Speaker 03

  In the Reichstag. But he was still alive because the Freundeskreis said, no, we need Hitler. He'll, he'll protect us from the unions and the communists. And so they bent and they put Hitler in charge. The Freundeskreis was composed of most names that people would know from the German companies.

• 3:08:34Speaker 03

  But one of the people that was there was from Indonesia. This guy was a major shareholder, he was the owner of that company, basically. And he was based in Indonesia, outside of Indonesia, in a town called Bandung, which is where all the wealthy people hang out. And if you're based in Jakarta, you live in Bandung. It's kind of cool there, it's nicer, the weather is better. So he was based there in Bandung. And there's a cemetery for Nazi U-boat people in that town. You can go to that cemetery, there's a cemetery for U-boat people.

• 3:09:07AJ Gentile?

  Did they set up these mini German cities like they did in Argentina?

• 3:09:10Speaker 03

  No, it wasn't the same like in Chile or Argentina.

• 3:09:12AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:09:12Speaker 03

  It wasn't a German city, it was just kind of quiet. But, you know, you can go and visit the U-boat cemetery. Why? Because there were German U-boats all over Indonesia during World War II. They were transporting stuff back and forth, oil, rubber, all the things they needed for the war effort was going back and forth. And then the Indonesian side needed other stuff. The Japanese were getting stuff from the Nazis. So there was a major trade route. So the Nazis were very, very much there. In Singapore, Malaya would have been taken over by the Japanese. You had German U-boats, and you had German U-boats all over Indonesia, all over the port cities. And there was a Nazi party there. And during the war, of course, the Dutch were the colonial powers in Indonesia. They were taken over by the Third Reich in the Netherlands. So now the Japanese were putting people in jail who were Dutch, right?

• 3:09:57Speaker 03

  So they were working with the Nazis to do this. And the Japanese were saying, "I don't know why we're putting these people in jail. We don't put just normal people. Our war is with, you know, our war is with ideologies, not with people."

• 3:10:08AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:10:10Speaker 03

  They said, "No, you gotta put these guys in jail." So the woman who became known as the Happy Hooker back in the 70s, she wrote these very risque sort of biographical accounts of her life. She was one of those people who was sent to the camps in Indonesia. She was Dutch, but she was sent to Indonesia in the camps. You know, she was there already with her family. So there's a lot of connections. You start pulling this apart and it becomes insane.

• 3:10:35AJ Gentile?

  Were there any sightings of Hitler there?

• 3:10:37Speaker 03

  Well, that's where I'm getting to.

• 3:10:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:10:39Speaker 03

  This guy that died in Surabaya was supposed to have been Hitler, according to the Indonesians.

• 3:10:45AJ Gentile?

  What year, what age?

• 3:10:46Speaker 03

  Much later. I mean, he died in around 1970 something, I think.

• 3:10:51AJ Gentile?

  Right. See, that's the thing is this is true. This is a massive failure of every intelligence agency on the planet.

• 3:10:57Speaker 03

  Well, this is, this is the thing. So I saw a picture of this guy. When I was in Indonesia, they kept talking about this and I thought, this is bullshit. This is not true. Hitler died in the bunker. You know, I was sort of married to that idea for a long time because he died in April 30th, Wall Purchase Night. You know, cool. Makes sense. I like that. I was happy. Don't disturb me.

• 3:11:15AJ Gentile?

  It's neat.

• 3:11:15Speaker 03

  It's neat. I don't want to be disturbed. But then they came and said, no, you gotta look at this. You gotta look at it seriously. You really have to. So they showed me a photograph of this guy and I said, that's not Hitler. It's this thin, skinny little looking guy with this mustache. He had the mustache, but that's about it. Then I saw a photograph of Hitler in the trenches in World War I. I'm thinking, oh my God, these guys could be brothers.

• 3:11:34AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 3:11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:11:35AJ Gentile?

  Because he's kind of a scrawny kid?

• 3:11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. They were both kind of the same. The head shape was the same. The earlobes looked like they were the same. And they said, oh, no, we have his passport. Oh, well, that should tell me something. Could be fake, but at least it'll tell me something. Oh, the guy was born in Austria like the same year. And I'm thinking, oh, no.

• 3:11:53AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 3:11:53Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. This, this can't be right. You know. So I started to think, I started to doubt myself and I said, maybe, maybe? But they had his diary or a notebook of some kind, which is addresses and a diary. And it was written in Gablesburg shorthand, which is a famous shorthand that was famously studied by Eva Braun when she wanted to be a secretary. She wrote Gablesburg. And it's shorthand. If I'm running a diary, would I write it in shorthand or would I dictate it to somebody to take it down in shorthand? So I'm thinking, okay, this is starting to look more real.

• 3:12:28AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:12:28Speaker 03

  You know, and then there was an account of an Indonesian military doctor who visited this particular guy while he was alive at his weird clinic on a remote island in Indonesia.

• 3:12:40AJ Gentile?

  Well, did you authenticate the diary?

• 3:12:42Speaker 03

  I'm getting to that. Yeah.

• 3:12:43AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:12:45Speaker 03

  The diary is full of stuff that really blew my mind, but anyway. So this guy goes and he visits, he says this guy and his wife, they're very strange. They're German, obviously they speak to each other in German.

• 3:13:00Speaker 03

  She kept calling him Dolph, but that's not his name according to their records. His name was George. Why is she calling him Dolph? And this kind of stuff was, and he was kind of, you know, spooked by it. He goes back, he was not like a World War II buff or anything, but it was like, it's just strange people. He goes back and then he reads this article on the fake Hitler diaries. If you remember that, it was back in the day.

• 3:13:23AJ Gentile?

  I do.

• 3:13:23Speaker 03

  There was this, you know, they faked the diaries. Really well done fake, but it was a fake. And because it was in the news in Indonesia, he saw all these photographs, he saw all this stuff and he thought, "Holy Christ, that's the guy that I saw." You know? So he died in Surabaya. He was, he never would leave his little island. He was on the island of Lombok, which is kind of far east of Bali. I mean, it's, in those days, it was remote. Monitor lizards this big and stuff, it was that kind of, you know?

• 3:13:53AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:53Speaker 03

  And, and it was next to the Komodo dragon island, it's like right next door. So we're talking out there. Why would this guy, this, this, why would he wind up there? What's the whole point? You know? So he put it all together and he said, he went to visit the widow because he died. He had converted to Islam. His wife left him, the German wife left him, went back to Germany, which I found interesting.

• 3:14:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:14:17Speaker 03

  He remarried, he married one of the people who worked at the clinic, a nice, sweet little Indonesian lady. But in order to do that, he had to convert to Islam. So he did then, there's photographs, right?

• 3:14:27AJ Gentile?

  There is?

• 3:14:28Speaker 03

  Yes, there's photographs of him with his, wearing Indonesian, you know, outfit and the wife and all the rest of it.

• 3:14:32AJ Gentile?

  Hand tremors or anything?

• 3:14:34Speaker 03

  Well, photographs, not video.

• 3:14:35AJ Gentile?

  I'm just wondering, is he hiding his hand like he always?

• 3:14:37Speaker 03

  Maybe, I don't know, I couldn't, couldn't tell from that. But I think by that time he was off drugs, so maybe, you know?

• 3:14:42AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:43Speaker 03

  But he received this emergency, he had to go to Surabaya and he hated to leave. He would never leave, not even to go to Jakarta. He would always stay in the island. He never left, except he went to Bali. And he went to Bali during 1965, during the massacres of the Chinese, where they killed hundreds of thousands of people. And he went there happy and came back happy.

• 3:15:01AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:15:02Speaker 03

  He told his wife, you know, "We're finally getting somewhere." Right? That's according to his wife's testimony, his Indonesian wife.

• 3:15:10Speaker 03

  And I, there's more to that story. So anyway, so he, he did all that. Um, he died. He, he went to Surabaya for this emergency thing, didn't last 24 hours. He's in Surabaya, he's dead as a doornail. Nobody knows why. They say heart attack, they don't know. He's buried in Surabaya, in that town. I know the grave, I know the cemetery. So I said, I'm gonna go and take a look. So I go to the cemetery.

• 3:15:41Speaker 03

  It's, it's an Islamic cemetery, which is distinct, has distinct special nature than, than uh, cemeteries you might be used to here.

• 3:15:48AJ Gentile?

  Islamic cemetery?

• 3:15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:15:50AJ Gentile?

  I didn't think they did that.

• 3:15:52Speaker 03

  Muslims, they, they bury for sure. Yeah. And they're, they're very specific shaped, um, headstones and everything else. And he's, he's buried that way. So I went to look at the cemetery and a guy, there's a guy there, there's a guy walking around the cemetery. "I'll, I'll take you. I know who you're looking for." I had the name written, you know, printed out. "Oh yeah, I know who." He takes me there and I'm walking through the cemetery. We get to it and he gets to the cemetery and he shows his hands and he says, "Hitler."

• 3:16:19AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:16:22Speaker 03

  So I'm looking at him saying, "Okay." And there's the gravestone. The gravestone was missing data. Now, if you know, I, I spent a lot of time in, in Muslim countries. The, the dates are very important. Birth, like they are here. Birth of date, date of birth, date of death. That's like a given, that's always there. That wasn't in this case.

• 3:16:42AJ Gentile?

  You grew up in cen- cemeteries. You were always...

• 3:16:44Speaker 03

  I was, yeah, basically. I was blessing graves. I'm used to cemeteries. Yeah. I'm used to it.

• 3:16:50AJ Gentile?

  So no dates?

• 3:16:51Speaker 03

  There were no dates.

• 3:16:53AJ Gentile?

  Just George, what?

• 3:16:55Speaker 03

  George Anton Poch, P-O-C-H-O-U-M-L-A-T-C-H.

• 3:16:59AJ Gentile?

  That name does ring a bell, maybe from your book.

• 3:17:02Speaker 03

  So he was, he's buried there. His, his name is there as, as I believe. I have photographs of it and I posted them, so they're there. But the dates were not inscribed on the stone. They were written in later, in, in like with the magic marker. Doesn't make sense.

• 3:17:17AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:17:18Speaker 03

  So then I'm talking to the, to the guy. And he says, "Oh, you know, people come in from abroad every once in a while. Foreigners. They come from Europe and they stand here and they're at the grave. They have some ceremony of some kind and then they go back." He says, "They come here maybe every year or so on the anniversary and they show up." "Who the hell is showing up for this guy?" Eventually, I managed to see the diary, or enough of it, that I could start to make sense of it, and translate the shorthand, the Gabelsberger. I found somebody who knew it and could help translate it for me into German and then back into English. This might have been the actual grave of George Anton Poch.

• 3:18:00Speaker 03

  That might very well have been, because this document is him running from the authorities, running from the Allies.

• 3:18:05AJ Gentile?

  That's the diary?

• 3:18:06Speaker 03

  That's the diary. And his hatred for the Allies and his contempt for Jews, it's all in there, right? But this guy, as I later found out, and one of my other friends, then had a missing piece of the puzzle, and they said, "Oh, my grandmother knows this story and sent me," or grandma, I think it was his grandmother, "and had newspaper clippings when they were looking for him in Austria back in 1945, 46." They were gonna put this guy in jail, he and his wife. They were both wanted war criminals.

• 3:18:35AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:18:36Speaker 03

  So they wind up in Indonesia, not in Argentina. So here's a leg of the Rat Line we didn't know existed.

• 3:18:43AJ Gentile?

  That's right, the Rat, that's another Rat Line.

• 3:18:45Speaker 03

  That's another Rat Line. We didn't know this existed. We thought it was Argentina and that's it, right? Or at least South America, Bolivia, Chile, whatever. But Indonesia, who thought?

• 3:18:53AJ Gentile?

  Did the diary tell us how he got out?

• 3:18:56Speaker 03

  Evidently, kinda. He escaped across the border into northern Italy, which was the major stopping off place for the Rat Lines.

• 3:19:04AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:19:05Speaker 03

  Because you went to northern Italy, then you went across Italy. And he had the names and addresses of the Rat Line stations. They were there, I could verify them, right? Including a few new ones we didn't know about. So, the churches for the monastery route, they're in there.

• 3:19:22AJ Gentile?

  They are.

• 3:19:23Speaker 03

  They're in there, in his handwriting, or somebody's handwriting, but in ancient handwriting.

• 3:19:27AJ Gentile?

  Because if this is a fake, this is very convoluted to get this far.

• 3:19:30Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I'm sure it's not a fake. I've seen the passports as well, everything, the real, the originals. So I know this is all real, this all exists. So it's there. And there's a whole other element of the Rat line we didn't know existed, and that ties into the gold, it ties into 1965, it ties into the overthrow of Sicardo, all the rest of it. This guy didn't have to be Hitler, but he was a damn good imitation of one, because of what he managed to have, to cause happen. And they wanted, they were looking for him, the Allies were looking for this guy. They wanted him. His wife was a famous anthropologist. She was at one point head of the Austrian Anthropological Society. She worked with the Nazi authorities in the Netherlands, because she wanted specimens of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews to find out what the genetic difference might be.

• 3:20:15Speaker 03

  She had this whole plan worked out. With a guy who was executed at Nuremberg.

• 3:20:21AJ Gentile?

  Do we have documentation of the Allies looking in Indonesia?

• 3:20:25Speaker 03

  Indonesia, no. Looking for him in Europe, yes.

• 3:20:28AJ Gentile?

  Yes, and South America, yes?

• 3:20:30Speaker 03

  No, South America, they weren't looking for him there. They were looking for him in Europe. They thought he was still somewhere in Europe. And he remained in Europe until like 1952. He didn't go out, and that mystified me. Why didn't the guy take off? He had all the documentation, he had all the contact information. He knew exactly how to get out. They got out through Genoa. My people. They got out that way. It's like, why didn't he go? Why didn't he go? There was a reason. Suddenly, he gets very active, and it's in the passports and it's in the documentation. He leaves his nice, comfortable hideout in northern Italy, in the Tyrol. He leaves that, goes into Switzerland.

• 3:21:11Speaker 03

  For a little while, couple of days, buy some tickets in the Netherlands.

• 3:21:15AJ Gentile?

  Switzerland was friendly to the party, I believe?

• 3:21:18Speaker 03

  Quite.

• 3:21:18AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:21:19Speaker 03

  And of course, there were large accounts.

• 3:21:20AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:21:21Speaker 03

  He goes into Switzerland, then he goes to this port in the Netherlands, boards a ship, and the ship goes very leisurely through the Suez Canal and everything else to finally to Indonesia, to Batavia, to Jakarta. He and his wife, Hella Poch, Hella, very famous name in Austrian anthropology circles. So they both wind up there in the 50s. They go and to that bank account, right? They open up these accounts, then they go to this remote island in the middle of nowhere. Why wouldn't they have stayed in? I mean, these guys, these were people from Germany, from Austria, right? They wanted their schmalz. They wanted whatever, right? They wanted, they want this, they had a lifestyle they wanted.

• 3:22:04Speaker 03

  No, now they're in, you know, far away. So, and she couldn't take it after a while. Evidently, she went home. Now, you're not going to believe this part of the story, because I don't either. I'm in Costco or someplace. I'm in, I'm in one of these places. This is in way in the 2000s already. I've already published the first book on a rat line on this guy. So I published Rat Line, that's come out in 2000 something. And I get a call on my cellphone. Now, as I mentioned, I'm an introvert. I don't answer the phone. I don't want anybody to have that number. I don't give it to anybody. It's an unlisted as far as it can be. And then the phone rings, it's a number I don't know, and on a whim, I answer it,

• 3:22:49Speaker 03

  because I ordinarily wouldn't, ordinarily would not. I answer the phone, and it's this woman calling me from Pennsylvania. And she says, "You're writing about Georg Poch and Hella Poch?" I said, "Yeah." "Oh, I know them. They were family. Hella Poch was family. Yeah, she came back after the war. After Indonesia, she came back to Austria. I can tell you stories. Georg, very unpleasant human being."

• 3:23:19Speaker 03

  She's telling us on the phone.

• 3:23:20AJ Gentile?

  Well, how are you just chatting with her? Aren't you like, how did you get this number? Who is this?

• 3:23:23Speaker 03

  Exactly. She's, don't worry about it, right?

• 3:23:26AJ Gentile?

  Don't worry about it.

• 3:23:27Speaker 03

  So then she, you know, she asked for an address. Or I figured if I give her an address or whatever. But she sends me, you know, a letter. And she sends me some details on this story. And I can't believe it. That Hella Pokes, like niece or something, I guess the relationship might be, is now telling me the story of what she knows. And she says, yes, it was Hella. And yes, she came back. And yes, she was, you know, what she said she was. But she came back and she was very quiet. You know, she wasn't sure if they were still looking or not for her, right? So she came back and she lived under the radar. She had been a very famous anthropologist, published everywhere, very important. Published a lot about the Middle East, a lot about all parts of different parts of the world.

• 3:24:07Speaker 03

  Her first husband was a famous anthropologist, the first guy to use tape to record songs in the field, you know, to record speech and everything else in Africa.

• 3:24:18AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:24:19Speaker 03

  He was like a major, major influence. He died kind of young. And then she married, I think it was his brother, same last name. I was always mystified by that, but they cleared it up. Yeah, it was the same family. So she married this guy. And this guy became the chief medical officer of Salzburg in Austria. So as chief medical officer, he was the guy responsible for putting people out of their misery. Right? He was the person responsible for the war against the life not worthy of living program.

• 3:24:48AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:24:49Speaker 03

  So people who had mental disabilities, physical disabilities were exterminated. He was in charge of that program. That's why the authorities wanted him. When the war was over, they were looking for him. And he found out they were looking for him. He had been questioned once by the authorities. And then he said, that's it, I'm out of here. He wrote that in his diary, I'm gone. He and his wife left, but they split up. And they went into the Tyrol separately. And they finally met at the Tyrol because traveling together was too obvious. So they split up, they went to the Tyrol, they met in the Tyrol. And that's where they stayed for a number of years, which to me is still mystifying.

• 3:25:24AJ Gentile?

  It's very strange.

• 3:25:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. They could have gotten out, they could have wound up in Argentina, I mean, immediately. The paperwork was all there. They even had names of Spanish tutors to learn Spanish. It's in that diary. Plus, they had a couple of other addresses that opened my eyes. There was a museum, I think, in Rome that they were using as a transit point as well.

• 3:25:44AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 3:25:45Speaker 03

  So, all this stuff was there.

• 3:25:46AJ Gentile?

  This is compelling. If George is really him, what does that mean for us in history? What can we do with that information?

• 3:25:55Speaker 03

  Well, there's two things. If George was George, that's already a major thing. There's a story there that has not been told. The Nazi involvement in the overthrow of Sicerno. That's one story. The other story is the rat lines to Asia.

• 3:26:07AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:26:08Speaker 03

  We're all looking in the wrong place, like in Indiana Jones. So, you know, there's that. All the people we haven't found, maybe that's where they are. The Nazi gold story is a story that won't go away. Okay, there's been some people who've written about that at length. They've been tracing that all over Asia. And the Japanese gold as well. It's a whole story. So, there's that. But what if he was Hitler? What if that was really the story? That's a whole other... That's, of course, as you said, a huge failing of intelligence or deliberate.

• 3:26:39AJ Gentile?

  Or deliberate is where I lean.

• 3:26:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:26:47AJ Gentile?

  I don't know how to even process or sit with that. Because no one's looking there.

• 3:26:53Speaker 03

  No one's looking, no. And, you know, the Indonesians, they've kind of... I get it. They don't want to talk about the problems that they had in 65. They don't want to talk about the problems they had in 98. There's a lot of bad blood there. You know, there's a lot of water under the bridge that, you know, they don't really want to go back and look at that anymore.

• 3:27:11AJ Gentile?

  No, they'd be happy if that goes away.

• 3:27:12Speaker 03

  To forget it. They want to have a nice, peaceful, happy life now. And dredging this up is something that they're fighting. But some groups are out there trying, no, we have to address this. We have to, you know, we have to face it. We have to talk about it. But if you throw the Nazis into this pot, it becomes a whole other story.

• 3:27:26AJ Gentile?

  And Israel hasn't looked into this? Because, boy, they looked everywhere.

• 3:27:29Speaker 03

  I have no idea if they had. But, you know, now that you mention it, that's the story that I wanted to tell about Colonia Dignidad. That was the piece that was missing. Israel looking for war criminals. Because when I was in Chile and I was looking at Colonia Dignidad, I just found out about two years ago that Mossad had sent agents already to Chile at the same time, the same month and year that I was there, looking for Walter Routh. And Walter Routh was the guy who created the mobile gas vans. He was one of their major person on their list. They wanted captured. And now we have video of Mossad agents staking out the house where Walter Routh was in Santiago, while I was down in Colonia Dignidad the same week,

• 3:28:14Speaker 03

  looking for Nazis down there.

• 3:28:15AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:28:15Speaker 03

  That's what they meant when they told the driver, "They're here. You need to know how many and where they are."

• 3:28:20AJ Gentile?

  So they weren't saying, "There are Jews here," as just like, they meant agents.

• 3:28:24Speaker 03

  They meant Mossad.

• 3:28:25AJ Gentile?

  They meant Mossad is here. Because that is dangerous.

• 3:28:29Speaker 03

  And that I found out only recently. So much I've only found out recently about that trip in seventy-nine. It's not funny, you know?

• 3:28:35AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:28:35Speaker 03

  And when I went after trying to get people interested in this story in seventy-nine, and nobody wanted to hear it. And I went to a lot of the, I went to some of the Jewish agencies. I went to the Simon Wiesenthal people.

• 3:28:46AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:46Speaker 03

  Right? I went to them and said, you know, "I got this thing happening. These guys should know." "No, it's okay. We know there's Germans down there. We know, nothing to look at." I found out later, this was a deliberate decision by Israel. They didn't want to piss off Chile. They were in business with Chile. They were trying to get some deals done. They were kind of warming up the relationship between the two countries. Doing something like Colonia Dignidad, spilling that all over the newspapers would have been bad. Getting Walter Routh privately? Okay, they could see that. One guy, take him out. Maybe take him out right there and call it a day, call it a day, and nobody knows who did it. One thing. But making a big deal and going after Colonia Dignidad and making a major investigation? No, they didn't want to do it.

• 3:29:31Speaker 03

  And I found that out much later.

• 3:29:33AJ Gentile?

  And I find that hard to digest, actually.

• 3:29:36Speaker 03

  They had so much trouble with Eichmann.

• 3:29:38AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:29:39Speaker 03

  Everybody criticizing them over Eichmann, going to a sovereign country, kidnapping the guy, taking him back. They didn't want to go through that again.

• 3:29:45AJ Gentile?

  That's true. And I feel like there's got to be America's fingerprints on that, too.

• 3:29:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:29:49AJ Gentile?

  Saying, "Take it easy. Take it easy."

• 3:29:52Speaker 03

  Could be, sure.

• 3:29:53AJ Gentile?

  Um.

• 3:29:54Speaker 03

  Especially after the overthrow.

• 3:29:56AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:29:56Speaker 03

  Now that Pinochet was in charge.

• 3:29:57AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:29:58Speaker 03

  Don't rock the boat.

• 3:29:58AJ Gentile?

  Don't rock the boat. So.

• 3:30:02AJ Gentile?

  How does a, I'm shaken. How does, how does a Nazi researcher researching occultism go into UFOs and consciousness? What's the consciousness connection now? That's, now, now is not a leap.

• 3:30:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:30:20AJ Gentile?

  But at that time, it would have been. Only, only Jacques Faure, I think, was talking about that.

• 3:30:24Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 3:30:27AJ Gentile?

  And this is leading into my question about cargo cult, which I love.

• 3:30:32Speaker 03

  Back, you know, during the 60s, I read a lot of, I guess you'd call it, popular anthropology and popular psychology, psychiatry. I read a lot of R.D. Lang, who wrote The Politics of Experience, a great book, you know, sort of mind-blowing kind of book at the time. Everybody was talking about it then. I read Victor Turner, I read a lot of The Standard, like Margaret Mead, like the Standard stuff, right? Because it was just interesting. So I used to read that, and then we would discuss it. We had, I had friends in, in Brooklyn Heights, we would meet and drink coffee like 14 hours and just, you know, at a coffee shop there and, you know, in those days, you could, you could do that. And so we would just hang out and talk about these things, right? We had a lot of cross-fertilization where that was concerned.

• 3:31:14Speaker 03

  So I found that kind of stuff fascinating, and I had exposure to different points of view. You know, people were artists, they were writers, they were musicians, so it was a kind of, there was different perspectives in all of this. And I think that, that contributed to it somewhat. And the fact that I'm autodidact, right? So I had not gone to college. I didn't go to college until the 21st century. So I had been, you know, self-taught on everything. And when you're self-taught, you read whatever you want to read, you don't care.

• 3:31:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:31:41Speaker 03

  There's no, there's no organization to it at all. So I read a lot of stuff. And so you eventually, you'll, you'll run into John Keel.

• 3:31:48AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:31:48Speaker 03

  You'll run into Valet, you have to.

• 3:31:50AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:31:50Speaker 03

  And then you run into weird Nazi occult books, right? And weird, you know, other things that are, people are telling you different stuff that you can't believe. But you start putting things together in a way that's kind of sub rosa, you know, it's right under the table.

• 3:32:01AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:32:02Speaker 03

  And you, you kind of think that there's connections to things, and you can't, can't quite put your finger on it. And then when weird stuff happens to you, as it happened to me, the whole church thing.

• 3:32:16Speaker 03

  That's a consciousness thing, right? That's all about ritual. It's about how you're dressing, the effect it has on people. They immediately make certain assumptions about you.

• 3:32:26AJ Gentile?

  Symbolism.

• 3:32:27Speaker 03

  Symbolism, very much so. So symbolism is like a major thing, right? So I was reading all kinds of, you know, sort of au-très kind of literature in that area. Reading about liminal experiences. So you have Victor Turner talking about, you know, there's the, there's this place which is regular. This is a sacred place and there's a spot between.

• 3:32:44AJ Gentile?

  Right, the transition.

• 3:32:45Speaker 03

  The transition between the two. And that was, you know, very fascinating stuff. And you read Jung because in the 60s you have to read Jung.

• 3:32:52AJ Gentile?

  And his synchronicity story.

• 3:32:53Speaker 03

  The synchronicity story is very important. So all of this, and, and direct experience of weird stuff makes you think that there is something more to everything than meets the eye. If you're living like an ordinary life, God love you because if you can, if you can lead an ordinary life without having these experiences, without being introduced to something different, except maybe it's a nightmare or, you know, a spooky sound one day or something and that's it and you forget about it, that's great, right? But if you live in a world where weird things happen to you all the time, you tend to pay attention.

• 3:33:31AJ Gentile?

  I'm glad you said that because you're one of those people. Yesterday I spoke to Mark, he's one of those people with all these experiences. People listen and they're like, "Oh, I wish that stuff would happen to me." You kind of don't.

• 3:33:41Speaker 03

  Right, you're right.

• 3:33:42AJ Gentile?

  You kind of don't.

• 3:33:43Speaker 03

  You kind of don't, because it will change your life.

• 3:33:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, because now you're looking, always looking.

• 3:33:49Speaker 03

  Right, you're always looking. You're always sensitive to it, you know when it happens. Yeah, that's what I, that's what I mean. God love you if you don't have this because you're, you're kind of secure, you know? And if you're listening to this, to this particular broadcast right now, there's like spooky stuff happening, right? And you're listening to all these things happening, but it's, there's an entertainment value aspect to it.

• 3:34:08AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:34:09Speaker 03

  And if it stays that way, that's cool, right? But there's some of you listening that you're gonna hear this and it's gonna resonate with something that's happened to you.

• 3:34:17AJ Gentile?

  It will.

• 3:34:18Speaker 03

  And it's happening to you now or it's happening to you later, it will happen to you. It has happened to you in the past and now you're starting to put things together. And that's when it gets a little tricky. You can go off. The handle completely. And you can say, wow, I'm talking to God, you know. Um, or I'm the incarnation of, you know, Katulu. You know, all those things are possible. Happened to me. But, seriously speaking, things like this happen and you take them too seriously. You can take, you can identify with them too much.

• 3:34:45AJ Gentile?

  That's a good point.

• 3:34:46Speaker 03

  Because what happens then is you close off to the rest of the experience. You don't want to do that. Once you've got this ball rolling, you might as well see it through. If you close it and you say, no, this means this, you've missed the boat. You're, you're, you're deluding yourself, really. Because there's so many other things that will talk to you, that will expand and elaborate on what you're experiencing, that make it more clear, make it more obvious what's going on. You'll feel a bit more comfortable with it later on as well, eventually. But you'll able to, to put it together and say, this is happening for this reason. Now I'm beginning to understand why this is going on.

• 3:35:19AJ Gentile?

  That's a good point. You have to walk that line between wanting it and seeing something that's not there and just relax and let it happen and then recognize.

• 3:35:27Speaker 03

  Yes. Because it will continue to happen. It may not happen tomorrow, but it will happen next week or a month from now. And when it happens, it's going to be one of these things where you say, oh, my God, really?

• 3:35:36AJ Gentile?

  Because you're surprised every time.

• 3:35:37Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 3:35:39AJ Gentile?

  So you're not looking for it.

• 3:35:39Speaker 03

  Something comes out of left field.

• 3:35:40AJ Gentile?

  It's like, here I am again.

• 3:35:42Speaker 03

  Right. Here I am again. And the, the synchronicities? I mean, my books, let's be honest, they're not up there with James Patterson. They're not selling multi-million dollars, you know, of copies. So you have a, a, a rather smaller, but dedicated readership. And they notice things.

• 3:36:02AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:36:03Speaker 03

  I don't need millions of people to do it. I need the thousands or the 50,000 or whatever, to sit there and say, okay, we noticed this. This is here and this is there. And you didn't notice it, here it is. Right? That's, you can't put a, a price tag on that. That's perfect.

• 3:36:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:36:18Speaker 03

  And it also shocks me every single time it happens. And it shouldn't, but it does. Somebody comes out of left field and said, but you said this here and now you're saying it over there. Don't you see the connection? I'm thinking, well, yeah, now that you mention it, now that you make me feel like an idiot, yeah, I do. But this happens all the time. You, you cross the Rubicon at some point. And I mentioned it, uh, some time ago, somebody asked me about, you know, how do people protect themselves from this? And I say, well, this is the problem. You can read a lot of books about it and you'll be safe. You know? All those books that you're reading. You can chalk it up to fiction. You can say it's fiction. You can say the nonfiction books are fiction. They're fake in some way or something. It's very popular now to say what you don't agree with is fake.

• 3:37:02Speaker 03

  You can protect yourself that way. You light that first candle in that first attempt to talk to something else. It's over for you, babe.

• 3:37:13AJ Gentile?

  It's it. Now you're in.

• 3:37:15Speaker 03

  You can stop it. You can blow that candle out. You can say, "Sorry, only kidding." But you've opened a door.

• 3:37:20AJ Gentile?

  So the connection between consciousness and UFOs, Whitley said the same thing.

• 3:37:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:37:25AJ Gentile?

  Just sit with it and it will be there.

• 3:37:28Speaker 03

  Because it's part of our reality. It's there. Only now, because of our technology, we have cameras, we have tape recorders, we have video. We're now recording something. And this is the tricky part, right? I have a dream. I'm not recording it, right? I don't see it later on and look at it and say, "Well, that was really weird." That doesn't happen, right? So you could have chalked everything off, all religious experience to delusion.

• 3:37:54AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:37:55Speaker 03

  Chalk it off.

• 3:37:55AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:37:56Speaker 03

  You're deluding yourself. That's it, right?

• 3:37:58AJ Gentile?

  Throw it out.

• 3:38:00Speaker 03

  But now you got it on tape.

• 3:38:01AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:38:02Speaker 03

  Now you have a meteor that stops and changes direction.

• 3:38:05AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:38:05Speaker 03

  You've got weird stuff like that happening. You can't explain it now. Why are we talking about consciousness? Because that is the interface. Now they're saying, "Guess what?" Right? "Before, we were angels and demons. Well, now we're craft, right?"

• 3:38:20AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that.

• 3:38:21Speaker 03

  And now you see us, and now you don't. And now it's one craft? Oh, no. We split into three. We split into 12. Oh, now we're back into one again.

• 3:38:28AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 3:38:29Speaker 03

  Explain that, assholes. So it's that kind of thing, you know? That's why it's consciousness, because now we need the tools to understand that. We need to understand what we've known for millennia as people who've been either religious or not religious, but having these experiences, having basically paranormal or occult experiences. We now have to get to the point where these experiences are now becoming material, materialized in front of us. They are materializing. The Tic Tacs materialized in and out. They were there and then they weren't, you know? They decide when and where. That is an effect on our consciousness that's almost impossible to overemphasize because...

• 3:39:16Speaker 03

  We don't, we can't explain it, so we don't look at it. Right? We file it away like it's not happening. But now, we can't get away from that anymore. So that is a consciousness problem. You know? Is this a material thing or not? Is this some ectoplasm? That's able to appear on photographic plates? On our radar, that we can see it, and then they're suddenly, they're not there. They're, they're screwing with us.

• 3:39:44AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:39:45Speaker 03

  Deliberately so. They know what they're doing. I think, I'm making that assumption. Because they seem to be operating according to a kind of cause and effect. They turn off our missile bases, turn them back on again.

• 3:39:55AJ Gentile?

  It feels like Loki coming out of the ether.

• 3:39:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:39:58AJ Gentile?

  Or the djinn.

• 3:39:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:39:59AJ Gentile?

  Playing with us.

• 3:40:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Which means that all those old stories had some truth to them.

• 3:40:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes, and I believe they did.

• 3:40:06Speaker 03

  Well, so do I. Now I have to go back and reevaluate all this and say, what is? What does it mean? That's a consciousness problem.

• 3:40:12AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:40:12Speaker 03

  It's not a technology. You can do the technology thing till the cows come home. But until we understand how we perceive. How is this perception situation going? What is consciousness made out of? Because that's consciousness too.

• 3:40:24AJ Gentile?

  That's the question, because we could talk about ancient Sumerian, we could talk about Anunnaki, and I'm on board.

• 3:40:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:40:30AJ Gentile?

  I'm on board with the Promethean theories.

• 3:40:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:40:33AJ Gentile?

  That's not the big question, though. The big question is, what's, what's going on? Is this consciousness? Are we all connected? Are we being guided? How many different entities exist? What is? I mean, what, what's going on? What does it mean? Why is it, why does it suddenly feel like it's accelerating? Art Bell would call it a quickening.

• 3:40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Because of our technology. Our technology has made it less possible for them to hide, maybe. In the old days, we didn't have cameras, we didn't have, you know, photographic evidence, there's nothing like that. Someone came and said they saw a spaceship, yeah, okay, fine. Now, here's the picture.

• 3:41:09AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:41:10Speaker 03

  Now, of course, with AI slop, we got too many of them.

• 3:41:12AJ Gentile?

  Yes, that's true.

• 3:41:12Speaker 03

  Now, that's, that's a problem, and that's, you know, devaluing the entire field, right? To an extent. It'll fix itself later. But right now, what we have to ask ourselves is... Whatever that is, let's assume it has consciousness. What does that mean for our consciousness? Is it the same consciousness? Does it come from the same source?

• 3:41:32AJ Gentile?

  That's what I mean.

• 3:41:33Speaker 03

  Is it totally different? Right? We don't understand ours well enough to understand theirs. And they're forcing us to pay attention.

• 3:41:40AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:41:40Speaker 03

  Pay attention to what this is. It doesn't necessarily mean it's hostile. But I understand the Defense Departments around the world saying, "Well, we can't take that chance." Right? We have to develop some kind of a defensive position here where these things are concerned. They're turning off missile bases. They're imitating missile attacks, you know, as they did with the Soviet Union. Can we, like, live with this, you know, constantly?

• 3:42:01AJ Gentile?

  And look, I don't think they're dangerous, but I still want my government to

• 3:42:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:42:06AJ Gentile?

  be prepared just in case.

• 3:42:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:42:10AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, so do that.

• 3:42:12Speaker 03

  Or the corollary to that is, our governments have no sovereignty over our own skies. In fact, over our own seas, or maybe our own land. The corollary to this is, if you can't defend us to it, what are you good for? Because this looks like a bigger existential threat than any of these countries that we're constantly screwing with, right? So shouldn't you be defending us against that? Well, we don't know what it is. We don't know where they live. We don't know what they are. We don't know what they want. We can't go and bomb their cities because we have no idea where they are, or if they have cities, or if that even makes any sense, or if we could bomb them. Which means they don't have legitimacy as government. That's the one... If you're wondering why there's no disclosure?

• 3:42:54AJ Gentile?

  That's why.

• 3:42:54Speaker 03

  That's why there's no disclosure.

• 3:42:55AJ Gentile?

  That's... It's absolutely true.

• 3:42:56Speaker 03

  That's it in a nutshell. It's not because they have alien bodies or they have a flying saucer. Maybe they do, I don't know. But they can't come out and say what they really know to be true, which is that they don't know.

• 3:43:08AJ Gentile?

  Is there a cabal? And maybe that's the too dark of a word. Is there a group of, kind of, controlling disclosure that live above sovereign nations, above the government? The Majestic Twelve? The whatever? The Bilder... Whatever theory or conspiracy? Is that a thing?

• 3:43:26Speaker 03

  I mean, such groups existed in the past.

• 3:43:30AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:43:31Speaker 03

  They existed during Cold War. We had scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain secretly communicating with each other. Not just the Nazis, but our own people.

• 3:43:39AJ Gentile?

  Those... That Table of Nine really did change history.

• 3:43:42Speaker 03

  Yes, right. So you have that going on. You have groups like that that did exist. Are they the same as that? You know, is it the Illuminati? Is it something like this? No, I don't think so. They're still human beings. They're still fallible.

• 3:43:56AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:43:56Speaker 03

  They're still weak. They have weaknesses that we don't, you know, that everybody has. So this idea of this super-secret organization that's militarized to the death and is controlling everything, I doubt that very much. I know a lot of people, I wouldn't, no, I don't think so.

• 3:44:09AJ Gentile?

  Couldn't keep a secret and were too greedy and selfish.

• 3:44:12Speaker 03

  Right, greedy and selfish and frightened and terrified and maybe having moral qualms. You can't keep it. You can't keep something like that operating for too long. So my feeling is, that kind of a cabal does not exist. But are there people who have seen things and decided to shut up about it? And told their subordinates to shut up about it? Yeah. And if all those subordinates got together and compared notes, would they have disclosure? They'd have something like it. It wouldn't be real disclosure. It would be what they're being told not to look at, not to say, not to reveal. And what that is may not be very much, but it may be the revelation that a people that we have in charge don't know what the hell's going on up there.

• 3:44:54Speaker 03

  That may be the disclosure and that's what they're afraid to unleash. Now, if they suddenly release all the UFO documents they have, to me, a physical impossibility. But let's just say they can and they do it and they release all this stuff, is that going to tell us anything more than we don't know already?

• 3:45:10AJ Gentile?

  I don't think they're going to release it and I don't think it would tell us anything if they did.

• 3:45:13Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 3:45:14AJ Gentile?

  I really don't think so.

• 3:45:14Speaker 03

  There'll be a lot of stuff, there'll be a lot of documents with names and places and we'll be forced to try to make some sense out of it and it'll take years to, and by that time, there'll be new sets of documents and new players on the field. So if, let's characterize it this way, let's make it easy. Er. What if we're not talking about UFOs? What if we're talking about witchcraft?

• 3:45:37AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:45:40Speaker 03

  There's people out there who perform witchcraft ceremonies.

• 3:45:43AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:45:44Speaker 03

  Some are people with a pedigree going back hundreds of years as witches. Most are not. There are covens. They come in and they come out of existence. Are we covering up anything about the covens? Is there documentation we're holding back on witchcraft? Right? Not really. Right?

• 3:46:04AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:46:04Speaker 03

  If we're talking about magic spells, do they work? Or is it going to be some scientists that say, yes, they work? Some scientists that say, no, you're deluded. Some scientists that say, well, there's physical properties that could be construed as. And you're going to get all of this. It's not disclosure.

• 3:46:17AJ Gentile?

  It's not. Here's, here's all the remote viewing documents. Have at it.

• 3:46:20Speaker 03

  Right. We got them.

• 3:46:22AJ Gentile?

  Right, have at it.

• 3:46:22Speaker 03

  We got the Stargate stuff.

• 3:46:23AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:46:24Speaker 03

  We got the gateway tapes. We've got all kinds of stuff we can do on this.

• 3:46:27AJ Gentile?

  Go ahead and chew on that.

• 3:46:28Speaker 03

  Nobody's doing it.

• 3:46:29AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:46:29Speaker 03

  Why? Because they're looking for a smoking gun. You want to know what Stargate was all about? Do the damn Stargate stuff. Do it. Do the remote viewing. You want to find out about it? It's a consciousness thing.

• 3:46:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:46:42Speaker 03

  You're not going to find proof in the documents. The documents don't tell you.

• 3:46:45AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:46:45Speaker 03

  You've got to do it. There's a, there's a line in the Bible that I, I quote a lot. People hate me for it. Faith without good works is dead. Okay? Martin Luther hated that line. He wanted faith to be enough. But I'm a firm believer that you can't have one without the other. You've got to actually physically get involved in order to understand what this is all about. You can't just read the books because everybody's well meaning, mostly, when they write these books. Right? They're trying to tell you, I'm doing the same thing. We're all trying to explain it. But if you actually go and just... "One impulse from the vernal wood will teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good than all the sages can."

• 3:47:27AJ Gentile?

  I don't know that one.

• 3:47:28Speaker 03

  That's a poem, I learned that in high school, I think, and I, now I've just forgot the author. Anyway, it's this idea of you actually experiencing something, which makes all the philosophizing about it suddenly put into a very calm perspective, very narrow perspective. The experience will tell you more. I'm not recommending everybody go out there and start lighting candles and talking to orbs and trying to make, you know, saucers appear.

• 3:47:51AJ Gentile?

  I would actually recommend against it.

• 3:47:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would as well. But my point is that the disclosure will be more like that than anything else. It will be people talking about weird stuff that happened that they can't explain. Because what else is, what is, what else are they doing? If they're aliens, they're not talking to the President of the United States. They're showing up in your backyard.

• 3:48:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:48:15Speaker 03

  They don't care.

• 3:48:16AJ Gentile?

  There's no treaty with Eisenhower.

• 3:48:17Speaker 03

  No, there's no treaty, believe me, there's no treaty with Eisenhower. That can't happen, right? So if that's not happening, what is happening? If UFOs have been sighted since the beginning of recorded history, as Jacques Vallée has a book out with that.

• 3:48:29AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:48:29Speaker 03

  If that's true, then no, it's not tech the way we understand it. What tech did they have 1,000 B.C., right? What was it? So it was something different, right? It wasn't tech during the great airship mysteries.

• 3:48:44AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:48:45Speaker 03

  The airships are floating along, you know, across the country and into Europe. That wasn't tech. It was seen, it was observed, it was reported on. Wasn't tech. But now we're saying, oh, no, it's all tech. It must be tech, it has to be tech. I love that, in a sense, I wish it was. I wish it was tech because that would explain everything. We didn't have to worry about consciousness.

• 3:49:04AJ Gentile?

  Well, then tell us why we're a cargo cult, because that kind of leads into it. Why we're, why?

• 3:49:08Speaker 03

  Well, that's it, that's it, that's the key. That's the thing that, I think Tom and I came up with this in the very beginning of the To the Stars thing, uh, Secret Machines program.

• 3:49:18AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:49:20Speaker 03

  Tom said, well, we need is like a mission statement. We need to talk to these people and show them something that we have. These advisors that he was going to talk to. And I said, okay, let me write the first chapter of Secret Machines. Just from my perspective, how we're going to go about it. And I said, it's a cargo cult. What we're talking about is a cargo cult. And what does that mean? Back in the day, long time ago, about 100 years now, in the South Pacific, there were planes landing on remote islands to support, at first to support archaeologists, explorers, but then later during World War II, to, you know, fight the Japanese, or the Japanese were landing the planes to fight the Americans and the British or whatever. So planes would land on these remote islands.

• 3:50:03Speaker 03

  And there are people living basically a Stone Age technology. In Papua New Guinea, for instance, in places of that nature, they're, they look up and they see something coming out of the sky that they've never seen in their life before, making a hell of a lot of racket, and then sailing down like a canoe, but through the air, and landing on this airstrip that, you know, a bunch of explorers have hacked out of the wilderness. And this thing lands, and out of the back of this plane, it opens up and all this stuff comes out.

• 3:50:32AJ Gentile?

  Treasures.

• 3:50:33Speaker 03

  Treasures.

• 3:50:34AJ Gentile?

  Beyond imagination.

• 3:50:35Speaker 03

  Things these people have never seen, they didn't know existed. Forget the plane, they didn't know that existed. They're seeing all of this, and it has this profound effect on people who, it's a consciousness problem, right?

• 3:50:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:50:46Speaker 03

  It was not a tech problem. It wasn't, "We don't have the tech." It's like, "We don't know what the hell this is. Is it real? Are we dreaming?" So they decide to answer that question, what they have to do is create their own airstrip. So they go back to their villages and say, "Let's do what they did. Let's make this airstrip. Let's build a tower out of bamboo."

• 3:51:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:51:08Speaker 03

  Right? They have lights. Let's have, let's have candles. Let's have torches. Let's, let's see if one of these things can land and give us stuff.

• 3:51:15AJ Gentile?

  The steel gods will come and bestow treasure upon us.

• 3:51:19Speaker 03

  It was a religion.

• 3:51:20AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:51:21Speaker 03

  Wasn't it? I mean, it was a religion based on tech. Somebody else's tech, but it was religion. Not based on their tech, but based on, on, on what they saw, what they perceived. And I said, "That's human society since the first contact was made." We don't know when that was made, but at some point, we were hunter-gatherers. We were happy. We were wandering around, you know, just hearing the 200,000 years of, of, of, of our Homo sapiens sapiens wandering around, being perfectly happy to do that. Then at some point, something happens, something clicks, and we all, around the globe, all around the same time said, "Oh, no, no, no, no. We gotta build cities. We gotta build fortresses. We have to build temples. We have to chart the stars."

• 3:52:01AJ Gentile?

  Why do we need to chart the stars?

• 3:52:04Speaker 03

  We were fine. We were fine. We don't need, we don't need no stinking stars.

• 3:52:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:52:08Speaker 03

  We're out there, we're just wandering off, and we have food, we have everything we need. We follow the herds wherever they go.

• 3:52:13AJ Gentile?

  But no, we have to track stars for generations. We have to do this.

• 3:52:17Speaker 03

  Who does that? You know, the thing that I always, amazes me, Babylon, right? We, we, we consider Sumer to be like the first civilization. Probably not, but that's what we say.

• 3:52:27AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:52:28Speaker 03

  Somebody there, sat on their back, every night. For hours, for days, weeks, months and years. They didn't have writing per se, they had cuneiform, clay tablets, and they're marking positions of stars. They're staring at that thing, which is nothing but dots of light, and they're saying, "No, there's one moving. There's one that's not in the same place that it was five weeks ago."

• 3:52:51AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:52:51Speaker 03

  "I know it's changed." Who does that, right? What's the motivation behind that? Who can do that? Who finances that? What society said, "Okay, your job is to do this"? Not just one person, but a lot of people, right? They're doing all this charting and mapping. Their star charts from ancient Sumer. What?

• 3:53:08AJ Gentile?

  Why are they tracking Venus's eight-year cycle?

• 3:53:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:53:11AJ Gentile?

  How long did that take them? Why are you doing that?

• 3:53:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:53:13AJ Gentile?

  That's for agriculture?

• 3:53:14Speaker 03

  Right. Unless someone came down and said, "You should do this."

• 3:53:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:53:18Speaker 03

  Someone-

• 3:53:19AJ Gentile?

  Because this will lead to this will lead to-

• 3:53:20Speaker 03

  Someone from there-

• 3:53:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:53:22Speaker 03

  Came down and said, "You should do this."

• 3:53:23AJ Gentile?

  The sky people, the sky gods, the-

• 3:53:25Speaker 03

  Like that scene in Close and Clowners of the Third Kind, right? They go to India. "Where's the sound coming from?"

• 3:53:31AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:53:31Speaker 03

  Everybody points up. That, right? That's the reason. That, to me, is what, where we are now. We are the cargo cult. Our medicine, our science, everything is based on this idea of achieving immortality and going to the stars.

• 3:53:47AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 3:53:48Speaker 03

  Getting off planet.

• 3:53:49AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 3:53:49Speaker 03

  Everything, that's the motivation behind it all. Behind all the technology, behind all of everything, started with people saying, "We need to go there and we need to live forever to do that." The DNA, as I've mentioned many times, the people are sick of hearing it, the DNA wants us dead. The DNA wants us to reproduce and get out of the way.

• 3:54:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:54:09Speaker 03

  The DNA wants to reproduce itself constantly without being stopped. So you have to have kids, and the kids have to have kids, and the kids have to have kids, and you have to die because you're taking up too many resources.

• 3:54:18AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:54:19Speaker 03

  But there's something inside of us that's not happy with that. We're not ready for that. We want to live forever. So part of us is kind of this Promethean instinct to live forever, to constantly be there, because Prometheus basically lived forever.

• 3:54:34AJ Gentile?

  Not very happy. Not happily.

• 3:54:36Speaker 03

  But he lived forever. And the other part wants to go off planet, wants to go to the stars. Our dead gods, right, our dead pharaohs become stars, right? The pharaohs, the famous ceremonies of mummification were designed to enable the pharaoh to take his place among the stars, not among the people, not among the earth, not here in Egypt, but he was going to go up there.

• 3:54:56AJ Gentile?

  The afterlife is...

• 3:54:57Speaker 03

  He was going to follow the stars at the dipper to the pole star.

• 3:54:59AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:55:00Speaker 03

  And sit on the throne and be immortal.

• 3:55:01AJ Gentile?

  Is that something within us, calling us home?

• 3:55:05Speaker 03

  Something may be, yes. Something came down and said, "Wake up."

• 3:55:10AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:55:11Speaker 03

  So whether it's calling us home, or maybe somebody up there is lonely, I don't know, but they've come down and they said, "You're going to go off planet, you're going to achieve immortality, and you're going to do it by starting this way. You're going to learn writing, you're going to learn mathematics, you're going to learn astronomy." Why? No, believe me, you're going to need it.

• 3:55:29AJ Gentile?

  Trust us.

• 3:55:30Speaker 03

  Astronomy, yeah. You're going to need all this stuff. You're going to need to plant stuff, you're going to need to reap and sow and reap. That's kind of planetary, you're going to have to look up at the planets also. So there's this idea that you're going to have to do all of this. Our medicine is designed to what? To keep us alive forever. That's our mind, to heal illness is to keep us alive.

• 3:55:45AJ Gentile?

  I feel like we're going to be able to do it. Am I in the cargo cult? I feel like we're going to be able to get there someday.

• 3:55:51Speaker 03

  No, I think so. I think we will be able to get there. I think we're on the way, you know? And we're on the way to the stars as well. Kinda.

• 3:55:58AJ Gentile?

  Kinda.

• 3:55:59Speaker 03

  Maybe there's a way of getting to the stars that's not the way we're looking at. Maybe that's where the consciousness comes back in.

• 3:56:05AJ Gentile?

  I think there is. Last thing for you, and I'm throwing these away now. Now, we're just two guys from the Bronx.

• 3:56:12Speaker 03

  Two guys from the Bronx.

• 3:56:13AJ Gentile?

  We ate at the same restaurants.

• 3:56:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:56:15AJ Gentile?

  Our cousins were whacked. Hey, that's how it was down at East Tremont, Arthur Avenue. Best bread in the city, Arthur Avenue. During this discussion, which I loved, a couple of times I had to pause and process, I've never had to do that, and the Hitler stuff actually shook me to my core. And I'm not sure why, but you've spent 30 years in the darkest corners of the human psyche. Have you ever been shaken? Are you? Are you a darker person? Or are you more hopeful? How has this not affected you?

• 3:56:53Speaker 03

  That's an interesting question. I don't think I've ever heard it put quite that way.

• 3:57:01Speaker 03

  I think basically, I understand that what we live through is a kind of a game. It's a kind of a glass bead game. It's something that, it happens not only here where we can see it, it happens where we can't see it. And once you're kind of sensitive to that understanding, that you know that things are happening in both places simultaneously, that what's happening here is kind of a simulacrum of something taking place someplace else, you feel a little bit better about it. Not 100% because there's a lot of cruelty. A lot of horrible things take place in this planet, not just recently, always. It's always been that way. People have called this a prison planet, right? Are we in prison here for some reason?

• 3:57:47Speaker 03

  And the famous writer Wilhelm Reich once said, he once wrote about that, saying that we are in a kind of a prison, the problem is, there's a big exit sign. And every time somebody sees the exit sign and they point to it, he gets beaten up by everybody else. So they don't want you to see the exit sign, they feel intimidated by it. There is a way out, and we just have to work to find it and to accept it when we hear it, right? Most of the plans we have for solving our problems are not that imaginative, unfortunately. We have small plans to tackle big problems. We don't tackle the big problems where they are. And unfortunately, consciousness is part of that problem.

• 3:58:25Speaker 03

  We're dealing with people who feel and think and operate are motivated by different ideas than the rest of us. So everybody's being motivated by something else. So the problems are not really medicine, it's not really science. It's really, it becomes more political, it becomes more people's desire to improve themselves, to save themselves, to save other people around them. And to do that, they feel they must enslave and trap or kill people who are not on their side. And that just balloons and it balloons and it balloons. We're frightened of our reality, we're frightened of this planet. We're never at home here, 100%.

• 3:59:05AJ Gentile?

  But how are you?

• 3:59:08AJ Gentile?

  Not how everybody, how are you, how is Peter with this? How do you sit with this? Honestly, this is, this is so heavy.

• 3:59:16Speaker 03

  There are people in this world who make that easier, right?

• 3:59:21AJ Gentile?

  That's a beautiful answer.

• 3:59:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Those are the people that, you find those people and that makes it all easier. That, that, that ameliorates the, the feelings very much. You suddenly realize there's this other person or these other people. They have their consciousness, they're living in the same world I am and look at them, right? They're happy. Or maybe they're not happy, but they're seeing it differently than you are. They're seeing a way out. Don't make fun of their exit, right? Don't make fun of the way they, they deal with things that are happening, right? Learn to learn, learn to, to, learn to learn from them, you know, because they're the ones that are helping you. They're, they're, they're keeping you on an even keel, maybe by something they say, some offhand remark.

• 4:00:04Speaker 03

  Remember all these coincidences that are happening, they're happening with personal relationships as well. There are people who are saying the right things at the right time and that always happens, right? And that always sets you on, on the right place. What, just when you're getting dark, somebody has the right thing to say, the right gesture, the right whatever, and suddenly you're, you're okay. You're okay for the next round, whatever that happens to be.

• 4:00:25AJ Gentile?

  And you're okay?

• 4:00:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:00:27AJ Gentile?

  This is a perfect answer, perfect way to end it. Peter Levenda, a joy, a treat. I hope you come back. Thank you so much.

• 4:00:32Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 4:00:33AJ Gentile?

  We'll have a slice.

• 4:00:34Speaker 03

  We'll have a slice, yeah.

• 4:00:35AJ Gentile?

  Goodbye, everybody. Okay, so that was one of my most favorite conversations ever. Peter does a lot of interviews and everybody usually skips right to the Hitler stuff or the UFO stuff, the JFK stuff. But my favorite part of all of that was the story of a fake priest as a 17-year-old dodging the draft and ending up crashing Bobby Kennedy's funeral.

• 4:00:58AJ Gentile?

  I mean, I did a lousy job hosting because I kept bouncing in my chair and I was yelling, "You gotta be effing kidding me!" So, sorry about that. Anyways, analysis. Peter Levenda is a real researcher. He's not an armchair guy. A Holy Alliance came out in 1995. The Sinister Forces trilogy is a beast. I mean, they're like, that thick. Three volumes covering the intersection of American politics, intelligence, and the occult. He co-wrote the Secret Machines series with Tom DeLonge through To the Stars. These are published, cited, reviewed, and the man has a huge body of work. Colonia Dignidad was real. A German sect-like settlement in Chile run by Paul Schaefer,

• 4:01:40AJ Gentile?

  founded in 1961. The UN published a report in 1976 linking it to Pinochet's torture apparatus. Amnesty International confirmed this. Schaefer was eventually arrested in Argentina in 2005 and convicted of child abuse. He died in a Chilean prison in 2010. That place existed exactly the way Peter described it. The Moray Island Incident, that's real, I've covered it. June 1947. Harold Dahl and Fred Christman, the two Air Force officers who collected the debris, did die when their B-25 crashed. Fred Christman was later subpoenaed by Jim Garrison during the JFK investigation. Guy Banister's FBI, all the air tells about UFOs, they're in the National Archives. These connections between early UFO incidents

• 4:02:25AJ Gentile?

  and the Kennedy assassination, they're documented. Now whether they mean what Peter thinks they mean is another question, but the threads are there. The Nazi Tibet Expedition of 1938 to 39, that happened. Led by Ernst Schaefer under Himmler's authority. They brought back a complete edition of the Kangir, the Tibetan sacred texts. Photographs of SS officers with swastika flags are in Tibet, you can see them. Peter found this material at the National Archives on microfiche before anyone else was writing about it or taking it seriously. Now the bigger stuff. The Nine. In December 1952, Andrea Puric brought an Indian mystic named Dr. D.G. Vinod to his Roundtable Foundation in Maine. Nine people attended.

• 4:03:08AJ Gentile?

  They included Arthur Young, the inventor of the bell helicopter, and Alice Bovary, born in Astor. The medium channeled entities that called themselves the Nine. Poorich later brought Yuri Geller into the fold, and Geller reportedly channeled the same entities. Ruth Forbes Payne Young, Arthur's wife, was the mother-in-law of Ruth Payne, the woman who housed Lee Harvey Oswald's wife and got him the job at the Texas School Book Depository. That chain of connections is real. I can't tell you what it means, but it's real. The Hitler-Indonesia Theory. That was crazy. Now Peter's book Rat Line traces a documented war criminal named, forgive me, George Anton Puch, an Austrian doctor wanted by the Allies.

• 4:03:50AJ Gentile?

  He escaped through the Rat Lines to Indonesia in the early 1950s. His wife Hella was a prominent anthropologist who collaborated with Nazi authorities. Peter found the passport, the diary written in Gabelsberger shorthand, and the grave in Surbaia. Whether Puch was connected to something larger, that's the question Peter's still asking. The Indonesians have their own theories. Now, the diary has addresses in it that match known Rat Line stations, so I don't have an answer for you on this one either, but again, the documentation is there. That Men in Black story, that took a turn I didn't expect. Now, I can't verify our personal experience, but Peter's not the only one who's reported encounters like that. Timothy Goode, John Keel, Jacques Vallée, they've all documented cases where the phenomenon

• 4:04:34AJ Gentile?

  seems to interact with researchers directly, not through technology, through something else. But here's what's sticking around. Peter said something near the end that I keep thinking about. He said, "We're a cargo cult. All of human civilization, the temples, the star charts, the medicine, the rockets, it's all one long response to something that showed up and said, 'Wake up.'" Now, I don't know if he's right, but I can't seem to shake it. Now, you can find Peter's books anywhere books are sold. He's got a lot of them. Buckle up, they're thick, they're worth it, but they're intimidating. Unholy Alliance, The Sinister Forces Trilogy, the 20th Anniversary Edition of that is out right now. Rat Line, The Secret Machines with Tom DeLonge. He's also on Substack and active on social media.

• 4:05:19AJ Gentile?

  If you want a Wi-Fi's take on some of Peter's stories, I've covered some of them. There is the Moray Island Incident, the CIA Men in Black, and the plot to take out JFK. That was weird because I hadn't stumbled across Peter's research yet. So, this is inside baseball, I'm off-script. When the Moore Island incident came up in our story pitch meetings, I didn't want to do it because it sounded stupid. It sounded silly. You know, the slag and the dead dog. It just sounded too weird. But I looked into the characters. You just started pulling the threads and I came across Fred Christman, and that led me to Guy Bannister. And I was like, I know that guy. And that led me to JFK. And then I told the team, this is not a UFO story. This is a JFK story. So when I came across Peter later and saw he made the same connections,

• 4:06:04AJ Gentile?

  oh, it was so satisfying. And his books have so much more detail. I wish I'd got his research when I was recording the episode. It would have been helpful. But his books, they're amazing. Back on script. If you like the Hitler escape stuff, I did Operation Eagle Flight, the escape from Berlin to Beryluca. Now, I didn't make the Indonesia connection. I didn't even see that coming. Mine goes to Argentina and Central America where everybody else does. It's still a fun episode. If the occult stuff is interesting to you, I have an episode called Symbols of Power, but good luck finding it. It's so demonetized and buried, but it is there. It's about occult organizations and the intelligence community. I wonder why I can't find it. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 4:07:43Speaker 04

  I feel the crack at and got stuck inside Mel's home with MKL truck I'm being only too aware Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone? On a film set, were the shadow people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told And his name was Cole And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more love will be all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth

• 4:08:27Speaker 04

  And one more love will be all through the night

• 4:08:49Speaker 04

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come To have got the secret city underground Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate and what the dark watchers found In a simulation, don't you worry though The black nights had a lot of toll to me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more love will be all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth

• 4:09:33Speaker 04

  And one more love will be all through the night Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more love will be all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth And one more love will be all through the night

• 4:10:44Speaker 00

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• 4:11:27Speaker 00

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