Pod Insights American Alchemy NASA’s Dark Secrets: UFOs, Pagan Rituals & Time Travel About this episode We explore the hidden history of rocket science, intertwining themes of mysticism, occult practices, and the influence of non-human intelligence.
We look at key figures like Jack Parsons and Edgar Mitchell, the occult obsessions of the Nazis, the esoteric dimensions of NASA's missions, and Russian Cosmism.
Is there a cosmic purpose for humanity, culminating in the idea that the history of space exploration is not just a technical story, but one deeply rooted in consciousness and belief?
Paul Hynek (AREA 52) | https://youtu.be/d68a1JfwVsE?si=wvT9S8PShY7UH5yq
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#NASA #Occult #Nazis
Tags - NASA, Occult, Nazis
Chapters
00:00 The Hidden History of Rocket Science
06:31 The Intersection of Science and Mysticism
12:33 Jack Parsons: The Occult Rocket Scientist
20:12 Nazi Occultism and Rocketry
27:27 Russian Cosmism and the Cosmic Purpose
31:19 NASA's Esoteric Dimensions
36:42 Rituals and Symbolism in Space Exploration
46:13 The Influence of Non-Human Intelligence
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:29 Jesse Michels? What is rocket science really?
0:37 Jesse Michels? In this special episode of American Alchemy, we're going to pull on all of the threads of this hidden history. Sex magic, Nazi scientists, secret societies, launch rituals, rockets launched in time with pagan festivals, Walt Disney's hidden messages.
0:56 Jesse Michels? This is the story of how communication with non-human intelligence might just be the real and hidden foundation of our entire journey to the stars. The whole subplot of our modern space program.
1:12 Speaker 02 Two, one.
1:15 Jesse Michels? The date is July 16, 1969.
1:22 Jesse Michels? 230,000 miles away from home, sat NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
1:29 Speaker 02 Columbia, good, son. You're looking great.
1:31 Jesse Michels? Just two and a half hours before, they had become the first pilots to touch down on another world.
1:39 Jesse Michels? As they prepared for their first moonwalk, Buzz Aldrin opened a small kit of personal items that he had brought with him. Aldrin then proceeded to carry out the first religious ceremony ever conducted on the moon.
1:54 Jesse Michels? Using a small silver chalice, a bit of wine, and a piece of bread that he had brought with him, he quietly administered communion.
2:03 Jesse Michels? He recalled the wine curling slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think the very first liquid ever poured on the moon was communion wine.
2:13 Speaker 02 It's one small step for man, one step for free masonry.
2:20 Speaker 03 Does the landing on the moon have anything to do with masonry?
2:25 Jesse Michels? Among his belongings was a small silk flag, hand-stitched with the symbol of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. According to the Masonic Grand Lodge of Ohio, the Apollo 11 mission even established an appendant body of the Masonic Lodge on the moon. That flag is now on full display at the Masonic Temple in Washington DC.
2:47 Speaker 03 When man reaches new worlds, Masonry will be there.
2:53 Jesse Michels? The Scottish Rite is a branch of Freemasonry steeped in esoteric symbols, ritual, and mysticism. Its highest rank, the 33rd degree, is symbolically tied to the 33 vertebrae of the spine, culminating in the crown chakra, said to be the gateway to divine insight. Buzz Aldrin, as it happens, held that rank. Over the years, researchers looking at these kinds of oddities began to ask questions about the meaning of these rituals on the moon. But those answers are not exactly what we're trying to explore in this episode. What I'm interested in is the hidden side of NASA and the even more secretive National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO,
3:35 Jesse Michels? agencies that have quietly launched thousands of rockets and payloads into orbit. Behind them lies a stranger history than most people realize. Because after all, Buzz Aldrin was not the first, nor the last, member of NASA to bring what some might derisively call "the woo" to the epitome of nuts and bolts aerospace, astrophysics, and rocket fuel. Just take Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, the sixth man to walk on the moon, and one of the most outspoken voices linking space exploration with the paranormal. Mitchell wasn't shy about his belief in extraterrestrial life, or that the US government was probably covering it up. But beyond the UFO question, he was also deeply invested in consciousness and the psychic phenomena.
4:22 Jesse Michels? On his journey to the moon, Mitchell conducted a private ESP, or extrasensory perception, experiment, attempting to send mental images back to Earth using a set of cards. The results, scored by colleagues back on Earth, were better than chance. Mitchell wasn't shy about this. In a 1971 New York Times interview, he said, "We're too much uninformed about telepathy, or ESP, to project its uses. But I think, once we understand the mechanism, then we can start talking about uses." Few at NASA were interested, except one: Werner von Braun.
5:00 Speaker 04 War is a dirty business, and all I can say is that I'm happy that it's all over now.
5:05 Jesse Michels? Yes, that von Braun, former Nazi and father of American rocketry. He was, according to Mitchell, deeply supportive, even encouraging Mitchell to find a site within NASA to study consciousness further. After his mission, Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a think tank dedicated to consciousness, psychic phenomena, and metaphysics. Von Braun attended one of its early fundraising dinners. For Mitchell, the overview effect, seeing Earth from space, was spiritual. It made him wonder if the entire cosmos might be conscious. And he wasn't alone.
5:42 Speaker 05 There I was, and there you are. There you are, the Earth, dynamic, overwhelming, and I felt that the world was just... there's too much purpose, too much logic. It was just too beautiful to have happened by accident. There has to be somebody bigger than you, and bigger than me. And I mean this in a spiritual sense, not a religious sense. There has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we ourselves create to govern our lives.
6:18 Jesse Michels? From the early days of rocketry to the height of the Apollo program, there's been a long tradition of visionary scientists who saw no contradiction between physics and mysticism. Even today, the pattern continues.
6:30 Speaker 06 They're using the images of Roman gods, and I would ask him, I said, "Why are you using the images of Roman gods? Why are you putting them on your mission patches, and also utilizing Latin phrases from that time period? I mean, you're sending it up into space. Who in space is gonna read Latin?" And his answer was, "Our sponsors."
6:53 Jesse Michels? Behind rocket technology, the thrust, the telemetry, the hardware, there is something else, something older. There are whispers and subtle acknowledgements to gods. Ancient symbols, rituals, and perhaps even the influence of non-human intelligence. And if that is true, or at least if people involved in this science believe it to be true, then we need to ask the fundamental question: What is rocket science really? Is it foundationally entangled in something very strange we've spent millennia trying to understand? Are there strange forces helping us get off this planet?
7:35 Jesse Michels? So buckle up, alchemists, because this one is going way out there.
8:15 Jesse Michels? When we think about the moon landing, the rockets, the computers, the broadcasts sent across 230,000 miles of empty space, it's easy to forget how recent this kind of knowledge really is. Just over a century ago, astronomers were still debating the basic structure of the universe. Einstein had shaken the foundations of physics in 1915 with his General Theory of Relativity. But when it came to the cosmos itself, even the experts weren't sure what they were actually looking at through their telescopes. Then, in 1923, Edwin Hubble peered through the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson
8:57 Jesse Michels? Observatory and saw something staggering. This new telescope was powerful enough to resolve individual stars inside what most had assumed was just a cloud of gas in our own galaxy. Guess what? It wasn't. That cloud, Andromeda, was another galaxy entirely, millions of light-years away.
9:20 Jesse Michels? This discovery shattered the old view. Our Milky Way wasn't the whole universe. It was just one among many.
9:33 Jesse Michels? It changed the cosmic perspective of the 20th century in the same way Copernicus had centuries earlier when he removed the Earth from the center of the solar system. And the man who built this observatory that made this discovery possible was one of the most important and strangest figures in the history of modern astronomy. I bring you George Ellery Hale.
9:58 Jesse Michels? Hale wasn't just a brilliant physicist. He was a visionary and in some ways, a mystic. While still at MIT, he invented the spectroheliograph, a device that could capture solar flares erupting from the sun's surface. But Hale's fascination with the sun went far beyond science. He saw astronomy as a kind of philosophy, a link back to ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Babylon. He founded multiple observatories, including Mount Wilson in Pasadena. The lodges where astronomers stayed were reportedly decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphs and symbols, a reminder that they weren't just studying the stars.
10:40 Jesse Michels? They were joining a tradition as old as human civilization. Then, there's the stranger part. Hale claimed he received creative inspiration from a being, an elf or a spirit, as he described it. Some biographers wrote this off as stress, eccentricity, or mistranslation. But what if it wasn't? Hale certainly wasn't the first or the last brilliant scientist to feel like he was receiving messages from somewhere else. His reverence for the sun wasn't just theoretical. When he designed the Hale Solar Laboratory in Pasadena, he included a tribute to Onk Aten in the arch above the entrance. The ancient Egyptian pharaoh who tried to replace the entire Egyptian pantheon with
11:23 Jesse Michels? a single god, Aten, the sun disk. When Hale died, his obituaries called him "a priest of the sun," a modern Zoroaster.
11:35 Jesse Michels? You might think Hale's beliefs were just personal quirks, unrelated to his science. But this fits a much larger pattern. Throughout history, the people we celebrate for pure science, the mathematicians, the engineers, the astronomers, were often described as tapping into something else, something they themselves called mystical, spiritual, or supernatural. Today, we like to separate the discovery from the discoverer. We want breakthroughs to feel rational, mechanical, explainable. But that doesn't erase the fact that many of those breakthroughs were made by people who believed they were channeling something deeper.
12:16 Jesse Michels? Back in the early 20th century, Hale's work helped lay the foundations for modern astronomy. But his influence didn't stop with telescopes. He also transformed a small technical school, through Polytechnic, into what would become a powerhouse of science and engineering: Caltech. By the 1930s, Caltech was more than just a hub for equations and experiments. It became a magnet for the greatest minds on Earth. Hubble, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, even Einstein passed through its halls. But Caltech also attracted outsiders. One of them wasn't even a student. But he would end up reshaping the future of American rocketry
12:59 Jesse Michels? and possibly, opening a door to something far stranger.
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15:09 Jesse Michels? John Whiteside Parsons, Jack to his friends, was born in Pasadena in 1914.
15:17 Jesse Michels? From an early age, he was hooked on science fiction. He struggled in school and never earned a formal degree. But that didn't matter. Parsons had an intuitive genius for chemistry and propulsion. As a teenager, he and his friend Ed Foreman built homemade rockets, scavenging parts from Foreman's father's workshop. One classmate later described them as a couple of powder monkeys going out into the desert, blowing things up. Jack's mother, worried about his obsession with explosives, sent him to military school. He was expelled after he blew up a toilet block. Nothing deterred him. Parsons had one dream: to build a machine that could reach the moon.
16:01 Jesse Michels? By the early 1930s, he and Foreman were sneaking onto the Caltech campus to meet like-minded students who believed in rocketry. Just a few years earlier, a Caltech student named Thomas Townsend Brown had formulated a less crude version of space travel. But that fell upon deaf ears with top physics professors at Caltech like Robert Milliken. Parsons was able to gain much more traction. He found an ally in Frank Molina, an engineering student working under Theodore Von Karmen, one of the sharpest minds in aerodynamics. Together, they formed an informal rocketry group and began testing experimental engines in the Arroyo Seco, a dry gulch just outside Pasadena.
16:46 Jesse Michels? That site would later become Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL. Now here's something a lot of people don't realize.
16:55 Speaker 04 At about 24 miles altitude, the first stage breaks away and the second stage motor fires.
17:01 Jesse Michels? In the early 20th century, even some of the most respected physicists believed rockets wouldn't work in space. One of them, Caltech's own Fritz Zwicky, the man who coined the term supernova and theorized dark matter, dismissed the idea as nonsense. They misunderstood Newton. They thought rockets needed something to push against, and in the vacuum of space, there would be nothing to push on. Even the New York Times mocked the idea in a 1920 editorial. So when people like Jack Parsons pursued this, they weren't solving a hard problem. They were chasing what many thought was a delusion. That makes what they achieved all the more remarkable.
17:44 Jesse Michels? They believed in the impossible, then figured out how to build it. And Parsons, as we'll see, believed in more than just exotic propulsion. At Caltech, his raw intuition led to breakthroughs in both solid and liquid fuels, more powerful and reliable than anything that had come before. The tests were chaotic and dangerous, but soon, the military took notice. Parsons developed a solid fuel booster, or what would later become the first stage of a rocket, to help heavily loaded aircraft take off. They called it jet-assisted takeoff, or JDO. They avoided using the word "rocket" because it still sounded too much like science fiction.
18:29 Jesse Michels? The first successful JDO flight was in 1941. By 1942, the US military was ordering 20,000 units per month. But just as JPL was taking off, the FBI came knocking. Because Jack Parsons wasn't just a rocket scientist. He was also a practicing occultist. He was a devoted member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, an esoteric order led at the time by the infamous Aleister Crowley. Thalema, their belief system, combined ceremonial magic, eastern mysticism,
19:12 Jesse Michels? and tantric techniques into what Crowley called "sex magic." That's "magic" with a "K" to distinguish it from stage tricks. Parsons wasn't just a casual participant. He led the local chapter from a Pasadena mansion where he lived with a rotating caste of artists, intellectuals, and magicians. The rituals were elaborate, invoking gods, spirits, and forces said to reside in higher dimensions. The most infamous of these was the Babylon Working, an attempt to summon the divine feminine archetype known as Babylon. Inspired by Crowley's novel Moonchild, the ritual aimed to recreate a magical child
19:56 Jesse Michels? through spiritual and sexual practices. Not literal birth, but transformation of the self. Kind of a weird extracurricular for a guy who became known as the father of the American space program.
20:23 Jesse Michels? These weren't acts of fantasy to Parsons. He believed the rituals had real power, that they could raise consciousness.
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21:01 Jesse Michels? Open doorways and make contact with non-human intelligences. He wasn't alone in thinking this way. Gnostic Christian sects, early mystics like Clement of Alexandria, and tantric traditions in India and China, all described sex as a vehicle for divine communion. Not lust, but willful transformation. Parsons believed he was continuing that lineage.
21:30 Jesse Michels? But it gets weirder. His ritual partner for the Babylon Working was a man named L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, that L. Ron Hubbard. Before founding Scientology, Hubbard helped Parsons conduct the Ritual Series. But soon after, he ran off with Parsons' girlfriend and a chunk of his money. Parsons, furious, attempted a magical counterattack, invoking the Spirit of Mars, Bartzabel, in a Miami hotel room. Magic or not, Parsons got his compensation. Hubbard's yacht would promptly encounter a storm, and a court later forced him to pay Parsons back. After that, some began to wonder if the Babylon Working had actually succeeded, if
22:15 Jesse Michels? it had opened something up in 1946. Because in the years that followed, reports of unidentified aerial phenomena began to skyrocket. Parsons himself believed he had made contact. He said he was being guided by a non-human intelligence. That idea surfaces in Diana Pasulka's work as well. The notion that visionary scientists may have been receiving messages, insights, or downloads from something beyond. It also is a prominent theme in Professor Jimenez Canales's book, "Bedeviled: About the History of Demons and Science." Parsons wasn't alone in this belief. Pythagoras, Newton, and even Edison spoke of mystical inspiration
22:59 Jesse Michels? or communion with unseen forces. Edison, near the end of his life, actually tried to build a device to communicate with the dead. So even if we keep our skeptic hats on, we're left with this strange pattern. Many of the people responsible for scientific breakthroughs, people we call geniuses, didn't see themselves as inventors. They saw themselves as receivers. In Parsons's case, he believed he was building technology to carry humanity into space with the help of something else. He would sometimes recite Crowley's hymn to Pan during rocket tests.
23:41 Jesse Michels? According to legendary French UFO researcher Jacques Vallée, there were rumors of a ritual in the Mojave where a blonde woman appeared and claimed to be from Venus. If true, this would have been the first recorded encounter with a "Nordic" or "tall white" non-human entity, predating similar contact these stories by years. Eventually, Parsons's occult lifestyle, strange house guests, and growing paranoia led to trouble. He was pushed out of JPL. In 1952, he died in an explosion in his home laboratory. Officially, it was ruled an accident involving volatile chemicals. But some found the circumstances suspicious.
24:30 Jesse Michels? Parsons left a crater on Earth, but also one on the moon. Literally. A lunar crater now bears his name. And at JPL, some insiders still call it "Jack Parsons Laboratory." Others just say "Jack Parsons Lives." Now, you might be thinking, "Sure, there was one eccentric rocket guy with a thing for ritual magic. Maybe he laid the groundwork for ICBMs in Apollo." But that doesn't mean that the whole field was weird. Maybe...
25:12 Jesse Michels? Longtime viewers of this show will know we've covered evidence linking the Third Reich to UFO technology before. From reports that Hitler knew about the 1933 Magenta Crash, to rumors of Nazi saucer tests in modern-day Czechoslovakia, to the post-war absorption of German rocket scientists experimenting with exotic propulsion.
25:40 Jesse Michels? But what often surprises people isn't just the tech. It's the fact that the highest level of Hitler's regime were obsessed with the occult. This wasn't just Hollywood fantasy. Sure, Indiana Jones gave us Nazis hunting for the Ark of the Covenant. But the truth is stranger. In 1945, near the end of the war, American forces uncovered a hidden stash of Nazi documents in a cave in southern Germany. Among them were records, revealing real state-sponsored occult projects. Expeditions to Tibet to trace Aryan origins, searches for ancient runestones, pagan sites, and even a government-backed quest to find the Holy Grail.
26:26 Jesse Michels? A lot of this stemmed from Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and one of the architects of the Holocaust. He was obsessed with Germanic mythology, paganism, and mystical power. He turned Wellesberg Castle into a ritual center, complete with a black sun chamber beneath it and a round table for his SS knights. He also created the Annunerbe, a pseudo-scientific institute devoted to proving that the so-called Aryan race descended from Atlantis. And yes, they actually believed that. The Nazi Party itself was born out of the Thule Society,
27:06 Jesse Michels? a volkish secret group that mixed Germanic paganism, Atlantis myths, and Aryan esotericism. The Thule Society held séances and rituals meant to contact non-human intelligences they believed were their ancient progenitors: star beings from the far north, beneath the Pole Star. They performed these rites at symbolic locations, like the Hartz Mountains, on nights like Walpurgis Night, a festival tied to witches, spirits, and old pagan ceremonies. There are also claims about the Vril Society, a group said to have channeled anti-gravity technology
27:47 Jesse Michels? and psychic powers from an ancient subterranean race. Now, we don't have to believe any of these occult theories themselves, but what matters is the Nazis did. And it didn't just stop at mysticism. The Nazis were also pioneers of actual rocket science. One of the key figures was Hermann Oberth. Born in Transylvania, inspired by sci-fi writer Jules Verne, Oberth began theorizing about spaceflight as a teenager.
28:18 Jesse Michels? In 1923, he published "The Rocket into Planetary Space", a landmark book that laid out how a multi-stage rocket could escape Earth's gravity. He was decades ahead of his time. He envisioned orbiting telescopes, space suits, weather-controlling satellites, even missions to other planets. His ideas sparked a movement, and when World War II began, Oberth was pulled into military work, building rockets for Germany and later for Italy. After the war, Oberth became one of the few major scientists to publicly support the reality of UFOs.
28:59 Speaker 04 After so many witnesses have seen the so-called "flying saucers", their existence cannot longer be denied. I believe that these flying objects come from another solar system.
29:16 Jesse Michels? In a 1954 lecture, he argued that these UFOs had been observed since at least the 1400s. Oberth believed they were piloted by extraterrestrial visitors, monitoring Earth's nuclear sites and military tech. In interviews, he even said, "We cannot take all of the credit for our record advancements in certain scientific fields. We have been helped." When asked by whom, he replied, "The people of the other worlds."
29:49 Jesse Michels? Later in life, Oberth was invited to watch the launch of Apollo 11 and the Space Shuttle Challenger, but he wasn't part of the official "Operation Paperclip" transfer of Nazi scientists. That honor fell to his most famous student, Werner von Braun. Before we jump in, I want to thank today's sponsor, Hexclad cookware, aka the pans I didn't know I needed until I ditched the warped, flaked mess I've been cooking with since college. But here's what sold me: Hexclad pans are like if stainless steel and non-stick had a love child. And then Gordon Ramsay adopted it. No joke, he actually uses them at home. And in his restaurants. And as we all know, that guy doesn't suffer fools gladly.
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31:30 Speaker 04 Dr. von Braun, were you embarrassed to come to London this time after being responsible for the B-weapons during the war? I'm really happy to have this opportunity to express my personal sympathies to those in London who lost their loved ones in these B-weapon raids. But then war is a dirty business. And all I can say is that I'm happy that it's all over now.
31:54 Jesse Michels? Von Braun wasn't just a German rocket scientist. He was the architect of the V2 missile program, a major in the SS, and one of the top minds in Hitler's war machine. Like Parsons, von Braun had dreamed of space since he was a boy. But where Parsons was invoking goddesses and desert rituals, von Braun was swearing loyalty to Himmler and building rockets with slave labor from concentration camps. After the war, the US swept von Braun up in Operation Paperclip, a covert mission to extract Nazi scientists.
32:30 Jesse Michels? He was captured in Bavaria, where a young Henry Kissinger was actually helping run counterintelligence for the United States. Von Braun's record was scrubbed, and he was given a new job: build America's space program. And that he did. Von Braun became the public face of NASA, a media darling, the man behind the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon.
32:55 Speaker 04 The overall size and weight of the rocket is mainly determined by the 11-ton weight of this top section. This weight dictates the amount of fuel and the numbers of motors needed to produce enough power to equalize the gravitational pull of the Earth.
33:14 Jesse Michels? But behind the scenes, many of the ideas, the scientists, and even the weirdness of the Nazi space program had been brought into the American one. As we'll see, the weirdness didn't vanish. It just changed uniforms. But before we get to NASA's more esoteric side, we need to check in with the other major player in the space race.
33:48 Jesse Michels? Before Parsons, NASA, or the Nazis, another conception of human purpose, one tied to our place in the universe, was emerging in late 19th-century Russia, something we now call Russian cosmism. It began with a librarian and philosopher named Nikolai Viadorov, who believed the true task of humanity and Christianity was not to await resurrection, but to cause it. He believed that one day, technology would allow us to resurrect every human who had ever lived. And that, once death was defeated, humanity's next task would be to colonize the cosmos.
34:31 Jesse Michels? Among those most influenced by Fyodorov and his ideas was a deaf, self-taught young man named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He would become known as the father of Russian spaceflight. Tsiolkovsky didn't just believe space travel was possible, he believed it was necessary. He saw humanity as part of a cosmic process, destined to leave Earth and populate the stars. In 1903, he developed what we now call the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation, the fundamental formula describing how a rocket accelerates based on its mass and exhaust velocity. Like Oberth, he anticipated breakthroughs in rocketry and space exploration well before
35:16 Jesse Michels? they were technologically feasible. And here's where things get especially strange. As Diana Pasulka points out in American Cosmic, Tsiolkovsky believed that non-human intelligences, what he called "ethereal beings," were communicating with us through celestial symbols. He wrote, "We are made as the ethereal beings, existing beyond our dimensions of recognized reality. These higher beings are in communication with us, reading our thoughts and sending us messages through celestial symbols, which most of us do not even perceive, much less understand."
35:57 Jesse Michels? A genius is one who comprehends and channels these messages from higher beings into technologies, products, and even art. Tsiolkovsky seemed to believe that his rocket science, the very math that would take humans off Earth, was received through this kind of cosmic transmission. He may have seen himself not only as an engineer, but as a medium for an intelligence beyond human understanding. Another example of someone who saw the spiritual dimension of science as fundamental to the work itself.
36:32 Jesse Michels? Even as the Soviet Union officially rejected religion, it opened the door to a different kind of cosmic mythology, one in which ancient contact with extraterrestrials was treated not as fantasy, but as a legitimate scientific possibility. These ideas were often framed in speculative or scientific language, a political workaround that allowed Soviet thinkers to explore humanity’s possible contact with advanced extraterrestrial civilizations without invoking the supernatural. Figures like Alexander Kazantsev and Felix Ziegler proposed that alien visitors may have influenced early human development,
37:13 Jesse Michels? seeding myths and technologies that were later taken on by ancient cultures. Unlike in the West, where such theories were typically fringe, in the USSR they were sometimes discussed in academic circles, covered in state-run media, and even investigated by military and intelligence services. This made paleo-contact, as they called it, not just a conspiracy theory, but a semi-legitimate line of inquiry into humanity’s cosmic origins. But it was the Americans who won the space race when they made it to the moon. And maybe, just maybe, that mission carried within it a hidden reverence for the esoteric dimensions of spaceflight
37:55 Jesse Michels? that men like Tsiolkovsky and Fedorov had long envisioned. Maybe the space race wasn’t just a Cold War pissing contest, but a transcendental mission. Which brings us to NASA, where the weird gets even weirder.
38:23 Jesse Michels? NASA was officially established on July 29, 1958, by the National Aeronautics and Space Act. On paper, this document laid out that NASA was supposed to be a civilian agency for space exploration, devoted to “peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind”. But that idealism is tempered in the very next paragraph. The Act makes clear that the general welfare and security of the United States requires such an organization, and that any activities peculiar to or primarily associated with weapon systems, military operations, or the defense of the United States fall outside the civilian mandate.
39:04 Jesse Michels? In practice, that meant if NASA found anything deemed strategically sensitive, at all, a breakthrough in propulsion, a powerful new sensor, or even contact with non-human intelligence, it could be withheld indefinitely. It's a reminder of something we've talked about before: the echoes of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act.
39:26 Speaker 07 If you read the definition of special nuclear material in the Public Atomic Energy Act of 1954, it basically states "any material that releases any kind of atomic energy."
39:39 Jesse Michels? That would be retrieved, crash material. So it's kind of a sneaky way of...
39:43 Speaker 07 No, it is. If you actually read the Atomic Energy Act, if something is not a nuke, but it has radiological energy coming off it, you know, alpha, beta decay, whatever...
39:53 Jesse Michels? Same secrecy.
39:54 Speaker 07 Same secrecy.
39:55 Jesse Michels? So how did the Nazi rocket scientists get in? After Operation Paperclip, Werner von Braun and his team were brought into the US to work on ballistic missiles. Many of them ended up in places like Fort Bliss in White Sands, where they were housed in military camps and worked under tight control. Swastikas and Nazi memorabilia were reportedly on open display in some of these facilities. FBI documents even showed that at one point von Braun was caught sending classified documents to his Nazi counterparts in the USSR, but it seemed like no disciplinary action was ever taken.
40:35 Jesse Michels? During this period, von Braun caught the attention of Walt Disney. The two collaborated on a series of educational films about space exploration. Von Braun features a lot in them, explaining the future of space exploration and the capabilities of imagined rockets and space stations. In one
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41:26 Jesse Michels? ...extended scene. A team of astronauts travel to the far side of the moon for the first time. That's when a radar engineer yells out that some kind of radiation is being picked up on their sensors at 33 degrees. Something that turns out to be a very constructed-looking feature on the terrain of the moon. Get some flares in that area, quick!
42:01 Jesse Michels? The film moves on without too much attention being paid to the set of ruins on the moon, almost like it was just included for those that would notice it. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, an imaginative nod to the unknowns of space. The coordinates 33 degrees are hard to ignore, especially given the prominence of that number in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.
42:25 Jesse Michels? There are a few Scottish Rite Masons you might have heard of, and those that were awarded the highest honor of becoming a 33rd degree. This includes the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, as well as the President, Harry Truman, and another astronaut we've already discussed, Buzz Aldrin. James Webb, NASA Administrator, Scottish Rite Mason. Kenneth Kleinecht, Director of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, also a Scottish Rite Mason. We've also got Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., who flew on the Mercury and Gemini programs. And then you have Walter Shura Jr. and Don Izzell, who flew on Apollo 7, as well as Virgil Grissom, who flew on the Mercury program,
43:08 Jesse Michels? but sadly passed away in the training capsule fire for the first Apollo mission. Thomas Patton Stafford flew Apollo 10. All Freemasons. Later, on Apollo 15, the eighth person to walk on the moon was also a Mason, James Irwin. And another man we've already mentioned earlier, Edgar Mitchell, who spent more than nine hours walking on the moon's surface on Apollo 14. Freemason. So by the mid 1960s, the structure of NASA, and I mean the actual power structure, was a strange cocktail of former SS officers, Freemasons, and occultists. And then there's the Teos Cave story. You know where I do want to go, though. You know, there are all the conspiracies that the moon landing was faked,
43:52 Jesse Michels? and then there's the UFO conspiracy that Neil Armstrong saw UFOs on the moon, or whatever. I'm not proposing that. I don't necessarily think that that's true. But the one possibly kind of funny piece of additional evidence would be that the second expedition Neil Armstrong did was in 1975, and it was to a cave in Ecuador, at the edge of the Amazon. And it was called the Teos Cave. And it was supposed to contain ancient alien metallic artifacts. And so clearly, Neil Armstrong believed enough in the possibility of that thing to like go into the Amazon and risk his life and try to look for it. And a BBC documentary crew followed him in there.
44:47 Jesse Michels? What we've seen throughout this video is that there's something more than a sterile materialist view of reality behind the engineering and physics of space exploration. There seems to be a kind of ritual element to it. And one of the clearest signs that NASA wasn't just about nuts and bolts science is something hiding in plain sight: the mission patches. Take the official Apollo program patch. At first glance, it's simple: the Earth, the Moon, a path connecting them and a large letter "A". But look again: behind the "A" is the constellation Orion, and the crossbar of the "A" is deliberately
45:27 Jesse Michels? aligned with Orion's belt: the three stars Mintaka, Al Nilam, and Alnitak. In Greek myth, Orion is the hunter, but to the ancient Egyptians, those three stars were Osiris, god of the afterlife, death, and resurrection. And in the patch, they're outlined in blue, given special emphasis. Strange, right? Especially for a mission named after Apollo, the Greek god of the sun. Why name the mission after one deity but center its symbolism around an entirely different pantheon? And which pantheon are we talking about here? Was the big "A" for Apollo, or for Assar, the Egyptian name for Osiris?
46:10 Jesse Michels? In Egyptian myth, Osiris is murdered by his brother Set and resurrected by his wife Isis and their son Horus, who then defeats Set and restores cosmic order: a myth of death, rebirth, and celestial destiny written into the sky. NASA's primary launch pad at White Sands, where von Braun ran early tests, was Launchpad 33. Same thing at Kennedy Space Center: there's only one runway, and it isn't runway 1 or "A", it's runway 33. Even key mission planners had surprising backgrounds. Farouk al-Baz, who oversaw lunar science planning and helped select Apollo landing sites, was nicknamed “the king” by the astronauts.
46:53 Jesse Michels? His father was a scholar of Egyptian religion. And of course NASA was never shy about a little syncretism. They would mix and mash and pay homage to all sorts of ancient traditions. Juno, the Roman queen of the gods, lent her name to one of the earliest launch vehicles. Mercury, the Roman messenger god, was chosen for the first human spaceflight program. Then came Gemini, the Zodiac Twins. And finally Apollo, the Greek sun god of light, knowledge, and rebirth. One of the most intriguing aspects of the whole story is how the symbolism doesn’t stop at names or patches. It carries into the actual timing of the launches themselves.
47:38 Jesse Michels? Back in 1936, while Jack Parsons was still testing rockets in the Arroyo Seco, his team managed their first successful liquid fuel test on Halloween night. That date, October 31st, was originally Samhain, a pagan festival marking the midpoint between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. Over 20 years later, Explorer 1, the first US satellite built by JPL, was launched on January 31st, 1958. That day is known in the Christian calendar as Candlemas, but in the pagan tradition as Imbolc. The odds of the US space program being bookended by Samhain and Candlemas, two cross-quarter
48:22 Jesse Michels? days with deep ritual significance in European pagan tradition, are striking. Even if not consciously planned by the engineers, the timing seems to follow an occult template: Samhain as a symbolic gateway and Candlemas as a moment of rebirth. Together, they framed the dawn of American spaceflight. But we’re just getting started. This alignment with sacred dates was not a one-off. During the Apollo era, launch planners sometimes chose dates that aligned with celestial or symbolic turning points. One of the clearest examples was Apollo 8, the first crude orbit of the moon. It launched on December 21st, 1968, the winter solstice, the day the sun is
49:05 Jesse Michels? symbolically reborn after the longest night of the year. Apollo 8 marked the first time humans left Earth's gravitational field, and from lunar orbit, the crew delivered the famous Genesis reading on Christmas Eve.
49:19 Speaker 02 In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. And God saw the light. Then it was good, and divided the light from the darkness.
49:47 Jesse Michels? But was it just convenient scheduling? Or was some deeper archetypal pattern playing out? A subconscious script of death and resurrection? I'm going to give a little warning here. What I'm going to lay out next is highly speculative. I'm not saying I definitely believe it, and it might sound a little bit out there. Let's take Apollo 11 as an example. Launched on July 16th, 1969, it coincided with the 24th anniversary of the Trinity Atomic Test, the dawn of the nuclear age. But the moon landing itself, on July 20th, happened under the astrological sign of Aquarius, symbol of the water bearer and bringer of knowledge. Aquarius is often linked with enlightenment and radical change, and it's tempting to
50:32 Jesse Michels? think that the moon landing, timed as it was, might have been more than a technological milestone. It could have been seen as a ritual passage into a new cosmic age, the so-called Age of Aquarius. Remember, Aldrin poured wine into a silver chalice during his private communion ceremony on the moon. Humanity, in a sense, poured itself into another world. What's especially fascinating is that these symbolic alignments haven't gone away. They've continued into the 21st century. In a presentation, former CIA officer John Ramirez described one particular case, the 2005 launch of NROL 16.
51:12 Jesse Michels? The mission patch was strange. It showed a pelican, a sun, several pentagrams, a silhouette of Bigfoot, and palm trees. Ramirez said that the pelican caught his attention because it matched the aviary code name of CIA scientist Ron Pandolfi. Pandolfi has been a mysterious figure, long tied to the UFO topic. He has worked on exotic physics, was connected to the Jasons and MITRE Corporation, and was part of the CIA's Office of Scientific and Weapons Research. A lot of people say that Pandolfi works the CIA's weird desk. According to Ramirez, Pandolfi was directly involved in this NRO-L16 launch.
51:53 Jesse Michels? The launch itself happened on 12:50 a.m. on April 30th, 2005. This happens to be the same day of Walper Gisnaud, the traditional pagan holiday tied to the idea of gates opening between worlds. The vehicle carried a payload named Prometheus, launched on a Titan IV rocket, and headed northeast towards the constellation of the Big Dipper. This alignment has uncanny parallels to a ritual described in the 1977 grimoire known as the Necronomicon. According to the text, "The best time to perform the ceremony of walking, a kind of spiritual journey to the stars, is when the great bear hangs by its tail in the sky."
52:37 Jesse Michels? The ritual is said to work best around midnight, facing north, with specific emphasis on the northeast, the direction the Big Dipper rises. The number five is the sacred, and the launch occurred at 050, five years into the millennium, on a patch covered in five pentagrams.
53:00 Jesse Michels? Some researchers, like Peter Lavenda, have suggested that figures close to these launches encouraged people like Tom DeLonge to study Greek mythology, especially the story of Prometheus, to better understand the UFO phenomena. That name, of course, matched the payload on the NRO-L16. After the launch, the remaining... Titan IV rockets were retired. One went to the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The other went to McMinnville, Oregon, the site of one of the most famous UFO photographs ever taken in 1950. All slightly schizo coincidences? Maybe.
53:40 Jesse Michels? But Lavenda has said that he's personally received letters from inside the US military praising the Necronomicon for being "spot-on," including some from officers in Strategic Air Command. For years, his book was even a bestseller at Fort Benning.
54:02 Jesse Michels? Then there's the symbolism of the Big Dipper itself. In Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the first UFOs to appear above Devil's Tower form the shape of the Dipper in the sky. Jacques Vallée noted that Betty Hill's abduction story also began with her seeing one too many stars in the Dipper. Even Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who's very humble in his claims, has said that pilots reported UAPs emerging from the Dipper and even dogfighting near it in orbit. Ancient Egyptian rituals used Dipper-shaped tools to send pharaohs into the afterlife. Daoist sages would trace its stars in ascension rituals.
54:43 Jesse Michels? Ptolemy, one of the fathers of modern astronomy in 2.Century AD Alexandria, would also say that souls would ascend through Orion's Belt. Even the Thule Society saw the circumpolar stars as a point of origin for non-human intelligences. And then look at modern super-experiencers like Chris Bledsoe. Bledsoe believes that the non-human intelligence he is in contact with, which he has termed "The Lady," is linked to the Dipper, and that her companions call themselves "The Guardians." Coincidentally, "Guardians" is the term now used by the US Space Force. And the emblem of Space Delta 7, the Space Force's intelligence wing, shows a bear holding
55:28 Jesse Michels? a key in front of the Big Dipper. So we return to the central question: Are these patterns just coincidence? Are we connecting the dots in a crazy way? Paradolia: finding patterns where they don't exist? Or does the pattern these disparate dots create suggest something deeper?
55:54 Jesse Michels? We return to Diana Pasulka in her discussions with the enigmatic Tyler Dee, Timothy Taylor, the NASA mission controller. One of the most curious aspects of Taylor’s story is his claim that he receives downloads from an intelligence he believes is non-human. These downloads appear as sudden flashes of insight, full mental blueprints, or instructions. He says they come to him through specific protocols, and they’ve led to real patents in technologies. They have also shaped how he approaches his ongoing work within the US space program. Even if we take the most skeptical approach, assuming Taylor is simply a high-ranking engineer
56:33 Jesse Michels? with strange personal beliefs, it still leaves us with a wild but undeniable fact: someone overseeing major NASA launches believes they are influenced by a non-human intelligence. I’m fairly sure Tim Taylor is a known entity at Kennedy Space Center. I personally tried to meet up with him once, but he had to go to Florida for a launch. And finally, I’ve found this bizarre connection between Tim Taylor and mid-century anti-gravity inventor Thomas Townsend Brown. Brown’s daughter Linda reviewed Tim Taylor’s book on Amazon before anybody knew who Tim Taylor was, well before he was written about even pseudonymously in Diana Pasulka’s “American Cosmic.”
57:15 Jesse Michels? And then Tim Taylor apparently told Christopher Bledsoe’s son, Ryan, that he was part of a “secret time travel” program in Nassau, in the Bahamas, and that Thomas Townsend Brown was the president of that group. I know a ton about Thomas Townsend Brown, and I can tell you definitively, he was obsessed with time travel. He also spent an inordinate amount of time in the Bahamas with the inspiration for James Bond and Winston Churchill super spy William Stevenson. And then there’s Tim Taylor telling Pasulka that he was part of the “adjustment team,” an homage to Philip K. Dick’s great book about a team of time travelers. And if we’re gonna entertain this speculation for a second, then how would a secret time
58:00 Jesse Michels? travel program actually work? We know in general relativity that gravity and time are highly related, so maybe you’d do an experiment like Thomas Townsend Brown’s. You might create a high voltage environment that bends spacetime itself. Or you might launch a very oddly timed rocket that happens to coincide with ancient traditional rituals.
58:26 Jesse Michels? Who knows? I doubt we'll ever know. But even if you dismiss all of those crazy theories, it is clear that the modern space program is not just a technical story. It's a story about consciousness, belief, and the role of the human mind in space exploration. This same theme shows up in other unexpected places. Take James Ryder, former vice president of Lockheed Martin and a director at Skunk Works. In 2018, he gave a talk called "The Garment of God." In it, he emphasized the relationship between mysticism, consciousness, and technological progress. In a separate lecture focused entirely on UAPs,
59:05 Jesse Michels? Ryder spoke openly about ritual, altered states, and the overlap between ancient spiritual entities and modern contact experiences. Dr. James Lekatsky, the DIA physicist involved in the OSAP program, made a similar point. Within the US government covert UFO program, Lekatsky writes that the team gained access to a non-human craft and entered it. The United States government has in its possession a craft of unknown origin, and you were able to access the inside. Is that correct? Yes.
59:39 Jesse Michels? But elsewhere, he's taken things further, saying that if full human capabilities were known to us right now, it is not something that we need to fear. Our capabilities never have been fully revealed, and we're still learning. We've got a long way to evolve still. Then there's Dr. Jeffrey Kreipel, Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Rice University. On the Danny Jones podcast, he revealed that Charles Chase, director of Lockheed's Revolutionary Projects Organization, once invited him to give a private talk to top engineers on one topic: levitation. Kreipel spoke about shamans, saints, and monks from around the world who claim- to float during intense spiritual or meditative states.
1:00:23 Jesse Michels? Apparently, Chase felt these accounts were worth studying. He wanted the engineers at Skunk Works to hear about it. And Chase wasn't alone. Other senior Skunk Works figures, Robert Weiss, Steve Justice, and Eric Schrock, along with Air Force Research Lab Commander Neil McCaslin, all advised Tom DeLonge and Peter Lavenda's Secret Machines project. These men weren't UFO YouTubers. They were among the most technologically capable individuals in the defense sector. It should come as no surprise then that the core thesis of the book Secret Machines is that UAP are mystical machines. According to both DeLonge and Lavenda, these elite scientists frequently circled back to one concept in their conversations: human consciousness.
1:01:08 Jesse Michels? So when experiencers say they fly the craft with their minds, it might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. It seems like people in the most elite circles of aerospace
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1:01:49 Jesse Michels? seemed to entertain the same possibility. When Diana Pasulka asked Taylor why he was interested in her work on religious studies, his answer was simple. The next development in my field, rocket science, will come from yours: religion.
1:02:09 Jesse Michels? As the 20th century philosopher Henri Bourgson put it, "The mystical summons up the mechanical. The origins of the process of mechanization are more mystical than we might imagine." He also said, "The eyes can only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend."
1:02:28 Jesse Michels? It seems like an inescapable conclusion that the history of rocket science and physics is intimately connected to mystical traditions, the occult and ancient mythology. Whether it was Einstein dozing off as a patent clerk in Zurich, or Dirac staring at the fire in Cambridge and downloading the Dirac equation, or Wolfgang Pali receiving the architecture of the hydrogen atom in a dream, or Heisenberg receiving the mathematical underpinnings of quantum leaps at Helgoland. Throughout history, genius and inspiration have been described not as invention, but reception.
1:03:09 Jesse Michels? It may be something that extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence is sharing with us, or it may be the truth that is being protected by secrets, as referenced by the first man to ever walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong.
1:03:25 Speaker 07 We leave you much that is undone.
1:03:30 Speaker 07 There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers.
1:03:44 Speaker 02 It was Neil Armstrong who asked to sit with my father and family. And turns out that he did talk with my father, and they talked seriously about creating a new UFO research group. Wow, which was... Which, well, I think became COFOs because Neil was, he was fairly reclusive, not like Buzz Aldrin, he's not, didn't really enjoy the spotlight. And especially in the early 70s, there was so much more stigma attached to the phenomenon that he decided, it's just not for me. But for me, some of the most telling evidence are these things. The fact that Neil Armstrong publicly sat with my father, who had...
1:04:26 Speaker 04 Reputation.
1:04:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, had good astronomical bona fides, but was known for UFOs at that time. He sat with him, and I know he talked to my dad about pursuing this. So I don't know what he saw, or what he think he may have seen, but he was a, you know, jet pilot, a test pilot, and...
1:04:47 Jesse Michels? He decided that there was something going on and he wanted to work with my father to figure out what it was. Wow.
1:05:02 Jesse Michels? Alchemists, did you enjoy that? Well, here's the thing. That episode was just the tip of the iceberg. So much research went into this script and a ton of wild stuff had to get cut. I'm talking Nazi occult expeditions during World War II, debates about whether the moon is inhabited or hollow, and a lot more. If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substack. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video, with weekly articles exploring all of the strange, forgotten, and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness. So join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack.
1:05:46 Jesse Michels? I am including the full link in the description of this video. And the first subscribers all get free American Alchemy hats.
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